Thread by @NiskanenCenter

We are live on Zoom to discuss open societies in partnership with @TakshashilaInst (featuring @khilldavis, @RuleandRuin, and Narayan Ramachandran). You can watch right now on YouTube. We’ll also be tweeting out the highlights here!

Narayan Ramachandran: In India, the politics of frequent elections is to use division for political gain. The Indian government is similar to that of the U.S. now. One could say that where the U.S. pampers the elites, India pampers the majority.

.@RuleandRuin: In a broad sense, the US Civil Rights movement has never ended. The difference between now and then: it was possible to believe that both parties would support the movement. Today, as Republicans have mostly become a party of whites, this is not what we are seeing.

Narayan Ramachandran: These battles and debates seem to be much more challenging now because you’re combatting an attitude and state of being rather than a law (as was the case in the 1960s).

.@RuleandRuin: Every advance we have made as a society has been through debate. If today’s Civil Rights movement is to succeed we need to see a mix of radicalism and conservatism.

Narayan Ramachandran: When social media started about 10 years ago, we all celebrated the transparency of it. But now, it’s more of a double-edged sword. We need to evolve the practices of how we use it, rather than trying to stop the practice of using it altogether.

.@RuleandRuin: What were seeing now with the Trump administration’s populism, is that maybe as things get worse, extremism isn’t the way forward. This is what the moderate path has going for it.

Thanks to everyone that tuned in! For some further resources based on this morning’s discussion, refer to @lindsey_brink's essays on the failure of libertarianism in the face of the pandemic.
1: niskanencenter.org/what-the-pande…
 
2: niskanencenter.org/the-dead-end-o…

3: niskanencenter.org/free-markets-a…