Matt Yglesias: belief

Transcript context

…If you think American democracy is doomed, does that make you less interested in adding more people? Or a bit like, “Well, it will be rich here. They’re not going to create that many political problems anyway, since we won’t have democracy. So you might as well crowd in some more people from other nondemocracies and raise their standard of living?” How does the whole picture fit together? Well, I wouldn’t say . . . My forecast there was not that the United States of America will cease to be a democratically governed country in the long run, but that the United States is due for a constitutional rupture. We’ve seen in French history and a number of other countries over the years that they continue to be democracies or democracy is restored, but you have breaks in the system. You have a moment where there’s a rewrite of things. Even in the United States — of course, our famous moments in history now are the Founding Fathers calling backsies on some of the Articles of Confederation or the country completely falling apart after Abraham Lincoln was elected. And you come out on the other side of it, and we now call those people the heroes of our historical epic. How you have a successful country over the long term is that, when things break down, you come out on the other side with something better rather than with something worse. My main aspiration in writing that essay is to try to get people — American people — to be a little less mad at each other and to have a little bit more recognition of the extent to which there are structural issues in our governance that is making it hard for us to proceed and that it’s not all “Oh my God, what the hell is wrong with those people?” Because if problems arise, if something goes badly wrong, I think you want to say what they did after the Articles of Confederation, which is, “We need to change the rules here. We need to change the system.” Not “We need to kill our political opponents.” What’s the most plausible scenario for that rupture? The Civil War — we know how that went. The Constitution, Articles of Confederation — that’s past history. What do you actually see happening? Not a prediction, but just the modally most plausible path?…

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