Saving America From American Idiots

Some long essays that I think those of you not wanting to a give up your freedom will want to read.

 How to Fix the Internet and Save Knowledge: An American Tale (PDF from Marginalia Review of Books) came to me through the email; I am a reader of their newsletter. The Editor issues what I read as a manifesto about the importance of history and the dangers of the Internet to the American Experiment. A sample from the newsletter:

The battle between the global resurgence of ethnic nationalism and the American idea of a multi-ethnic society is easily mistaken for a direct conflict between ideas. It is not. It is a conflict between one of the greatest powers, untutored human prejudice, which makes all of us natural bigots, and ideas themselves. It is a choice between America as an idea and America as the mirror image of its historic ethnic majority. The ideas used to justify the growing nationalism are ideas in the service of primal psychology, rationalizations of instinct and fear. The idea of America as a multi-ethnic society, defined not by borders but by those who cross them from around the world, is an achievement of centuries of struggle and thought; it is an ideal. It is in terms of our ideals that we can judge the past to be mistaken, to rebuke the present for its failures, and to demand a future that is different and better because it is who we truly are, the self we have not yet achieved.

 

Large-scale immigration from groups that challenge the ethnic and religious identity of the majority exists in Europe, but does not define it; America has long experience with such immigration—that is why American identity is not ethnic or religious, why a future America in which whites are a minority, though terrifying to some, does not challenge but expresses the American character. True, our history challenges this idea of America, and like any idea it can be contested, but history has always threatened America’s idea of itself.

I like his basic idea: combine the research university with the Internet for curated information. He calls it utopian; it probably is; so is what made America great.

 The other long essay is This is How We Fall Out of Love with the World by Anne Helen Petersen.

    
When a political party is elected as convincingly as the MAGA Republicans were this past term, they often declare that they have received a mandate from the American public. And that mandate, which they made abundantly clear on the campaign trail, was to eliminate what their voters blamed for the general feeling of life being harder than it once was. Again: DEI initiatives, trans people, immigrants and refugees, any reforms around #MeToo, and the government itself. It didn’t matter if companies, even those associated with the politicians themselves, enriched themselves. For these voters, the companies were never the problem.

This is how you get Elon Musk fundamentally restructuring both the government and the checks and balances of our democracy with no pushback from Congress. Because the short-term goal is cutting costs (which will then theoretically translate into lower taxes) individuals can feel like they are indeed paying less for projects and services from which they receive no explicit and immediate benefit.

But the long-term reality is bleak. The cuts aren’t just to park rangers who staff a national moment in a corner of Nebraska or the people doing fire mitigation in Western Washington. The cuts affect the systems that make so many parts of public life work. Payroll. Bathrooms. Science before it becomes the sort of science that drug companies pay for. Data sets that make medical records function and VA prescriptions renew on time. You can call it the meat of public works, or bureaucracy, or infrastructure. It was already hobbled from years of cost-cutting measures. Now it’s just straight-up busted.

The goal, of course, is to enshittify public works to the point that they become unusable — and then sell them to the highest bidder, who can transform them into a profit center. The cascade will go something like this: wow, sure seems like this national forest is being mismanaged, probably shouldn’t be under the purview of the federal government; it would be irresponsible of us, and against the public interest, to turn down all this money from a gas company / a developer / a wealthy landowner who wants to buy it! (And if you want to see this thinking vividly manifest, I invite you to read the FB comments on this piece about forest service firings in rural Idaho)

Not having the toilets cleaned is the point. Not getting the VA prescriptions automatically filled is the point. Making public services worse is the point. Making people (further) dislike and devalue public infrastructure — the point. How else do you get millions of citizens on board with a handful of robber barons profiting off what rightfully belongs to the public? 

Echoing Ms. Petersen, the philistines and puritans and the scared little boys supplying the fascist right are at work clamping on what we think:

Writer quits Society of Authors over union’s ‘betrayal’ of Jerusalem bookshop raided by Israeli police

A ‘great shock’: Julianne Moore’s children’s book under review by Trump administration (The Guardian)

Stand for freedom, or stand with the clampdown; this may be the last choice you get as a citizen.

I wonder what would happen if for one day we renounced X, Amazon, Instagram, Bluesky, and Facebook.

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