Nate Silver, the famous politics-stats guy, gets a lot of flak for accurately predicting that bad stuff will happen. In general he seems bemused by this, is flippantly contemptuous of his critics and just gets on with accurately predicting more bad stuff. But Silver clearly gets frustrated, that his natural political allies can be so pigheaded and so incompetent and so censorious. The Biden-Harris-Democrats screw-up, gifting Trump the presidency, has made him more frustrated than usual.
Last week, Silver posted an excellent essay on his substack:
The expert class is failing, and so is Biden’s presidency
Some excerpts:
… But if you zoom out the lens, 2024 was in some ways more shocking than 2016 — and much more of a middle finger to the expert class. In 2016, progressive institutionalist types could at least console themselves by saying the public didn’t know what it would be getting with Trump, and might have had some natural desire to experiment when the alternative was Hilary Clinton, the unpopular avatar of the technocratic status quo. Well, this time around, the public saw what it got with Trump — including the pandemic, January 6, and all those crimes and misdemeanors — and decided it liked it better than Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. In the national exit poll, 52 percent of voters approved of Trump’s performance from his first term in office, compared to 42 percent for Biden. …
I have a thesis about why these institutions have been performing more and more poorly. For roughly the past 20 years, Democrats have become increasingly the party of the educated — and as you can see in the above data, Trump’s election in 2016 really locked in the trend. The result is what I call the Indigo Blob: the merger between formerly nonpartisan institutions like the media, academia, and public health on the one hand — institutions that draw almost exclusively from the ranks of college graduates — and expressly partisan and political instruments of the Democratic Party and progressive advocacy groups on the other hand. …
The Indigo Blob has control of the “means of moral production”: it writes the story, at least as supposedly respectable people are expected to read it. It runs the newspapers and writes the Hollywood scripts. It awards the BAs, MDs and PhDs. And it seeks to shut out and shut up dissenters … Still, the Indigo Blob is eagerly flocking away from Twitter toward Bluesky, where it hopes to build a new echo chamber. …
And so these narratives have become unconvincing other than to a narrow group of Village midwits. Both the multiethnic working class and an increasing number of highly successful people like those in the River [the calculated risk-taking class] are seeing through the bullshit. …
If the Village wants to continue down this path, it can go right ahead. Don’t point out Biden’s obvious hypocrisy or cognitive decline. Don’t investigate school closures or COVID origins. Continue using “misinformation” as an excuse to shut down speech. Have a great time at Bluesky. But the Village just lost an election to Donald Trump. And it’s losing the battle of ideas, the one thing that it’s supposed to win.
Silver’s essay is focussed on America but the Indigo Blob, what Guy Rundle refers to as the knowledge classes, is also actively blobbing in Australia, and in ways it is worse. Australia is such a village that the village idiots – the media clowns and the university clowns and the censorship clowns and the government clowns – have more prominence and there are fewer voices to call out and to counter their idiocy. Unless you count Murdoch, which would be really stupid.
Read all of Silver’s essay. And, if you want to know about the perfect cartoon that Silver chose to illustrate the essay, go here.
I think it’s how the progressive side are constantly calling us racists etc, but above all the gender stuff. I remember at university being told how I was a privileged member of the patriarchy, when I really wasn’t. Constantly hearing stuff like that as you still do today really wears you down.
Yes, I think for a large group of people this is true and important. I don’t think it matters so much for the plebs, since they more easily write it all off as the rantings of wankers, and are more focussed on tangible difficulties. But for people on the fringes of the expert classes, including those from less privileged backgrounds, the constant guilt-tripping is absurd and exhausting.
To have some private school tosser give sermons on DEI bullshit is not simply nauseating, it is driving away natural allies. Most people in Australian society have a decent amount of liberal sympathies. If they are now attracted to divisive thugs like Dutton it is mainly because they are being driven there.
The majority, but far from all, Australian academics I know realise that 99% of this DEI stuff is bullshit. They are in a comfortable position, however, and it is simply not worth it to object to Trans Chemists Week, or whatever. They fear that they will be howled down, and they are right to fear it. The minority who truly believe this crap are perfectly happy to encourage this fear. They are awful people, truly Red Guards types. I loathe them.
Your post here is spot on!
I wonder whether DEI is in fact a diversion from the bigger issues of inequity in our society. Gaps in power and wealth are growing. DEI gives the appearance of caring about fairness, with a very small investment in publicity and bureaucracy. I see a lot less concern about trans and gay people experiencing poverty, than I do about their right to have, for example, an inclusiveness statement on a government website.
Thanks, JJ. There’s no question it’s a diversion: it’s a lot easier and cheaper to worry about how to refer to “Aboriginals” than it is to improve Aboriginals’ lot. A harder question is what the Word Police et al are hoping to gain from this. Matt Taibbi’s answer is that they are simply grifters.
Taibbi just wrote a (paywalled) review of a We Have Never Been Woke, a new book by a young academic, Musa al-Gharbi. As Taibbi, describes it,
Hence the title of We Have Never Been Woke, which shows that a generation of McCarthyist lunacies was neither a neo-Marxist movement, nor an anti-populist partisan gambit, but a vulgar scrum for resources disguised as political struggle, conducted wholly within the top of the wealth distribution. Rural conservatives, independents, and institutions like schools and the press were collateral damage to history’s dumbest upper-class food fight. …
The “church of dissent” became a political greenmail operation, learning to relax outrage toward patriarchy-tinged targets only after the correct people were hired to replace badthinkers and the right amount of money shelled out to fix “historical” injustice. If you check under the surface of even the silliest-sounding “protests,” you’ll almost always find the money demand somewhere.
I think diversity etc is used to distract. A few years ago, the Victorian teachers union did a really lousy pay deal, ie well below inflation. They had the details of the deal up on their facebook page, and many members were crowding in the comments saying how awful a deal it was etc, how awful the union was etc.
The union suddenly pulled down all mention of the pay deal, and put up about how they were fighting back against the patriarchy etc, sexism in teaching etc etc, crowding their facebook site with declarations of woke distractions rather than the hard economic discussion of the lousy pay deal. It effectively shut down debate.
Why do you think it shut down debate?
Well it shut it down totally because the only posts you could comment on were the ones about the union was fighting patriarchy, or fighting for gender rights etc etc.
So when some people got onto those posts complaining about the lousy pay deal, the union people would respond that it wasn’t the right forum, that the commenters were showing they didn’t think gender issues were important etc etc.
Ok, I guess I see. Thanks.
Friday was the last day of teaching for the year at my school. In the last period of the last day, I had a Year 10 class on General Mathematics. Although some students were absent, I still had a good size class – and not only the conscientious students. I decided to continue my lessons on algebra, and devoted this last session to inequalities. I began with a discussion of not just mathematical inequalities, but inequalities in general. I asked the students to talk about inequalities in society. Wow – they really opened up. I was impressed.
Why?
As it was the last class on the last day of classes – and it was hot – I was not expecting much in terms of participation. I was pleasantly surprised when a good number of the students spoke up about inequalities in Australia.
So you were impressed that they engaged.
Any politician or political party that gleefully denies biological reality does not deserve a single vote. The end.
What if the alternative is Donald Trump and his gang of loons?