Archives for 2024

John Josh Marshall [gift link]:

A key reason that many people are Democrats today is that they’re attached to a cluster of ideas like the rule of law, respect for and the employment of science and expertise, a free press and the protection of the range of institutions that guard civic life, quality of life and more. On the other side, say we have adherents of a revanchist, authoritarian politics which seeks break all those things and rule from the wreckage that destruction leaves in its path. So Democrats constantly find themselves defending institutions, or “the establishment,” or simply the status quo. Yet we live in an age of pervasive public distrust — distrust of institutions, leaders, expertise. And not all of this distrust is misplaced. Many institutions, professions, and power centers have failed to live up to their sides of the social contract.

In short, Democrats are by and large institutionalists in an age of mistrust. And that is challenging place to be.

What puts a finer point on the matter is that Democrats often find themselves carrying the water of institutions which do them no favors or are even affirmatively hostile. I think of this a lot when it comes to the establishment press. Civic democrats should and generally are in favor of a free and vital press. But that doesn’t or shouldn’t mean the press exactly as it’s structured right now. That’s not only wrong on the merits; it’s a losers’ game.

Commenter Martin yesterday:

I think Democrats (and traditional Republicans) problem is that the Constitution is a set of rules they can’t look past. And yet, we democrats fucking hate the electoral college, lifetime appointments, how apportionment is handled, at least the interpretation if not the wording of the second amendment, at times with parts of the first, fifth, 14th, and a bunch of others. We want to change these but cannot find the tools to change them within the rules as the constitution sets. We do the same thing with the senate – we cannot do the things we feel are needed to avoid existential crisis and still adhere to the senate rules, and the senate rules win over stopping the existential crisis.

At some point you have to accept this as irrational. The problem isn’t that we suck at navigating this space, the problem is that the space makes no goddamn sense for the set of problem we face. The problem is that the constitution is bad. It’s intent is great, a lot of it is objectively great, but it’s like the sports car you got with your partner when you got married that doesn’t work for you now that you have kids, and you love it, but you gotta get rid of it because it doesn’t work for you any longer. At some point you have to come to that conclusion. You aren’t rejecting cars – just that implementation of them.

And we assume that voters have the same respect and loyalty to each written word in the constitution that we do, and I think they simply don’t. They respect, again, the intent and many parts of it, but they see these problems that are increasingly intractable, not because Republicans are assholes, but because the document simply blew it when it came to figuring out how to keep the internet from destroying society because the fucking thing was written in 1789 and even though there’s an amendment process built into it, we’ve lost the capacity to use it. Sometimes you need to rewrite the fundamental rules of the game. And I think that’s what voters are asking for, and they’re tired of the excuse that the wisdom of some guy dead for 200 years won’t allow us to solve the homeless problem. At some point you have to say ‘fuck that guy, he’s not here, we can come up with new good ideas’. And that shit is scary.

Gotta run but I wanted to put both of those thoughts into the hopper and see what everyone thinks.

The Institutions Hung Around Our NecksPost + Comments (192)