this current war is over whether social democracy has any chance in the US. that’s a prospect the democratic party’s has a monopoly on. even the best of the republicans are manchinesque, they won’t go there. 2/
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Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
if dems don’t keep hope for social democracy alive, then the partisan split becomes less relevant. christian democracy, a “conservative welfare state” becomes the next best goal. 3/
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Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
@davidshor has effectively conceded that fight already. if so, there’s no reason for so much fretting over the partisan divide. the republicans can be a vehicle for christian democracy as much as the democrats, but it is a pretty existential loss for certain social liberalisms.4/4 replies 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
under christian democracy we’ll develop a strong welfare state tied to conformity with traditional social roles and functions, generous packages tilted towards married childbearing households, conditional on presence of a full-time earner as a carrot… 5/
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Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
and threadbare, means-tested, punitive, heavily conditioned “welfare” for the noncompliant poor as a stick. 6/
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Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
if corporatist/plutocratic interests overcome even christian democracy, then we are looking to the outcomes Ds catastrophize about in public, a new (not necessarily primarily racial) Jim Crow in which the threat of violence sustains an unassailable cast system, in which 7/
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Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
liberalism is sacrificed entirely (beyond the upper castes) for hierarchy and order. Fortunately, the US population does have a pretty strong sense if entitlement already, so stable violently-enforced stratification may be hard to pull off, in which case the final 8/
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Replying to @interfluidity @Pinboard and
alternative, crack-up or civil conflict, become operative. which of these four outcomes take hold strike me as pretty existential questions (although “civil conflict” is less an outcome than an extremely miserable roll of the dice on who-knows-what outcomes). /fin
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Replying to @interfluidity @EricLevitz and
I guess I disagree with you about the christian democracy outcome being some kind of existential threat. It seems pretty consonant with American traditions and perfectly livable provided it comes with revitalized democratic and civic institutions
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Replying to @Pinboard @EricLevitz and
it’s an existential threat to a socially liberal vision a lot of us have deep attachments to, and to the raison d’etre of the current D party. but if
@davidshor is correct in his pessimisms, by 2025 it’s the project to which we should all with some sadness devote ourselves. 1/2 replies 0 retweets 2 likes
I guess I think about these things along two axes. One is the ideological one, but the other one is functional/non-functional, and that is the one that scares me more. But I also take comfort remembering what I thought 2020 would look like in 2015. The future is always surprising
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Replying to @Pinboard @EricLevitz and
yes! the best case for optimism is we’re bad at predicting the future.
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