Skip to main content

Home/ History Readings/ Group items tagged problem

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Javier E

You Are a Conformist (That Is, You Are Human) | Psychology Today - 0 views

  • The philosopher Hannah Arendt famously argued that the atrocities of the Holocaust were not caused by psychopaths but by ordinary people placed under extraordinary pressure to conform.
  • Since then, we have learned that the pressure need not be extraordinary at all. In fact, it may not be experienced as pressure, but as relief.
  • Human beings are herd animals. We survive only in highly coordinated groups. Individually, we are designed to pick up social cues and coordinate and align our behavior with those around us
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • Recent research has shown that social disapproval provokes the brain's danger circuits. Conformity soothes.
  • We are often not even aware when we are conforming. It is our home base, our default mode.
  • To keep ourselves in the warm confines of conformity, we rely on two independent yet related types of social cues. First, we look to others for information about what's going on (informational cues). Second, we look for others to see what to do about it (normative cues).
  • We start to seek out these cues early. As the notion of self crystallizes in the second year of life, the child begins the effort to align the self socially. An infant who falls down looks up to the parents to gauge whether to cry. If mom reacts in fear, tears will follow. If the mother laughs and reassures — no tears.
  • This early attentiveness to informational cues is called "social referencing." Shortly after, the child also begins to align their behavior with those of the group by conforming to expectations to share, wait, or not hit (picking up on normative cues).
  • we use others to figure out what's going on. This can be a very good thing. Consultation, compromise, education, and information exchange are the levers of civilization
  • Informational cues, however, can also mislead us. Two quite random examples will illustrate: The 1938 Orson Welles War of the Worlds radio broadcast about an alien invasion led to panic because many people who missed the beginning of the broadcast turned to each other to find out what was going on, misinforming each other
  • Normative influences work because we depend on social acceptance to survive and thrive
  • In a classic '50s study, psychologist Solomon Asch told student participants they were to take a vision test. Participants in small groups were required to compare the length of lines. All the participants except one, however, were confederates who at some point began giving wrong answers. Overall, roughly 3/4 of the naïve subjects complied, adjusting their public judgment to conform to the group even though in their individual notes they indicated the right answer consistently. We use normative cues, in other words, to help us gain public acceptance.
  • Asch's work showed that people are reluctant to break with group norms even if the group is small, ad hoc, and made of complete strangers. But normative cues tend to be even more potent when they come from people whose friendship, love, and esteem we value
  • Looking outward, tight groups of friends will often make a decision that is bad for addressing the external situation because they seek to maintain internal cohesion.
  • For humans, both the problem and the solution are group-based. The group is the source of both conformity and rebellion. The dual system of informational and normative cues explains how social conformity spreads as the two types of cues converge (informational cues relay the messages and normative cues ensure compliance
  • But that dual system also explains social change over time as the cues diverge. Normative cues keep the majority opinion in power through public acceptance, while contradictory, informational cues, affecting private acceptance, may spread stealthily in the cultural underground until they gather sufficient momentum to rise and upend the old order.
  • n fact, effective nonconformity is in itself a group phenomenon. Psychological research from Asch's to Milgram's has shown time and again that, quite ironically, the presence of allies is the best predictor of nonconformist behavior. Our individual courage is a manifestation of group convictions and affiliations
  • The visible courageous individual is but the tip of a social iceberg. When you go against the group, you do it not on your own, but in the name — and with the backing — of another group
  • In other words, we can't avoid conformity. What we can do is raise our own consciousness and become more aware of conformity cues. Then we can try to find good information and the right allies who will help protect us from ourselves.
Javier E

Opinion | Trump Is Nothing Without Republican Accomplices - The New York Times - 0 views

  • Key members of France’s main conservative party, the Republican Federation, many of whom were inside the Parliament building that day, sympathized publicly with the rioters. Some praised the insurrectionists as heroes and patriots. Others dismissed the importance of the attack, denying that there had been an organized plot to overthrow the government.
  • When a parliamentary commission was established to investigate the events of Feb. 6, Republican Federation leaders sabotaged the investigation at each step, blocking even modest efforts to hold the rioters to accoun
  • Protected from prosecution, many of the insurrection’s organizers were able to continue their political careers. Some of the rioters went on to form the Victims of Feb. 6, a fraternity-like organization that later served as a recruitment channel for the Nazi-sympathizing Vichy government established in the wake of the 1940 German invasion.
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • The failure to hold the Feb. 6 insurrectionists to account also helped legitimize their ideas
  • Mainstream French conservatives began to embrace the view — once confined to extremist circles — that their democracy was hopelessly corrupt, dysfunctional and infiltrated by Communists and Jews
  • Historically, French conservatives had been nationalist and staunchly anti-German. But by 1936, many of them so despised the Socialist prime minister, Léon Blum, that they embraced the slogan “Better Hitler than Blum.” Four years later, they acquiesced to Nazi rule.
  • It is semi-loyalists’ very respectability that makes them so dangerous. As members of the establishment, semi-loyalists can use their positions of authority to normalize antidemocratic extremists, protect them against efforts to hold them legally accountable and empower them by opening doors to the mainstream media, campaign donors and other resources.
  • It is this subtle enabling of extremist forces that can fatally weaken democracies.
  • Rather than sever ties to antidemocratic extremists, semi-loyalists tolerate and accommodate them
  • Rather than condemn and seek accountability for antidemocratic acts committed by ideological allies, semi-loyalists turn a blind eye, denying, downplaying and even justifying those acts — often via what is today called whataboutism
  • Or they simply remain silent.
  • when they are faced with a choice between joining forces with partisan rivals to defend democracy or preserving their relationship with antidemocratic allies, semi-loyalists opt for their allies.
  • hen we look closely at the histories of democratic breakdowns, from Europe in the interwar period to Argentina, Brazil and Chile in the 1960s and 1970s to Venezuela in the early 2000s, we see a clear pattern: Semi-loyal politicians play a pivotal role in enabling authoritarians.
  • too often politicians become what Mr. Linz called semi-loyal democrats. At first glance, semi-loyalists look like loyal democrats. They are respectable political insiders and part of the establishment. They dress in suits rather than military camouflage, profess a commitment to democracy and ostensibly play by its rules.
  • politicians may act as loyal democrats, prioritizing democracy over their short-term ambitions. Loyal democrats publicly condemn authoritarian behavior and work to hold its perpetrators accountable, even when they are ideological allies. Loyal democrats expel antidemocratic extremists from their ranks, refuse to endorse their candidacies, eschew all collaboration with them and, when necessary, join forces with ideological rivals to isolate and defeat them
  • they do this even when extremists are popular among the party base. The result, history tells us, is a political firewall that can help a democracy survive periods of intense polarization and crisis.
  • The Spanish political scientist Juan Linz wrote that when mainstream politicians face this sort of predicament, they can proceed in one of two ways.
  • in much of South America in the polarized 1960s and ’70s, mainstream parties found that many of their members sympathized with either leftist guerrillas seeking armed revolution or rightist paramilitary groups pushing for military rule.
  • In Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, mainstream center-left and center-right parties had to navigate a political world in which antidemocratic extremists on the Communist left and the fascist right enjoyed mass appeal.
  • The problem facing Republican leaders today — the emergence of a popular authoritarian threat in their own ideological camp — is hardly new
Javier E

Donald Trump disowned by hard right for going 'mainstream' - 0 views

  • As Trump has tried to moderate the Republican position on some of the most controversial issues, he looked in danger of losing his base of conservatives pushing for more hardline positions on cultural identity, populist nationalism and non-interventionist foreign policy.
  • “We’re starting to see the dynamics of a collapsing campaign with the internal dissension and public fighting among his allies,” Mike Madrid, a Republican political consultant, said. “The problem for Trump is not so much that they’re not cheerleading for him any more, it’s that they may be representative of the sentiment that’s out there.”
  • Owens and others expressed disappointment that Trump’s advisers had not embraced “Project 2025”, the radical blueprint for a second Trump term written by the conservative think tank the Heritage Foundation.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Project 2025 calls for the removal of 5,000 civil servants and their replacement with Trump loyalists, the criminalising of pornography and a total ban on the abortion pill. Trump has gone to great lengths to distance himself from the proposal as he pushes a more mainstream position on hot-button issues such as reproductive rights.
  • Fuentes, a Nazi sympathiser and racist who was banned from Twitter before his account was reinstated by Elon Musk, said that the presidential campaign was in a “death spiral” and called for Trump’s campaign chiefs to be sacked. “FireLaCivita” and “FireWiles” he said on Twitter/X, referring to Chris LaCivita and Susie Wiles, who helped to engineer Trump’s political resurrection after President Biden’s win in 2020.
  • Now I feel forgotten,” he said, citing Trump’s “complete flip” on abortion, his threat to bomb Iran, taking a $100 million donation from a pro-Israel lobby group, and his choice of two “Never Trumpers” — and so-called Washington swamp-dwellers — in LaCivita and Wiles.
  • “RFK is the vessel through which some of this disfranchisement is being placed,” Madrid said. “In a race where margins are going to determine the outcome, a couple of points could be everything. If Robert F Kennedy is getting two, three points in places like Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, that puts all of those states very much in play for Harris.
  • “Trump’s base are not reliable voters, so unless they’re really passionately engaged, they’re just not going to show up.”
Javier E

Climate: Can Democrats make the case to climate voters? - 0 views

  • Most voters say they have not heard much about the Inflation Reduction Act, according to the Yale data, and fewer than half believe it will help them or the country.
  • “I definitely wish Taylor Swift was calling this the ‘Climate Kick Ass Act’ or something like that,” said Chakraborty. “That would just reach everybody and resonate with everybody.”
  • “We have to be really smart about explaining the really wonky, long-term, monumental policy legacy that Biden left behind, which has actually really created jobs and really created a more breathable future,” Chakraborty said.
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Some of the disconnect is because of the temporal dynamics of climate change — it’s the ultimate long-term problem in a world consumed by short-term crises.
  • “Three of the ads, shared with The New York Times before their release, frame President Biden’s climate policies and Harris’s prospective policies in terms of economic benefits rather than environmental ones, and also touch on economic issues not directly related to the climate,” Maggie Astor reported.
  • on Monday, the Democratic National Convention opened in Chicago, with President Biden touting the success of the Inflation Reduction Act, which has unleashed billions of dollars in clean energy investments. “With your support, we passed the most significant climate law in the history of mankind,” he said.
  • Former President Donald J. Trump, by contrast, has called climate change a hoax, has pledged to expand oil and gas production from already record highs and recently appeared to confuse nuclear power and nuclear weapons. On Monday, he called for rolling back pollution regulations. If elected, Trump has vowed to undo parts of the Inflation Reduction Act.
Javier E

The Bright Side of the Trump-Musk Summit - Heatmap News - 0 views

  • In addition to a litany of false statements and odd non sequiturs, Trump was illogically dismissive of climate concerns: “The biggest threat is not global warming, where the ocean’s going to rise one-eighth of an inch over the next 400 years and you’ll have more oceanfront property.”
  • He also lamented the imaginary fact that “you have farmers that are not allowed to farm anymore and have to get rid of their cattle,” an area apparently of deep concern to him; elsewhere he has claimed that Kamala Harris “wants to pass laws to outlaw red meat to stop climate change.”
  • Neither of these things is remotely true (though farmers forced to sell their cattle due to drought are now eligible for extra tax relief as of 2022).
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • The Tesla chief offered his own brand of misinformation; like many a semi-informed autodidact, he often says things that are true in some sense but deeply misleading. Talking about carbon in the atmosphere, he told Trump, “Eventually, it actually simply gets uncomfortable to breathe. People don’t realize this. If you go past 1,000 parts per million of CO2, you start getting headaches and nausea. And so we’re now in the sort of 400 range … we still have quite a bit of time. We don’t need to rush.”
  • While it’s true that it would be difficult to breathe at a CO2 concentration of 1,000 parts per million, the danger of rising carbon emissions isn’t that someday we might all choke to death; as climate scientist Michael Mann said in response, by the time we reach that point the myriad effects of climate change “will be so devastating as to have already caused societal collapse.”
  • On the whole, the interview showed Musk praising Trump and nodding along with some of the former president’s loopier statements, but eventually attempting to convince him that carbon emissions can be lowered painlessly (albeit in ways that would just happen to make Musk even richer). “People can still have a steak and they can still drive gasoline cars, and it’s okay,” he reassured Trump.
  • “When you look at our cars, we don’t believe that environmentalism, that caring about the environment should mean that you have to suffer. So we make sure that our cars are beautiful, that they drive well, that they’re fast, they’re sexy. They’re cool,” Musk said, concluding that “I’m a big fan of, let’s have an inspiring future and let’s work towards a better future.”
  • if the goal were to talk Trump into lessening his opposition to any and all efforts to mitigate climate change, that might be the only way to do it. Even in the course of the conversation one could see Trump coming around, at least here and there. “I’m sort of waiting for you to come up with solar panels on the roofs of your cars,” he told Musk. “I’m sure you’ll be the first, but it would seem that a solar panel on the roofs, on flat surfaces, on certain surfaces might be good, at least in certain areas of the country or the world where you have the sun.”
  • For the moment, Trump’s bromance with Musk — or marriage of convenience — has even led the former president to moderate his rhetoric on electric vehicles, which he has often condemned in the past. “I’m constantly talking about electric vehicles but I don’t mean I’m against them. I’m totally for them,” he said at a rally in July. “I’ve driven them and they are incredible, but they’re not for everybody.”
  • None of this is to say that Trump has anything but a deeply reactionary climate agenda.
  • rhetoric does matter, and Trump doesn’t have to become a climate hawk to begin influencing his admirers to see the issue in a slightly different way. Even if all it means is that they become a little more open to looking at climate mitigation as not a dire threat to their way of life, but rather something that won’t make much of difference to them one way or the other — in other words, if they move from being hostile to climate efforts to being simply indifferent — that would be a significant change.
  • The theory behind favoring carrots over sticks in climate policy — more subsidies, fewer mandates — is in part that diffusing opposition is an important component of policy success. If Elon Musk encourages Trump to start talking about climate in ways that make addressing the problem sound less threatening to his supporters, it couldn’t hurt.
Javier E

Opinion | From This Pennsylvania Swing County, the Truth About American Politics in 202... - 0 views

  • This election, more so than any I can remember, is about us, and how we think about our presidents. The people I talked to in this friendly little town expressed two starkly different visions of what a president should be — and what he or she represents in American society.
  • Most of the Harris supporters I spoke to in Riegelsville cited the vice president’s personal qualities — what they perceived as positivity and decency — along with a desire for a president who might somehow calm our rancorous political climate
  • Most of the Trump supporters were unconcerned with matters of character. If they ever had a hope that a U.S. president would be someone they admired, a person who might represent the best of us — a war hero, say, like Dwight Eisenhower; a straight arrow like Jimmy Carter; or a trailblazer like Barack Obama — they had abandoned it. Many said that was an outdated or even naïve notion. They know who Mr. Trump is and don’t care.
  • ...30 more annotations...
  • “He’s a shyster, but I’d take him over her,” Marvin Cegielski, 84, the retired stone mason, told me. “He’ll block off the border.”
  • “I detest him as a person,” said Natalie Wriker, 37, who works at the Lutheran church in town, “but he’s the lesser of two evils.” She said she believes that politicians are “easily bought” but that Mr. Trump has less motivation to do things for money because of his wealth.
  • Among the Harris voters I talked with was Jaycee Venini, 23, who grew up in Riegelsville and works as a landscaper. “She is actually a human being,” he said. “I feel like that’s a minimum requirement. And she’s not full of greed or a convicted felon.”
  • I asked Tracy Russell, 58, if she had thoughts about the election. “Do I think about much else?” she replied. Ms. Russell, a writer for the stage and screen, also planned to vote for Ms. Harris. The issues most important to her, she said, were reproductive rights, the environment, fairness for disenfranchised communities and “having a president who can help turn things around in terms of our brotherhood to each other, and sisterhood.”
  • Mr. Boenzli is a naturalized citizen from Switzerland and a private pilot. Ms. Boenzli is a former school nurse and the author of a lifestyle blog called Maplewood Road, the name of their street. Both support Ms. Harris. “What matters to me is decency — the humanity of a person who is going to be president,” Mr. Boenzli said. “It’s obvious to me that he’s not a decent person, and I don’t understand the people who want to vote for him.”
  • The Trump supporters had a more complicated story to tell. They did not express fears that Ms. Harris would take away their guns — or, for that matter, even mention if they owned guns. None of them were QAnon-level conspiracy theorists who claimed that Democrats were pedophiles. In other words, they did not seem insane.
  • But in their defense of Mr. Trump — of his serial lying, his misogyny, his role in the Jan. 6 insurrection — they offered a range of explanations and rationalizations that did not align with any knowable reality.
  • “I think it was a crowd that just got out of hand,” Gary Chase, 72, said when I asked him about Jan. 6. “Some of it was set up. There were feds in the crowd who whipped it all into a frenzy.”
  • He viewed Jan. 6 not as a national tragedy but as a partisan event. “It was a political show, a distraction from the whole Hunter Biden scandal,” he said.
  • Those sentiments were echoed by others. Jon Libasci, 62, an architect, said, “How was it different from the police headquarters burned down during the B.L.M. protests?”
  • Mr. Libasci commutes by car to his office in Manhattan, a drive of about an hour and 15 minutes. “Gas was $2.25 a gallon when Trump left office,” he said. “I just paid $4 for mid-grade. You hear what Trump says: ‘Drill, baby, drill.’ I’m OK with that.”
  • I asked her about Mr. Trump’s long history of using language that denigrates women. “I have no concerns about his rhetoric,” she said. “I’m a big believer in you get the treatment you allow people to give you. I won’t let you cross that line with me. But I’m not a fool. I know that when men get together, they speak like men.”
  • I asked Trump supporters about his performance in the debate with Ms. Harris. None argued that the result for him had been anything other than a sound defeat. Several, though, observed that Ms. Harris had clearly spent more time rehearsing — as if preparing for an important event were not a quality you’d want in a president.
  • “John can take a piece of metal and make anything out of it,” Michael Schaffer, 74, the lone Harris supporter at the table, said. “These guys I meet up with every morning, they’re brilliant, each of them in their own way. That’s why I just don’t understand their attraction to Trump.”
  • I asked them about Mr. Trump’s business history, which includes six bankruptcies, numerous instances of cheating his vendors and years of paying minimal or no federal taxes. Their responses were similar to what I heard from other Trump supporters: They accept that the rich play by different rules. Rather than resentment, they expressed admiration. “Every rich businessman goes bankrupt,” Mr. Shoemaker said.
  • A retired car dealer at the table, who asked that his name not be used, said he believed that Mr. Trump, as president, “took care of big business, and that’s smart because it’s good for all of us.”
  • In Riegelsville, several Trump supporters brought up former President Bill Clinton’s sexual encounters with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office, which may have caused more damage to the institution of the presidency than many Democrats are willing to acknowledge.
  • I ended up talking to a pretty good chunk of the town’s voters. As I made my way around, what struck me was the difference in expectations. Ms. Harris’s supporters expressed a sense of hope that she might lead us into an era that feels sunnier. It wasn’t quite blind optimism, but they were willing to let her fill in the details.
  • Mr. Trump has activated darker impulses. His followers were unbothered by his constant denigration of women, of immigrants, of political opponents and even, if he loses, of Jews he says will be at fault for not having proper gratitude for how much he’s done for them.
  • A president is called on to lead, especially in times of crisis. But if Mr. Trump’s supporters remembered that his response to the Covid epidemic was an exercise in chaos, disinformation and divisiveness, that did not bother them, either
  • They were not looking to be led or inspired. They said they want him to lower gas and food prices and close the southern border.
  • The relationship seemed purely transactional — even if the specific things they expect him to deliver would be largely beyond Mr. Trump’s control.
  • Presidents don’t set food and gas prices, and to truly solve the problems at the border would require an act from Congress — like the one Mr. Trump quashed in the spring for his own political benefit.
  • Character flaws in a national leader are not just about an individual — they speak to the character of a nation, its aspirations and ideals, and the type of government we want.
  • Mr. Trump often isn’t campaigning on a recognizable version of recent Republican policies. He is not bound by any party-coalition give-and-take. He is the party, and whatever he says, those are its positions. His product, solely, is himself.
  • What if what his supporters really want, and do not express, is the Trump vibe? All the name-calling, coarseness and bullying? The hypermasculine, authoritarian rhetoric?
  • Mr. Trump is peddling that poison like political crack, and half the nation is hooked, the other half repulsed. If it works and he is elected, it promises four more years of national political warfare.
  • As I walked its pleasant residential streets, Riegelsville really did, at times, feel like a Hallmark town. I figured that if there was a place that former Trump supporters might have grown sick of him — weary enough of all the ugliness and constant sense of grievance to cast him aside — this might be it.
  • I was wrong. One of my last conversations was with a construction worker at the general store who asked that his name not be used. He brought up the assassination attempt on Mr. Trump in western Pennsylvania. “It was Biden’s fault,” the man said. How so? I asked. “Oh, c’mon,” he said. “The deep state tried to take him down. You have to be an idiot not to be able to see that.”
  • I also heard Riegelsville described as “quintessential Americana” — and in a slightly altered way, that also felt apt. It is America in 2024. It’s defenseless, like everywhere else, from the ever-rising tide of division and madness in the civic life of our nation.
Javier E

Opinion | The F.T.C.'s Lina Khan Took On Big Tech. Now Her Job Is on the Line. - The Ne... - 0 views

  • Over the past 75 years, venture capitalists repeatedly nurtured early-stage companies to the point where they could replace big, established firms and drive markets in new directions.
  • Times have changed. The power of major technology incumbents is now so great, and the dependence of venture capital firms on those incumbents so complete, that today’s V.C.s are now siding with the monopolies — and fighting government agencies that are trying to advance competition.
  • These tech monopolies were enabled in part by our government’s decision to loosen the reins on our biggest corporations.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • For much of the history of antitrust policy, which dates to the late 19th century, courts remained suspicious of market consolidation and used antitrust to maintain competition. In a landmark case in 1911, the Supreme Court ruled that Standard Oil, which controlled nearly 90 percent of the U.S. oil market, had used predatory pricing, control of oil pipelines and leverage with railroad shippers to unfairly obstruct competitors. It ordered the company be broken up.
  • And when rivals did emerge, Amazon often bought them. Third-party retailers lacking an alternative sell their wares on Amazon’s marketplace only to say they found their most successful products copied and sold by Amazon itself. Meanwhile, the company routinely changes and obfuscates prices, making it harder for consumers to obtain the supposed benefits of online shopping.
  • As the internet matured in the early 2000s, there was hope it would spur a new generation of businesses by lowering the cost of reaching national or even global markets. Instead, a handful of enormous companies dominate key technology markets. To this day, and notwithstanding a surge since the pandemic, rates of entrepreneurship languish below the rate set in 2006.
  • The most successful of the new tech giants found ways to leverage online markets to their advantage. Take Amazon. By offering below-cost prices its rivals couldn’t match, it established itself as the gateway for digital commerce, and over time it has been able to erect further barriers to entry only possible in the internet age, like its rich data on consumer behavior and its huge repository of consumer reviews.
  • That began to shift in the 1970s and 1980s, when legal scholars, influenced by free-market economists, argued that markets can police themselves, and the focus of antitrust should be on maintaining the quantity and prices of goods rather than on the levels of competition or number of businesses. If a large corporation wanted to undercut a smaller rival on price, that isn’t predatory, but a benefit to consumers.
  • Now, Amazon controls something like 40 percent of online retail in the United States. Google controls 90 percent of the global search market. Meta owns three of the four largest social media platforms. And already Amazon, Meta and Google, along with Microsoft, are positioned to control the future of artificial intelligence.
  • In 2017, Lina Khan, then a student, identified the problem in an influential law review article that argued that Big Tech was amassing market power in ways that failed to register in the current legal regime. Appointed chair of the Federal Trade Commission four years later, she immediately set about pushing for a return to the more expansive antitrust jurisprudence of earlier eras.
  • You would think that venture capitalists — who purport to be in the business of displacing incumbents — might support the F.T.C. Instead, many have attacked.
  • Ms. Khan is “not a rational human being,” said Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures. Reid Hoffman, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist who sits on the board of Microsoft, has argued that Ms. Khan is trying to “dismantle companies” and called on a future President Harris to replace her.
  • I believe the attacks on Ms. Khan and the F.T.C. are an effort to protect the few very large technology companies that dominate markets
  • Venture capitalists must find ways to cash out on their investments, and in a world where four out of five of those cashouts involve selling startups to bigger firms, Big Tech is now venture capital’s biggest customer. The game might be rigged, but it’s the only game in town.
  • As markets concentrate, newly entrenched monopolies start exercising their power to foreclose challenges. They lock up talent, hoard patents and engage in predatory pricing. Entrepreneurs face more and more hurdles. Consumers and the economy suffer.
  • A robust federal antitrust program may be the only force that can liberate technology markets from the hold of Big Tech and restore venture capitalists to their true calling: advancing the cycle of innovation that powers American capitalism.
Javier E

Trump Chooses Lee Zeldin to Run E.P.A. as He Plans to Gut Climate Rules - The New York ... - 0 views

  • Mr. Trump campaigned on pledges to “kill” and “cancel” E.P.A. rules and regulations to combat global warming by restricting fossil fuel pollution from vehicle tailpipes, power plant smokestacks and oil and gas wells.
  • In particular, Mr. Trump wants to erase the Biden administration’s most significant climate rule, which is designed to speed a transition away from gasoline-powered cars and toward electric vehicles.
  • Mr. Zeldin wrote on X. “We will restore US energy dominance, revitalize our auto industry to bring back American jobs, and make the US the global leader of AI. We will do so while protecting access to clean air and water.”
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • Mr. Trump, who blames environmental regulations for hampering a variety of industries, including construction and oil and gas drilling. During his first term, Mr. Trump rolled back more than 100 environmental policies and regulations. President Biden restored many of them and strengthened several.
  • Some people on Mr. Trump’s transition team say the agency needs a wholesale makeover and are even discussing moving the E.P.A. headquarters and its 7,000 workers out of Washington, D.C.,
  • “Lee Zeldin is a great pick,” said Mandy Gunasekara, who served as chief of staff at the E.P.A. under the first Trump administration. She wrote a section on the E.P.A. for Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for re-engineering the federal government. In it, she recommends slashing the E.P.A.’s budget, ousting career staff, eliminating scientific advisers that review the agency’s work and closing programs that focus on minority communities with heavily polluted air and water.
  • He was a member of the House’s Bipartisan Climate Solutions Caucus and earned a 14 percent lifetime score from the League of Conservation Voters, an environmental group. It is a low mark from the environmental advocacy group, but it was nevertheless higher than nearly any other Republican.
  • When Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York criticized Mr. Zeldin for opposing the climate law, he responded on social media, saying “I just voted NO because the bill sucks.”
  • “Being that it raises taxes, adds 87,000 new IRS agents, & spends hundreds of billions of dollars our country doesn’t have on far-left policies our country can’t afford, I’m not surprised you’d blindly endorse it,” he wrote.
  • During Mr. Zeldin’s tenure in the House, he voted against clean water legislation at least a dozen times, and clean air legislation at least half a dozen times, according to the League of Conservation Voters scorecard.
  • Mr. Zeldin has also taken some votes that the group supported, including prohibiting oil and gas drilling off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts. He also voted in favor of a landmark conservation bill that passed with bipartisan support and was signed by Mr. Trump. It guarantees maximum annual funding for a federal program to acquire and preserve land for public use.
  • He voted for a bill that would require the E.P.A. to set limits on PFAS, which are a family of man-made chemicals that are persistent in the environment and the human body. The E.P.A. under the Biden administration has set strict limits on the chemicals in drinking water. In 2020, he voted against legislation that would have slashed E.P.A.’s budget.
  • “It would be productive if we could get to what is real and what is not real,” he said. “I’m not sold yet on the whole argument that we have as serious a problem as other people are.”
Javier E

'Trump's America': His Comeback Victory Signals a Different Kind of Country - The New Y... - 0 views

  • The assumption that Mr. Trump represented an anomaly who would at last be consigned to the ash heap of history was washed away on Tuesday night by a red current that swept through battleground states — and swept away the understanding of America long nurtured by its ruling elite of both parties.
  • With his comeback victory to reclaim the presidency, Mr. Trump has now established himself as a transformational force reshaping the United States in his own image.
  • Populist disenchantment with the nation’s direction and resentment against elites proved to be deeper and more profound than many in both parties had recognized. Mr. Trump’s testosterone-driven campaign capitalized on resistance to electing the first woman president.
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • he once again tapped into a sense among many others that the country they knew was slipping away, under siege economically, culturally and demographically.
  • To counter that, those voters ratified the return of a brash 78-year-old champion willing to upend convention and take radical action even if it offends sensibilities or violates old standards. Any misgivings about their chosen leader were shoved to the side.
  • As a result, for the first time in history, Americans have elected a convicted criminal as president. They handed power back to a leader who tried to overturn a previous election, called for the “termination” of the Constitution to reclaim his office, aspired to be a dictator on Day 1 and vowed to exact “retribution” against his adversaries.
  • “The real America becomes Trump’s America,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian at New York University. “Frankly, the world will say if this man wasn’t disqualified by Jan. 6, which was incredibly influential around the world, then this is not the America that we knew.”
  • “The Trump presidency speaks to the depth of the marginalization felt by those who believe they have been in the cultural wilderness for too long and their faith in the one person who has given voice to their frustration and his ability to center them in American life,”
  • Rather than be turned off by Mr. Trump’s flagrant, anger-based appeals along lines of race, gender, religion, national origin and especially transgender identity, many Americans found them bracing
  • Rather than be offended by his brazen lies and wild conspiracy theories, many found him authentic.
  • Rather than dismiss him as a felon found by various courts to be a fraudster, cheater, sexual abuser and defamer, many embraced his assertion that he has been the victim of persecution.
  • “This election was a CAT scan on the American people, and as difficult as it is to say, as hard as it is to name, what it revealed, at least in part, is a frightening affinity for a man of borderless corruption,” said Peter H. Wehner, a former strategic adviser to President George W. Bush and vocal critic of Mr. Trump. “Donald Trump is no longer an aberration; he is normative.”
  • Mr. Trump’s victory was a repudiation of an administration that passed sweeping pandemic relief, social spending and climate change programs but was hobbled by sky-high inflation and illegal immigration, both of which were brought under control too late.
  • Moreover, Mr. Biden and Ms. Harris never managed to heal the divisions of the Trump era as promised, though it may never have been possible. They could not figure out how to channel the anger that propels his movement or respond to the culture wars he fosters.
  • Ms. Harris initially emphasized a positive, joy-filled mission to the future, consolidating excited Democrats behind her, but it was not enough to win over uncommitted voters.
  • At that point, she switched back to Mr. Biden’s approach of warning about the dangers of Mr. Trump and the incipient fascism she said he represented. That was not enough either.
  • “The coalition that elected them wanted them to unite the country, and they failed to do so,” said former Representative Carlos Curbelo, an anti-Trump Republican from Florida. “Their failure has resulted in further disillusionment with our country’s politics and empowered the Trump base to give him another narrow victory
  • For all of its commitment to constitutionalism, the United States has seen moments before when the public hungered for a strongman and exhibited a willingness to empower such a figure with outsized authority. That has often come during times of war or national peril, but Mr. Trump frames the current struggle for America as a war of sorts.
  • “Trump has been conditioning Americans throughout this campaign to see American democracy as a failed experiment,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a historian and author of “Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.” By praising dictators like President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Xi Jinping of China, she said, “he has used his campaign to prepare Americans for autocracy.”
  • She cited his adoption of language from Nazi and Soviet lexicons, such as branding opponents as “vermin” and the “enemy from within” while accusing immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country,” and suggesting that he might use the military to round up opponents. “A victory for Trump would mean that this vision of America — and the recourse to violence as a means of solving political problems — has triumphed,” Ms. Ben-Ghiat said.
  • Mr. Short predicted another four years of chaos and uncertainty. “I would anticipate a lot of volatility — personnel but also significant boomerangs on policy,” he said. “Not boomerang from Biden-Harris but boomerang from himself. You’ll have one position one day and another the next.”
  • Mr. Trump’s latest victory also adds ammunition to the argument that the country is not ready for a woman in the Oval Office
  • Mr. Trump, a thrice-married admitted adulterer accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, has for the second time defeated a woman with more experience in public office than he had. Each of them was flawed, just as male candidates are flawed, but the sense of 2016 déjà vu on the left on Wednesday morning was palpable.
  • Yet even though most abortion rights referendums were passing in various states on Tuesday, the issue did not galvanize women in the first presidential race since Roe v. Wade was overturned to the extent that Democrats had expected and Republicans feared.
  • “In many ways, this is the last chapter of the Jan. 6 drama,” said Mr. Naftali. “Many Republicans thought they had managed to thread the needle, to avoid pissing off their base while also jettisoning Trump. And it turned out they hadn’t. And now they have him back. And if he wins the bet, and he’s returned to power, then the final verdict of Jan. 6 is that in modern America, you can cheat and the system isn’t strong enough to fight back.”
  • The defining struggle going forward will be the war that Mr. Trump says he will now wage against a system that he deems corrupt. If he follows his campaign promises, he will seek to consolidate more power in the presidency, bring the “deep state” to heel and go after “treasonous” political opponents in both parties and the media.
  • He learned from his first term, not so much about policy, but about how to pull the levers of power. And this time, he will have more latitude, a more aligned set of advisers and possibly both houses of Congress as well as a party that even more than eight years ago answers solely to him.
  • The Trump era, it turns out, was not a four-year interregnum. Assuming he finishes his new term, it now looks to be a 12-year era that puts him at the center of the political stage as long as Franklin D. Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan were.
  • It is Mr. Trump’s America after all.
Javier E

Why Trump Won - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Trump consistently offered a clear message that spoke to Americans’ frustration about the economy and the state of the country, and promised to fix it.
  • Throughout the campaign, Trump told voters that President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and undocumented immigrants were responsible for inflation, and that he would fix the problem.
  • His proposals were often incoherent and nonsensical.
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • We’re going to help our country heal,” Trump said in remarks early this morning. “We’re going to help our country heal. We have a country that needs help, and it needs help very badly. We’re going to fix our borders, we’re going to fix everything about our country, and we’ve made history for a reason tonight, and the reason is going to be just that.”
  • in a strange way, Trump does offer a kind of hope. It is not a hope for women with complicated pregnancies or LGBTQ people or immigrants, even legal ones. But for those who fit under Stephen Miller’s rubric that “America is for Americans and Americans only,” Trump promised a way out.
  • in a country where roughly three-quarters of Americans feel that things are on the wrong track, a pledge to fix things was potent.
  • You can contrast that with the message coming from Kamala Harris and the Democratic Party, which was more outwardly hopeful but suffered from a serious, perhaps unfixable, flaw.
  • Harris promised to protect things like Social Security and Medicare, and warned that Trump would ruin everything that was great about America. This was a fundamentally conservative answer, coming from a Democratic Party that, as I wrote last year, has become strikingly conservative, but it came at a time when too many voters were disgusted with the status quo.
  • The administration argued with frustration that inflation was a worldwide trend, caused by COVID, and pointed out that inflation in the U.S. had dropped faster than in peer countries, and that the American economy was running better than any other. All of this was true and also politically unhelpful. You can’t argue people into feeling better with statistics.
  • In early October, the hosts of The View asked her what she’d have done differently from the president, and she replied, “There is not a thing that comes to mind in terms of—and I’ve been a part of most of the decisions that have had impact, the work that we have done.” Republicans were delighted and made that a staple of attack ads and stump speeches.
  • Whether this was out of loyalty to her boss or some other impulse, it’s not clear that Harris would have been able to pull off a more radical switch. She was still the Democratic nominee, and voters around the world have punished incumbent parties in recent elections.
  • Her coalition meant she couldn’t run an aggressively protectionist or anti-immigrant campaign, even if she had been so inclined. Her strategic decision to court centrist and Republican voters closed off moving very far to the left on economics, though past campaigns do not offer clear evidence that would have been a winner either.
  • Besides, Democrats had a good empirical case that what they had done to steward the economy was very successful. They just had no political case.
  • In a bitter turn for Democrats, Trump will now benefit from their governing successes.
  • If he truly attempts to, or succeeds at, speedily deporting millions of people or instituting 60 percent tariffs, he will drive inflation higher and wreck the progress of Biden’s term, but Trump’s own political instincts and the influence of many very wealthy people around him may temper that
Javier E

The Berlin Wall Never Fell - by Timothy Snyder - 0 views

  • he Berlin Wall did not fall.  It did not fall thirty-five years ago today.  It never fell.  The "fall of the Berlin Wall" is a literary device, not a historical event. And that we have chosen a false image to stand for a moment of liberation reveals a problem.
  • Pretty much everyone says "the fall of the Berlin Wall" as a shorthand for the "the end of communism in eastern Europe."  But something that never happened cannot be a source of an actual memory.  It cannot teach us, for example, how authoritarianism is resisted. 
  • The image of a wall falling transforms a complicated history into a simple moment.  But when we embrace that image of something that never happened, we lose everything that we need to remember, everything that is human and interesting.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • The opening of the checkpoint that night was an accident.  But it was an accident made possible by human action. 
  • East Germans had chosen to leave their country.  They were protesting, and believed that they could protest in part because other people were doing so.  The largest and most effective protests were in neighboring Poland.  They went back to the foundation of a labor union, Solidarity, in 1980.  By November 1989, Poland had already formed a post-communist government.
  • the crucial thing to remember is what Poles did.  In the face of dictatorship they found concepts of cooperation and lived them.
  • The resistance to communism was a human story of cooperation.  Its dissidents stressed the need to work together.  Its most important organization was a union.  When a certain conjuncture emerged in 1989, it was these practices and traditions that allowed new political alternatives to emerge.
  • The human cooperation, called "civil society" at the time, was not enough in itself to change the world.  But when the world began to change in other ways, people were ready.  
  • When we imagine the Berlin Wall falling, as we will be summoned to do today, we are instructed that freedom is something that just happens.  The wall was up.  Bad.  And then it fell.  Good.  We think of freedom like that because it removes the responsibility from us.  And that is the wrong lesson, wrong historically and so wrong politically and morally.
  • Thirty five years ago today, the Berlin Wall did not fall. 
  • Thirty five years ago today, some people made history, amidst other people making history, thanks to some prior cooperation, and some good thinking about what freedom means.
Javier E

The Cumulative Toll of Democrats' Delusions - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • Surprised? No, I was not surprised,” Torres, who represents a poor and working-class district in the Bronx, told me. “Much of my side in politics, and much of the media, was in a state of self-deception. We confused analysis with wishful thinking.”
  • too many in Torres’s party assumed that they were heralds of virtue and endangered democratic values
  • There’s no need to assume—as some commentators have after Donald Trump’s sweeping victory Tuesday—that the United States has a uniquely fallen electorate; across the globe, voters have tossed out governments on the left and right over the disruptions of the past five years. “A majority of Americans disapprove of Biden’s performance and felt they were worse off,” Torres said; Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, “was not responsible for the inflation, but objectively, that was a near-insurmountable disadvantage.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Torres pointed as well to the cumulative toll taken by progressives who for at least a decade have loudly championed cultural causes and chanted slogans that turned off rank-and-file Democrats across many demographics
  • “Donald Trump had no greater friend than the far left,” Torres told me, “which alienated historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews with absurdities like ‘Defund the police’ or ‘From the river to the sea’ or ‘Latinx.’”
  • Torres emphasized that in his view, Harris ran a vigorous and effective campaign, given the circumstances. He did not discern many missteps. Although she sometimes tossed up clouds of vagueness when asked about past positions, she was disciplined and avoided mouthing the buzzwords of the cultural left during her 2024 campaign
  • But she could not sidestep her previous concessions to liberal cultural fevers, as she discovered when the Trump campaign bludgeoned her with endless commercials highlighting her decision, during her bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, to champion state-funded gender-transition surgery for prisoners.
  • In recent election cycles, Democrats have invested much hope that “people of color”—the widely varied and disparate peoples long imagined to be a monolith—would embrace an expansive list of progressive causes and rearrange American politics.
  • Politics, alas, is more complex than simply arranging virtuous ethnic and racial voting bloc
  • Four years ago, even as Biden triumphed, a majority of Asian and Latino voters in California rejected a ballot proposition that would have restored affirmative action in education and hiring.
  • A week before the election, Marcel Roman, a Harvard government professor, explained on X that he and a Georgetown colleague had discovered that Latino voters deeply dislike being labeled Latinx, a gender-neutral term now widespread in academia. This term also came into use by Democratic politicians eager to establish their bona fides with progressive activists. Alas, voters liked it not so much.
  • This problem seems easily remedied: Refer to voters by the term they prefer—Latino, say, or Hispanic. Roman drew a different conclusion, calling for “political education meant to root out queerphobia in Latino communities.”
  • Democrats might do well to listen carefully and respectfully to the tens of millions of Americans whom they claim to want to represent. This need not entail a turn away from populist economics so much as remaining clear-eyed about self-righteous rhetoric and millennialist demands.
  • He noted in our conversation that he is strongly in favor of immigration, and his majority-Latino district has many hardworking undocumented residents who need his aid.
  • But he recognizes that the national electorate, not least many Latino and Black voters, now seeks to at least partially close the door and tighten restrictions. He accepts that reality. “You have to recognize that in a democracy, public opinion matters,” he said. “We cannot just assume that we can reshape the world in a utopian way.”
Javier E

Opinion | Let's Not Lose Sight of Who Trump Is - The New York Times - 0 views

  • The outcome of the election, it almost goes without saying, puts America on a right-wing populist path, inching ever closer toward a form of autocratic rule rarely, if ever, seen in the nation’s history.
  • Trump’s campaign was openly racist, xenophobic and authoritarian and his supporters appear to be willing to jettison democracy in support of an autocratic demagogue who promises to “fix everything” while pandering to their angers, resentments and prejudices.
  • Fukuyama went on to say:The move of the working class to the Republicans is now much more entrenched. For Blacks and Hispanics voting for Trump, class was much more important than identity, and Democrats failed to understand that. I really think that the importance of the transgender issue was underappreciated by the Democrats. They simply thought it was the latest civil rights issue when the actual policy was really crazy and offensive to working class voters.
  • ...37 more annotations...
  • The MAGA/Republican coalition is clearly a viable competitor. Indeed, the coalition just won the White House — and the Senate. The coalition has proved its ability to retain strong support with the working-class, rural, non-college-educated base, still attract most of the rest of the older Republican electorate, and has demonstrated the capacity to grow into new areas such as Latino and Black men.
  • Early predictions of inevitable demographic shifts toward the Democrats missed how identity is complex, and how it can change. In our era of intense polarization, coalitions don’t have to be overwhelming. They just need to be big enough to push a party over in the swing states.
  • The first time a person is elected, for example, Reagan in 1980, we vote based on promise, aspiration and potential. The re-election campaign, which this is more comparable to, for Trump, is about legitimation. Voters know what they are getting and say that is who they want in office.
  • Trump, Zelizer pointed out, “has been extraordinarily transparent about his hostility toward core democratic principles — the peaceful transition of power, confidence in the election system, limitations on presidential power and more.”
  • “When you win an election this broadly,” Francis Fukuyama, a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies, argued in an email, “you’re entitled to move ahead with your agenda. The only limitations will be capacity (hard to deport 11 million people) and the courts which haven’t been completely made subservient.”
  • How big a role did gender play in Harris’s defeat?“Many men and non-college-educated women,” Cain argued, “still equate women with weakness and blustery masculinity with strength.”
  • conservative power is consolidated in a way that makes the Biden administration look like the fluke, the last gasp of a dying order.
  • The MAGA coalition, in contrast,doesn’t feel like the last stand of a dying electorate at all since Trump actually has managed to diversify the Republican electorate in a broad way. And doesn’t seem like the tyranny of a minority, because — though tyranny it may turn into — it would be the tyranny of the majority, since it looks like he’s clearly on track to win the popular vote.
  • The primary threat Trump poses, Fukuyama argued,is to the rule of law. He’s been very clear in the last few months and weeks that he’s really out for revenge. He wants to take revenge on all the people that he believes have been prosecuting him and or persecuting him. And I think that this is where Schedule F (Trump’s proposal to politicize the top ranks of the civil service) really matters. I think he’s going to put people in key positions in the Justice Department that will enable them to open up investigations.
  • Fukuyama expects Viktor Orban of Hungary to provide Trump a governing model with “this kind of steady, slow erosion of one check and balance against executive power after another.”
  • Donald Trump’s theory of the case was broadly correct. He and his campaign managers believed that it was possible to build on Republicans’ growing strength among white working-class voters to create a multiethnic working-class coalition. He was right: He made strides among Latinos and African Americans, especially men. He increased his share of the Black male vote from 12 percent to 20 percent and carried Hispanic men by nine points, 54 percent to 45 percent.
  • The Trump campaign, Galston went on to say,decided that Harris’s stance on transgender issues was the Willie Horton of 2024 and invested heavily in negative advertising that dominated the airwaves. Anecdotal evidence suggests that this campaign helped weaken Harris’s effort to portray herself as a common-sense center-left candidate rather than an emissary from San Francisco.
  • Once in power with a supine Republican-controlled Congress and judiciary, Trump will govern despotically as a populist based on his uninformed and increasingly delusional understanding of the nation and its challenges, wreaking havoc on the American political economy and the global political order.
  • The scale of Trump’s electoral success and the red shift in Congress makes it clear that Americans have rejected the policies and priorities of the Democratic Party. Many voters cast their ballots based on their perceptions of the economy. Although Harris attempted to highlight improvements in macroeconomic indicators, voters struggling with rising costs for essentials like milk, bread, and gas felt little connection between their financial troubles and abstract measures like G.D.P. growth.
  • According to Westwood, “What seems to unify the majority of voters is dissatisfaction with the vision of America articulated by Harris and the Democratic Party.”
  • The election outcome suggests that voters did not place much weight on the fear that Trump would undermine a “vision of America,” despite his history of doing just that.
  • The election results are in line with work suggesting that people care more about policy outcomes than democracy. Research shows that when people are asked whether they want a candidate that supports their preferred policy but subverts democracy versus a candidate that doesn’t support their preferred policy but is more democratic, they tend to choose the former. Policy trumps democracy.
  • Young men of lesser education are hit twice, both in marriage and in labor markets. It is not surprising that they are most likely to voice their grievances in expressions of political dissatisfaction with the status quo. Add onto this that almost without exception around the Western Hemisphere women now constitute the majority of college students and graduates and the full picture of change comes into view.
  • While most of the experts I contacted view the 2024 election as a major, and perhaps realigning, development in American politics, some were more cautious in their views.
  • my reading of 2024 is that this was a pedestrian “time for a change” election.
  • Polling, she added,had long shown that voters were very sour on the direction of the country, the high cost of living after the Covid shocks, and the scale of undocumented immigration. Polls were clear that Trump was more trusted on all those issues. Trump’s behavior on Jan. 6, 2021, probably was troubling to at least some of those who voted for him, as was his divisive rhetoric. But in a two-party system, voters’ choices were severely limited. They could either support Kamala Harris, the sitting vice president of an administration they blamed for the state of the country, or former President Trump, the only alternative on offer.
  • much of that expansion can be understood as swing voters moving against an unpopular administration. Harris underperformed Biden with almost all demographic groups. I wouldn’t see the voters who joined the Trump column this year as permanent parts of the Trump coalition. We need to see this expanded coalition hold together for additional cycles before we can draw firm conclusions about change in the G.O.P. generally.
  • Americans, in poll after poll, told us how this result should be interpreted — as a reaction to inflation and personal economic unease among many voters. Experts may understand that inflation was an inevitable outcome of successful efforts to save the economy during a global pandemic, that it is now largely under control in the United States, and that we fared better than most peer nations. But, average Americans have been feeling it in their pocketbooks for the last few years. It is incredibly difficult for the incumbent party to win when voters feel their spending power has decreased.
  • Donald Trump’s recasting of the Republican Party achieved a decisive victory over the combined forces of moderate center-left and radical left-libertarian political currents uneasily cohabiting under the umbrella of the Democratic Party. Historians may place the 2024 election, or the 2016-24 sequence, in significance for the United States on a par with the elections of 1860, 1876, 1896 and 1932.
  • The New Deal party system that was in full force until 1964 has been fully replaced by a new alignment. 2024 ratifies a lasting realignment in the American party system.
  • Driving the transformation of politics here and abroad, in Kitschelt’s view, are “changing ‘labor markets’ and changing ‘marriage/family markets.’”
  • These changes, according to Kitschelt,have produced new “winners” and “losers.” Changing labor markets have eroded the earnings potential of less educated people, and particularly those in occupations that were in demand in manufacturing. Changing marriage markets have reduced the bargaining power of men to dominate gender relations and the choice of offspring.
  • The problem now facing Democrats, Lelkes noted, is that they “will have to grapple with the fact that they are seen as the cultural elite and this is off-putting to a majority of the country, who do not see their values represented by highly educated city dwellers.”
  • The moderate and progressive left in the United States thought it could count on disadvantaged minorities as fixed components of a left-wing “rainbow coalition.” But it now turns out in the United States — and elsewhere — that these ethnic groups are internally divided by the same kinds of knowledge-society-induced divisions based on education, occupation and gender that run through the ethnic majority population
  • And right-wing populist authoritarians are increasingly skilled to sense these divisions and make their appeals resonate among the aggrieved elements of these minorities, especially younger people without college education, particularly young men.
  • The rise of Trumpism in the United States — and right-wing populist authoritarianism around the world — throws down the gauntlet to the remaining liberal and progressive forces to come up with new ideas for institutional innovation and policy reform that include those who have hitherto been losers of multiple decades of social change. The 2024 U.S. election is a signal that the political projects of the existing left have failed.
  • The pool of new “losers” is not represented by the Democratic Party and was not by the old Republican Party. A political entrepreneur — Donald Trump — has managed to activate them to drive his ascent. Aggrieved people look for an outlet and recently found one in Donald Trump, many of them never previously Republicans, but now Trumpists.
  • Kitschelt’s conclusion is both dark and bleak, suggesting that if Trump’s policies fail to produce a boom economy, his inclination toward authoritarianism will intensify as he tries to hold power in the face of growing public opposition:
  • When backed into a corner by policy failure, the greatest danger, then, becomes Donald Trump’s and his strategists’ inclination to suffocate opposition.
  • It is at this moment of policy failure, Kitschelt wrote, thatThe hour of political authoritarianism arrives, when the new wagers to create economic affluence among the less well-off and to resurrect the old kinship relations of industrial society turn sour and generate disenchantment among Trump’s own following.
  • Trump then may well want to make sure that his disenchanted supporters — as well as those who always opposed Trumpism — will not get another chance to express their opinions.
  • If the scenario Kitschelt depicts comes to pass, American voters will finally get to see the real Donald Trump — when it may be too late to do anything about it.
Javier E

Biden and Environmental Groups Try to Protect Climate Policies from Trump - The New Yor... - 0 views

  • Mr. Trump has said he wants to erase virtually all of Mr. Biden’s climate policies, which include rules intended to slash carbon emissions from power plants, automobiles and oil wells. He intends to make it easier to drill on public lands and in waters where Mr. Biden put up roadblocks. And he has called for repeal of Mr. Biden’s signature climate law, the Inflation Reduction Act.
  • The 2022 law provides at least $390 billion over 10 years in tax breaks, grants and subsidies for wind and solar power, electric vehicle battery production and other clean energy projects. Roughly 80 percent of the money spent in the first two years has flowed to Republican congressional districts, making a repeal politically challenging even if Republicans win complete control of Congress.
  • “Canceling electric vehicle plants in Georgia and battery factories in South Carolina is a losing strategy,” Mr. Markey said, adding, “The problem for Trump is the green revolution is blue and red.”
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The U.S. Treasury has issued guidance for 21 of the 24 tax provisions in the climate law. By the end of this year, it will finalize the last rules detailing who can claim tax credits for hydrogen production and tax credits for any facility that generates energy without producing greenhouse gases, whether that’s wind, solar, nuclear, hydropower or another source.
  • A handful of environmental regulations will be finalized, Mr. Podesta said. This week, the Interior Department issued two of them: a congressionally mandated plan for leases in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge that the Biden administration is restricting to the smallest parcels permitted by law; and a blueprint for protecting the greater sage grouse by limiting drilling, mining and livestock grazing across nearly 65 million acres of its habitat in 10 Western states. The E.P.A. is also expected to issue restrictions on pollution from gas-fired power plants.
  • Mr. Jealous of the Sierra Club said the environmental movement needed to do a better job of telling Americans how clean energy was creating jobs.
  • “We are the movement that is literally leading this country and rebuilding the manufacturing sector,” he said. “Trump can’t change the reality that an overwhelming majority of Americans want more clean energy, not more fossil fuels. Through investments in the Inflation Reduction Act, we are creating millions of new clean energy jobs. Clean energy is already cheaper in most cases than dirty fossil fuels, and wind and solar now generate more power in the U.S. than coal.”
Javier E

This Rout Is an Opportunity for Democrats--Shenk - 0 views

  • What do Democrats stand for? Over the last eight years, the answer has been simple: whatever Donald Trump is against. They have been the party of the so-called Resistance, defending institutions against a dangerous and fundamentally undemocratic movement
  • It has defined what it means to be a Democrat. And it failed spectacularly this week, helping clear a path for Mr. Trump to return to the White House with a clean victory in the popular vote
  • The first step for Democrats is reckoning with how they got here.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • In 2011, with Mr. Trump making headlines as the leading spokesman for birtherism, Barack Obama’s team seized the opportunity to cast him as the face of the entire Republican opposition. Years later, David Plouffe, an Obama campaign manager turned presidential adviser, explained the strategy. “Let’s really lean into Trump here,” Mr. Plouffe remembered thinking. “That’ll be good for us.”
  • the anti-MAGA coalition had rallied time and again, conveniently relieving Democrats of the burden that comes with deciding what to believe other than not being Mr. Trump.
  • But there was a price to be paid. No matter how progressive the rhetoric, Resistance politics inevitably feels conservative. It’s reactionary in a literal sense: The other side decides the terms of debate, and it usually ends with finding yet another norm under assault, a new outrage to be tutted over or another institution that needs protecting.
  • her biggest challenges were downstream from the failure to build a Democratic identity beyond #Resistance. Commitment to stitching together an anti-MAGA coalition made it impossible to lay out the priorities that would have guided a Harris administration
  • There was no way to tie her policies together into a unifying vision that set her apart from Mr. Biden, no account of what Democrats learned presiding over a country that most Americans feel is on the wrong track.
  • This fundamental problem explains the strange incoherence of Ms. Harris’s strategy. Judge the campaign by how it was described in the press, and you’d think the chief targets were Never Trump Republicans
  • Check out the ads that ran in swing states, though, and you’d hear a populist message that wouldn’t have sounded out of place coming from Bernie Sanders,
  • she struggled to harness material frustrations, even though testing from her chief super PAC, Future Forward, repeatedly demonstrated that it was her strongest argument with swing voters
  • the broad-based character of the shift toward Republicans is the classic tell of an electorate frustrated with an incumbent party. For now, the election looks like a rejection of Mr. Biden, not a realignment for Mr. Trump.
  • the pendulum that swung against Democrats on Tuesday will bring them back into power eventually. If history is any guide, that day will probably arrive sooner than feels possible right now.
  • Still, progressives worried that fascism is on the march would benefit from taking a closer look at how these movements gain power.
  • Reflecting on Hitler’s rise in her native Germany, Hannah Arendt pointed out that by the final days of the Weimar Republic, politics had split into two irreconcilable factions: “those who wanted the status quo at any price” versus “those who wanted change at any price.” One thing both groups had in common, she added, was “the tacit assumption that the electorate would go to the polls because it was frightened.”
  • He was impeached, indicted and convicted, and then he won more votes in a fair fight with what could well be the most racially diverse Republican coalition in decades. Trumpism doesn’t have a generational lock on American politics, but it has broad and deep support, with the potential to grow in the years to come.
  • It’s going to take a sprawling, messy and sometimes brutal debate inside the Democratic coalition — a debate that ends with a party that can plausibly present itself as a champion of ordinary people trying to make a better life in a broken system.
  • The Resistance has run into a dead end
  • it does mean giving up on the hope that laws, norms or one last impeachment will deliver us from Trumpism
Javier E

Opinion | The GOP has a lock on some states, Democrats others. It's not healthy. - The ... - 0 views

  • We have watched the national polarization that divides Americans in eerily equal numbers play out in vastly uneven ways, state to state. But talk of “red” and “blue” doesn’t capture either the full extent of the imbalance, or the knock-on consequences for the formation and pursuit of sound public policy.
  • It happened pretty quickly. In the early 2000s, three-fifths of the states saw reasonable political balance between the two major parties
  • Today, “trifecta” government, meaning one-party control of the governorship and both legislative bodies, has become the norm across the 50 states. In 40 states, containing 83 percent of the American population, one party enjoys trifecta dominance, and often by overwhelming margins.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • The roots of this phenomenon have been well studied. They include the cultural aggression of elite institutions and the predictable reaction to it, the nationalization of issues abetted by the collapse of local media and the pernicious effects of the antisocial media.
  • The gerrymandering that once exaggerated a dominant party’s political margin is no longer much of a factor; social clustering and these other factors have often done a more effective job than the political bosses ever did. In many jurisdictions today, one would have to reverse gerrymander, mixing geographies and crossing all kinds of legal boundary lines, to produce a truly competitive electorate.
  • Our campaign messages, as they had to, mostly centered on specific, new ideas: ethics reforms, access to health insurance, property tax caps, automatic tax refunds and many more, all couched in rhetoric stressing Indianans’ commonality as people, and the need for every part of the state to participate fully in its better future. Boy, is that passé.
  • Ideas fashioned not to stroke the erogenous zones of a riled-up minority of left or right, but to speak to the broader public in pursuit of a general election victory, evoke our common interest instead of our differences and antagonisms. But such campaigns rarely make sense these days.
  • Political campaigns need not necessarily be dispiriting, narrowcasting mudfests. They can be vehicles, in fact the best possible vehicles, for floating constructive ideas to an attentive public. Ideas proposed by a successful campaign have a higher likelihood of enactment after the election
  • Once in office, to make effective change, we had to engage with our Democratic counterparts, even in the years when we achieved full but narrow legislative control.
  • In 2024, 30 states feature not only trifecta government but 2-to-1 majorities in at least one house. In that setting, both campaigns and governance look totally different than they do in genuine two-party polities.
  • This year, our next governor ran a smart race and won his victory fair and square. The problem is that neither he, nor any of his competitors, had an incentive to offer their soon-to-be employers a sense of how Indiana could move forward.
  • What voters saw instead, besides attacks on each other, were political advertisements centered on “standing up to China,” taking on foreign drug cartels and closing the Mexican border. It became difficult to tell whether these folks were running for secretary of state or secretary of homeland security.
  • Wise policy and good government can and do emerge in lopsided states. But competition, always and everywhere, fosters innovation. In politics, it also compels a sensitivity and an outreach to the widest possible audiences.
  • The contours of the current system don’t conduce to those outcomes; until that changes, we have to hope for candidates who, elected by 5 percent of the state, somehow come to consider their duty of service to all the rest.
Javier E

A happiness expert's frank advice for Joe Biden - The Atlantic - 0 views

  • the ancient Hindu teaching on the stages of life, or ashramas, and the advice I received from a guru in southern India named Nochur Venkataraman. He taught me that many successful people get stuck in a stage called Grihastha—which is where you enjoy professional success and adulation—rather than progressing to Vanaprastha, which is where one should become more of a teacher (“crystallized intelligence”).
  • But there’s one more stage nearer the end called Sannyasa, which is to be fully enlightened and not working in the worldly domain. That transition is also sticky for many people—politicians, CEOs, sports figures, perhaps even the president—who struggle to stop doing what made them famous and admired. But that is the essence of truly retiring, and retiring well.
  • Matt: The United States seems to have the persistent problem of a geriatric ruling class. What’s your analysis of why that appears in our political elite?
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Arthur: Part of it is because we have a rigid system of power, and so we’re ridiculously institutionalized in the way that people can rise and prosper
  • Americans speak a good line about meritocracy, but we don’t have a meritocracy. When it comes to our politics, we have a gerontocracy that is based on seniority, loyalty, and tenure. We have leaders with tons of wisdom, but they don’t have the vigor and the focus and the energy to be putting in the grinding work of national and international governance.
  • Matt: Happiness is your principal subject, and your work usually frames it in terms of advice to the individual: How can you be happy? How can I be happy? But in this political moment, there’s also a dimension of this that’s about collective happiness, the public good—a general happiness that is at stake in Biden’s decision. How do you balance that?
  • Arthur: You know the famous Zen Buddhist koan: What is the sound of one hand clapping? One interpretation of that koan is that the sound of one hand clapping is an illusion. And one version of that illusion is that your personal happiness is somehow meaningful. In fact, the clapping becomes a reality only when there’s a second hand.
  • In other words, your happiness is real only when somebody else is happy as well. So if you’re a public figure, then the good of the public is required to get the second hand clapping. Otherwise you’ll be living in illusion.
  • a philosopher at the University of Cambridge named Stephen Cave who wrote a really important book called Immortality. In it, he talks about how one of the ways to become immortal is to build a legacy, and the way to think about that is the internal struggle of Achilles. Obviously, the Greek hero is a mythological character, but his story presents an emblematic dilemma: The best way to achieve immortality is to secure your legacy through a heroic end; the worst way to get immortality—and the most efficacious way to destroy your legacy—is to just hang around. Do you see the irony? People who hang around because of their legacy are diminishing their legacy.
  • Arthur: So there’s personal advice and there’s political advice. The personal advice is that for all successful people, there comes a time to decide between being special and being happy. Being special—staying on top—is hard, tiring work. But it is an addiction, which is why people keep at it way beyond what seems reasonable, at great harm to themselves and others. Get sober; choose happiness.
  • The political advice is based on a lesson from history, that the mark of great leadership is what happens after leaders leave the scene. Did they teach the next generation and set up those who came after for success? And then did they step aside with grace and humility? Be able to answer yes to both of those questions.
Javier E

The Upstream Cause of the Youth Mental Health Crisis is the Loss of Community - 0 views

  • In our first post, Zach discussed Robert Putnam’s essential work on the decline of social capital and trust, which happened in part because new individualizing technologies (such as television) emerged and participation in local and communal activities waned. As communities weakened and trust eroded, so did the play-based childhood.
  • In the second post, we featured an essay by Seth Kaplan, author and lecturer at Johns Hopkins who studies fragile states. In it, he argued that to restore the play-based childhood, we must first rebuild strong in-person local communities
  • A web of overlapping, affect-laden associations and relationships that crisscross and reinforce each other;
  • ...45 more annotations...
  • On one end is doubling down on technology
  • On the other end is to focus on strengthening the real-world human communities and neighborhoods we live in. Seth advocates for the latter and provides us with a roadmap to get there.
  • A prototypical community consists of most or all of the following:
  • We note that the first generation to move its social life onto social media platforms immediately became the loneliest generation on record. There is a spectrum of approaches that we as a society can take to address the crushing loneliness of Gen Z and Gen Alpha
  • A set of shared values, norms, and goals—a common culture that unifies and constrains;
  • A common identity, ideally based on a common history and narrative and recognition of mutual interdependence
  • Shared rituals that celebrate the group, its past, and future;
  • High levels of trust;
  • High levels of commitment, with limited options for (or high costs to) exit;
  • Recognition of and respect for common authority figures who guide the group’s decision-making;
  • More affluent children had many of their activities organized for them by their parents, putting them in a variety of highly structured functional groups with different kids rather than repeatedly playing freely with their neighbors.
  • A diverse range of skills and personalities that can contribute complementary things of value (e.g., money, time, expertise) to the group;
  • Role models who exhibit the cultural behaviors that the group should ideally replicate or at least aspire to;
  • Exhibiting a high degree of inclusiveness by actively seeking to encompass every member who shares the same identity or location;
  • Capacity to strongly encourage through moral suasion certain norms of conduct and, if necessary, sanction misconduct.
  • As we can see from this list, a community requires a commitment to a certain social order—and usually to a place—that, by definition, must constrain some choices. In return for security, support, and belonging, members surrender some of their freedom.
  • This explains why creating community in America today is so difficult—few want to compromise their ability to make choices.
  • This is especially true among those with the resources and/or capacity to relocate as soon as a better opportunity beckons—the very people whose leadership and role-modeling communities can ill afford to lose.
  • Why Kids Need Real-World Community
  • Much of a child’s learning and formation is absorbed from the environment rather than directly taught by adults; behavior is better shaped by modeling than by lecturing.
  • The institutions (e.g., schools, churches, and parents’ groups) and norms (e.g., regular family dinners, neighborhood play dates, and the expectation that adults will monitor streets) around us shape our kids' lives in ways we sometimes fail to consider because they are subtle
  • Keystone actors and institutions that bridge and bond different members together;
  • As I documented in a previous essay at After Babel, unsupervised, child-directed play was in decline long before kids had smartphones. Why? Because place-based institutions and the communities they support were in decline
  • This oversupervision or “coddling”—the subject of the 2018 book co-authored by Greg Lukianoff and Jon—made the attractions of smartphones and social media even more appealing.
  • Many praise the myriad benefits that smartphones and social media are said to bring; online connection can give a person a sense of “community,” we are told.  We can find new friends, discover just about any idea imaginable, network, and even date through our phones. We can video chat with hundreds of people simultaneously from far-flung locations. We can pursue learning largely untethered from any physical space. Based on all of this, it would be easy to assume that place doesn’t matter.
  • I disagree. Physical place actually matters far more than we realize, especially as our lives become ever more placeless.
  • As Jon writes in The Anxious Generation, only real-world (place-based) social relationships and interactions have the four features that have characterized human interactions for millions of years. Such interactions are embodied, they are  synchronous, they involve one-to-one or one-to-several communications, and they have a high bar for entry and exit.
  • The challenge today is that smartphones and other digital devices bring so many interesting experiences to children and adolescents that they cause a serious problem: They reduce interest in all non-screen-based forms of experience.
  • today, the term “community” is often used in ways that are aspirational and limitless (e.g., many online advertisements for new social networks)—quite different from the original meaning of the term.
  • Why? Perhaps fewer individuals have any experience of what community really means. Young people are marketed to and formed by the twin pursuits of convenience and choice while simultaneously being told that a person’s chief purpose is to express themselves (usually through consumption)
  • First, you can select a place to live based on its social wealth.
  • Community differs significantly from friendships, social networks, or what is experienced online. Whereas communities offer mutual support in times of good and bad and are bolstered by robust institutions and norms encouraging frequent, positive interactions, care and concern for one another, and ample opportunities to work together towards common goals, the alternatives typically fall short on these elements. 
  • they fall far short of actually producing community, which requires overlapping institutions and activities, things that are very hard to achieve if you don’t share a physical place with one another. 
  • online communities are also voluntary, with many being platforms built for expression or personal advancement. Few provide the diversity of personalities, experiences, income levels, and outlooks that were common in most neighborhoods a few decades ago
  • This vision of the good life is part of the next generation’s socialization. It feels “natural” to them, and yet it does little to prepare them for the demands and delights of membership in a community.   
  • If you are a parent and want to join or build a community to enmesh your kids in, what can you do? Here are a few ideas to get started.
  • Few provide the incentives to earn recognition through the force of character rather than a performative act about oneself. Few provide multifaceted psychological and practical support when needed for members who feel vulnerable or fall into practical difficulties. 
  • we visited, stayed overnight, met lots of people, and asked lots of questions. In the end, we chose the D.C. suburb where I live now—a warm, welcoming, and institutionally rich place.
  • Second, consider how you can befriend neighbors and other parents in your immediate vicinity
  • Try the 8 Front Door Challenge, which helps you plan and host a Get-Together with neighbors closest to you
  • Participate in organizations or activities in your neighborhood. Spend time in places where people congregate locally
  • Organize a block party or play street. Create a neighborly block. 
  • Third, leverage local institutions to build neighborhood community. Schools are best placed for this because of their direct ties to local families and kids, but libraries, local businesses, houses of worship, and any other entity with strong ties to your locale can play an important role
  • Working with the local library to organize activities in or geared towards your specific neighborhood would create an opportunity for residents to meet one another.
  • In general, it’s always easier if you find allies among your neighbors, build partnerships with existing institutions, and leverage the assets (cultural, environmental, educational, economic, etc.) you already have locally. Think incrementally, building momentum step by step rather than thinking there is a magic bullet.
Javier E

Fareed Zakaria on the Age of Revolutions, the Power of Ideas, and the Rewards of Intell... - 0 views

  • ZAKARIA: Yes. I think I’ve always been intellectually very curious. I don’t think I’m the smartest person in the world, but I am very intellectually curious. I get fascinated by ideas and why things are some way. Even when I was very young, I remember I would read much more broadly than my peers.
  • I think I looked this up once, but Henry Kissinger’s memoirs came out when I was 14, I think. I remember reading them because I remember my mom — at that point, she was working at the Times of India. They excerpted it. I remember telling her that they had chosen some of the wrong excerpts, that there were other parts that would have been better. I must have read enough of it to have had an opinion.
  • The Bengali intelligentsia was the great intelligentsia of India, probably the most literate, the most learned. I think it’s because they’re very clever. One of the things I’ve always noticed is that people who are very clever political elites tend to think that they should run the economy because they can do it better than the market.
  • ...52 more annotations...
  • a lot of people who came out of third-world countries felt, “We are never going to catch up with the West if we just wait for the market to work its way over hundreds of years.” They looked at, in the ’30s, the Soviet Union and thought, “This is a way to accelerate modernization, industrialization.” They all were much more comfortable with the idea of something that sped up the historical process of modernization.
  • Milton Friedman used to say that there are two groups of people who don’t like the free market. Academics, intellectuals because they think they can do it better than the market, and businessmen because they don’t like competition. What they really want — this is a variation of the Peter Thiel argument — what they all really want is to be monopolists. That former part is, I think, what explains the Bengali intellectuals.
  • I think that the reality is, the market is much more powerful than they are in these areas. To give you one simple example, they decided, “Okay, we need to be making high-end chips.” Who do they bet on? They bet on Intel, a company that has failed miserably to compete with TSMC, the great Taiwanese chip manufacturer. Intel is now getting multi-billion-dollar grants from the United States government, from the European Union, because it fills all the categories that you’re looking for: big company, stable and well-run, in some sense, can guarantee a lot of jobs.
  • But of course, the reality is that chip making is so complicated
  • Who knew that, actually, it’s Nvidia, whose chips turned out to be designed for gaming, turned out to be ideal for artificial intelligence? That’s a perfect example of how the Hayekian market signals that come bottom-up are much more powerful than a political elite who tries to tell you what it is.
  • COWEN: What did you learn from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer?
  • One was a reverence for tradition, and in particular, I loved the hymnal. I think Britain’s great contribution to music is religious music. It doesn’t have anything to compete with the Germans and the Italians in opera and things like that. Religious music, I think the Brits and the English have done particularly well.
  • The second thing I would say is an admiration for Christianity for its extraordinary emphasis on being nice to people who have not been lucky in life. I would say that’s, to me, the central message of Christianity that I take, certainly from the Sermon on the Mount, and it’s imbued through the Book of Common Prayer: to be nice to the people who have been less fortunate than you. Be nice to poor people. Recognize that in God’s kingdom, the first shall be last and the last shall be first.
  • There is an enormous emphasis on the idea that those things that make you powerful in this world are not the things that really matter, that your dignity as a human being doesn’t come from that. I think that’s a very powerful idea. It’s a very revolutionary idea
  • Tom Holland has a very good book about this. He’s a wonderful historian in Britain. I think it’s called Dominion.
  • He points out what a revolutionary idea this was. It completely upended the Roman values, which were very much, the first shall be first. The powerful and the rich are the ones to be valued. He points out, here is this Jewish preacher coming out of the Middle East saying, “No, the first shall be last, the last shall be first in the kingdom of heaven.”
  • COWEN: I went to Amritsar the year before, and it was one of the most magical feelings I’ve ever had in any place. I’m still not sure what exactly I can trace it to — I am not a Sikh, of course. But what, for you, accounts for the strong, powerful, wondrous feeling one gets from that place?
  • I think there’s something about it architecturally, which is that there is a serenity about it. Sometimes you can find Hindu temples that are very elaborate. Sikhism is a kind of offshoot of Hinduism. The Hindu temples can be very elaborate, but very elaborate and ornate. This somehow has a simplicity to it. When you add to that the water — I’ve always thought that water adds an enormously calming effect
  • Hindi and Urdu are two Indian languages, very related. They both have roughly the same grammatical structure, but then Hindi derives its vocabulary entirely from Sanskrit, or almost entirely from Sanskrit, and Urdu derives its vocabulary almost entirely from Persian. Urdu is a language of Indian Muslims and is the official language for Pakistan. It’s a beautiful language, very lyrical, very much influenced by that Persian literary sensibility.
  • If you’re speaking one of the languages, there’s a way to alternate between both, which a lot of Indian politicians used to do as a way of signaling a broad embrace of both the Hindu and the Muslim communities. Nehru, India’s first prime minister, used to often do that. He would say, “I am delighted to be coming here to your home.” He’d repeat the word home, first in Urdu, then in Hindi, so that in effect, both constituencies were covered.
  • Modi, by contrast, India’s current prime minister, is a great Hindu nationalist. He takes pains almost never to use an Urdu word when he speaks. He speaks in a kind of highly Sanskritized Hindi that most Indians actually find hard to understand because the everyday language, Bollywood Hindi, is a mixture of Hindi words and Urdu words
  • I think the partition of India was a complete travesty. It was premised on this notion of religious nationalism. It was horrendously executed. The person who drew the lines, a man named Radcliffe, had never been to India. He’d never been east of the Suez and was given this task, and he did it in a month or two, probably caused a million-and-a-half to two million lives lost, maybe 10 million people displaced. It broke that wonderfully diverse, syncretic aspect of India.
  • If you look at cities like Delhi and Lahore, what was beautiful about them is that they mix together all the influences of India: Hindu, Muslim, Punjabi, Sindhi. Now what you have is much more bifurcated. If you go to Lahore, Lahore is a Muslim city in Pakistan, and it has a Punjabi influence. Delhi has become, essentially, much more Indian and Hindu and has lost that Muslim influence. To me, as somebody who really loves cosmopolitanism and diversity, it’s sad to see that. It’s almost like you’ve lost something that really made these places wonderfully rich.
  • I feel the same way when you read about the history of Europe. You think of a place like Vienna, which, in its most dazzling moment, was dazzling precisely because it was this polyglot population of people coming from all over the Habsburg Empire. A large segment of it was Jewish, and it had, as a result — think about Freud and Klimt and the music that came out of there, and the architecture that came out at the turn of the 19th century. And it’s all gone. It’s like, at this point, a somewhat beautiful but slightly dull Austrian city.
  • I remember once being asked when I was a graduate student at Harvard — Tony Lake was then national security adviser, and his office called and said — I’d written something in the New York Times, I think — “Mr. Lake would like you to come to the White House to brief him.”
  • I think, in a sense, Islam fit in within that tapestry very easily, and it’s been around for a while. When people talk about cleansing India, Hindu nationals talk about cleansing India of foreign influences. Islam has been in India since the 11th century, so it’s been around for a long time
  • I was amazed that America — it wasn’t America; it was where I was at Yale and Harvard and all that — that nobody cared where I came from. Nobody cared.
  • the syncretic nature of India, that India has always been diverse. Hinduism is very tolerant. It’s a kind of unusual religion in that you can believe in one god and be Hindu. You can believe in 300. You can be vegetarian and believe that’s a religious dictate. You can be nonvegetarian and believe that that’s completely compatible with your religion. It’s always embraced almost every variant and variation.
  • I walked in and there were five people around the table: Tony Lake; Deputy National Security Advisor Sandy Berger; George Stephanopoulos, who was then director of communications at the White House; Joe Nye, who was a senior professor at Harvard; one other person; and myself. And I kept thinking to myself, “Are they going to realize at some point that I’m not an American citizen? They’re asking me for my advice on what America should do, and I am on a student visa.” And of course, nobody ever did, which is one of the great glories of America.
  • My thesis topic was, I tried to answer the question, when countries rise in great power, when they rise economically, they become great powers because they quickly translate that economic power into diplomatic and military power. What explains the principal exception in modern history, which is the United States?
  • My simple answer was that the United States was a very unusual creature in the modern world. It was a very strong nation with a very weak state. The federal government in the United States did not have the capacity to extract the resources from the society at large because you didn’t have income taxes in those days.
  • COWEN: What put you off academia? And this was for the better, in my view.
  • ZAKARIA: I think two things. One, I could see that political science was moving away from the political science that I loved, which was a broad discipline rooted in the social sciences but also rooted in the humanities, which was rigorous, structural, historical comparisons. Looking at different countries, trying to understand why there were differences.
  • It was moving much more toward a huge emphasis on things like rational choice, on game theory There was an economist envy. Just as economists have math envy, political scientists have economist envy. It was moving in that direction
  • COWEN: After 9/11 in 2001, you wrote a famous essay for Newsweek, “Why Do They Hate Us?” You talked about the rulers, failed ideas, religion. If you were to revise or rethink that piece today, how would you change it? Because we have 23 more years of data, right?
  • He had a routine, which is, he’d get up about 6:00 a.m. He’d go down to the basement of his townhouse, and at 6:30, he would start writing or working on whatever his next big research project was. He’d do that, uninterrupted, for three hours at least, sometimes four. Then, at about 9:30, 10:00, he would take the subway to Harvard.
  • His point was, you got to start the day by doing the important work of academia, which is producing knowledge. All the rest of it — teaching, committee meetings, all that — you can do later. He was so disciplined about that, that every five years or so, he put out another major piece of work, another major book
  • I looked at that, and I said to myself, I do not have the self-discipline to perform at that level. I need to go into something that has deadlines,
  • It’s all within you, and you have to be able to generate ideas from that lonely space. I’ve always found that hard. For me, writing books is the hardest thing I do. I feel like I have to do it because I feel as though everything else is trivia — the television, column, everything else.
  • The second piece of it was actually very much related to Huntington. Sam Huntington was quite an extraordinary character, probably the most important social scientist in the second half of the 20th century. Huge contributions to several fields of political science. He lived next to me
  • ZAKARIA: Yes. Not very much, honestly. The central point I was making in that essay was that if you look at the Arab world, it is the principal outlier in the modern era, where it has undergone almost no political modernization.
  • The Arab world had remained absolutely static. My argument was that it was largely because of the curse of oil and oil wealth, which had impeded modernization. But along with that, because of that failed modernization, they had developed this reactionary ideology of Islam, which said the answer is to go further back, not to go forward. “Islam is the solution,” was the cry of the Islamic fundamentalists in the 1970s.
  • COWEN: I’m struck that this year, both you and Ruchir Sharma have books coming out — again, Fareed’s book is Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present — that I would describe broadly as classically liberal. Do you think classical liberalism is making a comeback
  • the reason these books are coming out — and certainly, mine, as you know, is centrally occupied with the problem that there’s a great danger that we are going to lose this enormous, probably the most important thing that’s happened in the last 500, 600 years in human history, this movement that has allowed for the creation of modern liberal democratic societies with somewhat market economies.
  • If you look at the graph of income, of GDP, per capita GDP, it’s like a straight line. There’s no improvement until you get to about, roughly speaking, the 17th, 18th century in Europe, and then you see a sharp uptick. You see this extraordinary rise, and that coincides with the rise of science and intellectual curiosity and the scientific method, and the industrial revolution after that. All that was a product of this great burst of liberal Enlightenment thinking in the West.
  • If you think about what we’ve gone through in the last 30 years — and this is really the central argument in my book — massive expansion of globalization, massive expansion of information technology so that it has completely upended the old economy. All of this happening, and people are overwhelmed, and they search in that age of anxiety. They search for a solution, and the easy solutions are the ones offered by the populists.
  • They’re deeply anti-liberal, illiberal. So, I worry that, actually, if we don’t cherish what we have, we’ll lose what has been one of the great, great periods of progress in human history.
  • COWEN: Why does your book cover the 17th-century Dutch Golden Age? ZAKARIA: The Dutch are the first modern country. If you think about politics before that — certainly with the exception of ancient Greece and Rome — in modern history, the Dutch invent modern politics and economics. They invent modern politics in the sense that it’s the first time politics is not about courts and kings. It is about a merchant republic with powerful factions and interest groups and political parties, or the precursor to political parties.
  • It’s the beginning of modern economics because it’s economics based not simply on land and agriculture, but on the famous thing that John Locke talked about, which is mixing human beings’ labor with the land. The Dutch literally do this when they reclaim land from the sea and find ways to manage it, and then invent tall ships, which is, in some ways, one of the first great technological revolutions that has a direct economic impact.
  • You put all that together, and the Dutch — they become the richest country in the world, and they become the leading technological power in the world. It was very important to me to start the story — because they are really the beginnings of modern liberalism
  • COWEN: Circa 1800, how large were the Chinese and Indian economies?
  • Circa 1800, the Chinese and Indian economies are the two largest economies in the world, and people have taken this to mean, oh, the West had a temporary spurt because of colonies and cheap energy, and that the Chinese and Indians are just coming back to where they were.
  • First of all, the statistic is misleading because in those days, GDP was simply measured by using population. All society was agricultural. The more people you had, the larger your GDP. It was meaningless because the state could not extract that GDP in any meaningful way, and it’s meaningless because it doesn’t measure progress. It doesn’t measure per capita GDP growth, which is the most important thing to look at.
  • If you look at per capita GDP growth from 1350 to 1950, for 600 years, India and China have basically no movement. It’s about $600 in 1350 and $600 in 1950. The West, by comparison, moves up 600 percent in that period. It’s roughly $500 per capita GDP to roughly $5,000 per capita GDP.
  • You can also look at all kinds of other measures. You can look at diet. There are economic historians who’ve done this very well, and people in England were eating four to five times as much grain and protein as people in China and India. You can look at the extraordinary flourishing of science and engineering. You can look at the rise of the great universities. It’s all happening in the West.
  • The reason this is important is, people need to understand the rise of the West has been a very profound, deep-rooted historical phenomenon that began sometime in the 15th century. The fact that we’re moving out of that phase is a big, big deal. This is not a momentary blip. This is a huge train. The West define modernity. Even when countries try to be modern, they are in some way becoming Western because there is no path we know of to modernity without that.
  • One other way of just thinking about how silly that statistic is: in pure GDP terms, China had a larger GDP than Britain in 1900. Now, look at Britain in 1900: the most advanced industrial society in the world, ruling one-quarter of the world, largest navy in the world, was able to humiliate China by using a small fraction of its military power during the opium era. That’s what tells you that number is really meaningless. The West has been significantly more advanced than the rest of the world since the 16th century at least.
Javier E

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Self-Education and Doing the Math (Ep. 41 - Live at Mercatus) ... - 0 views

  • we’re not in here to eat mozzarella and go to Tuscany. We’re not in here to accumulate money. We’re in here mostly to sacrifice, to do something. The way you do it is by taking risks.
  • Some people take risks and some people labor in the fields. You have the option of doing either one or the other. But my point is you should never have someone rise in society if he or she is not taking risks for the sake of others, period. That’s one rule.
  • The second one, you should never be a public intellectual if any statement you make doesn’t entail risk-taking. In other words, you should never have rewards without any risk
  • ...17 more annotations...
  • we don’t know what the eff we’re talking about when we talk about religion. People start comparing religion, and the thing is ill-defined. Some religions are religions. Some religions are just bodies of laws
  • Judaism and Islam are not religions like Christianity is a religion, the exact opposite. Let me explain.
  • Islam and Judaism are laws. It’s law — there’s no distinction between holy and profane — whereas Christianity is not law. Why isn’t it law? A simple reason — you remember the Christ said what is for Caesar and is not for Caesar? It’s because the Romans had the laws. You’re not going to bring the law because they already have the law, and very sophisticated law at that, the Romans.
  • With Christianity was born the separation of church and state. It’s secular, so it’s effectively a secular religion that says that when you go home, you do whatever you want.
  • when people are talking about Salafi Islam — it’s not a religion in the sense that Mormon Christianity is a religion. It is a body of laws. It’s a legal system. It’s a political system. It’s a legal system.
  • So people are very confused when they talk about religion. They’re comparing things that are not the same
  • Sometimes religion becomes an identity, sometimes law, sometimes very universal.
  • The same weakness that I see sometimes describe ethnicity. Being Greek Orthodox is more ethnicity than something else, or being Serbian versus Croatian
  • Comparing religions naively is silly, it’s heuristic and leads to things like saying, “Well, he has a right to exercise his faith.”
  • Some faiths should not have the right to be exercised, like Salafis or extreme jihadism because they’re not religions. They’re a legal system. They’re like a political party that wants to ban all other political parties
  • countries that have too much stability become weaker, particularly if it’s propped up, sort of like companies. You see companies that go bust, you get companies that have zero volatility, compressed volatility.
  • Many of them really should have a little volatility, but some of them would be sitting on dynamite.
  • COWEN: What can we learn from Sufism?
  • The problem, that it was destroyed by Saudi Arabian funding. What can we learn from them is how your religion can be destroyed without anybody noticing. The number of Sufis —take Tripoli in Lebanon, it was Sufi. Why did it become non-Sufi? Because of funding from Saudi Arabia — you indoctrinate two generations, and that’s it.
  • as people get rich, they get controlled by the preferences, they’re controlled by the outside. It was $200 a person. I said, “OK, I’d rather pay $200 for a pizza and would pay $6.95 for the same meal except that by social pressure.” This is how we use controlling preferences. It’s the skin in the game. You discover that your preferences are . . . People are happier in small quarters. You have neighbors around you and narrow streets.
  • I’d rather eat with someone else a sandwich, provided it’s good bread — not this old bread — than eat at a fancy restaurant. It’s the same thing I discovered little by little. Even from a hedonic standpoint, sophistication is actually a burden.
  • Aside from that, there is something also that, from the beginning, you realize that hedonism — that pursuit of pleasure for pleasure’s sake — there’s something about it that gives me anxiety. On the other hand, doing something productive — not productive in the sense of virtual signaling, but something that fits a sense of honor — you feel good.
« First ‹ Previous 2361 - 2380 of 2389 Next ›
Showing 20 items per page