Proportional Representation is a Terrible Idea
I have a new piece out for Current Affairs criticizing proportional representation and the tendency to fixate on reforming democratic procedures. You can read it here:
Benjamin Studebaker
Yet Another Attempt to Make the World a Better Place by Writing Things
Category: Miscellaneous
April 19, 2021
The Consequences of Catholicism for Political Theory
There’s an endemic debate over what people are saying when they refer to ‘the west’. Is the west defined by its whiteness, its wealth, its liberal democracy? Should we call it the ‘highly developed countries’, the ‘advanced economies’, the ‘first world’, or the ‘global north’? I think most of these terms misses what is distinctive about this set of places. The countries we think of as ‘western’ are all countries where Catholicism was once dominant but is now in varying levels of retreat. Western countries are ‘post-Catholic’.
Read the rest of this entry »October 28, 2020
A Realistic Left-Wing Strategy for Red States
In recent years, the left has been excited about electoral breakthroughs in college towns and big cities. But these regions aren’t enough. To pass signature legislation like Medicare-For-All, the left must establish a Senate majority. This means that somehow, rural red states have to elect senators who are willing to get behind these proposals.
The left hates thinking about this problem, because it requires acknowledging the limitations of its existing approach. The strategy that seems to work well in New York and California has no traction at all in Middle America. Proponents of the coastal strategy love to daydream about circumventing the problem. They indulge in idle fantasies of abolishing the Senate and electoral college, they delude themselves about demographic shifts, and they mock red state voters for choosing their cultural values over their economic interests. Of course, they never consider making cultural concessions to red state voters because they themselves care more about progressive cultural commitments than securing economic rights. They have the same priorities they mock.
Read the rest of this entry »October 19, 2020
An Argument with Nathan Robinson about Whether the Left Should Support Joe Biden in the General Election
Nathan Robinson and I have written two very different pieces about whether the left should support Joe Biden in the general election. We got together to debate the issue, and our discussion is now available to you on YouTube:
Here’s my piece: https://benjaminstudebaker.com/2020/08/31/the-left-case-against-supporting-joe-biden-in-the-general-election/
Here’s his piece: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/08/an-ineffectual-biden-presidency-is-better-for-the-left-than-an-actively-authoritarian-trump-presidency
October 17, 2020
The Left’s Nationalism Dilemma
I want to talk about the American left’s relationship with nationalism. I’ll start by making a distinction between two different ways of understanding what America is:
- Some people think of America as a federal republic. In a republic, citizens are thinly united by a commitment to a shared political system. They may be very different from each other in many other respects, but despite cultural differences they share the same political status as citizens, and the republic recognises their shared status.
- Other people think of America as a nation-state. In a nation state, citizens are thickly unified by a shared culture, built around things like language, religion, ethnicity, and other values. If citizens don’t partake in the shared culture, they may be citizens of the state but they are not part of the nation. In this way, they can be thought of as second class citizens, or even internal enemies.
Benjamin Studebaker 