I think it is not just social media but also digital media and what we used to call “cable news” (MSNow, Fox). They all cater to the engaged due to their revenue model, and all the better if they can help keep the engaged enraged,
I have also observed (from meeting with regulators and congressional staffers myself and being tangentially involved in corporate lobbying efforts) that it is not the staffers who write legislation.
The lobbyists/activists/special interests write the legislation (using their law firms) and hand it to the staffers who slip it into bills.
The progressive groups/NGOs are much better organized and focused than the right. Over a few decades they’ve changed our government so that pols give grants to these groups to provide “services” and in turn these groups (and their tycoon backers) donate to the pols/parties giving the grants and provide ground level support for the pols (and there is a revolving door between employees of the groups and political staffers).
While not every local pol or congressperson is leftist, their money and their engaged supported mostly come from the “groups”.
This is why an ostensible “moderate” like Biden, gets in office and his staff effectively roll out the agenda of leftist groups. Look at what is happening in Virgina- a faux moderate wins and then rolls out the leftist agenda.
The right is a little less monolithic. There isn’t necessarily a natural affinity or shared agenda amongst, say, banks
, pharma companies and oil companies in the way that greens, open borders and teachers union groups might align and ally. Even within an industry, individual companies have their own agenda a s own legislative desires that might conflict with a competitor in the same industry.
“MAGA” doesn’t really have government funded NGOs working at the local and state levels- it is associated more with Trump and his supporters. It strikes fear in the hearts of non-MAGA Repubs, who worry about getting primaried, but it is not a well-oiled, well-funded grift like we have on the left. It is unclear in what form it will survive after Trump’s term is over, particularly (as NS notes) when he alienates many of his supporters.
As someone who is not particularly political - I have policy ideas but I have no party allegiance, have never donated to a pol or party and also celebrity-worship of pols turns my stomach- I don’t see the extreme left or right giving way to the more moderate objectives of the disinterested populace
I see MaGA eroding after Trump and a battle between populist and corporatist Repubs , which will be won by corporatist Repubs pretending to be populist.
On the left, they will put forward moderate sounding candidates who will be entirely in hock to the groups and enact leftist agendas. See also Biden, Virginia, NJ, Gavin, etc
Your choice will be between a conservative cosplaying as a populist or a radical cosplaying as a moderate.
Yes, most staffers are too clueless to write something as complicated as legislation. That said, they gatekeep access to their boss and so can certainly impact which lobbyist or academic gets to push their ideas to the Member.
At lot of the “work” is also done at the agency/regulator level. Why bother with messy stuff like legislation and votes when you just appoint activists and lobbyists as regulators who then write rules (coordinating closely with activists/lobbyists/donors on the outside.
Hi Noah. I appreciate your thinking and writing a lot. I’m sad that you re-posted Trump’s post about the Obamas. Just my take: reposting it adds more views. And it was particularly vile.
It was taken down before many people had seen it. We wondered what it looked like. Re-posting lets us see how stupid it was, in addition to being racist.
Another big disappointment from Noah. In his quest for both-siderism, he conflates left, liberal, and progressive once again. For example, he says "Liberals built the public libraries", but that is just wrong: the push for libraries was progressive, and I don't know how he would explain Andrew Carnegie (for example) as a liberal. Nor is there a counterpart to the billionaire-supported, coordinated, organized, right-wing movement that created Reaganism, the Tea Party, and MAGA.
A better way to write articles would be to focus on problems of one thing at a time, conservative, liberal, left or progressive, rather than this sort of messy, combined pseudo-analysis.
In that respect, Noah's analysis of self-destructiveness in the MAGA coalition is much better, though I think he misses two big ideas. The first is that the core of MAGA is white supremacist and Christian Dominionist. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. can delude themselves that they can join in if they are in the middle or upper classes, but they are really being exploited for their support by a core that despises them. The second is that this is a strategy by the ultra wealthy to keep the lower classes divided and controllable by giving them reasons to despise each other for race, religion, culture, class, and other excuses. It is simply appeal to a natural desire to feel superior to others in some way. The way poor white trash can say "at least I'm not a n-word". And now all those minority groups are in the FAFO stage with MAGA.
Reaganism and the Tea Party and MAGA are very different. I’m not sure why billionaire supported is highlighted as a thing here when Trump hasn’t out raised the Democrat in any of his elections? I think if billionaires had had their way Trump would never have sniffed the nomination.
"Reaganism and the Tea Party and MAGA are very different." In a few respects. Where they overlap is that their ideas were built by billionaire-funded think tanks (in large part those of the Kochs), and opposition to their candidates was primaried by massive donations. Not to mention an enormous right-wing media apparatus.
"I think if billionaires had had their way Trump would never have sniffed the nomination." I agree, and they did oppose him at first. Better to have a candidate that is dependent on you financially and your media. But once they recognized how venal he was, they knew they could work with him.
The first thing to note is that the progressive failure you describe (breaking things, creating chaos) creates strong support for right wing extremism.
And right wing extremism, at least as ineptly practiced by Trump's administration, creates similar support for left wing extremism.
And in each case, moderates pretty much have to follow their extremists. Those anti-ICE protesters might be standing for vastly more extreme positions than I would ever support, but hey, fuck masked government agents shooting protesters and ignoring all manner of the law.
For me, it is a little unclear what your piece is implying. That both extremes are failing, so moderates will inherit the earth? Or that both extremes are failing, so America is pretty much screwed?
At the moment, I lean very much towards the latter. I am quite sure that the majority of Americans actually prefer moderation, but contrary to myth, majority doesn't rule.
In large part, it's the technological shift in mass communications. It's not just that social media "provides these extremists a platform in which their emotionally charged messages are more likely to go viral than messages of positivity and reason." It's that almost everyone is more drawn to the sensational, the outrageous, the enraging. Which is why The Washington Post did fine under Bezos during Trump I but fell apart during Biden -- extreme, attention-grabbing crap is the lifeblood of media and politics in this era.
But yeah, at this point, power positions like congressional staffers and legacy media writers and influencers are filled with people committed to various forms of extremism. Once the print era got into high gear, illiterate people simply didn't matter much, regardless of fine words about all being created equal. Now it's a different era and a different set of people do (and do not) matter. And it's hard for print people to wrap their heads around, because they (we) analyze in terms of policies and majorities and rationality and so on.
It's not just the staffers that are extremely online. A lot of elected officials are, too. Look at JD Vance. It would be good for elected officials themselves to log off and prohibit anyone on their staff from using social media. It would be hard to enforce, but if it became a norm and spread it would make a big difference. Think tanks and other groups should have the same rule for their employees. They would also be wise to hire from a more diverse pool in terms of education. Way too many come from a small number of elite schools. Campaigns have had that same problem.
The cluster of colleges/universities from which staffers are drawn is so small and insular. DC types should do outreach to the College of Mines or Appalachia U - it would take them into interesting policy considerations.
That's entirely plausible. I think people from schools like that would be happy to work for elected officials and would be aware that not many people from their schools have been able to do it. One problem with elite schools is so many of their graduates get to do it that it becomes an entitlement. A lot of staffers these days have it in their heads that they're in charge and it's a real problem. Just hiring more people from flagship universities would be a big improvement, but certainly less known places like those two would be good.
Noah's headline sounded optimistic, implying both extremes will fail to *get elected* so we'll finally have the moderate government we want. But the content so the article is far more depressing call it argued that both the extremes are going to fail at *governing* but also offers no hope that we are ever going to get a different kind of government---just an alternation of failing ones Is there any pathway to optimism at all?
The game is up. The old liberal order was real, then became a hypernormal construct. The reason left and right are so at odds is they are fighting over what the new reality becomes. Old reality is done, and it's last fighters are screaming into an ever expanding void.
Great article and part of me feels like both failure mode applies to each side to a different degrees.
Like progressives def engaged in coalition shrinking yelling at any defectors too while MAGA also is willingly or unwillingly destroy the institution and trust in the society too (like Elon showed it with DOGE
I don’t know whether the progressive screw-ups, that Noah refers to, in hiring and then failing to oversee inept and or corrupt NGOs to do the work of government that Noah refers to are truly pervasive nationwide or limited to certain regions (e.g. San Francisco). Nevertheless, it seems ironic that the practice of outsourcing government services apparently originated with Reagan and his obsession with shrinking government
This is the most pessimistic thing I have ever read. It seems that we have two screwball narratives (they are too incoherent to deserve being called ideologies) that cannot possibly succeed in governing our country, yet we lack the structural capability to replace them. What can possibly be the outcome of this? Must we continue to dribble down into conflict and dysfunction until Xi Jinping sends over the PLA to re-establish order? Surely there must be some better exit from this “No Exit” scenario.
Very interesting. I don't disagree about extremism. I understand what has happened on the Left. Part of Dem DNA gives us Portland, crazy environmentalists, the current type of antisemitism, etc. The Dem party is a coalition of competing interest groups united only by a sense that govt exists to make life a little less brutal, nasty, & short. I think they'll work it out; they always have. What I don't understand is what has happened to the GOP. Is Trump sui generis or is there something in GOP DNA which has produced him? Why do you believe Trump about that Obama post? He has a strong record of racism & antisemitism. Wither the GOP? You're right to say a racist party has no future.
How is the current conflict of extremes different from before the Civil War or during the 1930s? Yes, communication technology is different, but is that truly decisive? Are we looking at a world-wide phenomena--Brexit, Putinism, Xism, etc.--& if so, what drives it?
Younger me would say we need more parties to represent that middle better.
But then I remember there have been other parties, and they are usually more extreme - Green Party, Tea Party … How do we govern with our mainstream parties being extreme as well?
Trump keeps pointing out that, in recent Republican losses, he was not on the ballot. The current MAGA version of the party relies largely on his personal charisma. But no one seems to have told him, he’s never going to be on the ballot again.
I have been fighting progressive excess on the ground for well over a decade. I tried warning my prog friends that they were inviting a right-wing backlash to their policies, but none would listen due to the supposed righteousness of their cause. I’d love to purge both extremes from the halls of power permanently and have an actual conversation amongst the majority for once.
I think one thing that’s missing in this analysis is the lack of generational turnover in the Democratic Party. The young leftists get to just yell from the outside because they are not in power, which generally acts as a moderating force. You can see this with Mamdani. These people need to be thrown into the realities of power so they learn tradeoffs, make compromises and learn how to adjust. The Biden dynamic where the old guard enacts leftist policies and the young never get a taste of power and the responsibility of holding power is honestly the most toxic and unhealthy dynamic.
A bit tangential, but is cheating really associated with Asians as Helen Andrews says? Not that I should take anything from her seriously, but I've never heard of that before. I'm sure there are Asian students who cheat, as well as students of every other demographic. If cheating is Asian, does that mean Trump is our first Asian president? (Trevor Noah already claimed he was our first African president, so might as well tick off all the continents.)
Good piece.
I think it is not just social media but also digital media and what we used to call “cable news” (MSNow, Fox). They all cater to the engaged due to their revenue model, and all the better if they can help keep the engaged enraged,
I have also observed (from meeting with regulators and congressional staffers myself and being tangentially involved in corporate lobbying efforts) that it is not the staffers who write legislation.
The lobbyists/activists/special interests write the legislation (using their law firms) and hand it to the staffers who slip it into bills.
The progressive groups/NGOs are much better organized and focused than the right. Over a few decades they’ve changed our government so that pols give grants to these groups to provide “services” and in turn these groups (and their tycoon backers) donate to the pols/parties giving the grants and provide ground level support for the pols (and there is a revolving door between employees of the groups and political staffers).
While not every local pol or congressperson is leftist, their money and their engaged supported mostly come from the “groups”.
This is why an ostensible “moderate” like Biden, gets in office and his staff effectively roll out the agenda of leftist groups. Look at what is happening in Virgina- a faux moderate wins and then rolls out the leftist agenda.
The right is a little less monolithic. There isn’t necessarily a natural affinity or shared agenda amongst, say, banks
, pharma companies and oil companies in the way that greens, open borders and teachers union groups might align and ally. Even within an industry, individual companies have their own agenda a s own legislative desires that might conflict with a competitor in the same industry.
“MAGA” doesn’t really have government funded NGOs working at the local and state levels- it is associated more with Trump and his supporters. It strikes fear in the hearts of non-MAGA Repubs, who worry about getting primaried, but it is not a well-oiled, well-funded grift like we have on the left. It is unclear in what form it will survive after Trump’s term is over, particularly (as NS notes) when he alienates many of his supporters.
As someone who is not particularly political - I have policy ideas but I have no party allegiance, have never donated to a pol or party and also celebrity-worship of pols turns my stomach- I don’t see the extreme left or right giving way to the more moderate objectives of the disinterested populace
I see MaGA eroding after Trump and a battle between populist and corporatist Repubs , which will be won by corporatist Repubs pretending to be populist.
On the left, they will put forward moderate sounding candidates who will be entirely in hock to the groups and enact leftist agendas. See also Biden, Virginia, NJ, Gavin, etc
Your choice will be between a conservative cosplaying as a populist or a radical cosplaying as a moderate.
Yes, most staffers are too clueless to write something as complicated as legislation. That said, they gatekeep access to their boss and so can certainly impact which lobbyist or academic gets to push their ideas to the Member.
Yes - usually the ones who pay! 😊
At lot of the “work” is also done at the agency/regulator level. Why bother with messy stuff like legislation and votes when you just appoint activists and lobbyists as regulators who then write rules (coordinating closely with activists/lobbyists/donors on the outside.
Hi Noah. I appreciate your thinking and writing a lot. I’m sad that you re-posted Trump’s post about the Obamas. Just my take: reposting it adds more views. And it was particularly vile.
It was taken down before many people had seen it. We wondered what it looked like. Re-posting lets us see how stupid it was, in addition to being racist.
Another big disappointment from Noah. In his quest for both-siderism, he conflates left, liberal, and progressive once again. For example, he says "Liberals built the public libraries", but that is just wrong: the push for libraries was progressive, and I don't know how he would explain Andrew Carnegie (for example) as a liberal. Nor is there a counterpart to the billionaire-supported, coordinated, organized, right-wing movement that created Reaganism, the Tea Party, and MAGA.
A better way to write articles would be to focus on problems of one thing at a time, conservative, liberal, left or progressive, rather than this sort of messy, combined pseudo-analysis.
In that respect, Noah's analysis of self-destructiveness in the MAGA coalition is much better, though I think he misses two big ideas. The first is that the core of MAGA is white supremacist and Christian Dominionist. Blacks, Asians, Hispanics, Jews, gays, etc. can delude themselves that they can join in if they are in the middle or upper classes, but they are really being exploited for their support by a core that despises them. The second is that this is a strategy by the ultra wealthy to keep the lower classes divided and controllable by giving them reasons to despise each other for race, religion, culture, class, and other excuses. It is simply appeal to a natural desire to feel superior to others in some way. The way poor white trash can say "at least I'm not a n-word". And now all those minority groups are in the FAFO stage with MAGA.
Reaganism and the Tea Party and MAGA are very different. I’m not sure why billionaire supported is highlighted as a thing here when Trump hasn’t out raised the Democrat in any of his elections? I think if billionaires had had their way Trump would never have sniffed the nomination.
"Reaganism and the Tea Party and MAGA are very different." In a few respects. Where they overlap is that their ideas were built by billionaire-funded think tanks (in large part those of the Kochs), and opposition to their candidates was primaried by massive donations. Not to mention an enormous right-wing media apparatus.
"I think if billionaires had had their way Trump would never have sniffed the nomination." I agree, and they did oppose him at first. Better to have a candidate that is dependent on you financially and your media. But once they recognized how venal he was, they knew they could work with him.
The first thing to note is that the progressive failure you describe (breaking things, creating chaos) creates strong support for right wing extremism.
And right wing extremism, at least as ineptly practiced by Trump's administration, creates similar support for left wing extremism.
And in each case, moderates pretty much have to follow their extremists. Those anti-ICE protesters might be standing for vastly more extreme positions than I would ever support, but hey, fuck masked government agents shooting protesters and ignoring all manner of the law.
For me, it is a little unclear what your piece is implying. That both extremes are failing, so moderates will inherit the earth? Or that both extremes are failing, so America is pretty much screwed?
At the moment, I lean very much towards the latter. I am quite sure that the majority of Americans actually prefer moderation, but contrary to myth, majority doesn't rule.
In large part, it's the technological shift in mass communications. It's not just that social media "provides these extremists a platform in which their emotionally charged messages are more likely to go viral than messages of positivity and reason." It's that almost everyone is more drawn to the sensational, the outrageous, the enraging. Which is why The Washington Post did fine under Bezos during Trump I but fell apart during Biden -- extreme, attention-grabbing crap is the lifeblood of media and politics in this era.
But yeah, at this point, power positions like congressional staffers and legacy media writers and influencers are filled with people committed to various forms of extremism. Once the print era got into high gear, illiterate people simply didn't matter much, regardless of fine words about all being created equal. Now it's a different era and a different set of people do (and do not) matter. And it's hard for print people to wrap their heads around, because they (we) analyze in terms of policies and majorities and rationality and so on.
It's not just the staffers that are extremely online. A lot of elected officials are, too. Look at JD Vance. It would be good for elected officials themselves to log off and prohibit anyone on their staff from using social media. It would be hard to enforce, but if it became a norm and spread it would make a big difference. Think tanks and other groups should have the same rule for their employees. They would also be wise to hire from a more diverse pool in terms of education. Way too many come from a small number of elite schools. Campaigns have had that same problem.
The cluster of colleges/universities from which staffers are drawn is so small and insular. DC types should do outreach to the College of Mines or Appalachia U - it would take them into interesting policy considerations.
That's entirely plausible. I think people from schools like that would be happy to work for elected officials and would be aware that not many people from their schools have been able to do it. One problem with elite schools is so many of their graduates get to do it that it becomes an entitlement. A lot of staffers these days have it in their heads that they're in charge and it's a real problem. Just hiring more people from flagship universities would be a big improvement, but certainly less known places like those two would be good.
Noah's headline sounded optimistic, implying both extremes will fail to *get elected* so we'll finally have the moderate government we want. But the content so the article is far more depressing call it argued that both the extremes are going to fail at *governing* but also offers no hope that we are ever going to get a different kind of government---just an alternation of failing ones Is there any pathway to optimism at all?
The game is up. The old liberal order was real, then became a hypernormal construct. The reason left and right are so at odds is they are fighting over what the new reality becomes. Old reality is done, and it's last fighters are screaming into an ever expanding void.
Great article and part of me feels like both failure mode applies to each side to a different degrees.
Like progressives def engaged in coalition shrinking yelling at any defectors too while MAGA also is willingly or unwillingly destroy the institution and trust in the society too (like Elon showed it with DOGE
I don’t know whether the progressive screw-ups, that Noah refers to, in hiring and then failing to oversee inept and or corrupt NGOs to do the work of government that Noah refers to are truly pervasive nationwide or limited to certain regions (e.g. San Francisco). Nevertheless, it seems ironic that the practice of outsourcing government services apparently originated with Reagan and his obsession with shrinking government
This is the most pessimistic thing I have ever read. It seems that we have two screwball narratives (they are too incoherent to deserve being called ideologies) that cannot possibly succeed in governing our country, yet we lack the structural capability to replace them. What can possibly be the outcome of this? Must we continue to dribble down into conflict and dysfunction until Xi Jinping sends over the PLA to re-establish order? Surely there must be some better exit from this “No Exit” scenario.
Very interesting. I don't disagree about extremism. I understand what has happened on the Left. Part of Dem DNA gives us Portland, crazy environmentalists, the current type of antisemitism, etc. The Dem party is a coalition of competing interest groups united only by a sense that govt exists to make life a little less brutal, nasty, & short. I think they'll work it out; they always have. What I don't understand is what has happened to the GOP. Is Trump sui generis or is there something in GOP DNA which has produced him? Why do you believe Trump about that Obama post? He has a strong record of racism & antisemitism. Wither the GOP? You're right to say a racist party has no future.
How is the current conflict of extremes different from before the Civil War or during the 1930s? Yes, communication technology is different, but is that truly decisive? Are we looking at a world-wide phenomena--Brexit, Putinism, Xism, etc.--& if so, what drives it?
Younger me would say we need more parties to represent that middle better.
But then I remember there have been other parties, and they are usually more extreme - Green Party, Tea Party … How do we govern with our mainstream parties being extreme as well?
Trump keeps pointing out that, in recent Republican losses, he was not on the ballot. The current MAGA version of the party relies largely on his personal charisma. But no one seems to have told him, he’s never going to be on the ballot again.
I have been fighting progressive excess on the ground for well over a decade. I tried warning my prog friends that they were inviting a right-wing backlash to their policies, but none would listen due to the supposed righteousness of their cause. I’d love to purge both extremes from the halls of power permanently and have an actual conversation amongst the majority for once.
I think one thing that’s missing in this analysis is the lack of generational turnover in the Democratic Party. The young leftists get to just yell from the outside because they are not in power, which generally acts as a moderating force. You can see this with Mamdani. These people need to be thrown into the realities of power so they learn tradeoffs, make compromises and learn how to adjust. The Biden dynamic where the old guard enacts leftist policies and the young never get a taste of power and the responsibility of holding power is honestly the most toxic and unhealthy dynamic.
A bit tangential, but is cheating really associated with Asians as Helen Andrews says? Not that I should take anything from her seriously, but I've never heard of that before. I'm sure there are Asian students who cheat, as well as students of every other demographic. If cheating is Asian, does that mean Trump is our first Asian president? (Trevor Noah already claimed he was our first African president, so might as well tick off all the continents.)