It seems like an odd place for a socialist like Doctorow to publish. I wonder how that happened?
It's an interesting strategy in part because it means a lot of the people encountering him are probably not aware of him in other online spaces, they'll only see him when republished in sources they already read, and they might not ever work their way back to his blog.
On one hand I'd be very worried about dilution of the message, misinterpretation, etc... On the other hand, it's enabled Doctorow to get some of his concepts into much wider cultural circles than he otherwise would have access to, so it's hard for me to criticize it too much.
And I think that Doctorow also has a talent for figuring out how to frame his ideas in a way where the conclusions stay the same, but it feels like he's reaching those conclusions by arguing specifically from your individual starting position and ideological base. His essays tend to (again, imo) feel tailored in a way where regardless of the context or regardless of where the essay is published, it'll have this vibe of "I'm on your community's side and I'm saying stuff that you all are going to nod along to and agree with... and therefore X/Y/Z."
Pros and cons to that approach, but it makes him accessible in a way that many other political writers aren't. So it's not too surprising to me to see his writing show up in Conservative circles as well as Liberal ones, I think it just kind of shows his talent for subtly reframing political discussions depending on the context.
This has pretty much just totally happened to the Republicans; Democrats have done a better job of staying centered and responsible, but I don't think that will last forever, unfortunately.
> Something that seems absent these days in American political discourse is the assumption that the other party, in general, has a similar north start to your own
Well, they don't have similar "north stars" or visions of the country or normative values. But this isn't discussed or debated directly by anyone; politician, talking head, or otherwise.
If Doctorow is picking up on that then I think his instincts are correct; I think a lot of modern Republican voters and Republican publications are much more receptive to government involvement in the market and are much less persuaded by "pro-business" arguments. Consider that the presumptive Republican nominee for president has come out in support of recent union strikes. The base is no longer Reagan's base.
Being down-voted by people who deny the reality of fake news about Hillary Clinton even though many of us saw it with our own eyes, and who deny the existence of places like 4Chan. Deny the existence of reporting about Facebook's role in propagating content that led to genocide in Burma (their right-wingers do what ours can only dream of), etc.
Lol.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/how-the-ownership-re...
I see that as orthogonal to this article
Right now there seems to be proto-forming an (reluctant) alliance between the saner right and the part of the liberal left that is scared/disgusted of the more fanatical illiberal ultraprogressives.
If you want freedom of speech and the freedom of computing - the conservatives are natural allies. Not that they are terribly principled, but because they are getting the shaft at online censorship they are willing to tolerate free speech a bit more, at least until they get to power.
"at least until they get to power" 2016-2020 was when the left ramped up their censorship efforts, not the right. So how do you square that sentence with what actually happened?
One way to square that with what happened: The left continued accruing power throughout Trump's presidency. I don't think the model of power relations presented in, eg, the constitution, or a civics class, or even an econ 101 class, have existed for centuries now
During the Trump years the leftist controlled only the social media, most of traditional media, cultural institutions, academia, almost any big institution became "woke" and the civil service. And whomever has watched Yes minister knows who actually rules a country. And the censorship machine was well oiled for the 2020 election. We had literal pleas to pharma giants to postpone the covid vaccine after the election.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/twitter-elon-and-the-indigo-blo...
Are you under the impression that Yes Minister was a documentary?
Are you under the impression that it wasn't?
Trump years showed clearly how the career people could sabotage easily administration's agenda.
Imagine if Trump had just let normal Republicans run everything the way they would have done had we had a President Kasich or something; things probably would have gone fairly well and we'd most likely be in his second term right now.
Man, if I had a son and he turned out to be right-winger, I don't know what I'd dislike about the situation more: that he'd be bigoted or that he'd be a little bitch who participated in a culture of never assuming responsibility for one's own short-comings and instead blamed his failings, and those of anyone he was misguided enough to admire, on shadowy others (as well as being so unselfconsciously asinine so as to publicly assert that "Yes Minister" somehow possesses real explanatory and descriptive power).
Granted, if he were a committed left-winger that would come with its own set of problems, but at least most of his misjudgments would involve a kind of misdirection or misguidance of moral impulse and an overabundance of empathy and altruism, as opposed to the almost naked abandonment of any semblance thereof.
(I take your word for it that they are a socialist since I don't who they are.)