It's puzzling to me that NIMBYism seems so common among people who identify as liberal. It's clearly just another way of kicking away the ladder and is inherently with the stated goals of liberalism. At least neo-liberals seems to have gotten this one 100% correct.
NIMBYism isn't congruent with liberalism. Liberalism is an anti-authoritarian, market philosophy. NIMBYism is about leveraging authoritarian policy to dictate what others can do. If housing in SF were left to market forces, there would be a completely set of different problems...but NIMBYism wouldn't be one of them.
Why would this be puzzling? Liberals support diversity until the rubber meets the road and they have to live near diverse sets of people. That's why they vehemently vote in favor of NIMBY policies.
What I notice in Berlin is a conflation between NIMBYism and desire to solve problems with good planning and not just filling in every yard in the city so no apartments get sunlight anymore.
What you need is simple incremental growth. Let people decide what they need instead of dictating what they need. This means increasing the number of available options. If there is a way to increase options while retaining things like sunlight then you should do that.
The incremental growth ship sailed 15 years ago. They need to zone with the intention to knock down badly built old buildings and build 3+ number of floors there instead.
I'm wondering what you think of the idea that the people we call "liberal" in this country aren't really all that "leftist" - they're just more left than our "conservatives". This is especially true for economic beliefs, I find. Like, ask an Italian communist (they still exist!) whether Joe Biden is a leftist and he'll choke from laughter on his ravioli. And after all, Barack Obama's world leader bff wasn't some Green Party guy in Bolivia or something - it was Angela Merkel.
I came around to this some time ago and I'm always curious if it makes sense to others.
This is what happens when several orthogonal concepts are distilled into two categories. Nobody actually knows what left or right actually mean. Originally it was just about economic policy, left being larger government, right being smaller (no party was extreme because that's insane). Now right can also mean authoritarian or racist. To many it's simply left=good, right=bad.
It was never originally about economic policy, you've got them mixed up. Right was originally about support of the French King, authoritarianism, conservatism. Left was in support of the French Revolution, liberalism.
The terms have lost all meaning in contemporary American discourse. “Socialist”, “liberal”, “leftist”, “progressive” are just used either as a pejorative or arbitrary categorical unrelated to any prior representation.
To a “progressive”, “liberal” is a pejorative. To a “liberal”, “leftists” are the enemy. To “the right”, all 4 words mean the same thing and are interchangeable in usage.
Unfortunately this is true. The two-party system is removing all nuance from arguments, forces everything into one of two boxes and it's dividing the country. The number one issue to solve is election reform. We desperately need an election system that's not extremely prone to the spoiler effect. If we don't get this, politics will only become more of a shit show or worse we might see more violence. It's encouraging to see that places like Fargo and Saint Louis have success in adopting STAR voting.
