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noahpinion.blog
The second Trump presidency is a world-historic failure

The blunt fact is that Trump's second term has already failed in the court of public opinion. This is an incredible, world-historic failure. And it didn't have to be that way — Trump simply made a bunch of avoidable errors, for a mix of ideological and personal reasons.

— Noah Smith
4d ago

The penalty that good men pay for not being interested in politics is to be governed by men worse than themselves.

2w ago
noahpinion.blog
Roundup #88: Is it time to panic yet?

The last of these — the progressives who simply couldn't admit that billionaire-funded private industry could build something powerful enough to endanger humanity — were the strangest of all, since their refusal to acknowledge the effectiveness of AI basically put them in an alliance with libertarians, hawks, and Trump.

2w ago
noahpinion.blog
Liberalism needs a new philosophy of immigration

Progressives in America and socialists in Europe still desperately claim that what angry working-class voters really want is more economic support. They keep offering more and more lavish promises of welfare supports and price controls, while staunchly opposing restrictions on immigration. The approach keeps failing, and the far right keeps rising.

4w ago

The fate of the country does not depend on how you vote at the polls — the worst man is as strong as the best at that game; it does not depend on what kind of paper you drop into the ballot-box once a year, but on what kind of man you drop from your chamber into the street every morning.

1mo ago
noahpinion.blog
America's political economy is pretty bleak right now

It's a validation of Matt Yglesias' "Secret Congress" theory — the idea that our legislators mostly just want to do what's good for the country, but are prevented from doing so by the partisan anger of their electorates. According to this theory, the way to get good laws passed is to have them remain low-profile, so they don't arouse the nation's compulsion to turn everything into a zero-sum politicized food fight.

2mo ago
noahpinion.blog
MAGA's attack on science is even worse than it looks

When MAGA types tell you about scientists losing their credibility, or a drop in trust in science, they're only talking about themselves. Whatever left-wing politicization of science happened during the Biden administration — and there was definitely some of that — it was not enough to make most Republicans lose faith in the scientific enterprise, or favor research cuts in order to purge unwanted ideology from the system.

2mo ago
noahpinion.blog
The Democrats have their own MAGA now

Avila Chevalier is as much of an extremist as anyone associated with the MAGA movement. The best comparator on the right would probably be Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has made a long string of similarly extreme and wacky statements. My typical line is that "both extremes are bad, but the Republican extreme is worse". Avila Chevalier is severely testing that asymmetry.

3mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Does anything I write matter anymore?

Whether it was Covid, Trump's advancing age, or his attempted overthrow of the 2020 election that made Trump totally lose faith in everyone but himself, the big man now seems inclined to listen only to the voices in his own head. There's no intellectual movement here, just a cult of personality. There's no one to argue with, because nothing that's happening is based on an argument in the first place.

3mo ago

The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men.

3mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
Left Impasse

Local contests are, it should be said, an unreliable guide to national outcomes. Three years after his capture of the Élysée in 2017, Emmanuel Macron failed to establish a foothold in municipalities large or small; he was nevertheless re-elected two years later.

5mo ago
noahpinion.blog
Yes, assimilation is good

In the past, showing that you were a good American — waving the flag, joining the army, speaking perfect English, and so on — was good enough to reassure most conservatives that you weren't an invader bent on overthrowing America's culture and replacing it with something alien. Nowadays, that's not enough.

6mo ago

Underscored — save the words that stop you in your tracks.

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