Blog Credo

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

H.L. Mencken

Monday, December 3, 2018

Online Revolutionaries

This is an interesting development noted by Anne Applebaum.  There have been widespread protests by a group in France calling themselves the Yellow Vests or Gilets Jaunes.  They are protesting...stuff.  Now, protesting is about as French as you can get.  As a country that has never really owned the dark side of it famous revolution, there is a consistent trend of taking to the barricades.

However, Applebaum notes two things.

First, there is a lot of anger out there.  Second, that anger travels faster and harder on the internet than it ever could before.  Time is the great perspective-giver.  It cools passion.  The internet does not allow for a cooling off period.  It magnifies the Hottest Takes, the Purest Outrage.  It has become clear that it gives an amplifier to the most extreme voices.  There were always Nazis sitting in their basement, fondling their replica Nazi gear.  Now they have their own Reddits, 4Chans and so on.  They dive into their various echo chambers and come back angrier and purer than when they went in.

It isn't clear to me whether liberal democracy (or social democracy) can survive this.  Both movements intend to disarm the Jacobins and the Brown Shirts by creating consensus.  You drain the anger of revolutionaries by providing answers to problems.  Social Security short circuits Socialism.  But now there is nothing to stop the angriest voices from dominating from the fringes.  This creates disorder, and - if Thomas Hobbes is right - disorder creates authoritarianism.  If France degenerates into chaos, they will look to someone like Le Pen to lead them out.  As Trump has proven, these demagogues can't actually solve any problems, but that won't matter. 

It's a dark time.  It's the 1930s, but different.  I don't know where we go from here.

No comments: