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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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8 Nov, 4 tweets, 2 min read
President Biden is going to be a lot more hawkish on China than a lot of people realize.

uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa…
Biden has called Xi Jinping a "thug", and has called the Uighur repression "genocide"! Image
Biden's approach to confronting China - build up alliances and strengthen the U.S. technologically and economically -- seems extremely reasonable and smart. ImageImageImageImage
If a confrontation with China is inevitable -- as is looking increasingly likely -- we should all be glad to have someone like Biden at the helm to handle it.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
9 Nov
Remember, even though the autogolpe is currently failing, it could still succeed. Trump's people are trying to persuade Republican state legislatures in states Biden won to pick the wrong electors, thus stealing the election for Trump. Image
This would almost certainly be illegal, by the way.

snopes.com/fact-check/leg…
Also, FWIW, Pennsylvania's state legislature has already promised not to try it.

pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/11/07/pa-…
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
6 Nov
Stacey Abrams is amazing.

DEMOCRACY is something worth fighting for.
The point of democracy is not to elect Democrats.

It's to give everyone a voice, however small.

It's to give everyone a fair and equal stake in the system.

And most of all, it's to create a modus vivendi. A way people with opposing views can live together.
Electoral democracy - by which I mean secret-ballot majority rule - is not a perfect system, which for example is why we have courts to protect minority rights.

But it's a crucial bulwark against the possibility of the few ruling over the many.

Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
4 Nov
1/Regardless of the election outcome, Trump's inroads with Hispanic voters kills the idea that the Democrats are the Inevitable Party of the Demographic Future.

amazon.com/Emerging-Democ…
2/This idea was always based on the false belief that future ethnic voting patterns would be similar to past patterns -- that "Latinos vote like such-and-such" was a stable property of the Universe that would remain constant through the decades.
3/Ignoring the lessons of history, some Democrats believed that Hispanics would always be a reliable 70-30 voting bloc, so that all Democrats had to do was sit and wait for their numbers to swell, and the GOP would vanish like morning mist.
Read 13 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
4 Nov
Here was my official pre-election prediction. Note timestamp! Image
Trump just said "Frankly, we did win this election", so my prediction that he'd declare victory now seems fulfilled.
He also declared his intent to sue to stop vote-counting, so my whole prediction is on target so far.
Read 9 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
3 Nov
Hot take: China is scary precisely because it's so much like early 20th century America.
1. Coal-powered manufacturing-based industrial supremacy with ambitions to catch up in science

2. Disinterest in global politics but ambitions to dominate neighbors

3. Repression of minorities

4. Drive for homogeneity, jingoism, repression of press freedom
Not that this reflects particularly well on China.

The alternatives to America, 100 years ago, were Germany, Russia, Japan, and the British Empire. The alternatives to China today are far more benign.

Being a 1920 superpower in 2020 is...not a great thing to be.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
3 Nov
An odd quirk of American socialism is that it has embraced a class analysis based not on occupation (i.e. relationship to the means of production), but on tax brackets.
And to be clear, I think these two types of class analysis each have advantages and disadvantages...
On the disadvantage side, American socialism doesn't have a good way of thinking about the difference between a $10millionare car dealership owner, a $10millionaire software startup owner, and a $10millionaire lawyer.

And this is an important political difference!!
Read 7 tweets

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