Welcome to The Fulcrum’s daily weekday e-newsletter where insiders and outsiders to politics are informed, meet, talk, and act to repair our democracy and make it live and work in our everyday lives.
Political blame game: Never let a good crisis go to waste
Last week, I wrote an op-ed in The Fulcrum entitled, “Learning to recognize political rhetoric.”
In that writing I spoke of how our elected representatives thrive on the red meat rhetoric they throw out to their base to score political points, rather than attempting to govern. Unfortunately, it is often much easier for them to make statements that generate a strong emotional response from voters instead of intelligently debating the difficult choices our country faces.
Well, our elected representatives certainly proved my proposed theory in their reaction to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB).
Tipping points
“Tipping point.” We’re hearing that phrase a lot these days.
In 2015, I spent months holed up in conference rooms with my friend John Wass. We were whiteboarding out what would become American Promise and our 10-year strategy to unite Americans behind fundamental reform of our political system. John has one of those Princeton/MIT brains, and the whiteboard quickly filled with the strange phrases of complex systems theory: “Non-linearity.” “Perturbations.” “Emergent properties.” And, of course, “tipping point.”
American society and politics are complex systems. So are pandemics, global banking, beehives, and lots of other things, big and small. Systems are everywhere, and systems thinking helps our understanding of how systems work and change.
Video: DeSantis, 18 states to push back against Biden ESG agenda
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on Thursday announced an alliance with 18 other states to push back against President Biden’s support for environmental, social and corporate governance investing, known as ESG.
Video: We asked conservatives at CPAC what woke means
Has the term “woke” replaced the culture wars as the buzz word for Republicans? Vice News went to the Conservative Political Action Conference - better known as CPAC - to ask conservative voters and lawmakers if that’s really the winning message for the 2024 presidential election.
