Links Regarding The Revolt of the Public

Gurwinder; Venkatesh Rao; Frank Furedi; Dan Williams

It’s been a Martin Gurri news cycle, with protests by both anti-Muslims and Muslims in the UK, and protests anticipated at the Democratic convention.

Gurwinder writes,

Ostensibly, these “nuisance-protests” are carried out by distinct groups motivated by a particular cause, such as the environment, Palestine, trans-rights, or immigration. In reality, however, all are animated by the same, self-destructive ideology: neotoddlerism.

…In infants, the chief causes of outrageous behavior — impulsivity, attention-seeking, and a sense of entitlement — are considered normal, but in adults they’re key symptoms of the “cluster-B” personality disorders. All four such disorders —  narcissistic, histrionic, antisocial and borderline — are associated with heavy social media use, most likely because impulsive and dramatic cluster-B behaviors, such as playing the victim and catastrophizing, excel at getting attention on such platforms.

The ease with which dramatic behavior gets attention online has convinced many political activists that a better world doesn’t require years of patient work, only a sufficient quantity of drama.

Time for my periodic reminder that I recommend clicking through on these “links to consider.” My quote is only a teaser.

I would add that university administrators tend to be the worst at dealing with neotoddler behavior. They are more likely to encourage it than to punish it. At least when it comes from the left. The Administrators are sensitive to pressure, and until recently they were only feeling pressure from the left.

Venkatesh Rao writes,

In the old system, in the mature state in which Jane Jacobs documented it, guardian and commerce syndromes formed a yin-yang duality, each containing a seed of the other, and constantly transforming into each other. This is what gave us the old politics of left vs. right (roughly speaking, guardian vs. commerce).

In the new system, we don’t yet have the mature yin-yang state. The Way of Wojak remains aspirational. People are trying hard to be just one or the other, weird or hypernormal, rather than aiming for a Wojakian synthesis.

But at least we are seeing the emergence of a center-periphery spectrum challenging the dominance of the left/right spectrum. This spectrum runs from hypernormal to weird.

I struggled to find an excerpt that summarizes his post. It includes another instance of using the expression “freak flag fly”!

In Martin Gurri terms, I would say that Rao thinks that a useful division as of 1992 was between a pre-Enlightenment (guardian of tradition) mindset and an Enlightenment (liberal) mindset. Today’s divide is between Enlightenment (hypernormal, in Rao’s terms) and post-Enlightenment (weird, in Rao’s terms).

Gurri would say that this division transcends left and right. You have the anti-Israel left and the British hooligans on the right. Neither has a program. They are just in revolt.

Frank Furedi writes,

The goal of the Government’s propaganda activity was to silence the views of protestors and rioters and displace their concerns with the claim that minority communities were facing an unprecedented attack by politically motivated groups of racists. In effect the Government launched a disinformation campaign that sought to represents the riots as a form terrorist activity designed to intimidate minority communities. In this way anyone who signalled their understanding of the concerns of the rioters could be labelled as a far-right sympathiser. In particular, anyone who dares to draw attention to the downside of uncontrolled mass migration is liable to become a walking target of multi-cultural identity policing.

Governments instinctively respond to protest movements that they dislike by trying to control information. This is unlikely to help in the long run.

Dan Williams writes,

Many people in the UK are already angry about biases in applying speech laws. There is a risk that increasing censorship in response to the riots will inflame this perception, exacerbating feelings of anger and institutional distrust that drive some people further towards extremist and anti-establishment politics.

Will 2024 be the year that the elites completely defeat the lower class? In France, Macron and the left beat back National Rally. In the UK, Starmer won a “landslide” (with 1/3 of the vote). In the U.S., the Democrats are running a “vibe” campaign with Harris and Walz, and they might win. I don’t think that these victories will end the revolt.

substacks referenced above:@

Twelve theses on the distorted representation of the communal conflicts raging throughout the United Kingdom

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Did online misinformation fuel the UK riots?

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The New Systems of Survival

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The Rise of Neotoddlerism