giving people what they want isn’t democracy working. democracy working means aggregating everybody’s interests and values from everybody in a way that results in high quality decisions that deliver well to some “fair” balance if those interests and values. 1/

so if more personalist regimes can’t be held accountable in a way that’s meaningfully better than more institutionalist predecessors (or otherwise deliver superior outcomes), i wouldn’t describe it as democracy working, however popular the strongman might be. /fin

traditionally we regulated free speech by eschewing prior restraint but using torts and the judicial system to impose some accountability ex post. it was a good balance! lawsuits are risky and costly so you could speak pretty freely, but outrageous threat and defamation were deterred. 1/

but we now have a class for whom lawsuits are not risky and costly, for whom the expense — even if they lose and some anti-SLAPP law hits them — is negligible. and these people are difficult to sue, since a lawsuit can become an all-pay auction in legal expenses, and plutocrats can outbid. 2/

to some degree it was always thus — corporations have long had deep pockets. but the emergence of ideological, aggrieved billionaires who can speak without accountability but punish others for speech they dislike strikes me in practice as a sea change. 3/

i find when i write in places like this i worry much more about Elon Musk than i ever did about Goldman Sachs. (i said a lot of mean stuff about Goldman Sachs!) 4/

plutocrats championing the traditional free speech regime are championing a regime where no meaningful accountability binds them, but they can hold others painfully to account at will or on a whim. 5/

i dislike some of the censorious tendencies of the last decade, even the ones those very billionaires complain about. but “free speech unless you piss off a billionaire” strikes me as imposing a far worse chill than any excesses of wokeness or public health overcaution. /fin

I think you'll find that what you see on network or cable news or NPR was often a scandal du jour a day or two before on Twitter. On cable news, they literally put up someone's tweets with some frequency. The only alt-site that ever happens with is Truth Social, and only for Donald Trump there. 1/

This dynamic is a bit diminished from what it used to be, but not so much. British politics has been completely overthrown, for example, in the last few weeks, by Musk's resurrection of the Rotherham scandal. Musk is a special case, you might argue, but a prodigious and destructive case. /fin

I’d have to think about the last point, but you’ll find political insiders, prestige academics, think tank types, and mainstream journalists still writing their threads and having their arguments on X. 1/

Some (who aren’t on the right) dislike that they are there, most don’t take tech ethics seriously and let their annoyance at the sanctimony of people (like me!) who tell them they are doing something wrong psychologically justify digging in. 2/

Which you want to do anyway if you are interested in prestige or career visibility, because X remains where the relevant conversations are. BlueSky has critical mass enough for “engagement”, but outside its smallish user base it remains, for now, a backwater. /fin

it's a bit disconcerting how paralyzed the Biden administration was by ostentatiously governing according to professional norms, to the acclaim of no one other than the professionals already the core of his coalition. 1/

and now immediately his successful successor gleefully governs in full mockery of those norms, even before he formally governs. (his premature negotiations yet another point in defiance of those norms.) /fin

It'll be interesting to see if Trump has problems with his base. On the one hand, he's historically been relentless about sussing out their prejudices and leaning into them, and has been rewarded with such loyalty all Republican rivals have been cowed into submission or resignation. 1/

On the other hand, until recently he's rarely tried to cross his base on those prejudices, but the Elon Musk wing of his coalition may push him in that direction. We'll see if he has a problem with the base if he finds it hard to give Musk all the precarious work visas he wants. 2/

The general problem is organizing "connective tissue" beyond what can spontaneously emerge from catering to our basest prejudices is expensive. 3/

It takes a lot of time and money to organize in-person social affairs, and we've restructured ordinary life so we encounter one another less and less except as customers and service providers. 4/

Our social impoverishment, related to the economic version, renders us unthreatening, and helps to stabilize insider dominated coalitions. I won't say it's a conspiracy, but it is an equilibrium. /fin

a problem now widely discussed and thinly addressed!

One thing to say though is that contemporary center-left parties are not actually trying to address it. On the contrary. Obama built an extraordinary grassroots coalition and infrastructure in 2008, then explicitly dismantled it after winning. He wanted technocratic, centralized control. 1/

I'm too distant from UK politics to comment very informedly, but the new AI push from labor looks strikingly like a party seeking to insulate itself from burning public concerns by substituting something onto which inchoate hopes can be projected that does not disturb its insiders' positions. 2/

In the US "centrist" pundits are obsessed with blaming "the groups"—philanthropically financed activist organizations, made up of elite professionals pursuing environmental and identity agendas— for Democrats' failures. 3/

And fine! It's probably right that NGOs claim to represent more than they do represent. Banish them to the wilderness! 4/

But the "and then" is not to reconstitute the party as an in-person membership organization or anything like that. It is to implement their own technocratic solutions, and address politics through polling and "popularism"—messaging what people say they like regardless of what you mean to do. 5/

I could be wrong, but my ill-informed sense is that post-Corbyn Labor is quite similar. 6/

Notionally socdem parties are constituted of entrenched insiders, whose public mouthpieces get labeled "centrist" or moderate". They have their own interests + clients. Much of their work is defending what must be done from demands that might come from ostensibly their own constituents. /fin