Us vs Them
Tourist on an excursion boat filled with tourists as it passes under the Michigan Avenue bridge, 25 July 2015. Photo by Phil Roeder from Des Moines, IA, USA, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons
Politics is, was, and always will be about power. Exerting the power you have over others to get what you want. America, being the lovely unique flower that it is, has multiple political parties but two incredibly dominant ones. The remaining “third parties” are mostly also rans. Ralph Nader may or may not have cost Al Gore Florida (the world will never know,) but third parties are rarely decisive to the election of a president. Teddy as the Bull Moose and Ross Perot are the only two times in our history where it seemed to truly matter. In effect, taking enough votes from one of the two sides to make the other’s victory much easier. Perhaps Wilson and Clinton would have won without their help, but, as stated above, the world will never really know.
Politics in America with a dominant two-party system leads to rank tribalism. Now, human nature itself does most of the work for politicians here, but tribalism has birthed horrendous hyper partisanship here for the last few decades. I’d honestly trace it back to the Bork SCOTUS confirmation hearings, chaired by Senate Judiciary Chairman Joe Biden (hey, that guy!), but that would be coy of me, wouldn’t it? In essence, tribalism is an “us vs them” mentality.
In practice, “us vs them” makes it really easy for a politician to gin up hatred for the other side. Everything you believe is good and true, while everything the opposition favors is scum of the earth evil. What you hate must be terrible while what the opposition hates can’t be all bad, can it? It can. What this inevitably causes is that the rabble-rousers, in the age of social media, just kill all legislative reform by being stubborn and obstinate. Obama was not some great bipartisan seer. Outside of a few GOP votes in the Senate on Dodd-Frank, all his major legislative accomplishments were straight party line votes. Biden won’t be some bipartisan master negotiator, either, as recent history makes crystal clear. That’s why executive power matters. Most regulatory changes originate in the executive these days, not Congress.
The key in all of this is not to debate who is in favor of what but what the solutions are to the problems we can all agree on are actual problems. Global warming, for one is another “us vs them.” Science doesn’t truly know how much we, as humans, really affect the world climate. But we obviously have some impact. The sun itself may dwarf most of what billions of humans do daily, but it doesn’t mean we have to be polluting jackasses. Unfortunately, the current climate1 doesn’t lend itself to actual solutions. Instead, we get the Green New Deal from AOC, which is just a laundry list of wishcasting. “We must become a commie utopia to tackle climate change!” China is easily the worst polluter in the world. How exactly does that make sense? Recent history has shown us that natural gas is a cheaper and cleaner alternative to coal. Yet, Biden cancelled the Keystone XL pipeline Trump approved after Obama punted on it. While approving a Russian pipeline to Germany at the behest of the EU while pissing off Ukraine (they got into NATO for their troubles.) Europe is why the world can’t truly tackle the issues of Russia, China, and Iran. Japan, India, Australia, and South Korea are all on board to isolate China, but the EU refuses to get off its ass.
Nuclear power is the best power option we currently have. What knows what the future will bring, but I believe we are about fifty years or so from some world-changing energy breakthrough. Maybe batteries get good enough to make solar power much more viable on a per kilowatt hour basis. Perhaps cold fusion becomes a thing. I don’t know. But that means we need an energy source to bridge the gap until we adapt and innovate our way out of the energy problem, as capitalism seems to be pretty damn good at doing with most things.
Nuclear power is one of the cleanest and efficient energy sources we have. In fact, research has gotten so good, a lot of “spent” nuclear waste can be reused to generate even more energy. Wildly efficient and clean. But NIMBY-ism has killed most nuclear power in America. You can blame many things for this, from Three Mile Island to The Simpsons (what does that idiot Homer do for a living?), but people are terrified of a nuclear power plant exploding. Even though the earthquake that hit that Japanese nuclear power plant a few years ago was several orders of magnitude stronger than the plant should have been able to take, Japan has mostly recovered from what happened there. Yes, there is Chernobyl, but that was commie incompetence using a material that melts easily as the meltdown safeguard in a nuclear plant. America wouldn’t be that incompetent. France gets something like 70% of its power from nuclear without issue. Largely because of the insane population density there. That’s why trains are popular in Europe too, random liberal who spent a semester abroad in Europe junior year. Oh, not random, Transportation Secretary…
Transportation, why not tackle that while I’m on “us vs them”? America just does not have the population density to make trains viable outside the Acela Corridor. America has a love affair with cars because we’re so damn spread out. And there’s nothing to be done about that. Unless the entirety of the lower 48 gets a population density of Paris or Tokyo, I don’t see how trains can really take off here. Amtrak loses money hand over fist. And that doesn’t even touch on the corruption in civil engineering in most states, especially those projects that get federal money. PennDOT sucks, and I imagine not a lot of states are much better. No one really enjoys taking the subway in NYC, especially not with the increase in homelessness and crime under DeBlasio.
Other cities such as San Fran have similar “us vs them” issues. Buses are mostly only used by people too poor to afford a car, usually in that they cannot qualify for a car loan. Yes, well-heeled professionals use buses, but that’s only because parking in some inner cities usually means horrendous traffic and lots of vandalism and theft on parked cars. Make cars better. Invest in battery technology to make them more efficient, less reliant on metals that only China seems to have much of, even smaller, and even lighter. That’s all we can do. Wait for technology to adapt and innovate ourselves out of the issue. Worked really well with fracking, so why can’t it work here?
It’s not hard to figure this stuff out, but the politics of “us vs them” is a game of not doing the obvious. Because where’s the power in that?
Sure, except he was voted against by his own side . . .
Again, sure, but only when you ignore 13 months of negotiating with Republicans, adding in nearly all their proposed amendments, to pass a bill the Heritage Foundation wrote in the 1990’s – only to have Republicans tank it . . .
Um no. “However, the science on the human contribution to modern warming is quite clear. Humans emissions and activities have caused around 100% of the warming observed since 1950, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) fifth assessment report.” https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-why-scientists-think-100-of-global-warming-is-due-to-humans
And also because the interstate highway system was built by federal tax dollars. And there’s the pesky fact that even in liberal administrations roads get something like 4 to 10 times the subsidies that transit an train travel do.
Only because, unlike your European example, Americans still expect train travel to be a profit making business instead of a government furnished service. Were we to get away from that, and fund Amtrak like we fund roads, you’d see a different outcome. Hell Amtrak was legally barred from advertising until nearly 2000.
I do appreciate you finally writing something I can read – makes rebuttal easier!Report
Oh, and on Amtrak – we just chose to spend $60 Billion just to keep airlines open during the pandemic (https://reason.com/2020/04/03/the-federal-government-is-spending-60-billion-to-keep-mostly-empty-commercial-planes-flying-over-the-u-s/). Amtrak, in contrast has a $2Billion annual congressional appropriation, though the Biden Administration has asked for $5 billion this year. Your call as to what we favor as national policy.Report
FWIW Amtrak services about 31 million passengers a year mostly in concentrated areas (2/3rd of that are in the top 10 metros) while US domestic airlines service over a billion passengers yearly nation wide.Report
yes, and if AMTRAK had airline level funding I suspect that number would go up substantially. Before we tax payers started funding interstates and airlines in the 1950’s we largely moved by train. I believe we need to be honest about that decision and its impacts.
And don’t forget that we tax payers also subsidize airport construction and maintenance. Bigly.Report
The demand isn’t there.Report
Because we stack the deck in federal spending in favor of airlines. I’d expect a true Hayek-ian to both know better and rail against that more . . . . pun fully intended.Report
An 18th century technology will never be popular in a country with the population density of the United States when air travel is faster, cheaper, and easier. The airlines are not owned by the government in any way. Amtrak sort of is, like the Post Office. What are you on about?Report
take away the subsidies to airlines directly, and the billions spent to build airports for those airlines, and see how many cities loose air travel.
Reinvest that in train travel, and see how many people opt for trains.
But more importantly – lets at least acknowledge the deck stacking as a starting place shall we?Report
I’m kind of surprised that Canada hasn’t figured out how to do high-speed rail. 90% of their population lives within 100 miles of the border. You’d think it’d be a no brainer to have a bullet train that takes you from Vancouver to Halifax.Report
The first few hundred miles east from Vancouver are ill-suited to high-speed rail.Report
The area between Toronto and Montreal would be a good area though. That’s nearly half of Canada’s population.Report
Do it from Sasquatchewan, then.Report
Rail is only useful in the dense regions. Passenger rail in the US for cross country trips is always going to be a hard sell because of both terrain, and the existing rights of way that the rail lines own.
Yes, we could have invested in rail over roads and airports, but altering that calculus now, without some significant driver (e.g. we lose the ability to make jet fuel), is a no go.
But in the end, the two major mountain ranges are what prevent cross country passenger rail from really being a thing. There are very few places you can cross the Rockies with train tracks without blasting through mountains (rubber wheels on pavement can tolerate much steeper grades than steel wheels on steel rails), and I assume the Appalachians are also similarly limited (although with probably more options).
So we could create North/South corridors along both coasts, and a web of lines across the interior, but that’s three largely separate rail systems.
Although, fun fact, it costs about the same to lay a single mile of normal train track as it does a 2 lane undivided road (~$2M/mi). As for HSR, Amtrak estimates it would cost $500M/mi to convert it’s existing rails in the NE to HS.Report
No. Trains don’t have the flexibility to take off in America outside the Acela Corridor.Report
We also stacked the deck in favor of cars for short and medium trips by spending a lot on roads but very little on local and regional transit. There were lots of great plans but they got voted down, usually by the voters.Report
Interurban rail predates cars and highways and provided the town-to-town transit I keep hearing about. And it all vanished in the ’30s because why take hours waiting on rail when you can just hop in your Model T and truck on over to Cedar Point on your own schedule.Report
Precisely.Report
Biden Administration == “I owed a few train autists a couple of favors”
They’re replacing a lot of the cars, which are from the 1970’s.Report
Actually most of the rolling stock replacements are for cars from the 1980’s and 1990’s. The Heritage Fleet from the 1970’s is long retired.Report
Worrying about nuclear plants exploding is so last century.
Worrying about a dozen nuclear plants flooding is a This Century Issue.
Global Warming won’t get much attention until vast swathes of The Tropics are uninhabitable.
Let about a billion people die, choking to death on their own sweat.
PennDOT is the WORST because they go with the lowest bidder on everything.
Maryland, in contrast, goes with the middle bidder, but if the road breaks, the contractor’s gotta fix it for free.
I remember Deep Water Horizon, where we had a significant chance of ending all life on earth.
I do not believe America is NEARLY paranoid enough about engineering projects.
Innovate out of it assumes we have time. Assumes, as well, that powerful people WANT to fix things.
(Solar Powered Roadways is a good example of Profit on the back of Virtue Signalling).Report
If you don’t live in an earthquake/tsunami zone then siting a nuclear plant out of the risk of flooding is ludicrously easy.Report
10billion cubic meters of water say otherwise.
(And with that much water, earthquakes are a major threat, from the water alone)Report
Yeah so don’t put them in places where you might get hit by a tsunami. Say all the Atlantic east coat, all of Europe, all of the Mediterranean and most of the North American interior (though if you go too far south you end up with a not enough water problem rather than too much of it).Report
And yet, both the Fort Calhoun (since shut down) and Cooper nukes in Nebraska have been threatened by flooding in recent years. It is always very tempting to locate thermal power plants immediately adjacent to large water features. Last year Moody’s identified dozens of US nuclear power plants that they believe will face increased credit risks due to extreme heat and water events.Report
Makes sense that they would be. Nuclear plants wanna be near water and in the US the entire regulatory system is designed to discourage their use and construction. Flooding, outside a tsunami environment, isn’t that difficult to design against or elevate out of though.Report
Well, you obviously can’t read my signature.
Or understand how much damage a missile can do.
Math. It is necessary, Virginia.Report
A missile? That covers a lot of territory. Exactly what kind of missile were you thinking of?Report
3gd==Three Gorges Dam.
Two countries in the world have a killswitch.
Egypt and China.
Know how much devastation happens if the Three Gorges goes?
Know how many dams they blew up to keep the three gorges standing??
Doesn’t take much of a missile to take down a full earthenwork dam.Report
OK, so tell me which missile and show me the math that supports your claim.Report
So the comment 3gd left regarding the missile is gone, thus my reply to it is gone as well. So here is a reprint of that comment:
That’s a cruise missile, and yes, a pair of those could do in ANY dam in the world, or any power plant, or pretty much anything that is not a hardened bunker.
Which is not actually saying anything surprising or insightful. So what is your point exactly? That military hardware is capable of destroying civilian infrastructure? Dear god man, you are clearly the next Hannibal.Report
I apologize, my tinfoilese is quite rusty (who even knew tin foil rusted).
If you’re talking about using a missile to blow up a dam upriver of a nuclear power plant I have… skepticism. I mean dams are giant heaps of reinforced concrete. I’m sure there might be some kinds of missiles that could bust a dam but they’d have to be specialized, I’m guessing, to do serious damage to a hydroelectric dam.
Likewise if you shot a missile at a fission plant you’d mostly ding up the containment building, scare the fish out of the resident techs and potentially get them to scram the reactor.
And if you’re talking about shooting a missile at 3 Gorges Dam… I’m no expert on that behemoth but I’m guessing you’d need a lot of missiles. Don’t know how many nuclear plants are sited downriver of the 3 Gorges Dam but you can be pretty assured they’d shut them down fast if the dam was in any danger of bursting.Report
However, if the United States were to launch a barrage of cruise missiles at China, my first reaction would be to worry about the world supply of antibiotics.
Well…or Geiger counters. But yeah, maybe antibiotics.Report
Some dams are giant heaps of reinforced concrete.
Some dams are mostly earth. And, of course, cause earthquakes, not to mention slowing down the earth’s rotation.
It doesn’t take much if the dam is being pushed on by “too much water” already.
Also, you don’t know china. 3 Gorges has been on the verge of bursting twice in the past five years (the pictures of Wuhan flooding were particularly hilarious). They didn’t shut the nuclear plants down, because “Three Gorges Will Not Break.”
Well, they were right. This time. They exploded nearly every other dam on the river, mind you, and lost tons of acreage to flooding, but at least they didn’t lose the City on the Ocean (yep, officially too lazy to look up which city is at the end of the Yangze — go ahead and do it yourself).Report
Still looking for a point to this word vomit…Report
There are no nuclear power plants on the Yangtze. One has been proposed, but is currently on hold because of internal opposition to putting nukes along any inland river.Report
I’ll never understand nuclear reactors in earthquake zones. Sorry, edge of Pacific. You know this is for your own good. Iran: backward? supporters of terrorism? loaded with fossil fuels? and an earthquake zone? Not a chance. Japan can’t handle it, and they’re better with tech and terrified of radiation. You think you can?Report
I mean it’s not like the Iranians (or the Israelis for that matter) are building nuclear reactors for the purpose of producing civil electricity.Report
The problem isn’t nuclear, the problem is the method by which we manage the reaction and extract energy from it.
Michael Cain and I go round on round on this topic perennially.
We have better designs, but nobody wants to be the place that lets the engineers figure out the bugs in the system (with good reason, *COUGH!*Hanford*COUGH!*).Report
I think nuclear day as passed, at least fission. Perhaps if they ever crack fusion. Sure, for naval vessels it’s great.
The problem with using it for baseline power is — fission isn’t getting any cheaper, and pretty much every other form of energy is. And you can’t MAKE fission cheaper, even if you hand-waved away NIMBYism and ignored waste products, without cutting corners. At the moment, there’s no magical new reactor design that’s safer and cheaper and easier — I mean sure there COULD be, but you gotta build your power plants now, not 40 years from now.
And ain’t nobody wanting to risk billions on a brand new reactor design. They’re risk averse for very good reasons — that’s a lot of up-front cash on something new.
If it’s cheaper just to massively overbuild renewables and storage than to build nuclear…. Now storage is still expensive — if you’ve got access to hydro plants, less so, but even that’s falling rapidly.
And nuclear isn’t. So who wants to spend a few billion on a power plant whose energy costs will become non-competitive well before it’s operating life ends?
Sure China — they’re not working off a profit motive though, are they?
Fission’s price per MW is much, much higher than wind, NG, and industrial solar. Heck, I think rooftop PV is cheaper than fission plants now. Offshore wind is competitive with nuclear. Tidal is within shouting distance, and tidal is a nightmare of constant expensive maintenance (the sea eats all).Report
Vogtle 3 and 4 will almost certainly go into full operation. The remaining question is whether it will be only the most expensive electricity ever used in Georgia, or the most expensive electricity used anywhere in the US [1].
TerraPower now has a license to build a small modular reactor — actually, up to twelve of them if they can find customers — in Idaho, on federal land and using federal preemptive authority to take cooling water [2] from the over-committed Snake River. The collective of small utilities that agreed to fund the actual construction shrinks every time the estimated cost goes up another $100M. My bet is that those utilities all bail before bankruptcy and no reactor ever comes online.
Gates/Buffett have, amazingly, gotten permission to build a small modular reactor in Wyoming. My interpretation of the systems engineering is that they may succeed, but only because they can sell power into the lucrative SoCal/Las Vegas/Phoenix markets over HVDC lines built to deliver much larger amounts of Wyoming wind power.
To be honest, I don’t see how the US east of the Mississippi River gets to no-carbon power in the necessary time frame without fission. I continue my long-standing position, though: if it’s so f*cking safe, find a place to dump the spent fuel east of the Mississippi.
[1] For the first time in Georgia history, ratepayers are paying for generating facilities that have not, and still may not, ever deliver a single watt to Georgia. In the last few years, cooling water for new thermal plants has become a quite scarce resource in Georgia.
[2] When Xcel built a new coal-fired unit in Colorado, the longest delay was negotiating sufficiently long-termed leases for cooling water. It is highly likely that the only changes in Colorado thermal plants in the future will be (a) retirement, or (b) conversion of 30% efficient coal plants for 60% efficient gas-fired plants [3] where the output can double without the need for any new water.
[3] The last time Xcel put out an RFB, wind came in embarrassingly below combined cycle NG. Enough so that geographically distributed wind power that provides statistically similar base load reliability may be cheaper than anything else.Report
” if it’s so f*cking safe, find a place to dump the spent fuel east of the Mississippi.”
Or say “Fish off Carter and you hippie morons, we’re repealing the rule blocking it and reprocessing the nuclear waste back into fuel.”Report
You hit on the one main issue for the current reactor designs – cooling water. Reactors need a lot of cooling medium, and inland sources of such water are increasingly unavailable. It makes offshore reactors more attractive, although those come with their own challenges. Although for the eastern seaboard, that might be the only viable option, because I don’t know how much of the coast is usable for offshore wind (I’d have to look at the maps).
Lacking that, plants would need a closed cycle cooling system, which, well, there are reasons we don’t do that…
As for fuel, that’s why TerraPower is trying to get the TWR working.Report
most of the offshore wind farms already leased are in the mid to north Atlantic – https://www.boem.gov/renewable-energy/lease-and-grant-informationReport
Are those active wind farms, or just sold leases on locations?Report
many are in the initial stages of development.
https://www.nbcphiladelphia.com/news/national-international/changing-climate/offshore-wind-turbines-renewable-energy-atlantic-ocean-new-jersey-united-states-climate-change/2723432/Report
My worry:
https://www.njspotlight.com/2021/03/nj-offshore-wind-farms-critics-predict-economic-damage-ruined-views-harm-wildlife-fisheries/
I can kinda understand NIMBYism regarding nuclear plants, even if it is based in a whole lot of ignorance. But the NIMBYism of wind turbines…Report
So many memories…Report
We have a whole evaluation process for siting offshore wind that requires evaluations against regulations under Magnuson-Stevens (fisheries) and the ESA and MMPA (marine mammals & listed species). BOEM and NOAA are doing joint independent analyses prior to lease granting as well once a developer begins to design and scope. Its not fool proof, but its way more then nothing. And why so few have been built yet.Report
“if it’s so f*cking safe, find a place to dump the spent fuel east of the Mississippi.”
We try, and they won’t let us, because EHRMAGERD ATERMZ, which you are also buying into.Report
Quehana? If it’s already a “do not live here” zone, why not dump more nuclear waste?Report
This seems like the worst time to be talking about transportation solutions. The last year and a half has seen too many changes. Fear of disease, urban decay, and massive experiments in teleworking. I don’t know how much of it will fade away, or what new direction we might be moving in, and I doubt anyone else does either.
I know that urban planning is always a popular subject on this site, even though it’s not something I’ve ever gotten excited over. I’d be interested to hear what the locals think about the city, post-covid (maybe a symposium?) but I wouldn’t be too confident we’ll get it right.Report
I dunno. There’s going to be a big boost to work from home options but I can’t imagine that urban demand is going to fade or fizzle away. People weren’t just looking to the cities for jobs but for amenities. If a reduced demand for office space leads to a surge in office to residential conversion it could easily usher in a new surge in demand for urban living. This is also assuming that office work in urban cores persistently declines. It’s possible that as some office jobs switch to work from home others will fill into the cheaper urban office space.
Politically speaking, though, if the work from home leads to a dispersal of dense urban populations outward into the suburbs and ruralia then hold onto your seats because the GOP and the right will be righteously fished by the increasing efficient distribution of left wing votes.Report
“People weren’t just looking to the cities for jobs but for amenities”
There’s a surprising number of people who honestly and sincerely believe people only live in cities because they have to. That freed from their bonds, they’d all live in the middle of nowhere. Or at least a suburb.Report
I think it really depends on the city. For example, I struggle to see a scenario where NYC isn’t majorly impacted if WFH becomes the norm for office work. It isn’t just lifestyle, it’s cost of living. Conversely I could see some of the rust belt cities seeing a bit of a bump, to the extent they can offer the perks of urban living with a bit more breathing space and at a much more reasonable price.Report
I honestly believe that once single 20ish and early 30ish somethings become late 30ish somethings with a main squeeze, the attractions of the city become obviously attractions fashioned for single 20ish and early 30ish somethings and the attractions most attractive to late 30ish something with a main squeeze are available elsewhere in multitudes of places.
Perhaps even Cleveland.Report
Intentionally or not, the first line of this essay is a quote from Saul Alinsky’s Rule For Radicals- Politics is about power- who has it, and how to get it. And this quote answers the questions posed after it.
The intractability of our inefficient transportation, energy, and planning systems is due to the fact that those with power designed it to be the way it is.
People like spread out suburbs, they like interstate highways, and these things demand immense amounts of cheap energy.
In order to have a more efficient transportation system we need more efficient, more compact cities, which is going to be a decades-long project.Report
In order to have a more efficient transportation system we need more efficient, more compact cities, which is going to be a decades-long project.
The best time to tear down a building is 20 years ago.
The second best time is now.Report
No, it’s because people wanted suburbs. Suburban sprawl happened naturally as a response to urban rot.Report
“Naturally” is a strange way to describe the massive central planning regimes that dictated use of land, lot sizes, building heights and the forcible (and sometimes violent) seizure of private property for the infrastructure systems needed to create the suburbs as well as the lavish governmental subsidies to those who participated.Report
Concur. It happened democratically in the sense that it was responsive to the demand of voters but I would not call anything about sprawl natural.Report
Sprawl was the “mean” way to say “affordable housing”.
If you want more millennials buying houses, you’re going to need more “sprawl”.Report
They’d probably be just as happy buying affordable condos, which they could have without “sprawl” if the West Coast ever pulls its collective head out of its collective posterior on building codes and zoning issues.Report
In the last ten years, the US Census Bureau finally decided to join the 21st century and has made it possible to compute density based on actual “built area” rather than on county areas. You know what you find when you use built area as the denominator? California is the densest state. The LA metro area is denser than the NYC metro area. Suburbs in the Census Bureau’s western region are almost twice as dense as suburbs in other parts of the country.Report
Sounds good, they clearly need to build more densely outside the metro area then.Report
There’s almost nothing built outside of the metro areas, though. By the CB’s counting methodology, the West is the least rural region of the country. CA beats out NJ as the least-rural state. Five of the top ten least-rural states are in the western region.Report
Sounds like a puzzling methodology if they’re simultaneously denser than anywhere else and yet still mostly suburban track homes.Report
I’m stating this badly, I know. Let me speak anecdotally, knowing that these things are true statistically as well.
30-odd years ago I moved from suburban NJ to suburban CO. What did I notice while looking for a home? CO had far more two- and three-story garden apartments complexes, far more townhouses, and the single-family homes were packed much closer together. NJ suburban “sprawl” was much worse than Colorado’s.
Western suburbs pack far more people per square mile — almost double, statistically — than suburbs in other parts of the country. I’ll quote my friend the anthropologist who has studied this: “Any two suburbs in the West are much more like each other than they are like anything outside the West.”
There are lots of reasons for it. To pick the area I’m most familiar with, Denver could sprawl all the way to Kansas — but the population has only reluctantly spread to the east. Because as you go east, the weather gets significantly worse, you lose the notion of mountains, and none of the land comes with significant water rights.Report
Ok I get it- a western/mountain region suburb is denser than suburbs in the rest of the country. That makes sense since land has been a constricted supply for decades. That said they still need to build denser- likely more dense than suburbs. They need two and three-plexes on many lots. They need midrise condos and apartment buildings, and lots of them. Currently Cali (I know little about CO) and other West Coast states policies are extremely obstructive to building stuff any denser than suburbs (even if they’re denser suburbs than is the norm).Report
Happening.
From 2000, Denver grew from 534,000 to 705,000 people without adding a single square foot to the city’s area. Before Covid I rode the light/commuter rail occasionally. Apartments, condos, and townhouses going up along all the rail routes.
Fort Collins, where we are now, grew from 118,000 to 180,000 over the same period. FoCo sprawled more than Denver, but is doing infill with apartments and condos at a furious pace. Current density is about 3,100 people per square mile and climbing rapidly.
The density number to differentiate urban and suburban in the US is often pegged at 2,200 per square mile. The median suburban density is about 1,900. I always like that “suburban” Anaheim in Orange County has a density of almost 6,900 people per square mile. About five times the density of the much larger cities of Nashville and Jacksonville. No one does sprawl like the South.Report
Makes sense. Personally I wouldn’t lump Colorado in with the the coastal states in terms of housing disfunction. I’ve not read a lot about CO specifically having a housing crisis like Cali, Portland and Seattle have.Report
Portland and Seattle have the problem of big, steep coastal mountains, so you can’t sprawl much, but no one wants to do infill because it displaces people (so it only happens when you can displace very few people). In CA, you don’t have the big mountains quite so close to the coast, and sprawling into the desert is only a challenge when it comes to water.
Google Maps needs a population density layer…Report
Mountains have explanatory value but not exculpatory power for those cities. You and I both know that other countries live in land scarce areas wedged between mountains and seas and provide housing just fine. There is enough land and enough housing technology to fix the issue. The obstacle is regulatory and the fundamental problem is that Seattle and Portland have absolutely God(ess?) awful government when it comes to building the necessary housing. There’s no point mincing words about it. I’m plenty liberal and I find it utterly mortifying.Report
Not disagreeing with you, just explaining why some places can’t sprawl their way out of housing issues.Report
Then there’s the minor detail that sprawling into the desert means building on the other side of some significant mountain passes.Report
Which mountains?Report
I can never recall the names of all the mountain ranges surrounding the LA Basin, but IIRC there’s no way out of the basin that doesn’t involve a pass that tops out above 3,000 feet, and is subject to occasional nasty weather.Report
OK, so that’s:
*Los Padres to the far north (with I-5 cutting through it, and Hwy 14, which is a freeway – 6 lanes, on & off ramps)
*Angeles NF to the N-NE (with Palmdale just north of that, in the desert)
*San Bernardino to the east, with Victorville just past that, in the desert (and I-15 plus a couple of smaller roads cutting through that).
*Go a bit further south and you got San Jacinto, with Palm Springs on the I-10 to the east, in the desert.
The basin is surrounded, but also has a number of very low altitude passes that allow major highways to cut through easily to the desert beyond.Report
I wonder if parts of Southern California, particularly out in the desert, are doing what is becoming increasingly common along Front Range Colorado. When a developer says that they want to build something big enough, the local water supplier says, “Show us 20 years of water rights adequate for that many homes, and sign them over.”
My new townhouse is built on land that came with a bunch of senior shares in the local ditch. Enough shares that the builder got a very nice deal with the water district.Report
I’d want more than 20 years.Report
They’re trying to stay within a variety of lines drawn by the courts.Report
Makes sense, but given CA, and the LA area specifically, troubles with sourcing fresh water…Report
It’s more than water.
The outlying areas of Los Angeles metro have been developed into bedroom communities, but the transportation links are already at capacity.
The commute from Palmdale/ Lancaster to even the suburban San Fernando Valley can be 2 hours, each way.
The outlying areas aren’t able to offer enough jobs within their own area which can sustain a mortgage and a family, to a large enough number of people to make further development financially attractive.
In the post-industrial era, there aren’t any mass employers like assembly plants or steel mills to provide an economic anchor to a town.
This is why the housing shortage will be solved by building higher density within the existing metro area instead of just going out farther.
Telework holds promise, but just that, a promise.Report
That all makes a reasonable amount of sense as well.
Now does LA have the same issue as Seattle and Portland, where any increase in density means displacing a significant population for a few years?Report
Affordability will result from building much higher density within existing city grids, not sprawl.
A lot of cities have plenty of low-density areas which can and should be upzoned to much higher density.Report
Dead serious question: is anyone scraping off those tiny jammed together houses in Long Beach — like the one I lived in as a baby — to produce much higher density multi-story buildings for affordable housing?Report
No way, the character of that neighborhood has to be preserved!
Also , high rises and rising seas… Makes me nervous.Report
Yep.
https://urbanize.city/la/neighborhood/long-beach
Not just Long Beach, but all the low rise neighborhoods within commuting distance of LA.Report
Trust me on this. Neighborhoods with 20% year-over-year appreciation? Check. Houses selling the day they go on the market for something over the asking price? Check. People from anywhere except the superstar cities looking at the price tags and getting pale? Check.
The only reason it’s not as bad as the others is that there were still places to build. Putting DIA 15 miles east out on the prairie freed up a couple of square miles inside the city. Trendy areas like LoDo and RiNo and LoHi were old industrial areas that fell on hard times and could be redone. The light/commuter rail system has opened up the same kind of underused spaces in the inner suburbs.
LoDo is an example of that good fortune. Run down and crime ridden. Drop an MLB stadium in, and the arena for the NBA/NHL teams, build tall buildings with office space, build tall luxury condo buildings. No one minds building up, there wasn’t any neighborhood character there anyone wanted to preserve.Report
I trust you on it. So basically historical luck and geography bailed CO out otherwise they’d be in the same basket at Cali and the Northwest? That’s depressing.Report
Depends on where you live. Nothing is really ‘affordable’ in most big coastal metros, even further out suburbs. Just less ‘unaffordable’ the more willing you are to live in gridlock traffic and/or a dilapidated shack.
I’m anti-sprawl but also very pro dev. The biggest obstacles to that in my part of the world aren’t save the Earth hippies, they’re juiced in NIMBY’s protecting grossly inflated property values and conveniently engineered school districts. I don’t think it has to be zero sum but that’s how it often ends up.Report
PA is pretty cheap.Report
When I moved here, if you got 5 miles North of the Air Force Academy, you’d best have water because you are in the middle of *NOWHERE*.
Now? In about 20 years, I’m expecting the space between Colorado Springs and Denver to be contiguous the way that you see on the East Coast where you move from city to township to city and you’re never more than 3 miles from a gas station.
30 years, down to Pueblo.Report
I’ve been hearing that Fort Collins is becoming a suburb of Denver.Report
At least in the sense of people living in FoCo and working in Denver, I’d say not yet. The drive is painful, and the third tolled lane on I-25 isn’t going to help that much. Now, if the BNSF were to go bankrupt and the proper pieces of right-of-way could be picked up so there was 60-70 minute express service from here to Union Station…Report
This is the 1970s. Not the 1870s. The demand was there to leave the crime-ridden cities for some place where people weren’t being murdered every five minutes.Report
https://www.newsday.com/long-island/nassau/levittown-history-in-photos-1.13458781#:~:text=Island%20Trees%2C%20or%20Levittown%20as,1%2C%201947.Report
I was talking about the eminent domain used heavily building the railroads, not the suburbs. That’s what he was talking about, presumably. Lots of scummy behavior there.Report
Chip was talking about the suburbs too . . . .
And while railroads came about initially as land grants, in most cases that land belong to the federal government not individual land holders . . .Report
The post-WWII suburbs are what I was talking about.
They were the result of massive central planning, everything from central land use laws, to infrastructure construction, to highways, to low interest VA/FHA loans.
They were the desired outcome of consumer preferences, written into law.
Which is where I started- the political center of gravity shifted after WWII, from the great cities to the suburbs, from the Northeast to the Southwest.
The inefficiency of our land use and transportation systems are the preferred outcome of the people who hold power. Any attempt to change that needs to grapple with those power centers.Report
Not really central planning. I notice you used that phrase before in this thread. That’s not what central planning is.Report
I know its nice to imagine that central planning only concerns the direct government control over factories, preferably in faraway places.
But the aggressive moves I’ve described are very much planning, done centrally.
We don’t think of the FHA/ VA and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as Soviet ministries, but they perform similar functions in steering the economy in directions the planners want.
And more importantly to the subject of the essay, they deliver power to certain constituencies, who are loathe to give that power up.Report
Obama was most assuredly not some great bipartisan seer. If anything, he was a fabulous politician in terms of campaigning, inspiration and rhetoric but was an absolutely terrible politician in terms of the cynical work of legislating and the vital work of institutional party building. On the latter two terms Obama basically had to have his bacon saved by Pelosi and Reid and on institutional terms he left the Democratic Party in a sorry state for fighting future campaigns. Personally, I believe that this was because he was entirely too idealistic and, frankly, drank too much of his own hope and change supply.
That being said you are being massively coy on the subject of Obama’s bipartisan bona fides. You’re ignoring the fact that the GOP, having observed how Obama campaigned, resolved early in his term that no substantive bipartisanship would be permitted regardless of the policy merits in question. McConnell instituted an absolutely unprecedented blockade of appointments and legislation and whipped furiously against even solitary senators trading votes for policy changes while shamelessly lying about that same activity. After decades of the GOP’s behavior no one outside of the right-wing true believers buys sorrowful denunciations of Democratic partisanship. There was no possible outcome where the Dems could have passed substantive legislation with republican votes. The choice was to have no substantive legislation or partisan legislation. The Democratic Party chose the latter and were absolutely correct to do so. Hell, look at the spare handful of changes the GOP has managed to make to the ACA. Obama would have given them ALL of those changes for even a handful of GOP votes.
One can certainly shrug and say “politics ain’t beanbag” but this escalation on McConnell’s part and this absolutely blatant double speak set the stage for the utter defenestration of the libertarian right on 2016 once words had no meaning and everything just became about posture.
All that being said you’re unambiguously correct about nuclear power. It’s been a bipartisan bugaboo for ages now, noisily from the hippie dippy left, quietly from the fossil fuel loving right and incoherently from the uninformed NIMBY center. Any serious plan to tackle climate change is probably going to need to include it. Particularly in the cold and gloomy (and tectonically stable) midwest and northeast. And the Green New Deal is a political dead end. No surprise there since there’s no reason for anyone to the right of the median congresscritter to engage with it since it’s impossible to pass.Report
Obama did not even try to work with them. You forget the “I won” moment during the stimulus package debate?Report
He spent 13 months trying to work Republicans on the ACA, given them nearly everything they asked for on a bill written from Heritage Foundation ideas. 13 months. And they gave him zero votes.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2017/08/01/set-health-record-straight-republicans-helped-craft-obamacare-ross-baker-column/523952001/Report
And it still passed with a completely party line vote.Report
and yet you keep holding that up as evidence of failure to engage in bipartisanship.
Amazing how far you are willing to put your head in the sand.Report
Sand? Not the first location that comes to mind.Report
I was trying to be polite.Report
Because Obama did not fail to craft a bipartisan legislation because of Republicans.Report
How so? What else could he give them? He gave them 160 amendments to a bill based on their ideas and they voted against it anyway? They essentially got what they wanted and voted against it. On what planet is that his fault?Report
Obama tried to work with the GOP on the ACA for the better part of a year and most of his productive legislative time prior to the ’18 election. In the end Pelosi and Reid basically bailed him out at the very last second because he had frittered away so much time chasing GOP votes that, Mitch revealed later, were never going to be obtainable. You recall the Waterloo quote or the 1 term president quote or the “if he was for it we had to be against it” quote? Yeah a frustrated Obama said “I won” after a roundtable where the GOP basically said “Why don’t you just do what we want?”Report
On the ACA he essentially did what they wanted and they voted against him anyway. I fail to see how he could have achieved a different outcome given that they never intended to play.Report
Both sides MUST BE THE SAME, minimum, or else you might feel bad about supporting your team.
Say, for instance, you’re really, really, really pro-life. But the idea of voting for a serial adulterer who paid for at least one of his mistress’ abortions (Trump!) is causing you bad, unhappy thoughts. Perhaps even mild guilt. It’s at least some level of discomfort.
BUT — you are relieved of this discomfort if, for instance, you choose to believe Clinton has had multiple people killed, or Biden is secretly a child-molester who had Epstein killed to cover up Hunter Biden’s cocaine problem.
Because that’s WORSE. So you can vote for your pro-abortion, porn-star diddling, guy as the “pro-life choice” without your thinky-meats struggling!
Therefore both sides have to be the same, although your side is probably worse, is the default conservative approach to anything in America.
Which I’m sure will be “both sided” rather rapidly because again, the whole point is to ignore reality so you don’t have to square a supporting a guy who supported insurrection under the guide of “law and order”.
And the people who do that will never, ever, be swayed by facts. They will — and do — cheerfully invent their own reality in order to avoid having their worldview challenged.
Which is why Gamergate is about Ethics in Game Journalism. and this site is full of tankies who need Econ 101 — handed down by Jesus himself so we’d understand supply-side economics and why liberals suck — conserva-splained to us.
Or the short version: It’s always projection with conservatives because it works on their voters really, really well. Meanwhile, the Democrats spend their time eating their own in circular firing squads of random intensity.Report
Any argument in the form of Cleek’s Law works with conservatives because they have no other priority.
Thus they oppose things like vaccinations, and upzoning.
There isn’t any actual policy grounded in anything that can be called conservative.
Instead every battle is a proxy battle over the real issue of cultural dominance and who counts versus who doesnt.Report
I am afraid you have fallen for the Liberal Fallacy:
The Conservatives NEVER have a solid reason for voting the way they do.
You see, the Conservative Christians have an entire philosophical basis, explaining why they are MORE likely to vote for the philanderer (or the drunkard) than for a “good godly” sort of man. Literal lectures on the subject.
But you, liberal asshat, can’t be bothered to learn a damn thing about your opposition.
They’ve got to be idiots without any possible rationale.Report
This is why I sometimes mention Jonathan Haidt’s research that liberals don’t understand conservatives as well as conservatives understand liberals. You can see the liberals are bolstering each other in this subthread. That said, in my observation if you don’t clean up your language you’re likely to have your comments deleted.Report
It’s of a piece with his provocative style.Report
There’s a difference between being provocative and being rude, you @!@##$&. I was trying to welcome a (as far as I know) newcomer and give him a hint.Report
So you’re the new Hall Monitor as well as the Pope of Conservatism?Report
Just being friendly. What are you being?Report
Speaking for myself I applaud your efforts.Report
Thanks; I’ve been in web groups that felt a lot like this one and imploded in two months.Report
For those who are not themselves Republicans, the question becomes which is more preposterous-the ostensible reasons conservatives give for their incoherent policy shifts, or the idea that they are motivated by inchoate cultural grievance..Report
Obviously I disagree with this assertion, but frankly I have no idea where it came from. I don’t see anything I said in the comment you replied to, or elsewhere on this thread, that that would be a sensible reply. I mean, unless your point is that liberal misunderstanding is justified? But Haidt isn’t saying that liberals fail to agree with conservatives; he’s saying that they fail to understand what they’re talking about when they disagree with conservatives. And definitely when you and Philip and JS volley agreement back and forth among you, there’s nothing happening that would lead to greater understanding. There’s a reason that when one of the many, many, many conservatives on this site say something I don’t immediately reply with “yes, yes, I agree, but even moreso”. It’s a dead end.Report
What is there to understand?
The stated positions offered by conservatives-
For example, why small government conservatives want to have cameras in every classroom, or why fiscal conservatives don’t care about the deficit, or why religious conservatives hate Obama but love Trump-
Are preposterous gibberish. They don’t make any sense even within their own internal logic.
On the other hand, the alternate explanation- that they are motivated by cultural fear and resentment- are persuasive and logical and fit all the known facts.
You can keep chanting “You don’t understand us!” all day long, but conservatives haven’t offered any reasons why we should want to.
Since 2016, Trump’s base of support hasn’t increased by any significant margin. He isn’t expanding beyond his core of aggrieved white rural people, and none of the followers have proposed any sort of vision of a society other than trolling and making their hated outgroups cry.
So why bother?Report
If I didn’t know you’ve been exposed to better thinking than that, I could accept that explanation. I’d still wonder why you keep repeating it though.Report
Failure to understand my comment: 100%.
Try again, Chip. This isn’t about policy, this is about Character. If you haven’t talked to a genuine Christian conservative (or read their philosophy online), you can’t articulate why they are more likely to vote for the philanderer.Report
You assume too much. Chip and I know well both Haidt’s research, and the vast amount of reporting on why white fundamentalist “Christians” vote as they do. where we move away from that analysis is its impacts – which even to others of us who are people of faith comes off as shooting themselves in the proverbial foot, no matter how much you dress it up in philosophy. When the aim is to preserve white, male, conservative control, adding in a Christian veneer doesn’t change the damage they are doing.
Having a rationale doesn’t make one rational or morally right.Report
Philip,
Okay, say you disagree with the rationale. At least bother articulating why Conservative Christians are MORE likely to vote for the drunkard and the philanderer, by their own philosophy.
Because, while I believe you’ve read Haidt’s research, I doubt you’ve talked to Conservative Christians a lot.Report
They voted for him because they take the line that God works more fully and more forcefully through the drunkard and the philanderer then the “godly” man. They saw Trump’s many many sins as a sign of kinship. It was, essentially a redemption play.Report
And don’t forget Cyrus the Great.Report
You’re wrong.Report
am I? Smugger told Chip this was a character issue not a politics issue:
https://theconversation.com/why-donald-trump-still-appeals-to-so-many-evangelicals-143232
https://www.futurity.org/evangelicals-voters-politics-2020-election-2456632-2/
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/christian-right-worships-donald-trump-915381/Report
Actually, Philip’s greatest joy in life is talking down to Conservative Christians.Report
They they should have loved JFK and Bill Clinton. IIRC, they did not.Report
JFK was openly Catholic, and most fundamentalists don’t regard Catholics as Christians.Report
I’ll do my duly appointed duty regarding whenever some one whines about Bork. He should never have ever even been a fed judge. His actions during the Saturday Night Massacre were corrupt and those of an autocrat. His judgeship and try at being a Supreme were harbingers of the R’s now with its trump fealty and disdain for democracy. Off to hell with Bork.
GND, yeah its a giant wishlist of things which aren’t going to happen. If only Ds had been proposing ideas for years before. Oh wait they had. Well if only Rs could pick the workable stuff from the GND to work with Ds on. Oh wait they could do that but won’t. And we should build more nukes which the R’s are all over…. Urm wait a minute on that.
Trains are cool and we should have more of them in select spots. The country wide network people talk about is a Twitter thing and nothing more.Report
Then I have to remind you the exact same arguments used in favor of Garland could have been used with Bork. It’s about power.Report
Bork still got hearing and an up or down Senate floor vote – where as we keep noting his own party voted against him. Garland got neither. And while its all about power, one side tends to be guilty here and not the other.Report
Both sides, but go on.Report
One party invaded the Capitol to overturn an election. Not both.Report
Blaming the entire GOP for the actions of the 1/6 faux revolutionaries and overestimating what they could have accomplished is quite the feat.Report
The entire GOP went from minimizing it to excusing it to embracing it. Now they want to lynch the officer who shot innocent martyr Ashli Babbitt.
But they want kids in Tennessee to catch all the childhood diseases too, so that’s relatively minor.
https://www.tennessean.com/story/news/health/2021/07/13/tennessee-halts-all-vaccine-outreach-minors-not-just-covid-19/7928701002/Report
At the rate they’re radicalizing, I give it just a few years until the GOP stats hacking off the arms of any child who gets immunized, and arresting anyone with eyeglasses.Report
The only nominee ever not to be confirmed was Bork, the only place Americans ever died was Benghazi, and the only president who ever fooled around was Bill. It’s something about the letter “B”.Report
Garland was willing to fire a special prosecutor to protect a corrupt Prez.!?!? Um yeah, I must have missed that.Report
I was talking about him being nominated to the SCOTUS, which doesn’t have anything to do with what past AGs might have done.Report
I am not sure what to make of this post. On the one hand, there are times when us v. them rhetoric can be eyerolling and inchoate but ideology exists, has always existed, and will always exist. Lots of people held deeply held ethical and moral beliefs on what the world should look like, act like, and what laws/policies are required to get there. Some of these can be dealt with democratically, others cannot. Sometimes it is really us v. them if you have a theocrat discussing why America or any other nations needs to become a reactionary theology based on their religion, that message is an us v. them message. We just had a President who spent four years going all in on how his side was pure and virtuous and the other side was perpetually dirty and corrupt. I’m not going to grant charity to Republicans now that they are the minority party. They have made their bed and can lie in it.Report
“We just had a President who spent four years going all in on how his side was pure and virtuous and the other side was perpetually dirty and corrupt.”
We’re on Year 13 of that.Report
Actually, it’s kind of interesting that in Trump’s case, it really was by “side” rather than by party. We may be in a fiercely partisan era, but Trump went after no one harder than critical Republicans.Report
He went after Republicans he perceived as disloyal to him. That’s a huge difference.Report
The title is ironic, intentionally or not.
It’s the title of a Pink Floyd song, which was written in 1973, as the old Establishment order in the America and the west was being discredited by things like Vietnam and the cultural upheavals of the 60s.
In the context of its time, Us And Them with its commentary about the futility of war, was echoing the sentiments of the doves who portrayed the US and the USSR as simply squabbling tribalists.
Forward he cried from the rear
And the front rank died
And the general sat
And the lines on the map
Moved from side to sideReport
Us AND Them.Report
Speaking of us v. them, let’s look at J.D. Vance. He hails from suburban Cincinnati, went to Yale Law School, earned millions as a venture capitalist in San Francisco, probably has a house somewhere like Atherton, Hillsborough, or Pac Heights, and likes to tweet about how New York is still suck in the 1970s even though it is such a blatant pander that it gets called out immediately: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/12/opinion/covid-big-cities.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage
It seems like the GOP base is all about us v. them pandering.Report
Both sides love pandering. It’s what makes politics filled with politicians and not policy wonks. And why Medicare will implode before anything is done about it.Report
Let’s look at the Bulwark’s Tim Miller for who is responsible for the culture war: https://thebulwark.com/whos-waging-the-culture-war/
“Mandel has tweeted about many of the same “issues” as J.D.—while adding a dollop of Islamophobia and a broadside at the gay pride parade as well, going so far as to suggest Biden’s preference for it over the Mt. Rushmore fireworks might reveal his “real agenda.” (Don’t tell Josh, but here’s a preview of what the gays have planned. It’s going to be lit!)
Now look across the aisle at what the Democrat running for the that Ohio Senate seat—Rep. Tim Ryan—is doing with his social media feed. It is entirely made up of pablum about jobs for working families and pictures of him visiting union workers. His most recent issue-related post endorsed voting rights, infrastructure, and bringing down health care costs. He’s not running on reparations, or a program to take away the tax exempt status of churches or mandating Ibram X. Kendi books in middle-school curricula.
Tim Ryan won’t even engage in culture war battles when his opponents bait him with a Fight Me About Drag Queen Story Hour I Dare You dunce cap. I tried to find the last example of Ryan sending a tweet that could be described as liberal culture war fodder but got bored around mid-June and gave up.
The story is basically the same in competitive races all across the country, where you see Democrats focusing on bread-and-butter issues while their Republican counterparts get big mad about Dr. Seuss’s self-cancellation.”Report
And yet Ryan is NOT a lock for that seat because he has a D after his name. Seems that R propaganda has been highly effective.Report
Ohio went for Trump twice. And it’s Biden’s first midterm. Any R is likely to win in November of 2022 as of right now.Report
From the same Miller essay:
Social change is constant.
“Civil rights, technology, advancements in science, new religions and philosophical concepts, demographic shifts—these specific changes are always new, but change itself is constant. Whether it’s people moving from farms to cities, computers remaking the workplace, or gay folks wanting the right to marry.
This country is a living organism, not a display in a museum.
And while social changes are inevitable, they’re also flammable. Throughout history demagogues of all political persuasions have used these changes to try to create resentment as a tool to amass power.
It’s the inflamers, the arsonists who are responsible for the “war” part of the culture war.
Yes, the scores of millions of people who create cultural change in the daily comings and goings of their lives should be more forbearing with everyone else. That would be awesome. #Endorse #LiveTheChange
But that’s not where the “culture war” comes from. The culture war is the creation of specific, powerful people—whose names we all know—who cynically and intentionally view conflict as a means to increase their power.”Report
For me, the Trumpists and Bulwarkists exemplify the difference between reactionaries and conservatives.
It is possible to imagine a conservatism that is inclusive of all America’s citizens. But it isn’t possible to imagine a Trumpism that is.
There really isn’t any place for ethnic minorities, gender minorities, religious minorities in Trump’s America. Not as co-equals entitled to share power at least. They exist, like Milo Y., as “Reformed Sodomites”, that is, as lesser beings whose existence is at the whim and tolerance of the majority.
The Flight 93 essay is the perfect distillation of the Manichean Us And Them mindset of the Trumpists; they see politics not as the messy resolution of competing interests, but as an existential clash.Report
You don’t think that politics is an existential clash?Report
no. most liberals don’t. Some Anachro-leftists do, but its uncommon on even the extreme left to view it that way.Report
There have been plenty of times where there was enough consensus that politics was not an existential clash like the Post-War consensus in a lot of the developed world after World War II. Full on communism was bad but there should be at least some welfare spending and government intervention in the economy to give everybody their fairshare. America had more people willing to wage an existential crisis because we had more hardline anti-Communists that saw everything they hated as Communism but there was a general consensus.Report
It can be. But doesn’t need to be.
I can see why liberals see the Trumpists as an existential threat to American democracy, because they tell us and demonstrate this every day.
What is the existential threat the Trumpists see? Most Trumpists describe cultural change as the existential threat.Report
If you share trait A with an opponent, why would you bring up trait A as a problem?Report
China. I used to believe that Trump an existential threat to China.
Turns out that was reciprocal.
“Culture Change” is only an existential threat to African Americans. What occurs today on the streets of LA, will occur tomorrow in the rest of the country.Report
I have a taco truck nightly right at the front door of my apartment building here in Los Angeles.
The rest of you can only dream of such a life.Report
I get James Beard nominated takeout whenever I want.
I walk it home.Report
The Bulwark types are not inclusive of conservatives, at least not really. Sonny Bunch is the only person I like there.Report
US versus THEM.
I tend to believe that “A Brave New World” is not a good template to base our society around.
(Oh, sure, an Improved brave new world, where they can give us brains back whenever they please.)
US versus THEM.
Neocons versus neoliberals ain’t the framework it used to be.
If Obama can run his big black ass over all of the Middle East, without a care as to who comes next…
well, hot damn, folks, didja really want that?Report
One of my favorite books. So much better than “1984.”Report