Destabilized Saturday Edition #8
The global warming hoax, Miami Beach real estate, frozen Russian assets, and a spring training poem
Russia’s (Putin’s) horrific and ongoing assault on Ukraine and its people is appropriately getting a lot of attention. You might think the reminder of the differences between autocracies and democracies would moderate political division and authoritarian momentum in the U.S., but there’s no evidence of such a shift. Instead, the radicalization of the Republican Party continues apace. A sampling:
The kicker to all this extremism and cruelty is it’s not hurting Republicans politically at all. They remain heavy favorites to win control of Congress this fall. (The ability to make Republicans pay a political price for their growing radicalism is a capacity the current Democratic coalition lacks, with deficits in skill, will, and message delivery infrastructure.)
I’m going to write a piece soon, hopefully next week, on the financial and investing implications of the right-wing authoritarianism threatening American democracy. The implications are real and almost completely overlooked.
My Work
Protecting your home from climate catastrophe
“If you can avoid it, don’t own real estate in a climate-vulnerable place, period. It’s not only a bad idea for the obvious reasons – your home could burn or flood, or your insurance rates could rise, driving down the value of your home – but also because these risks are not yet reflected in market prices. The housing market still treats real estate in Miami Beach and other vulnerable places like its value is as durable as the value of real estate in safer places. Spoiler alert: it isn’t.”
America’s presidential system is brittle
“[I]n the three decades since Linz wrote The Perils of Presidentialism, these two qualities have dramatically reversed. America’s two major parties are now both highly ideological – politics today is far more about principles than patronage – and sharply polarized ideologically.
“The sorting of the American political coalitions has resulted, in other words, in the U.S. developing two political characteristics that make presidential systems vulnerable to breakdown: 1. highly polarized and ideologically distinct parties, and 2. frequently divided government. To be clear, this doesn’t mean the U.S. political system is necessarily heading toward collapse. The United States is different in several important ways from many failed presidential democracies, including being economically prosperous and having a robust civil society.”
Interesting Reads
Russia’s Economic Blackout Will Change the World
Want to Understand the Red-State Onslaught? Look at Florida
Tweets of the Week
Baseball coming back reminds me of a poem about spring training I heard on SportsCenter in the late 90s:
Florida’s Grapefruit,
Arizona’s Cactus;
They play these games
Just for practice.
Extreme Weather Watch
Creeping Authoritarianism Watch
Moved above the fold this week.