Forgot to add, the discussion on the original tweet that Joey was criticizing is itself really interesting. As always, they are reasonable people. They are saying, "of course this specific case makes sense, but in general, deregulation is not a good thing" (because, it can't be a good thing, if your tribe's identity is defined by being against it)
> There's also not many common sense opportunities for deregulation
Yeah, I can think of dozens that we run in to trying to build housing that have very little value, drive up prices, prevent new and often really vital projects from happening, and drive scarcity, while not really accomplishing something that needs to be done.
One I came across recently that thankfully my electeds spotted as absurd and knocked back was a new parking requirement for a bar. The bar said: we really don’t want to encourage people to drive here” but the regulation, as written, would have had them spending (exorbitantly) to build a new parking lot, in downtown. This doesn’t make any sense from a progressive/liberal perspective, or a conservative perspective for that matter. We want to discourage people from drinking and driving. We want to encourage people to take public transit. We want to not add unnecessary concrete to our waterfront downtown, we want to avoid car runoff because we want to protect the environment and we have water qualities treaties with local tribes to honor. Yet, the knee-jerk reaction is often to assume malice if the topic is regulation…instead of taking some time to think about if this is really how we want things to happen, what gets lost if we do, what gets lost if we don’t.
A related issue is that a lot of people simply assume that the name of the tool is what it does, and will never be persuaded otherwise.
That is, they simply can’t (or won’t) consider unintended consequences or second order effects. No, the regulation has a sympathetic intent, so it must be good, and anyone against it must have bad intentions.
I’m sure “prevent unqualified workers from giving children food borne illness” was a very sympathetic reason to support the original regulation, and they probably did not intend to ban peeling bananas for preschoolers. But even when it’s pointed out that the latter is what actually happened, you’ve got people defending the regulation as the only stop on a slippery slope to poisoned toddlers.
I remember having a debate with an otherwise very intelligent classmate way back in the lead up to Obamacare, discussing my concerns about political capture creating some problems with the proposed law (e.g. that “preventative care” might get expanded to an unreasonable degree by lobbying from various interest groups, and some of the means to pay for the bill like medical device taxes and “Cadillac plan” insurance penalties might get nixed for the same reason). It was very frustrating because I could never get this person past their hangups that profit is evil, Democrats just want everyone to have good health care, and this is the Affordable Care Act sponsored by Democrats and opposed by evil profit seekers, so it must be an unalloyed good.
This is a great way to spin a critique we on the more-left have had against the Democratic Party’s blue(nomatterwho) tribe for ages.
Example: while I’m not categorically against means-testing as a tool (it’s a progressive idea in some contexts), using it for something like student loan forgiveness tends to have the effect of completely clearing debt for people who started middle-class and remained middle-class (borrowed a little, ended up with roughly the same earning potential as their parents) while leaving substantial debt (and a far worse skew in relative debt burden) for anyone who borrowed larger sums of money (because they were poor) as well as for anyone who actually did manage to successfully Bootstraps their way through the system (because they now have means). People who philosophically or ideologically want to use earnings as a measure of “merit” and are against punishing “merit” should’ve therefore been on the same side as people who want “equity” to level the playing field for poor people (disproportionately minorities) who borrowed more money.
A more personal example: at work I often find myself giving newer coworkers a summary of the history behind a decision, *especially* if it was a bad decision that we’re about to overturn. Sometimes people are puzzled by this or even get the wrong idea: they think I’m defending the thing, when all I’m doing is saying what people were thinking of at the time. I explain this in terms of Chesterton’s Fence: yes, one should not tear down a fence before learning the reason it was put there, but if you do learn that the reason was to keep out sea urchins, and you now have the new information that sea urchins don’t tend to live in the area and aren’t generally deterred by fences anyway, then you absolutely may tear down the fence. This is a good principle in both directions, and I’m not going to let the completely separate fact that I dislike who Chesterton was, as a person and as an overall political mind, get in the way of learning from a good idea.
I care somewhat about actual tribes but political tribes are meaningless. In a democracy it's just the ideas that matter. Good for the Democrats who recognized this as well.
I wish political tribes were meaningless, but unfortunately they're not, at least not right now. Tribal affiliation has always been a core part of human identity, and we're in a situation now where the political parties have become tribes in this identarian sense. Until we can fix that, we have to accept that political tribalism is going to be a driving force that must be worked around, or, when possible, harnessed.
Yes, race/ethnicity and religion are the usual tribes, but I think to a large extent political affiliation has displaced them. This is bad because it creates incentives that are harmful to the process of identifying and enacting the best ideas. It's common today to see partisans prove their bona fides by espousing the *worst* ideas of their political tribe. Anyone can push the tribe's good ideas, but only a true believer will support and defend the clearly insane ones.
There aren’t “best ideas” in a multiethnic state because different ethnicities are more compatible with different modes of socialization.
That combined with Arrow’s theorem is what drives this effect.
BTW this is the real reason the soviets only had one option on their ballots (effectively making public elections confidence polls.) Remember that the end goal of communism is international democracy. The soviet idea was that they would start in Eastern Europe and expand it outward rather than creating a global revolution. In order for that to work you have to overcome this effect and the only way to run a poll that gets around Arrow’s theorem is a confidence poll. They really did their best to make communism work and demonstrated that no matter how hard you try with administration and cybernetics you can’t make multi ethnic states of peers like that last.
And now we’re trying again but with managerialism and capitalism instead and we’re running into the exact same issues.
There are some areas in which different culture among ethnic subgroups will result in ideas that are good for one group not being so good for another group, but this is not generally the case. At bottom, we're all human and our commonalities vastly outweigh our differences.
Also, I notice that you seem to have reversed your position from your first statement, in which you claimed that political tribes are meaningless. Now you seem to be saying that political tribes are just ethnic tribes, and that ethnic tribalism does and should drive all.
My position has always been that ethnic tribes are the most important and political tribes are a distraction.
And this is generally the case, people have known this since antiquity and we only recently "forgot" it. Something similar happened in Rome near the end too.
yes! this is good news IMO, it means (1) if you're willing to put in the effort, change is absolutely totally possible, AND when the rubber meets the road, most people can actually find common ground on, is THIS particular regulation actually doing the thing we want it to or not (separate from, having different wants. You just need to orient around people who want the same things as you, but even within here, there are MANY cases of people wanting the same ends but failing to recognize this)
(2) in many cases, i do NOT have the time, or interest, or energy, to actually do this research. In which case, that's fine! I just will not worry about it! I will trust that others who care more/are more effected by it/who have more time will do this work. This has shifted my perspective on politics, where I used to feel like I had to have an opinion on everything. Now it's more important for me to have a trust network. "I don't know" is the answer to, is this politician/policy good or bad, but I will look to people I trust on specific domains, who have first hand experience in this or that industry, who have been correct in the past, and align with them.
I think the informed voter who makes all their choices alone through critical thinking is a myth, not tenable. We should lean into our trust networks. I will contribute my voice & opinion in matters that I am an expert in, and I encourage everyone else to do so
yesssss!!! as long as there are unresolved & valid edge cases that the dems/left don't handle, they will find solace in the other side. If the coalition grows finer discernment and just integrates these cases, winning becomes much easier (and it will force the other side to have to integrate too in order to compete, to have to take the good parts from the other side), and we spiral upwards as a society towards greater, more competent societies
There are no regulations "for no good reason". Every regulation was written for a specific purpose. Perhaps the cost exceeds the value of a particular regulation or it has unintended consequences but it's still the result of an attempt to address a problem.
Are there regulations that cause more problems than they're worth? Sure. But blanket calls for deregulation are mindless and ignore the fact that our society needs such regulations to function and to protect the public from those who would endanger us for their own profits.
"blanket calls for deregulation are mindless" -> this is true, AND this argument does not actually exist in the wild! this is the good news, no one holds this unreasonable position seriously.
When people argue about this, it's usually the pro-regulation person thinking of good regulation, and the anti-regulation person thinking of specific bad regulations they want removed. The thing we're stuck on is not a real argument
yeah even "taxation is theft" people will say "I would like to pool some resources for common infrastructure like roads & garbage disposal". There are people who insist there should be ways to live outside of the empire, and that's a position on both ends of the horseshoe
i think the real trick is, when you see someone making a crazy claim like this, to switch into detective mode and unravel their world view. I've been wanting to make a kind of prediction game about this (show someone's first post, and then show their full world view after I ask them a bunch of questions. In order to demonstrate to what degree people have good or bad theory of mind of their enemies)
A college housemate's girlfriend was a hardcore libertarian- she eventually went on to write policy papers for CATO. She thought all environmental regulations should be done away and the solution was that if you were harmed by someone polluting or defective product the remedy was in the civil courts.
I always meant to ask her how this squared with her support for tort reform but never got the chance.
May want to check in a meta-assumption here that there is an objective "Better" and we can know what that is. "I want things 'better' so I am a good person; they do not want the 'better' so they are bad people." Very common. You can contrast this with the idea that for most laws there are costs and tradeoffs. Almost certainly that means there are winners and losers, even accidentally, to every law or adjustment you make. So we would track, Do we want the thing done. How would we like the thing done. On Whom do all the cost fall. A great example of this is environmentalism, where office workers in NJ would like there to be more wildlands. Instead of buying and re-wilding Trenton, which was once a forest of wolves, they pass a law for Wyoming. The Ranchers there are marginal, trying to make a living at 1/4 the adjusted income of NJ, yet THEY pay the costs. They say they are destructive uncaring bad people, but really they're likely to ALSO want the benefit of having more wildlands, it's just that they don't want to be the only one bearing the costs. Especially when their economic situation is measurably worse to begin with.
A huge portion of political issues are this way, they're not actually arguing. They're just saying "Don't dump your costs on me." This is what's hidden in your word make it "Better" -- Better for Whom?
> I think humans need tribes, and healthy competition between tribes is good for everyone.
Collaborative competition.
There are players who want to win, and players who want to play an amazing game, and the latter makes for a more deeply enjoyable and sustainable sport.
I was thinking of it more around something like "precision", of narrative? You still have the good guys and the bad guys, but you have better discernment about what is good for you & what is bad.
Ironically, I think humans in the olden times were better at this. Fairytales that weren't true didn't survive contact with reality. Here you can go for a long time "without brakes on your car" because the systems are so big, top down, and lack feedback mechanisms.
> It’s the job of our government to give them that in practice, not just on paper.
> What if the best way to do that isn’t adding a new right, but subtracting from or editing the regulation that caused the confusion in the first place?
Some years ago, any opposition to a particular candidate was met with accusations of racism. Moderates were purged.
Some years ago, any opposition to a particularly ruinous insurance bill was met with accusations of racism. Moderates were purged.
Some years ago, opposition to redefining human relationships was met with accusations of hatred, and bigotry.
Some years ago, opposition to redefining a particular medical treatment or opposing breaking the Nuremberg code was met with accusations of conspiracy. Moderates were purged.
Some years ago, normal human interaction was banned, unless you were angry about a particular drugged up criminal dying under the watch of the authorities, in which case the rules did not apply to you. Moderates were purged.
Everyone left in the democrat party has had fifteen years to learn that deviation from the party orthodoxy will result in being blacklisted, and the orthodoxy is subject to change at any time in any direction. The ONLY way to be a party member in good standing is to vocally support the current thing, immediately and without question.
Ezra Klein on Jon Stewart’s podcast earlier this month are also talking about how we get kinda clutchy when our ideological categories are fussed with.
But it’s going to be important in the project of making government that works well for people and accomplishes the hard things that the market cannot or will not.
For instance, I hear a lot from this one activist ‘progressive’ guy in my area, who is very concerned that any deregulation is a handout to (like, a scooby-do villain caricature of) big corporate developers. But, in some cases, the big corporate developer is the only one who can build efficient multi-family housing. In some cases, efforts to control them only end up hurting and disadvantaging small, local, and values-based builders.
He tells me “the data backs him up”, but it’s really more of a gut feeling based on some vague morality he has attached to words like “development”. He will worry endlessly about where people are going to park, and how they might use the nearby playground more, and thus need to pay exorbitant impact fees, but he won’t see that on the other side of his hurdles to “make things fair” are people who cannot afford rent here any longer, who are increasingly at risk of homelessness, who can’t even afford to own cars any more, who end up in unsafe and unhealthy living conditions while he argues — far out of his area of expertise — for certain very expensive building standards.
My husband, a builder, will try to tell him about the reality of trying to permit small, affordable units (we have taken a few runs at this, trying to build a multi-family property, trying to add a unit for a wheelchair-using friend in our back yard, and we run into unnecessary costs that keep it from being something we can self-fund or make enough to live off of). But Jeff is determined not to adopt the expertise of the person actually doing the building, while he points fervently to the armchair experts studying the issue abstractly (at least the ones he agrees with).
I very much appreciate the wisdom of this. It is doubtful, however, that these adopters of the best of the other color can win elections at scale without electoral reform. 85% of the US Congress is effectively elected by something like 15% of the electorate. Moderates who reflect the political values of the fat part of the bell curve cannot win in these districts. The solution is to eliminate partisan primaries and ensure general election voter choice of at least three or four top performers in the primaries.
Forgot to add, the discussion on the original tweet that Joey was criticizing is itself really interesting. As always, they are reasonable people. They are saying, "of course this specific case makes sense, but in general, deregulation is not a good thing" (because, it can't be a good thing, if your tribe's identity is defined by being against it)
> There's also not many common sense opportunities for deregulation
https://x.com/stylianos_k/status/1855658263238607282
>> There's also not many common sense opportunities for deregulation
Not when we’re not looking!
Default mode network issue > skill issue
Yeah, I can think of dozens that we run in to trying to build housing that have very little value, drive up prices, prevent new and often really vital projects from happening, and drive scarcity, while not really accomplishing something that needs to be done.
One I came across recently that thankfully my electeds spotted as absurd and knocked back was a new parking requirement for a bar. The bar said: we really don’t want to encourage people to drive here” but the regulation, as written, would have had them spending (exorbitantly) to build a new parking lot, in downtown. This doesn’t make any sense from a progressive/liberal perspective, or a conservative perspective for that matter. We want to discourage people from drinking and driving. We want to encourage people to take public transit. We want to not add unnecessary concrete to our waterfront downtown, we want to avoid car runoff because we want to protect the environment and we have water qualities treaties with local tribes to honor. Yet, the knee-jerk reaction is often to assume malice if the topic is regulation…instead of taking some time to think about if this is really how we want things to happen, what gets lost if we do, what gets lost if we don’t.
A related issue is that a lot of people simply assume that the name of the tool is what it does, and will never be persuaded otherwise.
That is, they simply can’t (or won’t) consider unintended consequences or second order effects. No, the regulation has a sympathetic intent, so it must be good, and anyone against it must have bad intentions.
I’m sure “prevent unqualified workers from giving children food borne illness” was a very sympathetic reason to support the original regulation, and they probably did not intend to ban peeling bananas for preschoolers. But even when it’s pointed out that the latter is what actually happened, you’ve got people defending the regulation as the only stop on a slippery slope to poisoned toddlers.
I remember having a debate with an otherwise very intelligent classmate way back in the lead up to Obamacare, discussing my concerns about political capture creating some problems with the proposed law (e.g. that “preventative care” might get expanded to an unreasonable degree by lobbying from various interest groups, and some of the means to pay for the bill like medical device taxes and “Cadillac plan” insurance penalties might get nixed for the same reason). It was very frustrating because I could never get this person past their hangups that profit is evil, Democrats just want everyone to have good health care, and this is the Affordable Care Act sponsored by Democrats and opposed by evil profit seekers, so it must be an unalloyed good.
This is a great way to spin a critique we on the more-left have had against the Democratic Party’s blue(nomatterwho) tribe for ages.
Example: while I’m not categorically against means-testing as a tool (it’s a progressive idea in some contexts), using it for something like student loan forgiveness tends to have the effect of completely clearing debt for people who started middle-class and remained middle-class (borrowed a little, ended up with roughly the same earning potential as their parents) while leaving substantial debt (and a far worse skew in relative debt burden) for anyone who borrowed larger sums of money (because they were poor) as well as for anyone who actually did manage to successfully Bootstraps their way through the system (because they now have means). People who philosophically or ideologically want to use earnings as a measure of “merit” and are against punishing “merit” should’ve therefore been on the same side as people who want “equity” to level the playing field for poor people (disproportionately minorities) who borrowed more money.
A more personal example: at work I often find myself giving newer coworkers a summary of the history behind a decision, *especially* if it was a bad decision that we’re about to overturn. Sometimes people are puzzled by this or even get the wrong idea: they think I’m defending the thing, when all I’m doing is saying what people were thinking of at the time. I explain this in terms of Chesterton’s Fence: yes, one should not tear down a fence before learning the reason it was put there, but if you do learn that the reason was to keep out sea urchins, and you now have the new information that sea urchins don’t tend to live in the area and aren’t generally deterred by fences anyway, then you absolutely may tear down the fence. This is a good principle in both directions, and I’m not going to let the completely separate fact that I dislike who Chesterton was, as a person and as an overall political mind, get in the way of learning from a good idea.
I care somewhat about actual tribes but political tribes are meaningless. In a democracy it's just the ideas that matter. Good for the Democrats who recognized this as well.
I wish political tribes were meaningless, but unfortunately they're not, at least not right now. Tribal affiliation has always been a core part of human identity, and we're in a situation now where the political parties have become tribes in this identarian sense. Until we can fix that, we have to accept that political tribalism is going to be a driving force that must be worked around, or, when possible, harnessed.
In multiethnic electorates political tribes almost always just reflect ethnic tribes. The ethnic tribe is much more important.
It's not something to fix, it's an intrinsic feature of humanity and you should accept and work with it.
Yes, race/ethnicity and religion are the usual tribes, but I think to a large extent political affiliation has displaced them. This is bad because it creates incentives that are harmful to the process of identifying and enacting the best ideas. It's common today to see partisans prove their bona fides by espousing the *worst* ideas of their political tribe. Anyone can push the tribe's good ideas, but only a true believer will support and defend the clearly insane ones.
There aren’t “best ideas” in a multiethnic state because different ethnicities are more compatible with different modes of socialization.
That combined with Arrow’s theorem is what drives this effect.
BTW this is the real reason the soviets only had one option on their ballots (effectively making public elections confidence polls.) Remember that the end goal of communism is international democracy. The soviet idea was that they would start in Eastern Europe and expand it outward rather than creating a global revolution. In order for that to work you have to overcome this effect and the only way to run a poll that gets around Arrow’s theorem is a confidence poll. They really did their best to make communism work and demonstrated that no matter how hard you try with administration and cybernetics you can’t make multi ethnic states of peers like that last.
And now we’re trying again but with managerialism and capitalism instead and we’re running into the exact same issues.
There are some areas in which different culture among ethnic subgroups will result in ideas that are good for one group not being so good for another group, but this is not generally the case. At bottom, we're all human and our commonalities vastly outweigh our differences.
Also, I notice that you seem to have reversed your position from your first statement, in which you claimed that political tribes are meaningless. Now you seem to be saying that political tribes are just ethnic tribes, and that ethnic tribalism does and should drive all.
My position has always been that ethnic tribes are the most important and political tribes are a distraction.
And this is generally the case, people have known this since antiquity and we only recently "forgot" it. Something similar happened in Rome near the end too.
The hard part about this is that it involves actually finding specific regulations.
This means getting people to care enough to do detailed research and find the thing they need to do to change a specific annoyance.
It's awesome, but it's slightly more high effort than simply complaining.
yes! this is good news IMO, it means (1) if you're willing to put in the effort, change is absolutely totally possible, AND when the rubber meets the road, most people can actually find common ground on, is THIS particular regulation actually doing the thing we want it to or not (separate from, having different wants. You just need to orient around people who want the same things as you, but even within here, there are MANY cases of people wanting the same ends but failing to recognize this)
(2) in many cases, i do NOT have the time, or interest, or energy, to actually do this research. In which case, that's fine! I just will not worry about it! I will trust that others who care more/are more effected by it/who have more time will do this work. This has shifted my perspective on politics, where I used to feel like I had to have an opinion on everything. Now it's more important for me to have a trust network. "I don't know" is the answer to, is this politician/policy good or bad, but I will look to people I trust on specific domains, who have first hand experience in this or that industry, who have been correct in the past, and align with them.
I think the informed voter who makes all their choices alone through critical thinking is a myth, not tenable. We should lean into our trust networks. I will contribute my voice & opinion in matters that I am an expert in, and I encourage everyone else to do so
This is extremely smart: Dems to cooöpt deregulation as an issue, strategically.
yesssss!!! as long as there are unresolved & valid edge cases that the dems/left don't handle, they will find solace in the other side. If the coalition grows finer discernment and just integrates these cases, winning becomes much easier (and it will force the other side to have to integrate too in order to compete, to have to take the good parts from the other side), and we spiral upwards as a society towards greater, more competent societies
There are no regulations "for no good reason". Every regulation was written for a specific purpose. Perhaps the cost exceeds the value of a particular regulation or it has unintended consequences but it's still the result of an attempt to address a problem.
Are there regulations that cause more problems than they're worth? Sure. But blanket calls for deregulation are mindless and ignore the fact that our society needs such regulations to function and to protect the public from those who would endanger us for their own profits.
"blanket calls for deregulation are mindless" -> this is true, AND this argument does not actually exist in the wild! this is the good news, no one holds this unreasonable position seriously.
When people argue about this, it's usually the pro-regulation person thinking of good regulation, and the anti-regulation person thinking of specific bad regulations they want removed. The thing we're stuck on is not a real argument
I'm not sure that's true. Ever encountered a libertarian?
yeah even "taxation is theft" people will say "I would like to pool some resources for common infrastructure like roads & garbage disposal". There are people who insist there should be ways to live outside of the empire, and that's a position on both ends of the horseshoe
i think the real trick is, when you see someone making a crazy claim like this, to switch into detective mode and unravel their world view. I've been wanting to make a kind of prediction game about this (show someone's first post, and then show their full world view after I ask them a bunch of questions. In order to demonstrate to what degree people have good or bad theory of mind of their enemies)
A college housemate's girlfriend was a hardcore libertarian- she eventually went on to write policy papers for CATO. She thought all environmental regulations should be done away and the solution was that if you were harmed by someone polluting or defective product the remedy was in the civil courts.
I always meant to ask her how this squared with her support for tort reform but never got the chance.
And then there was this:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21534416/free-state-project-new-hampshire-libertarians-matthew-hongoltz-hetling
May want to check in a meta-assumption here that there is an objective "Better" and we can know what that is. "I want things 'better' so I am a good person; they do not want the 'better' so they are bad people." Very common. You can contrast this with the idea that for most laws there are costs and tradeoffs. Almost certainly that means there are winners and losers, even accidentally, to every law or adjustment you make. So we would track, Do we want the thing done. How would we like the thing done. On Whom do all the cost fall. A great example of this is environmentalism, where office workers in NJ would like there to be more wildlands. Instead of buying and re-wilding Trenton, which was once a forest of wolves, they pass a law for Wyoming. The Ranchers there are marginal, trying to make a living at 1/4 the adjusted income of NJ, yet THEY pay the costs. They say they are destructive uncaring bad people, but really they're likely to ALSO want the benefit of having more wildlands, it's just that they don't want to be the only one bearing the costs. Especially when their economic situation is measurably worse to begin with.
A huge portion of political issues are this way, they're not actually arguing. They're just saying "Don't dump your costs on me." This is what's hidden in your word make it "Better" -- Better for Whom?
MGP 2028!!!! This is the strategy Clinton used to win in 1992 (championed by Biden of all people), the New Democrats. Need to bring that back.
> I think humans need tribes, and healthy competition between tribes is good for everyone.
Collaborative competition.
There are players who want to win, and players who want to play an amazing game, and the latter makes for a more deeply enjoyable and sustainable sport.
Really insightful take! I love how you’re on the hot edge of this cultural evolution.
What would you call this? It’s like epistemological hygiene?
I was thinking of it more around something like "precision", of narrative? You still have the good guys and the bad guys, but you have better discernment about what is good for you & what is bad.
Ironically, I think humans in the olden times were better at this. Fairytales that weren't true didn't survive contact with reality. Here you can go for a long time "without brakes on your car" because the systems are so big, top down, and lack feedback mechanisms.
Jennifer Pahlka wrote about this exact same incident!! https://www.eatingpolicy.com/p/stop-telling-constituents-theyre
my tweet thread on it: https://x.com/DefenderOfBasic/status/1860063059206897694
> It’s the job of our government to give them that in practice, not just on paper.
> What if the best way to do that isn’t adding a new right, but subtracting from or editing the regulation that caused the confusion in the first place?
History:
Some years ago, any opposition to a particular candidate was met with accusations of racism. Moderates were purged.
Some years ago, any opposition to a particularly ruinous insurance bill was met with accusations of racism. Moderates were purged.
Some years ago, opposition to redefining human relationships was met with accusations of hatred, and bigotry.
Some years ago, opposition to redefining a particular medical treatment or opposing breaking the Nuremberg code was met with accusations of conspiracy. Moderates were purged.
Some years ago, normal human interaction was banned, unless you were angry about a particular drugged up criminal dying under the watch of the authorities, in which case the rules did not apply to you. Moderates were purged.
Everyone left in the democrat party has had fifteen years to learn that deviation from the party orthodoxy will result in being blacklisted, and the orthodoxy is subject to change at any time in any direction. The ONLY way to be a party member in good standing is to vocally support the current thing, immediately and without question.
THAT’S MY REP!!!!
Ezra Klein on Jon Stewart’s podcast earlier this month are also talking about how we get kinda clutchy when our ideological categories are fussed with.
But it’s going to be important in the project of making government that works well for people and accomplishes the hard things that the market cannot or will not.
For instance, I hear a lot from this one activist ‘progressive’ guy in my area, who is very concerned that any deregulation is a handout to (like, a scooby-do villain caricature of) big corporate developers. But, in some cases, the big corporate developer is the only one who can build efficient multi-family housing. In some cases, efforts to control them only end up hurting and disadvantaging small, local, and values-based builders.
He tells me “the data backs him up”, but it’s really more of a gut feeling based on some vague morality he has attached to words like “development”. He will worry endlessly about where people are going to park, and how they might use the nearby playground more, and thus need to pay exorbitant impact fees, but he won’t see that on the other side of his hurdles to “make things fair” are people who cannot afford rent here any longer, who are increasingly at risk of homelessness, who can’t even afford to own cars any more, who end up in unsafe and unhealthy living conditions while he argues — far out of his area of expertise — for certain very expensive building standards.
My husband, a builder, will try to tell him about the reality of trying to permit small, affordable units (we have taken a few runs at this, trying to build a multi-family property, trying to add a unit for a wheelchair-using friend in our back yard, and we run into unnecessary costs that keep it from being something we can self-fund or make enough to live off of). But Jeff is determined not to adopt the expertise of the person actually doing the building, while he points fervently to the armchair experts studying the issue abstractly (at least the ones he agrees with).
In conclusion, please don’t be like Jeff.
I very much appreciate the wisdom of this. It is doubtful, however, that these adopters of the best of the other color can win elections at scale without electoral reform. 85% of the US Congress is effectively elected by something like 15% of the electorate. Moderates who reflect the political values of the fat part of the bell curve cannot win in these districts. The solution is to eliminate partisan primaries and ensure general election voter choice of at least three or four top performers in the primaries.