I don’t see how things like crazy culture war politics or COVID reactions lead to a breakdown in democratic norms unless those crazy beliefs imply shifts in strategy. The bud light boycott seems plausibly good; it teaches Republicans that they have alternative tools of influence.
It’s less about specific issues, and more like a sense that the general sanity waterline has been perceptibly trending downwards in mainstream politics for decades. Politicians and institutions in general are less effective, less trustworthy, less coherent, etc. than they were in the relatively recent past (I claim, but this seems to be a fairly common sentiment among both rats and non-rats of various political stripes).
And then I’m further saying that if I’m right about my claim that the general sanity waterline has fallen, then a decline in democratic legitimacy is justified, or at least expected, in the sense that less sane institutions will be trusted and respected less, because they are in fact less trustworthy and less deserving of respect. Or, in more rationalist-y terms, a model of institutions and politicians as less trustworthy and less legitimate will be both more predictively accurate and more instrumentally useful than a model in which they are relatively more trusted and treated as legitimate democratic actors.
If you disagree, is is your disagreement more with the first claim (the sanity waterline in mainstream politics has generally been falling), or the second (this explains at least a significant part of the democratic backsliding that we’ve seen)?
I don’t see how things like crazy culture war politics or COVID reactions lead to a breakdown in democratic norms unless those crazy beliefs imply shifts in strategy. The bud light boycott seems plausibly good; it teaches Republicans that they have alternative tools of influence.
It’s less about specific issues, and more like a sense that the general sanity waterline has been perceptibly trending downwards in mainstream politics for decades. Politicians and institutions in general are less effective, less trustworthy, less coherent, etc. than they were in the relatively recent past (I claim, but this seems to be a fairly common sentiment among both rats and non-rats of various political stripes).
And then I’m further saying that if I’m right about my claim that the general sanity waterline has fallen, then a decline in democratic legitimacy is justified, or at least expected, in the sense that less sane institutions will be trusted and respected less, because they are in fact less trustworthy and less deserving of respect. Or, in more rationalist-y terms, a model of institutions and politicians as less trustworthy and less legitimate will be both more predictively accurate and more instrumentally useful than a model in which they are relatively more trusted and treated as legitimate democratic actors.
If you disagree, is is your disagreement more with the first claim (the sanity waterline in mainstream politics has generally been falling), or the second (this explains at least a significant part of the democratic backsliding that we’ve seen)?