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Ezra Klein Profile picture
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1 Jul, 4 tweets, 2 min read
It is hard to view your own country objectively. There is too much cant and myth, too many stories and rituals.

So over the past week, I’ve been asking foreign scholars of democracy how the fights over the American political system look to them. nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opi…
And this, from @IvanKrastev, is sobering.
Much more in the piece, of course: nytimes.com/2021/07/01/opi…

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More from @ezraklein

Ezra Klein Profile picture
22 Jun
Senator Sinema's op-ed defending the filibuster is frustrating, but I want to take one argument from it seriously, because it's shared by many of her colleagues: The idea that ending the filibuster will mean ricochet legislating. washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/…
I know people of good-faith believe this argument, and it's a reason they don't want to get rid of the filibuster.

BUT:

1. It's not true, mostly.

2. In the limited cases it is true, it's healthy.
I'm not going to try to condense this to tweet length. But I've reported and written a lot on this, and here's the counterargument:
Read 5 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
8 Jun
🔥🔥🔥 from @povertyscholar. Everything she says in this podcast is worth hearing. Don't miss it. nytimes.com/2021/06/08/opi…
And this, on "deservingness":
And on the way program design can connect people to politics, and make them feel empowered, or alienate them from politics by constantly humiliating them:
Read 4 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
1 Jun
So I sat down with this guy last week to talk about winning over skeptical voters, the things he didn't say when he was president, the mistakes in the ACA and the stimulus, aliens, what humans will be judged for in 100 years, and more.

Some highlights: nytimes.com/2021/06/01/opi…
Here’s Obama on the central paradox of his presidency:

He accomplishes this remarkable act of persuasion, but it opens the door to the Tea Party, to Sarah Palin, to Donald Trump — and so he leaves behind a politics that often seems post-persuasion, more hostile to pluralism:
One lesson some on the left have taken from the aftermath of Obama’s presidency is you can’t tiptoe around America’s worst impulses. You need a politics of confrontation, not of uncomfortable coalitions.

Here’s Obama on that tension:
Read 11 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
21 May
Violent crime is spiking. Homicides in cities were up by 25-40 percent in 2020, the largest single-year increase since 1960. And 2021 isn’t looking any better.

This is a crisis on its own terms. But it’s also a crisis for the broader liberal project in two downstream ways.
First, violent crimes supercharges inequality. Families who can flee, do. Business close or never open. Banks won’t make loans. Property values plummet. Children are traumatized, with lifelong impacts on stress and cognition.

(@patrick_sharkey's work is great on this.)
Second, fear of violence undermines liberal politics. Just look at America post-9/11. Or after the crime surges of the 70s and 80s and 90s — strongmen politicians win, punitive responses like mass incarceration and warrior policing rise, social trust collapses.
Read 12 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
19 May
This is completely insane. The FBI catfished a suicidally depressed pizza delivery guy. The agent catfishing him repeatedly tried to get him to commit a terrorist attack. He repeatedly talked her out of it. So they arrested him on gun possession. amp.cnn.com/cnn/2017/11/29…
The judge gave him an unusually long sentence because of past homicidal fantasies he’d admitted to (or made up, who knows?) in his conversations, even though when the FBI agent tried to convince him to make them realities, he tried to talk her out of hurting other people.
So basically the FBI was looking for possible terrorists, found a guy who was committed - even under duress, even when mentally unstable and lonely and trying to impress a woman - to talking possible terrorists out of terrorist acts, and they arrested him. It’s lunacy.
Read 4 tweets
Ezra Klein Profile picture
14 May
Everything @AgnesCallard says in this podcast is interesting. Like here she is just casually reversing the normal story of what politics is for, and what society is designed to teach us. No big deal. nytimes.com//2021/05/14/po…
And why parenting should actually be called "childing — all our language suggests the parent is in control, and setting the path, but really children are:
And what a leftwing version of Jordan Peterson would look like:
Read 6 tweets

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