Interesting Obama interview by @CitizenCohn, from his (essential) new book on the history & meaning of Obamacare. Dunno if he draws the same dire conclusions I do, but to me Obamacare symbolizes ... everything about current US politics, none of it good. huffpost.com/entry/obama-in…
Primarily, Obamacare illustrates that ALL the incentives in US politics have lined up against people trying to reform things. Obama was fighting a unified, nihilistic right. He was fighting a large group of (truly terrible) conservative Dem senators. And he was fighting ...
... against an activist left convinced that if the Bully Pulpited hard enough, he could force those conservative Dems to do what he wanted. That left him, & the Democrats pushing reform, with effectively no friends, no organized popular backing -- fighting everyone.
The fact that Obamacare got done at all (and 20M+ people now have insurance they didn't before) traces back to a series of miracles -- briefly having 60 Dem senators, being wildly popular himself, reconciliation lining up just so. It can't be replicated.
The world we're in now is better illustrated by the climate bill Dems tried to do after Obamacare. Again fighting a nihilist, unified GOP. Again fighting horrible conservative Dems. Again fighting a left that demanded Green Lantern miracles. Again: no real friends, no backing.
But that bill did what all bills do now: died in the Senate.

Obamacare slipped through a narrow aperture that was rapidly closing. It's fully closed now, and nothing big will pass again until/unless fairly radical democratic reform happens. Dems are now stuck ...
... and worse, getting *comfortable* being stuck, pushing all reform through tweaks in the tax code buried in reconciliation bills. That's a horrendous way to govern, politically & policy-wise. It won't ever do what Dems most need to do, which is demonstrate to Americans ...
... that big, bold government can help improve their lives. It's not a stable equilibrium -- and it is currently collapsing in the direction of quasi-authoritarian minority RW rule. All the incentives have lined up behind reality-show politics & against real reform.
Dems' only hope of breaking out of this doom loop -- to repeat myself for the zillionth time -- is to bypass/reform/kill the filibuster & pass sweeping democracy reform in the next two years. Absent that, they, and America, are fucked. </fin>

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More from @drvolts

28 Feb
Wow this Politico piece about Marjorie Taylor Greene is so, so revealing -- not just about her, but about the kind of person who is drawn to (and becomes a star in) today's GOP. politico.com/news/magazine/…
Key line: "her seat in Congress is less the fulfillment of a dream than the culmination of a desperate, yearslong search for an identity that fulfilled a yearning for affirmation and attention."
It's getting to be a familiar story on the right, whether it's Madison Cawthorn, MTG, or even Trump himself: an insecure person in desperate need of ego reinforcement casts about for some way to be the center of attention, to get the affirmation they need. And then they find ...
Read 9 tweets
26 Feb
Sometimes I try to imagine what it's like, caring about who else uses the bathroom you use ... caring about how other people identify themselves, gender-wise ... caring about other people's domestic arrangements ... and I just can't get there.
Granted, no one targets their moral sentiments & advocacy purely toward issues they calculate involve the most objective harm. We're not robots.

Nonetheless, it is a moral failing to rank your social & political concerns *purely on the basis of what makes you uncomfortable*.
I mean, the entire conservative discussion of gender issues proceeds as follows: a) this makes me uncomfortable, b) therefore it's bad, c) I can't just say it's bad because it makes me uncomfortable, so d) let's create a cottage industry finding/inventing real harms.
Read 5 tweets
24 Feb
Lemme try again: read @JillFilipovic's piece on Rush Limbaugh's misogyny. (Apologies to Jill & @JessicaValenti for getting my J-feminists mixed up, which they must find incredibly tiresome at this point.) nytimes.com/2021/02/20/opi…
All conservative rage & resentment come from fear, but nowhere is that more obvious than in Limbaugh-style sexism. At the very lizard brain core of these little boys is a desperate, desperate need for care & nurturing. They aren't allowed to articulate or even acknowledge it ...
... so when they enter puberty & beyond & find themselves without it -- clueless how to get it, unable to even ask for it -- they respond with the only emotion they've been taught is legitimate for a man: anger. They become furious at women for having this power over them.
Read 5 tweets
24 Feb
Worth noting: the Texas mess wasn't a "grid crisis." The grid did just fine distributing the power it had available. It was a *generation crisis* -- thanks to inadequately weatherized natgas production facilities & power plants, there just wasn't enough power to go around.
The Texas grid certainly would have benefited from being bigger, from being connected to the other two US grids, but you would need a truly epic amount of line capacity to import enough power to cover that shortfall. Generation failure was the heart of the crisis.
Everyone keeps RTing these tweets, so I'll add to this thread: I wrote a post on all this! See here: volts.wtf/p/lessons-from…
Read 5 tweets
24 Feb
The weird thing is, I can *easily* envision his audience believing both that Q is virtuous and that Q is a myth, just as they can simultaneously believe that the attack on the capitol was virtuous and that antifa did it.

Purest tribal epistemology.
The criteria for these claims is not correspondence to external reality. It's correspondence to the interests of the conservative tribe. Two things that are mutually contradictory based on the first metric can coexist peacefully based on the second metric.
Indeed I imagine this is the standard RW take on the insurrection: insofar as it was good (brave patriots fighting a stolen election), it was conservatives; insofar as it was bad (violence, dead cops), it was antifa. These should not be understood as empirical claims ...
Read 5 tweets
23 Feb
When I first heard Clubhouse described I genuinely thought it was a joke. I still have a moment of incredulity every time it comes up. Clearly my very strong feelings on asynchronous communication are, like most of my strong feelings, not widely shared.
Basically, as a neurotic & self-loathing type, the chances of me regretting what I say rise in direct proportion to synchronicity. I end up regretting about 90% of what I say "live" in conversation, about 50% of what I write on here, & only about 10% of my longform writing.
It's linear: the more time I have to consider my response, the better it gets. I've not yet found the limit of this principle. Ideally, I should just spend my whole life silently taking stuff in & then, on my death bed, write a zillion-page opus.
Read 4 tweets

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