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Great piece from @Peterfranklin_ at @unherd about tech giants leaving California. I wrote yesterday about how social liberalism has winners and losers, just like the economic sort, and what Peter describes here is the behaviour of its winners https://unherd.com/thepost/has-californias-day-in-the-sun-finished/
As it happens this ran yesterday in @FDRLST and implies much the same: cities governed by devotees of what @robkhenderson calls ‘luxury beliefs’ experience the moral equivalent of what happened to Detroit: https://thefederalist.com/2020/12/16/how-going-soft-on-drugs-and-crime-has-turned-seattle-into-another-american-wasteland/
That is, much as the liquefaction of the global economy enabled economic liberalism’s winners to keep cashing in even as the manufacturing communities they liquidated in order to do so fell apart, so an analogous process is taking place as our social norms dissolve.
The winners in the new liquid morality bob along on the surface, like Aella having a great time, while those who struggle to keep it together without norms and rules sink ever further into a misery and squalor which is reframed as their legitimate choice https://unherd.com/thepost/the-trouble-with-the-intellectual-porn-star/
The winners of social liquidity then leave for somewhere that hasn’t been liquefied yet, leaving behind a moral wasteland populated only by the ‘left-behinds’ who don’t know how to live, because those people with the intelligence and social capital to tell them refuse to do so.
In my Aella piece I predicted that we’ll see a moral populism emerging, to rival the economic/national populism that’s now pushing back against economic globalisation. We can expect any movement of this nature to face the same elite resistance as the economic one does.
