5 ms·

Historians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.

by slg 5mo ago

JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.
- notahacker 5mo ago
  We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
  - zamfi 5mo ago
    On its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate. But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
    - csoups14 5mo ago
      Of course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
    - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
      Yeah, people act like everything was peachy until Trump decided to run, and then people went crazy and voted for him for some unknowable reason. No, things were pretty fucked before Trump. We had decades of our "leaders" in Washington treating the people with contempt and making decisions for personal benefit, rather than what benefits the people. We had bribery, I mean lobbying, behind a ton of the laws that got passed. And that's without even getting into the tyrannical stuff, like the Patriot act, the NSA spying, etc. No, the government was pretty blatantly not serving the people's interests when Trump came along. That doesn't make Trump a good solution to the problem, but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves". It would be surprising if that promise didn't resonate with people.
      - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
        > nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves Which is ironic, given Trump has been pretty great for anyone who is rich or well connected.
      - retsibsi 5mo ago
        > but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves" Sort of, but that was always a pretty obvious tack to take, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of would-be leaders willing to play that role. So we're still left with the question of why the voters chose the most obviously untrustworthy guy to play it.
        pesus 5mo ago
        I think there is a shortage of would-be leaders like that though, that's the problem. Or at least would be leaders that gained any real traction. The only other one in the past decade was Bernie. Unfortunately for the past 3 elections, it essentially came down to the obviously untrustworthy "outsider" vs the ultimate establishment candidate. For a lot of people, it's as simple as that.
    - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
      What if the electorate is so stupid that what appeals to them is ruinous? What if the electorate is so stupid that it simply votes against women in order to affirm their personal desires to not be at bottom of the socioeconomic rankings, however delusional those may be?
- slg 5mo ago
  An emperor choosing a bad heir is much easier to explain than the general population of a democracy choosing this.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    Maybe Athens and Alcibiades is a better example? Or the Carthaginians being Carthiginians.
- bflesch 5mo ago
  Interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia [1]: > For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...] > During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...] > He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    I, Claudius does a solid fictionalization of the man. (Suetonius if you’re craving drier.)
    - floren 5mo ago
      Agreed, it's my 2026 book of the year despite being written in the 30s
Bud 5mo ago
[dead]
outside2344 5mo ago
Did you not consider the 5 second dopamine hit I got from owning the libs?
brianjlogan 5mo ago
Lots of historical precedent for an intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk leading to an uprising. I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!" Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority. Coal miners don't care that international students aren't coming to the US anymore. That's not an important factor for them. Edit: My point here is that you don't need hindsight to see how this aligns with historic precedent.
- exitb 5mo ago
  > intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?
- ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
  Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.
  - slg 5mo ago
    The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering The Clines, Justices and even Manchins have money. The miners are almost irrelevant.
    - deleted 5mo ago
      [deleted]
mullingitover 5mo ago
Or they'll just say "History doesn't repeat but it often rhymes."[1] [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802602/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802602/
Zigurd 5mo ago
Some of "we" were whipped into a frenzy of resentment against science, culture, and awareness of our mixed bag of history. That's how those decisions were enabled.
jalapenoj 5mo ago
[flagged]
- gosub100 5mo ago
  Or finding out that he was just the tip of a giant iceberg that corrupted every square inch of our government.
dfedbeef 5mo ago
I certainly am
gosub100 5mo ago
There will be no more historians. Their jobs will be lost to AI.
layer8 5mo ago
They might struggle understanding why the decision-makers were elected, though maybe not even that. It’s well-documented why the decisions are being made. Decisions being bad doesn’t mean that they aren’t perfectly explainable.
schainks 5mo ago
It seems pretty cut and dry to me: Boomers I know today still rave about Regan-era policies and how good they were for everyone, although I'm not sure what "everyone" they are referring to in that sentence. Regan-era deregulation, cutting of social spending, and favoring asset-based versus wage based economic growth certainly laid the groundwork for where we are with today's K-shaped economy.
justin66 5mo ago
On the contrary, populism and its effects are well understood by historians. This is just another wave.
rjbwork 5mo ago
I don't think they're going to struggle at all. It's quite clear.

Historians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.

by slg 5mo ago

Historians looking back at this era are going to struggle to understand why we made the decisions we did.

Eh, do we struggle with Caligula? He’s seen as he was—a joke. I imagine this era will be seen similarly unless we manage to capstone the era with nukes.

notahacker 5mo ago
We'd probably struggle to understand Caligula if he'd been popularly elected after he went mad by an electorate that got to listen to his madness on television...
- zamfi 5mo ago
  On its face this sounds like an indictment of an electorate. But I think it's actually a much deeper indictment of the incumbents who couldn't present a vision more appealing than the "madness on television".
  - csoups14 5mo ago
    Of course incumbents are going to be supportive of the system as it was and is, they're incumbents. You can't blame a person in power for maintaining a system giving them power any more than you can blame a bee for pollinating a flower. It's in their nature. The electorate misidentified the solution to their problems. Voters squarely hold the blame in my opinion. You can't vote for an arsonist and then complain when they set fire to everything. Leftists spend their time complaining online and disengaging from the political system instead of voting in primaries against incumbents. Independents and conservatives vote against their own interests consistently while keeping in power a party that is destroying our system of government.
  - bigstrat2003 5mo ago
    Yeah, people act like everything was peachy until Trump decided to run, and then people went crazy and voted for him for some unknowable reason. No, things were pretty fucked before Trump. We had decades of our "leaders" in Washington treating the people with contempt and making decisions for personal benefit, rather than what benefits the people. We had bribery, I mean lobbying, behind a ton of the laws that got passed. And that's without even getting into the tyrannical stuff, like the Patriot act, the NSA spying, etc. No, the government was pretty blatantly not serving the people's interests when Trump came along. That doesn't make Trump a good solution to the problem, but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves". It would be surprising if that promise didn't resonate with people.
    - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
      > nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves Which is ironic, given Trump has been pretty great for anyone who is rich or well connected.
    - retsibsi 5mo ago
      > but nobody should be surprised when people vote for an outsider who says "I'm for you, and I'm going to help you take back your country from the out of touch elites who hate you and only look out for themselves" Sort of, but that was always a pretty obvious tack to take, and I don't think there was ever a shortage of would-be leaders willing to play that role. So we're still left with the question of why the voters chose the most obviously untrustworthy guy to play it.
      - pesus 5mo ago
        I think there is a shortage of would-be leaders like that though, that's the problem. Or at least would be leaders that gained any real traction. The only other one in the past decade was Bernie. Unfortunately for the past 3 elections, it essentially came down to the obviously untrustworthy "outsider" vs the ultimate establishment candidate. For a lot of people, it's as simple as that.
  - lotsofpulp 5mo ago
    What if the electorate is so stupid that what appeals to them is ruinous? What if the electorate is so stupid that it simply votes against women in order to affirm their personal desires to not be at bottom of the socioeconomic rankings, however delusional those may be?
slg 5mo ago
An emperor choosing a bad heir is much easier to explain than the general population of a democracy choosing this.
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  Maybe Athens and Alcibiades is a better example? Or the Carthaginians being Carthiginians.
bflesch 5mo ago
Interesting comparison. From the Wikipedia [1]: > For the early part of his reign, he is said to have been "good, generous, fair and community-spirited", but increasingly self-indulgent, cruel, sadistic, extravagant, and sexually perverted thereafter, an insane, murderous tyrant who demanded and received worship as a living god, humiliated the Senate, and planned to make his horse a consul. [...] > During his brief reign, Caligula worked to increase the unconstrained personal power of the emperor, as opposed to countervailing powers within the principate. [...] > He had to abandon an attempted invasion of Britain, and the installation of his statue in the Temple in Jerusalem. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caligula
- JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
  I, Claudius does a solid fictionalization of the man. (Suetonius if you’re craving drier.)
  - floren 5mo ago
    Agreed, it's my 2026 book of the year despite being written in the 30s

Bud 5mo ago

[dead]

outside2344 5mo ago

Did you not consider the 5 second dopamine hit I got from owning the libs?

brianjlogan 5mo ago

Lots of historical precedent for an intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk leading to an uprising. I'd imagine every great(in scale/importance) uprising/political tumult had some aspect of "but they're ruining everything!" Everything for intellectuals and people with ties to the system that was functioning for that minority. Coal miners don't care that international students aren't coming to the US anymore. That's not an important factor for them. Edit: My point here is that you don't need hindsight to see how this aligns with historic precedent.

exitb 5mo ago
> intellectual elite ignoring the perception and needs of the common folk Isn’t that what the common folk chose? Was some of that not clear before the election?
ZeroGravitas 5mo ago
Grad students outnumber coalminers 70:1, if they're roughly half international which another comment claims, that's still a big difference.
- slg 5mo ago
  The way "coal miners" are discussed would also likely be something that puzzles historians. There are approximately 45,000 coal miners in the US, that's roughly equivalent to the combined enrollment of Harvard and MIT. There are more university students in the relatively small city of Cambridge, Massachusetts than there are people mining coal in the US and yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering.
  - JumpCrisscross 5mo ago
    > yet we have to pretend the latter are a constituency worth considering The Clines, Justices and even Manchins have money. The miners are almost irrelevant.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]

mullingitover 5mo ago

Or they'll just say "History doesn't repeat but it often rhymes."[1] [1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802602/ https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8802602/

Zigurd 5mo ago

Some of "we" were whipped into a frenzy of resentment against science, culture, and awareness of our mixed bag of history. That's how those decisions were enabled.

jalapenoj 5mo ago

[flagged]

gosub100 5mo ago
Or finding out that he was just the tip of a giant iceberg that corrupted every square inch of our government.

dfedbeef 5mo ago

I certainly am

gosub100 5mo ago

There will be no more historians. Their jobs will be lost to AI.

layer8 5mo ago

They might struggle understanding why the decision-makers were elected, though maybe not even that. It’s well-documented why the decisions are being made. Decisions being bad doesn’t mean that they aren’t perfectly explainable.

schainks 5mo ago

It seems pretty cut and dry to me: Boomers I know today still rave about Regan-era policies and how good they were for everyone, although I'm not sure what "everyone" they are referring to in that sentence. Regan-era deregulation, cutting of social spending, and favoring asset-based versus wage based economic growth certainly laid the groundwork for where we are with today's K-shaped economy.

justin66 5mo ago

On the contrary, populism and its effects are well understood by historians. This is just another wave.

rjbwork 5mo ago

I don't think they're going to struggle at all. It's quite clear.