Between the Headlines

"I think the future holds a tremendous amount of promise. We just need to make sure that no one's left behind," says Stijn Broecke, Senior Labor Economist at the OECD Future of Work Initiative.

The Automation Revolution (or Fourth Industrial Revolution) is taking over a variety of human tasks. According to the OECD, 14% of jobs are at high risk of disappearing due to automation, while another third will be heavily affected. This episode explores responses to this development, from education and training to corporate regulation to creating a stronger social safety net. Stijn helps shift this conversation from existential musings to a practical set of steps for countries and governments to follow.

We aren't an authoritarian country, but after the Trump presidency, the 2020 elections, and ongoing attacks on fair voting, it seems that our democracy is pretty low-quality. Across the world, we've seen that presidents can gradually weaken a democracy, undermining the legitimacy of elections, opponents, and checks on their power.

In this episode, I discuss four dangerous attitudes and trends, and how they enable the subversion of democracy: political polarization, nationalism, white (majority) identity politics, and cynicism. I use examples from the Trump presidency to illustrate these effects, and provide some thoughts on how we can watch out for the health of our institutions going forward.

Election Day will be relaunching relatively soon, new and improved. I'm very thankful for my audience, and proud of the content I've built up. Hopefully, you'll love the new topics and guests. More information will come in the following weeks.

There are three ways a president can beat the filibuster: win 60 seats in the Senate, negotiate with the minority party, or work on little things that both parties can agree upon. The first is impossible, the last is rare now, and Biden has chosen negotiation with Republicans, though Mitch McConnell's obstructionism makes this difficult. This leaves us only with backdoor, rule-bending measures like budget reconciliation or cloture.

So, how do things actually get done? Through executive actions and White House power; through state and local governments and courts; through social movements like the Capitol riot; or, they simply don't get done unless they're power grabs.

The Senate-president institution is incapable of getting work done. But there is a solution, it's surprisingly simple, and brought up often.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Israel%E2%80%93Palestine_crisis

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/26/world/europe/whats-happening-in-belarus.html

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/north-korea/2020-04-13/what-kim-wants

Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell's caucuses understand that the election was NOT stolen and that President Trump IS responsible. But they refuse to act accordingly, instead punishing Wyoming Representative Liz Cheney for pointing out Trump's "Big Lie" and voting to impeach. In other words, they are punishing dissidents to put blatantly their interests, and Trump's interests, above all other values. Loyalty to Trump is clearly, now, the only metric by which the GOP chooses to define itself. 

Retelling the story of the insurrection, I encourage you to recall the (ongoing) threat to the republic.

0:48   Conspiracy theories and general distrust

5:09   The new electoral map, and thoughts on the electoral college and filibuster

10:28   Tucker Carlson and FOX News' dumb, dangerous attack on scientific expertise, exploiting distrust through questions and assumptions, and "educated racism"

16:03   On the importance of controlled, grounded indignation rather than tribalism "removed from the issues"

20:13   On avoiding condescension and American conservatism — denial of systemic problems and reactionary views

23:42   Biden's State of the Union (joint session of Congress address) — why big government progressivism is a good strategy for the economy and COVID-19

27:59   Biden's version of 'America First' and disengaged foreign policy (https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/22408089/biden-trump-america-first-policy-immigration-vaccines)

31:14   On the border crisis and Liz Cheney — is empathetic, inclusive Republicanism possible?

In March, over 172,000 illegal immigrants were apprehended by Customs and Border Protection. The surge is stretching American border capacities, from patrolling to detainment to asylum hearings and deportations, very thin.

The surge of illegal immigration on the southern border has been highly politicized, particularly by the conservative media and Republican congressmen as a way of attacking Biden and exploiting identity politics/demographic fears. Meanwhile, the Biden White House tries to keep the issue quiet. Of course, it's not a direct result of government policy, as the main push factors are violence, economic desperation, and climate crises. However, it does force the Biden administration to make tough choices between humanity and security. The current situation dissatisfies almost everyone, as children are in prison-like, overcrowded tents that serve as hostile indefinite residences; also, with the end of the Remain in Mexico program, many illegal immigrants are held in American border towns as existing facilities overflow. The true conundrum is for unaccompanied (and accompanied) minors, whom the government has to take responsibility for, as deportation is not an option, leading to the current situation where tens of thousands are under US custody.

So, what do we do — and where do the migrants go — next? The answer comes down to Biden's favorite word: infrastructure, on the southern border. In the short term, emergency legislative and executive assistance; in the long term, build up of personnel and technology; and international relations, working with neighbors in Mexico and Central America. The immigration issue, especially given the border crisis, is a test of how the Biden government treats human lives and fates, and a test of the security policy to come.

A world tour of problems, and America's role in causing and resolving them.

America, despite many mistakes, is holding the global liberal democratic order together. America cannot give up on diplomacy, and must be a problem solver with a broad reach. For this, the Foreign Service and State Department must be valued and listened to in government, as Ronan Farrow's book "War on Peace" argues.

Politics is the means by which we as a society decide what to change and how.

So, let's think of political dispositions as a spectrum from wanting a return to the past, to no change, to change into a future, to rapid change into an immediate future. These positions are driven by how happy you are with the way things are, which is primarily determined by whether you are part of "the elite" or not. Politicians love railing against the elite, yet both the Democratic and Republican parties have both elites and non-elites. So how do they manage this internal tension?

GOP: the alliance is stable as long as 1) the populists remain inactive and unable to actually topple the establishment and 2) populist anger redirected to another definition of the elite. The former is being threatened by Trumpism, while the latter is fulfilled by white identity politics and the conservative media machine. 

Democrats: cynical liberalism, or a hopelessness for real change, denies the fundamental premise of liberalism, although it may appease the elite; in this case, the alliance is fundamentally flawed. Alternatively, optimistic liberalism has an emphasis on vision and virtue, which means that all Democrats are philosophically bonded. At the same time, magnitude setters like Bernie Sanders anchor the party and provide a clear identity, though they also threaten the establishment's stability.`