I’m a conservative who basically went left because of Trump. I feel pretty isolated now politically. And to tell the truth, being in the thick of Republicans it’s pretty depressing to see them go bat shit crazy.
The problem is motivation. Democrats bad ideas that are wrong are based on honest miscalculation or naivety. Republican ideas that are bad are based on some sort of mass psychosis.
My answer to the problem of polarization. Slowly abandon Twitter and Facebook and instead find a few good blogs to follow, and just engage in the comments.
I’m not sure what to do about the dysfunction in government. On one hand, I get the popular vote thing, at least when it comes to President, but on the other hand, I support the Senate. Senators aren’t there to represent people... they are there to represent their state. Funny enough the only solution I see is less Federal control.
I’m skeptical about majority rule as well. Imagine if Republicans got 50.5% of the vote. (Possible) and won house and senate. Should they pass laws passing universal open carry?
Perhaps we need to return to the era of earmarks. Let Democrats bribe a few Republicans by giving them some goodies for their state.
Quite frankly the whole thing is depressing on a broad level. Better to just be a kind considerate person. And assume the same of others, even if they are dumb enough to think that vaccines have micro-chips.
If Republicans passed universal open carry with 50.5% of the vote that would be unpopular and they would be help accountable in the next election. Or, maybe it would be popular and they would keep power. That's how democracy is supposed to work. It's a weird thing about this democracy debates that people raise these preemptive policy concerns. In democracies procedure is not supposed to block unpopular things, electorates discipline parties on their own.
That is the most compelling part of Ezra's argument re: eliminating the filibuster to me. Governing majorities should be able to pass their agendas and reap the rewards/penalties for them. If Republicans want to strip down the ACA, which I am not in favor of, they should totally be able to do it and then have to deal with the fallout of that decision. As it stands right now, they get all of the point-scoring of opposing particular issues without having to...you know, DO anything.
It's also how you show you're not just full of partisan shit. Like if our country is center right, let it be center right. I can hope true democracy would lead to my exact policy preferences, but it probably won't. Do we believe in democracy as an abstract principle or not?
Yeah, the Tories here in the UK have been able to actually implement Brexit. At the moment, the consequences are a bit hidden (no-one can travel any way because of covid) but if it turns out to have been a disaster, then they'll catch hell in a future election.
I don't think this is totally true. The Tories enjoy a geographic advantage similar to Republicans. They won less than half the popular vote in the last election but have a huge majority in Parliament. If the election was proportional, the left-wing/2nd-referendum--curious parties could conceivably have formed a government, altho admittedly it would have been tricky.
That's not a geographic advantage. It's a different property of the first-past-the-post system that we share, which is that it inflates a small lead into a bigger one.
Take a look at the 1992 Presidential election as an example. Allocated proportionally, the Electoral college would be 233 Clinton, 202 Bush, 103 Perot, a lead that the system inflated to 370 Clinton, 168 Bush.
The US seldom has a large third party, and hasn't seen a large national lead for one party over the other for a long time, so you rarely see this effect in federal elections, but statewide elections regularly see leads massively inflated by the system. Take a look at the most recent California State Assembly election - the Democrats easily maintained their 2/3 majority, winning 75% of seats, but only got 62.78% of the vote, well below a 2/3 threshold.
It really wouldn't matter where the Tories are winning and where they are losing, when they have an 11.5% lead, it's going to convert to a large majority (a similar lead with the parties reversed in 2001 gave Labour 412/659 seats; compared to 2019's Tories 365/650).
It does, obviously, matter exactly where you win votes, but there isn't a large systemic bias in the UK the way there is in the US.
I'm not sure if open carry was the best example. But there are things that might be popular with a narrow majority, that just shouldn't be universally mandated. Or restricted.
Yep... though we have qualified immunity used as an excuse to perform unreasonable searches. We have students being kicked out of schools for expressing unpopular opinions. Etc...
Yeah but I think that's a separate problem from unequal representation of the Senate. Unequal representation doesn't protect against majoritarianism, it just defines the majority in a weird counterintuitive way.
That was just an example that popped into my mind. Not sure if it was the best one. Personally, where I live, universal open carry is no problem, but I'm not sure I would feel that way if I lived in Chicago or New York City.
This is basically my dad. He was a lifelong Republican, voted for President Obama because he liked him (and I think he wanted to be able to say he was a part of a historical moment, not against it), and then when the Tea Party hit in 2010, he looked at that whole movement and decided he was 100% out on the Republican Party. He hasn't voted for a Republican candidate at the state-wide or Federal level since.
My dad is 60ish years old and has been a pretty successful manager in the manufacturing sector his whole life; what he appreciates most in a candidate is professional competency and someone who follows the data, and as he saw the Republican Party being increasingly driven by nonsense he decided he was done with that.
(The sneaky truth here is that my dad, by virtue of his values, was *always* kind of a very moderate northeastern Republican. Even during the 80s and 90s, his belief system would've placed him firmly in the D camp in many parts of the country, but the places we lived just happened to be liberal enough that he ended up on the R side of the issues. Once that sort of changed nationally, his support followed suit.)
When I say his values, I mean that he has never owned or expressed interest in a guns and finds gun culture weird and bizarre, is in favor of allowing abortion, is basically neutral on unions, and thinks free trade is good.
In a functioning democracy, bad ideas would be punished by voters shifting their preferences. The arguments against democracy presented here are weak because they assume that a perpetual majority will implement bad policies and get away with it. Majority rule is a better system by far. Conservative governors in blue states have a good track record so it’s not as if this would lead to a liberal hell hole. It’d just force conservatives to be slightly more appealing to the average voter.
I actually agree with this. I wish Dems would pass their ideas (except for any permanent change such as supreme court packing). If they are good, they will be kept, if they are bad, then Republicans will win.
Supreme Court packing need not be permanent, in fact it could be a catalyst for a constitutional amendment to fix the court at nine members but with 18 year terms. The amendment would require that every two years the most senior justice would step down and the President would appoint a new justice whenever the number fell below nine. Packing the court with 11 or 13 justices might convince Republicans to support such an amendment to undo the packing
Court packing requires a trifecta, which seems unlikely (but not impossible) for the Republicans in the foreseeable future- that is part of McConnell’s reasoning behind pushing judges so hard. If the Dems did pack the court with younger judges, Republicans might see the clearer path to undoing that would be term limits that would allow the next R President to appoint 2 justices
I agree too! I wish republicans would pass their ideas. My frustration is that there are strong incentives on both sides to posture but not pass anything because of the number of veto points within the government. The chance of a big idea getting passed is so minute.
Just had an unrelated thought - if vaccines have microchips, why aren't we using the vaccines to address the microchip shortage that has production lines stopped at car companies now?
Or is the chip shortage *because* of them all being in the COVID vaccine?
What do you think about proportional representation? This would solve all the problems you're talking about from making more parties with different ideas so you can find one that best fits your views, to allowing productive polarization but incentivizing cooperation and compromise, and finally getting rid of this majority rule debate because there would be no majorities (it would be pretty insane for a 4-6 party system to have one-party control a majority)
That’s my dream. I would love a moderate party. I’m this weird conglomeration of conservative and liberal ideas. I really support stuff like child allowances. I support labor unions. I support a higher minimum wage that is adjusted for inflation. I support a robust immigration system based on Australia and New Zealand points system. If I was writing a tax code, Bezos and Zuckerberg would be practically broke. The wealth tax would be pretty damn scary.
At the same time, I am skeptical of too much of a welfare state that disincentivizes working. I believe in the Second Amendment. I am ok if individual states want to restrict abortion. I think we should enforce immigration laws (this is balanced on making legal immigration easier).
I think I’m basically a populist.
My superpower is I can literally argue in good faith and east side of any political argument. I actually sympathize with my opponents.
But back to your proportional representation thing. Unfortunately I feel like national politics has become a team sport. It’s us against them. So there’s no room for us, them, them.
Yes!! This is exactly why we need proportional representation because there are many other people like you who are much more complex than the big tent parties and yet are sorted into these parties and forced to vote with beliefs you don't actually hold. I'm very similar but more on the left side where I don't support a lot of the more extreme progressive views but would appreciate a bigger safety net, etc. But I would pose another question which is what do you think is causing the nationalized politics? Because for me the answer is the first past the post electoral system.
Social media. Simply put, it allows people to more easily identify with a larger national in-group. Whereas prior to the social media, this identification was more at a local level.
In the 80s, I was a punk, in the 90s I was an Airman. I am sure others would describe themselves primarily by some other label they identified with.
I seriously don't remember ever caring what party someone voted for prior to about 2010. Then all of the sudden, liberal or conservative has become the defining overall broad label.
We are all guilty of meeting people and sort of top level pegging them as a republican or democrat. Maybe millennials and Gen Z think this is normal, but to Gen X and Boomers, its a completely new paradigm. Don't get me wrong, we are guilty of it as well, that's how powerful the tendency is.
On another note, prior to social media, we were primed by national news like CNN and Fox. I remember CNN first becoming a big deal during the Panama invasion. Prior to that it was just network TV for a short time. Local news and anchors had a much bigger effect.
Ya, I definitely agree that plays a part but I would argue that social media is the catalyst that propelled the change forward way faster and farther rather than the direct cause. Many other countries have had this social media revolution but haven't had the same nationalization of politics as the US has had. And I would argue that the reason why the US is so much more gridlocked than other countries is that we're stuck in this FPTP/two-party system that doesn't allow for complexity and instead flattens all debates into a two-sided argument.
Now one question would be why didn't this start sooner, if it was FPTP why didn't it start in the 1800s or something? And that's because we actually did have a four-party system up until around the civil rights era. There were liberal democrats, southern democrats, northern republicans, and rural republicans in the society. That's why republicans supported FDR's New Deal and why democrats couldn't pass any civil rights bills. However, once they did pass the civil rights bills and the parties sorted into two, it wasn't until the republicans in 2010 realized the power that they actually had and began to use it under Mitch McConnell.
I left FB in September before the 2016 election because it was so transparent how FB was profiling me based on my demographic information. I’m a heterodox political thinker, and I have different views from many people in my demographic group (at the time, 20-something in the Bay Area). They served me political advertising and materials that were so off the mark that it started to make me feel crazy. Maybe it’s good that FB got me so wrong. But the whole episode made me think that if I didn’t turn the thing off I would lose my capacity for genuine reflection and critical thought. Now that I’ve been five years away, and we see what we’ve seen from Cambridge Analytica to Jan 6, I think that was a very solid instinct.
I haven't abandoned them entirely, but my engagement is cut down a lot. Facebook really is a good personal communication tool, keep up with people type thing. Who had a baby, who got a new job, or moved, etc...
I think you’re right. Maybe it’s just the people I know but no one really puts much “political,” broadly defined, stuff on their personal pages. By political I mean no anti-vaxx, no weird conspiracies, no anti BLM rants...
The thing I can't wrap my head around is why national elections are so close right now. I've voted for plenty of Republicans in my life and I just can't understand what current R voters are thinking.
To me, the critical problem facing the nation isn't that 48% of the country can overwhelm the will of the other 52%. The problem is that 48% of the country supports the current Republican party.
The danger that this fact alone represents to our democracy cannot be overstated. The conditions in our culture and our media that have led so many of us to support the lies and borderline sedition of the current Republican party is putting our democracy in mortal danger.
The difference between needing 48% to rule versus needing 51% is practically a rounding error. The fact that 48% of Americans are OK with what happened on January 6th is the real threat to our democracy and is the real problem to solve.
Let me provide some insight for how one current R voter is thinking: I didn't vote for Trump (man, I look forward to not having to preface voting discussions with that phrase someday), but I did vote for almost every other Republican on my ballot.
I voted against a lot of things, and for a few. DeSantis has had a sane and reasonable response to the COVID panic, and his opponent turned out to be involved in a strange drug and male prostitute scandal, so I count that one as a huge plus. I disagree with the Democratic Party's views on illegal immigration, on support for Israel, on accomodation with Iran. I disagree with their views on anti-racism, on free speech issues, on religious liberty. I disagree with their views on the level of regulation broadly and their desires to impose a largely urban mindset to a large and diverse population. I find their proposals around climate change to be overwrought and overly pessimistic. I don't find the governance and quality-of-life in all-Democratic places to be a good example of where I'd like to live (SF Bay, Detroit, Baltimore, Portland). I find them condescending in their views to less-educated people.
I disagree with many policies of Republicans, too. But they largely don't work that hard to pass them (end Obamacare, privatize social security as examples) so I don't worry about over-reach in those areas. I do worry about over-reach by the Democrats.
You are clear on what you don’t like about Dems. As for Republicans, you like that they don’t accomplish much (other than cut taxes). Could I describe your view as pro status quo? America is fundamentally fine. Just let me have my freedoms (don’t police my language) and the economy will meet the needs of hard-working Americans. Is that it basically?
Yes, that is a fair characterization. I think we should tinker around the edges, but I don't support the more extensive changes I see the Democratic party supporting.
Earnest question: a lot of people in the US are not doing fine. I don't agree with a lot of far-left claims but there is racism, more poverty than other developed countries, currently lots of carbon emissions, it's very costly to have kids. Do you think these are problems that exist or that it's overblown?
I think those problems exist. I think many of the solutions proposed have unintended (or intended) consequences that would create bigger problems. I support smaller, incremental changes, some Democratic some Republican.
I like the idea (don't know where I saw it) of progressives proposing lots of new ideas, which then have to run the gauntlet of conservative criticism. The terrible ideas get shot down and forgotten, the necessary and positive changes get implemented. From the present it looks like the left has always won, but just because we don't remember all the policies the left used to propose.
If true, it would make sense that the conservative position can be defined more easily by what it doesn't want rather than what it does.
I have also voted R a lot in the past, but I consider the "don't try all that hard to pass things" to be (mostly) more of a bug than a feature.
When GWB was proposing the marriage amendment, I thought "I don't think he really wants to try that hard to pass it"(and I was correct), so it allowed me to justify ignoring his stance (especially since Democrats weren't particularly pro marriage equality at that point). And outside of that I found his policy preferences more in line with my own.
But applying that logic to the current R that basically tells me they won't try to get anything done.... and we really need some things done (even if I'm not 100% a fan of how the Democratic administration wants to do them)
Boy do I want the filibuster gone so both parties can actually try to _do_ things instead of relying on one party "not actually trying to do things"
Yeah. I'm all in on killing the filibuster. Running a government based on tradition and "gentlemen's agreements" is dumb. The rules should be clear, very hard to break, and relatively hard to change.
Disagree and argue as you wish, but I would urge you to use different language. Cancers are meant to be eliminated and this metaphor is not OK when applied to a country filled with Jews.
You complain about Democrats' attitude to free speech then 7 minutes later attacks someone's speech based on a clear misrepresentation of what they wrote
I didn't attack; I disagreed. I don't want him fired. I won't report him to his boss. I won't try to doxx him. I won't try to pass a speech code banning his views.
Greenwald and others have pointed out, that pro-Israel Zionist mastered cancel culture before everyone else. I think Matt has referenced this on twitter. It is about siloing certain discussions and kicking them out of the political realm.
I am sorry, but this comment exactly proves my point. This is a standard canard, play the anti-Semitism card to deflect from criticism of that settler-colonial regime. I think its good word, because like apartheid S. Africa and colonial Algeria, it should be removed.
This is ahistorical though. The Arabs conquered the area just in the 7th century CE. If you don’t want the Jews there, I guess you should try giving the area to Greeks, Italians or Iranians, all of which were there centuries before Arab colonization.
This is a bizarre comment. Arabization from the Muslim conquests wasn't a genocide, when the Arabs conquered the Levant they didn't wipe out the existing population like the Zionists are trying to do. The Palestinians living there are the people who have always lived there, not like the Brooklyn settlers.
In al honesty what do you think we’d be doing differently if not for the Israel lobby? I think Chomsky argues fairly persuasively that it’s the imperialist project that leads to support for Israel not a relatively small lobby.
I don't agree that AIPAC is theost powerful lobby but I would love more discussion about the advantages to the US in unconditional support for Israel, b/c I don't see it
I think the weapons manufacturers have them beat. U.S policy towards Latin America and Asia has been just as brutal. We don't need a foreign lobby to convince us to kill a bunch of people without any benefit to the average american
A fair and useful summary, even if I don't agree with some of the points, but 'not trying hard to end Obamacare' is surely a bit hard to square with California v Texas, no?
California v Texas (or some version of it) was going forward regardless of party control of the Congress and Presidency. The proof for me is that when Republicans had control of the House, Senate and Presidency between 2017-2019, they didn't pass any meaningful legislation other than tax reform.
They really didn't try very hard to pass ACA repeal, or much of anything else for that matter. The only thing of consequence they passed was tax reform.
I don't think that's right at all. They devoted a lot of congressional time and effort to it, and repeatedly brought back new versions even when it was already clear that their efforts were both widely unpopular with the general public and uniting their opponents with a winning campaign line.
I think you're mistaking the lack of complete unity (which they had over tax reform but didn't have over the ACA) for a lack of effort in leadership, but they're not the same thing.
If you don't mind why do you like his response to covid? Like he will tell you that. he is against people who thought we should actually stop the virus above all else and that seems like the better quality of life solution.
I live in Orlando and like everyone I know has been wracked with anxiety for over a year regardless of if they're working from home, working in a store, or were closed for months.
I'm really not trying to argue, but understand because my experience was one that the last year has been just awful here. Are you just fatalistic that we simply couldn't have accomplished a kind of victory against covid? I, perhaps naively, thought people would accept broad serious sacrifices if only people had asked for them.
Yeah I don't think victory against covid was feasible whatsoever. Moreover, it wasn't even really tried. Even in the bluest of blue states and areas I never saw a realistic plan proposed. To me that kind of plan would have involved much more extensive contact tracing and evidence-gathering. Instead it was just "hunker down indefinitely" which was realistic for a certain type of white-collar person but not for anyone else.
Bug bigger than that was the CDCs extreme errors in understanding and communicating how covid is spread. I keep going back to Japan's public health ministry who communicated right from the beginning "the 3 Cs": stay away from close contract, in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces (it's probably all Cs in Japanese). We started with sending kids home from college to their older parents houses and shutting down playgrounds. To this day people are walking around with masks outdoors and then taking them off to eat in restaurants, or washing doorknobs and things like that. It doesn't matter how much sacrifice people are willing to make if half of the sacrifice is geared towards useless hygiene theatre
The sacrifices necessary - stop travel, mass testing, forced quarantines, contact tracing - weren't asked of any American citizen in any state. We are an unruly and diverse populace and we weren't going to stop economic activity (and protests) for a disease with the risk profile of Covid-19. I don't think that is fatalistic, but YMMV.
I guess I just generally disagree that America wouldn't have done that if both liberal and conservative elites had asked them to. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think were that much more divided than the like Nazi Sympathizers to the Communist spectrum in June 1941.
There was like a kind of obvious log trade where liberals would get significant social spending in a guaranteed income and health care aid and conservatives would get closed borders and security state spending to build out the tracking infrastructure.
The US pandemic outcome is not that different from the Western European pandemic outcome. We had a slim chance to contain the pandemic extremely early IF the CDC/FDA had (1) not fumbled their initial test creation and (2) had been able to spin up contact tracing faster, but after that institutional failure (one that no president would have been able to stop in time) we were going to have a bad pandemic because we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility. The FDA also refused to approve rapid tests due to their "low accuracy" (see many experts on why speed > accuracy for containing a pandemic).
"we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility"
Everyone keeps saying this, but no-one ever tried! If Newsom (or your local governor; I live in CA) had proposed this, I would have supported it. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone.
More rapid tests would have empowered people to assess their own risk better and adjust behavior dynamically. When frequent, regular testing was used, such as in major sports and at many universities, outbreaks were minimized without needing very strict measures.
Yes, exactly that's why you force more complexity into the situation to blur that human tendency. And I mean it would really only take one bill in Congress for this to be passed.
Well, that's the thing, it wouldn't just be a third-party but also a fourth and possibly and fifth and a sixth. By making multi-party districts as well as ranked-choice voting you remove the third-party spoiler effect. The real reason I think they don't want to pursue proportional representation is that they'll lose the monopolies they've set up in government. PR is essentially breaking up the political monopolies through those same political monopolies so it will have to take a lot of support to get it passed.
There are surely multiple ways to get to supporting the current Republican party, but the path that I can grok is 1) being really cynical about government (and related institutions) and 2) being super turned off by left's cultural attitudes (and the policy they drive).
If you're really cynical about government, then Trump's administration being a shitshow doesn't bother you. You think that the government is basically always a shitshow. Also, the lies about the election sound about right.
I got some insight into 2 from talking with a few people from rural areas of my state over the summer (admittedly, not a large sample size). Fundamentally, making race and gender such a big deal is, at best, mostly irrelevant to people in rural areas; why vote for politicians who focus so prominently on other people? For many people, it's not just irrelevant; it's a pretty big turnoff. For example, de facto support for (or at least lack of serious condemnation of) the rioters over the summer --- along with calls for defunding the police and the likes --- was really unpopular. And yes, Biden did say he didn't support defunding the police, but with so much on-the-ground energy for it from the left, few cared what Biden said.
I agree with the view that many of the race/culture aspects of the modern left are garbage, but I also understand that moderate Democrats still exist in significant numbers; they're just a lot quieter.
Yeah. For sure extreme wokeness, defund the police, and riots in Portland and elsewhere pushed more than a few moderate Ds & Rs toward Trumpism. To me, it was a huge red flag when James Lindsay (@conceptualjames, Cynical Theories) came out for Trump even considering that his switch to Trump could have been for branding/economic reasons as much as conviction.
The Dems refusal to loudly slap down extreme wokeness was probably the biggest political blunder of this cycle. OTOH, I don't think them doing so would have moved the numbers by more than a couple percent overall and that would have still left Trumpism with a crazy-high level of support.
I agree that woke shit wouldn't be enough to move the needle much, but I'm including more than just woke shit.
For example, sending in the military to end riots is, historically, a very common approach. Call me a fascist, but it's also not inherently unreasonable. I'd guess that Biden supported sending in the Marines to suppress the Rodney King riots. He would have scored real points with the people I talked to if he called for actually doing something to stop the riots last summer. I understand why he didn't do that, but I also understand why people were disappointed that he didn't advocate for a real response.
I don't recall exactly where everyone landed on things. It looks like Trump was mainly calling on governors to request the National Guard to come in, although as usual, his rhetoric was more inflammatory than anything.
I think you are really right. I think that the degree to which people get info from a bubble and don’t quite get that that is happening is huge. I really find it hard to hate someone who says hey they are policing speech too much on the left I don’t want my kids indoctrinated (recently had a conversation with a liberal dad who doesn’t read almost any politics who is freaked out about critical race theory in school teaching his minority kids to hate white people reminding me that the small amount of stuff that reaches people like him is the weirdest crazy stuff and one may say hey the crazy stuff is on the right is worse than crazy left stuff and may be right but has nothing to do with hey democrats in general have a better plan for the country). I honestly have a lot of sympathy for nonracist(at least by old definitions) republicans who see a bunch of young loud people seeing injustice everywhere calling everyone on their side racist as people who are unrealistic and don’t seem to like the country they love very much.
I’m a conservative who basically went left because of Trump. I feel pretty isolated now politically. And to tell the truth, being in the thick of Republicans it’s pretty depressing to see them go bat shit crazy.
The problem is motivation. Democrats bad ideas that are wrong are based on honest miscalculation or naivety. Republican ideas that are bad are based on some sort of mass psychosis.
My answer to the problem of polarization. Slowly abandon Twitter and Facebook and instead find a few good blogs to follow, and just engage in the comments.
I’m not sure what to do about the dysfunction in government. On one hand, I get the popular vote thing, at least when it comes to President, but on the other hand, I support the Senate. Senators aren’t there to represent people... they are there to represent their state. Funny enough the only solution I see is less Federal control.
I’m skeptical about majority rule as well. Imagine if Republicans got 50.5% of the vote. (Possible) and won house and senate. Should they pass laws passing universal open carry?
Perhaps we need to return to the era of earmarks. Let Democrats bribe a few Republicans by giving them some goodies for their state.
Quite frankly the whole thing is depressing on a broad level. Better to just be a kind considerate person. And assume the same of others, even if they are dumb enough to think that vaccines have micro-chips.
If Republicans passed universal open carry with 50.5% of the vote that would be unpopular and they would be help accountable in the next election. Or, maybe it would be popular and they would keep power. That's how democracy is supposed to work. It's a weird thing about this democracy debates that people raise these preemptive policy concerns. In democracies procedure is not supposed to block unpopular things, electorates discipline parties on their own.
That is the most compelling part of Ezra's argument re: eliminating the filibuster to me. Governing majorities should be able to pass their agendas and reap the rewards/penalties for them. If Republicans want to strip down the ACA, which I am not in favor of, they should totally be able to do it and then have to deal with the fallout of that decision. As it stands right now, they get all of the point-scoring of opposing particular issues without having to...you know, DO anything.
It's also how you show you're not just full of partisan shit. Like if our country is center right, let it be center right. I can hope true democracy would lead to my exact policy preferences, but it probably won't. Do we believe in democracy as an abstract principle or not?
To be clear, I am not in favor of stripping down the ACA, not that I am opposed to the ACA personally.
Yeah, the Tories here in the UK have been able to actually implement Brexit. At the moment, the consequences are a bit hidden (no-one can travel any way because of covid) but if it turns out to have been a disaster, then they'll catch hell in a future election.
I don't think this is totally true. The Tories enjoy a geographic advantage similar to Republicans. They won less than half the popular vote in the last election but have a huge majority in Parliament. If the election was proportional, the left-wing/2nd-referendum--curious parties could conceivably have formed a government, altho admittedly it would have been tricky.
That's not a geographic advantage. It's a different property of the first-past-the-post system that we share, which is that it inflates a small lead into a bigger one.
Take a look at the 1992 Presidential election as an example. Allocated proportionally, the Electoral college would be 233 Clinton, 202 Bush, 103 Perot, a lead that the system inflated to 370 Clinton, 168 Bush.
The US seldom has a large third party, and hasn't seen a large national lead for one party over the other for a long time, so you rarely see this effect in federal elections, but statewide elections regularly see leads massively inflated by the system. Take a look at the most recent California State Assembly election - the Democrats easily maintained their 2/3 majority, winning 75% of seats, but only got 62.78% of the vote, well below a 2/3 threshold.
It really wouldn't matter where the Tories are winning and where they are losing, when they have an 11.5% lead, it's going to convert to a large majority (a similar lead with the parties reversed in 2001 gave Labour 412/659 seats; compared to 2019's Tories 365/650).
It does, obviously, matter exactly where you win votes, but there isn't a large systemic bias in the UK the way there is in the US.
I'm not sure if open carry was the best example. But there are things that might be popular with a narrow majority, that just shouldn't be universally mandated. Or restricted.
That's what the Bill of Rights is for
Yep... though we have qualified immunity used as an excuse to perform unreasonable searches. We have students being kicked out of schools for expressing unpopular opinions. Etc...
Yeah but I think that's a separate problem from unequal representation of the Senate. Unequal representation doesn't protect against majoritarianism, it just defines the majority in a weird counterintuitive way.
Should the UN be more equal? UN votes relative to a countries population?
The senate is their to protect a state as a wholes interest.
Personally, I think we were better off when Senators were appointed by the Governor or State Government.
That was just an example that popped into my mind. Not sure if it was the best one. Personally, where I live, universal open carry is no problem, but I'm not sure I would feel that way if I lived in Chicago or New York City.
I’m the same way. But I prefer it at the more local level.
This is basically my dad. He was a lifelong Republican, voted for President Obama because he liked him (and I think he wanted to be able to say he was a part of a historical moment, not against it), and then when the Tea Party hit in 2010, he looked at that whole movement and decided he was 100% out on the Republican Party. He hasn't voted for a Republican candidate at the state-wide or Federal level since.
My dad is 60ish years old and has been a pretty successful manager in the manufacturing sector his whole life; what he appreciates most in a candidate is professional competency and someone who follows the data, and as he saw the Republican Party being increasingly driven by nonsense he decided he was done with that.
(The sneaky truth here is that my dad, by virtue of his values, was *always* kind of a very moderate northeastern Republican. Even during the 80s and 90s, his belief system would've placed him firmly in the D camp in many parts of the country, but the places we lived just happened to be liberal enough that he ended up on the R side of the issues. Once that sort of changed nationally, his support followed suit.)
When I say his values, I mean that he has never owned or expressed interest in a guns and finds gun culture weird and bizarre, is in favor of allowing abortion, is basically neutral on unions, and thinks free trade is good.
In a functioning democracy, bad ideas would be punished by voters shifting their preferences. The arguments against democracy presented here are weak because they assume that a perpetual majority will implement bad policies and get away with it. Majority rule is a better system by far. Conservative governors in blue states have a good track record so it’s not as if this would lead to a liberal hell hole. It’d just force conservatives to be slightly more appealing to the average voter.
I actually agree with this. I wish Dems would pass their ideas (except for any permanent change such as supreme court packing). If they are good, they will be kept, if they are bad, then Republicans will win.
Supreme Court packing need not be permanent, in fact it could be a catalyst for a constitutional amendment to fix the court at nine members but with 18 year terms. The amendment would require that every two years the most senior justice would step down and the President would appoint a new justice whenever the number fell below nine. Packing the court with 11 or 13 justices might convince Republicans to support such an amendment to undo the packing
More likely it would just lead to an escalating round of packing. Dems up it to 11. Republicans up it to 15, etc...
Though I am pretty agnostic as to Democratic or Republican elected officials, I am partial to conservative judges.
Court packing requires a trifecta, which seems unlikely (but not impossible) for the Republicans in the foreseeable future- that is part of McConnell’s reasoning behind pushing judges so hard. If the Dems did pack the court with younger judges, Republicans might see the clearer path to undoing that would be term limits that would allow the next R President to appoint 2 justices
I agree too! I wish republicans would pass their ideas. My frustration is that there are strong incentives on both sides to posture but not pass anything because of the number of veto points within the government. The chance of a big idea getting passed is so minute.
Just had an unrelated thought - if vaccines have microchips, why aren't we using the vaccines to address the microchip shortage that has production lines stopped at car companies now?
Or is the chip shortage *because* of them all being in the COVID vaccine?
/s
(the fact I have to end this with /s ...)
Lol. The paranoia of people who carry around their smartphones and post on social media all the time.
But it’s all coming together.
I think I probably lean more liberal than you but feel we are in this together.
What do you think about proportional representation? This would solve all the problems you're talking about from making more parties with different ideas so you can find one that best fits your views, to allowing productive polarization but incentivizing cooperation and compromise, and finally getting rid of this majority rule debate because there would be no majorities (it would be pretty insane for a 4-6 party system to have one-party control a majority)
That’s my dream. I would love a moderate party. I’m this weird conglomeration of conservative and liberal ideas. I really support stuff like child allowances. I support labor unions. I support a higher minimum wage that is adjusted for inflation. I support a robust immigration system based on Australia and New Zealand points system. If I was writing a tax code, Bezos and Zuckerberg would be practically broke. The wealth tax would be pretty damn scary.
At the same time, I am skeptical of too much of a welfare state that disincentivizes working. I believe in the Second Amendment. I am ok if individual states want to restrict abortion. I think we should enforce immigration laws (this is balanced on making legal immigration easier).
I think I’m basically a populist.
My superpower is I can literally argue in good faith and east side of any political argument. I actually sympathize with my opponents.
But back to your proportional representation thing. Unfortunately I feel like national politics has become a team sport. It’s us against them. So there’s no room for us, them, them.
Yes!! This is exactly why we need proportional representation because there are many other people like you who are much more complex than the big tent parties and yet are sorted into these parties and forced to vote with beliefs you don't actually hold. I'm very similar but more on the left side where I don't support a lot of the more extreme progressive views but would appreciate a bigger safety net, etc. But I would pose another question which is what do you think is causing the nationalized politics? Because for me the answer is the first past the post electoral system.
Social media. Simply put, it allows people to more easily identify with a larger national in-group. Whereas prior to the social media, this identification was more at a local level.
In the 80s, I was a punk, in the 90s I was an Airman. I am sure others would describe themselves primarily by some other label they identified with.
I seriously don't remember ever caring what party someone voted for prior to about 2010. Then all of the sudden, liberal or conservative has become the defining overall broad label.
We are all guilty of meeting people and sort of top level pegging them as a republican or democrat. Maybe millennials and Gen Z think this is normal, but to Gen X and Boomers, its a completely new paradigm. Don't get me wrong, we are guilty of it as well, that's how powerful the tendency is.
On another note, prior to social media, we were primed by national news like CNN and Fox. I remember CNN first becoming a big deal during the Panama invasion. Prior to that it was just network TV for a short time. Local news and anchors had a much bigger effect.
Anyway, that's my theory.
Ya, I definitely agree that plays a part but I would argue that social media is the catalyst that propelled the change forward way faster and farther rather than the direct cause. Many other countries have had this social media revolution but haven't had the same nationalization of politics as the US has had. And I would argue that the reason why the US is so much more gridlocked than other countries is that we're stuck in this FPTP/two-party system that doesn't allow for complexity and instead flattens all debates into a two-sided argument.
Now one question would be why didn't this start sooner, if it was FPTP why didn't it start in the 1800s or something? And that's because we actually did have a four-party system up until around the civil rights era. There were liberal democrats, southern democrats, northern republicans, and rural republicans in the society. That's why republicans supported FDR's New Deal and why democrats couldn't pass any civil rights bills. However, once they did pass the civil rights bills and the parties sorted into two, it wasn't until the republicans in 2010 realized the power that they actually had and began to use it under Mitch McConnell.
I left FB in September before the 2016 election because it was so transparent how FB was profiling me based on my demographic information. I’m a heterodox political thinker, and I have different views from many people in my demographic group (at the time, 20-something in the Bay Area). They served me political advertising and materials that were so off the mark that it started to make me feel crazy. Maybe it’s good that FB got me so wrong. But the whole episode made me think that if I didn’t turn the thing off I would lose my capacity for genuine reflection and critical thought. Now that I’ve been five years away, and we see what we’ve seen from Cambridge Analytica to Jan 6, I think that was a very solid instinct.
I haven't abandoned them entirely, but my engagement is cut down a lot. Facebook really is a good personal communication tool, keep up with people type thing. Who had a baby, who got a new job, or moved, etc...
I think you’re right. Maybe it’s just the people I know but no one really puts much “political,” broadly defined, stuff on their personal pages. By political I mean no anti-vaxx, no weird conspiracies, no anti BLM rants...
The thing I can't wrap my head around is why national elections are so close right now. I've voted for plenty of Republicans in my life and I just can't understand what current R voters are thinking.
To me, the critical problem facing the nation isn't that 48% of the country can overwhelm the will of the other 52%. The problem is that 48% of the country supports the current Republican party.
The danger that this fact alone represents to our democracy cannot be overstated. The conditions in our culture and our media that have led so many of us to support the lies and borderline sedition of the current Republican party is putting our democracy in mortal danger.
The difference between needing 48% to rule versus needing 51% is practically a rounding error. The fact that 48% of Americans are OK with what happened on January 6th is the real threat to our democracy and is the real problem to solve.
Let me provide some insight for how one current R voter is thinking: I didn't vote for Trump (man, I look forward to not having to preface voting discussions with that phrase someday), but I did vote for almost every other Republican on my ballot.
I voted against a lot of things, and for a few. DeSantis has had a sane and reasonable response to the COVID panic, and his opponent turned out to be involved in a strange drug and male prostitute scandal, so I count that one as a huge plus. I disagree with the Democratic Party's views on illegal immigration, on support for Israel, on accomodation with Iran. I disagree with their views on anti-racism, on free speech issues, on religious liberty. I disagree with their views on the level of regulation broadly and their desires to impose a largely urban mindset to a large and diverse population. I find their proposals around climate change to be overwrought and overly pessimistic. I don't find the governance and quality-of-life in all-Democratic places to be a good example of where I'd like to live (SF Bay, Detroit, Baltimore, Portland). I find them condescending in their views to less-educated people.
I disagree with many policies of Republicans, too. But they largely don't work that hard to pass them (end Obamacare, privatize social security as examples) so I don't worry about over-reach in those areas. I do worry about over-reach by the Democrats.
You are clear on what you don’t like about Dems. As for Republicans, you like that they don’t accomplish much (other than cut taxes). Could I describe your view as pro status quo? America is fundamentally fine. Just let me have my freedoms (don’t police my language) and the economy will meet the needs of hard-working Americans. Is that it basically?
Yes, that is a fair characterization. I think we should tinker around the edges, but I don't support the more extensive changes I see the Democratic party supporting.
Earnest question: a lot of people in the US are not doing fine. I don't agree with a lot of far-left claims but there is racism, more poverty than other developed countries, currently lots of carbon emissions, it's very costly to have kids. Do you think these are problems that exist or that it's overblown?
I think those problems exist. I think many of the solutions proposed have unintended (or intended) consequences that would create bigger problems. I support smaller, incremental changes, some Democratic some Republican.
What kinds of changes?
I like the idea (don't know where I saw it) of progressives proposing lots of new ideas, which then have to run the gauntlet of conservative criticism. The terrible ideas get shot down and forgotten, the necessary and positive changes get implemented. From the present it looks like the left has always won, but just because we don't remember all the policies the left used to propose.
If true, it would make sense that the conservative position can be defined more easily by what it doesn't want rather than what it does.
I have also voted R a lot in the past, but I consider the "don't try all that hard to pass things" to be (mostly) more of a bug than a feature.
When GWB was proposing the marriage amendment, I thought "I don't think he really wants to try that hard to pass it"(and I was correct), so it allowed me to justify ignoring his stance (especially since Democrats weren't particularly pro marriage equality at that point). And outside of that I found his policy preferences more in line with my own.
But applying that logic to the current R that basically tells me they won't try to get anything done.... and we really need some things done (even if I'm not 100% a fan of how the Democratic administration wants to do them)
Boy do I want the filibuster gone so both parties can actually try to _do_ things instead of relying on one party "not actually trying to do things"
Yeah. I'm all in on killing the filibuster. Running a government based on tradition and "gentlemen's agreements" is dumb. The rules should be clear, very hard to break, and relatively hard to change.
The Israel Lobby is the biggest cancer on America's foreign policy.
Disagree and argue as you wish, but I would urge you to use different language. Cancers are meant to be eliminated and this metaphor is not OK when applied to a country filled with Jews.
You complain about Democrats' attitude to free speech then 7 minutes later attacks someone's speech based on a clear misrepresentation of what they wrote
I didn't attack; I disagreed. I don't want him fired. I won't report him to his boss. I won't try to doxx him. I won't try to pass a speech code banning his views.
Can you give me an example of the Democratic party proposing "speech codes"?
Greenwald and others have pointed out, that pro-Israel Zionist mastered cancel culture before everyone else. I think Matt has referenced this on twitter. It is about siloing certain discussions and kicking them out of the political realm.
I am sorry, but this comment exactly proves my point. This is a standard canard, play the anti-Semitism card to deflect from criticism of that settler-colonial regime. I think its good word, because like apartheid S. Africa and colonial Algeria, it should be removed.
This is ahistorical though. The Arabs conquered the area just in the 7th century CE. If you don’t want the Jews there, I guess you should try giving the area to Greeks, Italians or Iranians, all of which were there centuries before Arab colonization.
This is a bizarre comment. Arabization from the Muslim conquests wasn't a genocide, when the Arabs conquered the Levant they didn't wipe out the existing population like the Zionists are trying to do. The Palestinians living there are the people who have always lived there, not like the Brooklyn settlers.
What would it mean for Israel to be "removed"? What country would Tel Aviv be part of?
In that case, your choice of words supports your views, though I strongly disagree with your characterization.
Yeah, I'd like to 2nd this.
In al honesty what do you think we’d be doing differently if not for the Israel lobby? I think Chomsky argues fairly persuasively that it’s the imperialist project that leads to support for Israel not a relatively small lobby.
Yes. Read Ben Rhodes book and this book. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Israel_Lobby_and_U.S._Foreign_Policy
Israel's aims don't benefit the US. The pushback is from the Lobby, which is huge. AIPAC is the most powerful lobby in DC.
I don't agree that AIPAC is theost powerful lobby but I would love more discussion about the advantages to the US in unconditional support for Israel, b/c I don't see it
I think the weapons manufacturers have them beat. U.S policy towards Latin America and Asia has been just as brutal. We don't need a foreign lobby to convince us to kill a bunch of people without any benefit to the average american
Are you an “average american” [sic]?
I don't own stock in Raytheon, if that is what you mean
That’s not what I meant, but thanks for playing.
Maybe call them vermin instead?
A fair and useful summary, even if I don't agree with some of the points, but 'not trying hard to end Obamacare' is surely a bit hard to square with California v Texas, no?
California v Texas (or some version of it) was going forward regardless of party control of the Congress and Presidency. The proof for me is that when Republicans had control of the House, Senate and Presidency between 2017-2019, they didn't pass any meaningful legislation other than tax reform.
But they tried, really quite hard, to pass ACA repeal in that window. And California v Texas was driven entirely by Republican AGs.
They really didn't try very hard to pass ACA repeal, or much of anything else for that matter. The only thing of consequence they passed was tax reform.
I don't think that's right at all. They devoted a lot of congressional time and effort to it, and repeatedly brought back new versions even when it was already clear that their efforts were both widely unpopular with the general public and uniting their opponents with a winning campaign line.
I think you're mistaking the lack of complete unity (which they had over tax reform but didn't have over the ACA) for a lack of effort in leadership, but they're not the same thing.
If you don't mind why do you like his response to covid? Like he will tell you that. he is against people who thought we should actually stop the virus above all else and that seems like the better quality of life solution.
I live in Orlando and like everyone I know has been wracked with anxiety for over a year regardless of if they're working from home, working in a store, or were closed for months.
He prioritized the safety of seniors, kept schools open, vaccine rollout based on age, avoided mass closures of business activity. And ended up with a Covid death rate that was better than most states (ranked 27th), despite an older population. See: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1109011/coronavirus-covid19-death-rates-us-by-state/
I'm really not trying to argue, but understand because my experience was one that the last year has been just awful here. Are you just fatalistic that we simply couldn't have accomplished a kind of victory against covid? I, perhaps naively, thought people would accept broad serious sacrifices if only people had asked for them.
Yeah I don't think victory against covid was feasible whatsoever. Moreover, it wasn't even really tried. Even in the bluest of blue states and areas I never saw a realistic plan proposed. To me that kind of plan would have involved much more extensive contact tracing and evidence-gathering. Instead it was just "hunker down indefinitely" which was realistic for a certain type of white-collar person but not for anyone else.
Bug bigger than that was the CDCs extreme errors in understanding and communicating how covid is spread. I keep going back to Japan's public health ministry who communicated right from the beginning "the 3 Cs": stay away from close contract, in crowded, poorly ventilated indoor spaces (it's probably all Cs in Japanese). We started with sending kids home from college to their older parents houses and shutting down playgrounds. To this day people are walking around with masks outdoors and then taking them off to eat in restaurants, or washing doorknobs and things like that. It doesn't matter how much sacrifice people are willing to make if half of the sacrifice is geared towards useless hygiene theatre
The sacrifices necessary - stop travel, mass testing, forced quarantines, contact tracing - weren't asked of any American citizen in any state. We are an unruly and diverse populace and we weren't going to stop economic activity (and protests) for a disease with the risk profile of Covid-19. I don't think that is fatalistic, but YMMV.
I guess I just generally disagree that America wouldn't have done that if both liberal and conservative elites had asked them to. Maybe I'm naive but I don't think were that much more divided than the like Nazi Sympathizers to the Communist spectrum in June 1941.
There was like a kind of obvious log trade where liberals would get significant social spending in a guaranteed income and health care aid and conservatives would get closed borders and security state spending to build out the tracking infrastructure.
The US pandemic outcome is not that different from the Western European pandemic outcome. We had a slim chance to contain the pandemic extremely early IF the CDC/FDA had (1) not fumbled their initial test creation and (2) had been able to spin up contact tracing faster, but after that institutional failure (one that no president would have been able to stop in time) we were going to have a bad pandemic because we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility. The FDA also refused to approve rapid tests due to their "low accuracy" (see many experts on why speed > accuracy for containing a pandemic).
"we don't have the cultural cohesion to do true lockdowns (literally locking people inside as China did) or mandatory quarantine in a government run facility"
Everyone keeps saying this, but no-one ever tried! If Newsom (or your local governor; I live in CA) had proposed this, I would have supported it. I'm willing to bet I'm not alone.
More rapid tests would have empowered people to assess their own risk better and adjust behavior dynamically. When frequent, regular testing was used, such as in major sports and at many universities, outbreaks were minimized without needing very strict measures.
https://www.audible.com/pd/The-pandemic-playbook-Podcast/B092MX6G9B
Great The Weeds podcast on that subject.
>>>DeSantis has had a sane and reasonable response to the COVID panic<<<
Covid panic?
What would you think of proportional representation or a party that doesn't support Trump but is still to the right of Manchin?
That’s my dream. But human tendency is to divide into us them, not us, them, them.
Yes, exactly that's why you force more complexity into the situation to blur that human tendency. And I mean it would really only take one bill in Congress for this to be passed.
Yeah, but any thing that opened up a third-party would hurt but the Democrats and Republicans there for fear keeps them from supporting it.
Well, that's the thing, it wouldn't just be a third-party but also a fourth and possibly and fifth and a sixth. By making multi-party districts as well as ranked-choice voting you remove the third-party spoiler effect. The real reason I think they don't want to pursue proportional representation is that they'll lose the monopolies they've set up in government. PR is essentially breaking up the political monopolies through those same political monopolies so it will have to take a lot of support to get it passed.
There are surely multiple ways to get to supporting the current Republican party, but the path that I can grok is 1) being really cynical about government (and related institutions) and 2) being super turned off by left's cultural attitudes (and the policy they drive).
If you're really cynical about government, then Trump's administration being a shitshow doesn't bother you. You think that the government is basically always a shitshow. Also, the lies about the election sound about right.
I got some insight into 2 from talking with a few people from rural areas of my state over the summer (admittedly, not a large sample size). Fundamentally, making race and gender such a big deal is, at best, mostly irrelevant to people in rural areas; why vote for politicians who focus so prominently on other people? For many people, it's not just irrelevant; it's a pretty big turnoff. For example, de facto support for (or at least lack of serious condemnation of) the rioters over the summer --- along with calls for defunding the police and the likes --- was really unpopular. And yes, Biden did say he didn't support defunding the police, but with so much on-the-ground energy for it from the left, few cared what Biden said.
I agree with the view that many of the race/culture aspects of the modern left are garbage, but I also understand that moderate Democrats still exist in significant numbers; they're just a lot quieter.
Yeah. For sure extreme wokeness, defund the police, and riots in Portland and elsewhere pushed more than a few moderate Ds & Rs toward Trumpism. To me, it was a huge red flag when James Lindsay (@conceptualjames, Cynical Theories) came out for Trump even considering that his switch to Trump could have been for branding/economic reasons as much as conviction.
The Dems refusal to loudly slap down extreme wokeness was probably the biggest political blunder of this cycle. OTOH, I don't think them doing so would have moved the numbers by more than a couple percent overall and that would have still left Trumpism with a crazy-high level of support.
I agree that woke shit wouldn't be enough to move the needle much, but I'm including more than just woke shit.
For example, sending in the military to end riots is, historically, a very common approach. Call me a fascist, but it's also not inherently unreasonable. I'd guess that Biden supported sending in the Marines to suppress the Rodney King riots. He would have scored real points with the people I talked to if he called for actually doing something to stop the riots last summer. I understand why he didn't do that, but I also understand why people were disappointed that he didn't advocate for a real response.
Are you discounting the National Guard? When governors called them up, they seemed to do a pretty good job.
Did Biden call for it? Also, not all governors did much with them.
I don't recall exactly where everyone landed on things. It looks like Trump was mainly calling on governors to request the National Guard to come in, although as usual, his rhetoric was more inflammatory than anything.
https://www.stripes.com/news/us/biden-vows-not-to-use-national-guard-as-a-political-prop-1.643174
I think you are really right. I think that the degree to which people get info from a bubble and don’t quite get that that is happening is huge. I really find it hard to hate someone who says hey they are policing speech too much on the left I don’t want my kids indoctrinated (recently had a conversation with a liberal dad who doesn’t read almost any politics who is freaked out about critical race theory in school teaching his minority kids to hate white people reminding me that the small amount of stuff that reaches people like him is the weirdest crazy stuff and one may say hey the crazy stuff is on the right is worse than crazy left stuff and may be right but has nothing to do with hey democrats in general have a better plan for the country). I honestly have a lot of sympathy for nonracist(at least by old definitions) republicans who see a bunch of young loud people seeing injustice everywhere calling everyone on their side racist as people who are unrealistic and don’t seem to like the country they love very much.