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Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
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Jan 27 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It seemed that way in the 70s too, but in the end the choice was "neither", and the world sort of puttered along. More and more, I'm betting that that's basically what'll happen this time too.
Which is not to say that I'm not afraid of a dark fascist nightmare (I am!) or that I wouldn't like a transformative and new society (I would!). But I increasingly doubt that American society has the cohesion or the capacity to produce either of those.
In any case, I also recommend you read The Dispossessed, by Ursula K. LeGuin. But -- spoiler! -- it's about a society that putters along, pulled by its radical dreams but always restrained by its complex, unwieldy reality.
But having said all this, please do not listen to me. The only thing that can tamp down unrest is people believing that unrest has only just begun long after it has started to retreat. If you all keep freaking out for the rest of this decade, things will be OK for the kids. 😉
Anyway, I wrote this all up in a post, in which I also address the question of whether climate change will force us to accept a radical future:

noahpinion.substack.com/p/do-we-stand-…

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 28
When I was a kid, we had domestic terrorists killing hundreds of people and bombing the Olympics. We had 2200 murders in NYC in one year. We had 30,000 nukes pointed at us, on hair-trigger alert.

And this is what we now remember as a golden age.

So...maybe we'll be ok.
Three times as many people died in one single riot when I was a kid as died in an entire summer of nationwide George Floyd protests.

3x people died in one right-wing terrorist attack in the 90s than rightists killed during Trump's entire term in office.
The government laid siege to a cult just down the road from the town where I grew up. The cult burned down and like 80 people were killed.

Some guy stole a tank and rampaged through Los Angeles.

And it was just...stuff we saw on the news.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 28
1/Just for fun, let's go through the part of @RichardHanania's post where he talks about the likelihood of an insurgency in Ukraine, should Russia invade and seize the Eastern half of the country.

richardhanania.substack.com/p/russia-as-th…
2/The overall theme of the post is standard conservative stuff -- liberals are obsessed with Russia and with LGBT, etc. etc. Not super interesting.

But then he asserts that Ukrainians wouldn't fight an insurgency, and that this means Russia will prevail in this confrontation.
3/This argument -- Russia cares about Ukraine more than the U.S. does -- also applies to the USSR and Poland in the 80s. And yet Poland left Russia's orbit and joined the West.

What Poland wanted was more important than what the U.S. OR the USSR wanted. Image
Read 14 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 24
The reason all sides seem so unreasonable in a Time of Unrest is that everyone is afraid of Passion For Change being monopolized by the opposing side, so they all try to summon unreasoning passion for one thing or another.
This is why unrest is a macro variable that modulates all the micro variables in politics and culture; when the music plays, everyone has to get up and dance.
This does not mean there is no good side and no bad side in a Time of Unrest; instead it means that when we look back at the period from a time of reasoned calm, even the side we eventually recognize as "good" will seem fairly wacko.
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 22
The critics of NATO expansion are overplaying their hand. We DID leave Russia a sphere of influence: Ukraine, Belarus, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. Current and recent events are just the verification of that new sphere-of-influence equilibrium.
You can argue that we shouldn't have included the Baltics -- that all Soviet successor states should have been left within Russia's sphere of influence (though this would have sucked for the Baltics obviously).

But Poland? Romania? No, those were always going to join the West.
Russia invading Ukraine and Georgia and sending troops to Belarus and Kazakhstan is just the inevitable confirmation of the resolution of the Cold War -- that Europe gets to expand to include the old Warsaw Pact, but (mostly) not the old Soviet Union.
Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 18
At age 6 I was obsessed with the idea that nuclear disarmament could be achieved by having Godzilla eat all the nuclear warheads.
Crazy thing is that I didn't even think of using Godzilla to make nuclear power more sustainable by feeding him all the radioactive waste.
I think growing up in a house with many pets makes one perceive any animal, even an imaginary 400-foot-tall fire-breathing monster, as a potential pet
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🌐+🧦=🐇 Profile picture
Jan 17
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 The story since the 70s has been:
* Wages ⬆️ a little
* Hourly comp ⬆️ more
* Working hours ⬇️, so individual annual earnings only ⬆️ a little
* Govt benefits & investment income⬆️ so individual income ⬆️
* # of workers/household went up so household income ⬆️ a lot
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 So overall story: Your average worker is consuming a lot more and working a lot fewer hours, but now women have jobs
@LittleKeegs0 @JosephPolitano @ckrlft @TristamPratori1 This is why much of progressive policy is now focused on taxing the rich to pay for child care...
Read 5 tweets

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