Yeah, I feel you. I gotta hope the fervor continues to grow. This shyt is not sustainable. I’m at Rice right now and we‘ve been protesting and being vocal, but Rice is a small university (less than 5k students).
I’ve been forecasting a lot into the future recently, and one day I’m going to have kids and grandkids. If they ask me what I did during this maelstrom, I don’t think, “I was in grad school,” is a sufficient answer. People are scared, though. Our faculty are scared, students on visas are scared, and so on.
This shyt is trash.
I’ll give an example of what I mean. I’ve been pondering what is it specifically about the 1950s that MAGA keeps pining for? Is it racial homogeneity, social mores, a period of heightened economic prosperity, religious conservatism, etc.? Indeed, there were scholars problematizing the 1950s in real-time (Riesman and C. Wright Mills).
So, I built seven game theory models with different coalitions (e.g. minorities, working class whites, LGBTQ+, Women, youth, et al.). and different equilbria to attempt to find out why are MAGA nostalgic appeals are always to the 1950s?
The results showed that the economic prosperity of the ‘50s appealed to everyone, but that the 1950s are like the perfect dog whistle. The nostalgic appeal to the ‘50s is strategic ambiguity by political institutions—as different groups take from the whistle what they need. In turn, religious conservatives latch onto a return to “simpler times.” While the working class whites clamored for the economic prosperity, which increased the marginalization of others.
While some scholars have shown that appeals to the ‘50s have a favorable political effect, they have not shown the mechanics that are driving those effects computationally like I am. I was going to pair the game theory modeling with some content/structural topic modeling and compare political discourse/rhetoric from the ‘50s to the Trump moment.
I told my advisor about this and they hit the
immediately. They put the kabosh on my whole shyt.
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