I agree with this, but I have a caveat: political jockeying never ends. Once 80% of elites have established a coalition that controls the heights ... you get the same incentives to defect/fight INSIDE the coalition as used to exist between coalitions.https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/1488903007408373766 …
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3/ In the Soviet Union, every political operative was a member of The Party. Did political jockeying/alliances end inside the Soviet Union?
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4/ I propose a modification of what
@robinhanson is saying - that we go through alternating phases of very large and legibile coalition signifiers, and very small and subtle signifiers. During the Russian Revolution, we had different armed bands with different colored flags.Show this thread -
5/ ...and in 1970s Soviet Union, the factions were much quieter, and harder to detect...but the struggles were still very real. The incentives for political struggle are that coalitions can redistribute spoils (financial, emotional, status) amongst themselves. >>>
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6/ If a university controls an endowment of $10B USD, and hiring decisions and department funding decisions are made by a certain group of administrators ... there's a huge incentive for junior admins and junior faculty to try to wrest that power of the purse strings from them.
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7/ I actually modeled this in my novels The Powers of the Earth and Causes of Separation https://www.amazon.com/Powers-Earth-Aristillus-Travis-Corcoran/dp/1973311143/ … set in 2065. I proposed that the US Republicans had been entirely marginalized by the Dems, and had even merged with the Greens to try to retain relevance, but >>>
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8/ ...it was to no avail, and they were a laughable rump party (much like the LP putting forth candidates who garner 2% of the ballot). Did that mean that politics was over / dead? No. I proposed that there were two factions inside the US Dem party, Internationalist & Populist
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9/ ...which theoretically had policy disagreements, but which actually were just different coalitions scrabbling for the brass ring. You see these sub-coalitional politics inside deep blue US cities right now - the actual election of Dem vs R is entirely laughable/ foregone
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10/ ...and all of the real action is in the primaries, where the coalitions jockey. Institutions have a general pattern of moving meaning out of one ritual and placing the meaning and power into another ritual...and eventually the first one withers. In the world of my novels
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11/ ...if things continued, you could imagine that in another 100 years the Dem primaries might happen on the same day as election day, and the ballot forms, beneath the "choose your favorite Dem in the primary" section, would have a vestigial D vs R which would be premarked "D"
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