Nate Silver on “Blueskyism”

I always wondered about the politics of pollster and statistician Nate Silver, whose prognostications have been heavily relied on (he was a bit off in the last election, giving Harris and Trump about equal chances to win).  But I always read between the lines at Five-Thirty-Eight (which is now owned by ABC) and felt a kindred spirit in Silver, as if he wanted the Democrats to win. Well, as Wikipedia notes, I was pretty much on. Silver even dislikes progressives for becoming too left and jettisoning liberal values, which is the way I feel.  From Wikipedia:

In a 2012 interview with Charlie Rose, Silver said, “I’d say I’m somewhere in between being a libertarian and a liberal. So if I were to vote, it would be kind of a Gary Johnson versus Mitt Romney decision, I suppose.”  In a 2023 newsletter, Silver said that he misspoke during that interview and meant to say that he would have chosen between Johnson and Barack Obama. He added that he has voted for the Democratic candidate in every presidential election he has participated in, though he voted for John Kasich in the 2016 New York Republican presidential primary as he believed “the difference between a Kasich-led GOP and a Trump-led GOP would make a big difference to the future of the country”.

Silver has also criticized “the progressive political class”, believing that it has become “more left and less liberal“.  In 2024, he said that he voted for Kathy Hochul in the 2022 New York gubernatorial election and Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election, but has also criticized some of the Democratic Party’s actions and political positions.

Silver, then, seems like a man after my own heart.  This sentiment was strengthened by his new post on his website the Silver Bulletin, a post in which he analyzes the competition between Twitter (now X) and Bluesky. He generally favors the former but has critical words for both.

Since I don’t follow anyone on Twitter, my own views are conditioned by the tweets (or “skeets”) that readers send me.  I thus spend most of my time looking at X (I’ll call it “Twitter” in this post). And in general I like the rough-and-tumble of Twitter more than the superficial geniality and virtue-flaunting that I feel on Bluesky.

But I hasten to add that I have nothing against those friends (and I have several) who have left Twitter because they couldn’t take the pro-Trumpism they see there (I ignore it) and seek a more genial and politically congenial atmosphere on Bluesky.  In my view, though, the same vitriol is on Bluesky as was on Twitter—it’s just that it seems aimed mostly at conservatives, Republicans, and those who don’t adhere to “progressive” Leftism.  One has to be wary of any site that piles on Jessie Singal for publishing scientific facts as he sees them, facts that tend to go against the acceptive ideology of gender activism.  I do put up posts from both sites, but I find myself more often on Twitter, where I have 37 times more followers than on Bluesky. Further, on Bluesky I seem to be on a number of lists that are blocked en masse—probably because of my views on Israel and gender activism.

But I digress. Let’s see what liberal/libertarian Nate Silver has to say. Click the headline to read:

Since Silver’s a statistician, he first gives some plots suggesting that Twitter has declined a bit, but far less than Bluesky has declined (both peaked around last year’s election and then went down):

Twitter/X has slowly declined in influence, according to external evidence — Elon Musk’s occasional claims to the contrary notwithstanding.1 And yet, despite some extremely problematic characteristics that we’ve documented at Silver Bulletin, X remains relatively sticky, partially because it’s been a slow glide down from a high peak following earlier years of exponential growth.

Alternatives like Meta’s Threads, Trump’s Truth Social and the independent Mastodon have failed to gain traction. And we’re at a point where it’s probably safe to assume that Bluesky won’t displace Twitter either.

Let’s take a look at Google searches related to each platform

You can look at those plots for yourself; they show pretty much what I said above.  He then goes on to analyze the dynamics of the two sites, concentrating on the newer one of Bluesky.  As I’m not familiar with its history and only a little more with its contents, I can’t say whether I agree or disagree with what’s just below. Other readers will know much more:

Blueskyism predates Bluesky

Although many people, myself included, find Twitter/X addicting — or not-so-secretly enjoy its drama — the most essential reason to stay there if you were some sort of professional journalist used to be to promote your work elsewhere at places where you might actually make a living from it. Under Elon’s leadership, that use case has been undermined as he’s made the platform more of a walled garden that throttles traffic to other places. (Substack in particular: The share of Silver Bulletin pageviews that originate from Twitter/X has steadily declined to around 2 percent.)

But if the benefit of tweeting all the time is less than it once was, so is the cost — at least for someone like me. That’s because some of the most annoying people on the platform have exited for Bluesky.

He then discusses “shooting the messenger”, the tendency on social media to go after people not only because of what they say, but sometimes simply because the demonizers don’t like what the person is posting about:

And that’s because this behavior — I guess you could call it harassment but I’m a big boy and I can take it — consistently came from a relatively narrow group of power users, birds of a feather who flocked together, people who could demonstrate their fidelity to the group by picking on the main character. On Bluesky, exactly the same people — and I do mean exactly6 — attack exactly the same perpetual enemies, but to roughly 1/60th7 the size of the audience.

So I feel freer using Twitter these days for jokes, memes, and tongue-in-cheek ideas that aren’t meant to be taken entirely seriously, intended to be read as though they’re written in comic sans. Sometimes, the goal is to test the waters for potential newsletter topics, to see what sparks a reaction. But there’s usually some deeper thought behind them. This from the other day was one such example:

This tweet sparked a reaction; the term “Blueskyism” got picked up quite a bit.8 Everybody seemed to have some sense for what Blueskyism meant — except for the high priests of Blueskyism like this person, the podcaster and former Huffington Post reporter Michael Hobbes:

So what is “Blueskyism” that, claims Silver, loses elections for Democrats? Before he lists its characteristics, he says why it’s inimical to Democratic victories.

I think the preponderance of evidence suggests that moderation wins more often than not, but it’s complicated, and there can be exceptions. What really matters in elections is simply being popular and winning over new converts. Blueskyism, with its intolerance for dissent, is the opposite of that.

Because, yes, while this is personal for me, annoyingness matters in politics. Zohran Mamdani has deemphasized hot-button cultural issues for the cost of living and taken a more personable approach — scavenger hunts rather than struggle sessions — and he’s probably about to become the next mayor of New York.

Well, I give Silver a black mark for touting Mamdani, even if he’s right about Mamdani’s popularity.  Mamdani may be “personable,” but his policies are unworkable, and I don’t like his “antiZionism,” or whatever you call it.

Now, onto the three characteristics of “Blueskyism” as listed by Silver. There’s a lot of prose I’m leaving out, so read for yourself. Bolding is Silver’s:

The first essential characteristic: Smalltentism

Aggressive policing of dissent, particularly of people “just outside the circle” who might have broader credibility on the center-left. Censoriousness, often taking the form of moral micropanics that designate a rotating cast of opponents as the main characters of the day. Self-reinforcing belief in the righteousness of the clique, and conflation of its values with broader public sentiment among “the base”.

A healthy political movement, you’d think, would welcome people who agree with them on 70 percent of issues, particularly if it sees Trump as an existential threat to democracy and wants a broad coalition against him. Blueskyists do literally almost the exact opposite: their biggest enemies are people on the center-left like me and Yglesias and Ezra Klein. Or center-left media institutions like the New York Times, which are often viewed as more problematic than Fox News.

This aggressive policing of boundaries might at least have been tactically smart during the miraculous Blue Period when Twitter was afflicted with Blueskyism. Yglesias, say, is followed by a lot more Democratic staffers than Ben Shapiro or some actual conservative is.

But now that Blueskyism is losing the battle of ideas, it just draws the tent narrower and ensures that it will remain obscure. There’s nothing more Blueskyist than this, literally creating a “list of shame”11 of Bluesky posters who remain active on Twitter.

And yes, there is such a list, created by one Tony Yates (see Silver’s piece). But we most move on:

The second essential characteristic: Credentialism

Appeals to authority, particularly academic authority. Centering of the suitability of the speaker based on his or her credentials and/or identity characteristics (standpoint epistemology) as opposed to the strength of his or her arguments, accompanied by the implicit presumption to claim to be speaking on behalf of the entire identity group.

Although Blueskyism is small, its practitioners mostly consist of people within the professional-managerial class: (over)educated blue-state liberals, perhaps people who have drawn the short straw of elite overproduction. You can see that in the demographic data, or in the attitude site management takes: the platform literally just banned people from Mississippi because of a dispute over age verification.

And Bluesky has become relatively popular among academics, which I regard as a problem on various levels. The Democratic Party has already forgotten how to talk to large groups of voters like young men, who have become considerably less likely to complete college than young women. Meanwhile, the experts have made a lot of mistakes, and sometimes the reason is because they’ve become self-serving in pursuit of social media validation or blinded by political partisanship. Increasingly often, I’ll see academics engage in incredibly sloppy argumentation and this seems to be correlated with recent exposure to Bluesky. Because Bluesky is so small, it has a highly specific signature. It’s like if you have some toxic persona on the periphery of your friend group; someone starts speaking in a particular way that you just know they recently hung out with George or Gina.

Finally,

The third essential characteristic: Catastrophism

Humorless, scoldy neuroticism, often rationalized by the view that one must be on “war footing” because the world is self-evidently in crisis. Sublimation of personal anxiety as a substitute for political activism or material solutions to the crisis, with expressions of weariness and pessimism signaling virtue and/or savviness.

Although the first two characteristics already limit the appeal of Blueskyism, this makes it worse. Even people who might otherwise be sympathetic to Bluesky have noticed how impossible it is to get away with a joke on the platform, one of the things that X sometimes13 still has going for it. The Bernie-era, Chapo Trap House strain of left-wing discourse also at least had a caustic if sometimes juvenile humor streak. Blueskyism does not.

Instead, the prevailing Blueskyist attitude is often something like this — that we’re in the midst of a “late stage capitalist hellscape” and that you have to be “delusional” to have any amount of hope or optimism”:14

Most people outside of Bluesky don’t think like this. Although literally almost zero Democrats are happy with the state of the country, overwhelming majorities of Americans are happy with how their personal lives are going and are able to compartmentalize politics away or recognize that other things matter in life, too.

This gloom-and-doomism, which I don’t share (and have been excoriated for saying that), is one reason why so many “progressives” hate Steve Pinker, who, they say, touts a narrative of constant progress, even though Steve says that it’s not constant but still bends upward. And I think he’s right. Those who say, for example, that minorities have fewer civil rights today than in the 1950s seem positively insane to me.  Of course there’s still bigotry, but there is less bigotry in people and almost no bigotry that is “structural”: embedded in laws and rules.

Silver ends with this:

Still, I don’t expect the decline in usage of [Bluesky] to continue indefinitely. Bluesky will probably settle into a small but sustainable steady state as the equivalent of a niche hobbyist subreddit: a peculiar online neighborhood that someone wouldn’t encounter unless she takes a wrong turn, its facades gradually decaying into disrepair as its residents leer at passersby from their lawn chairs.

I’m not going to predict anything, but being of the same political persuasion as Silver (except for the libertarianism), I tend to agree with him about how the atmosphere of the two sites appears to me. (Again, I am speaking only for myself.)  Twitter has more pushback against my own views, but Bluesky has pushback against views that I consider prima facie sensible, like there being a sex binary.  I have been banned far more often on Bluesky (or “bluelisted”) than on Twitter. I rarely put up selections from my Bluesky feed at thee end of the morning posts, for I find what is suggested for me is overly pious and humorless, even though I follow no people on X and 17 on Bluesky.

Now I know that readers have their own feelings about these sites, so feel free to express them. But do not call me names!