I've been discussing this post with the Claude LLM, and it composed this comment:
Mr. Kling,
Your institutionalist/brokenist axis offers valuable insight, but I think Trump's relationship with Silicon Valley suggests a needed refinement. Trump isn't really a right-brokenist in the ideological sense - he's a former New York liberal and Democrat whose cultural conservative stance is largely performative.
This might explain why tech leaders are increasingly comfortable aligning with him. They see him not as an ideological conservative but as a pragmatic agent of institutional disruption. His lack of deep commitment to any particular ideology makes him more useful, not less.
Perhaps we need to distinguish between ideological brokenists (true believers in specific alternative systems) and pragmatic brokenists (those who simply want to clear institutional blockages to enable new growth). Silicon Valley leaders increasingly fall into the latter category - they're less interested in Trump's specific positions than in his demonstrated ability to disrupt calcified institutional structures.
This suggests the realignment you're observing might be less about left/right ideology shifting and more about tech leaders making a practical calculation about institutional change. Thoughts?
This is a thoughtful way to look at ideological realignments. I used to be a left-leaning institutionalist, but I have been dismayed by the increasing dysfunction in academia and media, especially in the last decade. I remain an institutionalist at heart, so I'm torn between reform and the incredibly challenging (and likely to fail) task of building anew.
We are moving to Florida, and one reason is that they have school vouchers. Lots of people are “building anew” in the education space by going outside the public k-12 system all together.
Silicon Valley didn’t try to reform existing institutions, it built new companies.
Conservatives are a lot more likely to let people build without interference than the institutional left, who sees “planning” as their right.
Frank writes: "I'm torn between reform and the incredibly challenging (and likely to fail) task of building anew."
Add, for instance, DEI policies (among others) influence on business as evidence similar to apparent "dysfunction in academia and media" ... Demonstrated corrections (e.g. Bud Light's market-share loss, Target's customer revolt, etc.) gives hope that "reform pressure" is possible. Consumers of academia/ media/ business will drive a shift and realignment, but broader change can be non-obvious as diffusion simply takes longer.
The idea that conservatives are low on Openness may be true on average but there are many exceptions. If one will pardon a personal reference, I am both highly conservative, tested at the 98th percentile for O and very low on N, yet am a "brokenist." A prominent social psychologist with whom I correspond (who is himself a moderate liberal) has told me that intelligent conservatives tend to be high in openness.
I think Arnold and others are conflating two very different meanings of conservative here.
I don't think the psychological term "conservative" (which is about openness and risk preference) has much of anything to do with political conservatism (which takes its meaning from maintaining ideas and practices that are proven to work). The latter is based on demonstrated success. The former is based on a priori phobia.
There's nowhere anything so conservative as a bureaucracy and ours is overwhelmingly progressive.
I don’t see how you look at masked blue hairs scolding people over pronouns and see high “openness”. And there is nothing open about leftist institutions like the teachers union, etc.
I ate at Appleby's exactly once 20 years ago. I remember this with precision (though nothing about the meal) simply because we had buried my grandmother-in-law in her county of origin, but had no other remaining ties to the place - and there didn't seem to be anywhere much to eat afterward except the Appleby's out on the highway.
Even then, not yet the experienced cook I am now, I didn't go in for eating at places where they warm up plastic baggies of food, so I distinctly remember thinking, now I will have experienced Appleby's.
So obviously I'm not terribly open, food-wise, to other than my own cooking, whether it's Applebee's or something better.
I'm reminded of the time that the media "discovered" the woman in some decaying Rust Belt town, who had faithfully written restaurant reviews for the local paper, for decades. Thus: she reviewed everything that opened up. As homegrown restaurants declined, she reviewed McDonald's, she reviewed Appleby's, etc.
They thought it was so funny someone was giving the Ruth Reichl treatment to these chains in the hinterland. That restaurant reviews would even be a thing outside the big city. Indeed, she was never snarky, and against the odds seemed to view every place as a possible source of community or at least deserving of respectful consideration on its own terms, and promotion - as someone's business, that employed people she probably knew.
I'm not sure if you got the point or not. Appleby's represents American comfort food, which I suppose we all eat to some extent but conservatives tend to only eat that. If you go to an ethnic or fusion restaurant, the clientele (other than people of that ethnicity) will be almost entirely liberals.
There are other odd correlations between various personality trait differences and conservative-liberal. The other one I can think of at the moment is that at a recreational lake near me the power boaters are all conservatives and the sail boaters liberals.
The last place I ate out was a somewhat higher-end Mexican restaurant. I'm not sure that should count given my environs but I guess I'll take it: I'm a liberal! I don't want women to be stoned to death for adultery!
(It's about a long tee shot from my apartment, and opened nearly two years ago - and I just now walked over there - so maybe I'm conservative? But I still don't want people to be stoned to death. But I walked! Conservatives never walk, right?)
That term "comfort food" is funny. It seems to usually signify - the food people used to produce at home, when they knew how or were not too lazy to - cook. Sometimes from produce from their pre-hipster gardens. They were, uh, open to cooking lol.
There may *possibly* be some market-based connection between urban and small town and rural availability, and voting blocs ;-)?
I was once talking to a girl hailing from the small city of Texarkana. A young African-American woman. High on openness, I would say, as she described having participated in a reality TV show that had not yet aired when we were speaking. (To me, un-open to anything with the one exception of talking to people, hearing about their lives: that sounded like walking on the moon.) She was saying her hometown was economically depressed, a backwater (as all of East Texas is, although in fact it is full of immigrants - so much for that). She said with mock pride, that she was excited to try the Panda Express that had come in while she was away. I'm pretty sure Panda Express is every bit the joke that Appleby's is, and probably more current.
Still, she explained that - to get anything new like that - was something!
"If you go to an ethnic or fusion restaurant, the clientele (other than people of that ethnicity) will be almost entirely liberals."
I don't think that's remotely true. Things like Italian, Mexican, Chinese, and Thai food are eaten by just about everyone these days as far as I can see.
Lol. What we typically eat in restaurants here is not what is typically eaten in Mexico or China. Most any Italian would argue the same for that. And for sure those four are the most Americanized, the most popular "ethnic foods," and the most equal between liberals and conservatives. Be that as it may, I know lots of conservatives who don't eat ANY of those. It gets more uneven for African, sushi, and other less common ethnic dishes.
Former Democrat, I've not been more hopeful since the start of the Obama administration. (IMHO that crashed and burned and that could certainly happen now... but I'm hopeful, again...)
I don't buy that the right-brokenists are closed to new ideas. They (we) are closed to the socialist/communist/collectivist ideas which the left has been pushing on us for a century; and it follows that we must reject the left's controlled institutions, especially the ones Mike Benz talks about in his interview with Joe Rogan.
This is why, it seems to me, it doesn't make sense to call Brokenism a two-axis model. The very same "new ideas" that Kling's "left-brokenists" want to introduce are the same ones the "right-brokenists" see as obsolete and need to destroy. They are not really new. The only reason the "left-brokenists" want to replace anything is to replace far-left poliicies with extreme-left policies so as to pretend that there are no moderates on the right. This is basically an exact repeat of China's Cultural Revolution, which destroyed everything good about their society.
Would you apply the institutionalist/brokenist distinction to those of us who identify neither with right nor left but with a consistent view of liberty? Or would we be, necessarily, brokenists? Personally, I am pro-brokenism.
Part of me wonders just how much it is a matter of belief about how well institutions can be reformed vs must be made anew, as opposed to more structured or less compartmentalized philosophical ideals. I personally believe that large organizations tend to be very difficult to correct and must just die and be replaced when they go bad, much like biological organisms, but that smaller corrections can happen around the edges. So I am brokenist when it comes to government as a whole, but if one was going to reform say the local Post Office that might be doable.
I think the post office is doing pretty well. Maybe that’s a local phenomenon. I know that conditions for new hires are tough, almost like they’re trying to be a branch of the armed forces.
I would be disappointed if Trump comes in and all that happens is people revert to talking about privatizing the post office. As ever.
Well, the post office is a bit better. They still run at a loss, and FedEx moves a large amount of their stuff. One could easily improve that, perhaps just starting with removing their monopoly on first class letters and seeing what comes out of the private sector.
I'd be disappointed if all that happens is privatizing the post office, too. I am looking forward to fat getting cut like they are disassembling a beached whale.
I just meant that one might be able to reform the PO as a government agency to make it work sufficiently without burning it to the ground (or privatizing). I don't think that many institutions are capable of being reformed once rot sets in, however, so I am generally pessimistic of reform and more in favor of letting the institution die and starting over with new people and processes.
Very nice overview of the current landscape. I think this makes more sense than most of the commentary I've seen from right and left. Thanks!
"And while Mr. Trump has personal grudges to settle with the FBI and other government agencies, he may be less motivated to follow through on DOGE and other institutional-change efforts dear to the hearts of Silicon Valley brokenists."
I think this captures the heart of Trump and his agenda. I'm pessimistic about any chances for positive change from him.
I see Trump as a leveragist. Push the institution to the breaking point in order to extract some gain. The survival or replacement of the institution is irrelevant.
This hits home and helps my understand why those of us who may have been right-brokenists in the past but who migrated into Edmund Burkeian right institutionalists have no natural political home these days. There is a sliver of optimism that there may be some good that comes out of DOGE disruption, but we are also fearful of revolutionary mob zeal. "Be careful what you break.."
I also would love to see the betting markets on how long the alliance between the low openness to new ideas supporters of Trump maintain their alliance with the Andreeson types. I can imagine the former turning on the latter spectacularly and quickly.
For what it's worth, "brokenist" seems to refer to the same set of beliefs as "radical", except the former focuses on the current state of things and the latter on the proposed solutions (going to the root, uprooting etc.)
I retired from teaching, but the college students I knew, and know, who were/are Trump supporters (although few were hardcore MAGA-types) would not fit in a "conservative" low-O box. They were pretty uniformly High O and low N. They generally seemd happier in general than other studnets.
The most liberal/Left students were more likely to be low O and high N, especially the ones furthest Left.
And Trump has never really claimed to be a conservative. I've always seen him as a 1995 NYC liberal, in the mold of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
My personal bias is to see human history as a struggle between the plebs and the oligarchy (or “institutional order” as some would describe it). Perhaps then I might be indulged in considering Gurri’s observations in a broader historical context? Two civil war historians, Matthew Karp (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii150/articles/matthew-karp-trump-redux ) and Forrest Nabors (https://lawliberty.org/forum/to-restore-republicanism/ ) appear to be from opposite ends of the left-right political continuum yet both voice similar “brokenist” themes exploring Gurri’s contention that “It has long been apparent that our current elite class must be replaced by people who feel at home in the 21st century.” I hope to discuss this a bit below and then conclude with a summary invoking an older essay by Marco D’Eramo (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii82/articles/marco-d-eramo-populism-and-the-new-oligarchy ) that observes “we are also dealing with oligarchy in a formal political sense, because increasingly the elites are not subject to the same legal regime as the rest of the population.”
Karp observes:
“The dominant patterns in the election data, considered over the last decade, suggest not an ethnocultural but an economic reconfiguration of the US electorate.
[… …]
Above all, as in 2016, the election turned on the ruling Democratic Party’s failure to retain its support within the economically depressed working class—male, female, white, black, Latino, Asian and Native.
[……]
After the election, even The Atlantic, leading citadel of Beltway centrism, could see that Bidenomics had simply failed to improve working-class lives:
‘Real median household income fell relative to its pre-Covid peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness . . . The food-stamp boost, the extended child tax credit, the big unemployment-insurance payments—each expired. And the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.’
In 2024, the immediate economic culprit was inflation, as in 2016 it had been wage stagnation, inequality and manufacturing job loss in the Rust Belt.footnote25 But the larger encompassing reality is that most working-class Americans no longer see the Democrats as a party that represents their interests.”
And Nabors appears to recognize that the oligarchic political establishment in the US controls the political machinery such that the lower income deserters from the Democrats are unlikely to find any real relief under Republicans:
“In steps, the American people have lost self-government and have become subject to imperial rulers as we were before 1776.
This political development was tolerated by Americans as long as our self-appointed imperial nannies seemed well disposed toward us, but in these latter stages of their revolution, the emerging ruling class has predictably shown a haughtiness and accompanying harshness that, in substance, threaten us to submit to the new regime, or else. Americans are painfully learning, pace Woodrow Wilson, that when so-called experts are appointed to government and given unaccountable power, they do not trade their human flesh for angel wings, and in fact, they are perfectly willing to abuse their power for partisan and self-serving ends. Americans are beginning to pay the high price for the folly of our recent past generations, who assented to this dramatic shift in power. Past generations’ assent to these changes in no way binds us. Although precedent must be honored and inherited law respected, the binding power of government and law is limited. No generation may barter away future generations’ natural rights, including our right to govern ourselves.”
Yet the best solution Nabors can offer is “nullification,” a legal doctrine the adoption of which appears highly unlikely.
In consequence, D’Eramo’s prescient 2013 essay has remarkable staying power and I am inclined to suspect will prove highly predictive of the future as the political reality in the US converges with that of China and Russia:
“the historical moment when the developed world is advancing into an oligarchical despotism, and the opposition between oligarchs and plebs has returned; when anti-popular policies are imposed just as the word ‘people’ is erased from the political lexicon, and anyone opposed to such policies is accused of ‘populism’. The democlastic frenzy is such that Umberto Eco now accuses even Pericles (495–25 bc) of populism.footnote42 Yet one reason why more and more movements are coming to be characterized as ‘populist’ is that anti-popular measures are multiplying. You want health care for everyone? You are a populist. You want your pension linked to inflation? But what a bunch of populists! You want your children to go to university, without carrying a life-long burden of debt? I knew you were a populist on the quiet! Thus the oligarchy’s court jesters denounce any popular demand. And even as they void democracy of any content, they accuse anyone opposed to this hollowing out of having ‘authoritarian instincts’...”
No, a return to healthy society almost certainly requires a Milei-style assault on the establishment oligarchy and their plundering ways. But potential for success of such an assault is really only possible in consensus style multi-party democracies with proportional representation, multi-member districts, and constitutional checks and balances on both the oligarchy and the plebs. Argentina has a proportional representation in 24 multi-member constituencies and its Senate is composed of three senators from each province, and three from the City of Buenos Aires, who are directly elected, with two seats to the most voted political party, and the other seat to the second place party. This tends to afford a little more democratic accountability and substantive representation to disparate interests than the US system. However small Milei’s chance of success, it is inconceivable in the US and that is why nearly everyone but true believers have written off DOGE as having any chance of success. The US constitution was written as a monument to the oligarchy’s paranoia over the potential for plebs to exercise any real power. And the US constitution is virtually unamendable in any substantive way that would allow control over deficit spending. Hence our bleak future. The future will likely belong to the consensus democracies that stay true to their constitutional checks and balances on oligarchy.
"My guess is that most of Silicon Valley still feels more comfortable with the left-institutionalists than with Mr. Trump. But there is a prominent faction, including Marc Andreessen, that aligns right-brokenist."
I like this framing, and I think your guess here is correct. I think one thing that needs to be added here is that the left-institutionalists seem to be losing ground to the brokenists, though. Not as thoroughly as Trump and his fans have taken over the conservative movement, but the institutionalists are on the defensive or at the very least, they have a hard time standing up to the brokenists. What was the whole George Floyd freakout if not an accusation that the justice system was broken? Who were the institutionalists who pushed back against the hysteria? There were like six of them in total, and they all got defenestrated.
The marginalization of the institutionalists is bound to bother some people and move them to rethink their affiliations or sympathies. The left brokenists seem to have more revolutionary fervor, more recklessness, and thus their capacity for harm seems greater.
I've been discussing this post with the Claude LLM, and it composed this comment:
Mr. Kling,
Your institutionalist/brokenist axis offers valuable insight, but I think Trump's relationship with Silicon Valley suggests a needed refinement. Trump isn't really a right-brokenist in the ideological sense - he's a former New York liberal and Democrat whose cultural conservative stance is largely performative.
This might explain why tech leaders are increasingly comfortable aligning with him. They see him not as an ideological conservative but as a pragmatic agent of institutional disruption. His lack of deep commitment to any particular ideology makes him more useful, not less.
Perhaps we need to distinguish between ideological brokenists (true believers in specific alternative systems) and pragmatic brokenists (those who simply want to clear institutional blockages to enable new growth). Silicon Valley leaders increasingly fall into the latter category - they're less interested in Trump's specific positions than in his demonstrated ability to disrupt calcified institutional structures.
This suggests the realignment you're observing might be less about left/right ideology shifting and more about tech leaders making a practical calculation about institutional change. Thoughts?
Long time reader - >20 years, first time commentor. This nails it, I think. I’m also a sucker for a good 2x2.
This is a thoughtful way to look at ideological realignments. I used to be a left-leaning institutionalist, but I have been dismayed by the increasing dysfunction in academia and media, especially in the last decade. I remain an institutionalist at heart, so I'm torn between reform and the incredibly challenging (and likely to fail) task of building anew.
We are moving to Florida, and one reason is that they have school vouchers. Lots of people are “building anew” in the education space by going outside the public k-12 system all together.
Silicon Valley didn’t try to reform existing institutions, it built new companies.
Conservatives are a lot more likely to let people build without interference than the institutional left, who sees “planning” as their right.
NB: there is no significant difference between "planning" and "ruling".
Frank writes: "I'm torn between reform and the incredibly challenging (and likely to fail) task of building anew."
Add, for instance, DEI policies (among others) influence on business as evidence similar to apparent "dysfunction in academia and media" ... Demonstrated corrections (e.g. Bud Light's market-share loss, Target's customer revolt, etc.) gives hope that "reform pressure" is possible. Consumers of academia/ media/ business will drive a shift and realignment, but broader change can be non-obvious as diffusion simply takes longer.
Don't think this is accurate....."conservatives, who are almost by definition low on O."
The idea that conservatives are low on Openness may be true on average but there are many exceptions. If one will pardon a personal reference, I am both highly conservative, tested at the 98th percentile for O and very low on N, yet am a "brokenist." A prominent social psychologist with whom I correspond (who is himself a moderate liberal) has told me that intelligent conservatives tend to be high in openness.
I think Arnold and others are conflating two very different meanings of conservative here.
I don't think the psychological term "conservative" (which is about openness and risk preference) has much of anything to do with political conservatism (which takes its meaning from maintaining ideas and practices that are proven to work). The latter is based on demonstrated success. The former is based on a priori phobia.
There's nowhere anything so conservative as a bureaucracy and ours is overwhelmingly progressive.
More than anything else, low O defines conservatives.
You ever here someone joke about only conservatives eating at Appleby's?
I don’t see how you look at masked blue hairs scolding people over pronouns and see high “openness”. And there is nothing open about leftist institutions like the teachers union, etc.
You are right that they don't sound open either, at least not in the ways you mention. That doesn't make conservatives any more open.
I ate at Appleby's exactly once 20 years ago. I remember this with precision (though nothing about the meal) simply because we had buried my grandmother-in-law in her county of origin, but had no other remaining ties to the place - and there didn't seem to be anywhere much to eat afterward except the Appleby's out on the highway.
Even then, not yet the experienced cook I am now, I didn't go in for eating at places where they warm up plastic baggies of food, so I distinctly remember thinking, now I will have experienced Appleby's.
So obviously I'm not terribly open, food-wise, to other than my own cooking, whether it's Applebee's or something better.
I'm reminded of the time that the media "discovered" the woman in some decaying Rust Belt town, who had faithfully written restaurant reviews for the local paper, for decades. Thus: she reviewed everything that opened up. As homegrown restaurants declined, she reviewed McDonald's, she reviewed Appleby's, etc.
They thought it was so funny someone was giving the Ruth Reichl treatment to these chains in the hinterland. That restaurant reviews would even be a thing outside the big city. Indeed, she was never snarky, and against the odds seemed to view every place as a possible source of community or at least deserving of respectful consideration on its own terms, and promotion - as someone's business, that employed people she probably knew.
Openness runs along infinite dimensions, surely.
I'm not sure if you got the point or not. Appleby's represents American comfort food, which I suppose we all eat to some extent but conservatives tend to only eat that. If you go to an ethnic or fusion restaurant, the clientele (other than people of that ethnicity) will be almost entirely liberals.
There are other odd correlations between various personality trait differences and conservative-liberal. The other one I can think of at the moment is that at a recreational lake near me the power boaters are all conservatives and the sail boaters liberals.
No doubt I didn't get the point.
The last place I ate out was a somewhat higher-end Mexican restaurant. I'm not sure that should count given my environs but I guess I'll take it: I'm a liberal! I don't want women to be stoned to death for adultery!
(It's about a long tee shot from my apartment, and opened nearly two years ago - and I just now walked over there - so maybe I'm conservative? But I still don't want people to be stoned to death. But I walked! Conservatives never walk, right?)
That term "comfort food" is funny. It seems to usually signify - the food people used to produce at home, when they knew how or were not too lazy to - cook. Sometimes from produce from their pre-hipster gardens. They were, uh, open to cooking lol.
There may *possibly* be some market-based connection between urban and small town and rural availability, and voting blocs ;-)?
I was once talking to a girl hailing from the small city of Texarkana. A young African-American woman. High on openness, I would say, as she described having participated in a reality TV show that had not yet aired when we were speaking. (To me, un-open to anything with the one exception of talking to people, hearing about their lives: that sounded like walking on the moon.) She was saying her hometown was economically depressed, a backwater (as all of East Texas is, although in fact it is full of immigrants - so much for that). She said with mock pride, that she was excited to try the Panda Express that had come in while she was away. I'm pretty sure Panda Express is every bit the joke that Appleby's is, and probably more current.
Still, she explained that - to get anything new like that - was something!
I'm not exactly sure who eats at Panda Express but it's not the same joke as I'm referring to.
"If you go to an ethnic or fusion restaurant, the clientele (other than people of that ethnicity) will be almost entirely liberals."
I don't think that's remotely true. Things like Italian, Mexican, Chinese, and Thai food are eaten by just about everyone these days as far as I can see.
Lol. What we typically eat in restaurants here is not what is typically eaten in Mexico or China. Most any Italian would argue the same for that. And for sure those four are the most Americanized, the most popular "ethnic foods," and the most equal between liberals and conservatives. Be that as it may, I know lots of conservatives who don't eat ANY of those. It gets more uneven for African, sushi, and other less common ethnic dishes.
Former Democrat, I've not been more hopeful since the start of the Obama administration. (IMHO that crashed and burned and that could certainly happen now... but I'm hopeful, again...)
I don't buy that the right-brokenists are closed to new ideas. They (we) are closed to the socialist/communist/collectivist ideas which the left has been pushing on us for a century; and it follows that we must reject the left's controlled institutions, especially the ones Mike Benz talks about in his interview with Joe Rogan.
This is why, it seems to me, it doesn't make sense to call Brokenism a two-axis model. The very same "new ideas" that Kling's "left-brokenists" want to introduce are the same ones the "right-brokenists" see as obsolete and need to destroy. They are not really new. The only reason the "left-brokenists" want to replace anything is to replace far-left poliicies with extreme-left policies so as to pretend that there are no moderates on the right. This is basically an exact repeat of China's Cultural Revolution, which destroyed everything good about their society.
Would you apply the institutionalist/brokenist distinction to those of us who identify neither with right nor left but with a consistent view of liberty? Or would we be, necessarily, brokenists? Personally, I am pro-brokenism.
Cato would be libertarian-institutionalist, David Friedman or Balaji Srinivasan would be libertarian-brokenist
Part of me wonders just how much it is a matter of belief about how well institutions can be reformed vs must be made anew, as opposed to more structured or less compartmentalized philosophical ideals. I personally believe that large organizations tend to be very difficult to correct and must just die and be replaced when they go bad, much like biological organisms, but that smaller corrections can happen around the edges. So I am brokenist when it comes to government as a whole, but if one was going to reform say the local Post Office that might be doable.
I think the post office is doing pretty well. Maybe that’s a local phenomenon. I know that conditions for new hires are tough, almost like they’re trying to be a branch of the armed forces.
I would be disappointed if Trump comes in and all that happens is people revert to talking about privatizing the post office. As ever.
Well, the post office is a bit better. They still run at a loss, and FedEx moves a large amount of their stuff. One could easily improve that, perhaps just starting with removing their monopoly on first class letters and seeing what comes out of the private sector.
I'd be disappointed if all that happens is privatizing the post office, too. I am looking forward to fat getting cut like they are disassembling a beached whale.
I just meant that one might be able to reform the PO as a government agency to make it work sufficiently without burning it to the ground (or privatizing). I don't think that many institutions are capable of being reformed once rot sets in, however, so I am generally pessimistic of reform and more in favor of letting the institution die and starting over with new people and processes.
Very nice overview of the current landscape. I think this makes more sense than most of the commentary I've seen from right and left. Thanks!
"And while Mr. Trump has personal grudges to settle with the FBI and other government agencies, he may be less motivated to follow through on DOGE and other institutional-change efforts dear to the hearts of Silicon Valley brokenists."
I think this captures the heart of Trump and his agenda. I'm pessimistic about any chances for positive change from him.
I see Trump as a leveragist. Push the institution to the breaking point in order to extract some gain. The survival or replacement of the institution is irrelevant.
This piece was a lovely synthesis. Thank you for writing it.
Invaluable framework with which to analyze our current state. Thank you!
This hits home and helps my understand why those of us who may have been right-brokenists in the past but who migrated into Edmund Burkeian right institutionalists have no natural political home these days. There is a sliver of optimism that there may be some good that comes out of DOGE disruption, but we are also fearful of revolutionary mob zeal. "Be careful what you break.."
I also would love to see the betting markets on how long the alliance between the low openness to new ideas supporters of Trump maintain their alliance with the Andreeson types. I can imagine the former turning on the latter spectacularly and quickly.
For what it's worth, "brokenist" seems to refer to the same set of beliefs as "radical", except the former focuses on the current state of things and the latter on the proposed solutions (going to the root, uprooting etc.)
I love 2x2. But . . .
I retired from teaching, but the college students I knew, and know, who were/are Trump supporters (although few were hardcore MAGA-types) would not fit in a "conservative" low-O box. They were pretty uniformly High O and low N. They generally seemd happier in general than other studnets.
The most liberal/Left students were more likely to be low O and high N, especially the ones furthest Left.
And Trump has never really claimed to be a conservative. I've always seen him as a 1995 NYC liberal, in the mold of Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
My personal bias is to see human history as a struggle between the plebs and the oligarchy (or “institutional order” as some would describe it). Perhaps then I might be indulged in considering Gurri’s observations in a broader historical context? Two civil war historians, Matthew Karp (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii150/articles/matthew-karp-trump-redux ) and Forrest Nabors (https://lawliberty.org/forum/to-restore-republicanism/ ) appear to be from opposite ends of the left-right political continuum yet both voice similar “brokenist” themes exploring Gurri’s contention that “It has long been apparent that our current elite class must be replaced by people who feel at home in the 21st century.” I hope to discuss this a bit below and then conclude with a summary invoking an older essay by Marco D’Eramo (https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii82/articles/marco-d-eramo-populism-and-the-new-oligarchy ) that observes “we are also dealing with oligarchy in a formal political sense, because increasingly the elites are not subject to the same legal regime as the rest of the population.”
Karp observes:
“The dominant patterns in the election data, considered over the last decade, suggest not an ethnocultural but an economic reconfiguration of the US electorate.
[… …]
Above all, as in 2016, the election turned on the ruling Democratic Party’s failure to retain its support within the economically depressed working class—male, female, white, black, Latino, Asian and Native.
[……]
After the election, even The Atlantic, leading citadel of Beltway centrism, could see that Bidenomics had simply failed to improve working-class lives:
‘Real median household income fell relative to its pre-Covid peak. The poverty rate ticked up, as did the jobless rate. The number of Americans spending more than 30 per cent of their income on rent climbed. The delinquency rate on credit cards surged, as did the share of families struggling to afford enough nutritious food, as did the rate of homelessness . . . The food-stamp boost, the extended child tax credit, the big unemployment-insurance payments—each expired. And the White House never passed the permanent care-economy measures it had considered.’
In 2024, the immediate economic culprit was inflation, as in 2016 it had been wage stagnation, inequality and manufacturing job loss in the Rust Belt.footnote25 But the larger encompassing reality is that most working-class Americans no longer see the Democrats as a party that represents their interests.”
And Nabors appears to recognize that the oligarchic political establishment in the US controls the political machinery such that the lower income deserters from the Democrats are unlikely to find any real relief under Republicans:
“In steps, the American people have lost self-government and have become subject to imperial rulers as we were before 1776.
This political development was tolerated by Americans as long as our self-appointed imperial nannies seemed well disposed toward us, but in these latter stages of their revolution, the emerging ruling class has predictably shown a haughtiness and accompanying harshness that, in substance, threaten us to submit to the new regime, or else. Americans are painfully learning, pace Woodrow Wilson, that when so-called experts are appointed to government and given unaccountable power, they do not trade their human flesh for angel wings, and in fact, they are perfectly willing to abuse their power for partisan and self-serving ends. Americans are beginning to pay the high price for the folly of our recent past generations, who assented to this dramatic shift in power. Past generations’ assent to these changes in no way binds us. Although precedent must be honored and inherited law respected, the binding power of government and law is limited. No generation may barter away future generations’ natural rights, including our right to govern ourselves.”
Yet the best solution Nabors can offer is “nullification,” a legal doctrine the adoption of which appears highly unlikely.
In consequence, D’Eramo’s prescient 2013 essay has remarkable staying power and I am inclined to suspect will prove highly predictive of the future as the political reality in the US converges with that of China and Russia:
“the historical moment when the developed world is advancing into an oligarchical despotism, and the opposition between oligarchs and plebs has returned; when anti-popular policies are imposed just as the word ‘people’ is erased from the political lexicon, and anyone opposed to such policies is accused of ‘populism’. The democlastic frenzy is such that Umberto Eco now accuses even Pericles (495–25 bc) of populism.footnote42 Yet one reason why more and more movements are coming to be characterized as ‘populist’ is that anti-popular measures are multiplying. You want health care for everyone? You are a populist. You want your pension linked to inflation? But what a bunch of populists! You want your children to go to university, without carrying a life-long burden of debt? I knew you were a populist on the quiet! Thus the oligarchy’s court jesters denounce any popular demand. And even as they void democracy of any content, they accuse anyone opposed to this hollowing out of having ‘authoritarian instincts’...”
No, a return to healthy society almost certainly requires a Milei-style assault on the establishment oligarchy and their plundering ways. But potential for success of such an assault is really only possible in consensus style multi-party democracies with proportional representation, multi-member districts, and constitutional checks and balances on both the oligarchy and the plebs. Argentina has a proportional representation in 24 multi-member constituencies and its Senate is composed of three senators from each province, and three from the City of Buenos Aires, who are directly elected, with two seats to the most voted political party, and the other seat to the second place party. This tends to afford a little more democratic accountability and substantive representation to disparate interests than the US system. However small Milei’s chance of success, it is inconceivable in the US and that is why nearly everyone but true believers have written off DOGE as having any chance of success. The US constitution was written as a monument to the oligarchy’s paranoia over the potential for plebs to exercise any real power. And the US constitution is virtually unamendable in any substantive way that would allow control over deficit spending. Hence our bleak future. The future will likely belong to the consensus democracies that stay true to their constitutional checks and balances on oligarchy.
"My guess is that most of Silicon Valley still feels more comfortable with the left-institutionalists than with Mr. Trump. But there is a prominent faction, including Marc Andreessen, that aligns right-brokenist."
I like this framing, and I think your guess here is correct. I think one thing that needs to be added here is that the left-institutionalists seem to be losing ground to the brokenists, though. Not as thoroughly as Trump and his fans have taken over the conservative movement, but the institutionalists are on the defensive or at the very least, they have a hard time standing up to the brokenists. What was the whole George Floyd freakout if not an accusation that the justice system was broken? Who were the institutionalists who pushed back against the hysteria? There were like six of them in total, and they all got defenestrated.
The marginalization of the institutionalists is bound to bother some people and move them to rethink their affiliations or sympathies. The left brokenists seem to have more revolutionary fervor, more recklessness, and thus their capacity for harm seems greater.
It’s not just that. Many institutions are just bad (teachers union, etc). Machine politics on the left are awful.