Goodbye (and Good Riddance?) to 'Normal'?
Martin Gurri tells me why he's glad Donald Trump sent Kamala Harris packing--and how 'wild hair' is related to wild politics.
There’s a new Reason Interview up and my guest is giving thanks, at least for now, about Donald Trump’s decisive victory of Kamala Harris.
is a former CIA analyst is a visiting fellow at the Mercatus Center and a columnist for . A decade ago, in the wake of the Arab Spring and various "color" revolutions around the world, he published The Revolt of the Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium, which analyzed how social media empowered ordinary people to resist control from above and anticipated the rise of Donald Trump, French President Emmanuel Macron, and Brexit.Since then, he’s been a fantastically engaging and provocative public intellectual. I recommend checking out his recent piece for
, Mistaking Leviathan for God, in which he argues, that a “crisis of representation” in American society has elevated the pettiest of partisan political squabbles to our primary way of creating meaning and transcendence. What a mistake that is!I spoke with Gurri last week at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation in New York City with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of intellectual conformity and groupthink. (Go here for information on Reason events, in NYC and elsewhere.)
We talked about why Gurri voted for Trump after sitting out the previous two presidential elections, and why he's cautiously optimistic about the next four years. We also talked about what it was like to be uprooted from Cuba as a child due to Fidel Castro taking power, what it was like to work at the CIA, and the connection between wild hair and wild politics.
Here are a list of topics covered and time stamps, followed by a YouTube embed, and audio versions at Apple, Spotify, and SoundCloud.
0:00- Introduction
1:13- Why Gurri voted for Trump
4:46- Trump vs. Harris: Chaos vs. Control
8:40- Trump's first term
11:04- Trump's new coalition
14:33- Is authoritarianism coming to America?
19:00- Attention, Populism & Wild Hair
20:42- Colossal transformation awaits us
34:05- Creating communities of meaning in the digital age
36:22- The transformations enabled by the printing press
38:41- More chaos is coming
43:11- Lessons from Cuba
48:40- Arab Spring and the spark that overthrows a regime
50:37- Short term pessimistic, long term optimistic
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