A vision where government makes a clear and direct difference for people - and only where appropriate - is the best place to start.

If you, like me, are humiliated and enraged by the instability and cruelty of the current administration, one critical thing to do is to construct and assert a credible alternative.

What I want moving forward is a pragmatic, dynamic approach to governance that emphasizes decisive ad-hoc problem solving where problems are addressed individually and directly.

The end result was what we got during the Biden administration, a presidency that certainly signed a lot of bills and spent a lot of money but didn’t actually build very much or achieve a lot of lasting change.

By “accomplish everything” I mean “achieve all positive things at once” - simultaneously bring prices down and end white supremacy and stop climate change and challenge heteronormativity and and and and and.

By “restrict everything” I mean “create a lot of veto points” - community review for new buildings, regulatory review for business and innovation, activist review for government initiatives.

Shakespeare’s other villains are more pathetic and/or relatable, but Iago feels like something superhuman, not so much otherworldly as closer to the root of the world than everyone else, and in the worst way possible.

Iago is a black eyed shark of a villain, the rottenest motherfucker in all of Shakespeare, the embodiment of whatever primal force it is that transforms love into hatred. A hyperefficient genius of torment and ruin.

All I’m responding to is seeing people who are on the right and also in government tend to be bizarre and erratic people - not across the board, but certainly more and more, especially in our current era. I want to wrap my head around a phenomenon that I think is bad without being 100% dismissive.

That’s also not to say that thinking government and academia are good automatically makes you smart - people on the left have proven (I think) to be plenty susceptible to echo-chambery group think, including people who pride themselves on their cynicism and intellect.

What I am saying is that if you’re right wing and smart and ambitious you’re probably going to do things like get really into running a business.

That’s not to say that having right wing positions automatically makes you stupid - there are reasonable critiques of government and academia and reasonable justifications for traditional social structures, though I generally disagree with those critiques.

If you think that government is evil and academia is corrupt and nobody around you will praise you for getting involved with those institutions then, surprise, you’re less likely to get involved with those institutions!

That, to me, is a key for understanding our times - not that the ascendant right are a bunch of Christian hypocrites, but that on a deeper level they aren’t motivated by anything that could be called Christian at all.

The contemporary right also doesn’t praise turning the other cheek, it praises hyper-masculine assertiveness - it doesn’t elevate men with devoted family lives, but it does elevate men who have caused a lot of pregnancies.

notice that contemporary conservatism isn’t rallied around someone like Mitt Romney, who at least seems to walk the walk with what he believes and openly campaigned on banning abortion, but is instead rallied around Trump, who is very much not the model of Christian virtue.