You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete. Buckminster Fuller This past week, Donald Trump won the NH primary, all but locking up his candidacy for the fall. So we’re fated for a rematch that most Americans want no part of, and the odds are that Trump will come out on … Continue reading A Different Game: A New Liberal Playbook
Only a crisis – actual or perceived – produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable. Milton Friedman As I write this (Jan 2nd), there are … Continue reading After Trump: Is there any common ground?
In the last couple posts (here and here), we established this general framework: our country is being artificially split into two warring factions, mainly due to our electoral machinery (winner-take-all) and the partisan media that feasts on the resulting confrontational style of politics. As economic conditions on the ground deteriorate for regular people, narrative theodicies arise to explain why things are so screwed up, and … Continue reading Setting the Table
Last time, we looked at the three-part structure of the Divided America complex: Winner-Take-All electoral machinery creating the two-party political landscape; partisan media using that duopolistic scaffolding to inflate their culture war balloons; and an economically desperate public willing to imbibe this us-versus-them story because it makes some narrative sense of why things have gone so horribly wrong. At the end of that piece, I … Continue reading Stories of Dreams
Entropolitan 