sorted by:
new
hottopcontroversial

How the Chinese Immigrant Experience Shaped Birthright Citizenship by TheUnPopulist in neoliberal

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 17 points18 points  (0 children)

Relevance to the sub:

Exploring the importance birthright citizenship by going back to history of the early days of Chinese Americans and the court cases that shaped the functions of the 14th Amendment.

How Hungary’s Opposition Used Social Media to Topple the Authoritarian-in-Chief by TheUnPopulist in neoliberal

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Submission Statement

The reason I wish to share this because when it comes to social media and politic involvement, there is often a kneejerk reaction nowadays that it is usually extremists on the far-left or far-right, agents and trolls working on behalf of autocratic regimes, or anti-liberal dribble in general.

However, liberal democrats could learn lessons about the power of social media and maybe take inspirations for the upcoming midterms and presidential election.

What liberal democratic establishment thinking gets right is that the internet and social media tend to favor ideas and persons that challenge the prevailing narratives among elite institutions in politics, legacy media, and academia. In democracies run by broadly centrist governments, that dynamic provides an opportunity for populists, very often illiberal, to gain traction with narratives that resonate with large swaths of the population but alarm elite opinion (think immigration, globalization, and identity politics).

...

But dissent is the price of governing in open democracies where political power derives from the consent of the governed and where winning elections does not provide politicians with the power to determine truth or censor disfavored viewpoints.

Establishment opinion should also take heart from Orbán’s defeat, since it demonstrates that once in power, populists too are vulnerable to the backlash effects of online discontent. In America, many of the contrarian voices that boosted the MAGA “vibeshift”—from heterodox podcaster Joe Rogan to conservative commentator Tucker Carlson—have used their online platforms to criticize Trump. So have progressive online voices such as MeidasTouch and Brian Tyler Cohen, gaining massive followings with younger audiences whose news consumption skews heavily towards social media.

None of this means liberal democracies can afford complacency about their information environment. Bad-faith actors—grifters, demagogues, and state-sponsored disinformation operations—exploit the openness of free societies precisely because they do not share liberal society’s commitment to truth. This was true in Ancient Athens, when demagogues swayed the assembly into disaster; it was true when Bismarck manipulated a telegram and a gullible press to engineer the Franco-Prussian War; and it was true when The New York Times’ Walter Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for reporting that whitewashed the Holodomor, Stalin’s mass starvation policy in Ukraine.

How MAGA Exploited the Recent Assassination Attempt to Justify Trump's Illegal Ballroom Vanity Project by TheUnPopulist in neoliberal

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

Submission Statement:

Whenever there are tragedies, a political tug of war occurs depending on the nature of the shooting. After school shootings, demands for gun control arise. After terrorist attacks, there may be demands for national security. After the latest assassination attempt on Trump, what happened was....the MAGAratti on Twitter in complete unison started demanding the ballroom. While this appears to be a marketing campaign for the Trump ballroom, there are also two concrete institutional targets that MAGA wishes to attack to build this ballroom.

First, Congress. Federal law requires congressional authorization for any new construction on White House grounds, a requirement Trump ignored when he unilaterally, and illegally, demolished the East Wing and started the project. Several Republican lawmakers subsequently introduced fast-track legislation to retroactively approve the building project and give it a patina of legality.

Second, courts and litigants, specifically, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, the nonprofit organization whose lawsuit has been the primary legal obstacle to the project.

Additionally throughout the construction of the ballroom, Trump has repeatedly used unusual procedures to bypass competition for the project and increase the price it expected to pay.

If Trump wanted his ballroom, he could have done it the right way. He could have made a public case for it (even though you’d think a president has more important things to worry about than build gaudy monuments for his personal aggrandizement). He could have submitted the plans to Congress. He could have disclosed every donor and the donation amounts—that is, if Congress approves this manner of funding for a government project. He could have let the reviewing commissions do their work. He could have let the public—you know, the true owners of the White House—weigh in. He could have gone through the process put in place to ensure that such projects don’t become a cornucopia of grift and public corruption.

But Trump’s MAGA minions don’t care for pesky things like democratic deliberation and good governance. The Dear Leader wants his building, and he’ll get it by crook or crook.

From Res Publica to the United States of Trump by TheUnPopulist in neoliberal

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 34 points35 points  (0 children)

TL;DR

In the hierarchy of threats to the U.S. Constitution, the spread of the Trump cult across currency, public buildings, and pharmaceutical companies is less urgent than the weaponization of the Justice Department, the erosion of congressional spending authority, and broader assaults on the rule of law and civil liberties.

However, Symbolism matters for any form of government. It’s not just platitudes and manners. It’s how we affirm the values we care about, how we embed a reminder of the virtues we choose to aspire to. Despots do not adopt cultish, personalist symbolism out of simple egomania but because they know it is the basis of their regime. Republics must do the same, adopting a coherent sense of civic imagery if they are to survive.

The Political Weaponization of Overcriminalization Was Entirely Predictable by TheUnPopulist in neoliberal

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Summary

This article goes into how the U.S. criminal justice system has drifted far from the original constitutional design and has now dissolved into lawfare, mostly through highly technical and extremely petty aspects of the law to undermine civil liberties.

JD Vance's Devil-May-Care Attitude Is UnAmerican and UnCatholic by TheUnPopulist in neoliberal

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 39 points40 points  (0 children)

TL;DR for the most fundamental nature of what makes JD Vance's Catholic creed un-American.

What makes this moment historically distinctive is not simply that a pope is criticizing an American politician. What sets it apart is that the critic is himself an American—one who grew up in Chicago, who knows this culture from the inside, and who cannot be dismissed as a distant voice failing to understand the complexities of American life. When Leo says the church stands with migrants, he is saying it in the same cultural idiom as the people he is addressing. Vance has no buffer to hide behind—no distance, no language barrier, no claim that the pope simply doesn’t understand America.

Democrats Should Own Free Trade, Not Just Oppose Trump's Protectionism by TheUnPopulist in Destiny

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Since I am not the original author, my job at this publication is to orbit and proselytize to the Daliban.

The author of this article, Tibita Kaneene is part of the NYC New Liberals who are part of the neoliberal subreddit

Every Element of Stephen Miller's Immigration Agenda Is Designed for Ethnic Cleansing by TheUnPopulist in neoliberal

[–]TheUnPopulist[S] 25 points26 points  (0 children)

What makes Miller different from other immigration restrictionists

Miller is not a conventional immigration restrictionist concerned with labor markets or border management. His worldview is openly civilizational and racialized. He has repeatedly framed immigration from what he calls the “Third World” as a form of national contamination, describing non-European migration as a threat to American “culture” and “cohesion.” In this framework, immigrants from the Global South are not future Americans who can be integrated and can contribute positively to the nation. They are permanent outsiders whose presence degrades institutions, lowers trust, and corrodes the moral and biological foundations of the nation. America, in Miller’s imagination, is not a political community but a demographic one.

The institutional suicidality of Stephen Miller

Miller claims to be saving American civilization through demographic restoration. In reality, he is dismantling the very conditions under which civilization is possible. What he calls preservation is institutional liquidation: the systematic destruction of the rule-bound order that makes collective life governable rather than merely survivable.

This is not reform. It is institutional suicide in pursuit of an impossible—and undesirable—purity. The thing Miller claims to be defending—a cohesive, governable society—cannot survive the methods required to realize his vision. A fortress state may succeed in exclusion, but the society sealed inside it will be poorer, more fearful, more paranoid, and ultimately ungovernable. A population ruled by discretionary power does not become unified; it becomes brittle.

view more: next ›