World Politics and Elections 2025

[Jubal]

Here we go again.

A much less election heavy year though there are some big ones coming up - for example Germany, Canada, and Australia, all three of which look like good prospects for right wing challengers to centre left governments struggling with cost of living issues.

We'll also likely start seeing the impacts of various 2024 elections more, especially re the course of the new US administration and how that affects the wider world.

[dubsartur]

This essay by Emmet Macfarlane goes over how the Prime Minister (elected by party members) and his apponinted Office have come to marginalize both parliament and the cabinet ministers in Canada https://emmettmacfarlane.substack.com/p/how-canadian-political-parties-select

Parliament has been prorogued until March 24 and an election is likely to be called shortly thereafter.  This will result in a Conservative majority and the Liberals holding just a few seats in big cities and parts of the Maritimes, but how many seats and with whom as leader can still be decided.  To change that outcome Justin Trudeau would have had to resign in summer 2023 and given the widespread anti-incumbent turn (and lukewarm enthusiasm for the Liberals) the Tories would almost certainly have formed the next government anyways.

[Jubal]

Also re Canada, I've seen that former Bank of England governor Mark Carney is running to lead the Liberal Party: it feels like leading a party into a more or less certain electoral defeat seems a pretty thankless task to be running for.

[dubsartur]

Also re Canada, I've seen that former Bank of England governor Mark Carney is running to lead the Liberal Party: it feels like leading a party into a more or less certain electoral defeat seems a pretty thankless task to be running for.

I sure don't understand why anyone would want to be Liberal leader under the circumstances. I think that tossing Trudeau was good for MPs as citizens (he works for them, not vice versa) but the new PM will promptly lose an election then be blamed by the rest of the party.

When a former Conservative staffer was asked to write on how the election could be later than May, he had to start "well, what if the new PM offers the NDP something to vote confidence, and then what if they pass a bill to overrule the Fixed-Term Election Act ..."  Not very plausible.

[dubsartur]

If you don't live in the USA, it can be hard to understand some of the cartoonish corruption there which the Democratic establishment and the civil service often support. It gets tied up with partisan nonsense and yelling at the TV so its hard to know what is real.

Here is the story of how from 2013 to 2016 some jobs as air-traffic controller in the USA were secretly earmarked for people of a specific race https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring  If you want to understand the anti-establishment turn in the North Atlantic, its worth understanding the many aspects of life in 2024 which suck and which establishments show little interest in improving (Congress actually got rid of the mechanism which allowed race-based hiring in 2016 but did not uncover the whole story).

A lot of righties in the USA feel that Old Media cover up stories like this or Biden's health decline.  He always seemed kind of frail to me and back in 2020 he said he would not run a second time due to his age.  And his administration seemed better than average and I care about outputs not whether there is a single Decider at the top or who that Decider is.

[Jubal]

Here is the story of how from 2013 to 2016 some jobs as air-traffic controller in the USA were secretly earmarked for people of a specific race https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring  If you want to understand the anti-establishment turn in the North Atlantic, its worth understanding the many aspects of life in 2024 which suck and which establishments show little interest in improving (Congress actually got rid of the mechanism which allowed race-based hiring in 2016 but did not uncover the whole story).

Huh, yes, I sort of expected some initiatives in the US would end up being that kind of scandalously blunt but it's an interesting case study.

I was less convinced by the end sections, in that questions like "are there other pressures alongside the above contributing to staff shortages" don't seem to have been dealt with (and if the answer is "no", then that's interesting, but it's something you need to prove to make the case that the scandal's knock-through effect is key, especially given that AIUI this was a 2013-16 scandal and we're now a decade on from it). The problems of e.g. early retirements and COVID stripping out experienced parts of key workforces have also affected lots of sectors in recent years and there's no balance-of-factors done. I think I'd also say that the closing "appeal to both sides" felt a bit... analytically lacking, though I can see why it was done that way in current circumstances.

And of course the comments and boosts around this sort of thing are all doing "this is why diversity is bad, destroy the Democrats", and then they wonder why people in my position go "well if I'm being asked to sign up for armadilloty, badly done corporate diversity initiatives, but you're only giving me the alternative of (at best) nepotistic oligarchy, yes I'll fight for the former and no I'm not prepared to equate those things". And sure, that's where the partisan nonsense comes in, but if there's one thing I've learned politically, it's that anti-corruption is vital but anti-corruption campaigners need to be handled with a lot of care because "let's sweep all the corruption away and put someone Strong And Decisive And Incorruptible in charge" is a very, very common move to pull which usually at best solves nothing. And I find the idea of "I am against the binary by being perfectly in the middle of it" rather tiring, not least because it creates the sort of idea-space that reinforces the binary just so someone can maintain their own self-description as a centrist.

Re the original piece, I'm not familiar with the author's work more generally, but nosing through some of it, it seems to be its own sort of Very Online (the sort that imagines itself to be Sensible And Moderate And In Touch whilst believing that what disaffected voters want is less economic interventionism and that the left are institutionally in control) whilst also spending a lot of time criticising the Very Online for being Too Online. But that brings us back into the Weird Internet Communities thread...


Anyway MEANWHILE some things happening around the world:

• It's not obvious that Frederich Merz's immigration shenanigans and resulting protests in Germany have changed much in German polling. The AfD are still on about 22% to the CDU/CSU's 30. A big part of the parliamentary balance will be which of Die Linke, the BSW, and the FDP get over the line and into the chamber: all three are hovering pretty close to it, which means ca 15% of people's votes are riding on whether their party gets over the line or not. Which is one of the problems with non-preferential voting systems!
• Twitter is being sued by German activists who say it's not providing them with information to track disinformation content which they're obliged to give under the Digital Services Act.
• In a signal that this really is a strange year, Bulgaria has a government now! Led by GERB (Conservatives) plus the Socialist Party (clue largely in the name), There Is Such A People (weird anti-corruption right wingers), and Democracy, Rights and Freedoms (the less corrupt part of the Turkish party which has now split in two). That leaves the other half of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms, the centre-left-liberal PP-DB group, the fascists (Revival), and the other fascists (Morality, Unity, Honour) as opposition.
• It is becoming obvious that Trudeau leaving and/or the trade war has helped his party - a bit. The Liberals are still polling 19 points behind in the 338 average, but that's down from a 25 point lead not long ago.
• The Turks & Caicos Islands have an election on Feb 7: their last election brought in a new centre-left government, with their other party, a right-wing group, reduced to one seat.
• Vanuatu has a new government with a five-party coalition. I've not seen any suggestion that this will significantly alter very much even in Vanuatu, where people mostly seem to be frustrated that the parliaments keep being weird factional messes where nobody can tell what's going on.

[dubsartur]

Here is the story of how from 2013 to 2016 some jobs as air-traffic controller in the USA were secretly earmarked for people of a specific race https://www.tracingwoodgrains.com/p/the-full-story-of-the-faas-hiring  If you want to understand the anti-establishment turn in the North Atlantic, its worth understanding the many aspects of life in 2024 which suck and which establishments show little interest in improving (Congress actually got rid of the mechanism which allowed race-based hiring in 2016 but did not uncover the whole story).

Huh, yes, I sort of expected some initiatives in the US would end up being that kind of scandalously blunt but it's an interesting case study.

I was less convinced by the end sections, in that questions like "are there other pressures alongside the above contributing to staff shortages" don't seem to have been dealt with (and if the answer is "no", then that's interesting, but it's something you need to prove to make the case that the scandal's knock-through effect is key, especially given that AIUI this was a 2013-16 scandal and we're now a decade on from it). The problems of e.g. early retirements and COVID stripping out experienced parts of key workforces have also affected lots of sectors in recent years and there's no balance-of-factors done. I think I'd also say that the closing "appeal to both sides" felt a bit... analytically lacking, though I can see why it was done that way in current circumstances.

Yes, if you are American I think a lot depends on whether you think "this is a typical program hidden under the DEI label but the lamestream media don't want us to know the truth" or "some blatant pork like this got included under the DEI label and was quietly stopped to avoid a scandal."  But I think a lot of anti-establishment politics in the USA is driven by experiences like "our Democratic-majority state government is paying huge sums for a high-speed rail project that will never carry a car" or "I have to pay kickbacks to get permission to build a garage in my backyard and my Democratic mayor responds with form letters" whereas we foreigners see other aspects.  I do not know ANY way to learn the details without living there given that you can't trust American journalists (of the centrist or reactionary kinds) and you sure can't trust the kind of people who used to post hourly on Twitter
 
And yes, another doctrine of smart righties in the USA is that The Left controls almost all institutions (the Cathedral, the Blob).  Of course four year degree/no degree is becoming a dividing line in the USA, and its hard to get a senior administrative office without such a degree, so sometimes "The Left" means "people with a four-year degree" rather than people who support specific policies.

I like that description of the blogger's space (I think Will Stancil who he mentions is a Twitter personality, Steve Sailer is an Internet racist who lurks in comment threads).  I hope that with the decline of Twitter journalists are spending more time out in the world talking to people, and less scrolling their feeds.  The people who feel ideologically oppressed or unable to speak freely are often people who posted a lot on Twitter where they got dogpiled for not following the changing party line (no idea what its like after the Muskening).