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Javier E

Opinion | The Coming G.O.P. Apocalypse - The New York Times - 0 views

  • older Democrats prefer a more moderate candidate who they think can win. Younger Democrats prefer a more progressive candidate who they think can bring systemic change.
  • They have constructed an ethos that is mostly about dealing with difference
  • The difference is ideological. According to Pew, 57 percent of millennials call themselves consistently liberal or mostly liberal. Only 12 percent call themselves consistently conservative or mostly conservative. This is the most important statistic in American politics right now.
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  • today’s generation gap is not based just on temporary intellectual postures. It is based on concrete, lived experience that is never going to go away.
  • Unlike the Silent Generation and the boomers, millennials and Gen Z voters live with difference every single day. Only 16 percent of the Silent Generation is minority, but 44 percent of the millennial generation is
  • Young voters approve of these trends. Seventy-nine percent of millennials think immigration is good for America. Sixty-one percent think racial diversity is good for America.
  • The generation gap is even more powerful when it comes to Republicans. To put it bluntly, young adults hate them.
  • They are much less likely to say the U.S. is the best country in the world.
  • Matthew Continetti recently identified the key blocs on the new right in an essay in The Washington Free Beacon. These included the Jacksonians (pugilistic populists), the Paleos (Tucker Carlson-style economic nationalists), the Post-Liberals (people who oppose pluralism and seek a return to pre-Enlightenment orthodoxy). To most young adults, these tendencies will look like cloud cuckooland.
  • There is a conservative way to embrace pluralism and diversity. It’s to point out that there is a deep strain of pessimism in progressive multiculturalism: blacks and whites will never really understand each other; racism is endemic; the American project is fatally flawed; American structures are so oppressive, the only option is to burn them down
  • A better multiculturalism would be optimistic: We can communicate across difference; the American creed is the right recipe for a thick and respectful pluralism; American structures are basically sound and can be realistically reformed
  • My mentor William F. Buckley vowed to stand athwart history yelling “Stop!” Today’s Republicans don’t even seem to see the train that is running them over.
oliviaodon

A Very German Love Story: When Old Left and Far Right Share a Bedroom - The New York Times - 0 views

  • VIENNA — When she says identity, he hears exclusion.When he says diversity, she hears Islamization.He accuses her of forgetting history. She accuses him of obsessing with history. He calls her a racist. She calls him a national masochist.Helmut Lethen, 79, and Caroline Sommerfeld, 42, are both writers. They represent two generations and two intellectual camps in an ever more divided Germany. They are political enemies.And they are married.
  • It is a very German love story (though the couple reside in Austria, where the husband teaches), one neatly pegged to the 50th anniversary of the counterculture movement that remains a touchstone of global postwar history — and to the ascent of the counter-counterculture movement of today.
  • May 1968 was as important in Europe as it was in the United States, fueled similarly by a youth bulge, sexual liberation, disgust with the Vietnam War and general discontent with the era’s political establishment.And it spawned much the same trajectory for its baby boomers, from budding student revolutionaries to button-down liberal elites.Germany was no exception. And neither was Mr. Lethen.
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  • Ms. Sommerfeld, a philosopher in her own right, was swept up in another countercultural movement: In the summer of 2015, as hundreds of thousands of refugees arrived in Germany, she discovered the “New Right,” the intellectual spearhead of a nationalist movement that considers Islam and globalization existential threats.Her husband had celebrated the arrival of the refugees: “I think it is the first time in our cultural history that we have welcomed the foreign in this way,” he said.Ms. Sommerfeld, though, felt “anxious” and “repelled.”Today, she hopes her own fringe movement is tapping into a shifting zeitgeist that will reverberate in Germany and beyond, just as her husband’s did in its day.“We are the megaphone of a silent majority,” she claims.Mr. Lethen dismisses the analogy.“We were moved by a yearning for the world, we looked to the future,” he said. “They are moved by the yearning to go back to the womb of Teutonic tradition. It is a nostalgia for a past that never was.”
  • One recent evening Mr. Lethen called his wife and her far-right friends “spongers.”Their attack on liberal democracy was only possible because of liberal democracy, he reasoned. Fantasizing about an authoritarian regime like that in Hungary was akin to “sawing off the branch you’re sitting on.”Ms. Sommerfeld countered that the liberal mainstream consensus was itself authoritarian and did not even realize it. “You preach openness,” she said, “but you aren’t open to opinions you don’t like.”
  • Even the methods of the New Right borrow heavily from 1968: provoking with language; staging sit-ins; infiltrating book fairs with far-right publishing houses; breaking taboos like throwing a burqa over the statue of the Empress Maria Theresa in Vienna; forging international links to similar movements.And feeding in large part off the outrage and reaction of the other side.“Revolutionizing perceptions,” Ms. Sommerfeld calls it.The first time they really fought was in 2016 after a far-right politician insulted the German soccer player Jérôme Boateng, who is black.
  • “People consider Boateng a good footballer, but they don’t want to have him as a neighbor,” Alexander Gauland of the Alternative for Germany party had said. Newsletter Sign Up Continue reading the main story
  • Ms. Sommerfeld remarked she would not want him as a neighbor either. Her husband exploded and called her a racist. Advertisement Continue reading the main story It was a key moment in their relationship. “That is the biggest conflict,” he said.Once, Mr. Lethen was so exasperated that he wrote down five conditions as a basis for discussion between them. Three of them had to do with acknowledging the Holocaust and the crimes of Germans during World War II.She rejected them all. Not, she says, because she denies the Holocaust, but because she rejects the notion that it should define modern German identity.
  • She wants to move on from “this extreme collective pathological obsession with the Holocaust which informs the entire moral discourse of the ’68 generation,” she said.(If he was really so concerned about anti-Semitism, she added, he might want to look at refugees from Syria who were taught in school that the Holocaust never happened.)“I want to say: ‘Dear lefties, this obsession with those 12 years is all yours. You can stew in it but it’s something we don’t want to deal with every minute of the day,’” she said.
Javier E

When the next generation looks racially different from the last, political tensions rise - 0 views

  • The racial generation gap is technically measured as the difference between the percent of those 65 or older who are white, minus the percent of those aged 17 and younger who are white. The bigger the gap, the more demographically distinct the generations.
  • the problem is that when seniors have trouble seeing themselves in children and young adults, social cohesion is at risk, as are investments in the future.
  • in a clear sign of retreating from the future, Arizona also made the largest cuts in K-12 state spending per student between 2008 and 2015.
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  • Even when you take all those other factors into account, the larger the racial generation gap, the less the state spends per student.
  • The peak of the racial generation gap occurred in California around 1994 to 1998. During this era, Proposition 187 passed, followed by a series of “racial propositions” that ended affirmative action, banned bilingual education and stepped up the incarceration of young men of color.
  • When the racial generation gap peaked, the damage to the California Dream was deep – and the state is still trying to work its way back from the wreckage.
  • California fell from among the top spending states on education to become one of the stingiest. Our state prison population increased by more than sixfold between 1980 and 2006, twice as fast as in the rest of the country. And we went from being roughly in the middle of the pack in terms of income inequality back in the glory days of the late 1960s to the sixth most unequal state in 2012.
  • Would California have gone through the same turmoil had the generational gap been narrower? It’s hard to know for sure, but it’s also not prudent to wait around for elders to come to their political senses or for the younger generation to age into power. We need a national game plan that can accelerate what the slower pace of demographic change might push along.
  • In my new book, “State of Resistance: What California’s Dizzying Descent and Remarkable Resurgence Mean for America’s Future,” I suggest that the U.S. can draw lessons from California’s political and social shifts.
  • Term limits, for example, opened up opportunities for new politicians of color. Easier voter registration helped lower the barriers for new and young voters. The power to “redistrict” – to draw the lines for state and congressional seats – was taken from a state legislature eager to protect incumbents and given to a citizen commission less invested in the past.
  • However, such structural reforms are only effective if there is a citizenry ready to take advantage of them. To make that happen, a new generation of community-based organizers became more adept at linking together communities, mobilizing voters and promoting winnable policy change.
  • to get there, the nation will need to overcome the tension between what journalist Ron Brownstein has called the “coalition of restoration” – older Trump voters seeking a way back to what they see as American greatness – and a “coalition of transformation” that consists of younger and more diverse constituents.
  • Closing that social distance will be crucial. The California Dream was never just about one person (or one generation) and their route to individual success. It was about the promise of a state that welcomed newcomers, confidently invested in its children and looked forward to its future. That’s a recipe for progress in the Golden State and America alike.
Javier E

The ugly face of ethno-nationalists - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • it’s time to acknowledge that many Republicans view his appeals to white grievance as a positive feature. It’s behind their obsession with “Telling it like it is” — code for expressing base prejudices. The rejection of Hispanics as real Americans has become a given among state-TV hosts like Tucker Carlson.
  • When Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) takes to the floor to claim Democrats care more about illegal immigrants than sick kids or the military, you see how vital the race/immigrant card has become to the GOP’s unity.
  • In many ways, antagonism toward immigrants is the glue that binds Trump to his followers and Republicans to one another.
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  • Trump proved in the 2016 election that immigration unified the GOP much more effectively than did its traditional focus on reducing entitlement spending, free trade and low deficits. Among the GOP base, the populist issues of trade and immigration are now far more animating than even abortion or taxes.
  • I never understood why a movement would take pride in rejecting modernism (rather than shaping it, conserving what is good and discarding what is not), but on top of that, stopping a huge demographic shift — the largest, most diverse generation in history (millennials) supplanting aging baby boomers — seems futile and irrational.
  • The retreat into ethno-nationalism is no small matter but rather goes to the very definition of America and the core questions the Civil War, the civil rights movement and every wave of anti-immigration sentiment have presented: Who is an American? Does America need immigrants to prosper and to renew its creed in each generation?
  • Trump and this iteration of the Republican party have made aversion to diversity such a vital principle, it cannot be considered trivial. This is how Republicans have chosen to define themselves these days — and why many of us can no longer call themselves Republicans.
malonema1

Obama's stern warning for Trump (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

  • During a conversation with David Letterman on his new Netflix program, former President Barack Obama issued a stern warning for the current commander in chief: "One of the things that Michelle figured out, in some ways faster than I did, was part of your ability to lead the country doesn't have to do with legislation, doesn't have to do with regulations, it has to do with shaping attitudes, shaping culture, increasing awareness."
  • It would be a mistake to dismiss the comments as a "distraction" because, with Trump, they are the main show. His rhetoric sends a message to the nation and to the world about the values that we treasure and that the nation will stand for in 2018.
  • President Trump, who launched his campaign by calling Mexican immigrants rapists and criminals, was reported to have said that all Haitians "have AIDS" (the White House denied the statement) and that Nigerians "live in huts."
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  • Baby Boomers will remember just how shocked they were during the Watergate investigation to learn through the transcripts of the White House recordings that President Richard Nixon swore, personally insulted his enemies, and used anti-Semitic language behind closed doors. Nixon referred to Henry Kissinger as "Jew-boy."
  • Trump insists on calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas" and has gone after football players protesting police violence against African-Americans
  • President Trump's rhetoric is also unpresidential in that he is willing to do and say big things, that entail huge risks for the country, in a dangerously ad hoc manner. Nowhere has this been clearer than with his tweets about North Korea
  • It is vital that members of both parties admit what they see when these moments happen and avoid normalizing these kinds of reckless departures from presidential history. For if the political class, and the public, starts to brush these moments off as "Trump being Trump" or "nothing worse than what we have seen" we will lower the bar so far it will be impossible to ever repair the presidency.
Javier E

The good economic news is actually bad. Here's why. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • In his essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” Keynes, seeking to dispel pessimism, predicted that, “assuming no important wars and no important increase in population,” the “permanent problem of the human race” — the “struggle for subsistence” — “may be solved.”
  • This, Keynes warned, could discombobulate the human race’s neurological wiring, because mankind has evolved through many millennia for toil and stress. Basic “habits and instincts” are unsuitable for a future of leisure and abundance. Because we have evolved as creatures designed by nature “to strive and not to enjoy.” So, work would have to be apportioned, perhaps in three-hour shifts and 15-hour workweeks, to keep people preoccupied.
  • In 1943, Paul Samuelson, who would become one of America’s leading economists and win a Nobel Prize, anticipated peace with foreboding. Good things — demobilization of more than 10 million from the armed services, the economy no longer busy producing instruments of destruction — would cause bad things. There would be “the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.” Any economy. Ever.
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  • A 2015 Federal Reserve study revealed that half of those surveyed said they could not gather $400 to cope with an emergency; one-third said they could not sell assets, tap retirement savings or turn to family and friends to pay three months of expenses.
  • In December, America’s household savings rate was the lowest (2.4 percent of disposable income) since the negative savings rates in 2005 and 2006, before the housing bubble burst.
  • As of 2013, 45 percent of working-age households had no retirement savings.
  • This stroll down memory lane suggests this rule: All news is economic news, because everything affects the economy, or reveals attitudes or behaviors that soon will affect it. And all economic news is bad — especially good economic news, because it gives rise to bad behavior.
  • By 2017, median household savings ($14,500) for those near retirement age had declined 32 percent in a decade, and for the first time, older Americans had more credit card debt than younger Americans.
  • Between 2003 and 2015, the indebtedness of those between ages 50 and 80 increased 60 percent. Today, those between 65 and 74 have five times more debt than that age cohort did two decades ago.
  • Do you wonder how such behavior became to seem normal? A partial answer might be:
  • Americans consider deferral of gratification unnatural, which it is. Time was, however, thrift was considered a virtue. People sat at kitchen tables, calculating how to bring their outlays, for living and retiring, into alignment with their incomes.
  • But eventually many people decided: This is no fun. Instead, let’s disconnect enjoyable spending decisions from tiresome facts about resources, thereby living the way the federal government does.
Javier E

The Japanese population is shrinking faster than every other big country - Quartz - 0 views

  • The Japanese population grew steadily throughout the 20th century, from around 44 million in 1900 to 128 million in 2000.
  • beginning in the late 1970s, birth rates crashed. While the average Japanese woman had 2.1 kids in the 1970s, today, they only have about 1.4—far lower than in comparably wealthy countries like the US and Sweden.
  • Today, Japan is a land of aging baby boomers and young adults who don’t want to have kids. By median age, Japan is the oldest large country in the world. More than half of its population is over the age of 46.
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  • Demographers forecast a steep population decline for Japan this century. The Japanese Statistics Bureau (pdf) estimates that the Japanese population will fall to just over 100 million by 2050, from around 127 million today.
  • Beginning in the mid-1990s, Japan’s government enacted a number of programs to make having kids more appealing for young adults. These were supposed to reduce the costs of childcare and force companies to adopt more parent-friendly policies.
Javier E

Chick-fil-A becomes third largest restaurant chain in U.S. - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Chick-fil-A has moved up the ranks from the seventh-largest restaurant chain in the United States to become the third.
  • Where total restaurant traffic increased less than 1 percent, Chick-fil-A saw double-digit growth.” Aging boomers are eating out less often, and while millennials rely on restaurants more than any other group (240 restaurant meals per capita per year, compared with 185 in the general population), they are still eating out less than Generation X did at their age.
  • The chicken sandwich giant blew past Wendy’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and Subway on its ascent, with $10.46 billion in American store sales, according to Nation’s Restaurant News’ latest countdown. Up 17 percent for the year, Chick-fil-A stands behind only McDonald’s ($38.52 billion in American sales) and Starbucks ($20.49 billion). Average sales for a Chick-fil-A location brought in $4.6 million in 2018, up from $4.2 million in 2017 — more than three times that of major chicken competitor KFC.
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  • “Half of all meals are now eaten in restaurants, half of those as fast food, and half of those are just 10 companies. Chick-fil-A is now one of them,” Allen says.
Javier E

Bill Maher on the Perils of Political Correctness - The New York Times - 1 views

  • The difference is that liberals protect people, and P.C. people protect feelings. They don’t do anything. They’re pointing at other people who are somehow falling short of their standards, which could have changed three weeks ago
  • when I was growing up, the most liberal thing you could do is not see color. Well, that’s wrong now. You see color, always, so you can register your white privilege. But I grew up in the Martin Luther King era: Judge by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. I still think that’s the best way to do it. Not see it.
  • If someone walks in the room, after a minute, I should not be thinking about color. And I am not. That’s how I have always been. I have actual black friends. I don’t think they want me to be always thinking: Black person. Black person.
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  • the Twitter-mob mentality has an effect on the rest of the world. Everyone fears the wrath of the Twitter mob and the social justice warriors and the P.C. police. Religions always talk about the one true religion. Now on the left we have the one true opinion. If you go against that, you do so at your peril. That’s why the air on the left is becoming stale. I railed for years against the Fox News bubble, and that is as strong as ever, but I didn’t think it would get this bad on the left.
  • You can still make whatever joke you want. The difference is that more people are calling you out if they find it offensive. That’s naïve. You can make the joke if you don’t mind giving up your career or being fired. Come on. The politically correct people are not concerned about social justice. They care about putting scalps on the wall.
  • Liam Neeson. Remember that?44 While promoting a film early this year, Neeson said he had a racist revenge plan as a younger man after a close friend was raped by a black man. He later apologized. Are we at this place where we can’t admit that we’ve ever had bad thoughts and gotten over them and become a better person? You can’t judge today by yesterday. We evolve.
  • We live in an era where I don’t think people’s main focus is the truth and/or sussing out something valuable or teachable. We live in a time in which people are more concerned with scalps and clicks.
  • Professors are afraid to speak, because what they say, even if it’s science, might go against the politically correct notion. This is pernicious. I’m sorry, but I have to lay that at the doorstep of the far left and the younger generation. It’s not the worst thing in the world to hear something you find somewhat offensive. You can turn the channel. Look at something else. Go to a puppet show; you’ll never be offended.
  • Almost all religions, by their nature, are intolerant and supremacist. At any time in history one religion will be the most fundamentalist. At this moment I think it’s pretty evident that religion is Islam. Of course, intolerance exists everywhere, but the places where, let’s say, human rights workers have their work cut out for them the most are probably traditional Islamic societies. To conflate thinking that with Islamophobia is a facile and unconvincing trick.
  • You have to find a way to begin with what you share and then explore why you differ so vehemently on other issues, and that’s what we seem to have lost the ability to do. I don’t see a lot of desire for people to talk to each other, to accept that, “O.K., this person doesn’t agree with me on a lot of stuff, but I don’t have to think he’s a monster.” We want to beat our chests and vanquish the other side. Compromise seems like a dead concept.
  • During the second year of “Politically Incorrect” we had a contest: “Politically incorrect or just stupid?” We were trying to make the point that saying something that’s contrary is not necessarily politically incorrect. It’s sometimes just stupid. I define political correctness as the elevation of sensitivity over truth. That’s my beef with it. We’re
  • Young people should be the free ones pushing the boundaries and not the ones inhibiting us. “Well, I’m not a woman, so I could not possibly know that experience.” “I’m not a person of color, so I can’t speak about that.
  • It’s ridiculous to label criticism of a religion as a phobia of a religion. I’m going to criticize any person or group that violates liberal principles, and so should you.
  • what’s the most disappointing thing about your own generation? Aside from ruining the world environmentally. We’ve left a dark, stinking husk of a planet, haven’t we? My generation started this mess. The Baby Boomers were the first “Me” generation. They were the first spoiled kids. There definitely was more discipline, but there was also more indulgence, and that seemed to continue on and on. So I think we have to look in the mirror as to when that trend started
Javier E

'We're the Base': Black Democrats in South Carolina Want to Send a Message - The New Yo... - 0 views

  • Chris Richardson, 39, said he was not surprised that many black voters in South Carolina were unfazed by Mr. Biden’s poor results in Iowa and New Hampshire. He flipped the question around: Why would anyone assume they’d care?
  • “Black voters know white voters better than white voters know themselves,” Mr. Richardson said. “So yeah, we’ll back Biden, because we know who white America will vote for in the general election in a way they may not tell a pollster or the media.”
  • “We’ve had a campaign season where people are calling out structural racism and saying ‘white supremacy’ on the debate stage,” Mr. Robinson said. “The fact that black people are being talked about in more nuanced ways — like black youth vote versus black baby boomers vote — it speaks to how much the movement building has been translated to electoral power.”
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  • Mr. Darby, the Charleston minister, said he believed the whiteness of the Iowa and New Hampshire electorates affects how they view the primary’s central question of electability.He contended that many white voters in those states could “afford” to base voting decisions solely on policy outlines and ideological promises, while many black voters were conditioned by history to assume the worst about politicians
Javier E

I regret that I have but one grandparent to give for my country - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • YOUR COUNTRY STOCK MARKET NEEDS YOU! IS ASKING YOU TO GIVE YOURSELF, NEEDLESSLY AND TO NO ULTIMATE LONG-TERM BENEFIT!
  • Brave boomers, hardy millennials, Gen X, Gen Z, rise to the call! Will you make the ultimate sacrifice so that Donald Trump’s chain hotels will not have to remain closed for more than 14 days? Will you lay down your precious life, against expert medical advice, for literally no reason at all?
  • We have the ability to support the individuals and businesses who would suffer from a shutdown of the length medically necessary to stem the virus, but why bother? When instead we can toss aside precious, irreplaceable human beings? Now is not the time for sensible measures
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  • Dare you not requite his sacrifice with all you have to give? This is rude and selfish of you, to say that your life is worth more than someone’s money. And I am not speaking of the money of people who need to go to work to feed their families, who are being devastated by this, who might be helped with a spreading of the social safety net. I am speaking of something greater. I am speaking of the stocks!
  • Doctors, why do you hesitate to fling in your lot? Is the single mask you have been issued not sufficient? Do you not know that there is MONEY somewhere, dwindling? I would suggest that you plaster dollar bills to your face, but they are all needed to bolster the Businessmen in this difficult time.
  • Here is your chance to serve! And there is still a place in the line for the people who did not ask to be volunteered — but you must help them! You can sacrifice them, too, by your decision, because this disease conveniently does not understand who is stepping up and who is not.
Javier E

America's midlife crisis: lessons from a survivalist summit | US news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • catastrophe hovers, like low clouds that could pass or bring flood. The market cycles are imminently due for correction. The international order that has maintained peace and prosperity for generations is being destroyed out of the boomer petulance: if it’s not the gerontocratic Brexiteers, it’s the Trumpists calling for the end of free movement of people. The press is under threat, partly from the president but mostly from the fact that the American people are finding they can quite easily make do without facts. And a sense of despair about the nature of the American state itself is spreading across the country, leaving a vacuum in which a new kind of radical Americanism can flourish – a patriotism defined by its loathing for its own government.
  • You don’t have to look hard, at all, to find the rhetoric and philosophy of the new anti-government right inside traditional conservative politics. The Oath Keepers – a group the Southern Poverty Law Center describes as “one of the largest radical antigovernment groups in the US today” – would be providing security at the summit
  • As different as they are in geography and sensibility, Thiel and Finicum Finch share an idea: they both see America as an experiment in property rather than experiment in democracy. Liberty to them is not government of the people, by the people, for the people. Liberty is ownership. Taxation is legal plunder.
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  • America’s midlife crisis has been realized in the flesh in the decaying Woodland mall: these men and women have been overwhelmed by an inherently unsatisfiable longing for freedom. To them, paying taxes, to be compelled to pay taxes, is a form of enslavement. By this definition, who among us is free? Who among us could ever be free?
  • Is freedom just what you could have been, rather than what you turned out to be? Is freedom just a word for youth that has passed? At the Woodland mall they know that, whatever freedom is, they are losing it. “How far are you willing to be pushed?” Finicum Finch asks. “When is your faith going to be bigger than your fear?” No political programme could ever assuage the hunger for impossible freedom it has sprung from.
  • Edward Gibbon, author of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, came to the same conclusion: “the most potent and forcible cause” of the Roman empire’s collapse was “the domestic hostilities of the Romans themselves”
  • Cultures commit suicide. That’s how they end. Just like with men and women, it’s not the challenges of life that break you, it’s your own internal contradiction
  • America’s internal contradictions are beginning to overwhelm its politics. The preppers combine all the features that have defined American existence since its beginning: the apocalyptic visions, the maniacal over-reading of the constitution, the desire to live by self-reliance but in total conformity, self-righteous violence and the evasion of taxes.
  • How many great American tech companies boil down to tax-and-regulation-evasion schemes? Hollywood is the world’s number one gun fetishist. Donald Trump isn’t from north-west Ohio, he’s a New Yorker – more a Billy Joel New Yorker than a Lou Reed New Yorker, sure, but a New Yorker nonetheless. The traits on display at the Woodland mall are evident everywhere. They are present in every aspect of its history. Why do you think every major columnist at the New York Times thought bombing Baghdad to rubble would solve the crisis of the Middle East? They’re bred to it. In America, the answer is violence. What was the question again?
  • Middle age is when the bullshit you tell yourself begins to crumble of its own accord. Middle age is when the sum total of your decisions, rather than the dreams you began with, starts to become who you are. You were once the hero of your own story but the best you can manage now is to be the punchline to your own joke. The urge to have it all burn down and start over is ferocious.
  • Middle age, for people and for countries, is a reckoning much more uncomfortable than a collapse: you find out who you are.
Javier E

Jeremy Corbyn and the bourgeois dream - 0 views

  • John Gray in the New Statesman. Mr Gray argues that Corbynism is “populism for the middle classes, serving the material and psychological needs of the relatively affluent and the well-heeled”. Far from being a repudiation of Tony Blair’s policies, Corbynism represents the completion of the takeover of Labour by middle-class people who put their own interests (such as free university education) above those of the working class.
  • most young Corbynistas are not so much settled members of the middle class as frustrated would-be members. Ben Judah, a millennial-generation journalist and author of “This is London”, points out that members of his generation are angry that they have done everything they were told, from studying hard at school to going to university to trying to get a respectable job, but are still holding on by their fingertips.
  • They are magnified by the London effect. Young people flock to the capital, where the best professional jobs are concentrated, but exorbitant property prices force them to migrate to the farthest corners of the city or to share with strangers.
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  • The young have been on the sharp end of two economic shocks: the 2008 crisis, which squeezed living standards, and a technological revolution, which is doing for middle-class jobs what mechanisation did for working-class ones. Automation is hollowing out entry-level positions
  • It is getting ever harder for young people to get a foot on the property ladder or find somewhere decent to rent.
  • Browse the Facebook pages where young Corbynistas hang out and you do not find hymns of praise to the workers’ control of the means of production, but laments for the indignities of modern metropolitan life and jeremiads against baby boomers who grabbed all the cheap houses and got free university education into the bargain.
  • Far from democratising the bourgeois dream, Mr Corbyn’s policies would quickly kill it. Empowering trade unions would produce disruption, particularly of public services. Abolishing university fees would make it harder for Britain to compete as a knowledge economy. And drastically increasing public spending would damage international confidence and risk capital flight.
  • the political class as a whole ignores the deeper causes of Britain’s stagnation, from stalled productivity to a failure to produce high-growth companies. The most likely outcome is that Britain will add an experiment with hardcore socialism to its experiment with Brexit. Then, the relative deprivation suffered by Mr Corbyn’s middle-class fans will be the least of the country’s problems.
Javier E

Steve Bannon's Coalition of Christian Traditionalists - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • even as Bannon and various religious leaders seek to pit the values of Christianity against those of Islam, there is also an internal competition to decide who gets to define Christian traditionalism.
  • Two of the main players in this competition, American Christian traditionalists—including conservative Catholics like Bannon as well as evangelicals like Franklin Graham—and Russian Orthodox, are united in their desire to save Christendom from the perceived threat of radical Islam. But buried underneath that superficial agreement is a complex disagreement as to what Christendom even means.
  • In Bannon’s telling, the greatest mistake the baby boomers made was to reject the traditional “Judeo-Christian” values of their parents. He considers this a historical crime, because in his telling it was Judeo-Christian values that enabled Western Europe and the United States to defeat European fascism, and, subsequently, to create an “enlightened capitalism” that made America great for decades after World War II.
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  • upon his return to office in 2012, Putin realized that “large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement.” Seizing the opportunity, he transformed himself into the “New World Leader of Conservatism” whose traditionalism would offer an alternative to the libertine West that had long shunned him.
  • Yet Bannon suggested that Putin is not really interested in conservatism but in changing Western perceptions of Russia, and for one main purpose: “At the end of the day, I think that Putin and his cronies are really a kleptocracy, that are really an imperialist power that want to expand.”
  • Here is where the ROC and ultra-conservative Russians have found allies in the West, and in particular among evangelicals: In a global fight for traditional families, it falls to them to promote heterosexual marriage, childbearing, and adoption as part of an overarching defense of “civilization.
  • While there are obvious connections between Trump and Bannon, Bannon and Dugin, American evangelicals and Russian Orthodox, there is no clear social, political or ideological framework tying them all together. And the gap between conservative and extreme right seems to be rapidly widening.
  • previously many conservatives focused on disputing the legal legitimacy of progressive policies, some conservatives have switched to opposing these policies under the banner of religious freedom.
  • Russian conservatives, led by the Orthodox Church, frame their need for moral conservatism and family values as a different type of freedom. Russian moral leaders insist that theirs is a freedom of association, the freedom to adhere to tradition rather than to the “totalitarian freedom” of the capitalist, pluralist West.
  • The possibility of a new global resistance to the values that have become stays of the mainstream progressive West raises the question of who will lead this resistance.
  • the difference here is that we’re seeing an emergence of Christian traditionalist, rather than progressive, global coalitions.
  • In a void that prelates and preachers struggle to fill, Trump will continue to be the face of a new traditionalism.
ethanshilling

Where Have All the Houses Gone? - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Much of the housing market has gone missing. On suburban streets and in many urban neighborhoods, across large and midsize metro areas, many homes that would have typically come up for sale over the past year never did.
  • Today, if you’re looking for one, you’re likely to see only about half as many homes for sale as were available last winter, according to data from Altos Research, a firm that tracks the market nationwide
  • “The supply side is really tricky,” said Benjamin Keys, an economist at the Wharton Business School at the University of Pennsylvania. “Who wants to sell a house in the middle of a pandemic?
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  • A majority of homeowners in America are baby boomers — a group at heightened risk from the coronavirus. If many of them have been reluctant to move out and downsize over the past year, that makes it hard for other families behind them to move in and upgrade.
  • “Every additional home that gets pulled off the market incentivizes someone else to not sell their house,” Mr. McLaughlin said. “That’s a self-reinforcing cycle.”
  • Add all of this up, and for every tale of someone who ran off and bought in the suburbs or paid all-cash sight unseen in some far-flung town, the larger story of the pandemic is this: Americans have been staying put.
  • The last decade has also been a period of relatively low interest rates. That incentivized many homeowners to stay in their homes longer than they would have in the past, clinging to cheap mortgages.
  • “We’re all looking for a unified field theory for what’s going on,” said Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics. “We have all these disparate pieces of information.
  • Right now, in a number of metro areas, home prices and rents aren’t just drifting apart; they’re moving in opposite directions. Prices are rising while rents are falling.
  • “I don’t think we’ve seen a housing market quite like this one,” said Jenny Schuetz, a researcher at the Brookings Institution. “And other recessions looked a little bit different, so that makes it hard to know what’s going on.”
  • Recent research by Arpit Gupta at N.Y.U. and colleagues suggests that rents have fallen the most in close-in urban neighborhoods.
  • The ratio of home prices to rents in many metros is now as high as it has been since the housing bubble — but it has spiked during the pandemic in part because rents have fallen, not solely because prices have soared.
  • The pandemic will also eventually subside, and people will gain more certainty about remote work, and more confidence about having strangers in their homes. But for anyone waiting for the typical spring surge in inventory, these reasons for optimism may not materialize in time.
martinelligi

Republicans And Democrats Largely Oppose Transgender Sports Legislation, Poll Shows : NPR - 0 views

  • In at least 30 states nationwide, lawmakers have introduced bills aiming to keep transgender girls and women from participating on girls' and women's sports teams. These type of restrictions have become a major culture war battle, with Republican lawmakers being the loudest proponents of such bills, while Democrats often oppose them.
  • Republican voters aren't that enthusiastic about those proposed laws, even while they do have reservations about transgender sports participation.
  • Just 29% of Republicans said they "support a bill that prohibits transgender student athletes from joining sports teams that match their gender identity." Moreover, there was no significant party divide: Similar shares of Republicans, Democrats and independents also said they oppose the bills.
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  • While there is no apparent partisan divide on legislating the issue, there is a pronounced partisan divide on transgender sports participation itself
  • This suggests that while many Republicans and some independents may feel strongly about keeping transgender girls off girls' teams, they have a much smaller appetite for states being involved in that issue.
  • Political party isn't the only major dividing line when it comes to opinions on LGBTQ issues; age also seems to play a significant role. Fully 78% of millennials and people in Generation Z support the Equality Act; progressively smaller shares of Generation X (61%), baby boomers (54%) and people in the silent and greatest generations (46%) support it.
carolinehayter

Poll On Capitol Riot: Majority Of Americans Blame Trump : NPR - 0 views

  • Almost 6 in 10 Americans said they blame President Trump for the violent insurrection that took place at the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6 by a mob of his supporters, according to the latest NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll.
  • But they are split on whether Congress should continue to take action against him after he leaves office next week, and half believe social media companies like Facebook and Twitter — which have banned him from their platforms — should not continue to restrict Trump after Wednesday.
  • Eight in 10 Republicans disagree that Trump is to blame for the violence, don't believe social media companies should continue restrictions on him and don't trust that results of the 2020 election were accurate.
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  • Trump has continued to falsely claim that the election was stolen and rigged, repeating that message to tens of millions of his followers. That was amplified by conservative media in the lead-up to the violence Jan. 6 that was intended to stop the ceremonial counting of the Electoral College votes from the states that showed Democrat Joe Biden won the presidential election. To date, Trump has still not conceded, even after the House impeached him for the second time Wednesday. Following the vote, Trump released a video denouncing plans for further violence and promised a peaceful transition, but he did not congratulate President-elect Biden on his victory.
  • Overall, 58% said Trump is to blame either a "great deal" or a "good amount" for the violence at the Capitol, while 40% said "not much" or "not at all."
  • Predictably, there is a very sharp partisan divide — 92% of Democrats and 55% of independents blame Trump, but 82% of Republicans do not.
  • When it comes to trusting that the results of the election are accurate, 60% said they do, while 38% said they don't. Almost all Democrats (92%) trust the results, as do a majority of independents (56%). But just 1 in 5 (20%) of Republicans do; a whopping 78% do not.
  • As with most things in the Trump presidency, there's a big split between whites with college degrees and those without — 67% of whites with degrees trust the results, while 50% of whites without do not.
  • There's also a predictable race and age split — 67% of nonwhites trust the result, compared to 56% of whites; 68% of Gen Z and Millennials (those under 40) trust them, compared to 51% of Gen Xers, 59% of Baby Boomers and 55% of the "Silent/Greatest" generation (those over 74).
  • Whether Congress should continue to take action against Trump for the Capitol violence is more controversial than whether he is to blame. Americans are split on this question. By a statistically insignificant margin, 49% to 48%, they think Congress should. Among registered voters, however, it turns slightly more opposed, 50% to 47%.
  • The key here is independents. While 84% of Democrats think Congress should continue to pursue action and 88% of Republican think it should not, independents by a 13-point margin said it should not (55% to 42%).
  • By a 50%-43% margin, Americans do not think social media companies should continue to restrict Trump's use of their platforms beyond his term as president
  • Three-quarters of Democrats (73%) think they should, but 79% of Republicans and 56% of independents think they should not.
Javier E

The Decadent Society | Book by Ross Douthat | Official Publisher Page | Simon & Schuster - 0 views

  • From the New York Times columnist and bestselling author of Bad Religion, a powerful portrait of how our age in human history, so superficially turbulent, is actually defined by stagnation, repetition, deadlocks, and decay
  • The Decadent Society explains what happens when a rich and powerful society ceases advancing—how the combination of wealth and technological proficiency with economic stagnation, political stalemates, cultural exhaustion, and demographic decline creates a strange kind of “sustainable decadence,”
  • Ranging from the chaos of Trump-era Washington to the gridlock of the European Union, from our empty cradles to our increasingly-lonely pathways through middle and old age, from the lost promise of the Space Age and the early internet to today’s earthbound surveillance state, from the recycling of Baby Boomer pop culture to the Brave New World we’re making with drugs and virtual reality escapes, Douthat provides an enlightening diagnosis of the modern conditio
Javier E

The Young Left Is a Third Party - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Americans 55 and up account for less than one-third of the population, but they own two-thirds of the nation’s wealth, according to the Federal Reserve. That’s the highest level of elderly wealth concentration on record. The reason is simple: To an unprecedented degree, older Americans own the most valuable real estate and investment portfolios. They’ve captured more than 80 percent of stock-market growth since the end of the Great Recession.
  • under the age of 40, for their part, are historically well educated, historically peaceful, and historically law-abiding
  • “In the U.S, as in the U.K. and in much of Europe, 2008 was the end of the end of history,” says Keir Milburn, the author of Generation Left, a book on young left-wing movements. “The last decade in the U.K. has been the worst decade for wage growth for 220 years. In the U.S., this generation is the first in a century that expects to have lower lifetime earnings than their parents. It has created an epochal shift.”
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  • Young Americans demanding more power, control, and justice have veered sharply to the left. This lurch was first evident in the two elections of Barack Obama, when he won the youth vote by huge margins
  • Obama won about 60 percent of voters younger than 30 in the 2008 primary. Bernie Sanders won more than 70 percent of under-30 voters in the 2016 primary, which pushed Hillary Clinton to the left and dragged issues like Medicare for All and free college from the fringe to the mainstream of political debate.
  • Joe Biden polled at 2 percent among voters under 30, within the margin of error of zero. Nationally, he is in single digits among Millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996. Yet Biden is the Democratic front-runner for the 2020 presidential nomination, thanks to his huge advantage among old voters and black voters, who are considerably more moderate than younger Democrats.
  • Bernie Sanders, by contrast, leads all candidates among voters under 30 and polls just 5 percent among voters over 65
  • justice: Social justice, sought through a reappraisal of power relationships in social and corporate life, and economic justice, sought through the redistribution of income from the rich to the less fortunate.
  • age—perhaps even more than class or race—is now the most important fault line within the Democratic Party. 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c 2c
  • It might be most useful to think about 2cyoung progressives as a third party trapped in a two-party system.
  • they are a powerful movement politically domiciled within a larger coalition of moderate older minorities and educated suburbanites, who don’t always know what to do with their rambunctious bunkmates.
  • this progressive third party’s platform look like?
  • age divides young leftists from both Republicans and Democrats. Democrats under 30 have almost no measurable interest in the party’s front-runner. Democrats over 65 have almost no measurable interest in the favored candidate of the younger generation.
  • This group’s support for Medicare for All, free college, and student-debt relief is sometimes likened to a “give me free stuff” movement.
  • every movement wants free stuff, if by free stuff one means “stuff given preferential treatment in the tax code.” By this definition, Medicare is free stuff, and investment income is free stuff, and suburban home values propped up by the mortgage-interest deduction are free stuff. The free stuff in the tax code today benefits Americans with income and wealth—a population that is disproportionately old.
  • Medicare for All might be politically infeasible, but it is, taken literally, a request that the federal government extend to the entire population the insurance benefits now exclusively reserved for the elderly. That’s not hatred or resentment; it sounds more like justice.
  • across ethnicities, many Americans have a deep aversion to anything that can be characterized as “political correctness” or “socialism.”
  • this might be the biggest challenge for the young progressive agenda
  • While Medicare for All often polls well, its public support is exquisitely sensitive to framing. According to the Kaiser Family Foundation, the net favorability of eliminating private insurance or requiring most Americans to pay more in taxes—both part of the Sanders plan—is negative-23 points.
  • The young left’s deep skepticism toward capitalism simply isn’t shared by previous generations.
  • Gen X is firmly pro-capitalist and Baby Boomers, who came of age during the Cold War, prefer capitalism over socialism by a two-to-one margin.
  • Social Security and Medicare are, essentially, socialism for the old, but that’s not the same as converting them into Berniecrats.)
  • “This is only the halfway point of an epochal change in Western politics following the Great Recession,” Keir Milburn says. The far right has responded with calls for xenophobic nationalism to preserve national identity, while the left has responded with calls for social democracy to restore socioeconomic justice
  • the far right is ascendant, but they have no answer to the future because they’ve given up on the future. The young left has identified that the future of adulthood no longer feels viable to many people, and it’s putting together a different vision.”
Javier E

How San Francisco broke America's heart - The Washington Post - 0 views

  • Conservatives have long loathed it as the axis of liberal politics and political correctness, but now progressives are carping, too. They mourn it for what has been lost, a city that long welcomed everyone and has been altered by an earthquake of wealth. It is a place that people disparage constantly, especially residents.
  • Real estate is the nation’s costliest. Listings read like typos, a median $1.6 million for a single-family home and $3,700 monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment.
  • “This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok. There are no guardrails,” says Salesforce founder and chairman Marc Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who in a TV interview branded his city “a train wreck.”
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  • Tech isn't what everyone talks about in San Francisco. It's money. Real estate, income inequality, $20 salads, the homeless, adult children unable to move out, non-tech workers unable to move in.
  • What residents resent now is the shift to one industry, a monoculture.
  • Julie Levak-Madding, who manages the VanishingSF page on Facebook, documenting the “hyper-gentrifiction” of her city. “It’s so devastating to a huge amount of the population.”
  • Too homogenous. Too expensive. Too tech. Too millennial. Too white. Too elite. Too bro.
  • Everyone has a story about what isn’t here anymore. The inability to find a hardware store, a shoe repair, a lesbian bar, a drag-queen bar, an independent music club
  • San Francisco has less of what makes a city dynamic. It has the lowest percentage of children, 13.4 percent, of any major American city, and is home to about as many dogs as humans under the age of 18.
  • To take a midday tour downtown is to be enveloped by a jeaned and athleisured army of young workers, mostly white and Asian, and predominantly male. The presence of a boomer or toddler is akin to spotting an endangered species
  • “I don’t know anyone in San Francisco who is making a full-time living as an artist,” says Victor Krummenacher of the band Camper Van Beethoven, who left the city in April after 30 years, moving an hour east of Los Angeles. “Part of being an artist is being an observer of what is going on. In the Bay Area, you’re so mired in the congestion and costs.
  • San Francisco has also become less welcoming of altruistic professions, as teachers and social workers are priced out of housing.
  • The Sierra Club, founded in 1892, decamped to Oakland three years ago after its annual rent was projected to increase by almost $1.5 million. “Nonprofits are fleeing San Francisco. They can no longer afford it, ”
  • “You’re constantly trying to justify why you stay. There’s this blanket of anxiety and frustration that lives on top of everything,” says Talbot, a white fifth-generation San Franciscan. “You’re heartbroken because it’s changed so much and so quickly. This nostalgia is baked into everything, of missing what was here.
  • and now the gayborhoods are going away.” A resident of the Castro, the city’s famed gayborhood that’s been transformed by record prosperity, he bemoans the loss of cultural vitality and lack of caring for the less fortunate. “I don’t hear people talking about poetry. I still love my town. I still love my neighborhood, but it is changing very rapidly. It’s quite harsh and quite brutal and it frightens me.”
  • this is what happens when unbridled capitalism collides with progressive ideals.”
  • Benioff, the city’s largest employer, says residents are at “the beginning of our journey in San Francisco of understanding who we’ve become and where we’re going,” he says. Yet, he acknowledges, “there are a lot of people who are not willing to do the work. They’re here to make money. They’re not here for the long haul.”
  • “This is a place none of us would have moved to. It’s Monaco,” Levak-Madding says. “It’s urban blight by excess.”
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