My wife is from India, and she mentioned that high-caste people can be kicked out of Hinduism if a Dalit (untouchable) touches them or prepares their food. A similar question might be why don't Dalit's organize en masse in a conspiracy to touch and degrade every high caste person in India?
I know anime is tangential, but the final season of Attack on Titan depicts this kind of manipulation of an underclass and it's so emotionally impactful.
I think the basic distinction is this: Nixon could understand that very few people were "truly Franklins", and that most people were constantly under the shadow of Franklins (and could consequently become Orthogonians). Hence, the class boundaries were fuzzy.
Here, the class boundaries between upper classes and lower classes are not fuzzy at all. An Indian Nixon cannot necessarily swell the ranks of the lower castes by using some clever maneuvering. Hence, only an all out battle between the pre-defined classes may equalize the playing field somewhat
Also, the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them, they're given the worst of everything: the worst jobs, the worst education, the worst access to government resources. So there you have a totally subjective, arbitrary distinction that eventually manifests as an objective reality regarding coolness: it's really hard to be cool when you're prevented from doing any job that is even remotely cool.
And that's key to maintaining the class distinction, too. An "omega" caste that's given an opportunity to perform work that allows them to accumulate resources and respect eventually results in either repressive violence to "put them back in their place", or results in a forced change to the caste system in place. See e.g. Ashkenazi Jews.
Yes and no. Dalits have reservations, like the US' affirmative action system on steroids, for education and government jobs. Of course, that only benefits a tiny elite of the Dalits, not the overwhelming majority that like most Indians has neither education nor government jobs, but it also breeds resentment from upper-caste folks who considered those perks their exclusive privilege, hence the often violent reaction against them.
"the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them"
Ashkenazi Jews became smart by being forced into certain occupations and marrying among themselves for hundreds of years. No reason to think the same thing hasn't differentiated different castes in India.
I think if you want to claim people are genetically less intelligent, you need direct evidence. The stakes are too high in terms of the effects of the conclusions drawn to rely on a circumstantial case.
I'm pointing out that there's no reason to assume that there's definitively NOT anything genetic that contributes to them being "uncool", without direct evidence.
Anyway, I don't think the stakes of an anonymous internet comment is very high.
This seems backwards. We know that culture, educational opportunities, early childhood nutrition, etc. are incredibly powerful forces. It's impossible to truly control for them.
It seems that the parsimonious explanation is that the factors we know about that are capable of causing the differences cause the differences. The alternative is that the factors we know about and unknown genetic factors cause the differences.
I'm not going to assume genetic factors without some specific evidence.
The stakes of this are not just some internet comment. The stakes are "Do I assume genetic differences account for differences between groups." This includes the groups in my own society. If I believe that poorly performing groups in my own society are genetically inferior, I will act accordingly. That's pretty damn high stakes.
Well, the Ashkenazis were the "beneficiaries" of an unintentional selective breeding program by their European persecutors, but of course most other persecuted minorities like the Romas did not have the cultural traits that allowed them to adapt and thrive despite it.
Indian genetics are very unusual. The Han Chinese are one population of a billion, India is home to hundreds of sub-populations of around 3M each, that have managed to maintain a higher level of endogamy than the Ashkenazis for over a millennium (from the excellent book on human population genetics *Who We Are and How We Got Here* by David Reich).
There are certainly some very successful groups like the entrepreneurial Patels but the only one I can think of matching your description is the Parsis (like the founders of Tata & Sons), they are fairly recent immigrants (18th Century IIRC) and not Hinuds but Zoroastrians, so not subject to the caste system (but still practicing endogamy for cultural/religious reasons).
There's doubt about Jewish intelligence truly being high. See Taleb's article about IQ: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39. Another explanation for Jewish success is nepotism. Nepotism would explain why Jewish success is concentrated in certain industries like Hollywood and the media as opposed to, say, engineering. I would say that Anglo-Saxons, Koreans, and a lot of other notably successful groups are also largely successful due to nepotism (not singling Jews out). It's easy to succeed when other people give you preferential treatment.
I'm going to copy and paste my response to another participant, with apologies for not crafting a reply specifically to you:
"I was hesitant to get into the subject, but it's not that I'm ruling out genetics playing a role, it just doesn't strike me as strongly relevant to the anthropological principle I suggested - which is that when a lower-caste group is given a consistent opportunity to accumulate wealth and glory, they're quickly going to cease to be lower caste.
"Genetics" is at best an auxiliary factor with respect to the success of the Western Jewish population. The primary factors are obviously (i) their restriction to providing financial services, combined with strong internal cultural/kinship connections across multiple cities, at a time in human history when international finance became obscenely lucrative, and (ii) a cultural focus on educational achievement, due to aforementioned restrictions to primarily intellectual careers, at a time when educational attainment was swiftly becoming extremely important to success."
How does that explain the massive success of Jewish immigrant kids in intellectual fields in the US? Nobody needed to impose an Irish Quota to keep the Irish from taking all the admissions slots to Harvard.
Are there any identifiable ethnic/religious groups who are more overrepresented than Ashekenazi Jews in, say, Nobel prizes, Fields medals, or chess championships?
One, that'd get you killed in short order in the rural hinterlands of the country.
Two, it's illegal - harassment bordering on assault - under any sane legal code, including the Indian one, and would be treated as such - in the cities, you'd be arrested.
Three, few people believe in such pollution that literally, and for those who do, there are purification rites you can perform to get cleanse yourself of any such pollution.
In practice, being nonconsensually touched by people of all castes is already a reality of life in urban India - trains, buses, public transport, civic life, etc etc etc - simply because of space constraints, the same way it is on a crowded subway train.
I assume that this sort of ritual contamination is therefore only active in certain social situations where purity is at stake? At a guess politics and marriage?
Well, for me personally, it's practically never at stake except some ritual situations, such as bathing after a haircut or a funeral, or before any kind of puja, for traditional and cultivatory reasons. I subscribe to *modern* theories of purity and impurity, dammit, with little creepy crawlies and their transmission being the causally relevant factor!
Marriage-wise, for most (urban) people who still care, it's not a matter of purity but more so of community, compatibility, tradition, and identity - castes are, well, *actually* diverse, you see, not the fake diversity of 'clothes, food, and a few days of ethnic stuff, but nothing that *really actually* matters' which diversity has been reduced to in most industrial and post-industrial societies. (I exaggerate, of course, but only somewhat. This deracinated class exists in India as well, don't get me wrong, yet history lives in a far more visceral way than in many other places I've seen.)
Note that two people from different castes in India, whose castes have been living together for the last 1000 years as neighbours but not intermarrying, are *more* genetically distinct - and have been for a thousand years - than a Sicilian and a Swede. And there are *thousands* of groups like this. Endogamy has been well-nigh absolute in the subcontinent for a millennium and a half or so. (Had the genetic analyses not shown these results to be the case, they would have been believed to be impossible, so strong is the sociological prior that people living as neighbours will, at least like *once in a hundred years*, fuck.)
Probably because 'can' is very much the operative word in that sentence - my guess is that in practice, no high-caste person is kicked out for such an occurrence unless they've already got other high-caste enemies calling for their ouster.
Because whatever actions hurt those who (have political power/are high class/the socially privileged) is viewed as an assault and punished accordingly. This is true even if it is voluntary.
Look at what triggered lynchings and white race riots in the US. Look at how unwanted suitors of high class ladies were treated in the past. Look at how authority figures (from teachers to parents to cops) treat being ignored. For a comic example, look at how certain types of customers respond to minor failings at customer service.
If the Brahmin loses their caste because of something the Dalit did, what is the Dalit going to lose?
"Hey remember the time you've beaten the living shit out of that Dalit guy for *almost* touching you? Yeah yeah sure he didn't, everyone seen that! But he was so close right?"
(Yes you can beat the living shit out of someone without touching them, using a stick or other people or booted feet. I'm sure there's some exception allowing to dole put corporal punishment to the lowest cast)
I'll 100% admit to neither reading Nixonland nor being an expert in 60s/70s American politics, but I think Nixon's wizardry might be a bit overstated?
The RFK assassination + the New Deal coalition collapsing in the face of civil rights for brown people + George Wallace probably did as much for Nixon in 68 as he did for himself.
If anyone here knows that I'm wrong about this please let me know!
That might explain why Nixon won in '68 instead of Humphrey. But just becoming a major party presidential candidate in the first place is a pretty impressive achievement that most people never accomplish in their lives, even among politicians who would like to. So presumably Nixon had some degree of talent to get there in the first place.
People keep forgetting that Nixon was Eisenhower's VP. Being second in line for one of the most beloved Generals and Presidents in American history is more than enough to explain his initial success.
He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken.
"He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken."
Um .... I'd score this as 8+ years rather than exactly 8. The I'd ask how many opportunities there have been. The exceptions I can think of are:
*)1904: Roosevelt follows his own 1st full term and McKinley
*)1908: Taft follows Roosevelt
*)1928: Hoover follows Coolidge
*)1940: Roosevelt (the other one) follows 8 years of himself
*)1944: Roosevelt again
*)1948: Truman
*) 1988: Bush follows Reagan
More than eight years of the same party seems to have gotten rarer, but the "natural tendency" seems to be recent and was frequently broken in the past.
To put it another way, by my count out of 14 total elections in the 20th Century where one party had held the presidency for 8 years or more, they held it in 7 of them- exactly half. It seems to me that the tendency to switch is more reversion to the mean than any specific desire from voters to switch things up.
From Eisenhower /onwards/ there have been 8 elections where one party had held the presidency for eight or more years - 1960, 1968, 1976,1988,1992,2000,2008,2016 - and the presidency changed parties in 7 of those 8.
By contrast, since 1896 years there have been 14 elections where one party had held the presidency for just 4 years - 1900,1916, 1924, 1936, 1964,1972,1980, 1984, 1996, 2004,2012,2020 - and the incumbent party won all but 2 of them.
Now, obviously, I'm slightly data-hacking by choosing my start points to get the strongest possible effects - if you look back further, one party holding the presidency for longer becomes much more common, and four-year holds slightly but not much more so.
But I think the effect sizes I'm able to find by doing so are strong enough that I'd bet on a theory close to "in the post-war high-media-scrutiny era having held the presidency for eight years causally puts you at a disadvantage, and having taken power from the other party four years ago is strongly correlated with, and possibly causal of, winning again" remaining true for the next few elections - in essence, some kind of hidden Markov model.
The one place I'd put a big question mark is the very next election - what happens immediately after two consecutive changes is harder to predict, because it's happened so rarely in the last 120 years.
This is where the numbered "party systems" that US political scientists talk about come in:
1861-1913: the Republicans always win and dominate US politics; the only exceptions are Johnson, (Lincoln's VP who never won an election) and Cleveland (who was a "Democrat In Name Only" and won non-consecutive terms because of defecting Republicans). Weirdly, almost all the Republicans are from Ohio (the ones that aren't tend to have ben VPs.
Wilson wins when the Republicans split in 1912, then gets another term. After him, everything goes back to the way it was before him until 1932.
1933-1968: All Democrats other than Eisenhower, who was a moderate New Deal Republican who won with Democrat support (not quite Cleveland in reverse, but not that far off. The Democrats then implode after LBJ.
1969-1992: All Republicans, other than Carter who sneaks in for a term when the Republicans implode after Watergate. Republicans win two 49-state landslides in this time
1993 onwards: Goes back and forth, generally every two terms, although it's only four presidents so this may just be a fluke in a narrow electoral environment.
Are we supposing he wandered into that smoke filled room by accident looking for the men's room? One way or another getting nominated for president requires some kind of talent.
Nixon had only just become a Senator (1950) when Republican leaders pushed him on Eisenhower. He won his Senate race by, essentially, accusing his opponent of being a Communist.
And why did those leaders choose him out of dozens of Republican senators, not to mention however many other candidates like governors and so on?
I suppose it's not impossible that Nixon's entire career was purely due to a long series of unrelated lucky breaks but my priors say it's much more likely he had some talent of his own.
Oh, make no mistake, I'm not claiming Nixon wasn't a gifted politician. The Checkers Speech, which saved his vice-presidency, shows that without a doubt. I'm just saying that his path to higher office wasn't completely unprecedented.
The mere fact of being elected to the House of Representatives, beating a Democratic incumbent, at the age of 34 is impressive enough. Then just three years later he got elected to Senate, again defeating a Democratic incumbent. Three years after that, he was selected as Vice President.
Now, once you've been a popular President's VP, becoming President isn't all that unlikely. But the run of successes that took him from being an obscure lawyer/Navy officer in 1947 to Vice President of the United States in 1953 is surely a sign that he must have been pretty bloody good at _something_.
I think you might need to factor in the times. The younger generation that had been enlisted men and junior officers in the war had begun to enter middle age, and I think they were a little restless about continuing to follow the leadership of their generals (like Ike) who had been born in the 19th century. Sputnik had been a major shock, and strengthened an impression among this somewhat younger generation that the older generation might be a little out of touch in dealing with the "modern" technological world, full of atomic bombs, missiles, transistor radios. Indeed, JFK exploited this impression to the hilt in the election of 1960 and I think it was a big contributor to why he won.
But that means that being Ike's Vice President was a very mixed blessing for Nixon. On the one hand, yes, he'd spend time in a very successful Administration that was widely admired. On the other...he was vulnerable to the charge of being a fossil himself, and it didn't help that he was kind of the antithesis of youthful "vigah" (you have to say that with a thick Boston accent) in his looks and presentation.
I'd add that VPOTUS was seen as a role where many potential rivals were warehoused away. LBJ, for example, thought being JFK's VP was going to be his own political death.
IDK I see a lot of parallels with Trump (insert corruption joke here). But seriously, both were popular at a time when working class Americans felt slighted (first by the hippies, now by everybody), won popularity by courting a group that other people considered unworthy of cultivation, and crashed and burned in spectacular fashion courtesy of their own hubris. It's really kind of eerie.
And you're forgetting to be properly weirded out by the Roger Stone connection -- the guy with a huge tattoo of Nixon on his back -- the guy who was hanging out with the Capitol insurrectionists. The visionary who forecast America's latest thirst for an authoritarian strongman and who, arguably, carried The Donald to fruition. Turns out he is literally The Penguin of Batman fame, who, with twinkle in eye, discovered a method for alchemizing bruised egos into populist power grabbers willing to subvert the Constitution for the benefit of the pathologically wicked.
The first was ultimately too constrained by vestigial shame or maybe his Quaker roots to go all the way (alas, he choked like a cuck). The second, a stable genius, was no choker of course, but he certainly broke new ground, thanks to his genetic superiority! Fortunately he pardoned Stone, so The Penguin gets another chance at world domination: third time's a charm?
Well...I think the Vietnam War was a bigger issue by 1968, plus the fact that the President (LBJ) took himself out of the running in March of 1968 and threw the Democratic side into some chaos. But I think you need to give credit to Nixon for (1) coming back from his loss in 1960, it isn't often that a losing candidate is given a second bite at the apple by his party, and (2) being able to win despite the mood of the country shifting significantly *left* from 1960 and 1964, so far as anyone could tell.
you could do absolutely terrible in a presidential election, but just to have your name on the ballot at all means you're an extreme outlier in the tiny percentage of people who ever get that far
You may be right about the General Election, but the General Election is almost always close to a coin flip anyway in our two-party system.
I think the real political wizardry is shown in becoming your party's candidate in the first place. That's proving yourself in a field of (dozens? thousands?), as opposed to a field of 2.
I am not sure what to make of this. It seems to entail a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation. I shudder to think of anyone seeing Nixon's application of his insights as being in any way laudable.
Just because it's bleak, doesn't mean it's not true. Among humans (and, indeed, most primates), competitive conquest and status games in general are undeniably more valued than pretty much anything else.
Which is why we spend all our time talking about and monitoring social status. It's a "fish who don't understand what water is" thing. We all live and breathe status competition, and that's exactly what you'd expect of a social ape species.
Whether or not something is "laudable" is a subjective value judgement; it's like saying "chocolate ice cream is delicious". It's interesting to talk about, but it has little to no bearing on making informed decisions. The question is not, "is it nice that status games are valued more than empathy ?", but rather, "given that status games are valued more than empathy, what should I do if I want to be at least as successful as Nixon ?"
It implies stasis. An inability to change. A silent, "... and that is how it will ever be," if you will.
Whether or not something is, in fact, "human nature" tells us nothing about whether we, as individuals, should allow it to be *our* nature. It does not tell us about the best way to make ourselves happy or the best way to build a better world. Understanding what the world is like is important, but it's also important to understand how you'd like the world to be.
Suppose you do understand it, what then? How do you propose to remake the world in your perfect vision? Many throughout history tried, with vastly varying incompatible ideals, but the human nature is still much the same, as far as I can tell.
Of course, unlike human nature, technology does appear to change, so a new kind of utopianism has become available recently. However much Yudkowsky & Co. dislike the phrase "rapture of the nerds", that is essentially the promise of their "friendly AI". Regardless of whether this particular idea has any merit, some application of new technology seems to be best positioned in the medium term to make the biggest impact on the world (and the human nature, including whether this notion would even retain its relevance).
Perhaps, but not "undeniably," as humanity has generally been committed to a long-term cooperative project of mitigating the more destructive aspects of competition with empathy, awareness, choice, and other gifts stemming from our evolved consciousness.
This project gets set back every now and again (and maybe even eventually snuffed out, so we can become a Mad-Max-style libertarian fantasyland?).
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough."
This kind of comment, made with a straight face, was seen often lately in golf forums in defense of the notorious pro golf cheat, Patrick Reed, who, like his president, is totally unashamed whenever he's caught; he just calmly claims that what everyone saw with their own eyes never happened.
It's just one tidbit of evidence of how the revenge of the (anti-democratic) Nixon nerds, the classless trumps, and the malevolent Roger Stones, gives permission for those with conquest in their bones to proudly declare their allegiance to their "animal nature" in opposition to the quaint notions of empathy and democracy favored by cucks.
I don't think the long-term cooperative project in question prevents, or even slows, down, status competition *within* the cooperative, and that's because the urge to seek status - to socially compete with our fellow apes - is incredibly hardwired, even in the most informal and equitable of settings. It's not an accident that every time someone attempts a communist-style government, even on a very local level, leaders/politics emerge.
Your comment suggests a hierarchy of intrinsic human drivers, with competition in the category of "inseparable."
But -- unless you are suggesting any and all competition-driven behavior must be excused -- the modern world demands you provide criteria to define what kind of competition-driven behavior is unacceptable. E.g., all the cucks like to pick on poor Patrick Reed just because he very naturally followed his human instinct (to win) (by cheating). Should we ridicule the cucks, or should we ridicule Reed? I'm getting confused.
And then there's poor little Donnie Trump. What are we to make of his insatiable appetite for "winning" (at any cost)? And what about the big ol' basket of deplorables who support him because they recognize his "very good genes" (i.e., eagerness to win at any cost)?
Since you're so tuned into the hardwiring of the human brain, tell us: have we just stretched it too far with our "no cheating" demands? Where exactly should we re-draw the line?
I'm reminded of a passage in Johnathon Heidt's Righteous Mind where he talks about how humans have evolved to both respect and resent authority - we want to elevate and follow leaders, but we also don't like it when they have a lot more than us. I think there's a definite truth to that, these conflicting desires probably explains a lot of left-right conflict (even if that;s more cultural than evolutionary).
I think that it's more that we want authority to be deserved. We want to follow the leader that saves us from harm, but not the leader that fails to protect us well enough or that harms us.
It's only bleak when framed that way. When it's the numberless orcs overwhelming the beleaguered few at the Fords of Isen, then it's a sad testament to the power of mass evil. When it's the honest peasantry storming the Bastille and putting the corrupt noblemen in chains, then it's a heroic tale of the majority reclaiming its heritage, and so forth.
Same thing with the value of empathy and cooperation. When it's Grant allowing Lee to keep his sword, it's the healing power of empathy. When it's Chamberlain understanding the Germans of the Sudetenland really did prefer to be part of the Reich than be ruled by Prague, it's appeasement and cowardice.
Indeed he did. But my point is that just as treason is a matter of dates, whether the fact that the majority usually wins a conflict is tragic or noble depends on our opinion of the winners and losers in the examples that come to mind.
Yes but your macro perspective makes it too easy to ignore the shorter view of America as, arguably, the world's most resilient experiment in democracy. So, unless and until someone (like a trump) succeeds in making the franchise irrelevant, those who want to undermine or overthrow our system simply cannot belong in the same historical bucket, even in theoretical macro terms, as honest peasants trying to overthrow the corrupt. That's why the Big Lie (writ large) is so important to Trump and Stone: the more people who believe the government is illegitimate, the more they can convince themselves they are no different from the revolutionaries who battled King George.
The historical jury is I would say still out in terms of the resilience of the American republic. It has lasted a bit longer than the Dutch Republic, which was I believe rather a model for the Founders, but is still only half the age the Roman Republic achieved. Given the growth in the so-called "Imperial" Presidency over even my lifetime, I am only mildly optimistic it will celebrate its 300th birthday, and somewhat doubtful it will make it to 400 or 500.
Also, I would say "this government is illegitimate/corrupt/evil/in the pay of Bad People" is kind of a staple of American populism, reaching back to early in the 19th century. I'm not really seeing anything new about that thread. What concerns me more is the quiet, steady growth, even *outside* the Sturm und Drang of an election, in the degree to which citizens look to the Federal Government, and even more specifically the President, to solve every quotidian problem. It's that kind of expectation that leads inevitably to single-man rule -- the only remaining debate (and of course it will be fierce) is *which* man.
I realize this is just a comparison of framing devices, but the actual story of the Bastille might surprise you for how poorly it fits its own noble framing device.
The Bastille was a defunct prison, and at the time of storming, it had only seven inmates, several of them mentally ill and arguably in better care than was otherwise available at the time.
In one of the most shockingly frustrating personal incidents in all of history, the governor of the prison, de Launay, surrendered, was beaten badly, then frog marched a mile to the Hotel de Ville. Here, the crowd wanted to kill him, but a group of people defended his right to live. However, de Launay was so angry at this point that he *kicked another man in the balls*, screamed "Enough! Let me die!" and was promptly stabbed to death.
I am not sure what to make of your comment. How did you get to "a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation" from this?
You think Nixon effectively _organizing_ a group of disaffected people to secure for them more power and status (as insignificant as it might ultimately be) to be a bad thing itself? Do you really think that other politicians are different? Are you basing that on what those other politicians say or write?
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that politicians are mostly the people that want political power and thus those that figure out how to secure that power, however it is they do so?
"Cool kids" who are exclusive are by definition extremely vulnerable to displacement, because they make a lot of enemies. Popularity by definition requires you to be popular.
Frankly, I've never understood the stereotypical cool kid dynamic. At my high school, there wasn't really a clade of cool kids. The geeky people were often the most popular and would win popularity contests because they were nice and affable. Trying to be cool would have been... well, not cool. One of the more popular students made a weird comedy movie.
It has always seemed to me like the idea of "cool kids" who were jerks doesn't make a lot of sense, and sometimes I wonder if it is because a lot of those stories were written by people who didn't really understand social dynamics very well. Overwhelmingly, popular people I've known personally were friendly and affable, because that's how you make a lot of friends.
That’s partially true, but the “mean girls” phenomenon is about entrenching social power through emotional manipulation. A nice, friendly person with desirable social qualities (attractive, athletic, engaging) can make friends, but a cutthroat person with those qualities can gain social dominance by making their rivals into pariahs. Your school might have functioned differently, but high school is often a training ground for young sociopaths learning how to manipulate their images and the social order.
The thing is, in real life, that's actually a terrible strategy outside of politics (and even in politics, it's a dangerous one, which is why people in primaries generally avoid angering their rivals too much - they have to work with them in the future AND that person might win anyway, in which case they're screwed).
You never know what the future holds, and its a big world. Having a lot of positive contacts means that there's a bunch of people who will happily hire you or work with you or shoot you a notice about there being job openings where they work or whatever; having a bunch of negative contacts will result in those not being available.
Doubly so because trying to attack everyone else usually ends up with them all ganging up on you, and if they're actually your peers, you're going to lose.
I think the problem here is the word enemies. Who really has enemies? Rivals maybe, bullies or victims certainly, but people you interact with who are actual enemies?
Mean girl types are bullies with a good social position to defend them, not schemers. Different dynamics than the Franklins Nixon encountered, in that they are using coercion to assert social dominance rather than asserting it through an existing social network. Their social pre-eminence is not entrenched and they have to performatively reassert it regularly. It's a striking example if Foucault's theories of how power is constructed spotted in the wild.
I wonder if there's a difference over time. I know my high school experience was nothing like that, but many older people experienced something similar. I'm tempted to suggest the internet as the cause, but that may be unwise.
The best strategy for the top tier kids is typically to do nice things for the sub top, but to be mean to the bottom tier, which in turn keeps the middle tier in check due to fear. Doing nice things for everyone is high cost and you typically don't need to.
You don't need to do nice things for people, just generally treat people reasonably well.
And really, people don't care about the dysfunctional kids very much to begin with, which means that "controlling via fear" doesn't really work well because they're not seen as part of their group to begin with.
Someone once told me essentially the opposite--that if you're nice to the people one tier below you, you become associated with them and risk being reduced to their tier. Thus, people one tier above you will either pick on you to show dominance or will ostracize you out of self-defense; meanwhile, top kids can afford to be nice to bottom kids because the top kids aren't at any risk of being mistaken for bottom-tier.
The entire model there is a model of fashion, it's not a model of actual human interaction.
Being nice to your subordinates is in fact almost always recommended in leadership. It is dangerous to get overly chummy, though this is more because sometimes you have to tell them to do something unpleasant and they need to understand that they actually need to do it (though if it is dumb, they should warn you beforehand and feel comfortable explaining why you are driving them all off a cliff if you do this thing) and also sometimes you need to fire someone.
Having a group of people who are "yours" is valuable, and setting them up to succeed is to also make them want you to succeed. And given that ranks are often quite close, particularly in the business world, it's possible that someday they might be your peer or above you, or vice-versa (and in fact, you should make especial care to befriend those who have a lot of talent/promise to rise, as those people are the most valuable friends to have down the road).
Indeed, if you look at real world groups, who they tend to exclude most harshly are those who are poor at socialization, because it makes everyone else around them uncomfortable. Excluding those who are bad at socializing and getting along with other people is beneficial to the group, and bringing in bad people reflects poorly on you and your judgement.
People who are bad at socializing aren't able to recognize that they're the problem (per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, their poor social skills also render them incapable of recognizing their own incompetence at it) and believe that people are picking on them for no reason, rather than that they're trying to make them go away because people don't want to be around them.
Indeed, you will often see very socially inept people repeatedly challenge the social order without having the slightest clue what they're doing. That's why the dregs (socialists, fascists, neo-confederates, gang members, ect.) constantly rant about the evil elites - because clearly, the reason why they're on the bottom is because of a conspiracy against them, and not because they're unlikable, incompetent, and antisocial.
I think that being nice to the losers only works with very stable and clear 'classes.' In most situations, ignoring them is the smartest move (little to be gained by interacting with them and much to lose).
@Titanium Dragon: in a not-at-all-contentious spirit, and out of genuine sociological curiosity... would you mind saying what years you went to high school, and in what sort of setting?
Also went to public high school in Oregon, 2001-2005 and can mostly echo what you wrote. Now living in California, I've found that my high school experience was far more inclusive and much less stereotypical than people who went to HS in CA.
When I look at younger people, the ones who tend to be the worst at socializing also seem to have the worst high school experiences. This suggests to me that a lot of what are seen as "typical" power structures by some people are instead a product of the Dunning-Kruger Effect - people who are bad at socializing see school as a means of pushing them down, of suppressing them, of exclusive cliques who don't want them as a member, of groups constantly vying for dominance.
The problem is, they don't actually understand what is really going on with the greater student body, so they create this bizarre alternate reality power structure that casts themselves in the role of a struggling picked-upon hero.
In reality, people who are bad at socializing are often excluded because they are uncomfortable to be around, because they are abrasive, because they bore other people and don't understand how to converse "normally", because they're bad at reading the room, or because they are constantly trying to challenge/confront people. They don't see what they're doing as dysfunctional social behavior because they don't understand how to socialize, so they cannot recognize what they're doing wrong.
This also matches what I'd call the "high school pattern" you see in biographical stories - stories told from the point of view of people who were good at socializing in high school don't show these stratified power dynamics, and instead show a totally different sort of "circles of overlapping friends" thing instead, sometimes with some random yappy jerks who are often very much on the periphery.
People who are dysfunctional at socialization are also the most vulnerable to predatory bullying because they are isolated and alone, so they will also tend to disproportionately be targeted by it.
Spot on. I was in student government and was an athlete. I've been told before that "maybe you didn't see rampant bullying because you were high-status". I was like, I dunno, I feel like, through knowing everyone, I had a pretty transparent view into the entire school...
Wonderful. Now you can follow up by explaining to all the Uhgyers in western China how they aren't Really being shipped off to concentration camps for forced labor. They merely failing to see how poor they are at being Chinese due to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
In my high school, jocks were frequently guilty of sexual assault and violence against unpopular kids. None of them ever suffered for it, the administration preferring to punish minor offenses by people who weren't star athletes.
The only way not to notice was to be stupid or willfully ignorant, and hardly any of the popular kids were stupid.
High school is Hell for anyone who isn't popular. I'm the son of a star athlete...football quarterback no less. I was one of those "silent majority" players filling out the team. Our high school experiences could NOT have been more different.
The popular kids at my school were violent and nasty. Same goes for a lot schools my friends went to.
The younger people I talk to seem to have better school experiences. Although many of those in deprived areas have even worse ones.
I'd definitely be cautious about dismissing a wide range of popular culture and human experience as "written by people who didn't understand social dynamics very well".
FWIW, I can't recommend Nixonland highly enough. If you like audiobooks, the reading by Stephen Thorne is excellent. I have listened to all 36 hours multiple times, I bought the physical book to follow along and read the references, and my Word file of notes on it is 20 pages long. It created in me an abiding fascination with both the period and, as Perlstein puts it, "the strange, tortured man" at the book's center.
I would add that Perlstein's book arguably has an application to the issue of trapped priors and partisan dialogue. I think Perlstein may be saying, with some justice, that right and left talk past each other, not so much because they are blinded by bias, as because each understands the other all too well.
I do think the past few years have flushed out real beliefs (as much as beliefs can be real) past their usual porticos of politeness. And what I've learned is that the core of the Right is genuinely disdainful and dismissive of democracy itself. This is just a fact of life in 2021 -- and if you want to say that that's just my trapped priors talking, I say you are simply gaslighting me.
Since, for now, we have recommitted to democracy, the way to move forward is for the anti-democrats to either admit they'd been on a destructive dopamine binge, or at the very least stop the gaslighting. You're not going to erase the last decade by pretending it didn't happen. If you continue to smirk about owning the libs and blowing things up you are simply not ready to again participate in civil democracy. So if you hate democracy THAT much, then your best choice now is to crawl back under a rock.
JKPaw, I'm wondering why you posted that in response to my comment. Do you see me as a rightist? I'm not! I've been a Dem voter all my life. I do appreciate Perlstein's (relative) evenhandedness though. He's very good at pointing out the flaws on "my" side in its 1965-72 incarnation. (Or perhaps by "you" you mean the impersonal you, not me?)
Yes, no, "you" was not intended to be directed at you, but at the anti-democrats.
I had no critique of your comments, even though I wasn't sure if you were of the sort who believed we're simply dealing with two competing visions for democracy -- and that we just disagree over the details. From my vantagepoint, we're dealing with one side who has demonstrated they are willing to throw democracy, truth, etc completely overboard in their quest for power (and they continue to gaslight us with their snickering denials and diversions). So I bristle at false equivalencies, but was agnostic about whether you were offering such.
I suppose we could place both-sider-ism in a trapped priors bucket, but it's also one of the many dishonorable tactics the Right has latched onto, especially in recent years -- but, admittedly, a pretty effective one, related somewhat to trump's strategy of stinking up the entire house with feces every day so casual voters had no way of knowing where the smell was actually coming from.
Just one example: the Fox echo-chamber specializes in existential -level outrage over anything and everything (like email servers or Benghazi) -- and after month after month and year after year of righteous repetition, casual voters could be excused for thinking the thousands of charges against trump were just more of the same mud-slinging from genetically corrupt, scandalous politicians.
They weren't, and they aren't. It's just a cynical strategy that trump was more than willing to shamelessly take advantage of.
Around that time I read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial" H.S. Thompson. About the '72 election. I can't recall details, but it had a big effect on me.
Nixonland is a terrific book. As someone who moved to the US as an adult with only basic knowledge of the Nixon era it really opened up that period of US history. Only downside, it's very long and almost too detailed to sustain interest through 400-or-so pages for all but the nerdiest of political junkies.
Not only does it open up that period of US history, it makes a lot of the 90s and 00s make a lot more sense once you know how much of those periods involved not just rehashing the same conflicts he stoked, but involved *the same people* doing the rehashing that had participated in the conflicts in his time (Karl Rove vs John Kerry in 2004 being the outstanding example).
_Before the Storm_ is also amazing. Perlstein gives a genuinely fair-minded assessment of Goldwater despite obviously hating almost everything he stood for. It's remarkable as an examination of the kinds of self-deceiving narratives people tell about themselves and others: Goldwater's supporters and opponents *both* told themselves lies about what sort of person he was and what he supported in order to make themselves feel more righteous. It's also worthwhile as an examination of right-libertarian fusionism, the understandable sentiments that motivated it, and the ways in which it veered off into crankery and craziness.
_The Invisible Bridge_ is good for completists but really too long. I got through it only because it micro-analyzes the period of history just before I was born, and I knew almost nothing about that period before, which I think must be a common problem: after all, when you're growing up that period of history is too long ago to be current events and too recent to be taught in history classes.
I haven't read _Reaganland_ yet but probably will sometime in the next few years.
You're right about Nixonland making sense of decades that followed. The biggest thing I took away from it was how much the current political climate is a resurfacing of age-old grievances. There is a strange comfort knowing we're no more uniquely screwed than our predecessors, and by many measures are doing much better.
My wife is from India, and she mentioned that high-caste people can be kicked out of Hinduism if a Dalit (untouchable) touches them or prepares their food. A similar question might be why don't Dalit's organize en masse in a conspiracy to touch and degrade every high caste person in India?
Outside of high-school, the social elite has access to money and men. What you're describing is a rebellion, and it would probably be put down.
It's comments like this that make me resent the loss of a Like button.
Because that's bad for your Karma.
I know anime is tangential, but the final season of Attack on Titan depicts this kind of manipulation of an underclass and it's so emotionally impactful.
And the name for these unfortunate exiles? Caste-aways.
It makes so much sense!
I've seen the word "outcast" used in that context, and it actually made me wonder about its etymology.
I should imagine that comes more from the idea that the outcast was “cast out” of society, in the same sense that fishermen cast nets.
Why the British didn't call the Untouchables the Outcastes is beyond me, you would think they would find the pun irresistible.
I think the basic distinction is this: Nixon could understand that very few people were "truly Franklins", and that most people were constantly under the shadow of Franklins (and could consequently become Orthogonians). Hence, the class boundaries were fuzzy.
Here, the class boundaries between upper classes and lower classes are not fuzzy at all. An Indian Nixon cannot necessarily swell the ranks of the lower castes by using some clever maneuvering. Hence, only an all out battle between the pre-defined classes may equalize the playing field somewhat
Also, the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them, they're given the worst of everything: the worst jobs, the worst education, the worst access to government resources. So there you have a totally subjective, arbitrary distinction that eventually manifests as an objective reality regarding coolness: it's really hard to be cool when you're prevented from doing any job that is even remotely cool.
And that's key to maintaining the class distinction, too. An "omega" caste that's given an opportunity to perform work that allows them to accumulate resources and respect eventually results in either repressive violence to "put them back in their place", or results in a forced change to the caste system in place. See e.g. Ashkenazi Jews.
Yes and no. Dalits have reservations, like the US' affirmative action system on steroids, for education and government jobs. Of course, that only benefits a tiny elite of the Dalits, not the overwhelming majority that like most Indians has neither education nor government jobs, but it also breeds resentment from upper-caste folks who considered those perks their exclusive privilege, hence the often violent reaction against them.
"the thing about Dalits is that although there's nothing genetically wrong with them"
Ashkenazi Jews became smart by being forced into certain occupations and marrying among themselves for hundreds of years. No reason to think the same thing hasn't differentiated different castes in India.
I think if you want to claim people are genetically less intelligent, you need direct evidence. The stakes are too high in terms of the effects of the conclusions drawn to rely on a circumstantial case.
I'm pointing out that there's no reason to assume that there's definitively NOT anything genetic that contributes to them being "uncool", without direct evidence.
Anyway, I don't think the stakes of an anonymous internet comment is very high.
This seems backwards. We know that culture, educational opportunities, early childhood nutrition, etc. are incredibly powerful forces. It's impossible to truly control for them.
It seems that the parsimonious explanation is that the factors we know about that are capable of causing the differences cause the differences. The alternative is that the factors we know about and unknown genetic factors cause the differences.
I'm not going to assume genetic factors without some specific evidence.
The stakes of this are not just some internet comment. The stakes are "Do I assume genetic differences account for differences between groups." This includes the groups in my own society. If I believe that poorly performing groups in my own society are genetically inferior, I will act accordingly. That's pretty damn high stakes.
Well, the Ashkenazis were the "beneficiaries" of an unintentional selective breeding program by their European persecutors, but of course most other persecuted minorities like the Romas did not have the cultural traits that allowed them to adapt and thrive despite it.
Indian genetics are very unusual. The Han Chinese are one population of a billion, India is home to hundreds of sub-populations of around 3M each, that have managed to maintain a higher level of endogamy than the Ashkenazis for over a millennium (from the excellent book on human population genetics *Who We Are and How We Got Here* by David Reich).
There are certainly some very successful groups like the entrepreneurial Patels but the only one I can think of matching your description is the Parsis (like the founders of Tata & Sons), they are fairly recent immigrants (18th Century IIRC) and not Hinuds but Zoroastrians, so not subject to the caste system (but still practicing endogamy for cultural/religious reasons).
There's doubt about Jewish intelligence truly being high. See Taleb's article about IQ: https://medium.com/incerto/iq-is-largely-a-pseudoscientific-swindle-f131c101ba39. Another explanation for Jewish success is nepotism. Nepotism would explain why Jewish success is concentrated in certain industries like Hollywood and the media as opposed to, say, engineering. I would say that Anglo-Saxons, Koreans, and a lot of other notably successful groups are also largely successful due to nepotism (not singling Jews out). It's easy to succeed when other people give you preferential treatment.
I'm going to copy and paste my response to another participant, with apologies for not crafting a reply specifically to you:
"I was hesitant to get into the subject, but it's not that I'm ruling out genetics playing a role, it just doesn't strike me as strongly relevant to the anthropological principle I suggested - which is that when a lower-caste group is given a consistent opportunity to accumulate wealth and glory, they're quickly going to cease to be lower caste.
"Genetics" is at best an auxiliary factor with respect to the success of the Western Jewish population. The primary factors are obviously (i) their restriction to providing financial services, combined with strong internal cultural/kinship connections across multiple cities, at a time in human history when international finance became obscenely lucrative, and (ii) a cultural focus on educational achievement, due to aforementioned restrictions to primarily intellectual careers, at a time when educational attainment was swiftly becoming extremely important to success."
How does that explain the massive success of Jewish immigrant kids in intellectual fields in the US? Nobody needed to impose an Irish Quota to keep the Irish from taking all the admissions slots to Harvard.
Are there any identifiable ethnic/religious groups who are more overrepresented than Ashekenazi Jews in, say, Nobel prizes, Fields medals, or chess championships?
One, that'd get you killed in short order in the rural hinterlands of the country.
Two, it's illegal - harassment bordering on assault - under any sane legal code, including the Indian one, and would be treated as such - in the cities, you'd be arrested.
Three, few people believe in such pollution that literally, and for those who do, there are purification rites you can perform to get cleanse yourself of any such pollution.
In practice, being nonconsensually touched by people of all castes is already a reality of life in urban India - trains, buses, public transport, civic life, etc etc etc - simply because of space constraints, the same way it is on a crowded subway train.
I assume that this sort of ritual contamination is therefore only active in certain social situations where purity is at stake? At a guess politics and marriage?
Well, for me personally, it's practically never at stake except some ritual situations, such as bathing after a haircut or a funeral, or before any kind of puja, for traditional and cultivatory reasons. I subscribe to *modern* theories of purity and impurity, dammit, with little creepy crawlies and their transmission being the causally relevant factor!
Marriage-wise, for most (urban) people who still care, it's not a matter of purity but more so of community, compatibility, tradition, and identity - castes are, well, *actually* diverse, you see, not the fake diversity of 'clothes, food, and a few days of ethnic stuff, but nothing that *really actually* matters' which diversity has been reduced to in most industrial and post-industrial societies. (I exaggerate, of course, but only somewhat. This deracinated class exists in India as well, don't get me wrong, yet history lives in a far more visceral way than in many other places I've seen.)
Note that two people from different castes in India, whose castes have been living together for the last 1000 years as neighbours but not intermarrying, are *more* genetically distinct - and have been for a thousand years - than a Sicilian and a Swede. And there are *thousands* of groups like this. Endogamy has been well-nigh absolute in the subcontinent for a millennium and a half or so. (Had the genetic analyses not shown these results to be the case, they would have been believed to be impossible, so strong is the sociological prior that people living as neighbours will, at least like *once in a hundred years*, fuck.)
Probably because 'can' is very much the operative word in that sentence - my guess is that in practice, no high-caste person is kicked out for such an occurrence unless they've already got other high-caste enemies calling for their ouster.
Because whatever actions hurt those who (have political power/are high class/the socially privileged) is viewed as an assault and punished accordingly. This is true even if it is voluntary.
Look at what triggered lynchings and white race riots in the US. Look at how unwanted suitors of high class ladies were treated in the past. Look at how authority figures (from teachers to parents to cops) treat being ignored. For a comic example, look at how certain types of customers respond to minor failings at customer service.
If the Brahmin loses their caste because of something the Dalit did, what is the Dalit going to lose?
Because anyone trying to do that would be the immediate subject of enormous extra legal violence. As would their entire community
"Hey remember the time you've beaten the living shit out of that Dalit guy for *almost* touching you? Yeah yeah sure he didn't, everyone seen that! But he was so close right?"
(Yes you can beat the living shit out of someone without touching them, using a stick or other people or booted feet. I'm sure there's some exception allowing to dole put corporal punishment to the lowest cast)
Reminds me of the character Widmerpool in Powell's "Dance to the Music of Time"
Wow, that's not nice. Nixon, at least, had pride and dignity.
I'll 100% admit to neither reading Nixonland nor being an expert in 60s/70s American politics, but I think Nixon's wizardry might be a bit overstated?
The RFK assassination + the New Deal coalition collapsing in the face of civil rights for brown people + George Wallace probably did as much for Nixon in 68 as he did for himself.
If anyone here knows that I'm wrong about this please let me know!
That might explain why Nixon won in '68 instead of Humphrey. But just becoming a major party presidential candidate in the first place is a pretty impressive achievement that most people never accomplish in their lives, even among politicians who would like to. So presumably Nixon had some degree of talent to get there in the first place.
People keep forgetting that Nixon was Eisenhower's VP. Being second in line for one of the most beloved Generals and Presidents in American history is more than enough to explain his initial success.
He lost the first time he ran for president, in 1960.
He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken.
"He was up against the natural tendency of the American people to give control of the White House to the opposition party after 8 years, though. That trend has almost never been broken."
Um .... I'd score this as 8+ years rather than exactly 8. The I'd ask how many opportunities there have been. The exceptions I can think of are:
*)1904: Roosevelt follows his own 1st full term and McKinley
*)1908: Taft follows Roosevelt
*)1928: Hoover follows Coolidge
*)1940: Roosevelt (the other one) follows 8 years of himself
*)1944: Roosevelt again
*)1948: Truman
*) 1988: Bush follows Reagan
More than eight years of the same party seems to have gotten rarer, but the "natural tendency" seems to be recent and was frequently broken in the past.
This is simply untrue.
1897-1913 was all Republicans.
1921-1933 was all Republicans.
1933-1953 was all Democrats.
So in the last 70 years prior to that election, 44 of them had been spent with multiple presidents in a row from the same party.
It's also worth remembering that the Republicans have won the popular vote exactly once since 1988 for president - in 2004.
The idea that the presidency goes back and forth is not really true.
To put it another way, by my count out of 14 total elections in the 20th Century where one party had held the presidency for 8 years or more, they held it in 7 of them- exactly half. It seems to me that the tendency to switch is more reversion to the mean than any specific desire from voters to switch things up.
Showing my work:
1904: Republicans hold for a third term.
1908: Republicans hold for a fourth term.
1912: Republicans lose.
1920: Democrats lose.
1928: Republicans hold for a third term.
1932: Republicans lose.
1940: Democrats hold for a third term.
1944: Democrats hold for a fourth term.
1948: Democrats hold for a fifth term.
1952: Democrats lose.
1960: Republicans lose.
1968: Democrats lose.
1988: Republicans hold for a third term.
1992: Republicans lose.
This depends what timescale you're looking at.
From Eisenhower /onwards/ there have been 8 elections where one party had held the presidency for eight or more years - 1960, 1968, 1976,1988,1992,2000,2008,2016 - and the presidency changed parties in 7 of those 8.
By contrast, since 1896 years there have been 14 elections where one party had held the presidency for just 4 years - 1900,1916, 1924, 1936, 1964,1972,1980, 1984, 1996, 2004,2012,2020 - and the incumbent party won all but 2 of them.
Now, obviously, I'm slightly data-hacking by choosing my start points to get the strongest possible effects - if you look back further, one party holding the presidency for longer becomes much more common, and four-year holds slightly but not much more so.
But I think the effect sizes I'm able to find by doing so are strong enough that I'd bet on a theory close to "in the post-war high-media-scrutiny era having held the presidency for eight years causally puts you at a disadvantage, and having taken power from the other party four years ago is strongly correlated with, and possibly causal of, winning again" remaining true for the next few elections - in essence, some kind of hidden Markov model.
The one place I'd put a big question mark is the very next election - what happens immediately after two consecutive changes is harder to predict, because it's happened so rarely in the last 120 years.
This is where the numbered "party systems" that US political scientists talk about come in:
1861-1913: the Republicans always win and dominate US politics; the only exceptions are Johnson, (Lincoln's VP who never won an election) and Cleveland (who was a "Democrat In Name Only" and won non-consecutive terms because of defecting Republicans). Weirdly, almost all the Republicans are from Ohio (the ones that aren't tend to have ben VPs.
Wilson wins when the Republicans split in 1912, then gets another term. After him, everything goes back to the way it was before him until 1932.
1933-1968: All Democrats other than Eisenhower, who was a moderate New Deal Republican who won with Democrat support (not quite Cleveland in reverse, but not that far off. The Democrats then implode after LBJ.
1969-1992: All Republicans, other than Carter who sneaks in for a term when the Republicans implode after Watergate. Republicans win two 49-state landslides in this time
1993 onwards: Goes back and forth, generally every two terms, although it's only four presidents so this may just be a fluke in a narrow electoral environment.
"He lost the first time he ran for president, in 1960."
He got the nomination, though.
Part of the question is: Why was he even in play at all??
That was before primaries were so dominant. He was next in line in the smoke filled room.
Are we supposing he wandered into that smoke filled room by accident looking for the men's room? One way or another getting nominated for president requires some kind of talent.
How can being Eisenhower's VP "explain his initial success" when a lot of success is required just to become Vice President in the first place?
Dan Quayle?
Joe Biden?
Nixon had only just become a Senator (1950) when Republican leaders pushed him on Eisenhower. He won his Senate race by, essentially, accusing his opponent of being a Communist.
And why did those leaders choose him out of dozens of Republican senators, not to mention however many other candidates like governors and so on?
I suppose it's not impossible that Nixon's entire career was purely due to a long series of unrelated lucky breaks but my priors say it's much more likely he had some talent of his own.
Oh, make no mistake, I'm not claiming Nixon wasn't a gifted politician. The Checkers Speech, which saved his vice-presidency, shows that without a doubt. I'm just saying that his path to higher office wasn't completely unprecedented.
I agree that it was probably due to more than luck, however counterexample would be Truman, who truly truly became president due to dumb luck
The mere fact of being elected to the House of Representatives, beating a Democratic incumbent, at the age of 34 is impressive enough. Then just three years later he got elected to Senate, again defeating a Democratic incumbent. Three years after that, he was selected as Vice President.
Now, once you've been a popular President's VP, becoming President isn't all that unlikely. But the run of successes that took him from being an obscure lawyer/Navy officer in 1947 to Vice President of the United States in 1953 is surely a sign that he must have been pretty bloody good at _something_.
I think you might need to factor in the times. The younger generation that had been enlisted men and junior officers in the war had begun to enter middle age, and I think they were a little restless about continuing to follow the leadership of their generals (like Ike) who had been born in the 19th century. Sputnik had been a major shock, and strengthened an impression among this somewhat younger generation that the older generation might be a little out of touch in dealing with the "modern" technological world, full of atomic bombs, missiles, transistor radios. Indeed, JFK exploited this impression to the hilt in the election of 1960 and I think it was a big contributor to why he won.
But that means that being Ike's Vice President was a very mixed blessing for Nixon. On the one hand, yes, he'd spend time in a very successful Administration that was widely admired. On the other...he was vulnerable to the charge of being a fossil himself, and it didn't help that he was kind of the antithesis of youthful "vigah" (you have to say that with a thick Boston accent) in his looks and presentation.
I'd add that VPOTUS was seen as a role where many potential rivals were warehoused away. LBJ, for example, thought being JFK's VP was going to be his own political death.
Nixon achieved it *twice*, which is even more impressive and almost unprecedented
IDK I see a lot of parallels with Trump (insert corruption joke here). But seriously, both were popular at a time when working class Americans felt slighted (first by the hippies, now by everybody), won popularity by courting a group that other people considered unworthy of cultivation, and crashed and burned in spectacular fashion courtesy of their own hubris. It's really kind of eerie.
And you're forgetting to be properly weirded out by the Roger Stone connection -- the guy with a huge tattoo of Nixon on his back -- the guy who was hanging out with the Capitol insurrectionists. The visionary who forecast America's latest thirst for an authoritarian strongman and who, arguably, carried The Donald to fruition. Turns out he is literally The Penguin of Batman fame, who, with twinkle in eye, discovered a method for alchemizing bruised egos into populist power grabbers willing to subvert the Constitution for the benefit of the pathologically wicked.
The first was ultimately too constrained by vestigial shame or maybe his Quaker roots to go all the way (alas, he choked like a cuck). The second, a stable genius, was no choker of course, but he certainly broke new ground, thanks to his genetic superiority! Fortunately he pardoned Stone, so The Penguin gets another chance at world domination: third time's a charm?
Well...I think the Vietnam War was a bigger issue by 1968, plus the fact that the President (LBJ) took himself out of the running in March of 1968 and threw the Democratic side into some chaos. But I think you need to give credit to Nixon for (1) coming back from his loss in 1960, it isn't often that a losing candidate is given a second bite at the apple by his party, and (2) being able to win despite the mood of the country shifting significantly *left* from 1960 and 1964, so far as anyone could tell.
you could do absolutely terrible in a presidential election, but just to have your name on the ballot at all means you're an extreme outlier in the tiny percentage of people who ever get that far
You may be right about the General Election, but the General Election is almost always close to a coin flip anyway in our two-party system.
I think the real political wizardry is shown in becoming your party's candidate in the first place. That's proving yourself in a field of (dozens? thousands?), as opposed to a field of 2.
I am not sure what to make of this. It seems to entail a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation. I shudder to think of anyone seeing Nixon's application of his insights as being in any way laudable.
Just because it's bleak, doesn't mean it's not true. Among humans (and, indeed, most primates), competitive conquest and status games in general are undeniably more valued than pretty much anything else.
Which is why we spend all our time talking about and monitoring social status. It's a "fish who don't understand what water is" thing. We all live and breathe status competition, and that's exactly what you'd expect of a social ape species.
Saying, "That is how it is" is one thing. Saying, "That is laudable" is entirely different.
Whether or not something is "laudable" is a subjective value judgement; it's like saying "chocolate ice cream is delicious". It's interesting to talk about, but it has little to no bearing on making informed decisions. The question is not, "is it nice that status games are valued more than empathy ?", but rather, "given that status games are valued more than empathy, what should I do if I want to be at least as successful as Nixon ?"
It implies stasis. An inability to change. A silent, "... and that is how it will ever be," if you will.
Whether or not something is, in fact, "human nature" tells us nothing about whether we, as individuals, should allow it to be *our* nature. It does not tell us about the best way to make ourselves happy or the best way to build a better world. Understanding what the world is like is important, but it's also important to understand how you'd like the world to be.
Suppose you do understand it, what then? How do you propose to remake the world in your perfect vision? Many throughout history tried, with vastly varying incompatible ideals, but the human nature is still much the same, as far as I can tell.
Of course, unlike human nature, technology does appear to change, so a new kind of utopianism has become available recently. However much Yudkowsky & Co. dislike the phrase "rapture of the nerds", that is essentially the promise of their "friendly AI". Regardless of whether this particular idea has any merit, some application of new technology seems to be best positioned in the medium term to make the biggest impact on the world (and the human nature, including whether this notion would even retain its relevance).
Perhaps, but not "undeniably," as humanity has generally been committed to a long-term cooperative project of mitigating the more destructive aspects of competition with empathy, awareness, choice, and other gifts stemming from our evolved consciousness.
This project gets set back every now and again (and maybe even eventually snuffed out, so we can become a Mad-Max-style libertarian fantasyland?).
"If you're not cheating, you're not trying hard enough."
This kind of comment, made with a straight face, was seen often lately in golf forums in defense of the notorious pro golf cheat, Patrick Reed, who, like his president, is totally unashamed whenever he's caught; he just calmly claims that what everyone saw with their own eyes never happened.
It's just one tidbit of evidence of how the revenge of the (anti-democratic) Nixon nerds, the classless trumps, and the malevolent Roger Stones, gives permission for those with conquest in their bones to proudly declare their allegiance to their "animal nature" in opposition to the quaint notions of empathy and democracy favored by cucks.
I don't think the long-term cooperative project in question prevents, or even slows, down, status competition *within* the cooperative, and that's because the urge to seek status - to socially compete with our fellow apes - is incredibly hardwired, even in the most informal and equitable of settings. It's not an accident that every time someone attempts a communist-style government, even on a very local level, leaders/politics emerge.
Your comment suggests a hierarchy of intrinsic human drivers, with competition in the category of "inseparable."
But -- unless you are suggesting any and all competition-driven behavior must be excused -- the modern world demands you provide criteria to define what kind of competition-driven behavior is unacceptable. E.g., all the cucks like to pick on poor Patrick Reed just because he very naturally followed his human instinct (to win) (by cheating). Should we ridicule the cucks, or should we ridicule Reed? I'm getting confused.
And then there's poor little Donnie Trump. What are we to make of his insatiable appetite for "winning" (at any cost)? And what about the big ol' basket of deplorables who support him because they recognize his "very good genes" (i.e., eagerness to win at any cost)?
Since you're so tuned into the hardwiring of the human brain, tell us: have we just stretched it too far with our "no cheating" demands? Where exactly should we re-draw the line?
If you reread my comments, you'll notice I'm discussing the matter in a positive sense, not a normative one.
I'm reminded of a passage in Johnathon Heidt's Righteous Mind where he talks about how humans have evolved to both respect and resent authority - we want to elevate and follow leaders, but we also don't like it when they have a lot more than us. I think there's a definite truth to that, these conflicting desires probably explains a lot of left-right conflict (even if that;s more cultural than evolutionary).
I think that it's more that we want authority to be deserved. We want to follow the leader that saves us from harm, but not the leader that fails to protect us well enough or that harms us.
It's only bleak when framed that way. When it's the numberless orcs overwhelming the beleaguered few at the Fords of Isen, then it's a sad testament to the power of mass evil. When it's the honest peasantry storming the Bastille and putting the corrupt noblemen in chains, then it's a heroic tale of the majority reclaiming its heritage, and so forth.
Same thing with the value of empathy and cooperation. When it's Grant allowing Lee to keep his sword, it's the healing power of empathy. When it's Chamberlain understanding the Germans of the Sudetenland really did prefer to be part of the Reich than be ruled by Prague, it's appeasement and cowardice.
I think even Chamberlain realized after the fact that things didn't work out as he expected.
Indeed he did. But my point is that just as treason is a matter of dates, whether the fact that the majority usually wins a conflict is tragic or noble depends on our opinion of the winners and losers in the examples that come to mind.
Yes but your macro perspective makes it too easy to ignore the shorter view of America as, arguably, the world's most resilient experiment in democracy. So, unless and until someone (like a trump) succeeds in making the franchise irrelevant, those who want to undermine or overthrow our system simply cannot belong in the same historical bucket, even in theoretical macro terms, as honest peasants trying to overthrow the corrupt. That's why the Big Lie (writ large) is so important to Trump and Stone: the more people who believe the government is illegitimate, the more they can convince themselves they are no different from the revolutionaries who battled King George.
The historical jury is I would say still out in terms of the resilience of the American republic. It has lasted a bit longer than the Dutch Republic, which was I believe rather a model for the Founders, but is still only half the age the Roman Republic achieved. Given the growth in the so-called "Imperial" Presidency over even my lifetime, I am only mildly optimistic it will celebrate its 300th birthday, and somewhat doubtful it will make it to 400 or 500.
Also, I would say "this government is illegitimate/corrupt/evil/in the pay of Bad People" is kind of a staple of American populism, reaching back to early in the 19th century. I'm not really seeing anything new about that thread. What concerns me more is the quiet, steady growth, even *outside* the Sturm und Drang of an election, in the degree to which citizens look to the Federal Government, and even more specifically the President, to solve every quotidian problem. It's that kind of expectation that leads inevitably to single-man rule -- the only remaining debate (and of course it will be fierce) is *which* man.
I realize this is just a comparison of framing devices, but the actual story of the Bastille might surprise you for how poorly it fits its own noble framing device.
The Bastille was a defunct prison, and at the time of storming, it had only seven inmates, several of them mentally ill and arguably in better care than was otherwise available at the time.
In one of the most shockingly frustrating personal incidents in all of history, the governor of the prison, de Launay, surrendered, was beaten badly, then frog marched a mile to the Hotel de Ville. Here, the crowd wanted to kill him, but a group of people defended his right to live. However, de Launay was so angry at this point that he *kicked another man in the balls*, screamed "Enough! Let me die!" and was promptly stabbed to death.
Hell of a tale, the Bastille.
Shocking parallels to Jan. 6
I have heard that, yes. An interesting gloss on a historical cliche, thanks
Someone clearly has not read Meditations on Moloch...
I am not sure what to make of your comment. How did you get to "a very bleak view of humanity and society, in which competitive conquest is valued above empathy and cooperation" from this?
You think Nixon effectively _organizing_ a group of disaffected people to secure for them more power and status (as insignificant as it might ultimately be) to be a bad thing itself? Do you really think that other politicians are different? Are you basing that on what those other politicians say or write?
Isn't the more parsimonious explanation that politicians are mostly the people that want political power and thus those that figure out how to secure that power, however it is they do so?
This insight seems obvious to me.
"Cool kids" who are exclusive are by definition extremely vulnerable to displacement, because they make a lot of enemies. Popularity by definition requires you to be popular.
Frankly, I've never understood the stereotypical cool kid dynamic. At my high school, there wasn't really a clade of cool kids. The geeky people were often the most popular and would win popularity contests because they were nice and affable. Trying to be cool would have been... well, not cool. One of the more popular students made a weird comedy movie.
It has always seemed to me like the idea of "cool kids" who were jerks doesn't make a lot of sense, and sometimes I wonder if it is because a lot of those stories were written by people who didn't really understand social dynamics very well. Overwhelmingly, popular people I've known personally were friendly and affable, because that's how you make a lot of friends.
That’s partially true, but the “mean girls” phenomenon is about entrenching social power through emotional manipulation. A nice, friendly person with desirable social qualities (attractive, athletic, engaging) can make friends, but a cutthroat person with those qualities can gain social dominance by making their rivals into pariahs. Your school might have functioned differently, but high school is often a training ground for young sociopaths learning how to manipulate their images and the social order.
The thing is, in real life, that's actually a terrible strategy outside of politics (and even in politics, it's a dangerous one, which is why people in primaries generally avoid angering their rivals too much - they have to work with them in the future AND that person might win anyway, in which case they're screwed).
You never know what the future holds, and its a big world. Having a lot of positive contacts means that there's a bunch of people who will happily hire you or work with you or shoot you a notice about there being job openings where they work or whatever; having a bunch of negative contacts will result in those not being available.
Doubly so because trying to attack everyone else usually ends up with them all ganging up on you, and if they're actually your peers, you're going to lose.
I think the problem here is the word enemies. Who really has enemies? Rivals maybe, bullies or victims certainly, but people you interact with who are actual enemies?
Mean girl types are bullies with a good social position to defend them, not schemers. Different dynamics than the Franklins Nixon encountered, in that they are using coercion to assert social dominance rather than asserting it through an existing social network. Their social pre-eminence is not entrenched and they have to performatively reassert it regularly. It's a striking example if Foucault's theories of how power is constructed spotted in the wild.
I wonder if there's a difference over time. I know my high school experience was nothing like that, but many older people experienced something similar. I'm tempted to suggest the internet as the cause, but that may be unwise.
The best strategy for the top tier kids is typically to do nice things for the sub top, but to be mean to the bottom tier, which in turn keeps the middle tier in check due to fear. Doing nice things for everyone is high cost and you typically don't need to.
You don't need to do nice things for people, just generally treat people reasonably well.
And really, people don't care about the dysfunctional kids very much to begin with, which means that "controlling via fear" doesn't really work well because they're not seen as part of their group to begin with.
Someone once told me essentially the opposite--that if you're nice to the people one tier below you, you become associated with them and risk being reduced to their tier. Thus, people one tier above you will either pick on you to show dominance or will ostracize you out of self-defense; meanwhile, top kids can afford to be nice to bottom kids because the top kids aren't at any risk of being mistaken for bottom-tier.
Some similar themes to this old Slate Star Codex post: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/22/right-is-the-new-left/
(On the other hand, I vaguely recall their being some more-recent post where Scott called the ideas from that post into question? Don't recall where.)
For my part, I really don't know what gears to put in my model here.
The entire model there is a model of fashion, it's not a model of actual human interaction.
Being nice to your subordinates is in fact almost always recommended in leadership. It is dangerous to get overly chummy, though this is more because sometimes you have to tell them to do something unpleasant and they need to understand that they actually need to do it (though if it is dumb, they should warn you beforehand and feel comfortable explaining why you are driving them all off a cliff if you do this thing) and also sometimes you need to fire someone.
Having a group of people who are "yours" is valuable, and setting them up to succeed is to also make them want you to succeed. And given that ranks are often quite close, particularly in the business world, it's possible that someday they might be your peer or above you, or vice-versa (and in fact, you should make especial care to befriend those who have a lot of talent/promise to rise, as those people are the most valuable friends to have down the road).
Indeed, if you look at real world groups, who they tend to exclude most harshly are those who are poor at socialization, because it makes everyone else around them uncomfortable. Excluding those who are bad at socializing and getting along with other people is beneficial to the group, and bringing in bad people reflects poorly on you and your judgement.
People who are bad at socializing aren't able to recognize that they're the problem (per the Dunning-Kruger Effect, their poor social skills also render them incapable of recognizing their own incompetence at it) and believe that people are picking on them for no reason, rather than that they're trying to make them go away because people don't want to be around them.
Indeed, you will often see very socially inept people repeatedly challenge the social order without having the slightest clue what they're doing. That's why the dregs (socialists, fascists, neo-confederates, gang members, ect.) constantly rant about the evil elites - because clearly, the reason why they're on the bottom is because of a conspiracy against them, and not because they're unlikable, incompetent, and antisocial.
I would think that the dynamics you get with *subordinates* might be pretty different from the dynamics you get from other status gradients.
@Dweomite
I think that being nice to the losers only works with very stable and clear 'classes.' In most situations, ignoring them is the smartest move (little to be gained by interacting with them and much to lose).
@Titanium Dragon
Companies are different than schools.
@Titanium Dragon: in a not-at-all-contentious spirit, and out of genuine sociological curiosity... would you mind saying what years you went to high school, and in what sort of setting?
1999-2003, public school in Corvallis, Oregon.
Also went to public high school in Oregon, 2001-2005 and can mostly echo what you wrote. Now living in California, I've found that my high school experience was far more inclusive and much less stereotypical than people who went to HS in CA.
Maybe it's an Oregon thing?
That's possible, but...
You might simply be better at socializing.
When I look at younger people, the ones who tend to be the worst at socializing also seem to have the worst high school experiences. This suggests to me that a lot of what are seen as "typical" power structures by some people are instead a product of the Dunning-Kruger Effect - people who are bad at socializing see school as a means of pushing them down, of suppressing them, of exclusive cliques who don't want them as a member, of groups constantly vying for dominance.
The problem is, they don't actually understand what is really going on with the greater student body, so they create this bizarre alternate reality power structure that casts themselves in the role of a struggling picked-upon hero.
In reality, people who are bad at socializing are often excluded because they are uncomfortable to be around, because they are abrasive, because they bore other people and don't understand how to converse "normally", because they're bad at reading the room, or because they are constantly trying to challenge/confront people. They don't see what they're doing as dysfunctional social behavior because they don't understand how to socialize, so they cannot recognize what they're doing wrong.
This also matches what I'd call the "high school pattern" you see in biographical stories - stories told from the point of view of people who were good at socializing in high school don't show these stratified power dynamics, and instead show a totally different sort of "circles of overlapping friends" thing instead, sometimes with some random yappy jerks who are often very much on the periphery.
People who are dysfunctional at socialization are also the most vulnerable to predatory bullying because they are isolated and alone, so they will also tend to disproportionately be targeted by it.
Spot on. I was in student government and was an athlete. I've been told before that "maybe you didn't see rampant bullying because you were high-status". I was like, I dunno, I feel like, through knowing everyone, I had a pretty transparent view into the entire school...
Wonderful. Now you can follow up by explaining to all the Uhgyers in western China how they aren't Really being shipped off to concentration camps for forced labor. They merely failing to see how poor they are at being Chinese due to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
In my high school, jocks were frequently guilty of sexual assault and violence against unpopular kids. None of them ever suffered for it, the administration preferring to punish minor offenses by people who weren't star athletes.
The only way not to notice was to be stupid or willfully ignorant, and hardly any of the popular kids were stupid.
High school is Hell for anyone who isn't popular. I'm the son of a star athlete...football quarterback no less. I was one of those "silent majority" players filling out the team. Our high school experiences could NOT have been more different.
You're confusing an authoritarian government for high school social dynamics. The two have basically nothing in common.
If you think they're the same, that might explain why you met with little social success.
>> Our high school experiences could NOT have been more different.
This I agree with, but you contradict yourself.
I suspect this is a https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/02/different-worlds/ sort of thing, not a "High school is Hell for anyone who isn't popular" sort of thing.
The popular kids at my school were violent and nasty. Same goes for a lot schools my friends went to.
The younger people I talk to seem to have better school experiences. Although many of those in deprived areas have even worse ones.
I'd definitely be cautious about dismissing a wide range of popular culture and human experience as "written by people who didn't understand social dynamics very well".
FWIW, I can't recommend Nixonland highly enough. If you like audiobooks, the reading by Stephen Thorne is excellent. I have listened to all 36 hours multiple times, I bought the physical book to follow along and read the references, and my Word file of notes on it is 20 pages long. It created in me an abiding fascination with both the period and, as Perlstein puts it, "the strange, tortured man" at the book's center.
I would add that Perlstein's book arguably has an application to the issue of trapped priors and partisan dialogue. I think Perlstein may be saying, with some justice, that right and left talk past each other, not so much because they are blinded by bias, as because each understands the other all too well.
I do think the past few years have flushed out real beliefs (as much as beliefs can be real) past their usual porticos of politeness. And what I've learned is that the core of the Right is genuinely disdainful and dismissive of democracy itself. This is just a fact of life in 2021 -- and if you want to say that that's just my trapped priors talking, I say you are simply gaslighting me.
Since, for now, we have recommitted to democracy, the way to move forward is for the anti-democrats to either admit they'd been on a destructive dopamine binge, or at the very least stop the gaslighting. You're not going to erase the last decade by pretending it didn't happen. If you continue to smirk about owning the libs and blowing things up you are simply not ready to again participate in civil democracy. So if you hate democracy THAT much, then your best choice now is to crawl back under a rock.
JKPaw, I'm wondering why you posted that in response to my comment. Do you see me as a rightist? I'm not! I've been a Dem voter all my life. I do appreciate Perlstein's (relative) evenhandedness though. He's very good at pointing out the flaws on "my" side in its 1965-72 incarnation. (Or perhaps by "you" you mean the impersonal you, not me?)
Yes, no, "you" was not intended to be directed at you, but at the anti-democrats.
I had no critique of your comments, even though I wasn't sure if you were of the sort who believed we're simply dealing with two competing visions for democracy -- and that we just disagree over the details. From my vantagepoint, we're dealing with one side who has demonstrated they are willing to throw democracy, truth, etc completely overboard in their quest for power (and they continue to gaslight us with their snickering denials and diversions). So I bristle at false equivalencies, but was agnostic about whether you were offering such.
Both sides are willing to throw truth over when convenient, and probably always have been.
I suppose we could place both-sider-ism in a trapped priors bucket, but it's also one of the many dishonorable tactics the Right has latched onto, especially in recent years -- but, admittedly, a pretty effective one, related somewhat to trump's strategy of stinking up the entire house with feces every day so casual voters had no way of knowing where the smell was actually coming from.
Just one example: the Fox echo-chamber specializes in existential -level outrage over anything and everything (like email servers or Benghazi) -- and after month after month and year after year of righteous repetition, casual voters could be excused for thinking the thousands of charges against trump were just more of the same mud-slinging from genetically corrupt, scandalous politicians.
They weren't, and they aren't. It's just a cynical strategy that trump was more than willing to shamelessly take advantage of.
Around that time I read "Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trial" H.S. Thompson. About the '72 election. I can't recall details, but it had a big effect on me.
I've been wanting to read that for a while now. Thanks for the rec!
Nixonland is a terrific book. As someone who moved to the US as an adult with only basic knowledge of the Nixon era it really opened up that period of US history. Only downside, it's very long and almost too detailed to sustain interest through 400-or-so pages for all but the nerdiest of political junkies.
Not only does it open up that period of US history, it makes a lot of the 90s and 00s make a lot more sense once you know how much of those periods involved not just rehashing the same conflicts he stoked, but involved *the same people* doing the rehashing that had participated in the conflicts in his time (Karl Rove vs John Kerry in 2004 being the outstanding example).
_Before the Storm_ is also amazing. Perlstein gives a genuinely fair-minded assessment of Goldwater despite obviously hating almost everything he stood for. It's remarkable as an examination of the kinds of self-deceiving narratives people tell about themselves and others: Goldwater's supporters and opponents *both* told themselves lies about what sort of person he was and what he supported in order to make themselves feel more righteous. It's also worthwhile as an examination of right-libertarian fusionism, the understandable sentiments that motivated it, and the ways in which it veered off into crankery and craziness.
_The Invisible Bridge_ is good for completists but really too long. I got through it only because it micro-analyzes the period of history just before I was born, and I knew almost nothing about that period before, which I think must be a common problem: after all, when you're growing up that period of history is too long ago to be current events and too recent to be taught in history classes.
I haven't read _Reaganland_ yet but probably will sometime in the next few years.
You're right about Nixonland making sense of decades that followed. The biggest thing I took away from it was how much the current political climate is a resurfacing of age-old grievances. There is a strange comfort knowing we're no more uniquely screwed than our predecessors, and by many measures are doing much better.