Social Learning Links, 5/31/2025

Ian Leslie on TikTok and populism; Conor Fitzgerald on filtering the narrative; Rob Henderson on "Adolescence"; Tyler Turman and Nikolai G. Wenzel on executive orders and Constitutional decay

Ian Leslie writes

A study of TikTok usage during the American election found that Republican content did significantly better than Democratic content (there’s a reason Trump changed his mind about banning it). A study of Swedish politics found a similar asymmetry. Right-wing populists love TikTok, and TikTok loves them.

…TikTok is something like the final form of social media, perhaps all media, and it may be as close as we get to a root cause of right-wing populism.

…Social media, as a category, is good at de-activating our rational faculties; TikTok is the GOAT at this. It obliterates context and argument and anything that slows it down. No other platform is quite as good at bypassing the verbal and reasoning areas of the brain and plugging directly into the limbic system…

the complex, boring processes of a functioning government are impossible to visualise - and these days, what you can’t see, you don’t trust.

…the platform is custom-designed for mockery and derision.

Conor Fitzgerald writes,

there is something basically healthy about being confronted with an unflattering version of yourself and your worldview from time to time; to be asked to think of yourself or people like you as the bad guy. It’s a kind of weakness to never have to search for reassuring lessons from the media you consume, to instead have them deferentially popped directly into your mouth as though you’re a screeching baby bird and not someone with a complex aesthetic sensibility.

In a related essay, Fitzgerald writes,

a person with an illiberal position is always capable of visualising themselves as the bad guy; this after all this is the face they see everytime they look in the mirror of the media. Perhaps that’s healthy. But on cultural issues, Progressive Liberalism has had things its own way for so long that it has lost the capacity to consider what it might be like to be wrong - not misguided, not mistaken but wrong from 1st principles - a capacity that every other ideological stream is required to have and to display. This is part of the wider problem liberalism has of being unable to conceive of its opponents as legitimate.

…part of the narrative privilege of progressivism has in our culture is that its failures and flaws are always memory-holed, and its successes become our culture’s new benchmarks, the ones that even its opponent’s must bow to. A worldview that takes that pattern as natural doesn’t adjust well to widespread failure or rejection.

Is thinking of oneself as inherently good and one’s opponents as always wrong something that is essential to progressivism or accidental? Would Progressivism as we know it still exist if Progressives were open to doubts about their moral superiority?

I raise that point because of the Current Thing regarding Harvard. When Steven Pinker and a few others say that it would be good for Harvard to have some more conservatives on the faculty, I think that the leftists hear that not as “We might be wrong, so it would be good to have our views challenged.” Instead, they hear that as “You want us to cave into Trump.”

Lacking an intellectual framework that allows them to be mistaken, I think that progressives get particularly defensive when something comes close to threatening their sense of righteousness. They start to spew epithets (“transphobic,” “racist”) in lieu of rational arguments.

Rob Henderson pointed out that the Netflix hit “Adolescence” plays to Progressive biases.

It has been praised widely for its emotional depth, gripping storytelling, and realistic portrayal of teen violence. The prime minister of the UK, Keir Starmer, called it a “documentary” and suggested it should be shown in schools.

…Despite its emotional impact, though, “Adolescence” is fiction widely misinterpreted as fact. The very aspects praised as realistic are, indeed, statistically improbable and misleading.

Tyler Turman and Nikolai G. Wenzel write,

To a large extent, it is normal for the presidency to seek greater powers within the Constitution’s delicate balancing act. But this process has faced two problems. First, as discussed above, Congress has increasingly delegated its powers to the executive; to paraphrase Federalist 51, ambition has failed to check ambition. But the problem is more fundamental, and deeper: the real culprit is the vast expansion of federal powers and action.

They point out that executive orders are powerful today because Congress allows the Executive Branch to exercise legislative authority and because the enumerated powers of the original Constitution have been replaced by the seemingly unlimited power of modern government. In theory, restoring the original Constitution is the solution. In practice, I don’t see the toothpaste going back into that tube. Not under the progressives, and not under MAGA.

substacks referenced above:

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What “Adolescence” Gets Wrong About Incels, Crime, and Class

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The Devil You Know

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Why Is TikTok Such Rocket Fuel For Populists?