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mmanphd.bsky.social
@mmanphd.bsky.social
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mmanphd.bsky.social
This Is No Time for the Democrats to Hang Back newrepublic.com/article/1925... via @newrepublic.com
This Is No Time for the Democrats to Hang Back
Some counsel the Democrats to just wait and let the GOP immolate itself. This is horrible advice. Here are some better ideas.
newrepublic.com
March 26, 2025 at 7:32 PM
Reposted
jonathanbernstein.bsky.social
Beware the #cleverfallacy - economic policy version.
kjephd.bsky.social Kevin Elliott @kjephd.bsky.social · Mar 20
This (adamtooze.substack.com/p/chartbook-...) from @adamtooze.bsky.social is brilliant. It's doing vital work in political epistemology to illuminate how the presence of a flagrantly ignorant autocrat at the center of US political & economic power is deforming the reasoning of even very smart people
Pulling this altogether, here is my point: None of us really knows where this clown car is headed and what drives it on its crazy course. It seems like a mystery even to many on board. Quite reasonably we look for elements of rationality. We ask: who inside MAGA 2.0 is thinking and what are their thoughts? We then relate that to our own efforts to diagnose America’s history and the history of the world economy. At the very least we need to explain how Trump 2.0 happened. Sometimes we will find a match between a strand of policy from inside MAGA and our own analysis and it is tempting to label that as “MAGA for thinking people” and to look for continuities with the Biden team etc. That mode of analysis is reasonable. To historically minded people it is appealing for obvious reasons. But it puts us at risk of is underestimating the radicalism of the break marked by the Trump administration. In search of historical context we miss what is most historically significant. We avoid facing the conclusion that the vision of a Mar-a-Lago Accord may have more in common with grift, a protection racket or a facelift pandering to the ignorant vanity of an old man than with economic policy as we have hitherto known it. Faced with Trump, the risk is that conventional realism is a form of escapism.
March 20, 2025 at 3:55 PM