Unless you push back constantly and forcefully, you can’t hope to move the system.
Optimized for conflict, not clarity
The October Surprise is not going to be a 2-minute cartoon that I’m going to produce
Justin Trudeau, Politician and Star of His Own Viral Universe
Experts say that politicians like Mr. Trudeau, Mr. Trump and President Obama have been ahead of the curve in harnessing social media’s paradigm-changing power. Their ability to shine in bite-size media is reminiscent of John F. Kennedy’s prowess compared with Richard M. Nixon’s in the first televised presidential debate in 1960. And tools including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram have given these politicians a significant portion of control in disseminating their own messages.
.. Ms. Olin, the social media strategist for the Obama campaign, said that social media tools might allow adept politicians in the future to paper over nuance or even obscure their beliefs, instead favoring moments that would most likely take off on social media.
Is the U.S. Ready for Post-Middle-Class Politics?
A particular vision of the American dream has shaped elections for decades. What happens when people stop believing in it?
.. Last spring, a Gallup poll found that the percentage of respondents who identified as middle class or upper middle class dropped 12 percent since the 2008 financial crisis; nearly half of those polled identified themselves as either working or lower class.
.. Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently revealed just how ill equipped American politics is for a post-middle-class nation
.. The new middle-class utopia did, of course, exclude most nonwhite Americans.
.. in 1959 the black poverty rate was still 56 percent, and blacks on average earned 53 percent what whites did.
.. Democrats’ hold on the white middle class was balanced precariously on the racial status quo — which, by the mid-1960s, was breaking apart. George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964 in protest of Lyndon B. Johnson’s turn toward civil rights, performed well not just in the South but also in white blue-collar enclaves in the few Northern states where he was on the primary ballot.
.. Ronald Reagan’s campaign aired its “Morning in America” ad, a Vaseline-lensed montage of overwhelmingly white suburban prosperity. Walter Mondale — the son of a small-town Minnesota minister whose politics radiated an austere, Scandinavian morality — spent the last days of his campaign unfurling increasingly dire pictures of urban and rural poverty and beseeching people to vote for an “America of fairness.”
.. Speaking bitterly of Reagan’s commercial, he told a crowd at a church in Cleveland: “It’s all picket fences and puppy dogs. No one’s hurting. No one’s alone. No one’s hungry. No one’s unemployed. No one gets old. Everybody’s happy.” But Americans liked the picket fences and puppy dogs.
.. not being black was what constituted being middle class.”
.. This is where you draw the line if you’re interested not in absolute wealth but in the trajectory of wealth — not whether you have a yacht docked in St. Bart’s, but whether you’re doing better than you were five years ago.
A Revolutionary Discovery in China
These competing ideas were lost after China was unified in 221 BCE under the Qin, China’s first dynasty. In one of the most traumatic episodes from China’s past, the first Qin emperor tried to stamp out ideological nonconformity by burning books
.. But the fact is that for over two millennia all our knowledge of China’s great philosophical schools was limited to texts revised after the Qin unification. Earlier versions and competing ideas were lost—until now.
.. For Gu Jiegang and his allies, Chinese history was much like the West’s, founded in myth and oral traditions that only slowly evolved into written works at a much later date. These were plausible theses, but Gu had no archaeological evidence to back his ideas, instead relying on close readings of the transmitted texts to find inconsistencies.
.. Academics in China have responded with thousands of books and articles, discussing every detail of the new texts. Western scholars have joined in a bit more slowly. But, perhaps with the benefit of distance, they are drawing broader and more provocative conclusions.
But the most revolutionary implications of these texts are political.
.. philosophers were grappling with the best way to organize and lead states. Should one be loyal to one’s family (and thus support hereditary rule) or should one put the best interests of the state (and the people) first, and accept that the best person should run the land?
.. For many of these skeptical Westerners, Chinese efforts to prove the antiquity of their culture is closet chauvinism, or part of a project to glorify the Chinese state by exaggerating the antiquity of Chinese civilization.
But the new discoveries should give pause to this skepticism.
.. Besides theDaodejing, only a few of the texts excavated over the past twenty years have mnemonic devices or rhyme. She writes that even the texts that claim to be speeches of ancient kings originated as literary compositions.
.. Some Westerners have dismissed this, saying that it did not make sense to speak of “China” before the Qin unified China in the third century BCE. Instead, they argue, the states that existed before the Qin should be viewed as separate cultures. But the discovery of these manuscripts at least partially backs the traditionalists.
.. The Party’s continued rule is likewise justified by China’s economic development, which proves heaven’s support (“history’s judgment,” in Communist parlance). But true to Chinese tradition, the Party makes clear that its rule is hereditary
.. the creation of a quasi-hereditary class that has coalesced around “red” families that helped found the Communist state.
.. “I don’t know if it’s especially Chinese, or a result of the past decades [of political turmoil], but people often don’t try to make bigger conclusions,” she told me. “They write the papers and do the research with the big picture in their head, but rarely write it down.”
.. When I asked Professor Liu about this, he told me that up until the 1970s, “We had these classics like the Shangshu[the Ancient Documents], and for two thousand years they didn’t change. Now we can see them before that and the texts are different!”