https://noahpinion.s...WxTIGjQx7JZ0hfE
Among the many amazing things about the GameStop episode is how various populists of both the Left and the Right have tried to present the struggle of day traders against hedge funds as a revolt of the people against the powerful. Here’s Alex O’Keefe, the creative director of the Sunrise Movement (the radical environmentalist group that famously confronted Dianne Feinstein in her office):
Alex O'Keefe said:
The Gamestop saga is one of the greatest direct actions. The people are seizing the means of production. In America that's not a factory it's the stock market. Where imaginary value gets put on our labor, where speculative capital gets to bet & believe in many possible worlds.
January 28th 2021
AOC got in on the day traders’ revolution too:
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said:
This is unacceptable.
We now need to know more about @RobinhoodApp’s decision to block retail investors from purchasing stock while hedge funds are freely able to trade the stock as they see fit.
As a member of the Financial Services Cmte, I’d support a hearing if necessary.
And amazingly, Ted Cruz agreed!
Tucker Carlson came in with his economic-populist-but-from-the-Right bit: "Don’t miss the point of all this".
Even Andrew Yang was feeling it: "GameStop has changed the game forever".
Now, first of all, just to be clear, a bunch of day traders putting the short squeeze on some hedge funders, while fun to watch, is not a revolution. It is not even really an uprising of the popular and oppressed; it’s just some people wanting to make a bit of money. Now, wanting to make some money is perfectly fine, and making it by successfully trading against hedge funds is a perfectly good (and funny!) way to do it. But this kind of thing is not going to materially effect the distribution of wealth and power in the United States of America, not even if it happens a hundred times.
But the really interesting thing here is the spectacle of a bunch of people rushing to try to lift the banner of the GameStoppers as a populist cause. After seven years of protest, unrest, Trump, terrorism, Nazis, pandemic, and insurrection, it gives me a profound feeling of relief to see people getting riled up over something so utterly, hilariously inconsequential to the future of the nation.
Which makes me wonder. If America’s populists are running around trying to feed off the energy of anything that smells vaguely like revolution, does that mean that their usual food supply is shrinking? After those seven long years, is a growing chunk of the American populace simply tired of being up in arms about things?
Ages of unrest rarely end because all the problems that sparked the unrest are solved. Often there’s some progress, but mostly people just seem to get exhausted, or other events intrude. Recently I’ve been reading a bunch of books about the late 60s and 70s — America’s last big age of unrest — to try to get a preview of what might happen in the 20s. Nixonland, The Invisible Bridge, and Days of Rage have been especially helpful here. One insight is that although Nixon and the Vietnam War didn’t begin that age of unrest, a lot of the popular anger came to focus on them. People might have gotten tired of the unrest before 1973. But as long as we were still fighting in Vietnam and Tricky Dick was in the White House, it felt like people couldn’t just go back to their lives. But when we withdrew from Vietnam and Nixon resigned in disgrace, a lot of people seemed to think “Well, OK, that’s enough of that,” and increasingly went back to focusing on their daily lives. The mid and late 70s featured far fewer riots than the late 60s, and the frequent terrorist attacks of the early 70s trickled off.
Of course, not everyone did that. In fact, a shrinking fringe got more radical in the 70s — think of the Symbionese Liberation Army. There were two assassination attempts on President Gerald Ford within the space of three weeks! That steady trickle of nutcases on the news probably made the normies feel like they were still living in an age of mass unrest (the good old Availability Heuristic). And that in turn might have deepened their own exhaustion.
So what’s the analogy to the 2020s? The unrest began over Black people being killed by cops and women getting sexually harassed at work, in addition to some more longstanding and diffuse economic and social issues. There has been some progress on those fronts, but the problems haven’t been fully solved (and may never be). But Trump, who became the focus of popular rage as well as its generator, is gone, and after much vigorous debate and a few exploded eyeballs and cracked skulls, the country has generally decided that both police racism and sexual harassment are bad. As in the 70s, the most flagrant irritants have been removed, even if the underlying maladies remain uncured. Also, years of general catastrophizing and despair tend to reset people’s expectations, which probably dampens popular anger, at least if you believe the Revolution of Rising Expectations theory.
If the 70s analogy holds, we can expect to see increasingly concentrated insanity among a shrinking extremist fringe (QAnon, etc.), accompanied by scattered acts of stochastic terrorism, while the great mass of people slowly shuffle back to their quotidian concerns and settle in for a decade of malaise. Ambient populist energy will continue swirling around for a while, latching onto goofier and goofier causes (like day trading!) until it finally drains away into a general goofiness.
But “general goofiness” as a means of recovery from an Age of Unrest is a topic for another post. Incidentally, I’m now reading Reaganland, the sequel to Nixonland and The Invisible Bridge…