Throughout the Trump era, there have been understandable but misguided calls to pass a domestic terrorism law expanding an investigative dragnet around Radical White Terror. Every law needed to combat Radical White Terror already exists. Further empowering law enforcement is more likely to give the FBI, Department of Homeland Security, and local police tools to target people who meant to donate money to legitimate right-wing causes and religious charities—after which, in keeping with historical practice, they will have an expanded domestic ambit to target nonwhite and left-wing groups, causes and enterprises. The very police entities that would be empowered tend to make common cause with those they ostensibly target. 

The calls are already starting. The Wall Street Journal reported shortly after the riot that President-elect Biden plans to prioritize passing a domestic terrorism law. Hillary Clinton advocated “immediately” passing “new criminal laws at the state and federal levels that hold white supremacists accountable and tracking the activities of extremists such as those who breached the Capitol.” On The View on Monday, Meghan McCain said she was “not against sending these people to Gitmo.” But the 9/11 era, with all the reactionary forces it unleashed, helped get the U.S. here. It will never be reverse-engineered to get the U.S. out. It can only get the U.S. deeper into a democracy-draining quagmire.

No mention above of economics. New terror laws won't help, but neither will liberal moralism. Blyth is good here. Later on, less so.

Blyth is a fan of Milanovic; two smart men who've cultivated a view from a distance, interested in policy, less so in democracy. Neither have an epistemology that models change in their own opinions as an aspect of change in the world. 

The problem of monopoly and limits on free speech are problems of information. That's not a defense of a free market –markets are never free– but it's certainly not a defense of technocracy, even ruled by Blyth and Milanovic.

The fact of bougie Palestinians in the west will be the end of Zionism. Nothing else, not "enlightenment", not "reason". The feminism of men is a result of the feminism of women. Technocracy can't model that. The model of benign authority ends in decadence. "The golden age" was rotten to the core. 

Serendipity/timing. continuing in the next post.