John Holbo jholbo.bsky.social Profile picture
Sep 23, 2020 9 tweets 2 min read Read on X
This Ezra Klein/David French podcast episode is interesting. Contrasting views on how to deal with the severity of the partisan split - the red-blue civil war. Klein: more democracy. French: more federalism. 1/
podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6L…
Klein has the better of it. French's side reduces to something ugly - or just sad - when the Madisonian varnish won't take. French explains more democracy won't work because the right fears 'the tyranny of the majority'. That is, it won't accept majority rule. 2/
At all. Not just about Bill of Rights basics. He talks about how, for the right, even very modest policy steps - he cites Obamacare provisions and wearing masks to stop a pandemic - become 'condensed symbols' (in Dreher's sense) hence categorically unacceptable. 3/
He doesn't cite examples from the left because - well, what would they be? Klein quotes Madison, saying obviously you have to have majority rule on most stuff, otherwise no governing gets done. French replies: even Madison wasn't right about everything. 4/
French's 'right Madisonian' position comes to this: we have to maximally federalize so the right gets regions in which it's the majority because, by his implicit admission, the right just won't accept Madisonian-style government as legitimate. That's weak right Madisonianism. 5/
If French is right, the blue states are, in effect, locked in with a pathologically abusive red state spouse. The best that can be done, since divorce isn't practical, is trying to arrange separate bedrooms. Lean into the Big Sort. But that isn't what Madison had in mind. 6/
French actually makes more sense than I'm making him sound like he makes. It isn't crazy to say: look this democracy stuff, however just and reasonable, is just going to make the right explode. But it's an ugly indictment that the federalism case has to be made in those terms. 7/
Part of the problem has to do with the threat being perceived as coming from the cultural left but as being a threat to cultural hegemony on the right. Example: Indiana's RFRA led to boycotts. But there isn't any way to make strong freedom of association be only for the right. 8/
There is no way to address the right's baseline demand for disproportionate power and asymmetric dominance within a fair, Madisonian scheme. Conversely, any fair scheme will favor the left, which not only has the numbers but also the even-handed asks. 9/

• • •

Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to force a refresh
 

Keep Current with John Holbo jholbo.bsky.social

John Holbo jholbo.bsky.social Profile picture

Stay in touch and get notified when new unrolls are available from this author!

Read all threads

This Thread may be Removed Anytime!

PDF

Twitter may remove this content at anytime! Save it as PDF for later use!

Try unrolling a thread yourself!

how to unroll video
  1. Follow @ThreadReaderApp to mention us!

  2. From a Twitter thread mention us with a keyword "unroll"
@threadreaderapp unroll

Practice here first or read more on our help page!

More from @jholbo1

Feb 1
This @radleybalko debunking of the 'Derek Chauvin was wrongly convicted' documentary, "The Fall of Minneapolis", seems quite thorough, convincing, and damning. radleybalko.substack.com/p/the-retconni…
It's SO thorough & damning it's fair to say that figures like @coldxman who have promoted the documentary, & its conclusion, should either 1) debunk Balko's debunking back or 2) admit they were suckered by liars or 3) be themselves regarded as such. thefp.com/p/what-really-…
Back in December I somehow found myself listening to this bloggingheads discussion between @GlennLoury and John McWhorter, in which Loury quite strongly takes the line that the documentary exonerates Chauvin and proves 'we've been lied to'. bloggingheads.tv/videos/67137
Read 19 tweets
Oct 31, 2023
11 things can be true at once.
1) Israeli policy towards Palestinians has been & continues to be deeply unjust.
2) Belief in 1) is not antisemitic.
3) Since 1) is a main root of the conflict 'solutions' that ignore it won't work & are bad.
4) The left has an antisemitism problem.
5) The left has an idiot problem. Lots of people shouting antisemitic slogans they don't understand out of a vague sense that this is social justice.
6) 4) + 5) is really bad and poisonous to the left.
7) The right has an antisemitism problem (and an idiot problem, duh.)
8) The pro-Israel right has an interest in playing up 4) because it is unwilling to admit 1), despite 3), and would like to believe 7) is less serious than 4), which - maybe? (Who can say, but I doubt it.)
9) 8) predictably exacerbates 4) + 5), hence 6).
Read 5 tweets
Oct 9, 2023
My personal resolution: I'm only going to comment on the Israel/Gaza situation in a calm manner, addressed to the relatively small slice of people I think might be persuaded to see things a bit differently.
Here is @monacharen. Obviously there is a sense in which Israel did nothing to 'provoke' this attack. Nothing could justify or excuse it. But Israel did a great deal to risk it - to recklessly tempt such a development, politically, strategically. plus.thebulwark.com/p/hamas-makes-…
Image
One can say so without thereby excusing or justifying the attack. Every Israeli is demanding to know who is at fault on the Israeli side for staggering intelligence and defense lapses. No one is saying no one is at fault because, morally, it was the job of Hamas not to attack.
Read 9 tweets
Aug 18, 2023
[Deep breath] It's worse. It's so, so bad - so much worse even than that - that it's hard to keep the big picture in view. But let's try. Trump was denouncing vote-by-mail as "dangerous" and "fraudulent" as early as April, 2020. https://t.co/04CKW1Kl7inpr.org/sections/coron…
In fact, he made similar claims way back to 2016. All totally baseless. But let's just go back to April, 2020. As many have noted, as many R's have regretted, this was shooting himself in the foot. His voters believed him. He depressed his own turnout.
Why would Trump do that? He deliberately lowered his chances to win honestly because he calculated that doing so increased his chances to cheat - to steal the election by falsely alleging the election was stolen by D's.
Read 22 tweets
Aug 13, 2023
Moyn's lectures were great! Haven't read the book yet but the review, which is great, emphasises his key idea: the characteristic pessimism of Cold War-era philosophical liberalism - Trilling, Popper, Himmelfarb, Berlin, Shklar. Let me rub together 2 thoughts via that.
Rothfeld, the reviewer, contrasts these figures, as Moyn portrays them, with an identikit liberal. "A chipper rationalist who is scornfully secular, naively sanguine about humanity’s prospects for self-improvement and devoted to the philosophy of the Enlightenment."
This is just SO wrong. Cold War philosophical liberalism, as Moyn emphasises, is dark, pessimistic, concessive not aspirational, pre-emptively crouched. Per Moyn, it is 'against itself'. As a result - to this day - most anti-liberal critiques of liberalism are not EVEN wrong.
Read 23 tweets
Feb 12, 2023
The pull quote is exactly right for this one from @jbouie. One way to think about it: suppose, for the sake of the argument, there ARE two problems at present. 1) teens confusedly over-identifying as trans due to some social contagion whatever. 2) docs over-accommodating this. 1/
You reply: 1 & 2 aren't actually true. That's fine but just be an abstract normative political philosophy seminar room dork with me on this for a minute. It isn't absurd to imagine 1 & 2. If 1 & 2 were true, for the sake of argument, what would be the proper response? 2/
Broadly, there are two strategies. If you believe in liberty and respect and basic rights for all there is no alternative than muddling through. If the medical community has overcorrected for its long history of insufficiently recognising trans people, we need to correct the over
Read 26 tweets

Did Thread Reader help you today?

Support us! We are indie developers!


This site is made by just two indie developers on a laptop doing marketing, support and development! Read more about the story.

Become a Premium Member ($3/month or $30/year) and get exclusive features!

Become Premium

Don't want to be a Premium member but still want to support us?

Make a small donation by buying us coffee ($5) or help with server cost ($10)

Donate via Paypal

Or Donate anonymously using crypto!

Ethereum

0xfe58350B80634f60Fa6Dc149a72b4DFbc17D341E copy

Bitcoin

3ATGMxNzCUFzxpMCHL5sWSt4DVtS8UqXpi copy

Thank you for your support!

Follow Us!

:(