US Politics 2023

[Jubal]

And here we go again: a new year, and one without a major election round in.

...which it turns out doesn't mean a lack of drama, as Kevin McCarthy is on track to be the first lead party candidate for Speaker of the House to fail to get elected on the first ballot since 1923. Seven Republicans have voted for Andy Biggs, an extreme Conservative candidate, and a few for Ohio representative and close Trump ally Jim Jordan: McCarthy could only afford to lose four, and it's possible the Democrat candidate (Hakeem Jefferies) will get more votes than he does. Jefferies still won't get to be speaker as the speaker has to be elected by a majority, not by plurality, but it's still a heck of an embarrassment.

[dubsartur]

Umair Haque writes like a prophet not a scientist, but I think he is right on this one: the current generation of radical rightists in the USA and UK don't want to govern, they want to hurt and humiliate people while grabbing money and attention with both hands.  They believe they win as long as government does not function and does not help people.

Until the 19th century the functions of post-Roman kingdoms (and kingdom-like cities such as Venice) were basically negative or destructive: fight enemies, punish lawbreakers, enforce enough standards that foreign traders can do business.  A lot of rightists are nostalgic for that.

Someone told me that he was more scared of Canadian Conservatives than American Republicans because our Tories are still reasonably competent at making plans and using the power of the state to implement them.  American Republicans have trouble with much more than spasmodic actions like raising a tarriff or throwing kids in cages or deciding which girls get to play on the girls' sports team.

Another thing he says in the voice of a prophet is everything the far right touches dies.  The far right is more than touching the Republican Party and the US Congress.

Edit: Duerte, Bolsonaro, the last few UK PMs, Trump - have they even tried to govern in a conventional way, or just hurt and humiliate people, break things, steal things, and hand money out to their supporters?  Radical rightists have been saying that they want to break the helping state for 40 years and now they think they can do it.

Isn't Musk removing or firing the parts of Twitter he does not find useful similar to the British Tories proposing to throw out swathes of EU-influenced law and worry about what will replace them or what other laws depend on them later?  And exactly the opposite of old school 19th century Conservativism with G.K. Chesterton's Fence?  The modern conservative movement is not about stability and resisting change, its about destruction and radical change in pursuit of an imagined past and a full wallet.

[Jubal]

So the GOP took fifteen ballots to elect McCarthy as speaker. We'll see how that bodes for the next year or two. The consensus I'm seeing is that his concession on allowing only one member to call a no-confidence probably isn't very meaningful, but him agreeing to include a block of three hardcore far-conservatives on the house rules committee probably is very meaningful especially when it comes to trying to pass financial bills.


I wish there was more readable stuff out there (maybe there is but I've not seen much of it) thinking clearly about the ideological divisions within moden anglosphere Conservatism. The Randian ultra-individualist who believes in the primacy of the isolated genius as the sole mechanism of human progress, the Patrician who wants conservatives to be the voice of institutional wealth, the Nationalist who is primarily in politics to strengthen the state's social penetration but doesn't much care about its post-New Liberal care functions... these are all quite different strands that mix into modern movements on the right, even if I find all of them awful and think they're essentially all engaged in paving the road that leads away from democracy and a generous society.

[dubsartur]

I have seen a fair bit of that analysis on Canada, but I also think its important not to take political theorizing and especially theories on the right too seriously.  Even more than political speech, political theories are usually rationalizations - particularly on the right, where people want terrible things and make up reasons why that might be good after all. Its not meant to describe the world, and its not necessarily meant to persuade others.   

Edit: Back when there were communists, they had lots of airy theorizing too, but the authoritarian left and the authoritarian right have a lot in common.  My impression is that the more decent parts of Canadian Conservatism don't have a lot of convoluted theories - rhetoric yes but not as many theories as a Right Libertarian or a tankie.  I think analysis of factions and their goals is more useful than analysis of theory.

Do BoJo, Erdogan, Putin, Orban, Bolsonaro, etc. believe in anything but themselves and their own pleasure?

And the people who verbalize the most tend to do the least.

[Jubal]

I think I'd distinguish ideology, something I think everyone has and most people are pretty idiosyncratic about, from theory in the sense of ideological positions formally set down on paper by a philosopher or thinker or journalist or whoever. Even technocrats and corrupt dictators aren't free of sets of ideological ideas that govern what they think is good, where the edges of their moral circle lie, and so on. "Screw you, Jack, I got mine" isn't really a piece of theory but it can be a pretty key ideological position for some sorts of people. If the number of people who agree with Rand's core ideological positions was limited to those who've bothered to read Atlas Shrugged, US politics would be a better place.

So I agree with you regarding theory, but I think there's interesting ideological analysis to do: for politicians especially, you can look at revealed preferences through their actions and the actions of people in their close political networks, rather than focusing on what people say. I do think it's a it too easy to push the boat out too far on the idea that expressed ideologies are all just post-hoc rationalisations though: it's easier for people to understand their opponents being venal or unthinking than understand them having a completely different social-moral framework, and I worry we end up going for the former understandings too quickly. Which isn't to say we should spend much time thinking about conservative theory, because I fail to see much evidence that conservatives read much of it. But it's useful from a political perspective to think about the tensions and divisions within conservatism, if one wants (as I do) a world with a much weaker set of conservative movements, and I think that requires some understanding of the constellation of preferences and ideals that they have.

As for the dictators - certainly Putin and his regime are extremely ideological, and I'd say that's true of Erdogan as well. A rational and simply corrupt Russian regime would never have invaded Ukraine and would never have made so many of the miscalculations on the way, a ton of which were based on an assumed ideology-narrative about Ukrainians being a rustic subject people who would meekly lay down their independence in the face of liberation by the mother country. Erdogan has by all accounts a similar imperialist/neo-Ottomanist view of Turkey's eastern neighbours.

[Jubal]

DeSantis is in, and appears to be testing the "can Elon Musk win elections" thesis, which I'm pretty sure the answer to is "no". He's still the... third most likely person to be the next POTUS? Maybe fourth if one takes into account the chance that it's Kamala Harris on account of Biden dying unexpectedly.

(Also in is, like, Tim Scott, but I don't see how he gets seriously into the race)

I've got to say that if I were looking at the state of the race right now, and I were a Trumpist, I'd be feeling pretty good. Not "this will be easy" good but it's super super hard to see how anyone catches Trump for the GOP nomination, and he's running more or less level with Biden in actual national polls. His unfavourable rating is mildly better than Biden's job approval (though both quite negative) and the highest quality polls are tending to show the GOP up one or two points in the generic ballot, which you'd guess would be enough to hold the house. Chances are the GOP will take the Senate given the god-awful map there.

That said, I think if one wanted to ask what the Democrat upside is, there are some: mostly in that it's hard-ish to see what else goes wrong for them from now on. Inflation is now dropping, most notably. Also the pandemic looks like it's genuinely in a reduced state internationally, from what evidence is available, and Russia is unlikely to make serious advances in Ukraine in the near future (though American voters generally don't care much about foreign policy unless they're being drafted for it). If they hit a relatively good economy year for 2024 then it might make enough difference to haul Biden out of trouble and perhaps even re-take the house. I think the Senate's probably gone unless it turns into at least a D+5 or better year though.

[dubsartur]

That said, I think if one wanted to ask what the Democrat upside is, there are some: mostly in that it's hard-ish to see what else goes wrong for them from now on. Inflation is now dropping, most notably. Also the pandemic looks like it's genuinely in a reduced state internationally, from what evidence is available, and Russia is unlikely to make serious advances in Ukraine in the near future (though American voters generally don't care much about foreign policy unless they're being drafted for it). If they hit a relatively good economy year for 2024 then it might make enough difference to haul Biden out of trouble and perhaps even re-take the house. I think the Senate's probably gone unless it turns into at least a D+5 or better year though.

COVID is really bad in the United States because of their disastrous bipartisan turn to "stop talking about it and hope it goes away" in 2021.  They didn't get enough people vaxed and boostered for a "vaccinate and let it rip" strategy to kind of sort of work.  In places like San Francisco the viral load in sewage keeps rising rather than staying level or gradually declining.

In one Canadian province which transitioned from a "public health" strategy to a let-it-rip strategy, deaths increased more from 2021 to 2022 than they have since they started tracking deaths, even in the World Wars and the Spanish Flue https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new-brunswick/record-covid-deaths-heart-stroke-1.6847211  So I think a lot of systems in the USA are slowly breaking and that will lead to generalized discontent (in the two Canadian provinces I know best, this is most obvious in the health care system which has to deal with short staffing and a lot of sickness, heart attacks, strokes, and other conditions which get more common after multiple COVID infections, but things like eg. the supply of bread to grocers have not worked right since March 2020).

The other big question is whether anyone will have the moral courage to charge Trump with any of his many crimes that would disqualify him for president (or at least put him behind bars during primary season).

People who have looked at China's COVID stats since they let it rip trust them about as much as Putin's COVID stats in 2020.  So its possible that there are big disruptions in Chinese factories in 2023 or 2024.  Naomi Wu says that Chinese housing is terrible for controlling airborne infections, air (and sewage-laden air) flows between units and many people live in very crowded spaces so its not possible to give an infected person their own room with an air filter and a window.

Edit: another possibility is that the Republicans refuse to raise the debt ceiling and the Biden administration does not use one of the many workarounds eg. depositing a giant trillion-dollar coin in the treasury.  The Economist, bless their hearts, have convinced themselves that the coin might not be "intellectually credible" or "legitimate" whereas this annual drama totally is.  That would set off a global financial crisis but there are many crazy destructive Republicans and many feckless Democrats sure that the way something was done in 1970 is a sacred norm.  And its not clear who voters would blame.

[Jubal]

Yeah, I think in the case of default then all bets are off essentially, the damage would be very large indeed.

[Jubal]

The debt ceiling is temporarily solved, everyone has awful approval ratings (I'm kind of surprised there wasn't any bounce for Biden for what was largely fairly deft handling of averting the crisis), and everyone wants to be the GOP nominee which means Trump gets more likely to win the nomination, I think. It sounds like there's a possibility of Trump just skipping the early debates, which might be a smart play, he's got so big a lead that him not going sucks the oxygen out of the whole event and maybe lets other candidates squabble.

EDIT: Perhaps more interestingly, Kavanaugh and Roberts have prevented the Supreme Court gutting one of the last key provisions of the Voting Rights Act. I'm a bit surprised by the Kavanaugh vote - it'll force Alabama to add a second Black-majority, and thus Democrat, district.

[Jubal]

The debt ceiling keeps being a problem, Kevin McCarthy is out and it's not yet clear who'll replace him though it'll probably be Trumpian hardliner Jim Jordan, Trump and Biden still both have awful approval but will win their nominations easily anyway, and I think Trump is increasingly odds-on to win next year because Biden's approval just cannot seem to recover regardless of events. I've stopped following the GOP nomination race because there's no evidence emerging that it's anything other than a sideshow since the DeSantis campaign flopped.

Also Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, will run as an independent candidate for president. He's an anti-vaccine conspiracist, and as it turns out also an abysmal public speaker. Like, he makes Biden's delivery sound crisp and functional.

It does feel like America is just shuffling forward with no perception into traps of its own making. It's quite worrying given they're the ones with all the bombs and guns and stuff.

[Jubal]

US Elections day for 2023 just happened!

Abortion has been given new protections and weed legalised in Ohio, the Republicans still hold the governorship in Mississippi despite a weak candidate but the Democrat governor of Kentucky held his seat and indeed improved his vote share. Both Virginia legislative chambers are back in Democrat hands, and the party got a slightly better majority on the Pennsylvania supreme court. So a pretty good night on the progressive side - mirroring that they've done really well in special elections in the past year or so.

Buuuuuuut of course these are "off-year" elections with low turnouts, and increasingly Democrats are getting pretty good at those because their voting base is more switched-on, informed, middle class and higher educated than it used to be. But next year's electorate will be bigger, and bigger electorates are not a scaled up version of off-year electorates (something I wish my own party in the UK actually showed an appreciation of).

[dubsartur]

I was told the situation in Ohio was a bit more serious than that since the state legislature had banned abortion after six weeks, a lower court had overturned the ban, and the supreme court was expected to reinstate the ban.

The controversial Democratic senator from West Virginia Joe Manchin has announced that he will not run for re-election in 2024.  He is 76.  Thinky talky Americans outside WV seem to have two takes on him, either they yell about him not being lefty and green enough, or they say "he is probably the leftyest greenest person who could get elected in West Virginia."

[Jubal]

either they yell about him not being lefty and green enough, or they say "he is probably the leftyest greenest person who could get elected in West Virginia."

Both might be true! WV is one of the reddest states in the nation and e.g. anyone wbo doesn't support coal mining is probably politically dead in the water there. But Manchin's assessment of what was political necessity isn't the whole picture: he's probably fiscally significantly more conservative than his (actually on average quite poor) constituents, so either he's quite tied to fiscal conservatism or he has donors who push him that way, or both. And Manchin is small c conservative on procedure issues which the wider electorate tend not to care much about but Manchin clearly does.