By the people
The American way of life, built on individual liberty and limited government, is on life support. American freedom is being gutted. Whether we are trying to run a business, practice a vocation, raise our families, cooperate with our neighbors, or follow our religious beliefs, we run afoul of the government--not because we are doing anything wrong but because the government has decided it knows better. When we object, that government can and does tell us, "Try to fight this, and we'll ruin you." In this provocative book, acclaimed social scientist and bestselling author Charles Murray shows us why we can no longer hope to roll back the power of the federal government through the normal political process. The Constitution is broken in ways that cannot be fixed even by a sympathetic Supreme Court. Our legal system is increasingly lawless, unmoored from traditional ideas of "the rule of law." The legislative process has become systemically corrupt no matter which party is in control. But there's good news beyond the Beltway. Technology is siphoning power from sclerotic government agencies and putting it in the hands of individuals and communities. The rediversification of American culture is making local freedom attractive to liberals as well as conservatives. People across the political spectrum are increasingly alienated from a regulatory state that nakedly serves its own interests rather than those of ordinary Americans.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
3mentions
2people
2021–2023years
33% recommend67% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I think ideology plays a strong role in addition to interests. In my mind (from reading about this a lot) there are roughly four political factions at the elite level (there's probably more variation at the grassroots level).
The most interesting is probably the Republican party establishment. I recently read books by two partisans on either side [1] (both prolific authors and MIT PhDs) and they were in almost total agreement historically on the people and timeline. The Republican party starting with Barry Goldwater underwent an internal revolution, and an upstart and more hard-line faction won, driving out the Eisenhowers and Rockefellers. The second author is a member of this group, and he believes strongly in very small government (for example, he is against the post-1950s government and believes America was last America in the 1930s).
The other Republican faction is roughly the Tea Party, which this [2] book goes into more detail. It started being a more major force in politics starting in 2010 after financial crisis. I think Boehner who was the speaker of the house at the time has talked more candidly about this period after leaving office. They are angry at the status quo and lean more to the conspiracy side of things.
On the Democratic side there are the left (Sanders, AOC, etc) and the center-left establishment. They both generally support social-democratic policies so can work together, but the center-left is more market-oriented (maybe you could also say capitalistic or neoliberal) and they also differ in political style. I think people are pretty familiar with Sanders etc but here's [3] an article by a center-left economist talking a little bit about how the nature of this coalition affects what policies are possible.
[1] Krugman's Conscience of a Liberal and Murray's By the People
[2] https://www.amazon.com/When-Party-Came-Town-Representatives/...
[3] https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/03/passing-the-baton-th...
- The themes here remind me of another politics-is-the-new-religion article by David French, "America Is in the Grips of a Fundamentalist Revival". [1]
In it he draws a distinction between religion and fundamentalist religion (which the author has a background with), with a key quality of the latter being a lack of a sort of humility, a certainty that they're right. Which in turn leads them to be less tolerant of opposing viewpoints - because (in their view) they can see right and wrong so clearly, it pulls them to the position that "error has no rights".
That being said, I think it is easy to pay too much attention to the extremes.
An analysis of the US's political problems is out of scope of a HN comment, but one thing I did recently was read books by two prolific authors on the US left and right [2] (who each have historically been aligned with one of our two political parties). They both contained opposing narratives covering the last 100 years or so, but what was very interesting was how they both overlapped around certain key historical/political events.
I think reading these books was quite helpful for my understanding of US politics in a way that isn't really covered by the news cycle (in the future, I'd like to spend more time reading these sorts of books and less time on news).
[1] https://frenchpress.thedispatch.com/p/america-is-in-the-grip...
[2] Paul Krugman's "The Conscience of a Liberal" and Charles Murray's "By the People"
