right when our physical technologies leapt ahead, many of what the Oxford economist Eric Beinhocker calls our “social technologies” — all of the rules, regulations, institutions and social tools people needed to get the most out of this technological acceleration and cushion the worst — froze or lagged.
.. When President-elect Trump wants to be heard he now gets his message out directly from his New York penthouse through Twitter to 15 million-plus followers at any hour of the day he pleases. And the Islamic State does the same from a remote province in Syria.
Politically Correct Holy Rollers: The New Campus Revival
Casting his net more widely to include all talk of “privilege,” from male to cisgender, essayist Joseph Bottum has observed that the concept is functionally equivalent to original sin. “I have to every day wake up and acknowledge that I am so deeply embedded with racist thoughts and notions and actions in my body that I have to choose every day to do anti-racist work and think in an anti-racist way,”
Leftism has become a religion, and what we are seeing now is a revival.
The revivalists testify from behind megaphones instead of pulpits and in “safe spaces” instead of country churches, but they stand squarely within the American tradition of converts who spread their gospel by bearing their witness. The way they keep bursting into tears is a clue.
.. The enthusiasm for personal denunciation that sets the present eruption apart from the usual PC background noise is a trademark of American revivals, too. When colonial congregations invited George Whitefield to preach for them, they quickly learned to ask in advance that he not sow dissension by denouncing local worthies by name. No
.. One reason Finney was the most popular revivalist of the Second Great Awakening was that his audiences derived a certain frisson from knowing he would call out by name any deacon he’d heard was an adulterer and any shopkeeper he’d heard saying “dammit” in the street.
.. He was more proud of it than of his more famous innovation, the “anxious bench.” But it’s not as if other preachers didn’t know that they could call down the 19th-century equivalent of a Twitterstorm on any parishioner they wanted. They just didn’t think it would be tactful. Tact, that pillar of decency, is not a principle so much as a truce. To break it, a person needs only to believe that he and his ideas are more important than other people.
How Fake News Goes Viral: A Case Study
Mr. Tucker, who had taken photos of a large group of buses he saw near downtown Austin earlier in the day because he thought it was unusual, saw reports of protests against Mr. Trump in the city and decided the two were connected. He posted three of the images with the declaration: “Anti-Trump protestors in Austin today are not as organic as they seem. Here are the busses they came in. #fakeprotests #trump2016 #austin”
.. The buses were, in fact, hired by a company called Tableau Software, which was holding a conference that drew more than 13,000 people... “I’m also a very busy businessman and I don’t have time to fact-check everything that I put out there, especially when I don’t think it’s going out there for wide consumption.”.. Mr. Tucker was replying to queries on Twitter about whether he had proof to support his claim. He confirmed in a post that he “did not see loading or unloading” but that the buses were “quite near protests at right timing.” That admitted lack of evidence, however, had little effect. By about noon, Mr. Tucker’s initial post had been retweeted and liked more than 5,000 times... Mr. Tucker considered deleting his tweet about the buses, but Mr. Trump’s message emboldened him. “I figured if he were to say something like that, I might be barking up the same tree,” Mr. Tucker said... rumor-checking website Snopes also debunked the claim that the buses were connected to any protests. None of this seemed to have much impact... rumor-checking website Snopes also debunked the claim that the buses were connected to any protests. None of this seemed to have much impact.
The Incendiary Appeal of Demagoguery in Our Time
Like Donald Trump, Mr. Modi rose to power demonizing ethnic-religious minorities, immigrants and the establishment media, and boasting about the size of a body part.
.. Arguments over what precisely is to blame for Mr. Trump’s apotheosis —
- inequality,
- callous globalized elites,
- corruptible local legislators,
- zealous ideologues,
- a news media either toxic or complaisant — will only intensify in the coming months.
.. In the case of India, the role of institutional rot — venal legislators, a mendacious media — and the elites’ moral and intellectual truancy is clear. To see it one only has to remember that Mr. Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat from 2001 to 2014, was accused of
- supervising mass murder and
- gang rapes of Muslims — and
- consequently was barred from travel to the United States for nearly a decade
— and that none of that prevented him from being elected to India’s highest office.
.. Americans are, as Mr. Frank writes, “a population brought up expecting to enjoy life in what it is often told is the richest country in the world.” In India, one of the poorest countries in the world, “the tutelage of a distant and self-satisfied elite” — to borrow from Ross Douthat, describing America — spawned a much more extravagant sense of entitlement.
.. Suave technocrats, economists and publicists (mostly U.S.-trained) endlessly regurgitated free-market nostrums (imported from America) — what Mr. Frank calls the “liberalism of the rich.”
.. The fervent rhetoric about private wealth-creation and its trickle-down benefits openly mocked, and eventually stigmatized, India’s founding ideals of egalitarian and collective welfare. It is this extraordinary historical reversal, and its slick agents, that must be investigated in order to understand the incendiary appeal of demagoguery in our time.
.. Karl Polanyi described in his 1944 book “The Great Transformation” how civil society and individual liberty are threatened as never before when a society has to reconfigure itself to serve the “utopian experiment of a self-regulating market.”
.. In recent years, smooth-tongued “policy entrepreneurs” (Paul Krugman’s term) advocating free-market reforms and a heavily armed security-state have dominated India’s public sphere.
.. Arvind Panagariya, a colleague of Mr. Bhagwati’s who now works for the Indian government’s economic policy think-tank, took to arguing that Indian children were genetically underweight, and not really as malnourished as the World Health Organization had claimed. The 2015 Nobel laureate Angus Deaton rightly calls such positions “poverty denialism.”
.. economic growth, of the uneven and jobless kind, was creating what the economists Jean Drèze and Amartya Sen have called “islands of California in a sea of sub-Saharan Africa.”
.. All the while they stoked hatred against such enemies of rising India as Kashmiri separatists and their Pakistani supporters.
.. Mr. Modi and his hawkish Twitter account emerged into national politics just as growth faltered
.. “Mein Kampf” is a perennial bestseller in India, Hitler being seen as an exemplary nationalist-cum-people-manager.
.. More important, Mr. Modi grasped then, as astutely as Mr. Trump does now, the terrible political potency of ressentiment. Positioning himself in the gap between the self-righteous beneficiaries of globalization and irascible masses, he claimed to be the son of a modest tea-vendor who had dared to challenge the corrupt old dynasties of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. One of Mr. Modi’s most loyal fan bases was rich Indian-American businesspeople, who were naturally attracted to the promise of a wealthy India allied with the United States.
.. Mr. Trump sought their support, and hailing India’s prime minister as a “great man,”
.. Silicon Valley lined up to hail Mr. Modi’s vision of “Digital India.”
.. B.R. Ambedkar, the main framer of India’s constitution, warned in the 1950s that democracy in India was “only a top dressing on an Indian soil, which is essentially undemocratic.”
.. India’s press, fearfully self-censoring, if not barefacedly mendacious, has become, as The Economist reported last month, “more craven than Pakistan’s.”
.. Fewer jobs are being created on Mr. Modi’s watch than under the previous government of quasi-foreign liberals.
.. Mr. Modi appears to be an opportunistic manipulator of disaffection with little to offer apart from the pornography of power and a bogus fantasy of machismo. Mr. Trump looks set to follow his lead.
.. In our own time, a global network of elites has tried to restart the discredited utopian experiment of a self-regulating market. The experiment failed, and again the rage of cheated masses has spawned demagogues who simultaneously promise to avenge the left-behinds and to rewire their alliances with the elites.