It may be too obvious to warrant mention, but a corporation can afford to have a monarch/CEO because a CEO is constrained externally by financial and product markets. In the case of public companies, the performance of the CEO is evaluated in a public fashion on a daily basis in the form of the stock price. External factors can also constrain monarchs of course but these constraints tend to be much weaker (see e.g. North Korea).
Exactly. To hold a monarch in check you need countervailing powers- barons, power mad bishops, highland chieftains, uppity peasants, and even a nascent middle class
It's, "Hereditary!", the new animated musical from Dixnar! A heartwarming and hilarious tale of in-fighting and in-trigue in a distant land of mystery. Watch as an initially benevolent monarch curdles into a paranoid fiend who kills his own children! Laugh as the nation's infrastructure rots when the king spends all the taxes on his harem! Yes, it's "Hereditary!", coming to a theater near you! Your family will love it -- or be raped and slaughtered by the Cossacks!
Not to mention that there are typically 5-500 competitors in the same space. Markets achieve good results, but not because the enlightened despot model works brilliantly at the firm level.
If a consumer doesn't like a company's products, they can go buy something else. If an employee doesn't like their company's culture, they can go work somewhere else. If a shareholder doesn't like the way the company they invested in is run, they can go move their money somewhere else.
In order for this analogy to hold, people who don't like the way their government is run would need to be able to quickly and easily choose to live under a different government. In reality, it doesn't work like that. Countries have borders and immigration restrictions, so citizens of a corrupt country who want to move to a more stable country typically can't - that's essentially what the whole mess at our southern border is about.
Even within a country, moving to another state more in line with your politics is not easy. Sure liberals in Texas and conservatives in California may whine about how much better state XXX is run than their own. But, at the end of the day, dislike of the politicians is just not worth abandoning one's home, job, and community over. So, people tend to stay put and just put up with it.
This is where the corporation analogy for governments falls apart.
+100 It's amazing how many people who say "it would be so much better if the government were run like a corporation" don't seem to understand these basic facts.
This is remarkably soft on the complete insanity of that Yarvin quote. Why would we believe monarchy is more common in human history than government by consensus of tribal elders? How are CEOs analogous to monarchs at all? Among the noxious features of monarchy that led the framers of the constitution to forswear it include eligibility by bloodline (often limited to firstborn sons with favored religious views, but somehow open to infants and lunatics) and the inability to fire the incumbent for incompetence. If Yarvin is proposing monarchy but minus that, in what sense in he proposing a monarchy, and in what sense can he claim his preferred style of government is common among governments in history? I kind of suspect that what he really wants is not so much a change in institutions as a change in uniforms, namely for the head of government to wear a fancy hat and be followed around by bishops waving censers or whatever.
Having foolishly gone to the Yarvin link in a previous post, I've learned my lesson. Matt might want to consider making future posts less Yarvin-rich. The guy really is, oh what's the term, an utter doofus.
I actually went down a small rabbit hole trying to figure out if I was missing something. I’m genuinely shocked that anyone (even the alt-right) finds Yarvin convincing. Just complete half-baked nonsense.
For what it's worth, elective monarchies definitely _have_ been a thing, in many places. The idea of having a supreme leader elected by a council of the various regional leaders/warlords was used in (listing just places I can name offhand) Norway (from which it also migrated to Iceland), pre-unification-of-England Mercia, Ireland, Greece (prior to the advent of broader democracy in Athens), and many of the city-states of Renaissance Italy (see for instance the Doge of Venice). Some of those (like Venice) were likely influenced by historical precedent, but a lot of these cases do appear to have come up with similar solutions independent of each other. So I think there is _something_ to the idea that there's a convergent-evolution thing happening here, where this is a form of governance that is pretty well-adapted... to a pre-modern society that doesn't have our kind of high-speed transportation, communication, and astonishing levels of productivity that remove a lot of the pressure pre-modern societies faced (like needing lots of land per person, and lots of farm labor, which then had to be protected by an elite military class, and instructed on the timing of farm activities by an educated class that figured out stuff like astronomy).
Yes, it seems pretty clear that while something around 98% of human history exclusively featured some form of the "tribal elders" form of government, various forms of monarchy/absolute rulers overwhelmingly predominate once you start talking about moving past the city-state level of civilizational development. (Especially when you consider that even a lot of purportedly collaboratively chosen leaders like the Holy Roman Emperors, Rashidun Caliphs, etc. often secured their positions through undemocratic means and mostly functioned as absolute rulers after securing office.)
Sorry, can't be bothered to read this Yarvin character, but is he arguing for a UK/Sweden/Netherlands style constitutional monarchy where the monarch is a symbolic head of state with little to no real power, or, like, Henry VIII?
My main recollection of the half of one of his pieces that I read was that it was at least as long as 3 whole long-form commentaries should be, and didn't even relay half as much actual meaning as one.
The ratio of noise to signal was just extraordinarily high, in addition to the signal being profoundly misinformed, even outright stupid, claptrap.
I soldiered thru, but it was a lot of words for relatively little content.
In his partial defense, I think that it was some weird personal blog on the fringe of the internet that blew up into something way beyond what it was probably intended to be.
I imagine that he's probably about as embarrassed as I would be if some of my college history papers were published online and widely read and commented upon.
I don't know about that defense -- that might work if someone unearthed writings in a random dead man's diaries, but Yarvin was 34 when he started it, and he still writes today under his real name and in the same style, still espousing the same types of ideas. And the blog was a Thing even as it was still happening among a certain small crowd. Plus Bannon apparently consulted with him, it's not like he shied away from his ideas as they blew up.
I myself am completely baffled by its appeal, like the rest of you. It's not even the supposed ideas that I dislike so much as the insane length without any clear substance.
The appeal is punk rock for racist nerds: we're the rebels who will tell you the secret truth at an extreme length that only true smarties can understand, and it turns out that Detroit was ruined by Black people and Arabs. I sort of see why he has a following, but once you figure out the schtick, there's not enough substance left to push back against, and racism is super-dumb. He for example argues that Obama's first book was written by Bill Ayers.
Haha, that's why I got all my university-level history courses out of the way in AP form as a high school sophomore and junior. Much more defensible to say "I was young and stupid" if anything embarrassing turns up.
"Personal" blogs are a bad idea and always will be. Either write with the expectation that it'll exist when you die or write in a hardcopy journal that you burn after 20 years.
It's not like he's gotten much better since, though.
My personal blog would be mortifying, and I just realised it can't be changed or deleted as I've forgotten the password, but looking quickly it seems to have been removed by Google at some point thank God.
Yarvin's point about corporate governance shows a laughable lack of understanding about how organizations actually work, unfortunately common not just among far-right edge lords, but other center-right ideologues, too.
Does Yarvin seriously think that C-Suite roles are filled via inheritance and legitimated via the Divine Right of Kings? Perhaps he's thinking of the second- or third-generations of a family firm? This does seem to be the point-of-reference for Conservatives when they imagine a given business corporation. CEOs of public corporations are far more accountable to the Board and stakeholders (especially activist investors) than any monarch. Which is why they tend not to last very long, which brings me to the next point...
Does Yarvin realize that CEOs, far from representing the stability and continuity of a monarch, have, on average, a lower tenure than a two-term president? We're talking <7 years now, on average, with that foreshortening fast-accelerating. The rest of the C-suite's "reign" is even shorter, with CMOs, especially, washing out faster than even House Members of Congress, with an average term of <4 years. Like many laymen, Yarvin's perception is likely skewed by the survivorship bias of the few especially successful CEOs with 15+ years tenure--much more like a dynastic monarch in a less tumultuous kingdom.
I suspect Yarvin is thinking of the "family firm" given his very-pro Trump inclinations and his general "everything was better in the good ole days" mindset.
I'm probably giving Yarvin too much time given that he's basically a lunatic, but I wanted to point something out regarding the generational "family firm" model that Yarvin clearly has in mind. Namely, it's not as successful as he likes to think once you scratch beneath the surface.
I would recommend a fairly recent Slate money podcast on this issue. Has been a little time since I listened to the episode in question, but will try to summarize as best I can what was discussed about the "family firm" issue. The thing to apparently keep in mind with successful "family firms" over generations are that they are overwhelming business models or businesses that didn't really need to change much over time or decided not to change. The successful "family firm" models over time are things like small B&B like hotels, wineries or even just other businesses that didn't change their operations all that significantly. Over and over again, the "family firms" that fail are ones where the son or grandson tries to expand the business significantly or reorient their business model. And over and over again these efforts result in disaster. History remembers JP Morgan or various Rothschild children (and grandchildren) because they are actually the exceptions that prove the rule. Ironically, a good example of what usually happen is DJT himself. Fred had a business model based on "working class" multifamily properties in the outer boroughs. DJT doesn't think this is sexy enough, builds "luxury" buildings in Manhattan and investing in casinos...and watches as it all crashes down in bankruptcy that he only is able to get out of by stiffing investors and having dad bail him out with what turned out to be scams and tax dodges.
My point is to show that the generational "family firm" model only works if you don't need much major changes to your operations. And one of the big big points of Matt' work for 20+ years is that our institutions need to be reformed (like getting rid of the filibuster) so they can actually pass legislation and address various policy issues of the day. As bureaucratic and "status quo" government can be, the last thing we need is a system that entrenches those features. Government actually needs to be able to adjust how it operates to be successful and the "family firm" model may be the worst way of doing that.
Really excellent points. There’s a lot of nostalgia-laden “common sense” that gets circulated among this crew without anyone really scrutinizing it.
Either because it’s “too ridiculous” or because those who would disagree with a Yarvin might not even dispute the assumptions of his arguments, just his conclusions.
> One of Yarvin’s pet ideas is the notion that democracy is essentially a sham, and real power is held by a network of civil servants, college professors, and NGO workers.
I worry that Yarvin and other right wing “intellectuals” are pulling on a thread with a strand of truth: yes, a small number of liberal/progressive elites hold a disproportionately large amount of sway within our Democratic party. I don’t really get Yarvin’s focus on bureaucrats when right wing populist seem to be having more success focusing on the mainstream media and tech industry.
My particular concern for the Democrats is that our elites’ disproportionate amount of power is particularly visible. In contrast, Republic elites (e.g., Koch, Cato, Manhattan Institute) are only known to political junkies. Further, our progressive elites—particularly in journalism and academia—are engaged in an intra-elite competition to see who can be the most pious progressive by developing and championing ever-more-extreme views. I worry that our highly visible elites will grow increasingly distant from the median Democratic voter (let alone the median voter in general) and this will be exploited by right wingers to pull away voters and possibly risk fracturing our broad coalition.
It’s not just the American Right being left behind by the Democrats, and there won’t be a course correction until left-critical media sources get read by committed Democrat voters. I don’t see this happening, which is why I predict a major political realignment very soon. When you can’t change the direction of a party, and the party is uniquely obtuse to average voters’ concerns, it’s time to switch.
“The idea that American institutions are in need of radical destruction rather than reform licenses extreme behavior and could easily put us on the path to collapse.”
I don’t want to draw an equivalence here. However, I hear these types of sentiments about our institutions a lot in the circles I run in, and the people expressing them are anything but right-wingers…
If the Bazelonian scenario of Dems getting a slight majority of the popular vote for president and the generic Congress ballot, but Republicans getting dominant control of everything comes to fruition, I definitely expect these sentiments to become overwhelmingly placed on the left wing.
I actually mean it to be even more defeatist, lol. In that I don't think the Democrats can fight their way to a majority of the popular vote such that they should feel disenfranchised by the Senate's tilt against them, not unless they toss most of the current "thought leaders" overboard loudly and publicly.
If they lose most elections between now and 2040, it'll be because the overly-educated professional classes have turned the party into a social club entirely divorced from the needs and wants of the mushy middle, while the Republicans have washed their hands of Trumpism's stupidity and embraced its populism. The Democrats, in this world, aren't winning *anything*, so they have nothing to bitch about.
Sometimes, "the game is rigged against me" really means, "I don't want to change my strategy to win under the long-established rules of the game so please change the rules".
I would happily torch the current system if it were in my power because it’s bloody antiquated and has a terrible global track record.
But that has damn all to do with the fact that the Democrats refuse to figure out how to run under it, it’s just the historical evidence is piling up that presidential systems are shit and ours will likely land us in a civil war eventually.
We got lucky to have the institutions and social solidarity to avoid catastrophe thus far.
Right now, all of the media attention is on problems with the Democrats. But, once Republicans are in power, everything is going to flip, like it always does. And, when it does, and everybody has long forgotten about "defund the police" and other progressive blunders, while Republican blunders (e.g. enacting a nationwide abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest) are fresh in voters' minds, Democrats will be given a chance.
That’s how it has traditionally worked, but any subscriber here I think is politically aware enough to understand how the internal mechanisms by which the party fights back to the center and earns that chance with voters are… degrading.
Democratic elite politics is becoming the politics of post-scarcity… of ego, virtue-signaling, and comfortable narratives.
Ha, fair. And yes, I do think on the other side of the coin that there are plenty of lefties that take a narrow look of the Democrats winning seven out of the last eight popular votes for president, and thinking that should translate to a national majority mandate everywhere.
Agreed -- to be clear, that's why I don't think there's an equivalence here. The way I see it, this sentiment is much more prevalent among the knowledge creation class than among actual Democratic politicians, and even then it's arguably not an entirely dominant idea.
Not exactly on target, but what is the story about voting machines? Lots of people write about the assault on voting rights but I have never read anything on voting machines. To me the biggest hurdle to get people to vote is that no one likes to stand in line!
So who determines how many voting machines go to each precinct/district? Are there any laws or regulations that require a certain ratio of voting machines to potential voters? Any laws or regulations on the quality of the machines – they have to work, paper receipts etc.? Who pays for the voting machines – only state and local or does the Fed step in with grants etc? Is there any difference in the ratio of voting machines to potential voters by racial, economic or geographic considerations? How about an article on the subject?
We need the Australian solution. Small fine for not returning your ballot. You're allowed to turn it in blank, but you do have to do _something_. Once people are doing something, a lot of them do make a little more effort to at least look at some of the higher-profile races, and over time participate more meaningfully.
Yes, my understanding is that studies show that mail-in voting only marginally impacts turnout and at least up to 2020 had no partisan effect, which makes the GOP freakout over it so bizarre.
The GOP was counting on fear of COVID to keep Democrats away from the polls in 2020, but widespread adoption of mail in voting foiled that scheme. Mail inviting used to be big with Republicans until Democrats caught on and started using it, now it’s some sort of liberal plot.
Voting machines (as in every voter making selections on a touch screen) are not necessary so long as there is one (or maybe two) for the disabled who can’t mark a ballot on their own. Each precinct does need a scanner or two, but those function like a ballot box (that automatically counts votes). Requiring a machine for each voter causes lines and provides the opportunity to discriminate against racial minorities by giving them fewer precincts with fewer machines (which has happened in Georgia, and other places too most likely).
I think it is already covered here. My understanding is that voting machines are needed in the US because of the large amount of different offices you are voting on. I don't believe I have ever voted on more than three things on the same day, for example, and I have never faced any serious lines, even without having voting machines.
"Needed" is dubious to me--I've voted in five states and never used anything but pen and paper.
Now that I'm a fancy nametag-wearing election official, we do have one touchscreen machine at each polling place, but only as an accessibility measure. It prints out a receipt that we go feed to the scantron, same as any other ballot.
I've never voted in the US, so what is a scantron? Is it a machine?
I have counted votes in the EU, and it took approximately two hours to count all votes manually twice (counted by nonpartisan local election officials and one representative from each party) for verification purposes. Votes were preserved at a local courthouse (or something like that) for a possible recount, but since no recount was needed, full and final results were announced before midnight on Election Day. My understanding is that most US election systems don't have the ability to do that.
The voter signs their name in the registered-voter book (or gets a provisional if they're registering day-of), fills in the bubbles with a ballpoint pen, and feeds the ballot into a very dumb, very offline, very 1970s-looking scanning machine. The machine records the vote, indicates that it's been successfully counted, and drops the paper ballot into a locked lower section of the machine. You get a sticker (the most important step).
When polls close, the machine prints out a receipt indicating vote totals for each candidate, the number of ballots, etc. We open the lockbox (hi Mr. Gore), count the paper ballots, put them in taper-proof bags, index any discrepancies (there shouldn't be any, but we document anything we find), and the whole mess gets bagged in an additional taper-proof bag that is driven to the county clerk. I don't have direct knowledge downstream of that step.
That's very similar to my experience in the EU minus the scanning machine and the sticker. (But you count manually twice to make sure there are no discrepancies.) A variation that exists to avoid having to mark things with a pen and then fight about whether the voter did indeed properly marked the ballot: You get multiple ballots, one for each candidate. You put one in an envelope for secrecy purposes, you discard the rest (all this happens in a voting booth), and then you exit the booth and you throw your envelope inside a locked box.
I think in EU you just select a party to vote for and that’s it, so it’s quick to vote and quick to count. In the US ballots have multiple levels of offices to be elected, including judicial candidates, county officials, and then often a number of state and local referendums—when I was a poll worker I remember some people taking as much as 45 minutes to fill out their ballot.
You don't always just select a party, because you may have single member districts or nonpartisan elections depending on the jurisdiction. But yes, our elections are far simpler. To take the example of France, since their elections are coming up, there was the first round of presidential elections (pick only one presidential candidate), then the second round of presidential elections (same as before), and now two rounds of parliamentary elections (same as before). So, four election days in two months, but each of them very simple. And their system is semi-presidential, so it's much closer to the US than most of the rest of the EU, which is even simpler.
I think that this system is far better, if you are looking for elections that are high turnout and meaningful. We're not trying to figure out who might be the best Secretary of State, or what exactly does the Secretary of State do versus (let's say) county clerks, and who has jurisdiction where. But America overall is in better shape than the EU in my opinion, so I won't try to claim that we're necessarily better on how we run our democracies.
My understanding is that voting machines/locations are mostly determined by local communities with the federal government doling out money every now and then to try and make things better. A significant challenge for many locations is that these are quite expensive. If your the local mayor and city council, then you can choose between spending money on making voting lines shorter or funding a local youth/senior facility, its not an easy choice.
I'm not going to actually read Yarvin's stuff because who has time for an adult that seriously argues for monarchy, but can someone clarify for me, does he actually mean monarchy with some sort of heredity line of succession or just isn't familiar with the terms despotism/autocracy?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Yes, the very obvious subtext of 'supporting the (re)introduction of a monarchy' is the idea that People Like You will be favoured, and it won't be, I dunno, Queen Alexandria the First passing a royal decree to make all lands owned by white Americans into royal lands to be disbursed to African Americans for reparations.
However, as amusing as that is to imagine, I think he's fairly safe in assuming that middling conservative white guys will come through fine as usual.
If having AOC as our monarch was the price, I'd be against this new system. However, as I'm rewatching "The Crown," if our queen was Claire Foy, I'd be all in. (Although Vanessa Kirby, as Princess Margaret, would be even better!)
People who favour communism think they will be the guys ordering more tractors to be delivered and rooting out wreckers. Fascists think they will be the guys wearing hats with skulls printed on them sending undesirables to a camp somewhere.
"An absolute hereditary monarch has no interest in employing a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Since he wants to see his nation thrive, he is more likely to adopt the economic and social system that seems to make nations thrive: libertarian capitalism. So we come full circle, in a kind of layer-cake of libertarianism, then absolute monarchy, then more libertarianism. "
oh wow he's even dumber than i had thought on the basis of his reputation and the quote! I didn't want to strawman his views because I thought surely, *surely* he was not going to be like "instead of electoral democracy with a balance of powers, which no corporation uses to select their leadership, we should have hereditary monarchy, in imitation of the many successful corporations that have been run by regents on behalf of the 4-year-old CEO, who inherited the position from his father"
You mean the Empire of Mexico, run by the Bonapartist descendant of Maximilian the first?
I'm sure they will do whatever is best for Mexico, since the interests of the hereditary monarchy exactly coincide with those of the state, as Yarvin has told us.
I'm betting on the House of Windsor. They already silently control most of the territory to the North, and have suspiciously planted an "estranged" prince in California....
We just have to hope they don't join forces with whatever the name is of the royal House that controls Japan.
I mean, American politics is already reality television for the rest of the globe. This would move it closer to Game of Thrones than House of Cards, so, like- the dragons would be a "pro."
I forgot about them. Did Jerry Brown have “issue?” That’s another clan. And then we’ll have to see if Sasha or Malia evince a taste for the political life.
It's true we have a system now that nobody would design if they set out to design one from scratch. But it's also true that nobody DID design the system we have now. The main feature of our system that drives gridlock and dysfunction is popular election of the President and independent policymaking in the Executive Branch. And that's not part of the original design -- it's a giant semi-truck that's been driven through a little loophole in the Constitution.
The closest we can get to a parliamentary system without a new Constitution, though it would still require a major constitutional reinterpretation albeit arguably closer to the original intent, is to reimagine the entire Executive Branch, from the President on down, as an impartial, apolitical civil service branch, a executing puppet with Congress pulling the policy strings.
Also, nobody designed the current system in the sense that our Constitution was attempting something that had never been done before and was a compromise between stakeholders with different aims. Half the Federalist Papers can basically be summarized as "I'd like to see you try to come up with something better and get all of these jabronis to agree to it"
Many people know the early controversy about how the President should be addressed, with Adam's arguing for, "his highness". It's not widely known that the delegate from New Jersey wanted the more democratic title, "the First Jabroni."
Article II shrunk down to, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed".
It's an attractive vision! And Hamilton supported it in the Federalist Papers, downplaying at every turn the powers that the presidency would have. Unfortunately, his true ambitions revealed themselves once he was in Washington's cabinet. We owe the imperial presidency, instead of the ministerial presidency, largely to him.
I think FDR, the Great Depression and WW2 had a bit more to do with creating the "imperial" (whatever that means) presidency than anything Hamilton did while Secretary of the Treasury.
The largest lack of foresight the writers of the Constitution had is they designed the powers of the president with George Washington in mind instead of the average politician.
And the greatest damage that Washington did to our country was to govern like an honest man and resign like a saint, instead of behaving like the normal crook that most presidents have been.
Had Washington only taken bribes, abused his office, overreached his authorities, and then conjured up a mob to keep him in power, the Congress would have properly stamped him out and seen to it that strict limits were placed, from that day hence, on presidential discretion and prerogatives.
We could have had an executive that lived in fear of the legislature, if only Washington had had the decency to be corrupt. His uprightness is unforgivable.
I wonder what the Constitution would have been like if John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been at the Convention. They would have been the biggest political heavyweights (besides Washington). They also would have brought the idea of "I don't really get along with this guy and he might be president one day, so what powers do I not want him to have?"
Totally agree. The fundamental dysfunction in the system is that the modern administrative state is obviously unconstitutional bullshit. Wickard v Filburn, Chevron, non-delegation, major question, yadda yadda yadda. The court needs to clean that mess up if we're going to escape the doom loop.
I don't agree with your premise. And on that point, I'd quote FDR himself, even though I don't think the solutions that worked in his time are necessarily suited for today's problems:
"Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced."
To the extent that necessary functions of a modern state are unconstitutional that very possibly does create problems requiring constitutional solutions. The threat to the political order comes from the problems of a particular line of SCOTUS cases that handwave away the need for those solutions in favor of the executive/administrative state just making it up as they go.
The amendment process was a significantly less handwavy option in the 30s, but yes, at this point, with so much baked into the cake, unwinding the problems of the administrative state is a gigantic lift, but given that the premise is that we're in a doom loop, our hand is going to be forced sooner or later. I'm certainly not laying odds on any particular outcome.
What specifically are you arguing for? A civil service branch with less independence and more directed by Congress? Is that how the typical parliamentary system functions?
I'm not sure I'm "arguing" for anything since I'm just a random person on the internet, but if I was, I'd be arguing for basically the Westminster system. An civil service branch nominally headed by a figurehead President, with Congressional leaders and committee chairs aka ministers calling the shots on big picture issues.
Gridlock and dysfunction is a feature, not a bug of the American system. Oligarchs deliberately crafted a system to make it very hard for a government to tax their wealth.
Had the Depression not been followed immediately by WW2 wartime conditions it's not clear how much of the ad hoc administrative inventions of the New Deal would have stuck vs being regularized into something more under the control of Congress.
Also, I think it's a mistake to interpret the administrative innovations of the New Deal period as any particular commentary on the proper division of power between Congress and the President, because the reality was that FDR Democrats overwhelming controlled both, so at the time fussing over proper details like whether to go through the motions of having Congress formally approve a given agency action, when approval was a foregone conclusion given FDR's control of Congress, might have seemed like a waste of time. That's quite different than a situation where Congress actually disagrees with an agency action and congressional approval isn't a foregone conclusion -- that's where the you actually have to confront the question of who as authority to approve policy and lawmaking, the President or Congress. When Congress and the President uniformly agree, the test is only hypothetical, but now we're in a world where it isn't hypothetical any more.
What wasn't working in the 30's and early 40s was the banking system, primarily. Reforms to the Federal Reserve and the abandonment of the gold standard were the solutions. FDR also enacted waves of reforms, established new agencies and consolidated power at the Federal level that have endured despite their ineffectiveness.
The expansion of the commerce clause in Wickard v. Filburn ensured future Presidencies and Congresses could attempt to legislate almost every commercial activity in the entire country. The stakes were raised and all the flaws Matt Y. points have been slowly becoming structural impediments to good governance.
America has been better served by its geography than its political institutions. Our nation was born next to a continent-wide expanse of recently depopulated land inhabited by stone-age natives who could, at best, fight battalion strength actions. This land was much easier to occupy and ethnically cleanse than Schleswig Holstein or Alsace Lorraine. Any continental European state would have been invaded and devoured during the civil war. This almost happened to France, which was massively bigger and more powerful than its neighbors but still barely made it through 1792-93 as a sovereign state.
"In fact, so far the Biden years have in some ways been surprisingly non-contentious — no government shutdowns, a debt ceiling drama that was pretty clearly fake all along, and some bipartisan legislation"
I'm confused- Biden has had a D House & Senate so far, that's obviously going to change soon. Also on the obstructionist front, it's pretty concerning that Republicans were primaried just over having voted for his infrastructure bill. I basically expect Debt Ceiling Craziness, House hearings on Hunter Biden (a legitimately shady character), and an impeachment in 2023-2024. Actually, I'd bet on it.
Anyways, my concern is that we have a specific failure point- the very poor institutional design of the Electoral College system, which makes each swing state winner-take-all. In other words, a few thousand votes can legitimately swing who wins the Presidency, which is godawful political engineering regardless of which country it is. You're asking a lot of election administrators to not find a way to just throw out enough votes to swing the state. Poorer, more corrupt countries than the US successfully do huge elections because a popular vote system just makes election fraud that much tougher- hard to fake millions of votes scattered all over the country, easy to fake thousands.
Anyways, part of the critique of presidential systems is that the actual running for the presidency is too high-stakes for an unstable, polarized, low-trust country. Which is, um, us now
"the very poor institutional design of the Electoral College system, which makes each swing state winner-take-all."
I'll nitpick and point out that there's nothing in the Constitution that requires that EC votes be awarded on a winner-take-all basis. That's purely a convention of state law, which is why Maine and Nebraska award their EC votes differently. Other states could change how their own process for awarding EC votes works by ordinary legislation or state constitutional amendment.
Indeed, the electors were originally supposed to apply their independent judgment. Funny that defenders of the electoral college don't mention its original purpose, which it has actually served ~never.
Why can't the President make the FDA, in your example, do what he wants them to do? He is their boss. Yes, it would be preferable for Congress to pass a law telling the FDA what to do, but there is nothing keeping the President from exercising his power over the FDA except public, and really just media, perception (and this has a lot to do with journalists' love and total deference to "experts" and people with Ph.Ds).
I think Matt is making this way to difficult. Readers would be wise to pick up a copy of Charles Mackay's fine book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (a freebie over on Project Gutenberg). This book was written in the middle of the 19th century and just as apt today (Richard Hoffstadter used a number of the themes throughout his work). A lot of what transpires in both the Fox and MSNBC universes strikes me as delusion building and once people start going down rabbit holes, it's hard to get back to the surface.
There was a good article over at The Atlantic on a family of Democratic organizers, originally from Dubuque IA and their reflections on how a reliably Democratic region flipped. It's well worth reading. Until the Democrats get back to grass roots organizing in a big way they will continue to wander in the desert. Quit complaining, get voters registered and turned out on election day and things will be OK. It's all pretty simple but the high level Dem pols are just as much of the grifter class (in a different way) as the Republicans.
This whole piece strikes me as quite naive (by contrast with the 2015 piece). Where to start? Perhaps the elephant in the room? “ Vance and Masters aren’t going to try to install a monarchy in the United States.” what makes you so sure? Doesn’t history teach us to believe people who say they don’t believe in democracy and want to topple it? Also- are you following the finds of the Jan 6 committee? Are you aware that trump tried really really hard to stay in power after loosing the elections, and that the gop has now effectively cleared house of almost all those who stood in his way last time? What makes you so confident that , should he gain power again he will ever agree to leave? And should he once more refuse that the system will once more succeed in forcing him?
Point #2 your faith in structures as the be all and end all is totally misguided. For generations us was considered as super stable and leading democracy while parliamentary systems all over the world failed. In fact de Gaulle in France demanded the shift to a semi presidential system precisely because parliamentary system was too weak to face the crises of that era. In todays world we see how parliamentary democracies are once more falling and becoming authoritarian regimes in some countries (hungary, Poland?) just as others prove more resilient (uk). It’s just a whole lot more complicated than the simple electoral system. The system makes *some* difference but is not some panacea. The problems of polarization in this country wouldn’t have ended under a parliamentary system and in fact a myriad of new ones you’re not even considering might have emerged.
Lastly, it’s cute you think that the GOP voting for Biden’s cabinet nominations etc means they’re more reasonable now and would be in future. Have you not noticed that they are in the minority in senate now and have no way to block those nominees anyway, so it’s in their interest to support some of them to keep their influence? That in no way proves that once McConnell is majority leader again he won’t decide on blocking 100% of all senate confirmations (in fact that’s precisely the scenario the Biden team was bracing for before miraculous wins in Georgia!)
"What makes you so confident that , should he gain power again he will ever agree to leave?"
Because presuming Trump wins in 2024 (which I find unlikely), he'll be 82 in 2028 and almost certainly in even more noticeably terrible mental and physical condition. People don't stage coups d'état to keep broken down octogenarians in power. In fact, that's the point where dictators and other strongmen typically get removed.
Perhaps. But he can still not be too old to hold on, or be replaced by someone else. The point is, it is baffling to me to simply assume that they will just allow free and fair elections and then a peaceful transfer of power to a democratic WH. Have we learned nothing from Jan 6th and the trump presidency?
I know a lot of people like to make those claims, but (1) I can't see how Trump doesn't run again just from an ego standpoint, let alone the graft opportunities and protection from criminal prosecution, and (2) once he's running I can't see how that doesn't immediately clear the field of any semi-serious competitors. (DeSantis, Abbott, etc., are all young enough they can easily wait for 2028 and run against Harris.) Further, even if the field doesn't clear, GOP primaries are overwhelmingly loaded toward winner-take-all races, so Trump just needs to eke our pluralities, which should be easy just by name recognition.
a) I don't think Trump liked being President all that much. He couldn't get anything done, people wouldn't just listen to him, the Dems and press were constantly digging up dirt.
b) I don't think his ego can withstand another loss and I'm not sure 'they stole the election' will be sufficient a second time. Much easier to make excuses on how everyone is going to cheat, so he isn't going to give them the satisfaction.
c) He can collect a lot more money for himself on the victim circuit than in the Oval Office.
2) I'm not certain he can win.
a) Losing as an incumbent is historically a career ender.
b) Trump is bad for the GOP and there will be huge motivation for people loyal to the GOP to oppose Trump.
c) People didn't take Trump seriously in 2016, focusing on everyone else assuming knocking Trump out last was the smart play. They won't make that mistake again.
d) Trump's reputation as a king maker has been shown to be a mirage, so his competition isn't going to be afraid to go against him anymore.
3) As for who? shrug - doesn't matter. Early favorites are universally wrong - trying to guess who is going to run and who is going to be the favorite is impossible to guess, so I'm not even going to try.
I’m imagining and the merger between State Street and Credit Swiss being cemented by the marriage by proxy of the 5 year old daughter of the State Street CEO to the 9 year old son of the Credit Swiss CEO.
The reason it's considered bad form for the President to run rough shod over the FDA has nothing to do with Madison. The FDA, or the Fed, for that matter, derives its power from its presumed expertise and the elite consensus that its functions should be handled via technical expertise. In both cases political interference is considered gauche.
A similar dynamic exists, I believe, with many aspects of the NHS in Britain.
The FDA has certainly weakened their claims to technical expertise, but the idea of an overtly political drug approval process hasn't become significantly more attractive.
But the other problem is that neither Congress nor the president seems to have expressed any interest in improving how the fda or cdc works to try to make them deal better with the next pandemic (or with the current ones).
It may be too obvious to warrant mention, but a corporation can afford to have a monarch/CEO because a CEO is constrained externally by financial and product markets. In the case of public companies, the performance of the CEO is evaluated in a public fashion on a daily basis in the form of the stock price. External factors can also constrain monarchs of course but these constraints tend to be much weaker (see e.g. North Korea).
CEOs also don't have a monopoly on violence within their company
Exactly. To hold a monarch in check you need countervailing powers- barons, power mad bishops, highland chieftains, uppity peasants, and even a nascent middle class
...power mad bishops, highland chieftains..."
Yes! Also, a manic pixy queen, and a vizier with a talking parrot!
Yes, and also his disgruntled brother's hyena henchmen.
It's, "Hereditary!", the new animated musical from Dixnar! A heartwarming and hilarious tale of in-fighting and in-trigue in a distant land of mystery. Watch as an initially benevolent monarch curdles into a paranoid fiend who kills his own children! Laugh as the nation's infrastructure rots when the king spends all the taxes on his harem! Yes, it's "Hereditary!", coming to a theater near you! Your family will love it -- or be raped and slaughtered by the Cossacks!
Not to mention that there are typically 5-500 competitors in the same space. Markets achieve good results, but not because the enlightened despot model works brilliantly at the firm level.
You only have one government, mostly.
If a consumer doesn't like a company's products, they can go buy something else. If an employee doesn't like their company's culture, they can go work somewhere else. If a shareholder doesn't like the way the company they invested in is run, they can go move their money somewhere else.
In order for this analogy to hold, people who don't like the way their government is run would need to be able to quickly and easily choose to live under a different government. In reality, it doesn't work like that. Countries have borders and immigration restrictions, so citizens of a corrupt country who want to move to a more stable country typically can't - that's essentially what the whole mess at our southern border is about.
Even within a country, moving to another state more in line with your politics is not easy. Sure liberals in Texas and conservatives in California may whine about how much better state XXX is run than their own. But, at the end of the day, dislike of the politicians is just not worth abandoning one's home, job, and community over. So, people tend to stay put and just put up with it.
This is where the corporation analogy for governments falls apart.
+100 It's amazing how many people who say "it would be so much better if the government were run like a corporation" don't seem to understand these basic facts.
Great point! Though with a name like yours, I'm not surprised...
This is remarkably soft on the complete insanity of that Yarvin quote. Why would we believe monarchy is more common in human history than government by consensus of tribal elders? How are CEOs analogous to monarchs at all? Among the noxious features of monarchy that led the framers of the constitution to forswear it include eligibility by bloodline (often limited to firstborn sons with favored religious views, but somehow open to infants and lunatics) and the inability to fire the incumbent for incompetence. If Yarvin is proposing monarchy but minus that, in what sense in he proposing a monarchy, and in what sense can he claim his preferred style of government is common among governments in history? I kind of suspect that what he really wants is not so much a change in institutions as a change in uniforms, namely for the head of government to wear a fancy hat and be followed around by bishops waving censers or whatever.
Yarvin's reputation among the alt-right should tell you a lot about the intellectual caliber of the alt-right.
To repurpose DFW's critique of Updike: Yarvin is just a bar-stool with a thesaurus.
“intellectual caliber of the alt-right.”
So… 0.17 BB?
BB, BAC, whatever.
Having foolishly gone to the Yarvin link in a previous post, I've learned my lesson. Matt might want to consider making future posts less Yarvin-rich. The guy really is, oh what's the term, an utter doofus.
I actually went down a small rabbit hole trying to figure out if I was missing something. I’m genuinely shocked that anyone (even the alt-right) finds Yarvin convincing. Just complete half-baked nonsense.
For what it's worth, elective monarchies definitely _have_ been a thing, in many places. The idea of having a supreme leader elected by a council of the various regional leaders/warlords was used in (listing just places I can name offhand) Norway (from which it also migrated to Iceland), pre-unification-of-England Mercia, Ireland, Greece (prior to the advent of broader democracy in Athens), and many of the city-states of Renaissance Italy (see for instance the Doge of Venice). Some of those (like Venice) were likely influenced by historical precedent, but a lot of these cases do appear to have come up with similar solutions independent of each other. So I think there is _something_ to the idea that there's a convergent-evolution thing happening here, where this is a form of governance that is pretty well-adapted... to a pre-modern society that doesn't have our kind of high-speed transportation, communication, and astonishing levels of productivity that remove a lot of the pressure pre-modern societies faced (like needing lots of land per person, and lots of farm labor, which then had to be protected by an elite military class, and instructed on the timing of farm activities by an educated class that figured out stuff like astronomy).
Yarvin is still a troglodyte, though.
Also, the Pope, who rules over the Vatican, and, previously, much larger papal territories.
"Why would we believe monarchy is more common in human history than government by consensus of tribal elders?"
I mean, you wouldn't. But if you actually look at cohesive states, monarchy does seem more common than rule by tribal elders.
And bunch of random tribes people really don't count.
Though it admittedly gets somewhat confusing in antiquity, where things like the early Roman Senate were kind of tribal elder-y if you squinted.
Yes, it seems pretty clear that while something around 98% of human history exclusively featured some form of the "tribal elders" form of government, various forms of monarchy/absolute rulers overwhelmingly predominate once you start talking about moving past the city-state level of civilizational development. (Especially when you consider that even a lot of purportedly collaboratively chosen leaders like the Holy Roman Emperors, Rashidun Caliphs, etc. often secured their positions through undemocratic means and mostly functioned as absolute rulers after securing office.)
Petty despots always imagine that they'd be the ones in charge.
Sorry, can't be bothered to read this Yarvin character, but is he arguing for a UK/Sweden/Netherlands style constitutional monarchy where the monarch is a symbolic head of state with little to no real power, or, like, Henry VIII?
I don't believe so. I read it like 8-10 years ago, but IIRC, his idea of a monarchy is basically having city-states with a kind of hereditary CEO.
Something about ensuring that they are a stakeholder and have a long time-horizon for their 'investment'.
I also seem to recall that he liked to pepper his articles with quotes by Thomas Carlyle.
My main recollection of the half of one of his pieces that I read was that it was at least as long as 3 whole long-form commentaries should be, and didn't even relay half as much actual meaning as one.
The ratio of noise to signal was just extraordinarily high, in addition to the signal being profoundly misinformed, even outright stupid, claptrap.
Moldbug's true calling was as a purveyor of ocularly administered sleep aids.
I don't disagree.
I soldiered thru, but it was a lot of words for relatively little content.
In his partial defense, I think that it was some weird personal blog on the fringe of the internet that blew up into something way beyond what it was probably intended to be.
I imagine that he's probably about as embarrassed as I would be if some of my college history papers were published online and widely read and commented upon.
I don't know about that defense -- that might work if someone unearthed writings in a random dead man's diaries, but Yarvin was 34 when he started it, and he still writes today under his real name and in the same style, still espousing the same types of ideas. And the blog was a Thing even as it was still happening among a certain small crowd. Plus Bannon apparently consulted with him, it's not like he shied away from his ideas as they blew up.
I myself am completely baffled by its appeal, like the rest of you. It's not even the supposed ideas that I dislike so much as the insane length without any clear substance.
The appeal is punk rock for racist nerds: we're the rebels who will tell you the secret truth at an extreme length that only true smarties can understand, and it turns out that Detroit was ruined by Black people and Arabs. I sort of see why he has a following, but once you figure out the schtick, there's not enough substance left to push back against, and racism is super-dumb. He for example argues that Obama's first book was written by Bill Ayers.
Haha, that's why I got all my university-level history courses out of the way in AP form as a high school sophomore and junior. Much more defensible to say "I was young and stupid" if anything embarrassing turns up.
"Personal" blogs are a bad idea and always will be. Either write with the expectation that it'll exist when you die or write in a hardcopy journal that you burn after 20 years.
It's not like he's gotten much better since, though.
My personal blog would be mortifying, and I just realised it can't be changed or deleted as I've forgotten the password, but looking quickly it seems to have been removed by Google at some point thank God.
Yarvin's point about corporate governance shows a laughable lack of understanding about how organizations actually work, unfortunately common not just among far-right edge lords, but other center-right ideologues, too.
Does Yarvin seriously think that C-Suite roles are filled via inheritance and legitimated via the Divine Right of Kings? Perhaps he's thinking of the second- or third-generations of a family firm? This does seem to be the point-of-reference for Conservatives when they imagine a given business corporation. CEOs of public corporations are far more accountable to the Board and stakeholders (especially activist investors) than any monarch. Which is why they tend not to last very long, which brings me to the next point...
Does Yarvin realize that CEOs, far from representing the stability and continuity of a monarch, have, on average, a lower tenure than a two-term president? We're talking <7 years now, on average, with that foreshortening fast-accelerating. The rest of the C-suite's "reign" is even shorter, with CMOs, especially, washing out faster than even House Members of Congress, with an average term of <4 years. Like many laymen, Yarvin's perception is likely skewed by the survivorship bias of the few especially successful CEOs with 15+ years tenure--much more like a dynastic monarch in a less tumultuous kingdom.
I suspect Yarvin is thinking of the "family firm" given his very-pro Trump inclinations and his general "everything was better in the good ole days" mindset.
I'm probably giving Yarvin too much time given that he's basically a lunatic, but I wanted to point something out regarding the generational "family firm" model that Yarvin clearly has in mind. Namely, it's not as successful as he likes to think once you scratch beneath the surface.
I would recommend a fairly recent Slate money podcast on this issue. Has been a little time since I listened to the episode in question, but will try to summarize as best I can what was discussed about the "family firm" issue. The thing to apparently keep in mind with successful "family firms" over generations are that they are overwhelming business models or businesses that didn't really need to change much over time or decided not to change. The successful "family firm" models over time are things like small B&B like hotels, wineries or even just other businesses that didn't change their operations all that significantly. Over and over again, the "family firms" that fail are ones where the son or grandson tries to expand the business significantly or reorient their business model. And over and over again these efforts result in disaster. History remembers JP Morgan or various Rothschild children (and grandchildren) because they are actually the exceptions that prove the rule. Ironically, a good example of what usually happen is DJT himself. Fred had a business model based on "working class" multifamily properties in the outer boroughs. DJT doesn't think this is sexy enough, builds "luxury" buildings in Manhattan and investing in casinos...and watches as it all crashes down in bankruptcy that he only is able to get out of by stiffing investors and having dad bail him out with what turned out to be scams and tax dodges.
My point is to show that the generational "family firm" model only works if you don't need much major changes to your operations. And one of the big big points of Matt' work for 20+ years is that our institutions need to be reformed (like getting rid of the filibuster) so they can actually pass legislation and address various policy issues of the day. As bureaucratic and "status quo" government can be, the last thing we need is a system that entrenches those features. Government actually needs to be able to adjust how it operates to be successful and the "family firm" model may be the worst way of doing that.
One of the topics discussed in a recent podcast on nepotism:
https://freakonomics.com/podcast/whats-so-bad-about-nepotism/
Family firms do worse than public firms.
Really excellent points. There’s a lot of nostalgia-laden “common sense” that gets circulated among this crew without anyone really scrutinizing it.
Either because it’s “too ridiculous” or because those who would disagree with a Yarvin might not even dispute the assumptions of his arguments, just his conclusions.
> One of Yarvin’s pet ideas is the notion that democracy is essentially a sham, and real power is held by a network of civil servants, college professors, and NGO workers.
I worry that Yarvin and other right wing “intellectuals” are pulling on a thread with a strand of truth: yes, a small number of liberal/progressive elites hold a disproportionately large amount of sway within our Democratic party. I don’t really get Yarvin’s focus on bureaucrats when right wing populist seem to be having more success focusing on the mainstream media and tech industry.
My particular concern for the Democrats is that our elites’ disproportionate amount of power is particularly visible. In contrast, Republic elites (e.g., Koch, Cato, Manhattan Institute) are only known to political junkies. Further, our progressive elites—particularly in journalism and academia—are engaged in an intra-elite competition to see who can be the most pious progressive by developing and championing ever-more-extreme views. I worry that our highly visible elites will grow increasingly distant from the median Democratic voter (let alone the median voter in general) and this will be exploited by right wingers to pull away voters and possibly risk fracturing our broad coalition.
It’s not just the American Right being left behind by the Democrats, and there won’t be a course correction until left-critical media sources get read by committed Democrat voters. I don’t see this happening, which is why I predict a major political realignment very soon. When you can’t change the direction of a party, and the party is uniquely obtuse to average voters’ concerns, it’s time to switch.
Or look at the SF DA recall election.
“The idea that American institutions are in need of radical destruction rather than reform licenses extreme behavior and could easily put us on the path to collapse.”
I don’t want to draw an equivalence here. However, I hear these types of sentiments about our institutions a lot in the circles I run in, and the people expressing them are anything but right-wingers…
If the Bazelonian scenario of Dems getting a slight majority of the popular vote for president and the generic Congress ballot, but Republicans getting dominant control of everything comes to fruition, I definitely expect these sentiments to become overwhelmingly placed on the left wing.
I think we need to look at the House results in 2022 before we decide whether that’s happening, lol.
I agree, I think a lot of these scenarios get too defeatist.
I actually mean it to be even more defeatist, lol. In that I don't think the Democrats can fight their way to a majority of the popular vote such that they should feel disenfranchised by the Senate's tilt against them, not unless they toss most of the current "thought leaders" overboard loudly and publicly.
If they lose most elections between now and 2040, it'll be because the overly-educated professional classes have turned the party into a social club entirely divorced from the needs and wants of the mushy middle, while the Republicans have washed their hands of Trumpism's stupidity and embraced its populism. The Democrats, in this world, aren't winning *anything*, so they have nothing to bitch about.
We'll see how it goes.
Sometimes, "the game is rigged against me" really means, "I don't want to change my strategy to win under the long-established rules of the game so please change the rules".
I would happily torch the current system if it were in my power because it’s bloody antiquated and has a terrible global track record.
But that has damn all to do with the fact that the Democrats refuse to figure out how to run under it, it’s just the historical evidence is piling up that presidential systems are shit and ours will likely land us in a civil war eventually.
We got lucky to have the institutions and social solidarity to avoid catastrophe thus far.
Right now, all of the media attention is on problems with the Democrats. But, once Republicans are in power, everything is going to flip, like it always does. And, when it does, and everybody has long forgotten about "defund the police" and other progressive blunders, while Republican blunders (e.g. enacting a nationwide abortion ban with no exception for rape or incest) are fresh in voters' minds, Democrats will be given a chance.
That’s how it has traditionally worked, but any subscriber here I think is politically aware enough to understand how the internal mechanisms by which the party fights back to the center and earns that chance with voters are… degrading.
Democratic elite politics is becoming the politics of post-scarcity… of ego, virtue-signaling, and comfortable narratives.
Ha, fair. And yes, I do think on the other side of the coin that there are plenty of lefties that take a narrow look of the Democrats winning seven out of the last eight popular votes for president, and thinking that should translate to a national majority mandate everywhere.
Right. More London Breeds; fewer Chesa Boudins.
Yes, but the type of leftist who talks about revolution don't run for office, and definitely don't win. They can hardly bring themselves to vote!
The most AOC has done is call for electoral college abolition and ending the filibuster, which is very in line with MattY/Ezra Klein reformist ideas.
Agreed -- to be clear, that's why I don't think there's an equivalence here. The way I see it, this sentiment is much more prevalent among the knowledge creation class than among actual Democratic politicians, and even then it's arguably not an entirely dominant idea.
Not exactly on target, but what is the story about voting machines? Lots of people write about the assault on voting rights but I have never read anything on voting machines. To me the biggest hurdle to get people to vote is that no one likes to stand in line!
So who determines how many voting machines go to each precinct/district? Are there any laws or regulations that require a certain ratio of voting machines to potential voters? Any laws or regulations on the quality of the machines – they have to work, paper receipts etc.? Who pays for the voting machines – only state and local or does the Fed step in with grants etc? Is there any difference in the ratio of voting machines to potential voters by racial, economic or geographic considerations? How about an article on the subject?
Put this in a mail bag thread!
>>To me the biggest hurdle to get people to vote is that no one likes to stand in line!<<
This is why California went to all mail ballots and we got 80% voter participation in the recent election!
(Whoops. My editor just gently told me that it was 80% *non* voter participation. I guess boring contests >> making it easier to vote.)
We need the Australian solution. Small fine for not returning your ballot. You're allowed to turn it in blank, but you do have to do _something_. Once people are doing something, a lot of them do make a little more effort to at least look at some of the higher-profile races, and over time participate more meaningfully.
Yes, my understanding is that studies show that mail-in voting only marginally impacts turnout and at least up to 2020 had no partisan effect, which makes the GOP freakout over it so bizarre.
The GOP was counting on fear of COVID to keep Democrats away from the polls in 2020, but widespread adoption of mail in voting foiled that scheme. Mail inviting used to be big with Republicans until Democrats caught on and started using it, now it’s some sort of liberal plot.
Voting machines (as in every voter making selections on a touch screen) are not necessary so long as there is one (or maybe two) for the disabled who can’t mark a ballot on their own. Each precinct does need a scanner or two, but those function like a ballot box (that automatically counts votes). Requiring a machine for each voter causes lines and provides the opportunity to discriminate against racial minorities by giving them fewer precincts with fewer machines (which has happened in Georgia, and other places too most likely).
I think it is already covered here. My understanding is that voting machines are needed in the US because of the large amount of different offices you are voting on. I don't believe I have ever voted on more than three things on the same day, for example, and I have never faced any serious lines, even without having voting machines.
"Needed" is dubious to me--I've voted in five states and never used anything but pen and paper.
Now that I'm a fancy nametag-wearing election official, we do have one touchscreen machine at each polling place, but only as an accessibility measure. It prints out a receipt that we go feed to the scantron, same as any other ballot.
"Now that I'm a fancy nametag-wearing election official..."
Thank you for your service.
(Said without irony! Or as close as I can come.)
It is my civic honor.
I've never voted in the US, so what is a scantron? Is it a machine?
I have counted votes in the EU, and it took approximately two hours to count all votes manually twice (counted by nonpartisan local election officials and one representative from each party) for verification purposes. Votes were preserved at a local courthouse (or something like that) for a possible recount, but since no recount was needed, full and final results were announced before midnight on Election Day. My understanding is that most US election systems don't have the ability to do that.
Each voter gets a paper ballot. They look roughly like this: https://brooklynwi.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/Dane-County-Sample-Ballot-scaled.jpg
The voter signs their name in the registered-voter book (or gets a provisional if they're registering day-of), fills in the bubbles with a ballpoint pen, and feeds the ballot into a very dumb, very offline, very 1970s-looking scanning machine. The machine records the vote, indicates that it's been successfully counted, and drops the paper ballot into a locked lower section of the machine. You get a sticker (the most important step).
When polls close, the machine prints out a receipt indicating vote totals for each candidate, the number of ballots, etc. We open the lockbox (hi Mr. Gore), count the paper ballots, put them in taper-proof bags, index any discrepancies (there shouldn't be any, but we document anything we find), and the whole mess gets bagged in an additional taper-proof bag that is driven to the county clerk. I don't have direct knowledge downstream of that step.
Thank you for the explainer! :)
That's very similar to my experience in the EU minus the scanning machine and the sticker. (But you count manually twice to make sure there are no discrepancies.) A variation that exists to avoid having to mark things with a pen and then fight about whether the voter did indeed properly marked the ballot: You get multiple ballots, one for each candidate. You put one in an envelope for secrecy purposes, you discard the rest (all this happens in a voting booth), and then you exit the booth and you throw your envelope inside a locked box.
I think in EU you just select a party to vote for and that’s it, so it’s quick to vote and quick to count. In the US ballots have multiple levels of offices to be elected, including judicial candidates, county officials, and then often a number of state and local referendums—when I was a poll worker I remember some people taking as much as 45 minutes to fill out their ballot.
You don't always just select a party, because you may have single member districts or nonpartisan elections depending on the jurisdiction. But yes, our elections are far simpler. To take the example of France, since their elections are coming up, there was the first round of presidential elections (pick only one presidential candidate), then the second round of presidential elections (same as before), and now two rounds of parliamentary elections (same as before). So, four election days in two months, but each of them very simple. And their system is semi-presidential, so it's much closer to the US than most of the rest of the EU, which is even simpler.
I think that this system is far better, if you are looking for elections that are high turnout and meaningful. We're not trying to figure out who might be the best Secretary of State, or what exactly does the Secretary of State do versus (let's say) county clerks, and who has jurisdiction where. But America overall is in better shape than the EU in my opinion, so I won't try to claim that we're necessarily better on how we run our democracies.
My understanding is that voting machines/locations are mostly determined by local communities with the federal government doling out money every now and then to try and make things better. A significant challenge for many locations is that these are quite expensive. If your the local mayor and city council, then you can choose between spending money on making voting lines shorter or funding a local youth/senior facility, its not an easy choice.
I'm not going to actually read Yarvin's stuff because who has time for an adult that seriously argues for monarchy, but can someone clarify for me, does he actually mean monarchy with some sort of heredity line of succession or just isn't familiar with the terms despotism/autocracy?
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony.
Help, help! I’m being repressed!
Marie, it's such a pleasure to be reminded that it's not just us nerdy guys that enjoy this kind of thing.
:-)
My (female) best friends and I were horribly obnoxious middle schoolers running around speaking only in Holy Grail and Austin Powers quotes.
For the non-cognoscenti, here's the ur-text:
https://www.theonion.com/maybe-i-can-impress-her-with-my-holy-grail-quotes-1819583773
Always happy to see a Monty Python reference!
I wonder if the neo-reactionaries would be happy with a compromise where we agree to install a king but it has to be Obama.
Yes, the very obvious subtext of 'supporting the (re)introduction of a monarchy' is the idea that People Like You will be favoured, and it won't be, I dunno, Queen Alexandria the First passing a royal decree to make all lands owned by white Americans into royal lands to be disbursed to African Americans for reparations.
However, as amusing as that is to imagine, I think he's fairly safe in assuming that middling conservative white guys will come through fine as usual.
Requesting some speculative political fiction from Matt about Queen Alexandria & her Squad is definitely going in to the next Mailbag call.
+100 would read!
If having AOC as our monarch was the price, I'd be against this new system. However, as I'm rewatching "The Crown," if our queen was Claire Foy, I'd be all in. (Although Vanessa Kirby, as Princess Margaret, would be even better!)
People who favour communism think they will be the guys ordering more tractors to be delivered and rooting out wreckers. Fascists think they will be the guys wearing hats with skulls printed on them sending undesirables to a camp somewhere.
The Obamas seem like a pretty natural choice to me -- they definitely have a regal vibe.
Yes, hereditary monarchy. You can see more at John Ganz's shake shack, including his excellent analysis and my reaction of incredulity:
https://johnganz.substack.com/p/murray-rothbards-america?s=r
"An absolute hereditary monarch has no interest in employing a dysfunctional bureaucracy. Since he wants to see his nation thrive, he is more likely to adopt the economic and social system that seems to make nations thrive: libertarian capitalism. So we come full circle, in a kind of layer-cake of libertarianism, then absolute monarchy, then more libertarianism. "
🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😭🤣🤣💀
I know, right? If that guy were paid to write comedy, my job might be in danger.
oh wow he's even dumber than i had thought on the basis of his reputation and the quote! I didn't want to strawman his views because I thought surely, *surely* he was not going to be like "instead of electoral democracy with a balance of powers, which no corporation uses to select their leadership, we should have hereditary monarchy, in imitation of the many successful corporations that have been run by regents on behalf of the 4-year-old CEO, who inherited the position from his father"
Wow, what an idiot.
I’m assuming these neomonarchists believe the succession battles that undergird about 76% of Shakespeare simply will not occur.
You mean the Empire of Mexico, run by the Bonapartist descendant of Maximilian the first?
I'm sure they will do whatever is best for Mexico, since the interests of the hereditary monarchy exactly coincide with those of the state, as Yarvin has told us.
I'm betting on the House of Windsor. They already silently control most of the territory to the North, and have suspiciously planted an "estranged" prince in California....
We just have to hope they don't join forces with whatever the name is of the royal House that controls Japan.
Didn't the Larouchies have some obsession like this with QEII? She was supposed to be part of the global conspiracy to etc.?
I mean, American politics is already reality television for the rest of the globe. This would move it closer to Game of Thrones than House of Cards, so, like- the dragons would be a "pro."
The House of Trump vs the House of Biden or Kennedy or Bush?
And there are so many of them. The Mormon houses have a real advantage in this regard.
I forgot about them. Did Jerry Brown have “issue?” That’s another clan. And then we’ll have to see if Sasha or Malia evince a taste for the political life.
There is something amazing iabout North Korea being a hereditary communist dictatorship. They managed to get the worst of both systems.
It is funny, though, when monarchists turn against the monarch for being too open to liberalization, as had happened several times in history.
"you have no basis for complaining when you wind up with Kim Jong Un."
Not even about the haircut? That's rough.
Too bad you can't post gifs in these threads, as this would have been a perfect place for "rollsafe".
It's true we have a system now that nobody would design if they set out to design one from scratch. But it's also true that nobody DID design the system we have now. The main feature of our system that drives gridlock and dysfunction is popular election of the President and independent policymaking in the Executive Branch. And that's not part of the original design -- it's a giant semi-truck that's been driven through a little loophole in the Constitution.
The closest we can get to a parliamentary system without a new Constitution, though it would still require a major constitutional reinterpretation albeit arguably closer to the original intent, is to reimagine the entire Executive Branch, from the President on down, as an impartial, apolitical civil service branch, a executing puppet with Congress pulling the policy strings.
Also, nobody designed the current system in the sense that our Constitution was attempting something that had never been done before and was a compromise between stakeholders with different aims. Half the Federalist Papers can basically be summarized as "I'd like to see you try to come up with something better and get all of these jabronis to agree to it"
I always felt it was the lack of usage of "jabroni" that undercut Patrick Henry's anti-federalist arguments.
Many people know the early controversy about how the President should be addressed, with Adam's arguing for, "his highness". It's not widely known that the delegate from New Jersey wanted the more democratic title, "the First Jabroni."
Article II shrunk down to, "he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed".
It's an attractive vision! And Hamilton supported it in the Federalist Papers, downplaying at every turn the powers that the presidency would have. Unfortunately, his true ambitions revealed themselves once he was in Washington's cabinet. We owe the imperial presidency, instead of the ministerial presidency, largely to him.
And there ain't nothing we can do about it.
I think FDR, the Great Depression and WW2 had a bit more to do with creating the "imperial" (whatever that means) presidency than anything Hamilton did while Secretary of the Treasury.
The largest lack of foresight the writers of the Constitution had is they designed the powers of the president with George Washington in mind instead of the average politician.
And the greatest damage that Washington did to our country was to govern like an honest man and resign like a saint, instead of behaving like the normal crook that most presidents have been.
Had Washington only taken bribes, abused his office, overreached his authorities, and then conjured up a mob to keep him in power, the Congress would have properly stamped him out and seen to it that strict limits were placed, from that day hence, on presidential discretion and prerogatives.
We could have had an executive that lived in fear of the legislature, if only Washington had had the decency to be corrupt. His uprightness is unforgivable.
And most of the Founders themselves turned into average politicians as soon as they tasked themselves with seeking the newfound power they created.
I wonder what the Constitution would have been like if John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had been at the Convention. They would have been the biggest political heavyweights (besides Washington). They also would have brought the idea of "I don't really get along with this guy and he might be president one day, so what powers do I not want him to have?"
Totally agree. The fundamental dysfunction in the system is that the modern administrative state is obviously unconstitutional bullshit. Wickard v Filburn, Chevron, non-delegation, major question, yadda yadda yadda. The court needs to clean that mess up if we're going to escape the doom loop.
I would say "the constitution doesn't contemplate the functions of a modern state" is a problem with our constitution, not with modernity.
I don't agree with your premise. And on that point, I'd quote FDR himself, even though I don't think the solutions that worked in his time are necessarily suited for today's problems:
"Our Constitution is so simple and practical that it is possible always to meet extraordinary needs by changes in emphasis and arrangement without loss of essential form. That is why our constitutional system has proved itself the most superbly enduring political mechanism the modern world has produced."
To be clear, I also believe the constitution should be construed as compatible with an administrative state.
To the extent that necessary functions of a modern state are unconstitutional that very possibly does create problems requiring constitutional solutions. The threat to the political order comes from the problems of a particular line of SCOTUS cases that handwave away the need for those solutions in favor of the executive/administrative state just making it up as they go.
Given the practical impossibility of changing the constitution (another flaw in it), that solution is itself rather hand-wavy.
The amendment process was a significantly less handwavy option in the 30s, but yes, at this point, with so much baked into the cake, unwinding the problems of the administrative state is a gigantic lift, but given that the premise is that we're in a doom loop, our hand is going to be forced sooner or later. I'm certainly not laying odds on any particular outcome.
What specifically are you arguing for? A civil service branch with less independence and more directed by Congress? Is that how the typical parliamentary system functions?
That's what I thought, that's why I don't really understand what he's arguing for
I'm not sure I'm "arguing" for anything since I'm just a random person on the internet, but if I was, I'd be arguing for basically the Westminster system. An civil service branch nominally headed by a figurehead President, with Congressional leaders and committee chairs aka ministers calling the shots on big picture issues.
Gridlock and dysfunction is a feature, not a bug of the American system. Oligarchs deliberately crafted a system to make it very hard for a government to tax their wealth.
My understanding is that the current system arose when the old one manifestly wasn’t working in the thirties and forties.
Had the Depression not been followed immediately by WW2 wartime conditions it's not clear how much of the ad hoc administrative inventions of the New Deal would have stuck vs being regularized into something more under the control of Congress.
Also, I think it's a mistake to interpret the administrative innovations of the New Deal period as any particular commentary on the proper division of power between Congress and the President, because the reality was that FDR Democrats overwhelming controlled both, so at the time fussing over proper details like whether to go through the motions of having Congress formally approve a given agency action, when approval was a foregone conclusion given FDR's control of Congress, might have seemed like a waste of time. That's quite different than a situation where Congress actually disagrees with an agency action and congressional approval isn't a foregone conclusion -- that's where the you actually have to confront the question of who as authority to approve policy and lawmaking, the President or Congress. When Congress and the President uniformly agree, the test is only hypothetical, but now we're in a world where it isn't hypothetical any more.
What wasn't working in the 30's and early 40s was the banking system, primarily. Reforms to the Federal Reserve and the abandonment of the gold standard were the solutions. FDR also enacted waves of reforms, established new agencies and consolidated power at the Federal level that have endured despite their ineffectiveness.
The expansion of the commerce clause in Wickard v. Filburn ensured future Presidencies and Congresses could attempt to legislate almost every commercial activity in the entire country. The stakes were raised and all the flaws Matt Y. points have been slowly becoming structural impediments to good governance.
To much power is concentrated in one person with very little real accountability outside one election.
America has been better served by its geography than its political institutions. Our nation was born next to a continent-wide expanse of recently depopulated land inhabited by stone-age natives who could, at best, fight battalion strength actions. This land was much easier to occupy and ethnically cleanse than Schleswig Holstein or Alsace Lorraine. Any continental European state would have been invaded and devoured during the civil war. This almost happened to France, which was massively bigger and more powerful than its neighbors but still barely made it through 1792-93 as a sovereign state.
I think France would have survived as a sovereign state. Just one with a reimposed Bourbon monarch.
Would the US be sovereign if Canada could impose a Hanoverian upon us?
"In fact, so far the Biden years have in some ways been surprisingly non-contentious — no government shutdowns, a debt ceiling drama that was pretty clearly fake all along, and some bipartisan legislation"
I'm confused- Biden has had a D House & Senate so far, that's obviously going to change soon. Also on the obstructionist front, it's pretty concerning that Republicans were primaried just over having voted for his infrastructure bill. I basically expect Debt Ceiling Craziness, House hearings on Hunter Biden (a legitimately shady character), and an impeachment in 2023-2024. Actually, I'd bet on it.
Anyways, my concern is that we have a specific failure point- the very poor institutional design of the Electoral College system, which makes each swing state winner-take-all. In other words, a few thousand votes can legitimately swing who wins the Presidency, which is godawful political engineering regardless of which country it is. You're asking a lot of election administrators to not find a way to just throw out enough votes to swing the state. Poorer, more corrupt countries than the US successfully do huge elections because a popular vote system just makes election fraud that much tougher- hard to fake millions of votes scattered all over the country, easy to fake thousands.
Anyways, part of the critique of presidential systems is that the actual running for the presidency is too high-stakes for an unstable, polarized, low-trust country. Which is, um, us now
"the very poor institutional design of the Electoral College system, which makes each swing state winner-take-all."
I'll nitpick and point out that there's nothing in the Constitution that requires that EC votes be awarded on a winner-take-all basis. That's purely a convention of state law, which is why Maine and Nebraska award their EC votes differently. Other states could change how their own process for awarding EC votes works by ordinary legislation or state constitutional amendment.
Indeed, the electors were originally supposed to apply their independent judgment. Funny that defenders of the electoral college don't mention its original purpose, which it has actually served ~never.
Right, the most notable of which could be the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
I will make a strong prediction that NPV will never happen - the marginal state will never sign up to give up their power to decide an election.
Plus, I'm guessing this Supreme Court will find a way to strike it down.
Why can't the President make the FDA, in your example, do what he wants them to do? He is their boss. Yes, it would be preferable for Congress to pass a law telling the FDA what to do, but there is nothing keeping the President from exercising his power over the FDA except public, and really just media, perception (and this has a lot to do with journalists' love and total deference to "experts" and people with Ph.Ds).
I think Matt is making this way to difficult. Readers would be wise to pick up a copy of Charles Mackay's fine book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds" (a freebie over on Project Gutenberg). This book was written in the middle of the 19th century and just as apt today (Richard Hoffstadter used a number of the themes throughout his work). A lot of what transpires in both the Fox and MSNBC universes strikes me as delusion building and once people start going down rabbit holes, it's hard to get back to the surface.
There was a good article over at The Atlantic on a family of Democratic organizers, originally from Dubuque IA and their reflections on how a reliably Democratic region flipped. It's well worth reading. Until the Democrats get back to grass roots organizing in a big way they will continue to wander in the desert. Quit complaining, get voters registered and turned out on election day and things will be OK. It's all pretty simple but the high level Dem pols are just as much of the grifter class (in a different way) as the Republicans.
This whole piece strikes me as quite naive (by contrast with the 2015 piece). Where to start? Perhaps the elephant in the room? “ Vance and Masters aren’t going to try to install a monarchy in the United States.” what makes you so sure? Doesn’t history teach us to believe people who say they don’t believe in democracy and want to topple it? Also- are you following the finds of the Jan 6 committee? Are you aware that trump tried really really hard to stay in power after loosing the elections, and that the gop has now effectively cleared house of almost all those who stood in his way last time? What makes you so confident that , should he gain power again he will ever agree to leave? And should he once more refuse that the system will once more succeed in forcing him?
Point #2 your faith in structures as the be all and end all is totally misguided. For generations us was considered as super stable and leading democracy while parliamentary systems all over the world failed. In fact de Gaulle in France demanded the shift to a semi presidential system precisely because parliamentary system was too weak to face the crises of that era. In todays world we see how parliamentary democracies are once more falling and becoming authoritarian regimes in some countries (hungary, Poland?) just as others prove more resilient (uk). It’s just a whole lot more complicated than the simple electoral system. The system makes *some* difference but is not some panacea. The problems of polarization in this country wouldn’t have ended under a parliamentary system and in fact a myriad of new ones you’re not even considering might have emerged.
Lastly, it’s cute you think that the GOP voting for Biden’s cabinet nominations etc means they’re more reasonable now and would be in future. Have you not noticed that they are in the minority in senate now and have no way to block those nominees anyway, so it’s in their interest to support some of them to keep their influence? That in no way proves that once McConnell is majority leader again he won’t decide on blocking 100% of all senate confirmations (in fact that’s precisely the scenario the Biden team was bracing for before miraculous wins in Georgia!)
"What makes you so confident that , should he gain power again he will ever agree to leave?"
Because presuming Trump wins in 2024 (which I find unlikely), he'll be 82 in 2028 and almost certainly in even more noticeably terrible mental and physical condition. People don't stage coups d'état to keep broken down octogenarians in power. In fact, that's the point where dictators and other strongmen typically get removed.
Perhaps. But he can still not be too old to hold on, or be replaced by someone else. The point is, it is baffling to me to simply assume that they will just allow free and fair elections and then a peaceful transfer of power to a democratic WH. Have we learned nothing from Jan 6th and the trump presidency?
I'm a little skeptical he can win the GOP nomination (even assuming he wants it)
I know a lot of people like to make those claims, but (1) I can't see how Trump doesn't run again just from an ego standpoint, let alone the graft opportunities and protection from criminal prosecution, and (2) once he's running I can't see how that doesn't immediately clear the field of any semi-serious competitors. (DeSantis, Abbott, etc., are all young enough they can easily wait for 2028 and run against Harris.) Further, even if the field doesn't clear, GOP primaries are overwhelmingly loaded toward winner-take-all races, so Trump just needs to eke our pluralities, which should be easy just by name recognition.
1) I don't think he wants it.
a) I don't think Trump liked being President all that much. He couldn't get anything done, people wouldn't just listen to him, the Dems and press were constantly digging up dirt.
b) I don't think his ego can withstand another loss and I'm not sure 'they stole the election' will be sufficient a second time. Much easier to make excuses on how everyone is going to cheat, so he isn't going to give them the satisfaction.
c) He can collect a lot more money for himself on the victim circuit than in the Oval Office.
2) I'm not certain he can win.
a) Losing as an incumbent is historically a career ender.
b) Trump is bad for the GOP and there will be huge motivation for people loyal to the GOP to oppose Trump.
c) People didn't take Trump seriously in 2016, focusing on everyone else assuming knocking Trump out last was the smart play. They won't make that mistake again.
d) Trump's reputation as a king maker has been shown to be a mirage, so his competition isn't going to be afraid to go against him anymore.
3) As for who? shrug - doesn't matter. Early favorites are universally wrong - trying to guess who is going to run and who is going to be the favorite is impossible to guess, so I'm not even going to try.
In 2024? That's interesting. What makes you think he won't? Would anyone even oppose him, and if so, who could beat him?
But even if he doesn't run in 2024, are we to assume the authoritarian streak goes with him?
Sanewashing Yarvin was not the take I expected.
I’m imagining and the merger between State Street and Credit Swiss being cemented by the marriage by proxy of the 5 year old daughter of the State Street CEO to the 9 year old son of the Credit Swiss CEO.
The reason it's considered bad form for the President to run rough shod over the FDA has nothing to do with Madison. The FDA, or the Fed, for that matter, derives its power from its presumed expertise and the elite consensus that its functions should be handled via technical expertise. In both cases political interference is considered gauche.
A similar dynamic exists, I believe, with many aspects of the NHS in Britain.
The FDA has certainly weakened their claims to technical expertise, but the idea of an overtly political drug approval process hasn't become significantly more attractive.
But the other problem is that neither Congress nor the president seems to have expressed any interest in improving how the fda or cdc works to try to make them deal better with the next pandemic (or with the current ones).
That is a problem! But not really a constitutional one.