Probably the longest book review I have written. But Gurri’s book is probably the most important one I have read in the past couple of years. One snippet of the review:
The insiders’ advantages include institutional continuity, the ability to mobilize large resources, and experience at choosing strategy and tactics. The outsiders’ advantages include rapid evolution by trying many tactics and quickly discarding those that fail, the ability to use information that gets filtered out by insider institutional processes, and unshakable conviction in their cause.
A central point of Gurri’s analysis is that the Internet and social media have altered the balance between insiders and outsiders with respect to information. Fifty years ago, outsiders lacked access to a lot of the information that was available to insiders.
Outsider goals aren’t unrealistic. At least speaking of my own outsiders (middle class white people). We are just trying to conserve something that already has existed (thus proving its own reasonableness). Moreover, the very nature of a reformer is that he isn’t nihilistic. Nihilists withdraw from the process and figure that nothing can be changed.
Elites meanwhile are pursuing a strategy of destroying all previous cultures and people in pursuit of a diverse multi-cult future that doesn’t appear to have any positive values besides private hedonism and novelty seeking. That seems quite a bit more nihilistic and unreasonable.
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“Insiders will have to cede authority, rather than seek to centralize and expand power. They will need to seek to devolve more decisions to local governments. Moreover, at the local level, existing governments will have to become willing to tolerate, and even to foster, competition from other institutions, such as charter schools, that are capable of providing government services.”
The one good thing in your piece. Though I’m not sure your plan for getting there if you are pro-elite. They won’t even let local school districts decide their bathroom policy.
What might be added to your review is a reference to observations such as Oakeshott’s* about the anti-individuals vs. the individuals and the “leaders” needed by (and using) the anti-individuals.
As a reader of Martin Gurri, I am struck by the fact he is observing the phoenix of individuality in those whom you label “outsiders.” Those outsiders are individualists, expressing and acting upon individuality
They are forming the base of an **informed** populism to displace the “lead” or herded populisms of times of more restricted information.
Information alone is not “knowledge;” but practically all knowledge is derived by perceptions of the relationships between bits of knowledge.
The perceptions of information and those relationships are dispersed amongst individuals. Only empirical results demonstrate the superiority of any particular group of individuals (regardless of their political or social positions) over other individuals, singly or jointly.
Raise a glass to **Informed Populism** the face of individuality in our times.
* “The Masses in representative democracy” (pp. 363 et seq)
in “Rationalism in Politics” (Liberty Fund 1991 -still in print)
My haste:
should have read:
. . . but practically all knowledge is derived by perceptions of the relationships between bits of * information.”
not “bits of knowledge”
Just bought the book on the strength of that review. Until then, I don’t quite grasp the mechanism that produces escalating over-promising from insiders. Why not stay the course, or even lower the bar to “Hey, it could be worse. We’re doing as well as anyone. The alternative is Greece, Venezuela, Argentina, etc…”
I suspect the null hypothesis is that over-promising worked, but now it is working less so.
A very specific example is all these cops we see on cell phone and dash cam video doing amazingly ridiculous things. They even know that they can’t get away with things anymore but it still hasn’t sunk in. On the other end of the spectrum, Lorretta Lynch not only didn’t talk for 30 minutes to Bill Clinton about his grand children, but she actually had the gall to tell us that is what happened.
In short, cops can’t not cop, Clintons can’t not Clinton, and AGs can’t not lawyer.
Think of it as like an institutional imperative, having to do with the sorts of promises such things are pressured to make to continue their existence.
But anyway the book will make it much clearer 🙂
Thanks Adam. I’ll check it out.
My big question for Martin Gurri is why haven’t we seen more substantial changes with the modern internet and this revolt? Hell, the surprise Brexit vote success is making everybody resign (ex Cobryn) and it appears nobody in the British has any interest in negotiating with the EU. Their most vocal supporter resigned and suggested getting a foreign negotiator over the weekend. At this point, it appears the British wrote a nasty internet comment against the EU with no long term strategy. (Also the CBS Dan Rather example proves this breakup because 50 years ago, I can’t imagine a insider news organization going after a popular sitting President about his spotty military record either. Given that most people did not need to have a smoking gun to understand W looked for ways to avoid Vietnam. Of course, Vietnam appears to first war that will not have a veteran become President as well.) Additionally, Trump is running at 40% for the general and most of the Party is avoiding their support for him. What appears to be happening is the developed world is getting very cranky about stagnant wages of the last 15 years and I suspect this subsides over the next ten years.
The chief answer is that the public in revolt doesn’t have any resemblance to the 20th century revolutionaries; they don’t have a programme, they’re just *against*. So they aren’t kingmakers, just dethroners. They have no agenda except anti-agenda.
Is this so? I’m revolting against the elite, but I have a pretty good idea what I’m for. Much of it literally existed in this country in the not too distant past, and aspects still exist in other developed countries in 2016.
You shouldn’t lump white middle class conservatives in with SJWs and BLMs.
Nor can you really say the elites are for anything. What are they for? Multiculturalism isn’t a culture. Tolerance isn’t a value system or worldview. As best I can tell they are for extreme narcissism and petty moral posturing. Economically, culturally, spiritually, and socially they’re been peddling non-stop disasters for decades. And their worst crime, immigration, threatens to premaritally destroy the west in a fundamental and uncorrectable way for generations.
Arnold’s portrayal of them as wise custodians of a perilous and desirable status quo is laughable. They’ve been spending down the societal capital of their ancestors for decades and have nothing of value to show for it. Good, decent, ordinary people are trying to stop them before its too late.
In that sense you are by definition not a member of that group.
My analogy is I’ve been anti-establishment forever. And early on I saw that cameras would change police behavior (but it seems police are slower on the uptake than even I had assumed). But when I go on cop videos and make (outstanding) comments and all the cops assume my objective is to blow up policing along with all the nihilistic idiots.
I get into arguments with cops about things that used to be standard police procedure, or at least used to be debated (e.g. should we have two cops per patrol car? After all, the only reason we don’t is because cars got so cheap. This would keep cops from having to be on edge at every citizen contact.). The cops react as if these things are attempts to bring on full anarchy. They react exactly as the insiders Kling/Gurri describes and additionally assume any criticism (even when it isn’t) is coming from a nihilist.
It’s actually a bit more complex than this (please don’t take my summary as sufficient, definitely get the book for the more nuanced discussion :))
Things like Occupy or the Arab Spring show that *a public* can be created around the negative issues; that’s where they actually end up having an impact and toppling a regime and whatnot.
But those publics are made up of a patchwork of people who may or may not have specific positive things they’d want. It’s just that when they start trying to assert those, or make those part of the movement, the movement falls apart. Witness the infighting of the former Occupy people in the years after.
The Arab Spring actually had a coherent strategy: Islamism. Once given power they have made efforts to implement it. I wouldn’t call it nihilistic.
Of course I wouldn’t want to live under it. It’s the kind of thing low IQ clannish peasant trash come up with when they start taking the Koran at its word. It’s a worldview though, you can’t say they didn’t have ideas and policies they didn’t want to implement.
The real shocker with the Arab Spring is that western elites actually thought they were going to result in “progressive Islam religion of peace democracy great wow!”. That was criminally retarded. Especially since Bush had just tried to do that in Iraq recently.
When I see the Arab Spring I see an example of global elite incompetence. To get from that that middle class white people in the west shouldn’t act as a check on our clueless elite is idiotic.
Didn’t the Arab Spring kick off by the insiders putting down protesters? In the past that may have worked. But now it resulted in backlash and upheaval.
And it still seems kind of hard to tell what is effective Islamism versus just chaos.
The Arab Spring had a lot of support from various actors in the government, including Clinton.
It also received some support by western technology companies who were keen to assist such movements, at least in the early days. If you’ll remember the news and interviews at the time, the Arab Spring was “the thing!” that made Twitter/Facebook/Etc not just a place for talking about Kayne West or baby pictures. It was going to “change the world/make the world a better place.”
Multiculturalism isn’t a culture. Tolerance isn’t a value system or worldview.
Sure it is….Go to any California university today and not see enormous amounts of inter-racial dating happening.
Also the main reason why multi-culturalism and tolerance are gaining strength is not because of government or pink police but because it is the way of multi-national corporations. (Yes I worked for one for decades and I work with counterparts in other nations.) For instance McDonalds has to be multicultural to win more customers in more nations and there some US businesses, such Yum Yum, that have had all their growth the last 15 years globally. In some sense I find complaining about David Cameron or Obama globalist is going to have little impact when Apple, McDonalds and Koch Brothers are building global business empires.
What does inter-racial dating have to do with culture?
I get that corporations want bland atomized consumers to juice bottom lines. I’m not sure why we would want that.
Growing up and living in California you learn to interact with people from a lot of backgrounds. My kids best friends are sons of various immigrant groups.
I get that corporations want bland atomized consumers to juice bottom lines. I’m not sure why we would want that.
I am not sure we want that either but it is happening in the global market so it must be profitable.
I don’t see how your kid watching the Disney Channel with kids of a different skin color says anything about having a culture?
One of the very things culture does is give people the complex web of experiences, rituals, habits, tendencies, ideas, and values that allow for the communication of complex and subtle concepts and intuitions. It also helps to bind people together and facilitate harmonious action and feelings. If you want to get particularly optimistic, its mankind’s path to truth, beauty, and communion with the divine.
By contrast, consuming products together isn’t much of a culture. Even if the people you consume together with have different color skin.
But Dan Rather is interesting (to me) in the way Hillary and people like Chris Christie are. I want to tell/ask them “you already won the game, why do you keep cheating?” I think we have to wait for this crop to die.
A few random thoughts:
1. For avoiding institutional decline, Insiders could try sticking up for their institutions, for a change, especially to the deranged nihilists on their own side. “If you guys are telling me Oberlin is a hotbed of latent racism and intolerance, then I guess it must be; here’s space for a Minorities Only lounge and some salaried positions where you can help us police microagressions among incoming freshmen after you finish your Communications degree” is not a viable long term strategy for protecting institutional integrity and performance.
2. You say neither side can implement an effective reform agenda. Does this have to be so? I would say that part of the problem is that selective institutions have had ideological conformity built (in many cases surreptitiously) into the selection criteria, resulting in a severe lack of diversity of thought which both further estranges the insiders and outsiders but also makes it appear as if the choices are between leadership by milquetoast neoliberals or the nihilism of the Occupy crowd. Isn’t GMU part of a project to change that? Or, to look at it a different way, Donald Trump doesn’t have what you would call a “reform agenda,” but he does have two rather specific policy proposals upon which to judge his performance as an executive: 1) build a wall to restrict unauthorized Hispanic immigration and 2) eliminate Muslim immigration. Regardless of the wisdom of those two proposals, his Outside supporters could clearly judge him on his implementation (or failure to do so) of those two policies. The Reagan Administration might qualify as a successful Outsider campaign that implemented some meaningful (mostly tax) reforms, as another example.
3. I’m not sure I’m as pessimistic about the situation as you and Gurri seem to be. As a libertarian, I think many of the formal, legal, institutions that make up this country’s government are either useless or downright pernicious and the worst that happens is that they lose all authority but hang around as zombie bureaucracies, sucking up resources and accomplishing nothing. We already have some of these and it isnt’ the end of the world. We already waste tons of resources; wasting some more won’t worsen the situation too badly.
2. Trump’s specific proposals are ridiculous. However, what I think they did is exposed the other side. You can’t say “we CAN’T build a wall!” because, sure, we can build a wall. You say we can’t and you get exposed. As for muslims, Trump, wittingly or not, does this thing where he says X and people report it as X+Y+Z. Then all he has to do is back off just a little bit from X and his detractors are sitting there claiming he said Y and Z and again they get exposed. His proposals aren’t serious or specific, but they are rhetorically effective, at least in the primary. When he says a Mexican-heritage judge is likely not equally unbiased all else being equal, he is obviously correct, but he says it in a way that makes the other side lose their minds.
Follow up: it needs to be pointed out that my #3 clearly identifies me as an outsider, so my flippant attitude to some extent helps make Gurri’s point. I guess in my defense, my appraisal of the value of our institutions isn’t based on a nihilistic “screw you” kind of attitude, but more on the classical liberal tradition that values individual choice and recognizes the Hayekian knowledge problem and the value of spontaneous order.