The Vernaculist: August 3, 2020
Making a Movie, China's Surveillance State, and American Politics
The latest on the podcast network: on Creedal Catholic, Casey Chalk and I wrapped up our five-part series on TULIP with a discussion on Perseverance of the Saints. If you listen to only one episode in the whole series, make it this one. And Josh Goldman and I continued our epic episode-by-episode discussion of Breaking Bad. I also joined a Catholic FM radio station for a discussion on Flannery O’Connor last week. If you’re interested, listen here (I start around the 4:30 mark).
Good Monday!
We’re back after taking some time off during what would have been last week’s installment. I hope you enjoyed a good weekend—it seems like most areas of the U.S. are kicking off August with more mild temperatures than we had in July, so hopefully that trend continues.
I’m especially excited this week to tell you about…
One Exciting Thing.
My brother-in-law, Chandler Ryd, is making a film. And it’s going to be great.
The premise: a pair of ne’er-do-well brothers (identical twins, in fact) decide to surrender the weed in pursuit of a law enforcement career. To pay the bills (it’s a post-COVID economy, after all) the two gents ride sidesaddle around town delivering delectable entrées for DoorDash. When one of their deliveries goes horribly awry, it’s a chance to prove everything…or nothing at all.
Trailer below:
If you’d like to donate to the Kickstarter, I know Chandler would be grateful. And I have to admit, I’m self-interested. If you look at the Kickstarter page, you’ll see my name listed on there. It’s because I (with my creative partner Josh Goldman of Breaking Pod fame) am going to be on set and behind the scenes making a serial podcast about what it’s like to make a movie (!!). Think StartUp but for films.
The working title? You’ll love this—Reel Life: Making a Short Film from the Ground Up.
One Scary Thing.
The Panopticon is Already Here by Ross Andersen (The Atlantic)
There’s so much in here beyond the chilling lede (see below)—pay special attention to the PRC’s use of Uighur communities as a testbed for unprecedented digital surveillance and of the search company Alibaba’s hosting and development of a citywide AI tool for the Chinese government.
I’ll say a lot more on this and related topics in future installments. Bottom line: The China-US tension isn’t just about the Houston Rockets’ General Manager, closing a consulate in Houston, corporate espionage, or TikTok. There’s a lot more going on under the surface, and I’m convinced that the defining event of the global economy’s next 30 years is going to be the decoupling of the United States and Chinese economies. Buckle up.
China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place. Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas. Much of the footage collected by China’s cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens. China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.
One Interesting Thing.
David Shor’s Unified Theory of American Politics by Eric Levitz (New York Mag)
As I’ve said before, I have a apathy (bordering on antipathy) for American Politics™, by which I mean the machinations, maneuvering, and mercenary nature of the American political system. But my apathy does not apply to an understanding of the electorate and the forces that animate it. Understanding what went wrong (or right) in 2016, for example, or how the two political parties have essentially switched positions on a number of issues over the past 80 years, is always an interesting question.
For that reason I appreciated this interview of David Shor, who readers may recall as the former Head of Political Data Science at Civis Analytics who lost his job (we can reasonably surmise) over a supposedly racially charged tweet that, well, wasn’t. Shor was a Marxist in college, is now a self-described socialist, and “an adherent of Leninist vanguardism.” I suppose that if he and I were to sit down over drinks, we’d disagree on most major issues. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have interesting ideas, or that he isn’t worth listening to.
Above: County-by-county swing margins between the 2012 and 2016 elections. (Wikipedia)
Take, for example, his take on 2012 vs. 2016:
Mitt Romney and Donald Trump agreed on basically every issue, as did Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. And yet, a bunch of people changed their votes. And the reason that happened was because the salience of various issues changed. Both sides talked a lot more about immigration, and because of that, correlation between preferences on immigration and which candidate people voted for went up. In 2012, both sides talked about health care. In 2016, they didn’t. And so the correlation between views on health care and which candidate people voted for went down. So this means that every time you open your mouth, you have this complex optimization problem where what you say gains you some voters and loses you other voters. But this is actually cool because campaigns have a lot of control over what issues they talk about.
That’s interesting, and though he doesn’t come right out and say it, it makes me realize how much the framing of the issues is what determines outcomes. Here are two elections, four years apart, with candidates from each party who hold virtually identical views to their fellow partisan in the other election. But in 2016 the outcome is very different from 2012. Why? Because of the issues were at the forefront. Who determines those issue? Shor points out that campaigns have a wide latitude, but I”m not sure I agree.
While campaigns lay out communications strategies and talking points, they still often have to be reactive to events and agendas that are established by media. Shor only mentions the word “media” only five times in the long interview (he has other mentions of CNN, and Twitter) and in my opinion doesn’t do justice to just how much influence it holds. “Media” by the way is not a monolith—Twitter influences an different electorate (and in a different way) from Fox, which is different from MSNBC, which is different from Facebook, etc. But I contend that we tend to underestimate the power of the fourth estate at setting the agenda, “priming” electorate response, and shaping campaign operations.
Also worth considering is Shor’s take on the Obama-to-Trump converts in 2016:
The fight I saw on Twitter after the 2016 election was one group of people saying the Obama-to-Trump voters are racist and irredeemable, and that’s why we need to focus on the suburbs. And then you had leftists saying, “Actually these working-class white people were betrayed by decades of neoliberalism and we just need to embrace socialism and win them back, we can’t trust people in the suburbs.” And I think the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.
I am more sympathetic to the J.D. Vance theory of the 2016 election, which is more in line with the first part of what Shor attributes to leftists above—the abandonment by coastal elites of the white working class, of neoliberalism leaving behind middle America, of social bonds among families fraying, of joblessness driving xenophobia. That explanation is to me much more nuanced (and empirically validated) than either the “redeemable racist” or “irredeemable deplorable” narrative. I’m not sure how Shor reaches the synthesis that he does in the paragraph’s penultimate sentence.
I also am intrigued by (and largely agree with) Shor’s theory of what we’ll call “corporatist centrism:” Businesses pull the Democratic party leftward by “buying off” the median voter.
Why do so many moderate Democrats vote for center-right policies that don’t even poll well? Why did Heidi Heitkamp vote to deregulate banks in 2018, when the median voter in North Dakota doesn’t want looser regulations on banks? But the thing is, while that median voter doesn’t want to deregulate banks, that voter doesn’t want a senator who is bad for business in North Dakota. And so if the North Dakota business community signals that it doesn’t like Heidi Heitkamp, that’s really bad for Heidi Heitkamp, because business has a lot of cultural power. I think that’s a very straightforward, almost Marxist view of power: Rich people have disproportionate cultural influence. So business does pull the party right. But it does so more through the mechanism of using its cultural power to influence public opinion, not through donations to campaigns.
Anyway, there’s lots of interesting stuff in there. I recommend giving it a solid read!
Presented without comment.
Related: If you have a Times (UK) subscription, I recommend reading Henri-Lévy’s interview from last week:
“People keep saying this is an unprecedented pandemic,” says Bernard-Henri Lévy, France’s rock-star philosopher. “It is not true. Humanity has had to deal with many pandemics, often more grave than this one. There seems to be an intention, a collective desire, to panic. It is not as big a disaster as we think.”
His essay on the pandemic is on my reading list; if you don’t have time for that, check out his 10-minute interview with WBUR on how COVID is straining both the EU and the United States. I’m also just glad that France has a rock-star philosopher.
The Afterword
Thanks to Eric P. and to Clarke F. for passing along kind words on the Vernaculist.
For next week, I think I’m going to do a special edition “deep dive” on the ongoing Uighur crisis in China. If you’ve seen interesting articles about that, please send them my way!
I’m also preparing for a podcast with my friend Trey on Robin DiAngelo’s White Fragility. I’ve seen John McWhorter’s and Matt Taibbi’s critiques; if you have seen critiques of their critiques or any other material worthwhile, please pass them along.
Have a great week!