Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

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He's putting the cart before the horse.

The problem is the stupid bankrupt politics in the USA.

Social media is just gasoline being thrown onto the fire, with the billionaire class pumping as much gas into it as they can.

I think there's one throwaway paragraph in the middle of the whole article that addresses the political shift in the 90s that led us to where we are. That should have been front and center.

The USA needs universal health care, child care and college (and probably UBI) meanwhile the Democratic party has shifted to the right and fully engaged in punching left as hard as it can to avoid this happening, while losing elections to the right wing (which is on a slope towards outright fascism) because they can't deliver anything which significantly moves the needle for the average american. That is why the last 10 years have been particularly stupid. And the one thing that both sides pump up is the social wars and identity politics in order to avoid talking about the economic changes that have to happen.

France, Canada, Britain and many other countries in the West that have everything you listed are also showing the same signs of division, all emerging in the same timeframe described by Haidt.

And "third way" neoliberalism took off in the US and the UK with Clinton and Blair in the 90s.

Why don't you address any counterfactuals that don't fit your theory?

You haven't cited anything "counterfactual".

I mentioned Canada and France. Could also list other countries like Austria and Netherlands that had similar issues. Hell, even Brazil, who had been improving economically and especially for its poorest people consistently since the 90s, and was taken over by a far right government that rose through social media, exactly the way Haidt describes.

My point is that what we are witnessing here is better explained by the sudden access to social media rather than socioeconomic deterioration. By the way, we agree that the working class in the US (and UK) have also experienced a relative decline in the past decades.

The right wing billionaire media blitz really took off with Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. That's the engine that has been driving a lot of it, and it is obviously transnational and doesn't know any boundaries (Murdoch is Australian). And it got started in the 90s before most people had discovered the Internet and before social media existed. The shift to neoliberalism also started with Blair and Clinton, but affected most of Europe and the Americas through all of the neoliberal institutions, including the EU, the G7/G8/G20, the WTO, agreements like NAFTA, etc. Social media didn't change the trajectory of any of that, it only accelerated it.

> The shift to neoliberalism also started with Blair and Clinton

No, the left-most party in systems that were right – center or right – center-left getting fully on-board with neoliberalism happened with Blair and Clinton, but neoliberalism dominated the same states from at least Thatcher and Reagan, respectively.

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