politics

Economic problems take time to ripple thru political system because after 30 most people don’t tend to change their views. They believe what they believe, they are who they are, and while age produces real changes, it doesn’t tend to change their politics, absent absolute catastrophe.

But we are now moving to the other side of that. For decades people put up with decline, but now the youngsters, some of whom are in their early 30s, have never known anything but a failed system and a bad economy. This political world has never worked for them, ever: they have no emotional investment in it, no habit of supporting it.

Ian Welsh on change.

… for better and for worse.

In early April [2020], I received a message from Winarso, a man I know in Indonesia who runs an organization that cares for the survivors of the mass murder that took place there in the 1960s. He was trying to raise money to buy rice so his community wouldn’t starve under lockdown. A dollar still goes a very long way in Indonesia, as Winarso knows too well. To explain America’s economic and political power, he points to the Cold War. It’s easy to see that Washington was truly victorious in the 20th century, he told me, because “we all got the U.S.-centered version of capitalism that Washington wanted to spread.” I asked him how America won. He answered quickly. “You killed us.”

Vincent Bevins on the world order.

Regularly scheduled ~friendly reminder~ that the US, and thus capitalism, “won” the Cold War on the back of wholesale, organized, government-endorsed slaughter.

Congress as an institution cannot function on this kind of partisan mentality. There can be no meaningful oversight of the executive branch if the only standards are “Yay, team!” and “Boo, team!” The party of the president should be just as keen as the other party to enforce subpoenas and punish contempt, because both parties in Congress should feel the same concern for the powers of Congress. But of course, that’s not how things work.

Almost all Republicans in the House of Representatives, and the great majority of Republicans in the Senate, will act to defend a president they despise against charges they know to be true. The worst of them will hare after crazy conspiracy theories. Most, though, will voice their concern and then find ways to avoid their duty. The system that protects all of us has failed because the protectors of that system have failed to protect it for us.

David Frum on checks and balances.

I mean… Frum is not wrong here but, also, Never Forget he was the asshole that coined the phrase “axis of evil” and in doing so is, far more than most, responsible for ushering in the current hyper-partisan, post-truth, ends-justifies-the-means era. Just, yanno. While we’re keeping score.