Is that part of an actual lecture somewhere? lmao
It feels impossible to describe in a few tweets a project I've been working on for years, but here goes: American politics isn't broken. It's working as structured. We need to understand that structure, and the incentives of the players in it.
At the core of this story is "identity politics," but not the narrow, weaponized version we tend to hear about. We need to understand identity much more broadly, and see the way majoritarian political identities work, and why they're getting so much stronger.
~A lot~ of the way political institutions work now is by activating and reinforcing certain political identities. And that sets of feedback loops where the institutions polarize, an that further polarizes the public, which forces institutions to polarize more, which further...
It’s been a messy day for Senator Bernie Sanders. When Sanders, one of the frontrunners in the 2020 elections, endorsed Cenk Uygur, a controversial congressional candidate in California with a long history of making problematic statements about women and other minority groups on Thursday, the move sparked immediate criticism from Democrats. By Friday afternoon, less than 24 hours after Uygur first tweeted about the endorsement, Sanders withdrew his support.“
Cenk has been a longtime fighter against the corrupt forces in our politics,” Sanders said in his statement of withdrawal on Friday. “However, our movement is bigger than any one person. I hear my grassroots supporters who were frustrated and understand their concerns.”
The bath water had gone cold. The wine bottle was empty.
People have speculated that Speaker Pelosi or the party leadership asked me to resign because of the photos and the allegations about me. That could not be further from the truth. In fact, one of the most difficult moments during my resignation process was my phone call to the Speaker, a woman I admire more than anyone and whom I had come to love. She told me I didn’t have to do this, that the country needed me and that she wished I hadn’t made this decision, but she respected me and what I felt I needed to do. I told her what I told everyone else when I announced my resignation: that it was the right thing to do.
That's peak upper-class white girl nightmare fuel if I've ever read it.
So the next day I put on my battle uniform: a red dress suit that my mom had bought me. I put on my war paint: bright red lipstick.