I voted for that sellout Obama, but the democrats are not getting another vote for their center right BS candidates. Fear monger over Trump all you want. I’m going to vote for him to spite the democratic leadership that put the most hated woman in recent history on a presidential ticket.

Will she win? Probably. Corporatist GOP will be rooting for her. After all, nobody can dismantle democratic policy with impunity than a democratic president.

Quick. Name me one piece of positive legislation that Bill C. advocated. You have nothing to say if you’re neither a conservative or a neoliberal democrat.

I think the EU has its own kinds of bottlenecks–which may be an underlying issue hiding underneath the nativism of the Brexit vote. I also think the Internet is almost a counter-example, and explains well the kind of libertarian bent of a lot of Silicon Valley folks, much of that infrastructure was established in record time despite the state rather than because of it. (That’s certainly true in much of the developing world, where land line installation had long since stalled out because of state involvement.) I think the infrastructure that has been built is the exception rather than the rule.

Though I do think China, Japan and Singapore are interestingly different, and it is worth considering why that might be (albeit in ways that hopefully don’t invoke stupid racialized theories of difference).

I agree that Secretary Clinton is very unlikely to be the person who leads the transformation of the state. All of her achievements have occurred within the framework of neoliberal technocracy and she’s not about to change now. The best we can hope for is that she will keep the train on the tracks and running long enough to hand off the problem to her successor. (As opposed to the presumptive Republican nominee, who would certainly send the train off the tracks and hurtling into the abyss.)

I am not sure that a sitting president or senior legislator can lead such a transformation, because any efforts would inevitably be filtered through the lens of retail politics. But I also don’t think that a transformation can be led outside government either, because change would have to be grounded in practical politics. Who does that leave? A post-presidency Barack Obama? Henry Kissinger? Bernie Sanders? It may have to be someone who would use the transformation precisely as a vehicle for increasing their success in retail politics, someone with the stature of, say, Nikki Haley or Cory Booker – not those people exactly, necessarily, but someone who has enough of a track record that you can’t dismiss them entirely, and yet not so successful that they are already in thrall to the structures that have to be changed. In other words, a retail politician who recognizes the retail-politics challenges and opportunities of the collapse of the nation-state.

Well, China is still in that game (see high-speed rail), but I think you are basically right. I think of it in terms of levels of organisation – the resources are not there to maintain the current level, let alone build to the level necessary to use technocratic tools to address global issues (most notably environmental ones, but many others are intertwined).

I think here I might buy a narrative of decline, though it’s not a simple journey from “great” to “terrible”. The specific decline I have in mind is this: the modernist state was capable of coordinating large-scale projects of construction and administration that current states (all around the world) seem largely incapable of carrying out, and it was capable of speaking in confident, progress-embracing terms about a better future, a way of speaking which the political class seems largely uninterested in today. The part of that change that isn’t simply a case of going from good to bad is that those modernist projects were often destructive or at least mixed in their impact and they required some profoundly undemocratic strategies for ignoring, overriding or compelling the action of communities affected by such planning.

This sentence, and the rest of the paragraph into which it leads, seem to describe a situation of decline, and fairly profound decline. I remember well (and was strongly affected by) a post on this blog from several years ago in which you took issue with narratives of decline as too often being based on false (both willfully and accidentally so), incomplete, or unrigorous accounts of the past.

As I read this post, it seems to imply some moment in time prior to now when the problems you describe were smaller or at least had a better chance of being solved by our elected officials, and I wonder if a broader and more careful reconstruction of the recent history of this country might not show that you are falling into the trap of the “declension narrative” here, to some extent. Or, on the other hand, do you think that, all things considered, we are living through a genuine period of decline or a recession from a high-water mark of the liberal, technocratic state that poses a real threat to the liberty and quality of life for citizens of the United States and other wealthy, democratic nations? If so, the historian in me wants to see more concrete evidence of it.

To my mind, I see climate change and nuclear proliferation as perhaps the existential threats/problems that seem to be getting legitimately worse year after year, but thinking broadly about social, political, and economic trends, I just don’t see much evidence that things are deteriorating across the board. I’m willing to believe that we may be heading towards some inflection point that harbors the potential for dramatic change, but it’s hard for me to frame that change necessarily in terms of decline.

or as a more direct friend texted me on Wednesday morning ” congrats, CA, on allowing Wall Street to continue its exsanguination of the American middle class”

Change is going to come…

Sorry, I hit ‘post’ too soon. Again, I think that you’re taking a rosy view of the past as reality. since when has government not involved a lot of client-patron relationships?
They might be hidden, but they are there.