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The Barrage of Trump’s Awful Ideas Is Doing Exactly What It’s Supposed To, M Gessen.
Trump keeps throwing out extreme ideas - like taking over Gaza or cutting huge parts of government - which forces everyone to debate things that would have seemed impossible before. This isn't just random: making people argue about crazy ideas creates confusion and anxiety, which helps Trump gain more control. While Democrats keep saying "you can't do that" because it breaks rules, this isn't working because many Trump supporters want him to break what they see as a broken system. To fight back, Trump's opponents need to offer better ideas about how government can actually help people. (ClaudeAI summary) (Political/Strategy)
Ezra Klein Interview with Barack Obama
“EK: Something I noticed again and again in the book is this very particular approach to persuasion that you have. I think the normal way most of us think about persuasion is you are trying to win an argument with someone. You seem to approach it with this first step of making yourself a person that the other person will feel able to listen to, which means sympathizing with their argument, sanding off some of the edges of your own. Tell me a bit about how you think about that.
BO: Now, that’s interesting. I forget whether it was Clarence Darrow, or Abraham Lincoln, or some apocryphal figure in the past who said the best way to win an argument is to first be able to make the other person’s argument better than they can. For me, what that meant was that I had to understand their worldview.
And I couldn’t expect them to understand mine if I wasn’t extending myself to understand theirs.” [read more]
What Hath God Wrought and how the Whigs defeated Jacksonianism? Daniel Walker Howe
Ezra Klein's guest today, Congressman Jake Auchincloss, recommended “What Hath God Wrought,” by Daniel Walker Howe, which is the Oxford history of the United States. It discusses how Andrew Jackson built the Democratic Party in 1828 as a Christian nationalist anti-elitist party — if that sounds familiar to people — and then how the Whigs came to contest him and ultimately won in the 1840 election. And I find that template to be informative for the political era we’re living in now.
So I asked Claude, "How did Andrew Jackson build the Democratic Party in as a Christian nationalist anti-elitist party?" and got this reply.