Notes and links - 17 Oct

Interesting links, news and footnotes for The Ideas That Explain the News

+ “Authoritarianism is a cancer.” Good vid from George Conway promoting the No Kings march.

+ Side note: Is ‘king’ the best way to attack Trump? I guess as a Brit with a constitutional monarch I find it hard to see kings as evil. (Actually quite a good system considering the dangers of presidents — but don’t get me onto parliamentary vs presidential systems.) Also, it feels like the idea of kings being bad is obscured by the fact they all died a long time ago. Personally, “tyrant” or “dictator” seem better labels.

+ “When the Nazi group chat ruins your talking points.” It’s only 40 seconds but just brilliant work from The Daily Show.

+ This week I learnt there are more theatres in London private schools than there are in the West End.

+ “A key thing about vought — and all of these guys — is that they have a totally top down and hierarchical vision of the world. they believe that the cultural changes they hate can be turned off by destroying the federal government because they can’t imagine that they emerged bottom-up in society.” This is a theory I’ve heard a few times from Jamelle Bouie. He argues that it’s what animates the right’s attack on George Soros, the “NGO Network” and so on.

I think Bouie is right to be sceptical of overly top-down theories of politics, but I think he misses that this is a meme that’s very present on the left as well. We on the left are always accounting for reactionary and conservative views by referring to lobbying, media oligarchs, “elite cues” and so on. To be clear, these have a role but I think we also need to take more seriously that some people are just conservative. (For more, watch The problem with the media is not what you think.)

+ Well, it seems most of my audience didn’t want to hear about Ezra Klein. That’s my lowest performing video in a while and most of the comments were in disagreement. (I should say however, they were intelligent and there wasn’t any abuse; I’ve genuinely found the debates I’ve been having on this video the most stimulating of all so far.)

Anyway, after the jump, I’ll share some of the best points disagreeing with Klein’s “moderate to win” argument, and some of my responses to common critiques such as “hasn’t Trump shown extremism works?”.

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