Mastodawn

PROJECT SYNDICATE: America's Broken Civic Bargain
I was going to write a review of Manville & Ober’s brand-new survey of democracy in four societies, but I got sidetracked. So instead, I wrote about how since the Republican Party has no plausible economic policy all it can do is gin-up culture war after culture war. As Marc Cooper put it this morning of last night’s Republican debate: “The one issue they all agreed upon was that Americans should be afraid, very afraid, actually scared... 1/

Show thread

delong Sep 28, 2023

...to death… ‘American Carnage’… present at least as a leitmotif during the entire event…. More words were spent trying to scare the piss out of the audience over the supposed ongoing invasion at the southern border… apparently… more dangerous and volatile than, say, the Polish border in September 1939…” This means we are all hosed. For Manville & Ober are, I think, 100% right in their claim that sustainable democracy requires “civic friendship”…
<https://open.substack.com/pub/braddelong/p/project-syndicate-americas-broken>
2023-09-28 Th 2/END

PROJECT SYNDICATE: America's Broken Civic Bargain

I was going to write a review of Manville and Ober's brand-new survey of democracy in four societies, but I got sidetracked. So instead, I wrote about how since the Republican party has no...

Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality

Show thread

Graydon Sep 28, 2023

@delong All y'all need to do is decide it's an insurrection and suppress it. Which you do not by piling skulls but by making churches (all religious organizations) impoverished. (And NOT a form of charity, but a social club with the attendant concerns that would apply to a youth camp, so they have public books and they stay impoverished.)

The only sincere belief involved is the one about thinking God wants them to have all the money. They can find less authoritarian means.

Show thread

Graydon Sep 28, 2023

@delong In the meantime, income and asset caps at one lifetime, where one lifetime is not going to do better than an order of magnitude better than the mean or median.

It'd take a determined Congress a year. It'd take the IRS longer, but not a whole lot longer.

Show thread

david m kim Sep 28, 2023

@delong feels like the stripping away of values only to be replaced by some neoliberal market valuation of all things in society has brought us here. it's not so much that the previous value system was great or fair to all or what not, but we didn't interrogate enough what the right value system was and then everything was replaced by the dollar, eyeballs, clicks. and the complete lack of mediation between the experts, the extremists/ racists, and the broader public all competing for clicks and clout seems to have fractured whatever civic friendship might have existed before.

Show thread

John Torres-O’Callaghan Sep 28, 2023

@delong we used to be scared of a bunch of foreigners chanting “Death to America” but now we’re scared of a bunch of foreigners chanting “Land of Opportunity”