Dr. Glaude is an engaging speaker and I enjoyed listening to him. I wish I'd heard him somewhere else. We're trying to hold a coalition together here to save the Republic in six months, and it suddenly had already become a lot harder with the anti-Israel protests, which have driven splits between us faster than I would have believed poss…
Dr. Glaude is an engaging speaker and I enjoyed listening to him. I wish I'd heard him somewhere else. We're trying to hold a coalition together here to save the Republic in six months, and it suddenly had already become a lot harder with the anti-Israel protests, which have driven splits between us faster than I would have believed possible. The comments here show that Dr. Glaude is not very helpful with that, in fact the opposite.
Listening to a Black man with a PhD from Princeton tell us that no, there really HASN'T been any progress for Black people in this country during the past seventy years was a little like being visited from a much worse alternate reality. Tim, to his credit, did try to push back, some. What it reminded me of was Clarence Thomas's take on his Yale experience: the two extremes of the horseshoe are so close that they crush reality between them.
Dr. Glaude thinks that Bernie Sanders represented how American politics should be remade. He, and a tiny percentage of the voting public who don't like the United States very much. He wanted to "break the back of Clintonism". His opinion, but I think that Clintonism was what made the Democrats competitive again after Reagan. He offers excuses for people who choose not to vote because the choices on offer don't meet their standards. Tim did push back well on that one, but the guest just wasn't buying it: when people decline to be good citizens, in his view, it's somebody else's fault. The legitimizing of the Israel-as-a-Colonial-Project tropes were ahistorical and outrageous, as they always are. Poison delivered with a spoonful of sugar and a sunny smile is still poison.
Dr. Glaude IS an engaging speaker, and I really would enjoy hearing you two contrast your analyses of neoconservatism. Please do bring him back for that, Tim -- and please follow your impulse to do it AFTER the election.
One point on which I appreciated Glaude's critique of The Bulwark was his argument that the binary-choice framework is patronizing. Whenever I hear it, there's a part of me that wants to vote third party just to give the middle finger to those attempting to trap me in their binary-choice prison.
If the only choice were between, say, Elizabeth Warren and Gavin Newsom, or between Jim Jordan and Tucker Carlson, I would consider either of those to be a real "binary-choice prison" and would sit the election out.
The choice between Biden or Trump for President is binary, but it's no prison. Almost nine years after Trump came down that garish elevator, I think that a lot of what comes across as "patronizing" is actually tightly controlled frustration at people who prefer blaming the messenger to accepting that (our current) reality is real, that the difference between the two is one of kind and not degree, and that the election of only one will lead to a disaster that may be unrecoverable.
You seem to accept our current milieu as a force of nature for which no one can be held responsible - a constraint that we just have to accept and react to. I refuse to accept those rules of the game as a given. I know too much game theory to allow myself to get stuck in one model.
But this is also a matter of my personality. Whenever anyone tries to coerce or manipulate me, my top priority becomes making them regret it.
Not a force of nature, but one of a limited universe of available fact sets among which we can choose. We exercise our agency by choosing the fact set in which we're going to participate, but we have very little power as individuals to modify the conditions of the set itself, so the question of "who's responsible" is only a distraction, at least in the short term.
I exited this particular fact set in 2017 by becoming a permanent expat, so I enjoy these discussions as an intellectual and social exercise rather than as a real participant. While I certainly have family and some financial connections to the US, I don't in fact have a dog in the fight, so if I seem detached and perhaps a little blasé, that's probably why.
My personality is not dissimilar, except that whenever anyone tries to coerce or manipulate me, unless they do something malicious to actually harm me, my top priority is only to neutralize any power they may have over me. After that, their regrets are not my concern.
I've thought so for a long time, but I'm no longer so sure. The Hamas-sympathetic demonstrations and civil disobedience have been like acid poured over our coalition and political culture, eating away in days and weeks alliances that took months and years to build, and damaging and disfiguring everything that they don't destroy outright. I really don't see how we completely recover from this, especially in only six months. And if we fail in November, none of it will matter anyway. The fact that then these deluded individuals will probably see what REAL geocide looks like under a second Trump presidency is, of course, no comfort at all.
That started well before this on the liberal side of this coalition. I voted in 2020 to save democracy and only to save Democracy because candidate Biden offered literally nothing else for me. This coalition then proceeded to do nothing but vote in Biden and pursue business as usual as if the trajectory of the Republican party, politics in general, and the underlying drivers of both would change on their own. That useless strategy not only betrayed their promise to attempt to save Democracy it also lost them the house in 2022 so they couldn't even try in the last two years. Trust was gone after that: trust in the strategy, trust in the institutions, and trust in the people of the coalition itself.
I am working very, VERY hard to find some miniscule scrap of faith that enough of this coalition has learned something and now has the will and ability to actually do anything about any of those problems if it is voted into power despite the fact that the same key players are making the same empty promises and platitudes *AGAIN* after either intentionally reneging on their promises the first time or at the least failing utterly and completely to act on them. Posts on this site make it damn near impossible to find that faith because they show exactly how much contempt much of this coalition has for a decisive chunk of people in the coalition who are having the same struggles I am.
But that is why I hang around here, to get a more accurate read on how worth saving this country is. It does provide that.
Yes, it feels like a bait and switch: the Democrats ran on democracy, but the only thing they actually did to save democracy was to not be Trump. It's almost as if they wanted to preserve the threat of Trump in order to force us to vote for Democrats again.
I'm sorry for your frustration and I'm sure that it's genuine. However, I really don't think that the Infrastructure Act or the misnamed -- but not misdirected -- Inflation Reduction Act were "business as usual" or "the trajectory of the Republican Party"; I thought that they were good, widely popular, Center-Left constructive legislation. And the 2022 losses were far lower than the usual midterm losses for the party in power. I'm also not sure what you include in the "any of those problems" that you want whoever wins in November to "do anything about", but I hope that we have a President who will try to build consensus on some of them.
I want them to save our Democracy. That means doing something to actually *fix* it so it can operate reliably. I cannot be done without at the very least removing the filibuster and finding ways to render gerrymandering of the house ineffective through electoral reform. That is a bare minimum. Something to start to get us closer to one person one vote as opposed to tyranny of the minority. There is much more that should be done on this issue alone imo so I'm already giving away most of it and any consideration of any other issues. What more do I have to give up to not be considered entitled and radical I wonder? It is mind boggling to me that tightening up the loopholes Trump exploited during his attempted legislative coup is *ALL* the Dems did on the sole issue that unites this coalition.
You don't sound either entitled or radical to me, at not least so far. The easiest and most effective thing that could be done to fix the House AND the Electoral College would be to repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929, take the artificial cap off the House of Representatives, and stop the under-representation of the most populous states. It only takes an Act of Congress, not an amendment, and it really frustrates me that Pelosi's leadership team apparently had no interest in it during the last Congress. I hope that changes next year if the Democrats win.
I totally agree on the filibuster, but the dirty little secret is that both parties denounce it when they're in the majority but never get around to abolishing it, because they think that they'll need it when they're in the minority. It gets a lot of mileage for something that came into existence as an oversight and everybody in the Senate claims to hate. As for gerrymandering, that's another thing that both parties hate -- but only when the other one does it. Neither the courts or the Congress are going to do anything about it; it's going to have to be the people ourselves, state by state.
"You don't sound either entitled or radical to me, at not least so far."
You are one of few who would say so. When the Dems actually had the ability attempt to remove the filibuster making repairs to the ship was deemed too dangerous and radical. It would scare the moderates. I still remember the pic of Manchin the saint in Tim's article on this site after he protected the filibuster and thus scuttled any chance of democratic reforms (which in turn led to internecine strife since all that was left was to argue over typical policy matters). Maybe the moderates have started to come around but neither Biden nor this site which is my only source of non-MAGA conservative thought says anything about such things so I doubt that. Neither do the moderate liberal sources for that matter.
Agreed on the Reapportionment Act and the filibuster. I thought that would have been one of the first things on the docket after Jan 6th but I was as naive about the Dems or the democracy coalition or whatever political entity this is now in 2020 as I was about Republicans in 2016. All the talk of principles is bullshit. When the time came to act on them they both balked as usual and I don't know how the stakes could get higher while still being in peacetime in a nominally functional society than covid and a coup. I trust neither. Voting in 2024, at the moment, is like buying a lottery ticket as my retirement plan. Is there a chance it pays out? ...sure but the chance is so small is it even worth wasting the effort?
I was very disappointed with Manchin over the filibuster, and over the Inflation Reduction Act, too. The next person who holds that chair will be a lot worse, though.
I was a "Liberal Republican" while there still was such a thing, and call myself "Center-Right" now. I've never called myself a "conservative", and especially won't now that the word is meaningless. I just want the government to work the way that I think the Founders intended: preserving and extending individual liberty, no filibuster, the House and the Electoral College growing to keep pace with the growth and distribution of the population, the debt limit respected and not gamed, strong federal action against racial discrimination and to dismantle structural racism (the Civil War Amendments are as much part of the Constitution as Articles I-VII!), the states and the federal government respecting each others' authority, including NOT incorporating the Second Amendment against the states, and levels of progressive taxation adequate to support the level of public services that the people decide, through their representatives, that they want to have and pay for. I keep hoping that that isn't asking too much.
"I was very disappointed with Manchin over the filibuster, and over the Inflation Reduction Act, too. The next person who holds that chair will be a lot worse, though."
This is where I don't understand the moderate argument. Neither Manchin nor the person who will be worse will allow the necessary reforms to get us out of this situation. Where is the hope to be found then? We are damned if we do and damned if we don't.
"I just want the government to work the way that I think the Founders intended [...]. I keep hoping that that isn't asking too much."
We are generally the same at that level of abstraction but the real world doesn't operate at that level so it is kind of meaningless. I say that not to be flippant and insulting but to communicate how cynical I am of that level of connection. Still, I understand and respect the sentiment.
Manchin was the best we were ever going to get out of West Virginia, and he WAS willing to work with Biden on a wide range of changes; if Jim Justice will be willing to work with him on anything, I'll be more than pleasantly surprised, I'll be flabbergasted. Anyone who doubts that that there's a big difference between the two is going to see next year.
Good discussion -- thanks. Politics and baseball will always break our hearts; the best we can do with politics is to try to keep it moving more or less in the right direction most of the time. Baseball is already the perfect blend of tragedy and hope, so we should probably stick to reforming politics.
Dr. Glaude is an engaging speaker and I enjoyed listening to him. I wish I'd heard him somewhere else. We're trying to hold a coalition together here to save the Republic in six months, and it suddenly had already become a lot harder with the anti-Israel protests, which have driven splits between us faster than I would have believed possible. The comments here show that Dr. Glaude is not very helpful with that, in fact the opposite.
Listening to a Black man with a PhD from Princeton tell us that no, there really HASN'T been any progress for Black people in this country during the past seventy years was a little like being visited from a much worse alternate reality. Tim, to his credit, did try to push back, some. What it reminded me of was Clarence Thomas's take on his Yale experience: the two extremes of the horseshoe are so close that they crush reality between them.
Dr. Glaude thinks that Bernie Sanders represented how American politics should be remade. He, and a tiny percentage of the voting public who don't like the United States very much. He wanted to "break the back of Clintonism". His opinion, but I think that Clintonism was what made the Democrats competitive again after Reagan. He offers excuses for people who choose not to vote because the choices on offer don't meet their standards. Tim did push back well on that one, but the guest just wasn't buying it: when people decline to be good citizens, in his view, it's somebody else's fault. The legitimizing of the Israel-as-a-Colonial-Project tropes were ahistorical and outrageous, as they always are. Poison delivered with a spoonful of sugar and a sunny smile is still poison.
Dr. Glaude IS an engaging speaker, and I really would enjoy hearing you two contrast your analyses of neoconservatism. Please do bring him back for that, Tim -- and please follow your impulse to do it AFTER the election.
One point on which I appreciated Glaude's critique of The Bulwark was his argument that the binary-choice framework is patronizing. Whenever I hear it, there's a part of me that wants to vote third party just to give the middle finger to those attempting to trap me in their binary-choice prison.
If the only choice were between, say, Elizabeth Warren and Gavin Newsom, or between Jim Jordan and Tucker Carlson, I would consider either of those to be a real "binary-choice prison" and would sit the election out.
The choice between Biden or Trump for President is binary, but it's no prison. Almost nine years after Trump came down that garish elevator, I think that a lot of what comes across as "patronizing" is actually tightly controlled frustration at people who prefer blaming the messenger to accepting that (our current) reality is real, that the difference between the two is one of kind and not degree, and that the election of only one will lead to a disaster that may be unrecoverable.
You seem to accept our current milieu as a force of nature for which no one can be held responsible - a constraint that we just have to accept and react to. I refuse to accept those rules of the game as a given. I know too much game theory to allow myself to get stuck in one model.
But this is also a matter of my personality. Whenever anyone tries to coerce or manipulate me, my top priority becomes making them regret it.
Not a force of nature, but one of a limited universe of available fact sets among which we can choose. We exercise our agency by choosing the fact set in which we're going to participate, but we have very little power as individuals to modify the conditions of the set itself, so the question of "who's responsible" is only a distraction, at least in the short term.
I exited this particular fact set in 2017 by becoming a permanent expat, so I enjoy these discussions as an intellectual and social exercise rather than as a real participant. While I certainly have family and some financial connections to the US, I don't in fact have a dog in the fight, so if I seem detached and perhaps a little blasé, that's probably why.
My personality is not dissimilar, except that whenever anyone tries to coerce or manipulate me, unless they do something malicious to actually harm me, my top priority is only to neutralize any power they may have over me. After that, their regrets are not my concern.
Can't agree. Speaking civilly, among friends, about disagreements is how you keep the coalition together.
I've thought so for a long time, but I'm no longer so sure. The Hamas-sympathetic demonstrations and civil disobedience have been like acid poured over our coalition and political culture, eating away in days and weeks alliances that took months and years to build, and damaging and disfiguring everything that they don't destroy outright. I really don't see how we completely recover from this, especially in only six months. And if we fail in November, none of it will matter anyway. The fact that then these deluded individuals will probably see what REAL geocide looks like under a second Trump presidency is, of course, no comfort at all.
That started well before this on the liberal side of this coalition. I voted in 2020 to save democracy and only to save Democracy because candidate Biden offered literally nothing else for me. This coalition then proceeded to do nothing but vote in Biden and pursue business as usual as if the trajectory of the Republican party, politics in general, and the underlying drivers of both would change on their own. That useless strategy not only betrayed their promise to attempt to save Democracy it also lost them the house in 2022 so they couldn't even try in the last two years. Trust was gone after that: trust in the strategy, trust in the institutions, and trust in the people of the coalition itself.
I am working very, VERY hard to find some miniscule scrap of faith that enough of this coalition has learned something and now has the will and ability to actually do anything about any of those problems if it is voted into power despite the fact that the same key players are making the same empty promises and platitudes *AGAIN* after either intentionally reneging on their promises the first time or at the least failing utterly and completely to act on them. Posts on this site make it damn near impossible to find that faith because they show exactly how much contempt much of this coalition has for a decisive chunk of people in the coalition who are having the same struggles I am.
But that is why I hang around here, to get a more accurate read on how worth saving this country is. It does provide that.
Yes, it feels like a bait and switch: the Democrats ran on democracy, but the only thing they actually did to save democracy was to not be Trump. It's almost as if they wanted to preserve the threat of Trump in order to force us to vote for Democrats again.
I'm sorry for your frustration and I'm sure that it's genuine. However, I really don't think that the Infrastructure Act or the misnamed -- but not misdirected -- Inflation Reduction Act were "business as usual" or "the trajectory of the Republican Party"; I thought that they were good, widely popular, Center-Left constructive legislation. And the 2022 losses were far lower than the usual midterm losses for the party in power. I'm also not sure what you include in the "any of those problems" that you want whoever wins in November to "do anything about", but I hope that we have a President who will try to build consensus on some of them.
I want them to save our Democracy. That means doing something to actually *fix* it so it can operate reliably. I cannot be done without at the very least removing the filibuster and finding ways to render gerrymandering of the house ineffective through electoral reform. That is a bare minimum. Something to start to get us closer to one person one vote as opposed to tyranny of the minority. There is much more that should be done on this issue alone imo so I'm already giving away most of it and any consideration of any other issues. What more do I have to give up to not be considered entitled and radical I wonder? It is mind boggling to me that tightening up the loopholes Trump exploited during his attempted legislative coup is *ALL* the Dems did on the sole issue that unites this coalition.
You don't sound either entitled or radical to me, at not least so far. The easiest and most effective thing that could be done to fix the House AND the Electoral College would be to repeal the Reapportionment Act of 1929, take the artificial cap off the House of Representatives, and stop the under-representation of the most populous states. It only takes an Act of Congress, not an amendment, and it really frustrates me that Pelosi's leadership team apparently had no interest in it during the last Congress. I hope that changes next year if the Democrats win.
I totally agree on the filibuster, but the dirty little secret is that both parties denounce it when they're in the majority but never get around to abolishing it, because they think that they'll need it when they're in the minority. It gets a lot of mileage for something that came into existence as an oversight and everybody in the Senate claims to hate. As for gerrymandering, that's another thing that both parties hate -- but only when the other one does it. Neither the courts or the Congress are going to do anything about it; it's going to have to be the people ourselves, state by state.
"You don't sound either entitled or radical to me, at not least so far."
You are one of few who would say so. When the Dems actually had the ability attempt to remove the filibuster making repairs to the ship was deemed too dangerous and radical. It would scare the moderates. I still remember the pic of Manchin the saint in Tim's article on this site after he protected the filibuster and thus scuttled any chance of democratic reforms (which in turn led to internecine strife since all that was left was to argue over typical policy matters). Maybe the moderates have started to come around but neither Biden nor this site which is my only source of non-MAGA conservative thought says anything about such things so I doubt that. Neither do the moderate liberal sources for that matter.
Agreed on the Reapportionment Act and the filibuster. I thought that would have been one of the first things on the docket after Jan 6th but I was as naive about the Dems or the democracy coalition or whatever political entity this is now in 2020 as I was about Republicans in 2016. All the talk of principles is bullshit. When the time came to act on them they both balked as usual and I don't know how the stakes could get higher while still being in peacetime in a nominally functional society than covid and a coup. I trust neither. Voting in 2024, at the moment, is like buying a lottery ticket as my retirement plan. Is there a chance it pays out? ...sure but the chance is so small is it even worth wasting the effort?
I was very disappointed with Manchin over the filibuster, and over the Inflation Reduction Act, too. The next person who holds that chair will be a lot worse, though.
I was a "Liberal Republican" while there still was such a thing, and call myself "Center-Right" now. I've never called myself a "conservative", and especially won't now that the word is meaningless. I just want the government to work the way that I think the Founders intended: preserving and extending individual liberty, no filibuster, the House and the Electoral College growing to keep pace with the growth and distribution of the population, the debt limit respected and not gamed, strong federal action against racial discrimination and to dismantle structural racism (the Civil War Amendments are as much part of the Constitution as Articles I-VII!), the states and the federal government respecting each others' authority, including NOT incorporating the Second Amendment against the states, and levels of progressive taxation adequate to support the level of public services that the people decide, through their representatives, that they want to have and pay for. I keep hoping that that isn't asking too much.
"I was very disappointed with Manchin over the filibuster, and over the Inflation Reduction Act, too. The next person who holds that chair will be a lot worse, though."
This is where I don't understand the moderate argument. Neither Manchin nor the person who will be worse will allow the necessary reforms to get us out of this situation. Where is the hope to be found then? We are damned if we do and damned if we don't.
"I just want the government to work the way that I think the Founders intended [...]. I keep hoping that that isn't asking too much."
We are generally the same at that level of abstraction but the real world doesn't operate at that level so it is kind of meaningless. I say that not to be flippant and insulting but to communicate how cynical I am of that level of connection. Still, I understand and respect the sentiment.
Manchin was the best we were ever going to get out of West Virginia, and he WAS willing to work with Biden on a wide range of changes; if Jim Justice will be willing to work with him on anything, I'll be more than pleasantly surprised, I'll be flabbergasted. Anyone who doubts that that there's a big difference between the two is going to see next year.
Good discussion -- thanks. Politics and baseball will always break our hearts; the best we can do with politics is to try to keep it moving more or less in the right direction most of the time. Baseball is already the perfect blend of tragedy and hope, so we should probably stick to reforming politics.