Writing a detailed post is too costly and risky for me right now. One of my grandparents was confined in a makeshift prison for ten years during the Cultural Revolution and died shortly after, for something that would normally be considered totally innocent that he did years earlier. None of them saw that coming, so I’m going to play it on the safe side and try to avoid saying things that could be used to “cancel” me or worse. But there are plenty of articles on the Internet you can find by doing some searches. If none of them convinces you how serious the problem is, PM me and I’ll send you some links.
My grandparents on both sides of my family seriously considered leaving China (to the point of making concrete preparations), but didn’t because things didn’t seem that bad, until it was finally too late.
I expect I have much more flexibility than your family did – I have no dependents, I have no property / few belongings to tie me down, and I expect flight travel is much more readily available to me in the present-day. I also expect to notice it faster than the supermajority of people (not disanalogous to how I was prepped for Covid like a month before everyone else).
I don’t know Wei Dai’s specific reasons for having such a high level of concern, but I suspect that they are similar to the arguments given by the historian Niall Ferguson in this debate with Yascha Mounk on how dangerous ‘cancel culture’ is. Ferguson likes to try and forecast social and cultural trends years in advance and thinks that he sees a cultural-revolution like trend growing unchecked.
Ferguson doesn’t give an upper bound on how bad he thinks things could get, but he thinks ‘worse than McCarthyism’ is reasonable to expect over the next few years, because he thinks that ‘cancel culture’ has more broad cultural support and might also gain hard power in institutions.
Now—I am more willing to credit such worries than I was a year ago, but there’s a vast gulf between a trend being concerning and expecting another Cultural Revolution. It feels too much like a direct linear extrapolation fallacy - ‘things have become worse over the last year, imagine if that keeps on happening for the next six years!’ I wasn’t expecting a lot of what happened over the last eight months in the US on the ‘cancel culture’ side, but I think that a huge amount of this is due to a temporary, Trump- and Covid- and Recession-related heating up of the political discourse, not a durable shift in soft power or people’s opinions. I think the opinion polls back this up. If I’m right that this will all cool down, we’ll know in another year or so.
I also think that Yascha’s arguments in that debate about the need for hard institutional power that’s relatively unchecked, to get a Cultural-Revolution like outcome, are really worth considering. I don’t see any realistic path to that level of hard, governmental power at enough levels being held by any group in the US.
If you think we should be more worried, I’d appreciate a more detailed post. This is all new to me.
Writing a detailed post is too costly and risky for me right now. One of my grandparents was confined in a makeshift prison for ten years during the Cultural Revolution and died shortly after, for something that would normally be considered totally innocent that he did years earlier. None of them saw that coming, so I’m going to play it on the safe side and try to avoid saying things that could be used to “cancel” me or worse. But there are plenty of articles on the Internet you can find by doing some searches. If none of them convinces you how serious the problem is, PM me and I’ll send you some links.
I do expect to be able to vacate a given country in a timely manner if it seems to be falling into a cultural Revolution.
My grandparents on both sides of my family seriously considered leaving China (to the point of making concrete preparations), but didn’t because things didn’t seem that bad, until it was finally too late.
That’s pretty scary.
I expect I have much more flexibility than your family did – I have no dependents, I have no property / few belongings to tie me down, and I expect flight travel is much more readily available to me in the present-day. I also expect to notice it faster than the supermajority of people (not disanalogous to how I was prepped for Covid like a month before everyone else).
I don’t know Wei Dai’s specific reasons for having such a high level of concern, but I suspect that they are similar to the arguments given by the historian Niall Ferguson in this debate with Yascha Mounk on how dangerous ‘cancel culture’ is. Ferguson likes to try and forecast social and cultural trends years in advance and thinks that he sees a cultural-revolution like trend growing unchecked.
Ferguson doesn’t give an upper bound on how bad he thinks things could get, but he thinks ‘worse than McCarthyism’ is reasonable to expect over the next few years, because he thinks that ‘cancel culture’ has more broad cultural support and might also gain hard power in institutions.
Now—I am more willing to credit such worries than I was a year ago, but there’s a vast gulf between a trend being concerning and expecting another Cultural Revolution. It feels too much like a direct linear extrapolation fallacy - ‘things have become worse over the last year, imagine if that keeps on happening for the next six years!’ I wasn’t expecting a lot of what happened over the last eight months in the US on the ‘cancel culture’ side, but I think that a huge amount of this is due to a temporary, Trump- and Covid- and Recession-related heating up of the political discourse, not a durable shift in soft power or people’s opinions. I think the opinion polls back this up. If I’m right that this will all cool down, we’ll know in another year or so.
I also think that Yascha’s arguments in that debate about the need for hard institutional power that’s relatively unchecked, to get a Cultural-Revolution like outcome, are really worth considering. I don’t see any realistic path to that level of hard, governmental power at enough levels being held by any group in the US.