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3 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
Electing Joe Biden and Kamala Harris will

a) Not solve all of America's problems, or even most of them

and

b) Will solve the particular problems created by Donald Trump being President of the United States, and those problems are life-and-death stakes for many, many people
Electing Biden and Harris doesn't mean, for instance, that a climate plan of sufficient scale will pass. But reelecting Trump means one won't.
Electing Biden and Harris doesn't ensure a successful coronavirus response going forward. But reelecting Trump guarantees the continuation of a disastrous one.
Presidential elections don't decide nearly as much national policy as candidates and campaigns claim. But – along with House and Senate races – they shape which policy fights are possible to win going forward.

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More from @ezraklein

Ezra Klein Profile picture
5 Nov
What we're seeing from Trump and his allies today is an autocratic attempt. It's not a competent one, and it probably won't be an effective one. But that's what it is. And far worse would follow if it succeeded.
As @mashagessen explained in this interview, using Balint Magyar's framework, an autocratic attempt is "the first stage when autocracy is still reversible by electoral means." vox.com/2020/7/10/2131…
The point is to make the regime's rule irreversible by electoral means, which is explicitly what Trump, et al, are trying right now.

"Then, at some point, there comes the autocratic breakthrough when you can no longer use electoral means to reverse that autocracy."
Read 10 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
28 Oct
I voted today, early, in California. I couldn't use the mail-in ballot because I'd moved between when they sent it and when voting began.

Even so: where I voted, there were no lines. There were extremely helpful volunteers. Everything was clean, safe.
My city, and my state, *wanted* me to vote.

Everything in the experience sent that message. They were trying to make this easy.

If mail was easiest, I could vote by mail. If that didn't work, I could vote in-person. If Tuesday was busy, I could vote early.
Everybody deserves that experience, You shouldn't have to fear sitting four hours in line to vote. You shouldn't have to worry about safety, or being rejected on a technicality, or not being able to make it to pick your kid up from school.
Read 10 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
22 Oct
I've been thinking a lot about this quote:

“In moments of extraordinary politics, in moments of transition between eras, the struggle is not to save the old regime, and political hardball is not a permanent status. The struggle is to achieve a new equilibrium.”

[Thread]
It's from @GaneshSitaraman’s “The Great Democracy," and I think it's right: We're in a period in which the kind of political system we will have is being decided.

The hardball will ease when one side or the other wins, and the rules become stable again, at least for awhile.
Republicans understand we're in that period, and are becoming more and more explicit about what that means, and what they want. They fear democracy, the rising power of a more diverse, more secular, more liberal generation.
Read 11 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
21 Aug
It's tucked into the middle of my Joe Biden wrap, but I want to highlight this interesting research on polarization from @Beyond_Conflict: Yes, we dehumanize, dislike, and disagree with each other. But not as much as we think we do. vox.com/2020/8/21/2138…
The twist of their polarization index is they ask not just how we feel about the other side, but how we think the other side feels about us.

It turns out that there's a huge gulf — we assume our political opponents loathe and dehumanize us much more than they do. Image
A caveat to this: Sometimes, the cruder, angrier divisions people perceive are a more accurate reflection of our system than mass opinion.

I'd say that's true now, with Trump's presidency. Perceived polarization and division isn't fake, it's just not the whole story.
Read 7 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
30 Jun
For all the talk of economic anxiety in 2016, there was an argument that Trump won precisely because the economy was improving and the election wasn't dominated by crises. People wouldn't have taken a flyer on him in riskier times, like 2008.

I think we're seeing that now.
Trump's reliance on electoral distraction is failing because the crises are too big for him to distract people from. And his presidency is failing because he's the last person in the world you want handling a complex, fast-moving crisis that takes a lot of coordination and focus.
To state the obvious, I was against ever taking a flyer on Trump, and I think the results have been predictably catastrophic.

But for all that punditry held he was a reaction to crisis, I don't think he was. People don't want a chaos president when the world is in chaos.
Read 6 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
24 Jun
One argument I make in “Why We’re Polarized” is that the alternative to polarization often isn’t agreement, or compromise. It’s suppression.

One way polarization can be healthy is it creates the conditions necessary for needed debates to actually happen.
The same is true on identity politics. The alternative to a politics that takes identity seriously is not national unity, but the suppression of problems and priorities of weaker groups.
As I argue in WWP, identity politics is most powerful when it’s least visible, because that tends to mean one identity group has full control of the agenda.
Read 8 tweets

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