Exilian
Art, Writing, and Learning: The Clerisy Quarter => Discussion and Debate - The Philosopher's Plaza => Topic started by: Jubal on February 02, 2020, 09:21:57 PM
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Here we go again...
There are as of now six or seven vaguely serious candidates running to be POTUS: updates will be made as the contest develops.
In the Red corner, the presumptive Republican nominee is of course incumbent president Donald Trump. A few primary challengers have declared: Businessman and perennial presidential candidate Rocky de la Fuente of California, former Massachussetts governor and former libertarian VP nominee Bill Weld, and talk radio host Joe Walsh, but they are not expected to mount any serious challenge and some states have even cancelled their nominating contests.
The Democrats meanwhile have a serious contest underway, with the first contest being the Iowa Caucuses on Monday. The most serious remaining candidates are centrist former vice-president Joe Biden, progressive-wing senator Elizabeth Warren, democratic socialist senator Bernie Sanders, and centrist mayor of South Bend, Indiana, Pete Buttigeig. Also still worth noting are Minnesota senator Amy Klobuchar, a moderate, Tom Steyer, a lefty billionaire, Michael Bloomberg, former NYC mayor and centrist billionaire, and Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur and Universal Basic Income advocate. Bloomberg may weirdly start featuring later in the race - he's skipping the early states and chucking money at ads in states that vote in March, which is... an interesting play and we'll see how it works out for him, as the meme goes.
From smaller parties, no major independent challengers have declared. The Libertarian nominee will be decided at the main party convention later this year in Texas, not by primary voters - the only one so far, in New Hampshire, managed to give the state's support to Vermin Supreme, a man with a boot on his head who presumably will not get nominated, but who knows. More plausible Libertarian nominees are former Rhode Island governor Lincoln Chafee, only state-level Libertarian legislator Max Abramson of New Hampshire, and John MacAfee of antivirus software and running away from Caribbean states' police forces fame.
For the Greens, co-founder of the party Howie Hawkins of New York seems by far the most likely nominee, though Dario Hunter, an activist from Youngstown, OH, will challenge him, along with possibly some other candidates: Hawkins seems to have significantly out-fundraised his opponents though.
The only other party with notable ballot access as far as my limited research has found is the Constitution Party, a hard-right party who seem likely to run former coal exec Don Blankenship, a man whose "controversies" Wikipedia article section is half the page and includes the death of 29 of his miners through negligence, as their candidate in 14 states.
Also of course there are things going on beyond the presidential race, including Senate and House elections. Democrats will need to flip the Senate to actually get anything done, but they have precious few good targets available beyond Maine and Colorado, and are likely to lose their seat in Alabama - they need to gain four net seats to flip the chamber, or three if they gain the presidency (vice-president gets the casting vote). They'll also be looking to hold their 2018 House gains, which should mostly be do-able, but it depends on the political climate in November a lot.
So, buckle in and we'll see where we end up!
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Its so weird to think that just the election of candidates for president will last until ?June? And do all the states have the rule that if a candidate at a meeting gets less than 15% of the votes, their supporters have to pick someone else?
Andrew Gelman the "Rich State, Poor State, Red State, Blue State" guy visited my town. His talk was kind of rambling- I would guess he was jetlagged and just belted out Lecture Number 963- and I did not have a chance to ask some hard questions about how the US system is specially designed to allow all that weird analysis of who vegetarian suburban women under 40 support https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/ In Canada there are not the same serious parties in Quebec three elections running!
That said, its worth studying how much of US federal elections you can predict by "rich states lean Democratic, rich people lean Republican, people vote for the incumbent if the economy is doing well and against him if its going badly, the minority of voters without a clear party affiliation tend to vote to divide the federal government between parties."
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And do all the states have the rule that if a candidate at a meeting gets less than 15% of the votes, their supporters have to pick someone else?
No, that's a rule that can only operate in caucuses - most states use primary ballots. I think all the states in the Democrat primaries have some sort of 15% threshold, but in ones that don't have caucuses, if your candidate drops below that then it's a wasted vote. On the GOP side, they don't have thresholds but also some states are Winner Takes All, whereas none of the Dem ones are. If I'm remembering right. Yes, this is a horribly complicated system.
That said, its worth studying how much of US federal elections you can predict by "rich states lean Democratic, rich people lean Republican, people vote for the incumbent if the economy is doing well and against him if its going badly, the minority of voters without a clear party affiliation tend to vote to divide the federal government between parties."
Yeah, that's broadly true, though there's a lot of complex reasoning behind how the state by state leans have ended up where they are (which IMO is worth noting because it can affect where they end up in future and what the trends are - there are definitely big shifts e.g. midwest moving away from the Democrats and sunbelt states moving toward them over time).
Meanwhile first general update can be summed up as "what the hell is going on":
- We don't know who won the Democratic primary in Iowa, the stupid system was worsened by an app failure. The general consensus emerging is that Sanders won the popular vote, and did about as well as expected, Buttigeig came a close second and did much better than expected, Warren came a workable third and Biden came a bad fourth.
- This was the first time that voters were allowed to vote outside the USA in the Iowa caucus. There was indeed a caucus in the Caucasus, consisting of about 2 people and held in Tbilisi.
- Trump easily won the GOP caucuses in Iowa with 97% of the vote. This led to Tea Party hard-right wing challenger Joe Walsh (who got around 1%) dropping out, and rather surprisingly going on TV to tell people to vote for literally any Democrat over Trump, saying that he felt the GOP had become a cult. This leaves Bill Weld as Trump's remaining gadfly challenger.
- There have been a lot of arguments over qualification rules for the Democrats' Nevada debate after the party dropped the grassroots donor numbers requirement - this had caused several candidates issues earlier in the race, and its being dropped was seen as being a boost for Mike Bloomberg, who as a billionaire is funding his own campaign.
- The 538 projections have become very bullish for Sanders after Iowa - he's expected to win New Hampshire, which neighbours his home state, and probably also heavily unionised Nevada - this may give him the momentum to go on and win the nomination with three state wins under his belt, especially as the rest of the field is extremely split (and the centrist part of it especially so).
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Gods only know what's happening. Sanders is now the front runner, but with a small overall base, having won NH and (arguably) Iowa. Klobuchar did well enough in NH to not drop out, Warren is still in there though without much of an obvious path (although she's arguably the best compromise option at a contested convention), Biden is still hoping to kick start his campaign again in South Carolina, Buttigeig has as many delegates as Sanders but his base isn't diverse enough to compete in the upcoming states, and Bloomberg is trying to buy the entire race and has basically purchased fifteen percent of the Democrat primary electorate which is a staggering figure. Tom Steyer is sticking around for, uh, some reason, too. The "UBI Guy" Andrew Yang is out, as are Michael Bennet and Deval Patrick.
This is all pretty perfect for Sanders, who could win pretty big against split opposition since Warren appears not to be a big threat to him thus far (though she is running third in delegate total). But also, it's big time contested convention fuel. Let's see how much of a mess things get as they go on...
On the GOP side, Joe Walsh, the more right wing of the president's challengers, unurprisingly dropped out and more surprisingly endorsed literally any Democrat to beat Trump. So far Bill Weld has one delegate, from Iowa, and none from New Hampshire. Trump has over 100 delegates already, both from dominating the two primaries so far and from states cancelling their primaries in order to just bind their delegates directly to him.
On the Libertarian front, as well as New Hampshire's Vermin Supreme win, Iowa's caucuses put Jacob Hornberger as the winner with 47% of the votes. Hornberger is president of the Future of Freedom Foundation, a conservative-libertarian think tank that suggests it want to return the US to a 19th century state of rejecting, "income taxation, Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, welfare, public schooling, economic regulations, immigration controls, drug laws, gun control, paper money, the Federal Reserve, overseas empire, militarism, entangling alliances, and foreign wars". Note that Libertarian primaries are indicative - they do not select delegates, and so the convention can AIUI just ignore them. Nonetheless, Hornberger's strong win may suggest his campaign for the Libertarian nomination actually has some legs. He previously ran in the rather odd US senate election in Virginia in 2002, the last in that state to be won by the GOP - in which the Democrats failed to field a candidate, and the Republican got 80% of the vote. Hornberger came third and last with 7% in that race, running as an independent.
On Feb 22 the Green primaries kick off in Georgia, so we'll see how things go there. My USGP contact suggests that there's a real split/no love lost between the seemingly dominant Hawkins campaign and those of the other candidates, so we'll see how that goes.
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Nevada apparently did in quite a big way. Really emphatic Sanders victory there. National totals now at Sanders 34, Buttigeig 22, Warren & Biden 8, Klobuchar 7. 538 think Sanders now has a nearly 50/50 chance of getting a majority of delegates, and a 2/3 or so chance of getting a plurality of them. South Carolina is next, Biden is staking a lot on it to try and rejuvenate his campaign, as is Tom Steyer. I think Steyer will likely be next to drop out, since I'm fairly sure he'll come third or worse there. Klobuchar may leave soon as well. Bloomberg is falling back heavily in forecasts after his bad Nevada debate performance (whereas conversely Warren's good performance in that debate has given her a whole bunch more cash to invest).
Meanwhile, on the GOP side the Nevada GOP just cancelled their caucuses and had the state's Republican leadership sit in a room and agree to give Trump all the delegates.
The next Libertarian contest is in Minnesota, on Tuesday, with eight caucus sites across the state. The Green nomination convention in Georgia is supposed to have happened, but all I can find out is a post on their Facebook page saying that the convention passed a "women's sex-based rights" motion (which for those who don't know is dogwhistle for "we hate transgender people here").
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Klob is also gone, and they're both on the Biden wagon - presumably a mix of not liking Sanders ideologically and being after administration jobs if Biden wins. Steyer also put but that campaign was weird.
I'm usually wrong about predictions but I think there are three actual candidates left now - Biden, Warren, Sanders. And Warren only wins via a contested convention if she improves her position and starts looking like the unity candidate between the Sanders and Biden camps. I can't see Bloomberg doing well in the mid run.
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You can really tell it's a vanity run, because if he wanted to win he'd just have thrown money at someone more credible (literally any of the other candidates) and they might be winning right now. But yeah, I'm very glad he's going to fail.
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Yup. I'm now expecting Biden vs Trump in the general. With Biden winning Maine and Massachusetts, I don't think Bernie can outrun him unless he really crushes it in the Midwest. I think either Sanders or Biden will be hard to unite the Dems behind properly too - they needed someone more able to bridge the gap between the centrists and the new left. That said, Trump is unpopular enough that it'll still be an even fight. And who knows what else could happen between now and November (especially with all the candidates being old enough that they don't have fantastic remaining life expectancies - I don't honestly know what happens if a party nominates a candidate and they die before the election).
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I'm glad Bloomberg got utterly destroyed. Warren is out now too, which could potentially help Bernie by not having a split vote between the progressives. Also the fact that buttgieg dropped out and endorsed Biden stinks to me, Biden seems so anti the entire platform the dude stood on.
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Battle of the septuagenerian white blokes is on, I guess. :/ Buttigeig is clearly after a senior Biden admin position to set himself up for a future run. I'm sorry to see Warren go, she made some bad errors, especially over the Native American heritage stuff, but I think she was likely the best potential person to actually run a country left in the race. Of the remaining people I hope Sanders wins, but I don't expect him to.
I think Biden is now the most likely person to be president at the start of next year, by the evidence - but not by much. Trump has I think consolidated his base popularity since last election, but whilst that might solidify some states in his camp, he's done it at the expense of putting off a fair number of swing voters and Dems have solidified more against him. The current state seems to be that Biden or Sanders would go into a general campaign with about a five point lead, which is enough for a narrow win. That means Trump needs to pull back support, but not thaaat much of it, and Biden and Sanders have bulging folders of past statements that the GOP can drop ads against. Also GOP super PACs etc will look to exploit the Biden/Sanders split to hold down turnout, which will probably be more important than swing voters - most people have really strong opinions on Trump already.
Crucially, the five key swing states (Pennsylvania, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Florida) look like they're all marginally more GOP leaning than the nation, so Trump can probably win the election as long as he doesn't lose the national vote by more than 2-3 points (I think he's unlikely to win the popular vote unless the Dems massively implode). Of course lots could happen between now and then, but I think those five states are the ones to watch - like, if Biden's taking Ohio or Iowa he's going to have won by a mile, and if Trump's threatening any Dem state he didn't take last time then he's won by a mile, so those are the tipping points.
For the Greens, Hunter has a delegate lead now and won Ohio, California, and North Carolina, but is well under half the delegates. Both Dario Hunter and Dennis Lambert got delegates from the OH and CA primaries, as did Sedinam Moyowasifza-Curry in California. For the Libertarians, Hornberger is winning most states, but often with low vote shares against a very split field. Libertarian primaries don't allocate delegates, so they're only indicative votes - I think he's increasingly the obvious front runner though. Amusingly, in the North Carolina Libertarian primary "No Preference" won by a mile.
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Wow, Elizabeth Warren is out.
It was weird listening to the Economist podcast talk about candidate Saunders and his "radical, uncompromising" policies where the ones listed were enacted decades ago in many jurisdictions. Since these days a president basically gives speeches and bosses the military and the civil service unless all three elected arms of government end up under one party for two years, someone who is a bit of an outlier within a party might not be so bad, but 78 is quite old for such a demanding job.
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Has anyone been following what Biden says he would do if he won the nomination and then the election?
If the old-media commentariat and democratic party establishment get a second "change nothing" candidate for president, and lose a second time, that will be interesting to watch from a safe distance, say the orbit of Mars.
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After last night it looks pretty impossible to stop Biden, who hammered Sanders in Michigan, indicating that basically the Midwest is going to join the South in going Biden, the Northeast is largely going to be Biden outside of NH and Vermont, and Sanders is really only strong in the West.
IIRC Biden does have quite a detailed range of policy platforms: it's just inching further along the same lines as Obama-era stuff, probably a bit more heavy duty on climate change than Obama was. I'm expecting the platform to shift at the convention too - he'll want to give the party left something to try and keep them on board. (I also think that "what he says he would do" isn't that relevant to whether he's a change candidate in narrative terms or not - Clinton's platform was noticeably further left if one actually read it than anyone seems to remember at this point.
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Worth noting that if Covid-19 gets really bad later in the year... the data from Europe suggest that it tends to hit older people much worse. And you have three guys in their late seventies running round and doing loads of rallies and fundraisers. Anyone know what happens in a presidential election if neither candidate makes it to election day alive? Do you just elect their veep nominees?
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IIRC Biden does have quite a detailed range of policy platforms: it's just inching further along the same lines as Obama-era stuff, probably a bit more heavy duty on climate change than Obama was. I'm expecting the platform to shift at the convention too - he'll want to give the party left something to try and keep them on board. (I also think that "what he says he would do" isn't that relevant to whether he's a change candidate in narrative terms or not - Clinton's platform was noticeably further left if one actually read it than anyone seems to remember at this point.
I don't care about narratives, I mean what people can be expected to do: so Obama gave Bush II three second terms of foreign policy and authoritarianism despite running on "hope and change" (and now all those awful things are bipartisan, sigh). I gave up on political discourse in news magazines and opinion pieces a decade ago because its so dishonest. I have a bad feeling that opinion pieces are like twitter: people are speaking to fellow travellers while being sure they are striking mighty blows against the wicked people in that other faction.
Of all the things in the platform that staffers wrote for him after careful focus-grouping, what is Biden talking about? A lot of that will be there because he feels obliged to have a position on that topic this year, so what does his life suggest he is actually committed to?
My impression is that Hillary Clinton's life and career strongly suggested that she was basically conservative (in a small-c sense), incrementalist, and very comfortable with the Washington bureaucracy's way of seeing the world, so whatever was in her platform she would not push for change outside the bounds that an Obama was comfortable with.
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Biden has it in the bag now. Decent wins for him in Arizona (which as a western state with a large hispanic pop was in the category of states Sanders has been stronger in), Illinois, and a really thumping win in Florida.
Regarding narrative and expectation: I think one should take platforms more seriously and literally than almost everyone does. If one analyses it, most politicians attempt most of their platform, most of the time: we just have a strong selectivity bias for remembering the calls they made which went against their platform. Conversely I think people's past makes slightly less difference than people expect, because politicians operate in the environment they're in, and are aware of who they're beholden to and who they need to keep on-side and what they can't get past their own party and so on. Of course that's not to say it makes zero difference, but I think it makes less than people expect.
I don't think for example that healthcare is a terribly hot-button issue for Joe Biden. But I suspect that a public option for medicare is something everyone will associate him with heavily by November, because he can't afford to not make that a key part of his plan - in the current situation, health topics will be paramount in people's minds, he's got to show some incremental progress at least in order to appease the Sanders wing of the party - and then in office, he's overwhelmingly likely to attempt to follow through on that, because the expectation has been set and that's the milleu we're in.
Looking ahead to the general, the 538 engine hasn't fired up yet, but the RCP poll averages give a rougher idea of where we stand - and they generally look OK but not stellar for Biden. He's a modest favourite in enough states to win, but Trump seems to be polling alright in Wisconsin and Florida in particular, which basically implies he's still competitive both in the midwest and the sunbelt. On the other hand, Biden seems to be a modest favourite in Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, and Arizona, which would see him comfortably over the line. Interestingly the few polls we've had out of Ohio have been really pretty bad for Trump too - it's very hard to see how Trump wins without keeping hold of OH. I think Trump's best case is that he holds on, just about, and Trump's worse case is a blowout loss, with the likelihood/midpoint guess being a narrow Biden win with some ground regained in the midwest (maybe MI and PA but not WI and OH), plus picking up North Carolina and Arizona or something in the south to get him over the line. We'll see.
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Regarding narrative and expectation: I think one should take platforms more seriously and literally than almost everyone does. If one analyses it, most politicians attempt most of their platform, most of the time: we just have a strong selectivity bias for remembering the calls they made which went against their platform. Conversely I think people's past makes slightly less difference than people expect, because politicians operate in the environment they're in, and are aware of who they're beholden to and who they need to keep on-side and what they can't get past their own party and so on. Of course that's not to say it makes zero difference, but I think it makes less than people expect.
I don't think for example that healthcare is a terribly hot-button issue for Joe Biden. But I suspect that a public option for medicare is something everyone will associate him with heavily by November, because he can't afford to not make that a key part of his plan - in the current situation, health topics will be paramount in people's minds, he's got to show some incremental progress at least in order to appease the Sanders wing of the party - and then in office, he's overwhelmingly likely to attempt to follow through on that, because the expectation has been set and that's the milleu we're in.
The problem we have is that we come from systems where the Prime Minister has more or less free reign to implement an agenda. That is not the American system this century at all, the Republicans will block anything a Democrat puts forward and don't have as much of a clear positive agenda other than tax cuts and deregulation and nastiness to poor people/brown people/LBTQ+ people (Mitch McConnell currently has 300 bills on his desk which he refuses to allow to be voted on). So given that a president can do maybe one big thing every 12-24 months, guessing which big thing is important.
And Obama could have chosen a different policy on American war crimes, torture, massive political corruption, warrantless assassination of people of all nations by robot in countries he laughingly claimed to be at peace with, and whistleblowing. For each of those things to move forward he had to say yes, and he listened to his daimon and he signed the papers. I hope they bury him with a big honking Book of the Dead because he will need the section on "be still my heart, do not tell what you have seen, do not tell what you have heard ..." Because there will be a quiet Canadian nurse saying "you kept me in a place beyond the law to be judged by a kangaroo court for acts I was supposed to have committed as a minor", and a one-eyed Afghan saying "you did not prosecute the woman who took my eye, and she was free to sin again."
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I don't think the US system is quite as simple as only a certain number of things-per-unit-time being doable - it's more categories of what can and can't be done over the heads of (in this case Republican) opposition, and continual constitutional border fights between the respective powers of different offices and in particular what can be done by executive order. I certainly don't disagree that Obama does bear heavy responsibility for his foreign policy - indeed, foreign policy is one of the areas presidents can move much more freely on, and I don't want "there's a heavy element of circumstance in explaining this" to be taken to mean "these people don't have individual moral responsibility", there's a big difference between producing workable explanatory models of people's actions and apportioning moral culpability and I'm very much trying to talk about the former not the latter. I don't think, though, that this negates my overall thesis that the big directional pushes in a presidential agenda are dictated by circumstance as much as personality, and that by and large presidents will attempt to implement as much of their platform as they can. The changes that matter in Trump's America aren't just the big-ticket fights over the wall/being horrific to migrants, or trade. There's an absolute mass of small-ticket executive level stuff, cutbacks to some agencies, funding for others, etc, that will for the most part have been in line with his platform and comprise much of the body of his reshaping of the USA. And those little changes can have big cumulative or unexpectedly reverberating effects (like, say, having your national security officials with responsibility for pandemics leave in 2018 and then not replacing them...)
I guess another way to put this is that I'm to some extent a sceptic of the "political capital" model that suggests that politicians can do a limited number of things and have to choose what to expend a limited stack of resource on. If given a clear run, politicians can do a huge amount very quickly, and if not, then the question is more about what the swing votes will let you get passed out of your platform than what you, personally, want to push for. Of course politicians can screw up the tactics of those situations and frequently do (as e.g. Trump failing to repeal the ACA), and I think at the edges there's a political capital concept in play when it comes to horse-trading over details, but I think if anything the US system makes a politician's agenda more shaped by expectation and circumstance and less by personal priority-setting than would be the case otherwise. If you want to know what a President Biden might get done on big domestic policy items that require legislation, it's the biography of Joe Manchin you're as likely to need as that of Joe Biden.
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I wish I had time and energy to give that the response it deserves but my goal is to spend less time in front of and/or screaming helplessly at screens. I have not done any sewing in months.
I am not necessarily thinking of the "capital/favours" model, but more that people only have time and emotional energy to force so many things through against opposition, both formal and informal. Obama was obviously keen to implement healthcare reform and to "not do stupid ****" in foreign policy but not keen to take on the security services, and as it happened healthcare reform and cleaning up after the previous administration was about all he had time and energy for in his first term.
Nobody has ever given a fart what i think about politics and damned few have even listened :( I don't have answers to any of the worst problems we face, but I know how to say "you may not torture. you may not murder. you may not promote that corrupt official. I don't care what my peers say." Darius the Great or Hammurabi knew that much!
Also, its not just the uninterrupted US foreign policy 2005-2016. It was all the shocking authoritarianism introduced under Bush Minor, plus Obama's own twist in the form of whistleblower policy. These things are all against the best American political tradition, and the next president could have either rejected them or continued them. He made his choice.
In other news, at least two US Senators walked into a closed briefing on coronavirus in February, walked out to give reassuring press releases, then sold millions of dollars worth of stocks. (Very few Canadian MPs own millions of dollars of anything except possibly a house).
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Don't worry, responses are never obligatory, and I very much support the idea of taking some time out for crafts :) And I at least find your politic-thoughts interesting and worthwhile to listen to! (Also, in news of a much much smaller body politic, congrats and welcome to becoming a citizen of Exilian.)
And yes, the GOP insider trading scandal looks like it ought to be big, though many bigger things have blown over. Fox news reps have actually been calling for resignations despite the senators being in their party, though, which is a really unusual place for us to be.
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Trump's polling bump seems to be levelling out and faith in his crisis handling dropping according to polls. He's still polling better than before the crisis, but not by much and fewer surveys seem to be happening than usual. A Florida poll was released which showed Biden up by 6 in a head to head match - that's an outlier, but it's also worrying news for Trump, situations in which he loses Florida but wins the election are... improbable, I think it's fair to say.
Most primaries are being cancelled and pushed back, but Wisconsin is still holding one on Tuesday because of deadlock between the (Dem) Governor and the (GOP) legislature - the latter refused to postpone it.
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Sanders out, so Biden vs Trump will be the November matchup unless Covid or another disaster/scandal has anything to say about either of the candidates before then.
Trump's net approval is now at about -5.5, his Covid peak was -4. For reference, Obama's at this stage in his re-election year was +1.6, Bush's was +2.3, Clinton's +13.
In the minor primaries, Hawkins still leads with a large plurality but not majority of Green delegates, with Dario Hunter in a close second. Hornberger still leads a very split Libertarian field, having won 5 contests despite getting under 25% of total votes. Vermin Supreme, a man with (and this cannot be stated often enough) a boot on his head, is in second, having won Massachussetts as well as New Hampshire. "No Preference" is also getting very high vote shares in a lot of Libertarian contests.
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Do you know of an overview of the allegations of inappropriate touching against Biden by someone sane? Or where to find his platform? Its just so hard to find factual information and level-headed analysis of US politics, especially from outside my urban, universitied, pale-skinned bubble.
One thing I have seen argued is that a lot of black voters are impressed that Biden spent eight years playing second fiddle to a black man without any sign of resentment, and people who are keen about the Democratic Party like that he has been a trusty part of it for a long time.
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Re the allegations: not really, everyone I've seen write on it has either been fairly transparently defending or gunning for Biden.
The formal Biden platform stuff is here: https://joebiden.com/joes-vision/
There's a fairly chunky amount of detail: it's very much overall a working administration-style document. Commentators I've seen I think correctly have analysed it as being to the left of Clinton's 2016 platform (which in turn was to the left of Obama) - but mostly on home/social policy, for example via major new education investment. I'd like to see a good analysis of what out of the platform has what roadblocks - aka what needs congressional approval, what needs state level approval - but good policy analysis is super hard to come by in any media at any time.
And yes: in many ways, the reason Biden won was that the thing he claimed about the electorate - that he had a solid bond with black voters who remembered his service under Obama - turned out to be true, whereas things the other candidates claimed - such Sanders claiming he could turn young voters out at a significantly increased rate and that he was able to win midwestern working-class white voters in ways a centrist candidate couldn't - turned out broadly speaking not to be.
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Thanks! I mostly see comments on specific issues, strongly partisan things, and clips of him talking where he does seem a bit less than coherent and energetic (but this is not 1850 any more, politicians don't get elected by delivering beautiful speeches full of logical twists and clever rhetoric). I am very sad to see more intelligent Americans moving onto twitter and sharing nonsense or using their excellent minds to produce bitbursts (or forgetting that the whole world, not just people in their state/State, reads their feed and sees their calls to action).
One effect of the pandemic is that print advertising revenues are collapsing (I have heard of a drop of 1/3 or more since the start of the year), so what is left of the US local journalism will either die or become even more dependent on state subsidies. There are already states in the USA where there is not one full-time reporter monitoring the state legislature.
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Also, and I am sorry that I have serious logorhea again ...
the last month or two feel strange because its like living in a fighting army or classical Athens expanded to 7 billion people, right? Observe, orient, decide, act; drop a round, observe the fall, correct and fire another until its close enough and you can order five rounds from every tube in the battery. And the reason that has happened, even though there are almost no sure facts about the novel coronavirus, is that there have been trusted sources of information and people of good will making recommendations based on cited sources, and because most people understand that this could kill them or someone they love. Seven billion people have come to a consensus about the general shape of an utterly uncertain situation, and acted in unison, moving around squawking morons in high office if they have to. Its utterly unlike normal public life this decade which is all about screaming identity politics and established interests bogging down changes which everyone agrees need to happen but would hurt them in the short term.
The media that existed in the 1990s had all sorts of problems, but they supported a little bit of real reporting about things which most people in a town or a neighbourhood or a region can agree affects them if they just knew that they were happening. And that is dying along with the other aspects of the media, and without those tiny communities of experts who look at sources and interpret them and share their interpretations and how they could be wrong, and those people you trust to tell you about some part of your community that you don't see directly or hear about from the experience of people you know face-to-face, you can't get this kind of concerted action. Everything falls back to "he said, she he said" (and most people my age and younger long ago turned out of the news, because they see a cruel and boring game that has no place for them to play). Half a dozen companies and venture capital have cut the throat of the mechanism we have for getting facts into the public domain, building consensus about what those facts are, and having public debates about how to interpret them, and I think that we have only begun to see what that will cost us.
Local papers were never any good at analyzing what is happening in a national election campaign, but they can be pretty good at "the finance minister just gave a large contract to a company which her boyfriend has a major financial interest in" or other things where you have to know the people and the space and the personal relationships to show why the facts are significant.
And now I am just another crank ranting on the Internet.
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Logorhea is fine, this is a friendly place for such :)
Update on the "state of play":
- Trump's Covid poll bounce for favourability continues to go down, and he's only a point or two above his pre-crisis level now.
- Biden's lead over Trump remains stable. The Trump bounce didn't actually dent it significantly and it remains at about 5 to 6 points. Which is enough to win, but not by much, and pollsters aren't filtering for voting likelihood much yet, so we should still expect a tight election.
- Not much state level stuff coming out - some Florida polling continues to show a tight race there. I think the present situation is that there's significantly enough states hanging as quite tight races to make it a genuinely close election across a wide board, though the Democrats have more "safe" electoral votes. That picture might change if we got better state-level data though, and the really good aggregator models haven't started up yet.
- The generic congressional ballot polls now have Democrats eight points ahead. The 2018 midterms had them eight and a half points ahead, so an eight point lead if maintained would be enough to hold most of their gains (and probably thus hold the House of Representatives).
- The fact that it takes an eight point lead in a two party system to feel you'll probably win really does show how utterly broken the US electoral system is.
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And with a geriatric president with multiple major personality disorders, a geriatric opposition candidate, two very elderly but sane Supreme Court justices, and an ongoing pandemic which is most lethal to the elderly and which the government spent months denying, it is a very uncertain situation. There are small regions in the United States with as many confirmed covid-19 cases as all of Canada, despite the fact that Canada has had more effective testing and more aggressive stay-at-home policies.
A good thing is that because the United States is a federal system, some state governments are limiting the damage.
Harpers' Magazine had a surreal "Weekly Review" for 9 April 2020 https://harpers.org/2020/04/sea-world-boris-johnson-american-airlines/ "The Crazy Years" go back to 1940 though, it could be that they are are product of industrialization + newswires with radio communication to put the most exciting news across the world in front of people every morning.
Quite a few people on the right in the United States seem to be screaming at China, that suits both Trumpists whose hero is a protectionist and anti-Trumpists who hate the CCP like T. Greer.
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More new polling data: two polls out of Michigan and Pennsylvania, from Fox, showing Biden eight points up on Trump in both states, and with a +10 favourability rating compared to Trump's -8. Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer has become the focus of conservative attacks at a national level... but still shows up with 63% approval. Obviously just two data points, and other recent surveys of the states have shown the race statistically tied, but it's interesting the extent to which the Republicans going after Democrat governors is really not paying off for them. It also shows how relatively powerful US governors are - I'd need to look up who the equivalent person (mayor I guess) for the state of Vienna is. (Interestingly, despite Fox News' appallingly bad broadcast content, their polling (which is of course conducted by contractors) is a) usually pretty good and b) gives very slightly Democrat-leaning results on average.)
Something very worth knowing about for anyone who's going to be reading polls in the coming months is the 538 pollster ratings (https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/pollster-ratings/) which give a lot of useful information on how good individual polls are likely to be - aggregators are usually better than looking at individual data points of course, but if you are looking at individual surveys (likely, as there's a lot of races out there and some just won't have enough polling to aggregate sensibly) being able to do comparisons to the mean etc is useful and the pollster ratings allow you to do that and check company quality fairly swiftly. Though of course companies can and do shift their methods at times and it can be hard for ratings to keep up with that.
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A new Republican narrative strategy seems to be emerging, or rather reemerging, which is Plan Blame It On China. The Conservative media are starting to talk about a "china election", and Trump has been working hard to support that narrative (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52482109).
Meanwhile the polling continues to be pretty bad for him. Nationally it's still around Biden +6, but the swing state polls look worse than that would imply vis-a-vis 2016. Of course things may not continue that way. Attempts to publicly go after Biden on sexual assault allegations continue, which is a very difficult one potentially for Biden - it looks like his campaign is stonewalling it and hoping it goes away. It's unbelievably grim that we're going into an election with both major candidates having open allegations of this kind hanging over them.
We've had some polls of interest from non rust-belt states in recent days, all showing Biden up: by 8 in New Hampshire, 5 in North Carolina, and 1 in Texas. The Texas and NC averages do show Trump ahead - NC narrowly, Texas by some way - but it's fair to say that NC looks like being an actual battleground and Texas will be worth some Democrat attention. I don't expect this to be the year Democrats start winning statewide in Texas unless Trump really has a collapse in his numbers due to Covid, but it does seem to be edging a few points closer every cycle. That's potentially hugely significant for Republicans. In a world where Texas and Arizona are both blue, the Republicans could repeat Trump's run across the midwest, add Minnesota to it, and still lose. It also might mean elections in 2024 and 2028 with far wider maps (at least in the sense of there being more options for the tipping point state and more chance of landslide wins/losses by narrowly running the table across all of them) than we've seen in many years in the US.
Finally, independent and former Republican congressman Justin Amash of Michigan has decided to enter the Libertarian race, which throws that pretty wide open - he's vastly higher profile than Hornberger who's been winning most of the primaries, and he may well just walk in and take it, but we'll see.
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Yes, this is another of the many many reasons why their archaic two-party system and "if you are not with us, you are with the other party" thinking is awful. In Alberta, which had been a one-party system for almost a century, around 2013 voters decided that the declining old party of oil and the keen and energetic would-be new party of oil were both awful and elected the New Democrats.
Apparently Tara Reade has said that if Joe Biden is the democratic candidate she will abstain from voting.
Edit: I think a specific issue is that the Obama administration introduced changes to a law called Title IX which governs allegations of sexual assault at higher education institutions. These changes tilted rules in favour of accusers and people with a wide variety of political positions don't like how they work in practice. So this is not just a terrible allegation, its one where if he defends himself he can be portrayed as a hypocrite.
One of the things which current events are making it harder to not see is the role of schools as subsidized childcare so their parents can both work (and work in places away from their kinship network). Pretending that so much of early schooling is not busywork makes it harder to step back and say 'we need to keep children safe and doing something enriching, but not load massive unpaid labour on their parents just so that the enriching activity comes with activity sheets and grades.' Siderea (https://siderea.dreamwidth.org/1618708.html#cutid1) talks about this from a US perspective, while I see that the Guardian has a piece on single parents and grocery shopping and busybodies (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/apr/30/scotland-supermarkets-urged-to-welcome-parents-with-children-coronavirus).
Also worth saying: large numbers of households in the USA do not have a physical Internet connection (or no connection suitable for live video), and significant numbers relied on their children eating school lunches to afford groceries.
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A European External Action Service report points fingers at Russian and Chinese "disinformation" https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6877118-INTERNAL-Coronavirus-3rd-Information-Environment.html
More than thirty years after Manufacturing Consent was published, we still see people presenting their own government's spin doctoring, straw speakers and writers, planting of useful narratives, and press releases as neutral and factual, and other people's governments as engaged in wicked lying propaganda ::) I see plenty of strange takes on the virus from California startup people and reactionary religious people in Europe and the USA, and UK and US officials have made strange statements and pushed contradictory policies a few days apart.
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Lots of recent polls out with the horrific events going on in Minneapolis and other cities.
Trump now has his worst polling and job approval numbers of the year, around ten or eleven points underwater on approval and trailing Biden by over seven and a half points on the generic ballot, which is nearly double what it was not so long ago.
Other polls still show the battlegrounds much tighter though. Biden appears to be leading in all the battlegrounds, but not by so much that occasional polls showing Trump ahead don't crop up (a +4 for Trump in Pennsylvania and a tied poll in Wisconsin are included in this week's batch). Biden is in the driving seat though: he just has a ton more paths to victory, whilst Trump effectively has one fairly narrow one. If Trump loses the rust belt, he loses. but if he holds it and Biden breaks through in North Carolina, Florida, and Arizona, say, that's also a plausible route. Trump is only 2pts up in Texas, though I'd be surprised if the Democrats threw too much money in there simply because Texas is infamously expensive to campaign in as a big state with pricey media markets.
The North Carolina senate race has also been polled and continues to look on a knife-edge much like the presidential one, whilst the NC governor's race looks very safe for the Democrats.
Overall the crisis seems to have been bad for Trump, and one suspects that Gen. James Mattis coming out to attack him as well today won't do him any further favours.
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So a poll came out showing the Democrat up in the Iowa senate race.
Democrats need +4 seats and the vice-presidency to take Senate control, assuming that Sen. Doug Jones will lose his re-election bid. There aren't really any other states that the Dems need to be heavily defending at Senate level as separate to their presidential lean - Minnesota and Michigan are both marginal and up for election, but if the Democrats are losing those two then they are screwed anyway.
I think it's becoming clear what the path of least resistance is to make the gains for that +4 outcome: Arizona, North Carolina, Maine, Colorado. However, polls have been showing the NC race in particular to be extremely tight, and none of the others are really in the safe zone. So having more of a senate playing field is really important, and that's where Iowa could be pretty crucial. It's a much smaller and electorally swingier state than Georgia where the Dems have never quite managed a breakthrough, and Montana is very deep red presidentially and is only really on the table because the Democrats got a strong and well known candidate. Texas is probably off the menu despite being nominally very close - it's just so expensive to campaign in effectively and is a bit beyond most obvious paths to the presidency either.
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Worrying about that stuff is kind of a trap for intellectuals though (like other horse-race thinking). Unless you are at the highest levels of the party, you don't get to make those choices, just try to get people you can stand behind elected in your district. And it gets you using your time and brain to think about how to play a stupid and dishonest game, rather than using them to think about what a more fun and honest game would look like and how to start it. And like 'electability' it is pretty circular: party A thinks it can't win, so it does not invest resources or campaign very hard, so sympathizers stay home and party A does not get many votes.
I think there is some merit to Maciej Ceglowski's suggestion that US persons with disposable income should donate to congressional candidates in marginal districts (and some Americans register with the strongest party in their district so they can vote for the least offensive candidate in its primaries) but its a dangerous mindset to slip in to (still better than being a 'politics fan' who just reads polls and opinion columns, but dangerous).
I am told that there are some national offices in the USA where one party does not even bother to run a candidate: that is absurd, and changing it is probably a better use of your energy and time if you are a R or D activist. One of Obama's points in his recent Medium essay was that if you don't like your local police in the United States, you need to put people into city and state offices who agree with you, the federal government can't do much about the police in East de Soto, New Mexico.
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Certainly in UK elections I do get asked questions like "which constituencies should I be donating money to", whereas conversely I'm limited in what I can do locally and we struggle to even find candidates to take on the Conservatives where I grew up. So I think from my specific perspective I do find that sort of strategic-level thinking worthwhile to engage in. That said, given my unusually bad capacity for local action and my unusually good (albeit still extremely limited) access to the mid-to-upper echelons of my political party, I'm far from in most people's position here. Also I guess country by country the importance of local action differs: the UK is exceptionally centralised, so even if I was out getting council candidates etc elected their capacity to affect things like policing and education and so on can be pretty minimal.
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Jubal, that is interesting because I don't hear as much of that in Canada, people donate to parties or candidates for office or leadership candidates but I don't hear them as much donating to someone two ridings away.
My take is influenced by hanging around thinky talky people in the United States who talk and feel and post a lot about politics but don't seem as good at getting out and doing things. But the Economist recently described bookface as "the main vehicle for political discourse" so maybe we need to retreat to our monasteries and our country estates and our walled gardens and watch the downfall of civilization.
Edit: a world where the Ds control both houses of congress and possibly the presidency would be very interesting; it would be ironic to see Trump barely re-elected and then impeached in 2021 for doing his usual nonsense but worse
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I'd say it's pretty common in the UK, especially given people will often want to do slightly different targeting to the parties they're donating to, and often actively don't want to donate in their home area because their chosen party are so unlikely to win. In particular I think there's a block of liberal-left voters who don't really care which of the Lib Dems, SNP, Greens, or Labour wins, and just want to strategise to reduce the number of Conservatives, and those people will ask questions like "who are the specific Lib Dem candidates I can donate to who are well placed to unseat Conservatives" and will donate to those local Lib Dem party groups and candidates, rather than making a national-level donation where some of their money would go on Lib-Lab fights like Cambridge or Sheffield Hallam or on the Lib Dems' Scottish seats.
And yes, I think there are always thinky people who don't seem to do much actual politics, at least in any branch of politics that has an intellectual or democratic angle to its politics (at the anti-intellectual end I'm not sure how many armchair Trumpian thinkers there are, but I guess there are a lot of armchair Trumpian fans). I think this is quite a natural feature in politics, though I agree it would be great if more of those people actively did stuff, especially at local levels.
I think Ds are least likely to take the Senate out of the three government branches: I find it hard to see an outcome where there's a Democratic senate but no Democrat in the White House. I'm not sure how much use they'd get form the trifecta, but there are definitely some interesting moves that could be pulled (beyond the standard things like judicial appointments and wading back into healthcare fights, Puerto Rican statehood is a really big one to watch out for).
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Ok, wow, in Canada I hear more often talk about how the the Greens and NDP could agree to a "we sponsor your candidate in one riding if you sponsor ours in another" deal to avoid splitting the "anything but Conservative" and "anything but the Janus Party (one face red, one face blue)" vote.
Because of the USA's badly designed electoral system, the unpredictable races for senate are in different places than the unpredictable races for president. I would not be shocked if someone dies at an inconvenient time, or responds to the current crises in a way which voters really really like.
I notice that Nate Silver is not touching the coming US presidential election with a pole the length of the total heights of players in an average National Basketball Association team. If he wants to study liver omens, monstrous births, or bird signs, Austria has free tuition ...
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I have trouble following what Maciej Ceglowski is doing, he has moved to sites and places which give me a headache and starts and stops different projects, but he has posted a post mortem on his attempt to get 13 "progressive" Democrats elected in 2018 https://idlewords.com/great_slate_post_mortem.htm On birdsite, he writes (https://mobile.twitter.com/Pinboard/status/1279096764084051969?p=v):
"The left is getting more sophisticated at winning campaigns" *against Democrats*. That part is really important and always left unsaid in these fantasies of progressive success. Our track record in contested races is abysmal. The progressive left tried to run against Republicans in 2018 and failed, but they did well in intra-party primaries. So the goalposts and definitions of success have been moved. Now the task is to seize power within the caucus.
None of this advances the goal of winning elections. States containing 17% of American voters—most of them white and rural—are a Senate majority. This is a great injustice and an indictment of American democracy, but to fix that broken system, we need to win by its rules. That means re-learning to get votes in rural America. Those votes are available, because people's livelihoods have been looted by corporate multinationals, health care has disappeared into the cities, schools are deteriorating and you can't even buy fresh local produce in farm states. But we need to go out and pursue them.
I think of this as a form of atrophy. Progressives have ideas that would connect well with rural voters if properly expressed, but they've forgotten how to. Capturing the leadership of the geriatric, corrupt, ideologically bankrupt Democratic party from within is an easier project. But it's not going to teach progressives to actually speak persuasively to rural America. It will just entomb us in our parochialism convey those ideas in language and policy that isn't coded for a small college-educated elite with weird ideological quirks.
A pressing problem in left politics is that a lot of podcasts, pundits, and blue-state political figures stand to benefit personally from a situation where we are a permanent minority. I'm not saying everyone is cynical about it, but it's hard to act against your own incentives. When you pick people to support, whether you share my flavor of politics or not, make sure you are picking people who are neck-deep in the fight to win against Republicans, not people who are going to see a windfall and fresh book deal if we lose another election.
He has tweeted some things which are misleading though (he says 27% of the US population has a 4-year-degree or more ... but the US government say that 36% have four or more years of tertiary education).
I don't know what happened to his project to organize workers at large US surveillance and digital service companies, he does not talk about it on his real site and when I flipped through his birdsite he has some nasty remarks at people who refuse to behave the way he wants them to behave.
Andrew Gellman says that he could have predicted the 2018 midterm results within a few seats by spring 2019 2017, it was the standard pattern of the president's party losing seats in the midterm as nonpartisan voters try to create 'balance.'
OTOH, Trump got it into the space between his ears that a president will win re-election if the stock markets are high and unemployment is low on election day, and look what that got his country.
Edit: Aha! "Tech Solidarity is a 501(c)4 grass-roots organization with the motto "technology serves people". It represents a failed attempt in the period 2016-2018 to organize tech workers around an ethical agenda.
In 2018, Tech Solidarity promoted a Great Slate of Congressional candidates running in districts across America, helping to raise over $5M for progressive candidates. " https://techsolidarity.org/
I am just really confused and distressed because people drop off the real web without explaining why or where they have gone. And Maciej's security advice written in the imperial we breaks more of my red lines than Nixon's China policy the Czech Legion.
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I think the biggest problem with reaching rural America for the left isn't a lack of clarity on policy, it's a media landscape and resulting social conservatism that's hard for the left to counteract effectively. I think the above quote is right that it's possible to reach rural Americans, on the grounds that they stand to heavily benefit from well targeted left wing policies, but it smacks a bit of one of the common left-wing flaws which is to assume that the economic argument would be sufficient if only you were using the right words to say it.
The fact is that groups like churches are immensely powerful in rural America, in part because they're the only functioning centres of community, the only groups through which worse off people can access services, etc. And the media landscape is overwhelmingly, pulverisingly right-wing. Overturning those advantages doesn't, I think, just require talking to people differently, and nor does it require the "blue dog" strategy of accepting it and trying to run as left wing social authoritarians. What it really needs is a restructuring of the rural social landscape either along more liberal-communitarian or social-labour driven lines, or both. (I think those in my head are two separate modes/structures, the former being "more village level organisation, societies, mutual aid groups, cooperatively run businesses", whereas the latter is more strictly organised labour). And it needs a major breaking and restructuring of the media model, and it probably needs twenty years to bed in because social beliefs are sticky and don't actually just transmute easily to the situation around them.
It is a difficult, multi-stage process: in parts of the UK the Lib Dems got quite good at step 1 (embed in communities effectively and address local concerns) and then screwed up on the important later step of "actually use that process to show your values and bring the community with you", which is partly why we crumpled so badly in the past decade.
I'd really like to see more polling on the Maine, Iowa, and Montana senate races, which collectively are the ones most likely to decide the upper chamber. Arizona and Colorado look likely pickups for the Democrats, North Carolina looks tight, and Alabama we can assume will be a loss, so Democrats I think need two out of Maine, Iowa, NC, and Montana, assuming they win the presidency. More would obviously be ideal as that lessens the chance of four years of Dems going "we tried to do a good thing but Joe Manchin said we couldn't".
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I am in no position to tell US persons what they should be doing politically (beyond "secret police disappearing people into unmarked vehicles is bad m'kay?"), but i think that one consequence of the collapse of local and international news is that it lets national news get phonier and more divisive. If a paper reports on local news, savvy people notice that the newspaper's view on their landlord or the business down the street is not their view, or hear their friends' take on something they saw versus the reporter's take. They have independent evidence, from sources whose reliability they can test, about some aspects of its coverage.
Its much harder to do that for things happening in a distant capital city or another country you never visited and don't know anyone from.
Edit: I don't want to romanticize the Canadian journalism of the 1990s and 2000s which I grew up on, but I am scared at the breakdown of consensus about basic facts.
I also wonder if they have the effect we see in Canada where each individual election of a representative is really a plebescite about who should be chief executive, so all that campaigning and local advertising and speaking to local issues is wasted. That can be really demoralizing to candidates.
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I think part of that is community delocalisation as much as other things - in an increasingly urbanised and mobile society, people's community networks are less likely to be localised on their own settlement or area/district. Even if I had good local news here in Josefstadt, or indeed was able/had the time to translate the monthly or so newsletters the district puts in my letterbox, I'd struggle for secondary checking because I'm simply not integrated enough into this community to know about its issues and businesses and so on. I think that's probably a general tendency to some extent, though obviously as a migrant I'm a more extreme example. But e.g. the sort of village I grew up in, in East Anglia, is increasingly quite a dormitory-village setup for many people there, or it's somewhere well heeled people want to raise their kids quietly, and in either case engagement with the locality is increasingly a matter for the older residents only: most people don't spend enough time there or are sufficiently isolated that they don't have strong investment in the place. I don't actually think all of that is necessarily bad - I think it might be inevitable - but I think we need other sources and networks of community and news if localities are going to become less important.
I feel like Facebook use is starting to drop off a bit among some of my friendship circles in recent years, possibly from sheer fatigue, so maybe we'll see a readjustment to more localised modes of operation in the 2020s as there's more of an "unplug" movement (which in itself will have its downsides by leaving people who need the internet as a social tool more isolated, but I think it might happen).
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Jubal, I find it just does not physically work: there is no way for me to understand personal politics unless I know everyone involved personally face-to-face or have trusted friends who know everyone involved face to face. One of the reason I find Americans writing opinion pieces and on social media so tiring is that they demand that people have opinions and agree with their opinions on all kinds of personal-politics and celebrity-gossip stuff, but never put in a spot of effort to understand situations in other countries.
Edit: There have been times where I had a bad feeling about some people and kept them at a distance, and later I learned about who was bedding whom, groping whom, and paying whom behind the scenes, but "I have a bad feeling about them" is not very concrete and its not enough when you are in charge of a community and have to resolve a dispute.
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So, Kamala Harris, the choice so obvious everyone spent months trying to consider other options because she was too obvious, is Biden's Vice-Presidential nominee. I suspect this changes basically nothing about the election.
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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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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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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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Canadian nation-builders idolize figures like John A. MacDonald (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_A._Macdonald), Nellie McClung (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nellie_McClung), or Terry Fox (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/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.
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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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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.
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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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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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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 (https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Dominionism) 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.
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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.
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Caitlyn Johnstone (http://"https://medium.com/@caityjohnstone/us-politics-isnt-polarized-it-s-in-almost-universal-agreement-dec5ad6d20b7") 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.
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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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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.
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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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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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I would say that a 51 to 48%, high-turnout election where one candidate is a generic older politician and the other is a pathological liar and narcissist with a history of fraud and failed businesses who just spent 4 years governing according to his nature is pretty sanginuary close! Especially if he hints on live TV that he will ignore the results if he loses and toys with private militias engaged in political violence. I do not know where the United States goes from here, after Sulla comes Marius and Caesar.
The most common interpretation of the 2016 US federal election across different political perspectives focused on individuals and circumstances: "there was an anti-establishment mood, and one big party's candidate had some weaknesses facing the other big party's candidate." That interpretation has been falsified.
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I hate to be impartial but I was surprised at how happy I felt about the result.
Apparently both candidates were the two most voted for US candidates in history, which is commendable.
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It will in fairness probably not be 51-48: that's still probably got some widening to do.
But yes, "close" of course is relative, and it's simultaneously, I think, valid to say "this should never have been within ten points, one candidate was essentially a proto-fascist and we should be scared of the fact that so many millions voted for him", and also valid to say "this is the first time an incumbent president has been unseated in nearly thirty years, by a chunky margin both of popular and electoral votes, and despite overall good economic performance in the last half decade, and as such represents a notable electoral achievement for the challengers". Both of those takes are true.
I don't think we'll be able to get good theses on what drove politics in the Trump era on the Republican side until we have some more elections without Trump at the helm. I genuinely don't know to what extent Trump's particular coalition of voters holds together without him, or how internally fractious the GOP will get now. And I don't think we'll have much chance of understanding 2016 and 2020 until we see that because the "how much of Trump's support is specific to Trump" question is still an unanswered behemoth.
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I thought they were more or less done counting? Apparently the USA has nothing like Elections Canada and its provincial equivalents so the poor chaps have to rely on news agencies (sigh) deciding who is ahead enough that they will probably win.
Any idea why Naomi Klein (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/nov/08/joe-biden-risky-candidate-us-election) is still writing conspiratorial things like "even if the Democratic party base was much more politically aligned with Bernie Sanders, or Elizabeth Warren, in their support for Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, for racial justice, the party was sure that Bernie Sanders was too risky. And so, as we all remember, they banded together and gave us Biden."? My impression is that Biden won the internal party election for candidacy fair and square, and that one reason for that is that Sanders appeals to educated Democrats in big cities and young people but is not so popular with other demographics. And Ceglowski seems to be saying that this time he picked new candidates, raised as much money as he thought they could usefully spend, and saw the vast majority lose- so he tried people pushing old-school early 20th century social democratic policies and they still lost.
I hate that political speech is so dishonest and such epistemological cotton candy and drives otherwise rational and evidence-based people mad.
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Oh, no, they won't be done counting for a fortnight or so yet - largely this is due to some late arriving ballots in a lot of states, either mail-ins that were postmarked but not recieved by election day, or some states have a late window for overseas votes, and then there's the US practice of provisional ballots, where voters who can't prove their identity or right to vote can cast a ballot provisionally and then have a week or two to supply the state with the relevant data to make their ballot allowable. This slow process is partly why the practice of "calling" races where the count isn't actually finished happens - once the result is obvious, people want to know it rather than waiting days for the last 5% of the votes when those aren't enough to change the result anyway. So even now we know most of the results (but by no means all), we will be getting ballots coming in for ages yet, and most of those later/provisional ballots historically lean Democrat, since Republican voters tend to be older and more middle-class and go and vote on election day. Nate Silver said recently that he thinks Biden's current vote lead over Trump could shift up from 4% to 5% or even 6% by the time all the results are finally certified.
I can see some advantages in the US' system here - it is both very secure and has a lot of features like provisional balloting to allow reasonable turnout despite that - but personally I'd probably reduce the excessive security measures, make election day a holiday, and set an earlier mail-in deadline to keep turnout high and count faster. That said I'm relatively relaxed about voter fraud because the rate of it is utterly minuscule and relatively concerned about voter suppression which I think is a big deal, and clearly a lot of Americans don't share my priorities there.
The Sanders base seems to have a big "Sanders was cheated" mentality, which has unfortunately included some of them amplifying Trumpian type accusations (like that he's senile, which he very clearly is not). There also seems to be a strong conspiracy theory that the DNC somehow forced or paid off Elizabeth Warren to run in order to split Sanders' vote. It is true of course that after the South Carolina primary all the moderates in the race jumped behind Biden and propelled him rapidly to victory, but, well, that's politics. It shouldn't be a surprise or a sign of anything untoward if a Buttigeig or a Klobuchar gets behind a Biden-type candidate, that's just logical in the Democrats' system. So yeah, I don't know Klein specifically but this seems very much in tune with Sanders-hardliner discourse.
The other thing about Sanders which his biggest fans haven't faced is that he did much worse against Biden than against Clinton with white working-class Democrats, so he wasn't able to repeat e.g. winning Michigan's primary this year. I'm not sure what this tells us - partly I suspect that Biden as a middle-class man from Scranton has a reasonably good appeal shot across the midwest, partly that Sanders probably benefited from sexism among voters in 2016.
Do you have a link to the Ceglowski piece mentioned?
One good story in local races was that this was a really good election for some minority groups. LGBT candidates got elected in record numbers (largely as Democrats at state level), including the US' first trans woman to become a state senator (in New Hampshire), and the US' first non-binary person to get elected office (in Oklahoma). There are also now six Native Americans in congress, oddly enough half of them are Republicans which is curious considering the hugely Democrat lean of Native Americans generally. Indeed Biden's probable win in Arizona will almost certainly be lower than the margin of victory he had among Navajo voters there, some of whom reportedly rode ten miles on horseback in order to cast their votes.
Relatedly, I noticed that there were two states in which no counties went for Biden (Oklahoma, West Virginia) and three where no counties went for Trump (Rhode Island, Hawaii, Massachusetts). I'd actually expected some of the plains states to be block red as they are some of the reddest states, but just about all of them have at least one Native American dominated county and those are pretty much always solid blue.
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Do you have a link to the Ceglowski piece mentioned?
He seems to be mostly posting on twitter and his mailing list for potential donors. Its a little weird, towards the end of the campaign he was alternatively begging for money and musing whether any of it matters or it is just a donation to Google and Facebook with the various parties and campaigns as an intermediary. The most sense I could make of his twitter posts was "donations to underfunded candidates matter, because they know how to reach voters where they are and get them to the polls where they will tend to vote a party ticket, donations to big political advocacy groups and parties and presidential campaigns will just be eaten by parasites."
I liked when he was writing essays and talks better because it was easier to tell the serious thought apart from the blowing steam and the killing time. It was valuable to hear from someone who is actually engaged in the US political process, not just writing and talking and feeling about it, but I'm not willing to distill it out of his twitter feed.
Edit: And yes, my impression from outside the country and the party was that people in smoke-filled rooms wanted Hillary Clinton to be the Democrats' candidate for president in 2016 and were upset to get such a fight from Saunders, but 2016 is not 2020, this year there were many candidates for candidate and the party seemed divided behind different ones, as far as I can tell from outside the country.
Wikipedia gives 46% Trump, 48% Clinton in 2016 which is about what I remembered. So we're talking about a shift in vote share of 1-2% which is probably about what we would see if the election were two days earlier or two days later or the weather was different on election day.
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Even in 2016, the simple fact is that Sanders couldn't actually have won without far better support from some key demographics within the Democrats.
I have some sympathy with the thesis that donations to underfunded down-ballot candidates can matter, though I don't think it's very applicable outside the US for the most part as parties both raise and spend less in most places. I wonder if I should write more posts on my blog - I agree that twitter isn't good for engaging in any sort of serious thought, and I probably use it too much.
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Even in 2016, the simple fact is that Sanders couldn't actually have won without far better support from some key demographics within the Democrats.
I have some sympathy with the thesis that donations to underfunded down-ballot candidates can matter, though I don't think it's very applicable outside the US for the most part as parties both raise and spend less in most places. I wonder if I should write more posts on my blog - I agree that twitter isn't good for engaging in any sort of serious thought, and I probably use it too much.
It may be more important in the USA than in many countries because of all the factors that make it harder for workers, poorer people, and urban people to vote. If voting day is a holiday (like in Australia) or you can vote pretty much anywhere with a cheap common kind of ID, or voting is just checking a box on a scrap of paper and dropping it in a box (like in Canada) turnout is probably more evenly distributed across the population. The way Ceglowski describes it, many of his candidates have to ask people to go out in the dark and the freezing cold after a shift at a meat packing plant to cast their ballot, or reach people with a high-school education who are really really interested in antitrust in the beef industry or some other topic that the New York Times might talk about once in five years.
Now that he has more or less won, apparently the Joe Biden team has explained that when he said he would be a "transitional president" to make room for new blood, that did not mean that he would not run again in 2024 at the age of 82. After three years in the hot seat he may have changed his mind.
The single biggest thing that saved American democracy these past four years is that the current president is too lazy to want to be a Duerte, a Bolsonaro, an Erdoğan, a Putin, or a Xi. As Tacitus would have put it, he is not capax imperii. His secret dream seems to be a mafia boss and he was happy to pretend to be a wheeler and dealer on TV, and he'd rather humiliate capable subordinates than build a team of people who can all do something better than him (Xenophon, Sallust, and Ada Palmer could all explain in short words why that is a terrible idea). The reason the people with political science training are talking about norm-breaking is that a lot of things in society work because people don't think they can get away with breaking them. It is easier to banish a habit of thought than a piece of knowledge: a lot of ambitious disciplined awful people are going to keep trying to pull the same levers he pulled, and there is no way to know whether any will work. This election did not hurt the Republican party much (having the presidency was nice but Trump was not a team player and they got their Supreme Court justices).
Assuming they get the current president out of the White House on 20 January, I expect a Biden / Harris administration will make most Americans' lives slightly better, but in the longer term I honestly do not know where the United States can go. This is a very very bad situation and I honestly can't see any parallels that ended well.
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It's nice to see Trump reacting to the election loss with his characteristic grace and humility.
Huehue.
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@Dubs: I think it's not just the factors you mention re difficulty to vote but also far far more downballot races over much wider areas and a more money and less manpower dependent system. In most UK seats, when we campaign, on election day there will indeed be no campaigning in a downballot council race, but that's because we've moved the candidate and everyone they've got to a target constituency. Within a given 40,000 to 60,000 person parliamentary constituency there simply isn't the space for downballot candidates to be organising that separately to the top-banner race, and we don't have many geographically wider races to fight most of the time.
And yes, I feel like the current Trump supporters' flailing about will subside, but I guess we'll see.
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My summary of Ceglowski's posts has an implicit "for federal politics in the United States" attached. For the past few years he only talks about US and Hong Kong politics, but unlike most of the talky universitied people who do that he actually visits Hong Kong and works to get people elected in the United States. Before that he was trying to organize workers at US ad and personal information companies.
His essays / talks were useful for self-governing people everywhere, but his political actions are just academic for those of us outside those two countries.
And yes, I feel like the current Trump supporters' flailing about will subside, but I guess we'll see.
It hurts me to talk and think about this or to try to explain, because I have a unique background, but I will try one more time to give my model.
There are the millions of coloured hat types who are edging each other on to commit mass violence for white male supremacy (authoritarian followers). There are the useful idiots who will apologize for whatever a Republican president does like Victor Davis Hanson. But then there are a whole crowd of clever, dilligent, terrible people like Gina Haspell who are saying to themselves "we can go harder-core on the authoritarianism than we did under Bush II, we don't need to dog-whistle and observe the proprieties like only murdering and torturing people in distant countries." These people don't give a hog's turd for Trump or Trumpism, other than that he is a halfway effective authoritarian leader. And these are the really dangerous ones, because the US state is very good at resisting physical violence (just look at how the domestic terrorism of the 1970s faded away), but so far it is not very effective at resisting fascism from within.
The authoritarian followers can bludgeon, shoot, or drive over one or two people at a time as they have since the 2016 US election and this is terrible and tragic. It is the wannabe authoritarian leaders and office-holders who can build the re-education camps and turn that tragedy into a statistic. Americans are very very lucky that Trump was not interested in picking the useful Berias and Goebels out of the crowd of ruthless, greedy, incompetent people who flocked around him in 2016 and 2017.
I am very sorry and it hurts me to talk about this.
Talking about "Trump supporters" is a superficial journalistic way of thinking about problems which are really structural. David 'Orcinus (https://dneiwert.blogspot.com/)' Neiwert noticed that the hate crimes and embrace of madness by elected officials and professional sharers-of-opinions increased in 2008 after Obama's election. The kidnappings, murders, and tortures by federal agencies began in the first administration of Bush Minor. The deranged online commentators who we talk about this year are just continuing the work bringing increasingly radical ideas together and sharing them which Fox News, bookstores, and radio shows did in the late 20th century and the 2000s. The conservative movement in the United States has been heading in this direction for at least 40 years, its part of a global network including other national governments and powerful parties, and it won't stop until its publicly humiliated or until the patient sociopath wing decides that the impulsive showmen are no longer useful tools. Hofstadter's "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" came out in 1964 right?
And in response to all the dehumanizing language from conservatives, many people who see themselves as liberals or progressives have embraced authoritarianism and started using dehumanizing language. Anyone who says "inevitable" is selling something, but once you descend this many steps into the Pit of Civil Strife its hard to turn around and climb back out.
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Firstly - if it's painful for you to talk about a particular issue, you honestly shouldn't feel obliged to do so. Especially at the moment, looking after yourself should come first and above dealing with the relatively inconsequential back and forth we have here!
I do see where your model is coming from - I think you're talking about a different specific issue within US politics to the one I'm addressing though. When I discuss the current issues of Trump supporters, I am using that term in a specific and limited sense. It's not superficial or journalistic to say Trump supporters when that's what one means, and nor I think is it pointless to address the specific social dynamics of that sub-movement. This is for a number of reasons: one is that how those dynamics play out and how die-hard Trump supporters as a voting block shift with the change in status of their current personality cult leader actually could have very real impacts on the future of the GOP and the strength of different forces within it. As you say, there are also real physical dangers of violence, and one shouldn't discount those, even if recognising that their impact may tend to be more individual than structural. Nonetheless I think there are structural issues, or at least sociological ones that intersect and interact with the structures proper, in how hardline authoritarian followers react to changes of circumstance and situation. Those often volatile dynamics are important to how the authoritarian leaders are able to take hold and gain and retain power within their movements. When I discuss Trump supporters, this is where I'm coming from - not to say that this is somehow the core problem, but that it's a specific current dynamic of how encroaching authoritarianism is developing and that one should have an eye on it.
Your point, if I understand it rightly, is more to say that this is a smaller problem when it comes to the prospect of encroaching fascism than a) the structuralisation and normalisation of authoritarianism both in the GOP and wider society across the last four decades and b) the presence of more skilled proto-authoritarians who would have the capacity to do far more damage in a smarter hard right government. I agree with both of those things, they just weren't what I was writing about when discussing Trump supporters. Discussing and examining the micro-dynamic of particular movements should be a building block in understanding the wider system - and indeed I'm sceptical of the idea that one can paint really long term pictures of social system developments without considering the blocks that make up the system and how the system would have reacted if things were different. I agree with you that a major problem of journalism is often that it treats these as the core and end point of the issue rather than part of wider and longer term changes and dynamics, but I am not sure it's fair to stipulate the reverse. Or, all people who take superficial takes on how Trumpism works will write about "Trump supporters" as a core issue, but the reverse case that people writing about Trump supporters as a block are necessarily taking a superficial view of the system doesn't necessarily stand I think.
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Thank you Jubal! I find I often misunderstand people right now (and vice versa). It comes with the neurodiversity.
I am sorry if the last paragraph of my previous post was offensive. I am scared for my American friends, and because I live in the only one of the six largest countries which is not governed by an authoritarian strongman.
I feel like there is a short-term issue of militias plotting to behead their state governor and senators who won't admit that Biden got a clear majority of electoral votes, and the long-term embrace of violent hate by so many in the United States. I think that political violence in the United States will probably decline over the next six months, but I'm not sure about the next six years.
One speculation I have seen is that if Trump is alive and out of prison in 2023, he will try to become the Republican presidential candidate again. If not, it will be someone else who does not see women, brown people, the propertyless, or foreigners as people.
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Has there actually been any violence yet regarding the election results?
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Has there actually been any violence yet regarding the election results?
My understanding is that there have been a few dead a week since at least November 2016. There have been a lot of murder and rape threats, plots to kidnap government officials or seize houses of government, and a lot of threatening with weapons (oh, and the Canadian who is charged with mailing ricin-laced packages to the president (https://exilian.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=6093.45) and other elected officials, and of course trying to block post office service and ban measures to control the pandemic which are very violent if your proscription arrives late, you lose your job, or you get a bad case of COVID from someone who could not be compelled to wear a mask in public).
Edit: When the governor of Florida had police raid the home of a data scientist (Rebekah Jones) at gunpoint at 8:30 am on 7 December because she criticizes his handling of the pandemic and the numbers public health officials under his authority release, that is partisan and violent (allegedly, she logged in to a public address system which she should have been denied access to after she was fired, but it had a single username and password so the only evidence is an IP address). Its much less violence than some people expected, but someone armed demanding that you hand over your property is violence.
I don't know who could say whether there has been an increase in the past month, maybe the Southern Poverty Law Centre. Trying to separate out tactical partisan violence, various COVID and Q-Anon conspiracy theories, and white supremacist violence feels a bit academic. Was the guy who burst into a pizza joint with a rifle because he believed it had a Democratic party child rape dungeon in the nonexistent basement conspiratorial, partisan, or misogynist? Por qué no los dos?
For the last month I saw Americans obsessed that Trump might try to steal the election or organize a coup, and since the middle of November that strikes me as more "weather" than "climate" (its not a zero chance, and the Republican party has not disowned his claims to have won, but I don't see signs that the military or the courts would support him). So far the people who feared street fighting after the election have been pleasantly surprised.
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Yes, if one restricts election violence to "people having gunfights over ballot issues" then that's essentially been avoided (though I think dubs is correct to note that it's pretty hard to disentangle motives for other sort of violence). But there's certainly been a lot of intimidation. One Pennsylvania Republican literally said recently when asked about backing an effort to overturn that state's results that "If I would say to you, 'I don't want to do it,' I'd get my house bombed tonight.". (Source: https://www.businessinsider.com/pennsylvania-gop-leader-worries-house-would-be-bombed-trump-election-2020-12?r=DE&IR=T )
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On 17 December, former Lt. General and former national security advisor Michael Flynn suggested in a meeting with the outgoing administration that the 45th US president should deploy military forces and "re-run" the election in swing states. Apparently he went on a TV show called Newsmax and said the same thing as a 'purely hypothetical statement': "He could order, within the swing states, if he wanted to he could take military capabilities and he could place them in those states and basically re-run an election in each of those states. It’s not unprecedented. These people out there, talking about martial law like it’s something we’ve never done. Martial law has been instituted 64 times. I’m not calling for that. We clearly have a constitutional process. That has to be followed."
Whatever happens to the cabal of thugs and grifters who were in the White House from 2017 to 2020, all the people who are open to organizing a coup but not sure if they can pull it off are not going away (traditionally they spent a few years giving talks in Canada or the UK or in business and 'consulting' and working for think tanks before they try to move back in to US national politics). Nor are the armed militias and the people trying to turn police and paramilitary forces into white supremacist death squads. Anyone who says "inevitable" is selling something, but this is a very bad situation for people in the United States and it is not going away soon.
Edit: see eg. David Frum, who worked to align the Republican party and the Conservative movement behind invading Iraq, who was quiet for a few years, then started giving talks at universities and foundations across Canada, and then tried to brand himself as a "Republican against Trump." Or Gina Haspell the torturer of prisoners and burner of records who left the CIA for a while then was reappointed to a high office. Very wealthy and well-connected people in the United States look out for each other and make sure that nothing is more than a brief setback.
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Oh I don't think it's just wealthy and well connected people in the US who do that.
TBH part of me would welcome some attempt at armed revolt by these "militia" groups, I imagine the reality of fighting against the world's most well funded military would probably cool their ardour rather swiftly. But I do hope these lunatics keep their tin foil hats on and stick to just playing soldiers.
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Oh I don't think it's just wealthy and well connected people in the US who do that.
The way I have heard it is that if you 'just' have a household income of a few hundred k a year in the United States, you can still be ruined if someone in your household has a medical crisis or becomes a person of interest to the security state. There is a level above that where people in the United States are more or less invulnerable. One big difference between the United States and most rich countries is that life for the wealthy and well-connected still has these two kinds of big risk.
Most countries have wingnut welfare and ways to shuffle people who provided a service into an easy, well-paid job, but not such a direct cycle from disastrous time in government to sinecure back into government.