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For me, the abundance/yimby movement is an ok answer to the tantalizing but wrong question: what can do to make people's lives better through technology or publ
by norir 2y ago
For me, the abundance/yimby movement is an ok answer to the tantalizing but wrong question: what can do to make people's lives better through technology or public policy?
For me, there is a deeper problem that this framing can't answer: the pervasive sense among all people that things have gone wrong and a lack of any kind of stable sense of identity.
The maga right has been successful because they speak to that sense of alienation. That their policies are nonsensical and counter to the material interests of their supporters is utterly beside the point. They promise a reassuring sense of order and stability to a desperate populace. This is cross cutting across economic classes. Rich and poor people alike are fearful of their place in a society that threatens to leave them behind. The strongman is comforting.
Even though the maga movement is not particularly popular (they barely beat a deeply unpopular administration and only because they relentlessly misled their voters and relied on their voters irrational projections of the good they would do them), they are far more powerful than the opposition because they have a far stronger base of support.
Better policy ideas, which I do support, is not the way out of this mess.
To me, it is a grave mistake to think irrationality can be defeated with rationality. Sure, the abundance agenda is rationally superior to maga. But it does not in any way address the pervasive feelings of alienation and disconnection in modern life. At best it offers the promise that we can more comfortably feel these feelings.
The only thing that will truly stamp out maga is a counter movement that address the deeper spiritual issues that we face collectively. Personally, I am not optimistic that will happen until we go through a lot of pain and chaos.
I pray I'm wrong.
- ideashower 2y agoI think you're right. There's another thing, too, where the opposition is unable to provide a coherence that speaks to the pervasive sense of 'wrong' and provide stability in identity that you mention. Indeed, their idea of being coherent is not only maintaining the status quo that enables those two things, but doubling down. When challenged, they nest in the politics that the Republicans once espoused and have left behind, than realizing that there's a reason those messages and values have shifted by the maga right's successes. It should come as no wonder then that they lose ground year after year from desperate people looking for comfort from the political class.
- modo_mario 2y agoI feel like the dems in the US (and many like them elsewhere in current times) struggle with purity politics whereby they either ditch those who could provide them vital support in their quest for purity on some fronts and espouse a pure stance on other fronts but drastically undermine that image. It's hard to be the party that is aligned with opposing large capital in the public consciousness whilst at the same time bending over and pushing these purists out of the way for donations from said wealth. A party with a subset of oppose police or wants to see it's role redefined with a kamala as a frontrunner. A party that on occasion tries to make itself seen as having the stance and solution regarding things like housing but then not adequately doing so where they have an uncontested stronghold. etc,etc
- LauraFoote 2y ago(author) Personally, I believe that the pervasive sense that things have gone wrong is an effect of feeling economically stunted. I think it feels spiritual, but it's got a specific and direct economic cause: When the next generation is doing worse economically than the previous one, people have all kinds of dark psychological and political responses. Responses that are self-defeating and irrational. What I'm worried about is that we won't have time (or political will) to fix the economic problem before the resulting irrational reaction blows shit up.