An image that keeps recurring to me is of powerful but uninformed groups that have been hunkered down in their bunkers reassuring one another that they are the best and brightest being dragged out into daylight by crowds that pulled the doors off of the bunkers. The self-regarding bunkerites stand blinking in the sunlight, confused and angry that their reveries have been disturbed. It isn't clear to me or to the bunkerites if they have been rescued, freed from confinement, or if they are about to be tarred, feathered and run out of town on a rail.

It's the IPCC that is rapidly melting rather than Himalayan glaciers. It's the stupidity of the command and control fantasies of closeted academics and politicians that are being exposed and ridiculed rather than the pragmatic good sense of the rest of society. It isn't that there are no real problems and threats, it is that the supposed elites have proposed idiotic policies to address them and sought to stampede societies into adopting the bad policies with miserabilist narratives of impending doom.

The bunkerites have failed to grasp that the world has changed. They can't control the narrative because the broadcast age is over. We have a peer-to-peer world now. People talk to one another without intermediaries to shape and spin the stories. The result is that the stupidity of the proposed policies is observed and discussed, society is laughing at the ideas of the dullards in the bunkers, and have set about dismantling the bunkers.

It's a new set of problems. Peer-to-peer communication can have a high error rate, like the old whispering game where some phrase gets garbled as one after another person whispers the phrase to an adjacent peer. After a few iterations the words get garbled, often comically. But there are also error correction systems and feedback. The net effect is that correct communication usually occurs, but that it isn't immediate and a lot of crosstalk takes place.

It's no surprise that poodle pundits who make their livings on the scraps discarded from the high table of the elites have been speaking about the virtues of Chinese autocracy, denigrating democracy, and whining that the US has become ungovernable.

. . . In the old days, the elite media really did control the national political discourse; there were no partisan, splenetic cable news or ubiquitous talk-radio channels and no blogosphere to keep the populists riled up and make them feel the excitement of a mob. Until fifteen years ago, presidents and congressional leaders could pretty well manage the policy conversations, keep them on reasonable simmer. But the new technologies have, maybe permanently, turned up the political heat to boil.

Apart from the fact that this is false - the wheels came off that wagon 50 years ago and had only been on the wagon for a brief time in the world war era - there is a complete disengagement with reality. The policies being proposed are nonsensical, which really should be widely discussed. The more pressing the problems the more important it is to have good policies. National governance isn't a video game. It isn't a simulated world controlled by a gamer. Real world systems are far more complex and the consequences of simple minded policies can be dire. This is not understood by the bunkerites.

One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the politically difficult but critically important policies needed to move a society forward in the 21st century.

China is a mess because of the autocracy. It is less messy at the moment than it has been in the recent past, but the autocracy is responsible for all of it, past and present. There is little reason to assume that the current lessening of mess will continue, and good reason to assume that it will blow up in their faces again as it has many times before. It is worth noting that they are working feverishly to suppress the emergence of a peer-to-peer information society since that would likely be the end of them.

Both of these quotes come from Arnold's post: The Progressive Tantrum. He concludes:

The important point is that Progressives are never wrong. Top-down reform is the only way to fix the health care system. Anthropogenic global warming is scientifically proven, and its solution requires strenuous exercise of political control over individual behavior. Deficit spending is necessary and sufficient to create jobs. Technocrats can make banks too regulated to fail. Markets without technocratic control are like adolescents without adult supervision. Individual happiness can be improved by political authorities using scientific knowledge. Concentrated political power is the wave of the future, and it is good.

I am not a populist. I fear the mob. But how can I fear the Progressives any less?

I place the emphasis differently. The issue isn't that the hordes are insubordinate, it is that the proposed policies are stupid. Insubordination is rational when the orders are nonsensical and immoral. The rational response isn't to decry the mob and try to shout or shoot them down, it is to rethink the stupid policies. Others claim that society can be mollified.

One recent study found that people who had been treated unfairly became more selfish. It’s hard to pass reform programs that depend on a sense of solidarity—like health-care reform or cap-and-trade—when voters are trying desperately to protect what they already have.

The temptation, then, is simply to abandon ambitious plans in an attempt to annoy no one. But a better approach would be to recognize that voters’ anger is less ideological than pragmatic: at heart, it’s the product of the weak economy and the poor job market. (The movement that today’s populism most closely resembles is Ross Perot’s, which arose, similarly, during a downturn.) And while that means that there’s no way to make voters happy without improving the economy, it also means that, if you start creating jobs, people will start to feel better. Obviously, small initiatives that nod to people’s concerns (like the deficit commission) can help. But what matters most is getting the economy moving again—even if doing so means handing out tax credits to businesses or magnifying voters’ frustration with government spending. It may bring some short-term political pain, but the only way out is through.

There's truth in this. Stupid policies such as those now on offer about health care and climate change meet less opposition when times are good and people have secure employment and no sense of impending crisis. The problem is that the policies are stupid and will cause insecurity and crisis, and that they can't be enacted without the elites whipping up a crisis mentality with miserabilist stories of immanent doom. In good times such policies would be calmly appraised and rejected for their obvious defects. "Try again son, you can do better". In hard times like now the reaction is angrier, as we should expect.

I'd like to see us move beyond the petty politicking and think deeply about the situation. There are problems that require our attention - as ever - but the policies championed by the Progressives - who are not actually progressive, just as the Conservatives are not conservative and the Liberals are not liberal - are just silly. They won't do squat about the problems though they will be hugely oppressive and expensive. They should be embarrassed that they have advocated such nonsense. We should name names, point and laugh, and seek to shame them into doing better work. Oh wait, that's what we are doing.

Never mind. Talk among yourselves.