Nate Silver’s arc has been instructive: He grabbed attention by positioning himself as an alternative to the “wisened opiners” of politics, openly heckling them and supplying a “system” instead of “opinions.” This lasted roughly as long as it took for him to get interviewed.
The thing is, Nate Silver has always had opinions; often they’ve been off-base. But he was fairly open about his premises and framed “the model” as the point of interest. As he grew in visibility, he’s had more opportunity to Just Say Stuff, same as those much-maligned opiners.
Increasingly, he conflates his own common sense with the assumed objectivity of those objectively assessable models and statistics: “I’m the stats guy, not the opinions guy!” It’s a good brand, a contrarian pose, but he’s morphed into the very kind of pundit he heckled for years.
It’s instructive because the contrarian brand — the “Heterodox Opinion Haver” as @danieleharper often puts it — is a fantastic way to grab attention in our information ecosystem. It’s brand differentiation, and a way to paint everyone else as “the crowd.”
The idea of “counterculture”and “rebellion” as virtues regardless of the actual ideology being put forth… the trickster-archetype “deflater of the proud”… all resonate! The IDW crowd, hell, corporate marketing teams, all understand that.
When I was coming of age ideologically and politically, I watched this concept gain traction in evangelical fundamentalism: “In a liberal culture, we’re the real rebels!” “There’s nothing more punk than being conservative!” Etc.
They saw the success of 60s counterculture and understood that they could co-opt the tone to different ends. It’s not bad in and of itself, but it’s also content-free branding, like showing your product next to a celebrity.
Because this posture is fundamentally about how one feels towards the idea of “the powers that be,” huge swaths of reactionary messaging today focuses on convincing people that [group x] — trans people, black people, atheists, scientists, whatever — are “in charge”.
I’ll be the first to confess that I found this compelling as a teen growing up in fundamentalism. It FELT true! But scratch the surface, and it fell apart. Conceptual frameworks like Intersectionality and Kyriarchy are a critical antidote; at least they were for me.
The idea that all people exist at the intersection of many different power dynamics, social hierarchies, and cultural systems isn’t (as the reactionaries I knew still insist) a way to “count up who wins,” but a call to examine the particulars and the context.
That’s one of the many reasons reactionaries have seized on Critical Race Theory as a corrupting poison. It’s not a brand or a pose, but an actual analytical framework; whether you agree or disagree with it, “rebellion as a brand” looks rightly threadbare when held next to it.