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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I don't think "relegated to the markets" is an accurate description. Like sure, Twitter banning Trump was a non-governmental actor deciding to stop serving a customer, but the processes that led to that happening don't look at all like firms acting on their supply/demand curves.
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There were pressures acting on employees and leadership at the intra-firm and cross-firm level, and the final result looked like a very harmonized policy shift across many platforms - not like market firms specializing.
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Zooming out a bit, "big government" and "big business" were only ever two legs of the triad (of risky forms of large-scale coordination). "Big mob" might be an equally pejorative way to describe the third one.
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Even in the hypothetical case where the US actually is on a path to becoming a low-government society, whether that looks like a market vs a mob vs an oligopoly of organized firms is a very open question.
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No disagreement there. Except big mob is actually a network of small mobs. Often around specific corporations that are powerful enough to be worth targeting (and the scale threshold is now very low)
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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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You've read chomski on this? He has written at length about how he sees power in the US.
To me it seems a very compelling story teller can always move the needle. For example Musk, AOC or MLK.
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Manufacturing Consent? Was a compelling thesis in 1995. Out of touch now. We’re running up against structural barriers manned by people either too sociopathic to be susceptible to narrative or already in death grip of one. Plus TV’s top-down ability to shape culture is gone
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