If you were to write a sweeping history of say 1980-2020, you'd dismiss these 2 periods in short footnotes, besides noting smugly that almost nobody took the possibility of a sharp historical pivot seriously, though most people noted the possibility.
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Modern BLM-ish black politics took shape in the last years of his administration and is basically the most un-Obama thing ever. Sadly, his most direct impact on history will have been triggering the white reaction and helping directly create Trump with his standup set.
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Most of his legislative record has been rolled back and won't be restored even if Biden wins. The world has changed too much. Can't step in the same river twice etc. But ACA remains as... something of a landmark compromise. I'm still on it.
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Clinton too will be remembered as a dead-end president on an abandoned historical branch. His second term was mostly bogged down with the Lewinsky scandal, and his own legacy is fumbling the post-Cold War and creating Putin via the permissioning effects of intervening in Bosnia.
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The best thing that can be said for Clinton is that he didn't mess up the growth of the internet that was happening on his watch, and did a mediocre job wherever he did have some agency. He was mostly harmless, and a pleasant presence on the world stage.
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Interestingly, both 1993-97 and 2010-14 were periods of high indeterminate optimism for people on the right side of history. That part of the energy of those periods was NOT a dead-end. But because it was illegible nobody could take credit for it or narrativize it.https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1310658178326040577 …
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The definition of “right side of history” didn’t change, though some people who were on that side either went pessimistic or determinate. In both cases becoming, as far as I’m concerned part of the problem.
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I’m pretty proud of how I threaded the futures needle in my software eating the world essays of 2015. I managed to hedge it just right and call out the upcoming fork in history correctly, though I didn’t make branch predictions. So the essays managed to not get cache-invalidated.
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I didn’t predict either the right or wrong future. I just pointed to both as possibilities and warned against one.https://breakingsmart.com/en/season-1/the-future-in-the-rear-view-mirror/ …
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The biggest thing I missed was which elites would lead a reactionary revolt. I was focused on fox elites (aka Bernie/inequality crowd), but the ones who led were the lion elites. But I didn't learn about the Pareto fox vs. lion circulation of elites theory till later.
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Kind make sense, since the 2013-14 milieu which I was thinking about was all techlash, inequality, occupy wall street etc., with Piketty being headline news. I expected a leftist-fox-reaction and got a rightist-lion-reaction.
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