Author Topic: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020  (Read 13343 times)

dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #45 on: September 21, 2020, 01:06:28 PM »
Are there any other countries where Supreme Court judges are idolized public figures like they are in the United States?

As best as I can guess, it is a mix of the United States' fixation on heroes, and the fact that running a modern state under the United States' archaic constitution requires organized hypocrisy.  Nobody wants to live under the United States Constitution as a reader in 1783 would have understood it, but then its really important whether the people being hypocritical are being hypocritical to allow the kinds of projects you want or not.

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #46 on: September 21, 2020, 02:14:54 PM »
I can't think of one - I think though that the only other places where political figures are hero worshiped are communist - the main difference as far as I can tell being that in communist countries the worship all focuses on one or two great leaders while in the US each level of government is meant to have its' heroes and villains

Just my impression though; I find generally speaking hero worship is a weird thing
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Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #47 on: September 21, 2020, 02:33:12 PM »
Quote
I think though that the only other places where political figures are hero worshiped are communist
Or fascist or authoritarian or dictatorships - and dictatorships are way more common globally than nominally communist states. Hard to think of an authoritarian state that doesn't try and build a personality cult around its leader. In Europe, probably the worst state for this is Hungary where Orban has worked hard to build his cult as the sole defender of Hungarian values against liberals or communists or universities or whatever it is he doesn't like this week.

I think there's been some idolising judges in Poland, and a little happened in the UK when some of the Brexit arguments were happening: essentially, the slide to authoritarianism (whether from the hard right or state communism) always requires that the authoritarians gain control of the judiciary or otherwise remove barriers to the utilisation of their power, and this usually involves clashing with judges who will uphold older norms and eventually replacing them with those who won't. Judges therefore can easily reach a celebrity status under such circumstances for anyone who values either a) the status quo or b) a rules-based order generally, usually people from soft conservative, centrist, social democratic or liberal political stances.

In the US this is exacerbated by the constitutional test and precedent being so important re what rights the constitution actually gives people, and by the fact that Supreme Court judges serve life terms which is absurd and makes it super random who gets to pick judges. And in the modern period that's been exacerbated by one party having a vast structural advantage in the part of the legislature that actually has power to confirm judges.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #48 on: September 21, 2020, 04:09:05 PM »
Canadian nation-builders idolize figures like John A. MacDonald, Nellie McClung, or Terry Fox but it has become harder and harder to do and I have a hard time thinking of a Supreme Court of Canada judge in my lifetime who was a "household name" except when a particular decision was in the news.  Prominent admired Canadians tend to be people like astronaut Christ Hatfield who do things which are easier to understand than resolving some irreconcilable legal dilemma.

Generally, we Canadians talk about how "the supreme court of X issued a ruling ..." not about individual judges.

I would be interested to know whether there was a debate between say a 12-year term for justices and a life term for justices when the second and current US Constitution was being drafted.  Edit: I wonder if they were trying to avoid the situation we now see in the HoR where representatives spend the last year of their term trying to be re-elected rather than performing their office to the best of their ability.
« Last Edit: September 21, 2020, 04:21:26 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #49 on: September 21, 2020, 05:06:20 PM »
What the US should have, and which would be wholly workable, would be 10-12 year terms for justices with no renewal or second terms, really. That would solve some of the problems - the other problem is the US Senate and the huge skews that have developed in how it represents some American demographics more than others, which will continue to be an issue for the foreseeable future.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #50 on: September 21, 2020, 11:07:52 PM »
Canada went with a series of complicated rules to keep Quebec and the Maritimes over-represented relative to their populations, the four western provinces don't have the benefits.  Treating populous and low-populations equally was the whole point of how Senate seats are allocated in the United States (to agree to the second constitution, the smaller states demanded assurances they they would not be stomped on by Virginia and Pennsylvania), but I wonder if they could have done a deal where only the founding states had over-representation built in.  In 1783 nobody had any vision of a United States which reached the Pacific and the Rio Grande though, Lewis and Clark had not marched.

Edit: It looks like in the 1790 census, the outliers were Delaware with 59,000 census population and Virginia with 748,000 census population for a ratio of 13:1.  Today the extremes are 579 k in Wyoming and 39, 512 k in California for a ratio of 68 : 1.  So the disproportion between population and Senate representation did not spring out of nothing, but it has gotten worse.
« Last Edit: September 21, 2020, 11:56:14 PM by dubsartur »

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #51 on: September 21, 2020, 11:24:07 PM »
Oh sure, keeping small states strong was certainly the whole point - but it's clearly not workable in a much more national-driven system in which senators represent their party far more than their state in most of these considerations.
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Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #52 on: October 02, 2020, 11:41:15 AM »
Aaaaaaaand there was a really armadilloty debate and also now Trump has Covid. We'll see what happens with that I guess?
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #53 on: October 03, 2020, 02:03:54 AM »
Yes, with the Black Shirt wing of the Republican base excited because the president gave them an order and it was not "hand over your weapons and disband", and the dominionist wing of the Republican base wondering whether their Lord is going to remove his flawed servant after the servant gave them the judge they need, and a lot of geriatric congresscriters having been exposed to the virus, it is going to be an exciting few weeks.

Meanwhile the BC election called at the beginning of September will be held on 24 October and the results should be final by the US election day.
« Last Edit: October 03, 2020, 03:09:41 AM by dubsartur »

dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #54 on: October 04, 2020, 07:37:35 PM »
I am very sad to see Maciej Ceglowski posting anti-intellectual nonsense like "In the end there's only one poll that matters; everything else is life support for podcasters."  He sounds like a handegg coach giving a pep talk before a big game not an adult talking to other educated adults :(  In his current career raising money for political campaigns he seems to be violating all the principles he laid out in his earlier essays with no acknowledgement of the contradiction.

I am not emotionally shocked that grifters gonna grift and fascists gonna fash, but ever since November 2016 I have felt very sad and very tired that so many people I thought were educated humane adults are drifting back into childish ways of thinking and letting the bullies and thugs manipulate them.

dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #55 on: October 11, 2020, 07:37:22 AM »
Caitlyn Johnstone has a version of the list of things that US presidential politics and the machines which used to run both major parties take for granted.  Her writing style is 'prophetic' and bold whereas mine was more ironic and clinical, because she is trying to find a new way of thinking about politics which is free from all the unexamined nonsense that most political commentators and talking heads take for granted (just like Nate Silver and the Fivethirtyeight team were doing from their math nerd perspective), but if you want to see one person's take on it she still has words and is still willing to try to understand US federal politics.

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #56 on: October 11, 2020, 03:19:07 PM »
We're very much getting into the bit of the election where I get increasingly frustrated with bad US takes on third party voting.

A few thoughts on things recently:
  • Due to a screwup Arkansas' senate race has no Democrat, which means it will probably get the best Libertarian performance in the country (however forecasters seem to think that'll still only be 17%, which would imply that about half of Democrat voters will not vote or even vote Republican rather than voting third party, which is strange to me.
  • There seems to be a lot of confusion over whether Lindsey Graham is in trouble in his Senate race. He's not a very strong incumbent, and he's getting buried in small-dollar cash donations, but on the other hand South Carolina is very inelastic - it's easy for the Democrats to get to 44 or 45 percent there but very hard for them to get much beyond that.
  • Nate Silver's polling average now has Trump ten points under and his forecast eight under nationally: the swing states are tighter, but not tighter enough, and it's quite hard to see where the race changes much from here.

I as usual by this point in an election year am quite tired of US politics and would like to hear about the rest of the world, though I do dearly hope that Trump loses and as badly as possible: though I don't know whether that would be merely a breather from the authoritarian shift the world feels like it's undergone in the past decade, or would be a meaningful shift towards a receding tide.
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dubsartur

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #57 on: October 11, 2020, 07:44:21 PM »
Yes, I have no patience whatsoever for "a vote for $partyA is really a vote for $partyB, you need to vote for $partyC which is the least bad of the biggest two."  That is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and when half the population does not vote, a good party can persuade some of them to get out (even in the United States where there is no paid time off work to vote).  And when it gets down to specific smaller parties, you really need to live in a place, know the people and the institutions, and decide for yourself whether they are serious.  It was years ago in this election cycle that I completely lost patience with American commentators demanding that their global readership have an opinion and share their opinion on each of the smaller parties.

I don't claim to understand US federal politics, just that the current situation is very bad and that judging by polls, Trump will lose in the electoral college if all ballots are counted.

Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #58 on: October 30, 2020, 07:37:42 PM »
Well, here's the final stretch!

The big concerns around the election are now about election night and the capacity of Republicans to mess things up in the courts if there are tight results that they think they can legally challenge. This will not be a problem if Biden does, say about as well as 538 forecasts him to, because then it will be clear he has won on election night. However, some states are going to take much longer than others to count all the votes, and some are going to count in-person votes first and then mail-in votes. Pennsylvania seems like a particular likely focus for this issue - which, given it's the likeliest state to provide either Trump or Biden with electoral vote #270, is not ideal to put it mildly. However, states like Florida and Arizona will get most results out on the night, and if Biden carries both, what happens in Pennsylvania will no longer be relevant in all likelihood.

The numbers are still looking quite solid for Biden. There are lots of indicators flying around and lots of disagreement about what they mean, but none of them are terribly good news for Donald Trump. Turnout looks stratospheric - Texas has surpassed its 2016 number of voters and we're not even at election day yet.
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Jubal

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Re: US Politics & Presidential Election 2020
« Reply #59 on: November 07, 2020, 10:09:52 PM »
After a gruelling week, it's finally nominally over - all networks projecting the presidency for Joe Biden. A long election was always a possibility, but it's been exhausting seeing it happen in practice. It won't actually be close: Biden has the most votes of any candidate in history, and will have more electoral votes with more comfortable margins than decided the 2016 election. That said, there seem to have been two major misses along the way with predicting it: the midwest was a lot less Democrat than expected, so the key "blue wall" states (WI/MI/PA) have razor-thin margins instead of the comfier 5-10 point range that the polls were coming in at. Second, both Mexican-American and Cuban-American voters seem to have been a weakness for Biden, resulting in poor margins for him in Miami that lost him Florida (he did better than Clinton in the rest of the state), and in slightly weak performance in places like Texas, Nevada, and New Mexico (the Democrats held the latter two but Nevada is tight and the New Mex 2nd district went red). On the other hand, polls were pretty dead on in other places, like Georgia and Arizona where Dems slightly favoured in a tight race was absolutely the prediction and result - and the electoral map that results isn't too different to what one might have expected at the modest but not catastrophic end of Dem performance.

Also it's not over - there are two runoffs in Georgia which will decide control of the Senate, and which will likely favour Republicans unless they're too busy with Trump burning the party down on his way out. It's really hard to see what happens next to the GOP, and that's probably the biggest unanswered question of US politics right now.
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