Yes! The country is quite literally descending into Hungarian-style autocracy and many of our most notable liberal voices are… wishcasting a policy agenda about housing regulations? It just feels like this is their happy place and they don’t really want to acknowledge how this hasn’t saved us before - ThreadSky

whstancil.bsky.social • 14 days ago

Yes! The country is quite literally descending into Hungarian-style autocracy and many of our most notable liberal voices are… wishcasting a policy agenda about housing regulations? It just feels like this is their happy place and they don’t really want to acknowledge how this hasn’t saved us before

Reposted from Fyodor

I think also that there is I dunno a real danger of liberals reflexively falling back to comfortable technocratic concerns like Biden doing semiconductor subsidies as his approval tanked.Right now we need Hakeem Jeffries leading a gang of congressmen to break into the SSA not homebuilding proposals.

Comments

mobikscube.bsky.social•13 days ago

dananimal.bsky.social•13 days ago

It's like the dems think they can lawyer their way out of a home invasion.

anthonyspall.bsky.social•14 days ago

I think there’s a risk that abundance liberalism decomposes into popularism/deliverism, but isn’t there a version that’s basically New Deal/American Century politics updated to work in a post-material political world?

awilm.bsky.social•13 days ago

Book was supposed to be published last Summer

spicybundesliga.bsky.social•14 days ago

Don't mind me, just trying to optimize my interest rate on a home equity line of credit while people are trying to burn down my house!

jajajaboo.bsky.social•14 days ago

This is cherry picking. They would say you have to do both and that’s true. What’s the vision for any swing voter? They already heard Trump bad, Trump threat to democracy. You have to have a positive vision of the future and show how govt can fix real tangible things in ppls life

haskell.bsky.social•14 days ago

- Make the trains run on time
- Drain the Pontine Marshes
- Occupy Nice
- Invade Egypt

janarab.bsky.social•13 days ago

They tried that for 4 years.

pjeanne97.bsky.social•14 days ago

lol you can’t show them anything if the government is dismantled

jajajaboo.bsky.social•13 days ago

You have to do both. You’re fighting 50 years of GOP propaganda that govt sucks, a reason a lot of people aren’t super engaged with what’s going on rn

pjeanne97.bsky.social•13 days ago

I’m saying right now showing tangible positive results is near impossible.

jajajaboo.bsky.social•13 days ago

I don’t think anyone is saying there will be immediate results given the current situation. Current electeds obv need to be fighting much more than they are. This is a set of ideas that can be a central plank for new platform.

pwnedlib.bsky.social•14 days ago

Swing voters don’t want to go forward. They want to go back to some combination of 2015, 2019, and 2023. Liberals should do YIMBY stuff but don’t expect it to win over the hearts and minds of people who don’t follow politics and vote based on sociocultural vibes

jajajaboo.bsky.social•13 days ago

Yes policy and politics is downstream of culture, but they are intertwined. I disagree they may want some return to “stability” of pre covid, stuff was cheaper and they didn’t have to examine every issue of modern life. That doesn’t mean giving anyone under 55 a path to buy a house isn’t a winner

pwnedlib.bsky.social•13 days ago

Sure but that’s a long term project and again is good policy and probably politically wise. It’s just not the One Neat trick that some of the biggest proponents of Abundance Theory are claiming it to be.

jajajaboo.bsky.social•13 days ago

I think the characterization of it as “one neat trick” is disingenuous by ppl like Will who have an axe to grind. I have not heard abundance guys say that. They’ve identified a huge problem in society that breaks ppls faith in gov, the American dream is not attainable. Focus on outcome Nd deliver

crispybanks.bsky.social•14 days ago

Add 1959, 1859, and 1000 AD.

vacation-4-all.bsky.social•13 days ago

Comparing the US broligarchy to Hungary is a an insult to Hungary

jackwaltimore.bsky.social•14 days ago

This didn't "save us" because we have not even begun to try it in the reurbanization era.

The vibecession actually starts to look less baseless when you stop thinking about rent like it's the latent background energy of the universe.

jackwaltimore.bsky.social•14 days ago

I get that our federal response to fascism cannot focus on this, but we do need to address the underlying reason that voters feel crunched in a good economy, that young men are trapped in dead-end lives in their hometowns, that GOP-owned leges are getting more districts to play with, etc. etc.

kristinarobinson.bsky.social•14 days ago

Meeting material needs is going to have to undergird any populist reemergence of the Democrats. That’s going to mean affordable housing, food, childcare, and healthcare, and the US hasn’t had a coherent national strategy for two of those items in at least 40 years.

jackwaltimore.bsky.social•14 days ago

Will is not wrong that we're going to get no credit for doing this while it is happening, but as long as the basic state of Democratic urban governance is failure to produce its most basic need, we will never get out of the hole either.

newcartographer.bsky.social•13 days ago

Hakeem Jeffries isn't talking about housing regulations any more than he's kicking in doors at the SSA.

A lot of this is just time. People write books over years. Ezra Klein isn't going to have a book about DOGE out right now.

harryhgardner.bsky.social•14 days ago

I don't know, but this does seem like a 'yes and'. People are voting with their feet and choosing to live in cheaper, more conservative places. You need to have intense focus on these rule of law concerns, but you also need to make liberal places more attractive than conservative ones.

steenstrup.bsky.social•13 days ago

Not a fan of this take. I fought hard and knocked on hundreds of doors. The fact is it’s the moderate Republicans who need to wake up and break from the cult. Fascism can only be beaten if it comes from his own supporters.

2020willbelit.bsky.social•14 days ago

#VichyDems

ammartin.bsky.social•13 days ago

Happy places can be a good thing sometimes because without them what are we fighting for. I can't pivot from occasionally thinking about big picture stuff (admittedly, nor can Ezra Klein's publisher who probably wishes this shit were coming out after a Harris win)

jcpillars.bsky.social•13 days ago

You are 1000% right. They are going to go to the center (which collapsed 8 years ago) and win some pathetic majority in the House during mid-terms and fuck the left.

Unless Trump ignores their victory and they will look to us to go to the streets. We need to William Wallace these turncoats.

donquixote66.bsky.social•13 days ago

It’s easier for democrats to be cowards than to fight. Not a lick of fight in most of them. Squandered 4 years of power. They’d soon be writing letters of condemnation while we’re being hung. The Democratic Party is not gonna save us from Trump and his henchmen.

mavwreck.bsky.social•13 days ago

They never had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and at least two of their members were centrists. They were never going to be able to do much.

justindavidh.bsky.social•13 days ago

Policy proposals are wishcasting but fanfic about Jeffries isn’t?

carthaged.bsky.social•14 days ago

I think that they’re trying to create a new deep narrative, to replace whatever you call the animating energy of the last decade plus, which was pretty much powered by anti-discrimination energy. Normie, even centrist libs, need an elevator pitch for what they’re working towards. I’m also not sold.

drrxufa.bsky.social•13 days ago

🎯🤬😡

jennifereolin.bsky.social•13 days ago

Yes!! "A goal without a plan is a wish." I scream this daily. My dogs can vouch for this. 😬

ernesto.bsky.social•14 days ago

frozen by grief, a cornered rat pissing itself instead of fighting for its life

whstancil.bsky.social•14 days ago

In a universe where Trump didn’t exist I’d be fully on board with a lot of this stuff but right now it just kind of feels like an effort to keep pretending it’s forever 2014 in the face of all evidence, and attempts to give it some kind of causal relationship to current politics are part of that

aphclarkson.bsky.social•14 days ago

You're not going to get the political street fighters needed to deal with an authoritarian turn from your average think tank

dtkoslovsky.bsky.social•13 days ago

To be fair they’ve been working on this book for years, terrible timing for it to come out now. Is the media tour tone deaf and self interested? Absolutely. But it would take an exceptionally selfless person to just shelve a major professional project like that

dtkoslovsky.bsky.social•13 days ago

So they’ve had to try to shoehorn a weak political economy argument to meet the moment in some way into what should have just been a more technocratic argument. It’s not great but I get it

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

Ooooookay. Now i get it. This makes me so much less ragey. They really should have stayed in the technocrat lane, and marketed it to state level policy types. Because hoo boy, the marketing got me very hot under the collar

rakista.bsky.social•14 days ago

Democrats choosing leadership mostly by seniority for 20+ years has made it weak and lethargic.

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

If we're wishing on a star, I'd like reparations, affirmative action x 100, a national education program re: the betrayal & massacre of native Americans, the horrors of slavery, the fascistic abuses of segregation /poll taxes/redlining/ rigging of systems to favor whites well into the 80s.

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

Our national security requires urgent commitment to ending the fascist propaganda machine & white supremacy. That goal + constitutional reform to makes the legislative & electoral process more majoritarian is the only wishing I'm doing RN.

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

But hey, now that I think on it, how about more banking & securities regulation, more consumer protection & anti-monopoly enforcement? Or how about the biggest elephant in the room: corruption. My god, the corruption of American politics & the SCOTUS. It's staggering.

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

If you think your reps work for you, you're SO wrong. They fundraise. They do a little legislating but mostly they dial for dollars & suck up to corporate donors & oligarchs. Those folks always get their needs met -- appropriations riders, reg provisions, whole-ass statutes! All for them!

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

Citizens United killed America. At the start of Bush II's presidency, the 2 party system died & an active conspiracy to end democracy began, while the feckless & corrupt Democratic party watched -- passively and, until sometime this week, cluelessly.

othurone.bsky.social•14 days ago

Hit the nail dead on with this comment. Now comes the heavy lifting to get the opposition to admit the Past cannot be fully used in this new environment. Having ongoing doubts, sadly.

conjurial.bsky.social•14 days ago

the lack and expense of housing does have a big part in our current predicament*, but that doesn't mean the long-term project of fixing it will help in the next 6 months

* don't believe me? would bringing more D voters into states we win help win the election?

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

I dunno, WFH could've helped move more blue state people into red states/ districts. But the Biden admin tightened post-pandemic WFH restrictions on feds, and there was so little political will to push back on RTO. It could've been transformative. Ds blinked.

radicalcroissant.bsky.social•13 days ago

Affordable housing is its own issue (apart from how it impacts our effed up electoral system) and the unaffordability of major cities is a global, not just an American, problem IMO.

conjurial.bsky.social•14 days ago

if you can do more than one thing at once, you should do it anyway though

annenotation.bsky.social•14 days ago

A difference here is that a lot of these are state-level powers on the other hand so blue states can actually do this stuff

stopburningthings.bsky.social•13 days ago

if they don't cost (much) money. To the extent that blue states are going to try to mitigate a collapsing federal government, they simply won't be able to do it all, they don't have that kind of money, they will have to pick and choose, watch out below.

dcactuary.bsky.social•14 days ago

Yep, agree. And so instead of trying to dominate the *national* political conversation maybe Klein, matty, Et Al should give up their platforms and start lobbying ny and California.

feralrobots.bsky.social•13 days ago

For now.

whstancil.bsky.social•14 days ago

That’s fair

matunos.bsky.social•14 days ago

There's space for local / state-level policy debates over pressing issues like housing, public safety, etc.

But those blue states are in the cross-hairs of the occupied federal government and they need to be prepared for that.

klausdor.bsky.social•14 days ago

I think you may be right about the national politics of it but multi family residential projects are still going to be proposed and argued about in our cities and advocating for the homes to be built and helping elect people locally who will allow more homes seems good.

whstancil.bsky.social•14 days ago

I mean as someone who tried to be one of those people, I obviously agree

billclampett.bsky.social•11 days ago

Tbf the book was slated to be published in 2024…much like the malaise they talk about it the book

hellscapenavigator.bsky.social•14 days ago

segregationists will pour concrete into a swimming pool before sharing it, they aren't going to give up power just so some liberal can modernize zoning regulations

timhens.bsky.social•13 days ago

Either that or an implicit message that the descent into autocracy is not inherently bad, just the person/party leading it is.

matunos.bsky.social•14 days ago

The only policy proposals I want to hear right now from Democrats in or seeking elected office are:

1. Policies to reign in the autocratic Trump admin.
2. Policies to repair the damage already done by the Trump admin.
3. Policies to prevent the executive branch from indulging in such abuses again.

peter0dactyl.bsky.social•12 days ago

Except that's all the Democrats have done since 2016, run on "not Trump" and the country has gotten worse, even with him gone, to the point that they lost to an insaner version of him with the benefit of hindsight. Failing to deliver basic governance by not even talking about it won't win votes.

peter0dactyl.bsky.social•12 days ago

They need to do everything you said, AND breathlessly talk about housing, cost of living, inequality crisis, etc. Even if the sleepy party hacks we've had forever could do this, it wouldn't come across as genuine, so what that really means is we urgently need totally new fresh faces intra party

matunos.bsky.social•12 days ago

I'm exaggerating somewhat… yes it's fine to call out those issues too but they're not going to be able to deliver on any of them until they repair the damage being done. Running as the opposition is much more effective when you are actually in the opposition.

kensingtongrey.bsky.social•13 days ago

Even if they produce these proposals, who's going to vote for them?

matunos.bsky.social•13 days ago

Well my guess would be voters.

kensingtongrey.bsky.social•13 days ago

And if they're democratic proposals, and democrats are in the minority-what happens?

kensingtongrey.bsky.social•13 days ago

I'm not trying to be a dick, just thinking through the idea

matunos.bsky.social•13 days ago

I'm talking about policy proposals to make to the public, to hopefully win elections, so that they can be in a position to implement them.

Whether they formally introduce them now with no chance of passing is a strategy question.

pwnedlib.bsky.social•14 days ago

It’s because they think Trump is temporary and that their policy concerns are actually more endemic and serious. They are still just as, if not more, annoyed at San Francisco NIMBY politics as they are at Donald Trump’s fascism

felker.dev•13 days ago

Making blue cities better, cheaper places to live is a good thing, especially at a time when many people are being pushed to cheaper places like Florida and Texas.

It is true that abundance liberals haven't advocated for a military overthrow of trump.

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