if almost twice as many people voted, what difference do you think it would make? they’d have the same menu of choices the rest of us have. 1/

of course i encourage everyone to vote! but it’s not enough. absent changes to our electoral system, voting has been largely neutered. 2/

with an incredible lift (given the suppression they will try to bring to bear) we may get another Democratic administration. will we then be, yet again, one mild inflation away from fascism? that’s a deeper problem than an electoral result. 3/

we have to organize to remake our institutions, starting i think with our electoral system and political parties. yes, we need more participation! but unfortunately via channels less straightforward than just turning out to vote. /fin

I just think you are mistaken to think that it is. 1/

We have a voting system that converges on two political parties at pain of splitting your coalition and harming your own interests if you choose a third, and political parties captured by leaderships that don’t represent most of our interests. 2/

Voter turnout, donations, every form of evidence of energy and participation have been on an upswing as our democracy is in collapse. It’s an institutional problem, not an apathy problem. /fin

I tend toward a hopeful belief, not that human nature is inherently good, but that it is malleable, and under suitable circumstances and institutions, can in practice be good. 1/

Just how differently humans behave on x.com compared to almost how I've experienced them almost anywhere else should be a confirmative data point: bad institution, bad behavior! 2/

Nevertheless I have to confess that, at a level of intuition, perusing X pushes me toward a hopeless (and I still think false!) sense that we humans are inherently awful, perhaps irredeemable. 3/

I'm grateful to all of you here, who for all of our squabbles, are really just great. /fin

It's not the medallion system per se that seems neoliberal — I agree a state cap on taxi supply is not an obvious neoliberal cop. 1/

But once there was going to be a cap, making it cap-and-trade in a "free" market, indifferent to speculation or leasing arrangements, seems like a neoliberal approach to managing the cap (despite the kinds of pathologies that might and did emerge). 2/

Nevertheless, as a matter of history, the spiraling (then collapsing) market in NYC Taxi medallions seems to have been an unanticipated consequence of how the medallions were issued and defined, not any neoliberal economic design. The market that emerged surprised the system's initiators. /fin

Yeah, it looks like that's right! Medallions when issued weren't intended to become speculative assets, but they were in fact transferable from the start and their market price higher quickly appreciated. My bad! www.politico.com/states/new-y...

(oh! i've just replicated your search! my bad twice!)

The whole project of social democracy, the whole project of the historical United States, the reason it rose to become a superpower, is to enable coordination at scale that transcends ethnonational bases for statehood. 1/

The divisions in the United States reflect elite manipulations, not ancient hatreds. We have only recently become red vs blue. Ohio was not part of the confederacy, but it is now. 2/

This was an active result of the pathologies of out political system. That it rewarded a "Southern strategy" that was about reconstituting Confederate dysfunction. 3/

The 2025 electorate is much more ethnonationally riven, much more divided, than the 2005 electorate. That is the work of politics on the public, not the work of the public on politics. 4/

The whole art is to build and sustain democratic institutions that match the nation to the state, rather than build ethnostates to match a nation. 5/

It's easy to be pessimistic at the moment, but for the bulk of America's history — and in its reflection, much of Europe's postwar history — has been success. 6/

We have plenty of reason to think a thriving multiconfessional polity is possible, as long as exaggerated material class divisions are not permitted to emerge. 7/

Once they do, of course, the work of the rich is to gin up interconfessional (racial/religious/ethnic/political party) division, to neutralize the possibility a democratic polity will insist no groups transition from luxury to domination of and disconnection from the polity by virtue of wealth. /fin

I'm hardly Pollyanna-ish on the United States' current situation. I share a lot of your structural critiques. I have a child. We're likely to step away from the US, at least for a while. 1/

But unlike a terminal cancer patient, the territory of the United States and I think the overwhelming majority of its population and descendants will continue to live on this Earth. 2/

The US won't die, just transform. There's no point trying to plan out a hypothetical future for a person dying of cancer. It's very much worth trying to think of what might rise from the ashes of our collective life in the US, and how to minimize how literally to ashes we collectively fall. 3/

I have no idea whether what emerges will be one country or several, or to what degree there will be continuity with the 1789 Constitutional republic (a new founding, like post-Civil-War? something completely different?) 4/

The broader project of social democracy will continue, and building a social democracy that can do dramatically at actively coordinating our collective life and preserving its own prerequisites to thrive is what I spend my time thinking about. 5/

One way or another, it's a project that has only just begun. /fin