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Your guide to what the 2024 US election means for Washington and the world
Which is worse? Having someone describe your race in a way you don’t like, or having someone knock on your door late at night, ask for proof of residency and put you in a van? I only ask because apparently the question is more difficult than I thought.
There is no question that there are many labels that the benevolent left wants to impose on me without my consent. A particular dislike are people who write to tell me that I should call myself “mixed heritage,” a term that makes me sound like a tomato.
So I understand why the word “Latinx” actively pushes some people to Donald Trump. But then I understand Trump’s promise to deport 20 million people from the United States — a pledge so central it made it onto placards at the Republican National Convention — and, frankly, deeply fear it. Will provoke the person who is not the “look”. White makes the American tomato thing less problematic.
Those who are members of political parties should not say that the voters have been cheated on the basis that the customer is always right. But as someone who doesn’t belong to a political party, let me say this: if you’re letting some half-baked opinion of some form of social justice guide your vote, there’s something wrong with your sense of danger. has gone wrong.
Nor is this problem limited to the American right. I’ve lost count of the number of people in British politics, including some card-carrying Conservatives, who have told me that while Trump is “for four years”, Brexit is forever. Brexit is a major blow to Britain’s economic prosperity and, if you think, as I do, that a British presence in the bloc improves policy-making, it’s a blow to the whole continent. But it’s simply not comparable in terms of content or downside risk to a president who vows to water down or abandon multilateral institutions, which have been an important part of America’s cooperation. all Our safety and prosperity.
What went wrong here? I think there’s a common problem: We live in a noisy age. Quacky and unhelpful ideas about race are not new, but now they appear on the BBC website. The burgeoning slights of Brexit are with us all the time, but you can’t even take to social media to complain about an extra charge for ordering something from the continent without pointing out how this metropolitan blunder happened in Brexit. There is good evidence that more than broadening our horizons, exposure to strongly opposing views on social media can actually cause us to double down on what we already thought.
This is not the first time that humans have had to live with increasing amounts of ambient noise from each other. Both the invention of writing and printing represent similar information revolutions.
As Lindel Roper explains in his forthcoming book on the German Peasants’ War, A summer of fire and bloodthe rebellion of 1524-25 was not the first time that the Lord’s power was challenged by the peasantry, nor was Martin Luther the first priest to challenge the orthodoxy of the Catholic Church. But he was the first to benefit from the easy spread of ideas thanks to the printing press. Although Luther may have been referring simply to spiritual “liberty” in his writings, the peasants believed he was talking about something more radical – and acted accordingly.
Of course, the Peasants’ War was not just about the spread of ideas. As Roper points out, long-standing economic and social issues, such as Trump and Brexit, include women’s entry into the workplace, globalization, immigration, and the migration of middle-income jobs around the world. are about The Lasting Consequences of the Global Financial Crisis.
But the information revolution is a big part of it. We will once again have to adjust to a vast expansion in the amount of conflicting information at our fingertips. Some people react with “news avoidance”: preferring not to pay too much attention to what is happening. Others may never unplug. Neither approach leads to good decision-making.
It took us a century of war to invent a new idea – liberalism – that prevented Europeans from killing each other in the wake of the last information revolution. I used to think that for all the problems that social media has brought, we are doing a better job of navigating it. I’m not so sure anymore.
stephen.bush@ft.com
