A peek into the fevered mind.

From Do we stand at the precipice of radical change? by Noah Smith.  

Among the nattering nabobs of the chattering class there is much emo hysteria about the pending collapse of American culture.  You listen to these people and wonder, what planet do they live on because their concerns have virtually zero correlation to easily ascertainable reality in the here and now.  Smith puts it:

If unrest in America has peaked, you wouldn’t know it from people’s tweets. World War 3, civil war, and apocalyptic climate change are the standard topics of discussion now. Saying that “democracy is dying” and members of the opposite party “literally want to kill you” is de rigueur when discussing electoral politics. On Signal, friends ask me in hushed tones whether they should stockpile food or move out of the country.

A high performance, high trust, high productivity culture and society depends on a reasonably verifiable grasp on reality and, in particular, on a reasonably high signal to noise ratio.  Reality is knowable and that reality ought to be easily transmissible.  But we certainly seem to have a lot of people committed boosting the noise over the signal.  Why?

My guess is that they are feeling threatened by the reality based.  Their sinecures and status depend on a subservient ignoring of reality.  Confronting reality would strip away large cadres of government spending.  No DEI, no ESG, much less school and university administration, far less misallocation of tax funds into non-productive ventures.  No feather-nesting of bureaucrats bank accounts and multimillionaire politicians retiring on large fortunes after a life-time of public "service."

Still, the conviction about an impending apocalypse seems to outstrip mere venal motivation.  What is going on?

Smith is a competent journalist solidly on the Democratic progressive side of things but still with at least one foot in reality.  He has occasional information and occasional insights.  If you want to follow someone on the left side of the ledger, he is one to follow even though there is a lot of guff as well.

This particular piece is useful for laying out the lengthy indictment of untrue things which are dearly held to be true on the partisan and progressive left.

It’s understandable that Americans would feel this way right now. We’re in the middle of a pandemic that has probably killed a million of our people and is still killing thousands a day. A year and a half ago we had the largest protests the country has ever seen, and a year ago we had what was arguably our country’s first real coup attempt. Violent crime is high and rising, with every day bringing lurid reports of new atrocities. Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine, while China menaces Taiwan, India, and Japan. And over it all looms the menacing shadow of climate change, as wildfires, hurricanes, and extreme heat events become commonplace.

Let's break this down into testable beliefs and measure the degree to which any such source of concern is warranted.  Why are people (on the left) writhing in an apocalyptic frenzy? Because:

We’re in the middle of a pandemic that has probably killed a million of our people and is still killing thousands a day. 

 

A year and a half ago we had the largest protests the country has ever seen 

 

A year ago we had what was arguably our country’s first real coup attempt. 

 

Violent crime is high and rising, with every day bringing lurid reports of new atrocities. 

 

Russia is on the verge of invading Ukraine, while China menaces Taiwan, India, and Japan. 

 

There is the menacing shadow of climate change, as wildfires, hurricanes, and extreme heat events become commonplace.

If you actually believe each and all of those propositions, there might be some cause for concern.  The problem is that most of these belief are either untrue or dramatically overstated.  

Pandemic - Not an issue.  It has already become endemic and is dramatically less lethal than in 2020.  We know the 800,000 claim is vastly overstated by including those who died with Covid rather than those from Covid.  When Italy corrected for this, their correction led to a 90% reduction in death from Covid.  There is cause for major concern given how obviously badly the government policies made the response so much worse than it needed to be but the pandemic itself is a rapidly retreating issue.

 

Largest protests ever in 2020 - Not an issue.  An emotional inaccuracy probably due to recency bias.  The 1960s riots were far worse in terms of lives lost (>200) and value of property destroyed and in terms of being a death knell to so many cities for at least a generation.  More people died in the 1992 LA riots (63) than died in all the George Floyd riots (25) across the nation in 2020.  The 2020 protests were dramatic sustenance for mainstream media fortunes but the riots were small to those in even the recent past.  

 

A real coup attempt in 2021 - Not an issue.  By August, 2021, FBI had found that there was no coup attempt at the Capitol on January 6th, 2020.  It is an article of faith among Democrats and the progressive left that there was a violent coup attempt, and an armed insurrection.  But no rioters have been charged with either a coup attempt nor insurrection.  There was no coup attempt and not much of a riot despite its enormous symbolism.  

 

Rising violent crime - OK, something of an issue; but not for the whole nation.  We still do not have all the data but it is appearing that this is a highly localized phenomenon in one or two dozen major cities and not occurring across the nation at large.  A local governance issue, not a sociological issue.  It does carry further weight because while property crime in those cities does not seem to be rising, violent crime certainly is.  But it is concentrated in particular cities and largely concentrated in particular neighborhoods of those cities.  For the nation as a whole there is not much of an issue and outside those cities, it appears that crime is continuing its post-1995 drop.  Since all our journalists are a) innumerate, and b) live in the cities with the largest rises in crime, the mainstream media is reporting as a national reality that which appears to be only a local reality.

 

Russia and China - Yes, a real issue.  Both nations are flexing themselves and desperately trying to divert domestic attention (which would otherwise be on regime failures) onto international adventures.  It makes the whole international relations field both dangerous and tricky.  

 

Climate change - Not an issue per the IPCC on the measures of storms and wildfires, etc.  Again, the mainstream media has been playing this harp for three decades and there are some legitimate grounds for theoretical and future concern.  We know that CO2 levels are well within the historic record but we don't know to what degree, if any, they might be inducing climate change.  We know there are long cycle changes in climate which have nothing to do with anthropogenic global warming.  Is AGW real? Quite possibly.  Do we know it is real?  Not yet.  Are there other forces at work which are driving climate change and nothing to do with human actions?  Certainly.  In contrast to the earlier hysteria three decades of research are proving much more reassuring than the original concerns.  

Of the issues which Smith identifies as sufficient to support an apocalyptic distress over the future, only the actions of Russia and China warrant real concern.  As all global power contests warrant concern.  

All the rest either are not real or are small potatoes in the scheme of recent history.  There is no real basis for deep concern.  Steven Pinker wrote a whole book on the good news which is always ignored, Enlightenment Now.  

The entirety of Smith's justification for hysteria rests on journalists misreading reality to a staggering degree and markedly different from the 80% of the nation who do not live in the dozen or two big city centers where some of these issues do have some local salience.  

He has some useful information and insights in his piece but Smith is always tethered by his ideological world view.  For example, he writes

In 1996, the Atlanta Olympics that was supposed to symbolize the post-Cold War triumph of peace and democracy was bombed by a right-wing terrorist.

But that is not quite right.  Eric Rudolph wasn't a right-wing terrorist.  He was an anti-abortion extremist.  Smith is shading the truth to foster an incorrect interpretation.  The equivalent would be to identify a PETA terrorist act as that of a left-wing terrorist.  The act was not that of a left-wing terrorist but of an animal rights extremist.  The terminology of left or right-wing calls for the assumption that the act was due to an ideological worldview when, in most these types of cases, it is not partisan political, it is policy political.  There are left and right wing anti-abortionists as there are left and right-wing animal rights advocates.  

Smith continues through his piece advocating for alarmism about things which are not alarming and also advocating for muddling through.  It is as if he is alarmed by the ill-founded call for socialism from those to his left but does not wish to cede the issues which he finds hysteria-inducing.

Oddly, and very interestingly, he argues for muddling through.  Which is not far from the Classical Liberal (i.e. conservative) view of faith in an emergent order in a world of free speech, free markets and consent-of-the-governed through constitutional elections.  Classical Liberals do not have prescriptive solutions.  All they have is the evidence of the past 200 years that when we rely on free speech, free markets and consent, economic progress and prosperity follow.  Whenever we resort to banishing misinformation, controlling/managing markets and governing through edicts and mandates, we always end up with ruin.

The left have the advantage for advocating for specific and desirable-sounding policies while Classical Liberals are always mumbling on about emergent order and it will be alright in the end.  They are right, but it isn't a particularly stirring cri de guerre.