1) I've been mulling the intra-left debate over Twitter's Trump ban and the unaccountable power of private tech monopolies, and have some very tentative, inexpert thoughts that I find ideologically uncomfortable, and thus would gladly see rebutted:
2) I think tech platforms should be public utilities. I also think that, at a time when every arm of the federal state over-represents a far-right party, such that it will probably win full control of government if it loses the popular vote in 2024 by 2 points...
3)...it's not clear to me that a publicly managed/regulated Twitter would be less likely to censor leftwing speech, or to abet fascist propaganda, than one owned by a private entity that is dependent on the cooperation of a largely left-leaning labor force.
4) Which is to say: I think the first step to solving any of our polity's major problems is to democratize the state so as to disempower the authoritarian movement that now threatens every progressive project. Until reform or realignment is achieved, however...
5) I think we need to grapple with the possibility that the far-right now has more purchase over the public sector than it does over a globally-oriented tech sector that is reliant on workers who are generally hostile to the right, and potentially capable of workplace militancy Image

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More from @EricLevitz

27 Dec 20
1) There are a lot of problems with this @oren_cass piece. But here's the biggie: Stipulating that existing immigration levels are somehow incompatible with raising wages (as though Cass's proposed sectoral bargaining would not overwhelm any purported effect of labor inflows)..
2)...there's still no empirically plausible way to square a vision for sustained economic growth in the U.S. with slashing immigration. Pro-natal policies can mitigate demographic decline. But they can't reverse the global trend towards lower birth rates bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
3) The forces reducing family size (chiefly, women securing reproductive autonomy) overwhelm all culture/policy differences. You just cannot sustain growth -- or provide native-born workers with comfortable retirements as they age -- while slashing immigration...
Read 5 tweets
22 Dec 20
(1/) There's one argument in this piece that I think I could have made a bit clearer: Policy polling can be used to gauge the democratic legitimacy of a given proposal, *or* to anticipate how voters might behave if a given proposal achieved high salience..
nymag.com/intelligencer/…
(2/) M4A tends to lose support in polls that mention its implications for taxes/private insurance. Progressives are right to argue that this fact does not tell us much about the policy’s democratic legitimacy...
(3/) It’s impossible to know what voters truly want if they aren’t also alerted to M4A’s implications for their overall household finances and coverage stability etc. As @MattBruenig notes, employer-provided insurance becomes very unpopular when its downsides are highlighted
Read 7 tweets
30 Nov 20
Trump rang in 2020 by committing an unprovoked act of war against Iran, after ripping up America's diplomatic agreement with that nation (that Obama had pursued, so as to frustrate the neocons' push for war) and attempting to destroy its economy through secondary sanctions.
As it happened, killing Soleimani did not provoke a new U.S. war in the Middle East. But that has a lot more to do with Iranian pragmatism than Trumpian restraint.
Obama's drone war was horrible. Trump's has been more expansive and even less transparent. theatlantic.com/international/…
bbc.com/news/world-us-…
Read 5 tweets
15 Oct 20
Originalism, like “free market” economic doctrines, seems like little more than an elaborate mystification of power — a way for reactionaries to insulate their unpopular goals from democratic challenge by casting those aims as dictates foisted upon them by some distant agency...
So, *I*, a conservative ideologue in a robe am not voting to overturn a democratically enacted health reform, I’m simply carrying out The Constitution’s orders...
And *we* — elected and appointed office holders — are not choosing to funnel wealth upward through a particular set of tax, monetary and labor policies; impartial market forces are simply valorizing natural hierarchies of merit.
Read 4 tweets
20 Sep 20
1) If I believed that abortion was genocide and that the Clean Air Act was the first step on the road to Stalinism, then I would want McConnell to handle things exactly as he has. But once we drop the pretense of an apolitical judiciary...
2)...Democrats have no obligation to let the timing of various deaths + the biases of Senate and Electoral College award Republicans a high court supermajority for a decade -- despite the fact that their party has lost the popular vote in 6 of 7 presidential elections...
3) And the idea that they are obligated to honor the right's fortuitous triumph is all the more absurd when one considers the profound unpopularity of the conservative judicial agenda (not least on corporate power) and the audacity of the modern right's judicial activism...
Read 5 tweets
20 Feb 20
Virtually no one has a strong, context-neutral opinion on whether a candidate who enters the convention with a plurality of delegates should automatically get the nomination *no matter how small that plurality is.*
In a world where Mike Bloomberg got 30% of the vote, Bernie got 28%, and Warren got 23%, very few Sanders supporters would denounce the idea of Warren delegates putting Bernie over the top on a 2nd ballot as an affront to democracy.
The stakes of political conflict are too high -- and the theory of procedural justice in this circumstance too arbitrary -- for anyone to prioritize principle over outcome. (Fortunately, Bernie appears on track to win a large plurality, so this prob won't matter).
Read 4 tweets

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