Don Moynihan Profile picture
Feb 4 9 tweets 4 min read
I wrote about the effort to both-sides current threats to American democracy, focusing on Ross Douthat's claim that liberal belief in expertise is akin to right-wing populism. 1/
donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-least-its…
Douthat's core argument is summarized below: right-wing populism is democratic in ways that liberalism is not. This is, I think both wrong and misleading. It understands the anti-democratic nature of populism and the value of expertise to successful democratic societies. 2/
Douthat picks three examples of how expertise is at odds with democracy, all of which fail in some fundamental way. First, libs want you to listen to Anthony Fauci and public health guidelines. Well...3/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-least-its…
Second: school officials are ignoring parents. Here Douthat restates the messaging of a large-scale right-wing effort to assert control over schools, often by ignoring the claims of minority students and free speech/due process rights of education officials. Not v. democratic! 4/
Finally and weirdly, Douthat raises Ireland running multiple referenda on a key EU treaty (first voting no, then yes) as proof of expert dominance of a democracy. But a) EU membership has been historically popular in Ireland, leaving b/c of a single referenda would upend that..5/
b) referenda often have weird dynamics. The Irish govt got reassurances on abortion/military neutrality issues that drove the no vote, which is how democracy is supposed to work. A second landslide referenda w higher turnout based on better info seems democratic! 6/
Again, we have a direct counterfactual, right next door to Ireland, of a populist referenda on the EU. From an Irish point of view, Brexit turned out to be a disaster for the UK (and Ireland) and helped increase support for the EU. 7/ donmoynihan.substack.com/p/at-least-its…
Sometimes it's not that complicated: the people threatening democracy are the ones who say free and fair elections are illegitimate, attempted a coup, and are seeking to control the machinery of elections so they can succeed next time. It's not Anthony Fauci or schoolteachers. 8/
As populism has become more extreme among its supporters, the GOP response has been to normalize rather than reject it. The party and the movement seems unable to fix itself. 9/ nytimes.com/2022/02/04/us/…

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More from @donmoyn

Feb 3
Here, Douthat offers what is intended to be a parody of liberal reliance on expertise and autonomy. Instead, it is a parody of Douthatism: the tendency to waive away the excesses of radical right and equate them as equivalently dangerous the basic aspects of running a democracy.
Douthat: Trump attempting a coup and managing to create massive distrust in US elections is not good, no, but it's complicated. Cast in a certain light it reflects intellectual traditions on the right.
Also Douthat: Now let me tell you about the dangers of schoolteachers.
There is so much in this single paragraph that it falls apart on the slightest inspection. Did Fauci "lead" pandemic decision making? No, the President does, and is free to discard Fauci's adivce.
Better ?: would we have been better off granting Trump the power to fire Fauci? No.
Read 8 tweets
Feb 2
Lisa Cook's work documenting how a collapse in Black personal security dramatically undermined innovation is amazing. It speaks to the value that an empirical approach and different perspective provides a deeper understand of the economy. paulromer.net/lisa-cook/
What struck me looking that Cook's graph documenting a Reconstruction-era spike and Jim Crow era collapse in Black patents, is you see the same pattern in political participation (graph on the right documents voter registration in Louisiana, from Keele, Cubbison, and White, 2021)
This historical data had to be painstakingly assembled to provide a broader picture of US history. They speak to the enormous long-term costs of the abandonment of Reconstruction in terms of not just equality but human innovation and prosperity.
Read 4 tweets
Feb 2
Started my morning doing a zoom panel hosted by the OECD presenting research about US government performance improvement reforms to a group of international finance officials. What I didn’t mention is that Congress is no longer sharing the data that the research is based on.🧵
Bit more background. Every few years the GAO surveys federal employees about how they use performance data in government. Here is an example of a report based on those surveys. 2/ gao.gov/products/gao-2…
I have used that survey data to understand what sorts of factors make it more likely that public employees use performance data, and how they use it. The resulting studies provide insights into US government, and specific variables like the effects of ideology or training. 3/
Read 12 tweets
Jan 31
Part of a consistent pattern by a public Texas institution to violate the first amendment by threatening and then firing faculty for exercising protected speech rights. But it doesn't make a dent in the broader discourse because it doesn't fit a very specific narrative. 1/
This history professor says he was fired from their university after they visibly advocated for the removal of confederate statutes and criticized the absence of public health messaging on campus. 2/ Image
Couple of points here. This is at least the fourth prof removed in similar circumstances by this college. The last one won a settlement. But the institution just keeps on doing it. Sometimes, a fine is just a price for misbehavior, not a disincentive. 3/ lawandcrime.com/first-amendmen…
Read 6 tweets
Jan 26
TN county school board votes to remove use of graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus from school curriculum. Complains about vulgarity and naked pictures. tnholler.com/2022/01/mcminn…
All I’m suggesting folks is that maybe it’s a good thing if the professional autonomy of teachers was respected a little more
We don't know a lot about the details of the removal of the book Maus, but since the anti-CRT push we've seen a) a 60%⬆️in effort to bans books, and b) the election of school board members who are less likely to accept the judgement of education officials. donmoynihan.substack.com/p/the-book-ban…
Read 4 tweets
Jan 26
Looking forward to the guys who floated the theory that a Kavanaugh doppelgänger attacked Christine Blasey Ford and she just misremembered the whole thing now turn their attention to questioning the credentials and temperament of Black female candidates
People sort of memory-holed this, but the nuts Kavanaugh doppelgänger theory was given credence by NY Times columnists, and became the means by which Senators who said they didn't think Ford was lying could still vote for Kavanaugh vox.com/2018/10/1/1791…
If I had promoted a wild conspiracy theory designed to protect a SCOTUS nominee from credible allegations of assault, I would simply stop weighing in on SCOTUS nominations for the rest of my life.
Read 5 tweets

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