Are liberals on the wrong side of history
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"Perhaps Tocqueville’s most brilliant insight (and Mishra, to his credit, cites it) was that revolutions are produced by improved conditions and rising expectations, not by mass immiseration. As Louis C.K. says, right now everything is amazing and nobody is happy. Each citizen carries on her person a computer more powerful than any available to a billionaire two decades ago, and many are using their devices to express their unbridled rage at the society that put them in our pockets."
Paying rent without stress is better than any smartphone.
The fix is as simple as sufficiently progressive taxation to make the median worker's income track the productivity growth of the economy. The fact that we have made the political choices not to follow that path (as opposed to the Scandinavian countries) is a different matter, but there is no doubt as to the ability for the government to fix the problem you laid out.
Then imagine what it takes to bring the median closer - you have to squash the curve (make it more progressive). You can either lop of the top end, shore up the low end, or do some combination of the two.
To get a sense of just how progressive the tax system could be, consider the rule of thumb that the value of money is roughly logarithmic.
Logarithmic tax systems have been designed - here's a simple one as a thought experiment. They call it the logarithmic flat tax. First, figure out your yearly revenue. Then, figure out how many times the poverty rate your income is. Then take the log of that number, and then multiply it by a certain flat constant that would be the same for everyone (to get the amount of tax revenue the united states needs for instance - for the united states, that would be around 9). The resulting number is the percentage of your gross that you should pay in taxes.
If you apply that to all individuals and businesses, then you have a progressive tax system that is basically equal in terms of how much it "hurts" for every payer (the value of money being roughly logarithmic). Hint, it's probably much lower than you are currently paying unless you are Apple or Exxon. Last I checked, Bill Gates roughly pays an appropriate amount.
Pretty sure it's closer to four decades.
> Nobody knows how to fix this.
Everyone who knows even a little about fiscal policy and it's effect on distribution of gains in the economy knows how to fix it, which is the mirror image of how it was achieved (reduce the degree of additional taxation imposed specifically on both paying and recieving wages, which discourages employment and reduces the returns that are retained by those who are employed.)
That an insufficient number of people choose to act on that knowledge is not because the knowledge is missing, it's because people in power want to preserve the result you seem to view as problematic.
Oh please. We lived in a golden age of enlightenment, peace (our past president, did after all get the Nobel Peace prize), and prosperity and now the dark ages have come. Probably brought about completely unexpectedly "by the Russians".
> the failure of liberal élites around the world to address the perpetual problem of identity,
Maybe one of the reasons for its failure is precisely because they addressed identity, but in the wrong way -- creating "Identity Politics". Everyone gets to get called by the label they pick for themselves and it seems everything is good. Except it is good only on the surface. Ultimately this is just impotent outrage. Those who have power still do, those that don't still don't, even if they get called however they wanted in the public sphere.
It is interesting that this also gets shuffled over to the "left". That is liberals call themselves "leftists". Except, Marx would have probably laughed at that, and would have said "Why don't you destroy those who have power, instead of just forcing them to call you by a different label".
> American atavism has to take into account that the same system that produced Trump had immediately before given us the eight forward-looking years of Obama, who remains a far more popular figure than his successor.
Right. If the years would have been really forward looking and wonderful, we would not have ended up with a TV personality as the president. Trump is just a symptom. People expend tremendous amount of energy trying to get rid of Trump somehow. Marching, talking of impeaching, veiled and misguided hints at assassinations and so on without understanding he is a symptom of something deeper. If he is gone, there would be Trump 2.0 replacing him. And I am sure, just like I've heard people praising G.W. Bush compared to Trump, they'd be praising Trump compared to Trump 2.0.
Liberals call themselves "leftists"? Only ever saw it as a derogatory from the (US) right.
(Edit: fixed formatting screw up)
I don't think this is an accurate reflection of identity politics. Names are only the beginning. They indicate that the group being identified is a legitimate one; once this is established, particular concerns the group has are raised. If you think this is meaningless, consider that transpeople continue to face an uphill battle in being recognized as a substratum of society.
>It is interesting that this also gets shuffled over to the "left". That is liberals call themselves "leftists". Except, Marx would have probably laughed at that, and would have said "Why don't you destroy those who have power, instead of just forcing them to call you by a different label".
Identity politics has been practiced by the Left for a long time. The originators of the term were black feminists[1]. As to Marx, his thoughts may be important but they are not the be-all and end-all of leftism. There has been 150 years of evolution under the umbrella, and lots of disagreement, just as there has been on the right.
I found this to be a terrible read, from start to finish. Perhaps I missed something.
What bothers me is that I had (slight) difficulty getting through it, but the difficulty wasn't because of the rambling nature but more on sentence-by-sentence level. It seems needlessly convoluted and reminds me of the reams of academic pages I had to read in college.
And it's not like I usually only read 'simple' stuff.
It's not just Trump, and it's not just a single election.
No, they've been losing ground pretty steadily for 20 years. The media didn't pay much attention until recently because most of the losses were occurring in "flyover" areas.
They're paying attention now.
Even at the Federal level, the Republicans have had control of the House of Representatives since 2010, and the Senate since 2014.
And I don't agree that it's just the U.S. In other countries you have Brexit, the rise of the Le Pen family in France, etc.
I'll go first, I think that is mostly because of a disastrous 2010 off-year election, its ensuing redistricting period, and, well, I enjoyed this piece:
http://fusion.net/the-long-lucrative-right-wing-grift-is-blo...
Utter failure of the current Democratic Party to connect with those voters who made up its base for a century or more.
I don't think there's any other way to spin it. Trump won because he carried several industrial and mining states that were traditionally Democratic strongholds.
Your link is just another attempt to blame it on "stupid racists".
Did it ever occur to the Dem leadership that calling people stupid racists doesn't make them more likely to vote for you?
Those states all voted for Obama twice. While I suppose it's possible that everyone in those states turned into a stupid racist over the last four years, that's not where I'd place my bet.