Concerning
What I'm reading about American politics
This week’s recommended readings are Mitt Romney’s account of the bad faith of Republicans in the senate, the ideology of “Bronze Age Pervert,” and Twitter’s transformation into the Nazi bar.
What-I’m-reading posts are compulsory exercises for Substack writers. Our newsletters come preloaded with a template for posts linking to things we find interesting. But while curated reading lists are not original—and I generally like to tie my commentary to probabilistic forecasts—I like reading them when they are done well. They can also be fun to write, because writing them means doing a lot of interesting reading. While it feels almost inappropriate to write about anything besides Hamas’ coordinated atrocities and Israel’s response to them, I don’t have anything sensible to say about what’s happening right now. So instead here’s a what-I’m-reading post from me.
What I’ve been reading recently is a lot about US political culture, starting with Jill Lepore’s superb volume of US history, These Truths. None of the readings in the post are specifically about forecasting, but they have informed my recent forecasts. In particular, these readings paint a disturbing picture of contemporary conservatism in the US that illuminates the nihilistic dysfunction of today’s Republican Party. That dysfunction was on display when Republicans made history last week by voting out their own Speaker of the House after he voted with Democrats to fund the government for an additional 45 days. Republicans simply don’t have a large enough majority to govern without the support of a wing of their party with no interest in governing. The leader of that faction—and the clear frontrunner to be the Republican nominee in 2024—is of course former President Donald Trump, who currently faces 91 felony charges, including for inciting a mob to attack Congress and obstruct the transfer of power.
