His summary of the problem is not new, but I like it nonetheless:
As I have recounted at great length in other posts, over the last several decades, conservatives have waged war on social and political trust, calling into question the fairness and independence of almost every major US institution from journalism to academia to science. They have created parallel institutions of their own, meant to support their factional interests. And they have relentlessly cast “libs” as an enemy within — an alien, hostile, and ultimately illegitimate force.As a result, a large faction of the country has descended into paranoia and conspiracy theories, fighting intensely against the basic rules, norms, and post-war assumptions of American life. And because that faction has successfully rendered all political fights — even fights over basic facts — as vicious, zero-sum partisan struggles, another large faction of the country has simply tuned out, coming to regard politics and public life generally as corrupt and fruitless. Americans’ trust in their institutions and in one another is at record lows.This serves the right’s purposes. If all common identity is dissolved, all transpartisan facts and norms, then there is no longer any ability to communicate across factional lines. What remains is raw power struggle. That is the milieu in which an identitarian like Donald Trump feels at home; witness his purging of public servants he deems insufficiently loyal.But it works against the left’s purposes. The left needs for voters to believe that effective, responsive governance is possible — that we can, in fact, have nice things. The left needs social and political trust. Without them, collective action for collective benefit, the left’s stock in trade, becomes impossible.This is the left’s challenge in the US: how to break out of the doom loop and get on a trajectory of better governance and rising trust.
As to the difficulty of addressing this, politically, you should go read the rest of the article.
4 comments:
For fucksakes you can never get things right. Why is that? Why must you always get things wrong? When institutions have gone bad and corrupt the problem is not that they've lost the trust of the public. The problem is that they don't deserve the trust of the public because they are corrupt.
Am I going too fast for you?
The only person who looks a suitable candidate is Bloomberg.
For fucksakes. Bloomberg. Good lord. That evil little welfare queen? To put up with that horrible little man would make 8 years crawl by like an eternity.
Notice the choices we are down to. Trump captured by the Chabad Lubavitch cult and the Israeli right. Most likely a crypto demi-Jew. A traitor, in practice more loyal to Israel. Then an honest man who is unfortunately a Jewish communist. Then we have a horrific little Nazi crony capitalist welfare queen who hates people.
Has anyone noticed that one inbred ethnic group is controlling everything here? Look how they marginalised Yang and Tulsi. The two natural and competent candidates who would have been great for the vast majority of Americans. You guys not seeing a pattern forming here?
The contradiction of Warren's desire is that the Democratic Party is corrupt. She should start there. Look at how they hobbled Sanders at the last election, their willingness to take big money from all and sundry, that so many of them are filthy rich and now Bloomberg is in on the act. The Dems put up Biden solely to counter the fresh young blood that offered some hope of genuine reform. Biden's useless and would be hopeless as President.
The voters know the major parties are hotbed of corruption, support corrupt corporations and promote policies that preserve the status quo. They are not going to be the agents of change.
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