Was great to chat! I was going to say, there’s a joint paper in here somewhere…

All helpful, thanks. The location of enmity per se is perhaps the question a democratic collectivity must pose to itself - iteratively and continually

Struggling to articulate: he seemed a figure outside of the bounds of reasonable disagreement yet, at the extreme edge, adversary rather than enemy. but i’m also not convinced by that and so I feel stuck between two poles of accusations: liberal wish-washyness on one hand and heartlessness on other

Yeah, and whether those more than disagreements mean he vanishes as an interlocutor entirely (a mere grifter) - or is he better viewed as a social symptom, etc

If you could make one rule change based exclusively on enhancing entertainment, what would it be? A parallel in the NHL was changing the overtime rules to make it 5 minutes 3 v 3 as opposed to 4 v 4, making goals and chances far more likely.

Makes me think about the peculiarity of the American experiment - at once conservative and reactionary in so many ways - yet when push comes to shove persistently anti-authoritarian

Buyer’s remorse enacted at the level of the collective unconscious will be a spectacle for sure!

Haha! Now to figure out what’s Albertan for “oven-ready”

They just need this on the side of a bus…

Totally, if you’re interested Marc Stears book Demanding Democracy is excellent on this

Yeah, interesting. Gets at the heart of any dilemmas of democratic reform, I guess. Build consensus first or drag em kicking and screaming first!

I think the agonistic approach can be useful to establish small hegemonies that dilute small resistances — ie winning power and using it might over time create a common sense on bike lanes — but on bigger stuff it seems dangerous to give up on the dialogical stuff.

If you do want to know how it works—and, specifically, how it can work in the US, here’s a thing I wrote: substack.com/home/post/p-...

Do you know this piece? www.grace.umd.edu/~dcrocker/Co...

Yeah, and I think at the heart of these distinctions is her idea that totalitarianism was never a regime - only a movement - which cannibalized anything solid or stable in its way. The tyrant bears some relation to this.