The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration [1], and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary [2].
The Dept of Defense was only created in the late 1940s. Before that the US had the Dept of War, the Dept of the Navy, and other organizations. The point of calling it "defense" was not because "everyone has the right to defense", but because the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda, as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.
If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.
> the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda
Many other countries similarly changed the name of their respective ministries, reflecting the ideal (if not the fact) that war should not be pursued for gain or used to resolve international controversies.
Actions trail behind ideals; ideals are set to remind us of how things should be even if we don't live up to them. Renaming the DoD to DoW reflects an aggressive, violent and ultimately predatory posturing that the West had chosen to abandon after WW2 and many millions of deaths.
They haven’t, though. In the decades that followed World War 2, creation of the UN etc, the number of people dying in warfare and civilian death due to war dropped dramatically.
No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.
They may have dropped from the level of death during the war itself. A transnational conflict that involved every continent on earth. But I'd be shocked if the numbers dead from war in the post war period did not exceed the median number of civilian victims of war pre-WW1 or in the post war period. The World Wars normalised the idea of total war, of death squads and killing fields and mechanised genocide. Those have continued apace, everywhere from the Congo to Cambodia. At the time they were novelties in 'the civilised' world.
I for one am happy the US is not being as hypocritical as to call its military department the Department of Defense anymore. The US has initiated or participated directly in many, many wars since the UN was founded, and none of them were in self defense - no country on Earth would be foolish enough to attack the US (arguably, Al-Kaeda did it, but they're not a country and Afghanistan was essentially scapegoated). Yet, we have a long list of conflicts the US either started outright, or entered on its own volition for reasons that just can't be called self-defense by any sane person: Korea (1950), Vietnam (1960s and 1970s), Libya (1980s), Iraq and Balkans (1990s), Afghanistan (2000s), Syria + Iraq + Libya (2010s) and now Iran. Not to mention the many CIA-led regime changes it instigated: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_involvement_in_r...
> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.
…which is the bad thing being discussed, yes. I don’t really understand why “there used to be one” would be exonerative. Not to mention, they didn’t rename it, that requires an act of Congress. Instead they just told everyone to change which name they use. Lines up with the “adult children” theory. Skip the actual work, (which would involve addressing the nation and justifying this change in posture), instead focus on the performative.
As we are seeing in real time with Iran, “we’ll just war!” was a juvenile idea, committed to with near-zero forethought or planning.
Starting the war with Iran was definitely a pretty stupid decision, even at this point of it.
In a couple of years it will look like the beginning of the end for the US hegemony.
> The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration, and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary
Referring to a dime as a dollar bothered me too. Going deeper, the absence of the olive branch is actually an intentional historical reference to the Revolutionary War, where peace was tragically lost. According to the artist who made it, the open claw is to symbolize the desire to regain it:
The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.
> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.
The “Dept of War” naming is not aimed at our adversaries. It’s aimed internally. It’s chest beating from man children who want desperately to identify as “alpha males”.
The same man who calls himself the “president of peace” unilaterally renamed the department of defense. It’s entirely legitimate to call this out as nonsense.
> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.
“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”
Seems like a stupid and immature reason enough to me.
The effects of Idiocracy are much worse than we appreciate. I believe it's hidden in part by technology (as a cognitive crutch) and part by top skilled immigration (people previously suppressed in their undeveloped countries). And education is much, much worse almost everywhere by leaning more to memorization and catering to the lowest common denominator. Student A is bad at math and good at language, student B is the opposite, both get the worst education for both subjects.
I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.
No need to do a drive by on Predator Badlands like that, it's a perfectly enjoyable film in its own right. I agree with the author though, there's nothing nearly as emotionally deep or socio-politically engaging as One Battle After Another, and so it would make for poor choice as a double feature to run second in the pairing.
I have genuinely put a lot of thought into this lately. I have the sensation like older media was more expressive and thoughtful, there's at least more... interesting flavors there generally...
I am happy to ponder and willingly accept this is probably just my perception.
I have a couple of theories. The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age. Do they have nothing interesting to say to me as our experience is shared? Is this something experienced by previous generations as their generation took over media, or is our zeitgeist as "digital natives" so newly shared that this is a new experience?
I know people who would blame "ensh*tification" and move on, but I really think that there is more to what is happening.
What I do know is it's exceedingly rare for me to watch a movie or show made after about 2015 and to find myself thinking about it days later. There are of course exceptions.
In my experience, everyone turns twelve when they disagree or are shown to be wrong. Very few have the temerity to accept their faults. Let's not throw stones lest they hit our own glass houses.
What’s childish is thinking that calling the Department of War by a euphemism changes what it is and always has been. The Department of “Defense” killed a bunch of people Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and countless minor actions. These bubbles of civilization we enjoy are built on adults killing a bunch of people, as necessary, to establish the order that allows more childish people to build social media websites.
Is this an attack on Captain Underpants of the silly novels? Or are we arguing that the global leaders are immature and don't think through their decisions? I admit I've only just started reading Captain Underpants but it doesn't seem like George and Harold are willing to do pranks to the extent of harming anyone. I do recognize childness in leadership occasionally. When I directly have to interface with it I adapt my response as though it actually is a child. That tends to help moderate the results somewhat. Children for the most part have good intentions and pure hearts, when things go wrong it's through inexperience not malice.
Does Tom Clancy think the novels are literary trash? The books are made for children, it's about following your dreams and using your imagination in the face of grown up resistance.
At the risk of sounding very old:in partial response to the nonsense starting around the 2015/2016 era I decided it was a good time to start mining the cultural vault and catch up on classic movies and books (especially) that I’d always been meaning to get around to, and kind of immersed myself in it more and more over time. Lots of older science fiction, fantasy, and just random movies I’d heard of but never got around to experiencing.
Subsequently, trying to return to consuming modern media has been quite the shock to the system. In many ways, but maybe the most startling is the storytelling. Books and movies lauded for being modern classics are so brain-numbing stupid (sorry but there’s no other accurate way to describe them) abound. Just absolute paint by numbers stories, messaging so on the nose you almost need a new phrase to describe it because the standard one didn’t do it justice, small-minded and petty characters being portrayed as heroic or brilliant - it’s incredible. I know there’s already comparisons to Idiocracy in this thread, and yes I’m well aware of the term selection bias so there’s no need to point it out - of course classics are classic for a reason. But I’m talking the most celebrated stories of our modern age here, the supposed next generation of classics, and all I can think is… really? Really? Have you all gone insane?
The author framed this as if "One Battle After Another" was some adult work and they couldn't watch "Predator" afterwards because it was so childish.
I had the opposite reaction and could barely make it through 15m of One Battle. The movie opens with women in skin tight dresses and mini skirts with automatic weapons robbing banks and breaking into migrant detention centers while yelling "this is what real power looks like". That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously. Rather than movies like Predator which are intentionally dumb and fun the author should look at how vague political messages and sex are used to take extremely shallow work and make it "adult".
I think a lot of us have worked with That Guy at one point or another. The person that never internalized what being 'wrong' means. I don't mean the curmudgeons that might be really prickly about certain things, but the kind of person that is not only habitually wrong but incapable of recognizing it.
In a sense I think this is a different thing from someone that is antisocial or manipulative, because even they can admit being wrong or incorrect in certain circumstances. It's closest to narcissist behavior but it exhibits in such a specific way that makes me think it's a different type.
You could probably link it to a lot of different things. Extreme machismo social media brainrot, a society that rewards never admitting you're wrong, extreme wealth.
I was totally with it until they started talking about the real world again. The Department of War was called that up until 1947 when it was renamed to the euphemistic Department of Defense (or more specifically merged with the Department of the Navy which was previously separate). It has nothing to do with the right to self defense, the undermining of which would make a great paragraph here comparing modern self defense law the world over with schoolhouse rules.
The US Department of War does not take full advantage of its name. Declaring a war has real legal and political consequences which presumably are not appealing to the current US administration.
I also have the same feeling about media since around 2015. The prime example being Alien: Earth, which people will argue has immeasurable depth and nuance while when I watched it I just facepalmed a lot. Although it did get better in later episodes.
I feel like no media today has really topped the stuff of the 90s and 00s. Star Trek Voyager season 5 still stands tall above the rest for me. The movie September 5 came close as it had interesting bits.
But besides that, there is a generational thing going on. I felt when I grew up online in the 90s and 00s that people who were older than me were smarter than my generation. My generation watched movies and played games while gen x and baby boomers did hardcore assembly programming and whatever.
And then the same thing happened with millenials and gen z. Gen z is just different from millenials which again are different from baby boomers. Each generation progressively gets less technical it seems like. There are always outliers in every generation of course but I think the trajectory is somewhat clear.
I also think this applies to movies and tv shows. Gen z just thinks differently and doesn't have the same ideas. I don't think a gen z'er could create Voyager season 5, and maybe not even a millenial could. There is so much information and knowledge and perception in the context a generation is born into and grows up in and a lot of that context and information is lost with the next generation.
H.R. McMaster: Trump’s knowledge was like a series of islands. He might know a lot about one specific thing, but there were no bridges between the islands, no way to connect one thought to another
working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"
“I’m strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm” of course you do. You’re twelve. “I don’t want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal” hell yeah homie you’re twelve. “Maybe if there’s crime we should just send the army” bless your heart my twelve year old buddy
Complaining about called the former DoD the Department of War is like complaining about calling water wet. Just because the wars haven't been legitimately authorized by Congress as required in the Constitution doesn't mean that the US hasn't been waging war on someone for most of its existence.
That's mistakenly conflating two concepts: the media propaganda in a more general sense of the word (like the pentagon reviewing movie scripts for war propaganda) and the underlying material and ideological reasons for US foreign policy (see natural resources, petrodollar, etc.). It would be a severe mistake to think the current conflict is somehow detached from the "grand chessboard" type of neoconservative thought dominating foreign policy for decades. In other words you shouldn't disagree with the war on Iran because Trump is an idiot, you should disagree because its an horrific atrocious war even if it were run by competent people instead.
Just as a very basic example: 4 presidents in a row have bombed Yemen: Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. This is consensus on very fundamental ideas on US foreign policy. But way more importantly than whether or not you agree with bombing Yemen, you should start to recognize that the real reasons for bombing Yemen or any other conflict are completely absent from public discourse and media.
Also once you broaden your horizon on film a bit it becomes very hard to watch modern mainstream western movies at all. Like watch The Battle of Algiers or any Costa-Gavras movie and you realize most western cinema is at best just infantilizing and at worst outright propaganda.
Like if you watched One Battle After Another and thought it was profound, did you not notice the absence of any real ideological exploration beyond "racism is bad"? What did the caricatured resistance really believe in? What can such a movie really say about "radical" politics on immigration if the liberals who made it have to account for liberals approval and funding of ICE? Like it said nothing at all, that's the issue with everything. We are so politically atrophied that we think its the most political movie ever, but its really apolitical if you think about it a bit more.
tl;dr we’ve got the politicians that are most aligned with the majority of voters
I have a suspicion that it’s no different than any other highly efficient system. You’ll notice that every time there’s a natural crisis you’ll hear how facility X is the only place in the world where Y is done and now everything Y is going to go up in price[0].
There’s lots of reasons everyone downstream of X doesn’t have backup plans but one that certainly applies to the immediate consumers of Y is that over time market forces shave off any insurance against Y prices.
This phenomenon is well-understood and so most countries intentionally develop backup facilities to X in what they believe are crucial spaces. It’s why the US pays for both ULA and SpaceX (instead of just whichever works better) and pays more for locally grown food and so on.
But someone has to be watching and convince the rest of us that this kind of thing is worth doing and they need to keep doing it for a long time.
What I think happened is The Sort[1] happened. We got better at giving people with the requisite skills their rewards. Previously, you might end up with a smart steely-eyed guy as Flight EECOM at NASA but today that guy has a shot at 100x the wealth on Wall Street or in tech. If you look at the debate between George H W Bush and Ronald Reagan[2] you’ll see a sort of thing that isn’t so common today: they are asked whether the US should be paying for the education of children of people crossing the border with Mexico and where today the highly-optimized politician will respond that he will do what you, the constituent, is asking here[3] and stop paying for these people one way or another - both candidates actually contest that idea and offer a view that’s not populist.
You’ll see this today with the rise of direct to constituent social media. A big part of politicians’ approach today is about What Polls Well. Sen. Warren is the biggest example of this I think. Once the proponent of intelligent policy, she is now most commonly known for highly populist policy - to the extent that she is now often described as a slopulist.
So what I think is the difference is that earlier most politicians were more influenced by smarter people with low time preference and as the constituents became more powerful as a mass, politicians started being influenced primarily by the median person until we eventually have someone perfectly reflective of the electorate. The electorate, for the most part, would like all taxes set as close to zero and all spending set as close to 100% on their own pet interest; and second-order effects are rarely considered.
Therefore, in the common way of all people to declare monocausal roots of events, I declare that refinement culture has caused:
- highly efficient adaptation of politician to populace
- with low tail-risk mitigation
And consequently we’ve got a person who can’t do effective foreign policy running foreign policy because they are very good at politics.
A good self-test I think is “if chair of the Federal Reserve were an elected position would your party of choice have elected a multi millionaire investment banker like Jerome Powell to it?”. I think the answer to this is “no” for either party, yet he has performed his function admirably well, in my opinion.
0: often this is small and facilities X’ take on the same work at slightly raised costs Y’ but sometimes, like in the Thai flooding with HDDs, costs rise greatly
1: A term I first heard from patio11, but it’s related to the idea of refinement culture
3: because this is a Republican debate; if it were Democratic Party he would answer that he would do what you, the constituent wants, and assign a new fund to these people who he will declare (in agreement with you) are humans, not illegals and so on. The fact isn’t of significance here. It is whether they can talk the trade-offs of policy with their constituents. The modern leader is “I’m a leader. I need to follow the people”.
311 comments
The Dept of Defense was only created in the late 1940s. Before that the US had the Dept of War, the Dept of the Navy, and other organizations. The point of calling it "defense" was not because "everyone has the right to defense", but because the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda, as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.
If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.
[1] https://www.ccac.gov/system/files/media/calendar/images/Semi...
[2] https://www.usmint.gov/coins/coin-programs/semiquincentennia...
> the US was promoting the United Nations and waging a Cold War, and wanted to pretend that it would never do anything proactive or aggressive. That is, it was propaganda
Many other countries similarly changed the name of their respective ministries, reflecting the ideal (if not the fact) that war should not be pursued for gain or used to resolve international controversies.
Actions trail behind ideals; ideals are set to remind us of how things should be even if we don't live up to them. Renaming the DoD to DoW reflects an aggressive, violent and ultimately predatory posturing that the West had chosen to abandon after WW2 and many millions of deaths.
No, it wasn’t zero. But there was still a notable drop. I don’t think it’s coincidence that blowing up this world order has only become a cause now that those who suffered the horrors of WW2 have died.
For example 3 to 5 million were killed in the 2nd Congo war of 1998-2003. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll
> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.
…which is the bad thing being discussed, yes. I don’t really understand why “there used to be one” would be exonerative. Not to mention, they didn’t rename it, that requires an act of Congress. Instead they just told everyone to change which name they use. Lines up with the “adult children” theory. Skip the actual work, (which would involve addressing the nation and justifying this change in posture), instead focus on the performative.
As we are seeing in real time with Iran, “we’ll just war!” was a juvenile idea, committed to with near-zero forethought or planning.
> The "silver dollar" change isn't -- it's the dime. The design was in the works before the current administration, and is only intended to be for the 250th anniversary
Referring to a dime as a dollar bothered me too. Going deeper, the absence of the olive branch is actually an intentional historical reference to the Revolutionary War, where peace was tragically lost. According to the artist who made it, the open claw is to symbolize the desire to regain it:
The image takes inspiration from the Great Seal of the United States, and represents the colonists before and during the American Revolution, Custer explained. While he included the arrows from the seal, he left out the olive branch to symbolize the fact that the colonies hadn’t yet reached peace — but left the claw open to demonstrate that they were waiting for it.
https://www.spotlightpa.org/news/2026/02/philadelphia-mint-c...
> as the current preferred name "Dept of War" is now for a different posture with regard to America's adversaries.
The “Dept of War” naming is not aimed at our adversaries. It’s aimed internally. It’s chest beating from man children who want desperately to identify as “alpha males”.
The same man who calls himself the “president of peace” unilaterally renamed the department of defense. It’s entirely legitimate to call this out as nonsense.
> If you're going to call people stupid or immature for making certain decisions, maybe take a couple minutes to find out who made the decisions, and/or what the history of those and similar changes has been.
“We won the first world war, we won the second world war, we won everything before that and in between,” Trump said at the signing. “And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense.”
Seems like a stupid and immature reason enough to me.
Not to say that War is Peace folks won’t jump on it.
I think we haven't felt yet the true consequences of this. Worldwide.
I am happy to ponder and willingly accept this is probably just my perception.
I have a couple of theories. The creators of the media are becoming more and more my age. Do they have nothing interesting to say to me as our experience is shared? Is this something experienced by previous generations as their generation took over media, or is our zeitgeist as "digital natives" so newly shared that this is a new experience?
I know people who would blame "ensh*tification" and move on, but I really think that there is more to what is happening.
What I do know is it's exceedingly rare for me to watch a movie or show made after about 2015 and to find myself thinking about it days later. There are of course exceptions.
Nobody knows what they are doing in the sense we think they do when we are kids.
Does Tom Clancy think the novels are literary trash? The books are made for children, it's about following your dreams and using your imagination in the face of grown up resistance.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91429448/everyone-is-12-twitter-...
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/everyone-is-12-now-theory-of-...
Subsequently, trying to return to consuming modern media has been quite the shock to the system. In many ways, but maybe the most startling is the storytelling. Books and movies lauded for being modern classics are so brain-numbing stupid (sorry but there’s no other accurate way to describe them) abound. Just absolute paint by numbers stories, messaging so on the nose you almost need a new phrase to describe it because the standard one didn’t do it justice, small-minded and petty characters being portrayed as heroic or brilliant - it’s incredible. I know there’s already comparisons to Idiocracy in this thread, and yes I’m well aware of the term selection bias so there’s no need to point it out - of course classics are classic for a reason. But I’m talking the most celebrated stories of our modern age here, the supposed next generation of classics, and all I can think is… really? Really? Have you all gone insane?
I had the opposite reaction and could barely make it through 15m of One Battle. The movie opens with women in skin tight dresses and mini skirts with automatic weapons robbing banks and breaking into migrant detention centers while yelling "this is what real power looks like". That feels like childish nonsense to me but then it is wrapped in this "radical chic" that is supposed to force me to take it seriously. Rather than movies like Predator which are intentionally dumb and fun the author should look at how vague political messages and sex are used to take extremely shallow work and make it "adult".
In a sense I think this is a different thing from someone that is antisocial or manipulative, because even they can admit being wrong or incorrect in certain circumstances. It's closest to narcissist behavior but it exhibits in such a specific way that makes me think it's a different type.
You could probably link it to a lot of different things. Extreme machismo social media brainrot, a society that rewards never admitting you're wrong, extreme wealth.
https://www.war.gov/Spotlights/Operation-Epic-Fury/
> When you punish a person for dreaming his dream / Don't expect him to thank or forgive you
> Hail Satan
I feel like no media today has really topped the stuff of the 90s and 00s. Star Trek Voyager season 5 still stands tall above the rest for me. The movie September 5 came close as it had interesting bits.
But besides that, there is a generational thing going on. I felt when I grew up online in the 90s and 00s that people who were older than me were smarter than my generation. My generation watched movies and played games while gen x and baby boomers did hardcore assembly programming and whatever.
And then the same thing happened with millenials and gen z. Gen z is just different from millenials which again are different from baby boomers. Each generation progressively gets less technical it seems like. There are always outliers in every generation of course but I think the trajectory is somewhat clear.
I also think this applies to movies and tv shows. Gen z just thinks differently and doesn't have the same ideas. I don't think a gen z'er could create Voyager season 5, and maybe not even a millenial could. There is so much information and knowledge and perception in the context a generation is born into and grows up in and a lot of that context and information is lost with the next generation.
H.R. McMaster: Trump’s knowledge was like a series of islands. He might know a lot about one specific thing, but there were no bridges between the islands, no way to connect one thought to another
—
working on a new unified theory of american reality i'm calling "everyone is twelve now"
“I’m strong and I want to have like fifty kids and a farm” of course you do. You’re twelve. “I don’t want to eat vegetables I think steak and French fries is the only meal” hell yeah homie you’re twelve. “Maybe if there’s crime we should just send the army” bless your heart my twelve year old buddy
https://bsky.app/profile/veryimportant.lawyer/post/3lybxlwzj...
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:US_presidents_timeli...
Those that can't become politicians.
Just as a very basic example: 4 presidents in a row have bombed Yemen: Bush, Obama, Trump and Biden. This is consensus on very fundamental ideas on US foreign policy. But way more importantly than whether or not you agree with bombing Yemen, you should start to recognize that the real reasons for bombing Yemen or any other conflict are completely absent from public discourse and media.
Also once you broaden your horizon on film a bit it becomes very hard to watch modern mainstream western movies at all. Like watch The Battle of Algiers or any Costa-Gavras movie and you realize most western cinema is at best just infantilizing and at worst outright propaganda.
Like if you watched One Battle After Another and thought it was profound, did you not notice the absence of any real ideological exploration beyond "racism is bad"? What did the caricatured resistance really believe in? What can such a movie really say about "radical" politics on immigration if the liberals who made it have to account for liberals approval and funding of ICE? Like it said nothing at all, that's the issue with everything. We are so politically atrophied that we think its the most political movie ever, but its really apolitical if you think about it a bit more.
I have a suspicion that it’s no different than any other highly efficient system. You’ll notice that every time there’s a natural crisis you’ll hear how facility X is the only place in the world where Y is done and now everything Y is going to go up in price[0].
There’s lots of reasons everyone downstream of X doesn’t have backup plans but one that certainly applies to the immediate consumers of Y is that over time market forces shave off any insurance against Y prices.
This phenomenon is well-understood and so most countries intentionally develop backup facilities to X in what they believe are crucial spaces. It’s why the US pays for both ULA and SpaceX (instead of just whichever works better) and pays more for locally grown food and so on.
But someone has to be watching and convince the rest of us that this kind of thing is worth doing and they need to keep doing it for a long time.
What I think happened is The Sort[1] happened. We got better at giving people with the requisite skills their rewards. Previously, you might end up with a smart steely-eyed guy as Flight EECOM at NASA but today that guy has a shot at 100x the wealth on Wall Street or in tech. If you look at the debate between George H W Bush and Ronald Reagan[2] you’ll see a sort of thing that isn’t so common today: they are asked whether the US should be paying for the education of children of people crossing the border with Mexico and where today the highly-optimized politician will respond that he will do what you, the constituent, is asking here[3] and stop paying for these people one way or another - both candidates actually contest that idea and offer a view that’s not populist.
You’ll see this today with the rise of direct to constituent social media. A big part of politicians’ approach today is about What Polls Well. Sen. Warren is the biggest example of this I think. Once the proponent of intelligent policy, she is now most commonly known for highly populist policy - to the extent that she is now often described as a slopulist.
So what I think is the difference is that earlier most politicians were more influenced by smarter people with low time preference and as the constituents became more powerful as a mass, politicians started being influenced primarily by the median person until we eventually have someone perfectly reflective of the electorate. The electorate, for the most part, would like all taxes set as close to zero and all spending set as close to 100% on their own pet interest; and second-order effects are rarely considered.
Therefore, in the common way of all people to declare monocausal roots of events, I declare that refinement culture has caused:
- highly efficient adaptation of politician to populace
- with low tail-risk mitigation
And consequently we’ve got a person who can’t do effective foreign policy running foreign policy because they are very good at politics.
A good self-test I think is “if chair of the Federal Reserve were an elected position would your party of choice have elected a multi millionaire investment banker like Jerome Powell to it?”. I think the answer to this is “no” for either party, yet he has performed his function admirably well, in my opinion.
0: often this is small and facilities X’ take on the same work at slightly raised costs Y’ but sometimes, like in the Thai flooding with HDDs, costs rise greatly
1: A term I first heard from patio11, but it’s related to the idea of refinement culture
2: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=YsmgPp_nlok
3: because this is a Republican debate; if it were Democratic Party he would answer that he would do what you, the constituent wants, and assign a new fund to these people who he will declare (in agreement with you) are humans, not illegals and so on. The fact isn’t of significance here. It is whether they can talk the trade-offs of policy with their constituents. The modern leader is “I’m a leader. I need to follow the people”.