ositanwanevu.bsky.social
Contributing Editor | The New Republic
Columnist | The Guardian
Author | The Right of the People (2025)
Newsletter | ositanwanevu.com
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Maybe we can finally get serious about the fundamental questions here after this. Should we be trying to maximize the breadth or quantity of views in these institutions for its own sake or do we want to evaluate them in substance? Are there actual stakes to these ideas in the first place or not?
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Bookmarking this
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Anyway, more to come on this.
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This Congress has shown no willingness to do so in large part because the Constitution has structurally given the parts of the country most likely to back the president a disproportionate amount of power in Congress relative to their share of the population.
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Naturally, the Founders did not help matters by making the Constitution difficult to amend and by making the design of the Senate in particular functionally impossible to amend.
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The slope isn't slippery; the frog isn't gradually getting boiled. Within its first hundred days the Trump administration has openly asserted the right/ power to seize and imprison anyone— including political dissidents, including citizens— and deprive them of any legal recourse at all.
5/
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Neato
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putting who where?????
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I have more respect for the (revealingly few) people who argue for having pro-Trump voices in liberal spaces, though I disagree. Then it's at least plausible that "ideological diversity" isn't just "I want centrists here and don't really care about the abstract availability of different views."
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Obviously, that goes double for children raised under serious material stress or in societies with serious material scarcities.
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That said, I don't think it's intrinsically right or wrong to have children or not even if you want to bring societal impact into the question. It's not obvious to me at all that a child raised by someone more out of social obligation than innate desire will be a service rendered to society.
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There's some collective anxiety about having kids stemming from the amount of agency we now have — which the right is trying to claw back — in making that choice; I think it's true and out of whack that the people most materially capable of sustaining a stable family seem the most worried about it.
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Naturally, people are going to want to know why those other solutions aren't first-order priorities.
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I think small-l liberal commitments should encourage us to resist the idea that certain ways of living are more normatively correct than others without sound reasons; if we're telling people they should live a certain way to solve a problem we're not using available solutions for, that doesn't wash.
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I think people just mistrust the way the stakes here are being framed. If the thing we're concretely worried about isn't The End of Humanity but the specific socioeconomic stresses of low birth rates in particular places, there are ways we might address them without making lifestyle prescriptions.
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At any rate, it's a argument I'd hesitate to offer to a partner.
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Scolding liberal women in the West into desiring more children today because, holding all else in the world constant and assuming global trends continue indefinitely, the human race would go extinct in a number of centuries no one has specified doesn't seem sound to me.