Fundamental thesis: generational value shift generally tends to move towards being more liberal because materialistic concerns generally become less important.
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As older generations become smaller proportions of the population, they tend to feel increasingly more “disoriented” and want a return to the values they believe should be respected. They can feel like the world is turning against them and all the institutions that they used to rely on have been taken over.
- They tend to prefer loud, bold, courageous, transgressive leaders who openly say what they feel like they couldn’t say
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”What often seems to me to unite the parties that respond to this tendency is a kind of promise that they will solve disorientation by making things the way they were…But at its core is a kind of nostalgic promise that you won’t have to feel like your own country has changed in a way that you don’t recognize it and it doesn’t recognize you…You can disagree about things like taxing and spending, but you can cut the pie in lots of different ways, and we can kind of agree to disagree. But when it comes to issues of what you can say, for example, what is socially acceptable in terms of race or ethnicity, or what’s socially appropriate in terms of issues of gender or sexuality, then it’s really getting at the heart of who you are, who you feel that your identity is, what you can be proud of, what your status is in that society, and what your moral values are. So a lot of these debates are bitter because it’s really us vs. them.
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Contra this: Beware theories of everything → especially for the generational shift part of the thesis
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What’s the role of social media, the internet, and traditional media in all of this?
- Ezra Klein take: Social media plays a fundamental role. Algorithms and greater connectivity makes it easier to find tribes, enhances Tribalism, you have more chances of interacting with the people and ideas that you see as threatening your culture and your value, change seems faster. People especially at the top of influence on public opinion (journalists, politicians, etc) are disproportionately more plugged into political social media, and perpetuate what they see to the people that listen to them.
- Pippa Norris take: Blaming things overwhelmingly on social media seems like a cop-out. Most people aren’t plugged into social media for political discussion and spend much of that time looking at other things instead. It can lower the barrier (to virtually zero) for extremist opinions to spread, go viral, and make a community for themselves, but it doesn’t really affect the underlying social causes. Basically it can increase the speed and the scale, but it isn’t the root.
- My take: I think I lean towards Ezra Klein’s perspective. Pippa Norris is probably biased towards searching for “deeper causes” and theories of everything as an academic and writer on these subjects. Of course social media isn’t the root cause, but speed, scale, and especially the barrier reduction to near zero is tremendously important in enabling extremist parties to rise.