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Reflecting on Marshall Plan, it strikes me that distasteful as it might seem to both sides, Blue America needs to craft a Marshall unPlan for Red America to avert a Cold War. It’s an 1830-project Jacksonian honor society that feels humiliatingly dependent on blue tax dollars.
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Next pandemic live read. The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil amazon.com/Marshall-Plan-
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The political-cultural war obscured the central truth of neoliberalism: Blue America overwhelmingly won an economic war ironically thanks to the way Reagan set up the post-Nixonian economic chessboard.
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Red America is economically moribund, living off subsidized commodity industries half of which are under threat due to the energy transition, and automation. Culturally it years for 1830. Economically it has nothing left in the tank except a wishful fantasy of dominating China.
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Their *best* utopia is that China continues to buy hogs and soybeans and leaves just enough manufacturing here based on obsolete machinery to let it feel technologically needed. This is.... grim. Not a future I’d want to stay alive for.
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They’ve seemingly given up all hope of participation in any economic activity that has emerged since about 1985. They use computers but act like they wish the PC and everything that came after hadn’t been invented at all. It’s odd to not feel at least a little excitement about it
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I think a lot of it is actually isolation from the blue world. TV doesn't seem real enough, and they're in filter bubbles of their pundits the rest of the time. When I moved to Pittsburgh from rural W. PA, I went from Evangelical NeoCon to Atheist Libertarian in 2-3 years.
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I don’t think there’s much upside to building fake bonds that way. When two groups feel like meaningful peers in commerce mutual cultural connecting can be opt-in. I get most of my stuff from China but feel no need to deeply understand or be understood by Chinese people.
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It's not fake. You've heard of student exchange programs right? An unfortunate German kid came to our rural high school, and it was actually great for us and him to have the cultural exchange.