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David Roberts Profile picture
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19 Mar, 4 tweets, 1 min read
This is such incredible work. nytimes.com/interactive/20…
Look at Seattle -- pretty much the only city (except DC) with virtually no trace of red at all. Yet the intensity of blue here could also serve as a map of NIMBY sentiment.
Portland is wild too. That is some extremely concentrated blue.
Be honest. If a house or apartment came up for sale next to you, and you were allowed to choose the partisan orientation of your future neighbor, would you choose:

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More from @drvolts

David Roberts Profile picture
20 Mar
Yeah, this is such a good pod. Even beyond Cuomo, it's great at showing how we have been trained to mistake toxic masculinity for "leadership." And it's not based on results. Leaders who are assholes *perform worse*. Being a dick is not effective.
I have, I'll just say vaguely, a close-up view of the business world, and it is gobsmacking how much time & emotional energy *everyone* has to devote to navigating around the tender egos of white men who fashion themselves mini-Pattons. It does not help get things done.
One thing both research & common sense show is that superior performance comes from internal motivation, not fear of external threat. You want people to perform well for you, you treat them well, acknowledge their strengths, encourage their initiative -- SEE them.
Read 7 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
20 Mar
I recently wrote a piece arguing that the Senate must pass voting reform, or else US democracy is fk'd for a decade, minimum. And I also made the point that the GOP will fight voting reform with everything they've got. volts.wtf/p/the-most-imp… Image
In that vein, I draw your attention to this AP story. Already the right is pulling together across issue lines for this. Already the rhetoric is escalating. (Cruz says Dems want to let murderers & child rapists vote.) Already oligarch money is flooding in. apnews.com/article/legisl…
This is my great fear about voting rights: the right understands the stakes & the left, broadly speaking, does not, at least not yet. The right is pulling together, coordinating, spending money, spreading shared talking points. The left is not, at least not yet.
Read 6 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
16 Mar
Such an important subject. We need lots more hard thinking in this country about, instead of "bigger" or "smaller" government, *better* government -- government that can do big things, well, at reasonable cost.
One challenge to better government, obviously, is that one of America's two political parties is institutionally committed to degrading & destroying government wherever & whenever it gets the chance. That means when the other party finally gets some pro-social policy in place ...
... it just locks down & goes into defense mode. There are a million ways US laws -- environmental review, pollution laws, utility regs -- could be improved with tweaks, but if they get opened up at all, the right will simply try to destroy them. So it's 100% defense for Dems.
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
15 Mar
Some day I'd like to go back through recent history and mark all the times when I thought, "no way Republican politics can get dumber than this." I think I've finally broken myself of the habit, but it was pretty regular there for a long while.
Like ... when they changed the french fries in the House cafeteria to "freedom fries." I was like, holy shit, this clearly crosses over into parody, this is going to get them laughed out of room.

Uh ... nope.
And then Clint Eastwood spent several minutes talking to an empty chair on stage at the RNC convention. Remember that? I thought, "welp, there's just no way anyone's keeping a straight face through this."

Nope.
Read 4 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
14 Mar
Highly recommend both the newsletter & the piece on baugruppen linked below it. I can't tell you how many people I've talked to who express a yearning for more communal life -- it just seems so daunting to get there from the position of the average suburbanite.
For years I have been thinking about the central point @annehelen makes in the newsletter: individualist capitalism tells us that success = freedom from constraints. Total mobility. Total autonomy. All the choices open, no paths cut off. But actual lived experience tells us ...
... that happiness comes from embeddedness, from obligations & entanglements. We draw sustenance from community, which we cannot get without restrictions & trade-offs. Fulfillment is one side of a coin, the other side of which is commitment & constraint.
Read 5 tweets
David Roberts Profile picture
14 Mar
Not just professors! Like anything that energizes & empowers the right wing, 9/11 kicked off years of efforts across culture to suppress liberal speech.

There is NO speech today that elicits the coordinated "cancelling" faced by people calling for peace & compassion in '02-'04.
Remember the Dixie Chicks? Now that was canceling -- not just protests from some activists, but a coordinated campaign of harassment & exclusion that included numerous public officials & involved death threats & album-burning parties.
More broadly: throughout history, in the VAST majority of cases, threats to speech come from the powerful & are directed against the powerless. It is subaltern & minority groups that are "canceled." It is beneficiaries of the social & economic status quo doing the canceling.
Read 6 tweets

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