As Omicron was ramping up Joy Reid said something along the lines of “Is there a way to cut out a safe place to live these days [free from all the anti-vaxxer crazies]?” That resonated with me. I think that’s a plausible way how life could be in ten years. Some municipalities & companies, maybe some states, will appeal to individuals that value, well, reason, and others will not. Then the exercise becomes one of which brands are in some sense profitable. This will of course deepen polarization, but over the course of several generations the unprofitable approaches will die a desperate and lonely and death. Some of the woke brands won’t make it, but neither will some of the reactionary brands. It is not clear what will happen to the federal government during this time, perhaps the kind of oscillation the author imagines. The trick will be to insulate oneself from it until the political power of the crazies is ground down by repeated failure and steadily decreasing economic power.
From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> On Behalf Of Steve Smith Sent: Friday, February 4, 2022 8:32 AM To: friam@redfish.com Subject: [FRIAM] Democracy in Name Only: endemic regime instability Someone here is more likely than I to have actually read Ziblatt and Levitsky's How Democracies Die<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/How_Democracies_Die#:~:text=How%20Democracies%20Die%20is%20a,process%20to%20increase%20their%20power.> A recent article (behind a subscribe-wall) included the following quote: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2022-01-20/americas-coming-age-instability America may no longer be safe for democracy, but it remains inhospitable to autocracy. Rather than autocracy, the United States appears headed toward endemic regime instability. Such a scenario would be marked by frequent constitutional crises, including contested or stolen elections and severe conflict between presidents and Congress (such as impeachments and executive efforts to bypass Congress), the judiciary (such as efforts to purge or pack the courts), and state governments (such as intense battles over voting rights and the administration of elections). The United States would likely shift back and forth between periods of dysfunctional democracy and periods of competitive authoritarian rule during which incumbents abuse state power, tolerate or encourage violent extremism, and tilt the electoral playing field against their rivals. I found this characterization of our plight very compelling, if also very disturbing. It seems as if we have "tumbled our gyros" but in a different mode than the rhetoric about "Civil War" and "Descent into Autocracy" seem to suggest. It also characterizes a lot of the aspiring/limping democracies we know of in the world today up to and including extreme examples such as Russia which fits the DINO (democracy in name only) label pretty well. This conception of the problem lead me to a very well written HS student-essay by the same title: democracy-in-name-only<https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/democracy-in-name-only-2020-01-02>. Within this essay was a poignant quote: In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, “A new science of politics is needed for a new world. This, however, is what we think of least; launched in the middle of a rapid stream, we obstinately fix our eyes on the ruins which may still be descried upon the shore we have left, while the current sweeps us along, and drives us backward toward the gulf.”
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