Tech nerds are smart. But they can’t seem to get their heads around politics. (David Rober
Tech nerds are smart. But they can’t seem to get their heads around politics. (David Roberts, Vox, Aug 27 2015)“There are two broad narratives about politics that can be glimpsed between the lines here. Both are, in the argot of the day, problematic.The first, which is extremely common in the nerd community, is a distaste for government and politics. Sometimes this shades over into ideological libertarianism (see: Peter Thiel, who wants to build a floating libertarian city), but often it’s just a sense that government is big, bloated, slow-moving, and inefficient, that politicians are dimwits and panderers, and that real progress comes from private innovation, not government mandates. None of which is facially unreasonable.The second is the conception of politics as a contest of two mirror-image political philosophies, with mirror-image extremes and a common center, which is where sensible, independent-minded people congregate (“both parties have good points; both also have a bunch of dumb people saying dumb things”). (…)I think that these two narratives — disdain toward politics, and the parties as mirror images with rational thinking in the center — are connected. That vision of the political spectrum implies that one is partisan precisely in proportion to one’s distance from rational thinking. It defines partisanship as irrationality, as blind, lemming-like behavior, the opposite of approaching things “from a standpoint of rationality and what I think makes sense." The independent thinker takes a bit from this party, a bit from that one, as rational thinking dictates.Since the loudest voices in politics are partisans, people who have chosen a side, seeing the political spectrum this way is inevitably going to lead to an irritation and disdain toward politics, a desire to wash one’s hands of it and proclaim, as Urban does, that "I am not political." But that just won’t do. (…)People who know little about the landscape of politics or the mechanisms of policy will tend to support positions outside the mainstream, often positions that more experienced political observers will find ludicrous (for good or ill). A voter with deeply informed, mildly center-left positions will code as "more partisan” than a moderate who has ill-informed positions that are all over the map, but that doesn’t mean the moderate is more centrist or more rational.Third, in practical coalitional politics, the “center” will tend to be shaped not by rational thinking but by money and power. If there is any space left for bipartisanship in US politics, it is around measures that benefit corporate elites.The right-wing base has a coherent position on climate change: It’s a hoax, so we shouldn’t do anything about it. The left-wing base has a coherent position: It’s happening, so we should do something about it. The “centrist” position, shared by conservative Democrats and the few remaining moderate Republicans, is that it’s happening but we shouldn’t do anything about it. That’s not centrist in any meaningful ideological sense; instead, like most areas of overlap between the parties, it is corporatist.” -- source link
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