Beyond Hashtag Bitterness: Campaign Season vs. A Politics of Public Projects
petedavis.substack.com
i. Politics as public projects; elections as terrain-setting Politics, to me, is the word we use to describe the interplay of our public projects. These projects range from the specific (“We want to regulate this product”) to the conceptual (“We want to achieve equal justice under law”); from the bounded (“We want policies that protect our family”) to the grand (“We want an international climate plan”); from the self-interested (“We want this tax break for our income bracket”) to the civic-minded (“We want to ameliorate this social ill”); from the state-centered (“We want to end this war”) to the culture-centered (“We want to change this practice”) to the market-centered (“We want to modernize this industry”). These projects advance through struggle: against inertia, against friction in the institutions that can help realize them, and against each other. We identify with some of these projects and their respective struggles, while disdaining and fighting other ones. We treat most as practical steps to address complicated challenges, but experience a special few as simple religious crusades. These public projects -- and the struggles for them, the fights between them, and the processes that grant them power -- are the meat and potatoes of politics.
Beyond Hashtag Bitterness: Campaign Season vs. A Politics of Public Projects
Beyond Hashtag Bitterness: Campaign Season…
Beyond Hashtag Bitterness: Campaign Season vs. A Politics of Public Projects
i. Politics as public projects; elections as terrain-setting Politics, to me, is the word we use to describe the interplay of our public projects. These projects range from the specific (“We want to regulate this product”) to the conceptual (“We want to achieve equal justice under law”); from the bounded (“We want policies that protect our family”) to the grand (“We want an international climate plan”); from the self-interested (“We want this tax break for our income bracket”) to the civic-minded (“We want to ameliorate this social ill”); from the state-centered (“We want to end this war”) to the culture-centered (“We want to change this practice”) to the market-centered (“We want to modernize this industry”). These projects advance through struggle: against inertia, against friction in the institutions that can help realize them, and against each other. We identify with some of these projects and their respective struggles, while disdaining and fighting other ones. We treat most as practical steps to address complicated challenges, but experience a special few as simple religious crusades. These public projects -- and the struggles for them, the fights between them, and the processes that grant them power -- are the meat and potatoes of politics.