I've seen a lot of people link to my piece with Tip O'Neill's old aphorism that "all politics is local."

I don't think that's quite right. It's that local politics is increasingly national. nytimes.com/2022/01/09/opi…
I talked with @JakeMGrumbach for the piece, who's forthcoming book, "Laboratories Against Democracy," is all about this. He had a line I didn't end up getting into the column, but have been thinking about since:
As he put it, this moment is unique in how much "national conflict is playing out through subnational institutions."
Look at any past American conflict and it played out, at least partly, through state and local institutions.

But Grumbach argues those were often regional or inter-state conflicts that became nationalized. They laddered up, not down
What's different now, he argues, is that nationalized parties + nationalized media + nationalized fundraising mean truly national conflicts are becoming localized, to an extent with no real precedent in American history.
It's a thesis I need to think about more, but you can pre-order the book here: press.princeton.edu/books/hardcove…
Anyway, the world has changed since the 80s.

All politics is now national, and all politics is now local.

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More from @ezraklein

9 Jan
I’ll say this for the right: They pay attention to where the power lies in the American system, in ways the left sometimes doesn’t.

Bannon calls this “the precinct strategy,” and it’s working. nytimes.com/2022/01/09/opi…
It reminds me of the old line about war: Amateurs talk strategy; professionals talk logistics. Right now, Trumpists are talking logistics.
“These local races that determine the mechanics of American democracy are the ventilation shaft in the Republican death star. These races get zero national attention. They hardly get local attention. Turnout is often lower than 20%.” - @benwikler
Read 5 tweets
5 Jan
Blogs are back. It's the blogosphere that's gone.

And that's partly because of this here web site!
What Substack and other newsletters have brought back is the long blog essay. That's a great form, and I'm thrilled to see it revived.

But that was always a small fraction of blogging, and it wasn't what built the ecosystem.
So much of blogging was "Link + quick comment."

The sites that built the blogosphere as a conversational ecosystem — Instapundit, Atrios, Daily Dish — specialized in that. But we all did a lot of it. And it created maps and conversations for readers to follow.
Read 6 tweets
2 Jan
Another example: It looks like CDC is going to revisit ending quarantine after 5 days without a test. But there isn't an available supply of rapid tests in many areas.

So we're going to have possibly infectious people driving from drugstore to drugstore, looking?
Read 4 tweets
31 Dec 21
I enjoyed this @VitalikButerin post on the Bulldozer vs. Vetocracy axis, but I think the problem is vetocracies are, by nature, complex and opaque, and people often don't even know the vetocracies shaping their lives. vitalik.eth.limo/general/2021/1…
Which is to say: This might be a good way of thinking about the problems of different societies, i.e., China's has bulldozer problems, America has vetocracy problems.

But I'm skeptical it's a good way of thinking about individual or even collective preferences.
Also: People's preference for veto points tend to change a lot with who's in power. I don't find that irrational or insincere, as some do, but it makes it harder to pinpoint an abstract preference in the area.
Read 5 tweets
31 Dec 21
I'm seeing this too, and I...don't think it's great.

There are more options here than, as @EricTopol puts it, inevitability vs. avoidance. This is what I've been trying to tease out pushing for a clearer description of goals.
There are other camps one can fall into, rather than seeing this as a binary between "let 'er rip" and "lock back down" (which seems to me to be what's obviously demanded by many arguments here, but since it won't happen, few are directly advocating it)
Here's mine: People are going to have very different risk tolerances, different needs, and little patience for lockdowns. No strategy that doesn't accept that can work.

So I want policymakers to make sure people have a full supply of risk management tools.
Read 13 tweets
29 Dec 21
This isn’t a “best books of 2021” list. I don’t read enough for that. And this isn’t a list of books published in 2021.

These are the books I read or reread in 2021 that I still find myself thinking about the most. They did the most to shape me this year.
“Under a White Sky,” by Elizabeth Kolbert. penguinrandomhouse.com/books/617060/u…
“The Alignment Problem,” by Brian Christian brianchristian.org/the-alignment-…
Read 18 tweets

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