In a way Trump and Biden are both irrelevant. The system’s irreversible doomsday mode was triggered during the 2010 midterms. I was not yet a citizen at that point and not really paying attention.
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I think the one thing that’s still murky to me about the situation is why the democrats still haven’t discarded the filibuster to get a last rush of things done before they’re locked out of power for a generation 🤔
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I can’t believe nobody has the leverage to get Manchin/Sinema in line, but I suspect there is broader reluctance to use the nuclear option anyway since it probably means handing the gerontocratic part of the party handing the keys over to AOC left or something
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I no longer have strong feelings about any of this. It’s turned into a spectator sport with a foregone conclusion. The national divorce at state level seems pretty complete.
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This seems like weakly sourced speculation about a weird tentative deal, but it does illustrate what congress is actually solving for.. a sort of generational spoils initial board position for an extended state-vs-state quagmire.
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DC in 2022 is like Berlin in 1945, a place to set up the next extended war rather than continue or finish the last one.
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The only 2 political issues that remain are about international borders between countries and neighborhood borders between rich/poor parts of cities. Everything else is settled — it will be relegated to the markets. There the new line of conflict is shareholders vs employees.
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Another funny thing is Ketanji Jackson being seated today. As with Obama in 2008, left-leaning black people aka meaningfully representative ones, are elevated to apparently consequential power roles just when the roles are about to become largely inconsequential for the left
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On paper, left and right look somewhat balanced with minor local advantages for each in different places. In practice the configuration has been impossibly stacked against the left since 2010, with time not on their side.
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The extremism on the right is the extremism of impatience… so close but they can’t fully cut loose while the fiction of nominal balance is worth preserving a while longer. The extremism on the left is that of a cornered animal with no meaningful options left.
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It is always illuminating to watch velvet gloves come off, revealing the rusty iron fists beneath
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Since business executive and senior managerial ranks have gone mostly full accelerationist at this point, it is not surprising that white-collar employee activism has emerged as the last meaningful lever of majority/democratic political action (blue collar/old union seems owned)
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It is deployed in bumbling, fringe, counter-productive ways, but when comfortable, bougie white collar workers start getting desperate enough for political agency that they start signing ill-conceived letters, staging walkouts, and enabling obvious DEI grifters, it’s serious
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It is not clear to me that any of the political actors at any locus are unambiguously positive enough to support whole-heartedly. It’s a pick-your-poison buffet. I think I’m mostly wary of the completely disenfranchised being completely abandoned without representation anywhere.
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Perhaps the most confounding thing is that whatever their actual agency, everybody acts like a frustrated, helpless, and besieged minority being hemmed in by powerful nefarious opponents. I actually believe everybody. Pie of agency relative to magnitude of problems is shrinking.
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Pie of overall agency may be growing in absolute terms due to technology, but problems are growing even faster. So everybody feels relatively helpless.
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As always I conclude my own personal path to agency is to acquire a mansion 😎
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Same seems true around the world. The Westphalian state has been marked end-of-life. Please do not use this component in future civilizational designs.
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Westphalian World: Dominion
A world of de facto or de jure theocracies built around church-state-corporation assemblages (any ideology counts as a church) with mainly city-state level locus of agency. Even when the corp piece is an MNC.
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California is as much in the grips of a kind of Dominion theology as any red state. Just a different church-state separation being reversed. It’s a bad time to be an atheist
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