here is a long thread about how the federal government can end run the Constitution in just about any way you like bringing this up For No Particular Reasonhttps://twitter.com/eigenrobot/status/1276663566427283456 …
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in many ways I see our country becoming less "free" in some broad sense. i am not sure of the extent to which this is a reversion to some tacit historical norms--you could hardly call the Puritans "free" on many important dimensions--rather than a lurch in a novel direction.
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i may actually write an essay about this and post it somewhere once I've digested this further. i think this trend is often noted or intuited but rarely analyzed. in advance of that, one thread that weighs heavily on me is the role of norms in governing freedom
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lots of the norms that existed for the majority of the 20C were thrashed by new behavioral modes enabled by the internet. the tabooing of pornography is one; I suspect there were many others, less obvious.
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Trump, Obama, Bush, Gingrich, and Clinton also destroyed norms; political ones, of course. as someone observed elsewhere, we are a nation of norms. (perhaps this is what a nation is: a collection of norms) (link to my pinned tweet, ha ha ha)
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things that seem likely to me: 1. freedoms in some sense are downstream of norms. 2. some norms permit a broader swathe of freedoms than others. 3. norms are frequently socially load-bearing beyond their overt purposes
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overall I see what is happening now as both a discrete crisis and a symptom of deep social decay not captured by the usual metrics that social scientists like to use as objectives, and I am growing more pessimistic about the near future.
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End of conversation
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