Top-down vs bottom-up

There is, I believe, a fundamental error in the way many bloggers and media assess politics and social issues.  It's analogous to, but broader than, my earlier point about how culture influences and dominates politics rather than vice versa (see here and here and here for some examples).  Such commentators mostly have a "from the top down" vision of how things work, whereas a "from the bottom up" model more accurately reflects reality.

Here's an example.  It's a common belief among liberal bloggers that the disastrously-bad US response to the covid-19 pandemic is mostly due to Trump's incompetence and downplaying of the danger, which supposedly inspired the widespread denialism and resistance to masks and vaccines which we still see among the right-wing population, and that if Hillary or another Democrat had been president, things would have gone far better.  In fact, a better president would have made only a marginal difference.  The disdain for science and expertise (ultimately rooted in religion), the conspiratard mind-set that reflexively treats any new government mandate as "tyranny", the embrace of rejection of objective reality as a marker of right-wing tribal identity -- all these stupidities were deeply entrenched and festering on the right long before Trump became president.

That population's reaction to masks, vaccines, the seriousness of the pandemic, etc would have been roughly the same regardless of who was president -- indeed, with a hated Democrat in office, such responses would have been even more rigid and truculent.  Blue states would have been somewhat better off during 2020 with a more competent federal response, and the vaccine roll-out would have gone somewhat faster (though remember that the first vaccine wasn't even approved until November anyway), but the overall course of the disaster would still have been roughly similar.  The real problem is the "stupid one-third" of the US population, much more than quality of leadership.  It's a "from the bottom up" issue, not a "from the top down" one.

Another example is the baffling belief on the left that draconian gun-control laws, or even a mass confiscation edict, would be effective at curtailing the mass shootings and other gun crimes to which our society is prone.  The assumption seems to be that most citizens are basically automata who will operate in accordance with whatever programming Washington chooses to download into them.  In fact, guns are a deep-rooted and fundamental part of the very culture of vast areas of the US, and it's impossible to enforce a law in regions where most of the population, including most local police and other authority figures, vehemently rejects it as illegitimate.  We've already seen the emergence of the "sanctuary county" movement, in which many rural counties in blue states simply refuse to enforce state gun-control laws.  There is nothing much state governments can do about this, when the local sheriffs and elected officials are supporting and even leading the sanctuary movement.  The same was true of the earlier "sanctuary city" movement in which liberal cities refused to cooperate with federal efforts to round up and deport illegal aliens.

The most the would-be enforcers can do in such cases is to stage an occasional symbolic raid targeting some particular location with overwhelming force, which makes headlines for a day or two but leaves the general prevalence of guns (or illegal aliens) unaffected.  In the regions of the US where most of the guns are, any serious effort at enforcing more than cosmetic limitations of guns (or, Satan forbid, large-scale confiscation) would require an operation similar in scope and brutality to a full-on military occupation of an enemy country, and would probably lead to more bloodshed than the original 1861-1865 conflict.  Attempting such a thing would be madness.  Culture trumps political authority, and the direction of power cannot be reversed.

The media and the political blogosphere tend to focus heavily on the minutiae of political maneuverings in Washington.  These are not unimportant -- passing things like a minimum wage increase, Medicare expansion, etc would make a real difference to a lot of people -- but they are effects, not causes, and such an emphasis on them illuminates only the surface and not the depths.  Endless paragraphs are spent analyzing Manchin's latest remark, while strikes, mass demonstrations, the Great Resignation, etc are almost ignored.  I've seen very little effort to understand why so many more women and non-whites voted Republican in 2020 than in 2016, or why the gay movement gained acceptance so rapidly over the last twenty years, or why religion has declined so dramatically during the same period while the shrinking fundamentalist minority became even more militant, or why illegal immigration is such a concern to so much of the population (and no, bleating "racist racist racist" is not "understanding" what's going on).  These are the kinds of currents that drive politics -- that shape election results and thus, ultimately, legislation.  They are questions of culture -- of what the millions are actually thinking and feeling, not what the political leaders decide to tell them to do.  They require different modes of analysis than political issues do, and a longer-term view.  But they're far more fundamental questions.