(1) Yes, it's possible to imagine progressive dystopias - 0 views
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we discussed left-of-center folks like Brianna Wu, Matt Yglesias, and Ezra Klein pushing back on some of the people to their left
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Brad framed these pushbacks as being fundamentally about tactics — as he saw it, Brianna, Matt, and Ezra are frustrated with the means that some progressives are using in their attempts to achieve utopia, and arguing for a more pragmatic, effective approach.
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what we’re really seeing is growing discomfort with some of the goals that progressives seem to be fighting for — not so much about the pace of change, but about its direction
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notice I said the word “some”. Many progressive visions, like greater economic equality, the closing of racial wealth gaps, and the reversal of climate change, are things I want!
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what I’m arguing is that some of the big ideas progressives embraced in the heady rush of the 2010s are misguided and should be discarded, in order to work toward utopias that human beings would actually like to live in.
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When Brad challenged me to list some examples of dystopian progressive visions, I immediately said “degrowth”, and he agreed.
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halting or reversing economic growth — an idea that has become fashionable among some progressive circles in the past decade — is both unworkable and undesirable as a way to limit humanity’s environmental impact
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First, I argued that the drop in living standards that degrowth would require makes it a political nonstarter, and the amount of global central planning involved would be impossible to implement:
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I also argued that solving climate change requires growth, since it’ll take a lot of economic output to replace our energy sources with solar and wind and batteries. And then once we do switch to those energy sources, they’ll be so cheap (thanks to learning curves) that we’ll actually have sustainably higher consumption than before.
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As I explained in that second post, I view degrowth partly as an attempt to valorize national decline, which is why the idea is much more popular in Europe than in the U.S.
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ome progressives in the U.S. have begun to talk about an entirely different type of “decolonization” — the expulsion of “settler colonial” populations from regions that their ancestors settled in.