By “more insane and extreme object-level behaviors and beliefs” of people and factions in power, I am mainly referring to beliefs of mainstream U.S politicians and political beliefs, on both / all sides of the political spectrum.
e.g. COVID restrictions which aren’t based on any actual model of the world, tariffs, immigration policy, environmental policy, a general preference for talking about (or legislating on) culture war things which are usually more symbolic or mood-affiliation than actual policy choices. A few examples which were initiated by high-level elected officials or received significant / outsize attention from them or mainstream media:
Whatever is going on with local San Francisco politics (and probably local governments more generally)
And the point is that, regardless of your views on any of these specific things (or the underlying policy issues or culture war topics for which these examples are often proxies for), if these are the topics your elected officials and mainstream media are spending their time and energy arguing about, something has gone seriously wrong, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the system itself is losing democratic legitimacy as a result.
I don’t see how things like crazy culture war politics or COVID reactions lead to a breakdown in democratic norms unless those crazy beliefs imply shifts in strategy. The bud light boycott seems plausibly good; it teaches Republicans that they have alternative tools of influence.
It’s less about specific issues, and more like a sense that the general sanity waterline has been perceptibly trending downwards in mainstream politics for decades. Politicians and institutions in general are less effective, less trustworthy, less coherent, etc. than they were in the relatively recent past (I claim, but this seems to be a fairly common sentiment among both rats and non-rats of various political stripes).
And then I’m further saying that if I’m right about my claim that the general sanity waterline has fallen, then a decline in democratic legitimacy is justified, or at least expected, in the sense that less sane institutions will be trusted and respected less, because they are in fact less trustworthy and less deserving of respect. Or, in more rationalist-y terms, a model of institutions and politicians as less trustworthy and less legitimate will be both more predictively accurate and more instrumentally useful than a model in which they are relatively more trusted and treated as legitimate democratic actors.
If you disagree, is is your disagreement more with the first claim (the sanity waterline in mainstream politics has generally been falling), or the second (this explains at least a significant part of the democratic backsliding that we’ve seen)?
By “more insane and extreme object-level behaviors and beliefs” of people and factions in power, I am mainly referring to beliefs of mainstream U.S politicians and political beliefs, on both / all sides of the political spectrum.
e.g. COVID restrictions which aren’t based on any actual model of the world, tariffs, immigration policy, environmental policy, a general preference for talking about (or legislating on) culture war things which are usually more symbolic or mood-affiliation than actual policy choices. A few examples which were initiated by high-level elected officials or received significant / outsize attention from them or mainstream media:
$2000 / mo retroactive covid stimulus checks, Grand Theft Education
U.S.-Mexico border wall
Some kind of controversy / boycott over a beer sponsorship
State governor feuding with Disney World
Whatever is going on with local San Francisco politics (and probably local governments more generally)
And the point is that, regardless of your views on any of these specific things (or the underlying policy issues or culture war topics for which these examples are often proxies for), if these are the topics your elected officials and mainstream media are spending their time and energy arguing about, something has gone seriously wrong, and it shouldn’t be surprising that the system itself is losing democratic legitimacy as a result.
I don’t see how things like crazy culture war politics or COVID reactions lead to a breakdown in democratic norms unless those crazy beliefs imply shifts in strategy. The bud light boycott seems plausibly good; it teaches Republicans that they have alternative tools of influence.
It’s less about specific issues, and more like a sense that the general sanity waterline has been perceptibly trending downwards in mainstream politics for decades. Politicians and institutions in general are less effective, less trustworthy, less coherent, etc. than they were in the relatively recent past (I claim, but this seems to be a fairly common sentiment among both rats and non-rats of various political stripes).
And then I’m further saying that if I’m right about my claim that the general sanity waterline has fallen, then a decline in democratic legitimacy is justified, or at least expected, in the sense that less sane institutions will be trusted and respected less, because they are in fact less trustworthy and less deserving of respect. Or, in more rationalist-y terms, a model of institutions and politicians as less trustworthy and less legitimate will be both more predictively accurate and more instrumentally useful than a model in which they are relatively more trusted and treated as legitimate democratic actors.
If you disagree, is is your disagreement more with the first claim (the sanity waterline in mainstream politics has generally been falling), or the second (this explains at least a significant part of the democratic backsliding that we’ve seen)?