Mastodawn

delong Sep 28, 2023

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/

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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

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david m kim

@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.