1. Unless there's a vaccine very soon, I fear that Joe Biden will not handle the pandemic much better than Trump did. I really hope I'm wrong. It just seems to me that a lot of dealing with the pandemic means convincing people to sacrifice...
2. ... Americans aren't going to sacrifice very important cultural rituals and family time when they see their elites living by a separate set of rules. It just doesn't work that way. They have to see their leaders sacrificing first. Will even that work? I don't know. But...
3. That isn't how Dems think of themselves. One thing that's really clear about the boomer and up elite Dems is they really believe they are beloved and trusted. They don't understand you have to *earn* popular trust, Harvard doesn't grant it to you with your law degree.
4. I really hope that Joe Biden does all the stuff good scientists suggest he does, but even there, hospital executives are often arrogant and dismissive. Early on they ignored advice from competent Chinese doctors with experience in Wuhan.
5. This pandemic experience has been deeply humbling for America, and I hope we draw the right lessons. Joe Biden's political team, like @RonaldKlain, were able to ignore bad arrogant advice throughout the campaign and set their own course. I hope they do that with the pandemic.
6. But there is a really sick culture of entitlement among elite Democrats like Nancy Pelosi and Gavin Newsom, a 'rules are for thee and not for me' attitude. They justify this by pointing to the goon Trump. Trump won't be in office much longer.
7. I really hope that the new Biden team has @zeynep involved in their pandemic response work. She's been the clearest thinker about how to understand the dynamics of this pandemic as it interacts with social and political systems.
8. Covid is a hard problem, and no one is handling it well.

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More from @matthewstoller

14 Nov
I'm increasingly furious at the complete disinterest in governing by supposed political analysts.
Governing matters. Democrats victories in 2006 and 2008 were about the war in Iraq and financial crisis, Trump's victory had a lot more to do with NAFTA and China PNTR than anything else.
Flip it around, Trump entirely defined the agenda in 2016, and he was the challenger. Nate's a smart guy, but he's completely lost because his polls didn't work and he doesn't realize the government exists.
Read 5 tweets
10 Nov
The Joe Biden transition teams are... not bad.
It's a mixed bag. There are some really bad signs. For example, the Commerce transition team's lead is the general counsel at the University of Pittsburgh, which has been hiring union busting consultants to go after faculty and grad student unions.
Bridget Dooling, on Biden's OMB team, is a straight up Koch brothers plant. She wants more cost/benefit analysis across government, your basic deregulatory operative. citizen.org/article/koch-c…
Read 5 tweets
10 Nov
On the way out the door Trump DOJ antitrust chief Makan Delrahim approves the Uber-Postmates deal, because apparently independent restaurants have it too good these days. I guess that's one way to ask for a private equity job. axios.com/doj-clears-ube…
So @makandelrahim will go down as one of the all time biggest dumbasses to run the antitrust division. A lightweight, generally corrupt, but also recused from the Google case, which is the only interesting thing in the division he ostensibly runs. Embarrassing.
Hey Republicans, Trump's antitrust chief is doing the bidding of little big tech. This is embarrassing. Clean house now that you have the chance out of power to do so.
Read 4 tweets
8 Nov
1. I'll explain what I mean here. I'm a Biden voter. But it is fundamentally dangerous that Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai are making policy over how we deliberate over political matters. This policy has to be done through the government. But the problem is even deeper.
2. Voting machines are now consolidated and owned by private equity firms, who make policy over electoral infrastructure itself. Media conglomerates organize the political parties. Contractors structure government spending and Blackrock structures Federal Reserve policy.
3. The essence of democracy is twofold, civic and commercial. We need competitive markets and a democratic system of industrial control. Otherwise monopolists will and do make public policy that we the people would otherwise be making.
Read 12 tweets
6 Nov
In 2017-2018 there was a debate among Dems about what happened, the side saying it was because Trump voters are unredeemable and evil won.

That debate has opened up again.
Trump’s narrow loss despite his massive governance failures show that what happened in 2016 wasn’t really about Hillary Clinton, but a deeper anger and mistrust towards Democrats.
The political problem for Democrats is that the GOP is now plotting to take the entire working class, and Dems kind of want them to take it.
Read 4 tweets
5 Nov
Democratic donors dramatically over-invest in elections and grassroots organizing and under-invest in actually understanding how to use the massive and complicated government they are about to take over.
It's an unpopular hot take but maybe hiring a few people to think about how to use the Commerce Department with its authority to, oh I don't know, restructure the entire economy, is better than handing Amy McGrath another eleventy zillion dollars.
The Federal government is a $5 trillion behemoth. Maybe it's a good idea to know stuff about how to run it.
Read 5 tweets

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