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Debate and Aftermath Recap
It may be worth reflecting on the aftermath of the presidential debate. To me, it looks like if Biden doesn't drop out, he will lose. But the elected Democrats don't have the spine to tell him to leave. They're scared of the cultural and relationship ramifications associated with breaking ranks, more than they're scared of losing. Except for the handful (3 at the time of writing) who told him to drop out. Is this the end for the Democrats unless they can get him out?
Analysis vs Prescription
Do you ever think about how to balance political analysis on the one hand against prescribing a normative political worldview on the other? I used to follow political ideologues but eventually realized its often analytically vapid, and now I try to analyze the world for how it is by understanding different perspectives. But now I feel that if you go too long analyzing how the world is, without thinking about how it should be fixed, it can feel somewhat aimless and pointless. Have you ever thought about how you balance analyzing political events in a purely descriptive way versus subscribing to a political ideology that normatively tells you how you can fix the world?
Will the 2020s be the era of political instability?
Much of the 2020s so far seems to be marred by political instability, in the literal sense that countries seem to be going from one extreme to the next. The UK entered the 2020s with the largest Labour loss in a hundred years, and then go to the complete opposite in a matter of 4 years. The US seems to be vacillating between Democratic and Republican administrations right after one another, and France is also shifting heavily from the center to the right. I'm getting the sense that perhaps this decade will be marred by hard ideological shifts back and forth as a consequence of the aftereffects of the pandemic.
Would a devastating Biden loss change the trajectory of the Democratic party?
Hey Marshall and Saagar, I'm predicting a Trump victory in this next election. What I'm curious about is what impact it would have on the Democratic party. Lets say its not a close election, Biden loses the majority of the swing states and Trump has a decisive win. Do you think this would provoke change in the Democratic party? Specifically I'm thinking back to the Reagan era where the Democratic party took L after L and reacted by shifting in a neoliberal direction. Do you think this election has the potential to affect that kind of change? And if so, what lessons would they learn?
Stalin's War
I'm listening to Stalin's War and the sense I'm getting from the author is that he's very anti-Stalin, which is reasonable, it's almost impossible to read about him and not come to that view. But his thesis seems to be that the allies were especially soft on Stalin, and that they should have been more antagonistic towards him. Either by sanctioning the USSR or going to war with it, he doesn't explicitly say he's in favor of these things but it's clear in the subtext. The problem I have with this is that A.) Stalin and USSR tried to isolate Germany for almost a decade before he gave up and got sick of the Allies appeasement which is why the USSR signed the Molotov-Ribbentrob pact, and B.) the USSR was a crucial ally for eventually defeating Germany, 80% of German losses were on the Eastern front, and C.) when the West did decide to go hard against the USSR after the end of the war, it resulted in the Cold War, which was an unmitigated disaster for millions of people around the world (i.e. the Vietnam War, US backed coups in Latin America, and many other proxy conflicts). Am I wrong in my analysis? It seems like the critique should be that the allies should have coordinated with the USSR against Germany from the start, instead of appeasing Hitler.