3 ms·

America Needs a Liberalism That Builds, Not Adversarial Legalism

6 points by jseliger 4y ago

arglkjrgl 4y ago
[dead]
rektide 4y ago
Great post, absolutely love the challenge it makes. > No one considers this success. Deese, in his speech to the Economic Club of New York., declared the debate over: "The question should move from ‘Why should we pursue an industrial strategy?’ to ‘How do we pursue one successfully?’" I am unabashedly sympathetic to this vision. In a series of columns over the last year, I’ve argued that we need a liberalism that builds The real meet though is a challenge to the do something party to actually follow-through on their talk & make more decisions, to build, especially in deep blue states: > It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak. This is where the liberal vision too often averts its gaze. If anything, the critiques made of public action a generation ago have more force today. Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. There's a lot of good exploration of the problems, why our government (unlike so many others) is slow. But the title & the gist eventually tends towards this core paragraph: > This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism,” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule-making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.” Reasonably believable & well enough stated! I believe the thesis, in industrial policy, in a nation that can build & grow competencies. I do think the adversarial process is a sizable part of the US's modern disfunction. I worry that we've been in such a contested state over doing anything for so long that even if so many challenges disappeared, our elected officials would have a hard time exercising the powers we are asking them to weild, that politics is too much about lawmaking & campaigning & that doing work, building things is a competency we'd have to relearn & develop, to a degree. It's challenging to think how states can develop capabilities- they're not quite big enough, funding is so hard. Interstate alliances seem like they'd be required, to make lessons portable, re-use practices, jointly invest.
haspoken 4y ago
https://archive.ph/5onbO https://archive.ph/5onbO

6 points by jseliger 4y ago

[dead]

Great post, absolutely love the challenge it makes. > No one considers this success. Deese, in his speech to the Economic Club of New York., declared the debate over: "The question should move from ‘Why should we pursue an industrial strategy?’ to ‘How do we pursue one successfully?’" I am unabashedly sympathetic to this vision. In a series of columns over the last year, I’ve argued that we need a liberalism that builds The real meet though is a challenge to the do something party to actually follow-through on their talk & make more decisions, to build, especially in deep blue states: > It is too slow and too costly to build even where Republicans are weak — perhaps especially where they are weak. This is where the liberal vision too often averts its gaze. If anything, the critiques made of public action a generation ago have more force today. Do we have a government capable of building? The answer, too often, is no. There's a lot of good exploration of the problems, why our government (unlike so many others) is slow. But the title & the gist eventually tends towards this core paragraph: > This is a way that America differs from peer countries: Robert Kagan, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, has called this “adversarial legalism,” and shown that it’s a distinctively American way of checking state power. Bagley builds on this argument. “Inflexible procedural rules are a hallmark of the American state,” he writes. “The ubiquity of court challenges, the artificial rigors of notice-and-comment rule-making, zealous environmental review, pre-enforcement review of agency rules, picayune legal rules governing hiring and procurement, nationwide court injunctions — the list goes on and on.” Reasonably believable & well enough stated! I believe the thesis, in industrial policy, in a nation that can build & grow competencies. I do think the adversarial process is a sizable part of the US's modern disfunction. I worry that we've been in such a contested state over doing anything for so long that even if so many challenges disappeared, our elected officials would have a hard time exercising the powers we are asking them to weild, that politics is too much about lawmaking & campaigning & that doing work, building things is a competency we'd have to relearn & develop, to a degree. It's challenging to think how states can develop capabilities- they're not quite big enough, funding is so hard. Interstate alliances seem like they'd be required, to make lessons portable, re-use practices, jointly invest.

haspoken 4y ago

https://archive.ph/5onbO https://archive.ph/5onbO