Great win for #USMNT. Another absolutely pathetic and embarrassing night for CONCACAF, which will never be taken seriously until this absolute nonsense stops happening in every game.
Paper of record opting for nonstop “Reverse Emails” coverage (bit.ly/2ZNk957) of GOP authoritarianism & “Dems in disarray” as the core narrative of 10 months of unprecedented policy achievements by the Biden admin - has thoughts on optics & denying political reality.
🧵 This is a total, multidimensional failure of journalism. Astounding in its detachment from the political reality that it’s writers claim the Democrats are denying.
The Democrats - the party that passed the unprecedentedly large & ambitious American Rescue Plan that has avoided another Lost Decade, & has made massive progress against the pandemic despite active GOP sabotage - are “distracted.” It’s as if the last 10 months didn’t happen.
👇 Raising public awareness of the dire need for wholesale institutional reform is probably the single most useful thing political scientists can be doing right now. Not talking about structural things b/c they are deterministic & demoralizing is avoiding the central problem.
The thing that’s even more demoralizing & causes even more of a backlash is telling people that organizing & voting harder is the solution. Inevitably, they’re disappointed by the anti-democratic institutions, as so many takes this week about Dems’ failure to deliver bills note.
The way to possibly square this circle is for Democrats to make institutional reform the policy platform, instead of spending months of presidential primaries promising what their preferred Green Lantern universal health care policies will be.
👇 But it's worse than no context or data. It's a pre-assumed narrative that no amount of context/data is changing. We've lost the plot over 3-4% inflation. Pieces on housing & childcare costs make sense. Even a well-contexted piece on 👆 is a diversion.
Democrats have <literally> had 9 months of unprecedented legislative achievements amidst a raging pandemic & total non-cooperation in governance by the far right authoritarian party. This framing b/c <more> legislation isn’t done yet is utter nonsense.
Oy, what’s wrong with you, national media? The American Rescue Plan - one of the largest, most ambitious pieces of legislation in 🇺🇸 history - was passed within weeks of Democrats gaining majorities. Does anything actually matter, or is it all performative nonsense?
Ten months ago, we had a government run by a far right party actively trying to overturn election results and actively sabotaging the policy response to a raging global pandemic that has killed 700K+. But sure, Democrats “haven’t gotten anything done” since January. 🤷♂️🤦♂️
The thing to remember about Josh Hawley is that he an untruthful, fundamentally unserious person with awful ideas about trade, globalization, the WTO, systemic racism, democracy, and a…tenuous grasp of the scope and content of American history:
How many times did the national media fret over the credibility of the US being on the line or used “botched” to describe any of the disastrous foreign policy decisions of 2017-20? We’ve totally lost the plot here, as with the panic over 3-4% inflation.