Starting with today’s Dad Joke:
Q: What do you get when you’re inundated with bras?
A: A boob-bonnet plague!
Chris Hayes couldn’t have said it better in yesterday’s Ezra Klein Show: Democrats spent an entire year trying every which way to get “leverage” over Joe Manchin, when the simple truth is that no such thing ever existed.
Just let the man write whatever bill he wants, and pass it. Look, just because many of us hate Median Voter Theory, and it’s horribly over- and mis-applied, doesn’t mean it’s not actually quite accurate when describing the dynamics passing a bill. Joe Manchin is the median voter, and under the current math, also the envelope of the coalition of “people who want to pass a bill”. So let the man just write the damned bill, if it’s that important to your electoral chances in November. And use it as a selling point for building a larger national Senate Democratic coalition.Chris also repeated this annoying line I keep hearing in the democracy conversation: “It just cannot be the case that in a two-party system, one party has to keep winning in order to preserve democracy.”
Anti-alarmists like to trot this out as some sort of trump card, like the fact that Democrats will inevitably lose at least some elections over the critical-for-democracy period of the next decade somehow means that we need to convince ourselves that those outcomes won’t be disasters.
But whenever I hear it, I can’t help but finish the sentence with the part that I suspect its speakers are always too afraid to utter: “… which is why we won’t keep being a democracy for much longer without fundamental reform.”
Just because it’s scary to contemplate, is no license to refuse to follow it to its logical conclusion.Hayes also brought up a great point about how Trump won by dominating the attention economy, and that the attention economy seems to be the central dynamic driving our politics. Which makes me wonder, how does this dynamic fit in with or work alongside what we’ve already identified here at DDD in CIZST?
The Atlantic says there’s a feeling that we’re all “in a battle at the end of time” in our culture war. In true Atlantic fashion, of course, they just kind of chalk it up to some kind of hyper-current anomaly, as would the Michael Bay Theory Of History that we discussed yesterday
But we here at DDD know better. Things don’t just magically happen. Trends don’t just emerge from Zeus’ skull, fully formed, armed, and armored.
I suspect it mainly has to do with the fact that technological progress accelerated exponentially since the Industrial Revolution. We don’t go decades and centuries between major innovations; it’s more like months and years. Combined with the globalization of information, this means that we’re more aware than ever of what’s going on in our own countries and around the globe.
The contrast isn’t that medieval peasants lived completely in the dark. They knew some things about the world. And plenty were well aware of various “apocalypses”. But there was never a sense of inexorable progress; only a sense of inexorable powers, whether temporal or spiritual. And today, it’s progress that drives our sense of being near to an apocalyptic/apotheosic moment — literally, for many, represented in “the singularity”.
What I’m trying to get at is, I think both the global left and global right have a growing sense that whichever system wins the current struggle between democracy and authority, will get to define what the next stage of human existence looks like. They may not be guaranteed to survive the singularity wholly intact, but they’ll stand the best chance of shaping how it turns out. And depending on who you talk to, there may only be a few short decades left to battle it out on the global chess-board before all control is taken out of our hands.
Maybe Francis Fukuyama wasn’t wrong in his prediction about the “end of history”; he was just early.
What are you thoughts on McConnells response to Bidens speech about pushing through voting reform? Do you think that the GOP has found a viable alternative truth argument about who is REALLY supporting democracy? Does he make a point that voting reform should be bipartisan? And if it’s not it’s really a power grab? Or is congress just so politically toxic that nothing besides military spending and infrastructure will be bipartisan?
His response was shocking, illogical but scary to those who actually support democracy and voting rights.