Heinlein and Independence Day

Today, three days after Independence Day, is the 37th anniversary of the death of Robert Heinlein, who would have a thing or two to say about revolution in our time.

For some years now I’ve thought civic holidays in the US should have, whenever possible, a specific conceptual focus, as Thanksgiving Day already does. MLK Jr Day should be devoted to game theory, Columbus Day to learning about discovery and exploration in general, and so on.

The question we should openly discuss every July 4th is: are there prices too high to save the United States? My formulation is from Heinlein’s Guest of Honor speech, “The Future Revisited,” to the XIXth World Science Fiction Convention in Seattle in 1961:

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The Spirit of ’76

Lest we forget….

Today is Independence Day. The “Fourth of July” is merely a date on the calendar.

We all make that mistake given the vernacular of our time, but it’s an important distinction.

We forget the circumstances surrounding the signing of the Declaration of Independence. The men who signed that document understood that they weren’t just rebels, but now traitors subject to capital punishment. As Benjamin Harrison joked to Elbridge Gerry:

“I shall have a great advantage over you, Mr. Gerry, when we are all hung for what we are now doing. From the size and weight of my body I shall die in a few minutes and be with the Angels, but from the lightness of your body you will dance in the air an hour or two before you are dead.”

The signers were not desperate men, not Jacobins at the head of ravenous mobs. These were men who largely represented the elite of American society. They didn’t have to do this, they could have turned away and continued to enjoy their lives. Yet, for all that, they decided first as individuals and then collectively to risk it all and to “…pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honour.”

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Enablers of Mamdani: America’s Universities

Supporters for Mamdani tended to be more college-educated than those who voted for Cuomo; many have graduate degrees. One might find this surprising, since university graduates are supposed to have more knowledge about things like history and economics…and more ability to think clearly about things. But actually, it makes sense that Mamdani’s greatest strength is among college graduates, especially young college graduates. Why? Several reasons:

First, there’s student debt. A lot of people believed the promises about the right educational credentials practically guaranteeing a future income which would make any educational debt incurred almost trivial by comparison. Now they’ve found out that it isn’t so, and they are angry not at the educational institutions that benefited from their tuition, but on broader factors: ‘society’, or ‘boomers’, or, especially, ‘capitalism.’

Second, the education that many of these former students received encouraged them not only in an anti-capitalist attitude but in a broader hostility toward American society, hence priming them for a sense of resentment and an affinity for those promoting revolutionary change. In effect, this indoctrination largely immunized the universities they attended from blowback directed against themselves.

Third, there is a sense of entitlement coupled with a limited sense of options: the idea has been broadly promoted that college is the way to go for career success. At the same time the idea has been promoted that noncollege jobs (and noncollege people) are inherently inferior.  There is a feeling that “I did what they told me and now look where I am.”

Here’s an interesting email that Peter Thiel wrote to some Meta executives and board members back in 2020. Excerpt:

Nick — I certainly would not suggest that our policy should be to embrace Millennial attitudes unreflectively. I would be the last person to advocate for socialism. But when 70% of Millennials say they are pro-socialist, we need to do better than simply dismiss them by saying that they are stupid or entitled or brainwashed; we should try and understand why. And, from the perspective of a broken generational compact, there seems to be a pretty straightforward answer to me, namely, that when one has too much student debt or if housing is too unaffordable, then one will have negative capital for a long time and/or find it very hard to start accumulating capital in the form of real estate; and if one has no stake in the capitalist system, then one may well turn against it.

College debt has contributed to the negative-capital phenomenon, and what is taught in all too many colleges has contributed to the feeling that it’s impossible to get out of the negative capital trap.

Of course, Mamdani may not win the NY mayor’s race: only a small percentage of New Yorkers actually voted for him, and his extremism is sure to drive considerable pushback. But I’m afraid that we haven’t seen the last of the phenomenon he represents.  This post notes that:

The kids who were radicalised and indoctrinated into Critical Theory at elite universities in the 2010s are now in their mid 30s. And they’re starting to climb the ladder. Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York is just the first of many, I fear.

The marketing approach taken by the Mamadani campaign also bears examining.  @signulll says:

one under discussed part of the mamdani campaign was the usage of the video filters. every video used the same soft, humanizing tone consistently. it crafted a world around him. an aesthetic, almost utopian one. close shots, warm tones, delicate pacing.

it framed him as the delivery vehicle for a better feeling reality. beautifully cinematic. no surprise,

his mom is a well known filmmaker. this was vibe warfare. & he won. you have to understand how modern culture works in order to partake in it no matter what your underlying mission is.

…to which @Olivia_Reingold responded:

Filters are just the beginning.

Zohran is the director of a Hype House first and politician second.

From what I can tell, his team can shoot, produce, and edit a reel within an hour. That means there is about a ~60 minute lag time between when he appears in public, shaking hands in a given location somewhere in the city and the moment it goes live on his various channels.

Not every video of his gets uploaded to every one of his pages. They understood that their recent “Hot Girls For Zohran” video, in which esteemed political theorist Emily Ratajkowski declared that Zohran is like so totally cool, would preform better on Instagram than X, and so they pushed it primarily via Instagram reels and by adding @emrata as a collaborator to the post. T

hey are the kind of operation that would never be caught dead uploading a horizontal video to Instagram. This is a vertical-first shop. It’s the kind of team that makes Trump’s viral TikTok dance (the iconic shimmy) look cute. Zohran has introduced a new era that has instantly outdated that craze, making it look ‘so 2024’ in retrospect.

You’ll notice he cultivated virility without a signature dance, gesture, or gimmick. There was no TikTok dance that spread like wildfire. Merely supporting him became the meme.

All you need is a look at Cuomo’s feed to understand why the man got cooked.

(‘virility’ corrected to ‘vitality’ in comments)

I’m sure I’m not the only one who is reminded of a filmmaker named Leni Riefenstahl and her accomplishments in shifting the political winds in Germany. And no, I’m not asserting that Mamdani is equivalent to Riefenstahl’s client (although there are some points of similarity), but making the point that the aesthetics of the way that something is presented–in video or otherwise–can have a lot to do with how successful it is in the marketplace.

Your thoughts?

 

The Mamdani Ascendancy

So the Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani has won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor.

I’m not going to go into much detail about the guy except to say he is someone who seems to be the political embodiment of the progressive millennial, or if you like, a Columbia University protestor. Bowdoin College graduate, where he founded the campus chapter of Students for Justice in Palestine, and an avowed socialist who has promised as mayor he would make life affordable by having the city take over grocery stores.

You know the type, a person who thinks the fact that his policies have never worked is a mere implementation detail.

Given that Mamdani has the Democratic nomination, the Republican nominee is a nobody, and the incumbent Eric Adams (running as an independent) has an approval rating somewhere around 20 percent. Unless something dramatic happens Mamdani will be elected as mayor in a little over four months.

There’s some smart commentary out there about what this all means

Jesse Arm looks at the results and attributes Mamdani’s victory to his ability to get his supporters, younger progressives, to the polls.

Joel Kotkin writes about what it means for the future of New York City. Quick summary? Now would be a good time to open a U-Haul franchise in New York City.

Ruy Teixeira looks at the national implications and sees the overall effect as limited.

With apologies to Teixeira, who is one of the rare Democratic analysts who is both sharp and honest, that’s missing the point.

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Langston Hughes, George Orwell, and the Tea Party

Waxing nostalgic about the Tea Party and how it was marginalized, creating the void that Trump would later fill, I thought I’d reprint a November 5, 2010 post from my long-neglected blog.


For those of you who brought your Langston Hughes collections, turn to the poem Harlem:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Hughes may have had a particular tragedy in mind, but despair is universal, and he eloquently captures its essence. Deferred dreams are met in different ways. Some people give up. Some get angry at the dream, or at themselves for having it. Some manage to savor the dream, whether they have any real hope in achieving it or not. Some sink into chronic despair. And some “explode” – that is, they drive themselves to some desperate act.

How does a dream explode?

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