The House is controlled by a bunch of sociopaths who want to burn everything to the ground. We’re going to run up against the debt ceiling again in 2023. As it approaches, they’re going to use the threat of default to try to extort all kinds BS. The best suggestion for neutralizing the threat I’ve heard so far: Mint the Coin. The headline nails it, “The debt ceiling is an absurd problem. Only an absurd solution can save us.”
Over the past couple years Carlos Lozada has become a must-read writer for me. His column in yesterday’s New York Times is a good example of why. Some excerpts from “How to Strangle Democracy While Pretending to Engage in It“:
[The] right-side-of-history argument… is rarely about history at all. It is a pre-emptive assertion of one side’s virtue and another’s wickedness; it is not about interpreting the past but about scoring points in the present to shape the future. Hirschman likened this argument to “the earlier assurance, much sought after by all combatants, that God was on their side.” The comparison is apt: God on your side will help you win, and history on your side will say that you did….
“You are extreme and destructive; I have history on my side.”… renders dialogue not just impossible but unfathomable….
From Melanie McFarland’s, “Reality bites, so of course Generation X was always going to sell out and vote Republican“:
Halstead prophetically added: “Today’s young adults will be remembered either as a late-blooming generation that ultimately helped to revive American democracy by coalescing around a bold new political program and bringing the rest of the nation along with them, or as another silent generation that stood by as our democracy and society suffered a slow decline.”
Yes, I’m feeling particularly frustrated with my generation. Moderate Burkean conservatives we are not.
My politics are, roughly speaking, 1/3 B. Sanders, 1/3 E. Warren and 1/3 moderate Burkean conservative. I can think of an active example of the last sort. Once upon a time there was MA Senator Ed Brooke, CT Senator and later Governor Lowell Weicker, MA Governor Frank Sargent. Something I read today got me thinking about that political outlook and I remembered John Michael Greer’s essay, A Few Notes on Burkean Conservatism. It’s a good framing of the type and I enjoy his language. It reminds of essays by Lewis Lapham when he was editor of Harper’s. Here are few excerpts from Greer’s post:
A genuine conservatism—that is, a point of view oriented toward finding things worth conserving, and then doing something to conserve them—is one of the few options that offer any workable strategies for the future as the United States accelerates along the overfamiliar trajectory of a democracy in terminal crisis.
And Continue reading
“The Freedom to Vote Act… establishes a baseline for access to the ballot across all states. That baseline includes at least two weeks of early voting for any town of more than 3000 people, including on nights and weekends, for at least 10 hours a day. It permits people to vote by mail, or to drop their ballots into either a polling place or a drop box, and guarantees those votes will be counted so long as they are postmarked on or before Election Day and arrive at the polling place within a week. It makes Election Day a holiday. It provides uniform standards for voter IDs in states that require them.
The Freedom to Vote Act cracks down on voter suppression. It makes it a federal crime to lie to voters in order to deter them from voting (distributing official-looking flyers with the wrong dates for an election or locations of a polling place, for example), and it increases the penalties for voter intimidation. It restores federal voting rights for people who have served time in jail, creating a uniform system out of the current patchwork one.
It requires states to guarantee that no one has to wait more than 30 minutes to vote.
Resolved: Coalitions comprised of people with different cultural capital are weak.
Reluctantly, I’m inclined to agree. What do you think? Agree? Disagree? Usually so, but not always? What exceptions can you think of?
FWIW, I looked up a bunch of definitions of “cultural capital”. I find Wikipedia’s definition the easiest to understand:
Cultural capital comprises the social assets of a person (education, intellect, style of speech, style of dress, etc.) that promote social mobility in a stratified society.
The way to understand the panic over Critical Race Theory is as a reactionary counter-mobilization. After George Floyd’s murder & ensuing wave of protests, a focus on racism in America took on new urgency. Fearmongering over CRT is largely a project to delegitimize that movement.
-Omar Wasow
“Maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to reduce the number of classes that teach civics, democracy and American history?”
-Michael Beschloss
There are a lot of reasons the filibuster should be abolished, but my preferred ones are a) if the public elects a majority to govern, that majority should be able to govern and b) endless Senate gridlock has effectively broken Congress and undermined the constitutional order.
-Jamelle Bouie
The pro-democracy forces in the US are at least a two-thirds majority. We need to act like one.