Social Democracy
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Stay of Execution
Nobody feels a greater sense of relief than I do that Biden has won this thing, but as I pointed out in my post yesterday, the madman might be gone, but the madness remains. And that's why all the happy talk about Biden being the man to unite the country is nonsense. He will be
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Whence the Republicans?
The Republican Party as currently constituted is a minority party representing a demographically narrow segment of the American electorate. It needs stasis — institutional and constitutional — to survive. Democrats do not. Just the opposite, they need a political system that can grow with and respond to change within our society. Progressive government is necessarily
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Quote of the Day: Richard Rorty
[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to
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Stephanie Kelton, Big Gummint, Central Banks, and the American Future
An MMT view of the monetary system changes the way we think about what it means for currency-issuing nations to “live within their means.” It asks us to think in terms of real resource constraints—inflation—rather than perceived financial constraints. It teaches us to ask not “How will you pay for it?” but “How will you
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State of the Race 3
It's looking more and more like it's going to be Bernie, and it's looking more and more like the establishment types are in full freak out. I think it's fine to go after him with all guns firing between now and Super Tuesday, but I hope that the establishment types are savvy enough to get
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A Centrist Way Out of the Impasse? Not Likely
From Morton Kondracke: If voters are furious with Washington now, they’ll be positively revolutionary in 2020 if none of the nation’s problems get addressed. And if America’s adversaries — Russia, China and Iran — continue to take advantage of the weakness our divisions exude, Trump and Cruz will be back. The upshot of all this
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It’s the Meaninglessness, Stupid
I've just finished Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging after just having read J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy. Both focus on what I've been writing about here for years, which is that the problem at the root of American societal dysfunction since the sixties is the lack of a meaning narrative that gives Americans a
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Socialism v. Neoliberalism
As I wrote in the my last post Sanders' candidacy is important for his attempt to legitimate a certain range of ideas. The word "socialism" is one that timid liberals think is radioactive, but Bernie to his credit won't back away from it. Instead he seeks to define it in terms that make sense to