I can only hope this eventually adds a "Will a politician attempt to change a prediction market threat to democracy index" question, both because that would be the best possible signal of its success and because it would be hilariously hard to interpret the resulting number.
Formally removing another party's candidates from the ballot. Interesting criterion.
What if instead a party were to, I don't know, allow large numbers of noncitizens into the country and let them vote? Does Metaculus have a question on that? Or would that just not count as a "threat to democracy" because "voting good?" Just what is "democracy" anyway?
This gets weird - because of course someone who stands to gain from it will make the *attempt* if it is legitimate to do so.
IE: If your opponent sexually assaults a child on 5th avenue, and you try to indict them for it I think that's on your opponent, not you.
However, a big part of the game of that thing we call "politics" is "reframing your actions to make it look like you're not doing that obviously underhanded thing" , so what would be a framing that could detect this ?
I don't think people are concerned with "prosecuting the political opposition" per se they are concerned with, for example:
* Handling Hillary Clinton with kid gloves on the security breach
* The FBI committing crimes to wiretap Trump
* As already mentioned, Letitia James
"Not conceding the election" is another pretty wild one, because we have:
* Ran a scheme to send alternative electors to the certification to vote for him (Trump)
* Engaged in a 2 year long criminal process on the basis of fabricated information to impeach the President on the basis of a fraudulent election (House Democrats)
What "counts" is most of the question, and there's tons of room for "whataboutism".
That assumes prosecution automatically removes a candidate from the ballot, which doesn't necessarily follow. I'd think that the removal of the candidate is a more straightforward measure of threat to democracy than the prosecution (which is obviously still impactful).
And "sentenced to prison for political views" is more straightforward measure than "forcibly put in mental health hospital due to alleged schizophrenia", but it would miss a huge chunk of USSR's political repressions.
This right here. This is why the Democracy Threat Index will fail. If we can’t even agree if USSR repressed political opposition or not, how can we hope to build any consensus around what it means to formally remove another party's candidates from the ballot?
if the primary cause of alleged political repression in Russia were "removal of American or British spies or saboteurs," we would expect such cases to involve a lot of espionage prosecutions. this is not what we observe.
Eugene Debs was on the ballot while in prison. I had mused that would be the most entertaining outcome for Trump in the most recent election, particularly if SCOTUS ruled he couldn't pardon himself and he couldn't trust his VP to pardon him if he resigned, so he spent his whole term governing from behind bars.
But the way the questions are phrased, though, it's not about who is right or wrong, it's about whether there's a threat to democracy.
If someone refuses to concede an election then either (a) they're incorrectly claiming an election was rigged, which is bad for democracy, or (b) the election really was rigged, which is also bad for democracy.
In a healthy democracy you could be reasonably confident that neither of these things would happen, because the voting system would be secure and everyone would have high confidence that significant fraud isn't possible.
"If someone refuses to concede an election then either (a) they're incorrectly claiming an election was rigged, which is bad for democracy, or (b) the election really was rigged, which is also bad for democracy."
Then we've already hit that milestone, because of course everyone knows about Trump and the 2020 election, but there were also those claiming the 2024 election was rigged to let Trump win.
So we've got partisans of both parties claiming illegal/rigged elections, and even back in 2016 the whole Not My President crowd where some nutjobs on the Internet liked to claim Hillary was the President Elect and that was it, Trump was not president.
Didn't Stacy Abrams also indulge in some "my opponent only won because the election was dodgy" claims?
So if democracy is imperilled where there are claims of election rigging, then that has already happened and democracy is indeed imperilled.
It's an index, not a set of milestones. It has happened in the past, but perhaps it will happen less in the future, and I guess that's some of the value of the index.
See for example Turkey. Turkish Constitution requires the President to have a university diploma. An opponent of Erdogan, Imamoglu, was stripped of his diploma by his alma mater, thus rendering him ineligible to stand in the election.
Now this wasn't technically done by the government, but by a university. But it still counts IMHO, as the university was obviously pushed to do this via Erdogan's people.
This also illustrates quite nicely how hard is it to protect democracy via laws alone.
I have seen a lot of intellectuals toying with the idea of some tests required for voting. None of them seems to realize that much like this weird constitutional requirement, this would create a massive loophole to be abused.
Maybe, but I don't immediately see the specifics. I don't think the same loophole works; "about 1% of people get stripped of their degree, and that just happens to include the primary opposition candidate" is an effective trick you could get away with, but "about 1% of people get stripped of their degree, and they just all happen to vote opposition" wouldn't accomplish very much. It's feasible to set up a rigged test to reinforce a status quo, but if you started with a decent test to begin with it it might be harder to intentionally corrupt it, at least until you get to an already pretty high level of corruption, I think.
I don't think such a test is a good idea though, because I think introducing any kind of bias tends to have a runaway effect. It's almost tautological that people will assume they themselves have the best plans (because if they thought someone else had better plans they would adopt those) and thus that their will ought to be done (as "the best course of action" and "what ought to be done" are definitionally equal) and thus that any edge that they have should be pushed (instrumental convergence), without needing any particular coordination and irrespective of what they actually believe.
I really wish our democracies allowed us to specialize more. I really don't feel feel qualified to vote for generic representatives for the entire nation, an unfathomably complex high stakes endeavor. I wish I just choose some 10% of the public matter to be co-responsible for and specialize in in that. And maybe then there would be more space to evaluate different people's authoritativeness on different topics.
No it doesn't illustrate that all. It just shows that this particular condition can be gamed. However, other conditions can be too. You can argue that the condition is unnecessary in its own right (fine!) but using Erdogan's manipulation of a specific condition to argue that it's "dumb" pre-supposes a balance you haven't proven.
That there is no “Will an opposing party authority convict a presidential candidate of a crime that isn’t normally prosecuted?” makes me worried this is too sensitive to question choice to be a good early warning system.
Pretty similar to what you want and was resolved "yes" in 2023-2024 already, presumably due to the Trump indictments. And as for "isn't normally prosecuted" - that's pretty hard to judge! I mean, John Bolton just plead guilty to mishandling classified documents, with retaining classified documents being one of the original indictments. Is that the same as (one of the) things Trump was prosecuted for? I don't think anyone has ever done exactly what Trump did before.
I struggled with whether or not to answer this question for multiple days and every time I scrolled past it it caused me to wince so at the risk of re-litigating the entire last several years:
...the crimes trump was charged for are normally prosecuted.Source: I'm a white collar criminal defense attorney.
now, whether these charges are proper for *his conduct* is a separate question. It's a question that can only be answered by going to trial. Every white collar criminal defendant believes that x crime is "not normally charged" against people who do what they did. Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried, Spiro Agnew, and John Poindexter all thought that.
Macro, the crimes trump was indicted for are indeed crimes that "are normally prosecuted." You can see many many examples of these crimes being prosecuted every year.
Trump was prosecuted for the following commonly-prosecuted crimes
18 U.S.C. § 241 (conspiracy against rights)
- United States v. Worthy, 915 F.2d 1514 (11th Cir. 1990)
- US v. Erlichmann, 546 F.2d 910 (D.C. Cir. 1977)
- Anderson v. United States, 417 U.S. 211 (1974)
18 U.S.C. § 371 (conspiracy to defraud the united states, which hopefully from the title you can appreciate is a very commonly charged crime but...)
- United States v. Klein, 247 F.2d 908 (1957) (which gave rise to a whole series of progeny cases called "Klein conspiracies")
- Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 358 (2010) (this statute is a paradigmatic one used to prosecute white collar offenses against the government, as with enron and iirc volkswagon and exon executives too)
- US v. Weisz, 718 F.2d 413 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (this is one of the famous "Abscam" cases off which the American Hustle movie was based on.
(trust me, this one gets charged a fair bit, I just picked famous examples)
18 u.s.c. § 1519 (destruction of evidence, another very commonly charged crime)
- This is brought frequently enough that it's often a unit in white collar law, the central case you read in that unit is United States v. Kernell, 667 F.3d 746 (2012)
And 18 USC 1001, the general conspiracy statute, which is among the most frequently charged federal crimes, as well as 18 USC 2, the aiding and abetting statute, which is also commonly charged.
now to be very very clear: I'm not rebutting the idea that trump's conduct matched these statutes, or even whether his *conduct* was not 'the kind of thing that normally gets charged'...I'm rebutting the idea that these "types of crimes" are not "normally prosecuted", they absolutely are.
We have a very nice system for figuring out whether someone's actions are, in fact, the crimes contemplated by the charging statute, it's called the criminal process and a trial.
I guess to dispel any confusion: I cited cases one can easily look up and you'll see most of those cases cite other cases about the same crimes. I didn't cite like the most recent cases because those are harder to look up, and most cases aren't appealed (so there's *no* easy way to look them up)
Noncitizens voting in federal elections is illegal, so that question reduces down to "will there be widespread voter fraud in a future election?"
Metaculus has this question at 0.9% chance, and most of that probability is the nitpick that the Trump administration will probably *claim* that this happened regardless of how much fraud there actually is.
To make clear, the measure would expand voting rights to non-citizens in citywide elections. Non-citizens living in LA would be able to vote for the mayor of LA, not president. The parent comment mentioned voting in federal elections, which is illegal for non-citizens and will remain illegal for the foreseeable future.
Right, hence the mention of specific locales. But it does show that the left is politically amenable to letting noncitizens vote, so I disagree that it's definitely out of the question for the foreseeable future, especially when the point is forecasting the future.
And appeals to absurdity or legal unlikeliness are out the window when we have leftist political candidates (soon-to-be congresswoman, as she just won the Dem primary in New York) not only arguing that illegal immigrants who have committed murder and other serious crimes should be protected from deportation, but also that prisons should be abolished entirely (https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/darializa-avila-chevalier-on-housing).
Sure, just the original comment could be misconstrued & wanted to avoid any confusion.
Re: fringe congressmen, it's not fair to define an entire party based on the most extreme people sent to congress. Republicans in Georgia sent Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress 3 times, and she believes that California wildfires were started by a Rothschild-owned space laser. I imagine most republican-leaning districts aren't on board with that, but in a non-competitive district you can easily get wackos.
Oh I would certainly not define the entire party based on the DSA types, but I also give them more a chance to get their wacko policy agendas into law because they're more of an organized bloc than right wing fringe loonies like MTG, who as far as I know is an isolated case. They've been pretty effective at coopting the Dem voter base in deep blue areas to get more DSA types into power, so I could definitely see a trajectory where they form a significant enough caucus within the Dem party to be able to inject something like noncitizen voting into the Dem platform, and eventually make it into actual legislation when Dems are in power again.
sorry, are you really arguing that NOW 'appeals to absurdity' are out the window because of what a 2026 dem politician who hasn't even taken office yet said five years ago? Have you been on truth social any time in the last...idk, ever?
In keeping with kind / necessary / true, I appeal to the latter two: your position IS absurd, but not because of what you think.
Can you cut the snark and explain with your words why it's absurd? Do you think she doesn't believe this anymore, or that she won't be winning the congress seat, or there aren't more DSA candidates like her?
And no, I haven't been on Truth Social, not sure how that's relevant.
I could imagine someone being honestly confused why they can vote in this election but not that election, or assuming that if they can now vote in these elections then that means they can vote in that election.
- I believe this is not a "US federal elections democracy index", it's a "US democracy index". City elections becoming corrupted when federal elections aren't is still a degraded democracy
- various people might disagree about the answer to "will illegals be allowed to vote in federal elections in the foreseeable future?". Considering we are talking about prediction markets here it seems entirely fair to have a question like this in a prediction market about democracy. If predictors all agree that it's certainly unlikely and continues to be unlikely under a new democratic president, that's a useful signal.
(Which gets back to the fact that the central question here is whether noncitizen voting is a threat or improvement to democracy, not whether it's likely or the scale of it. Whether it's federal or local only matters for the scope of the index, whether it's likely or unlikely would be the literal result of the market itself so "it's unlikely" is not a counterargument, just a single prediction by a single individual)
Non-citizens voting in cities that have specifically made it legal for them to vote in city elections would not be a "corruption", and would not be a good sign that someone in a city which **doesn't** let non-citizens vote is going to have problems with this.
Why is it corrupt to let non-citizens vote on the school board nominations and city government of the school where their children go in the city where they live?
1. noncitzens do not carry all the reciprocal obligations of citizenship such a jury duty and draft eligibility
2. local elections have national consequences. for example, illegal aliens might elect a local government which enacts sanctuary city policies which can have a direct causal link to more illegal immigration, which has national effects.
3. if I am only a citizen of the US, I have skin in the game because I have nowhere else to go, and therefore might vote differently than if I had citizenship somewhere else
4. it is usually done for purely ideological reasons rather than on the principle of fair representation. As a litmus test, there are basically zero examples of it being championed by factions that expect to lose votes by championing it.
5. noncitzen voting is straightforwardly a political ratchet, they cannot easily be reversed if the preexisting citizen population changes its mind later on
6. it is often enacted by councils in the face of strong opposition by the voting populus at large, incumbent councils which expect to win more new voters they invented than old voters that vote for their competitors. Franchise expansion without majority buy in by the existing voting population is both corrupt. Even in far-far-far-left polities like San Francisco, it passed on a razor slim margin in a voter initiative, for local school boards only, for parents of kids who are in those schools only, after 2 failed attempts prior, partly due to tribal self-interest reasons (households with mixed citizenship status, wishing to enfranchise their own household members)
(this is my attempt to steelman the case against noncitizen voting. The strongest argument for it, to me, is that even in places where it's legal, turnout is like 0.5% or lower, mostly because registering as a noncitizen is a pain in the ass, might get you put on a list if you're illegally here, might jeapordize your citizenship application, etc. So any arguments about hoards of noncitizens swinging elections against native citizens' interests basically never happen in practice...yet)
It obviously isn't. When I was teaching, the School Site Council, which decides on how to spend state and federal supplemental funding, sometimes had noncitizen parents on it. Was that corrupt? No.
I find it questionable to argue that making more people vote would be something that should be classified as a threat to *democracy*. You can think it's a short sighted ploy by a specific party to buff its numbers, but the same tends to be true of many changes in electoral law, districting, etc. Sometimes a change is good for democracy in the long run but still will only get enacted when, situationally, it's also good in the short term for the prospects of a specific party. That's not amazing but it doesn't destroy democracy because in the long run the system stays while things like "this demographic votes for me" change and dissolve.
If this is bannable, I'm tempted to file a lot more reports.
It's not that I disagree that this is one of those darkly-hinting comments. It's rather that I recall seeing similar comments in the past (and maybe in this thread, if I read with that in mind) that didn't result in a ban, to the point that I thought comments this edgy were tolerated. So hitting this one in particular now, strikes me as somewhat unfair, and a slippery slope for which I see no clear limiting principle.
(This might just be me. Having been a moderator for DSL for years, and having done more-than-average modding elsewhere for years, I probably have more-than-average sensitive positions on how to curry a discussion.)
Can anyone explain what actually prevents non-US-citizens from registering to vote?
You'd think it would be pretty easy to force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering; either a birth certificate or a certificate of naturalisation would work.
If you have a social security number or California state ID number you have to include it and they will check against the database. You can also register affirming under penalty of perjury that you are a citizen but have neither ID number, as you have said. (EDIT: also note that if you register online or by mail without an ID number, you'll need to show an ID the first time you vote, but it doesn't have to be a photo ID and doesn't apply if you register in person.)
I would disagree that penalty of perjury is "no actual check". It seems like it would be risky to commit fraud on a government form if you're already in the country illegally. Also if millions of people were suddenly registering without ID numbers someone in the bureaucracy would probably notice and whistleblow.
But I think the goal is that a tiny chance of fraud is an ok tradeoff for making it a lot easier for actual citizens to vote (in the vein of "let 10 guilty men go free rather than convict one innocent man", but with a better ratio). Personally, I'd support sidestepping the issue by having a real national ID system that's free and automatic, though you'd still need to worry a bit about fraud/accessibility in the ID system itself.
> I would disagree that penalty of perjury is "no actual check". It seems like it would be risky to commit fraud on a government form if you're already in the country illegally.
>It seems like it would be risky to commit fraud on a government form if you're already in the country illegally.
On the other hand, people who are in the country illegal are already selected for being willing to take the risk of breaking the law. I don't think there's really a large number of people doing it since the benefit is not as great as being able to live in the US, but I also think it's silly that the CA government is so against checking that they legislated *disallowing* requiring voter IDs https://legislation.ballotpedia.org/elections/bill/10007
Overall I think it's good to keep voting rules consistent across municipalities, and I prefer lighter ID laws *in the absence of a universal ID program*, so I can't say I disagree with CA's decision. But I don't think your perspective is unreasonable.
The meaning of "let 10 guilty men go free rather than convict one innocent man" is that whenever there's a conviction, there should be absolutely no question that the conviction was achieved fairly, justly and with due process - and lower overall conviction rate of proven criminals is an acceptable cost.
The election equivalent of this would be that whenever there's an election, there should be absolutely no question that the election was performed fairly, justly and with due process - and lower overall voting eligibility is an acceptable cost. Your argument for making voting more accessible is closer to an argument that convictions should be easier to achieve even if it means a tiny fraction of people will be wrongfully convicted. Which is not a bad policy at all; it could easily result in reduced crime rates and overall safer society. It's just rooted in different principles that are fundamentally incompatible with "let 10 guilty men go free..."
This seems like a stretch to me. Elections are abstract entities that do not have their own rights, while voters are people who do. It's not the conviction that's the important part of the "10 guilty men" idiom as I understand it, it's the "man" part. So the unifying principle is "the burden of proof for taking away a person's rights (to be not in prison or to vote) should be high"
>You can also register affirming under penalty of perjury that you are a citizen but have neither ID number, as you have said.
Incredible, lmao. As a terminally online Trump supporter, it never fails to amaze me how often the absolute fringe wackos to my right or proving correct.
I never looked into this because I assumed it was just too ridiculous to be true, but here we are lmao.
If you register without an ID number by mail or online then you have to show an actual ID at the polls, at least in CA. It seems to be possible to register in person without having to show an ID, but it would be hard to get more than a few dozen illegal votes per county cast that way.
You also have to be able to *detect* voter fraud, and afaict there is no actual way to detect voter fraud in California.
Also their verification of citizenship for voting registration is: do you say you're a citizen? good, they don't verify anything else. they don't even verify if you live at the address on your form.
Please note that I am not claiming there is widespread voter fraud. I am claiming *the system provides no way of knowing if there is or isn't*.
I think the federal officials have lost all credibility on ~every matter, though, so I'm not sure why this would be evidence of anything. If anything, my prior is that if a federal official says X, !X is likely true (cf the dozens of times ICE blatantly lied about things that were released on camera)
Its worth noting that there is no system that actually lets you catch 'voter fraud' as you are defining it. Ballots are anonymous on purpose. Once an election has occurred it's not really possible to go back and figure out how many ballots were cast by people who shouldn't have cast them.
You can look at the _registration process_ and see where the registration process failed. But in your hypothetical world where they do verify citizenship for voting registration, you still wouldn't be able to detect voter fraud. Any hypothetical fraudulent voters would just be stopped by the registration process, and would never be able to commit their voter fraud (and if they somehow got through the registration gate, then it would be invisible anyway)
*Ballots* are anonymous, but the fact of voting is not. I don't think I've ever voted in a national election where I didn't have to sign a piece of paper saying "Yep, I'm John Schilling, the registered voter who lives at [redacted] and here I am casting my vote". If State authorities in particular want to catch the person-who-isn't-allowed-to-vote-but-votes-anyway sort of voter fraud, they can actually do that and they can show the receipts in court.
They just can't do that only for people who vote for the Bad Wrong Party
California, in theory, knows the number of ballots it sends out, and those ballots should be received back in a signed envelope with the name of the person that filled it out. As far as I can tell, there is no public auditing of the number it sends out, the number it receives back, they allow illiterate marks as signatures so signature verification is pointless, etc.
Walking through the hypothetical: she pays a bunch of homeless people to register. They use her address because they don't have addresses. California does no verification of their citizenship or even their identity afaict- they just get assigned new 'voter id numbers.'
Election season rolls around and 100 ballots show up at this woman's house. Who knows what happens with them.
The primary way for this to be detected would require the homeless people involved to know their voter id number, and look up to see if a ballot exists that they didn't fill out.
If a party did this, I'm not sure "threat to democracy" would be the right term, but it would definitely disrupt the established democratic system in a bad way. Fortunately, no party has even attempted to do this; given the number of readily available threats to democracy, it seems mostly unhelpful to come up with unlikely hypotheticals.
What’s wrong with letting established residents of a city vote for city government, despite not being citizens? Why should citizenship be relevant to that?
I don't get this question, it happens all the time and isn't special at all. My boss in a county-level race a few years ago (a Dem prosecutor) was almost able to get his GOP opponent removed from the ballot, did in fact have such an order at one point, and it got tossed out on appeal, but it certainly could've happened. And in fact removing the Republican from the ballot would've been correct on the merits (didn't meet a residency requirement according to fact determinations of the circuit court), he only remained on due a procedural issue. The only reason this kind of thing doesn't happen too often at state level now is that state-level parties adequately investigate candidates, prepare for this, and have good litigation teams that don't miss things of this sort.
I get what it's gesturing at, it's just not a great criteria because there are many reasons it might be legally appropriate for a GOP election authority to remove a Dem candidate from the ballot or vice versa.
The first time I thought "this feels like banana republic crap" w/r/t US democracy was with calls in 2016 to charge Hillary with felonies during the election, but of course we didn't do that. Then it escalated into Trump actually being charged not for what he might've deserved but instead with some rather trivial stuff calculated to impede his electability, and then the attempts to remove him from ballots via the Reconstruction Amendments. That he nevertheless won the election would've provided a good off-ramp from this sort of thing, since he did in fact drop this kind of rhetoric in 2017 after he won, but we're not getting that. I suppose the baseline level of this sort of thing would be what was done to Nixon and Clinton, it's always around to some degree, it's more a question of optics. Politics will always be dirty power contests in reality, but it needs to preserve the appearance that it's about the will of the people, and in the absence of media control to launder whatever happens through a legitimizing lens, I'm not sure we'll ever get that back.
I'm happy to put your mind at ease on this matter, because this is a very unlikely scenario unless Congress nullifies some key Federal statutes: viz. ...
> 18 U.S.C. § 611 – Voting by aliens, which makes it unlawful for non-citizens to vote in any election for federal office (Class A misdemeanor, up to 1 year in prison)
> 18 U.S.C. § 1015(f) – False claim of citizenship, which makes it a Class E felony to falsely claim U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote, or vote in a federal, state, or local election (1 to 5 years in prison).
> 52 U.S.C. § 20511 – Election fraud, which include non-citizens registering and voting, but also citizens voting multiple times (Class E felony, 1 to 5 years in prison).
The only examples we have of non-citizens being allowed to vote in any type of election are certain local elections and certain school board elections. San Francisco and Oakland, allow non-citizen *residents* to vote in school board elections *if they have kids enrolled in the school district.* And I believe Maryland and Vermont allow municipalities to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. Personally, although I understand the no-taxation-without-representation narrative that pro-non-citizen voting advocates like to push, I think this is unwise because extending the franchise to non-citizens for even minor local offices dilutes the citizenship rights of US citizens — and of course, the rightwing scare machine can whoop up people's fears that illegal aliens are voting in our elections.
I’m finding the idea that Democrats and Republicans corrupt in different ways a little ridiculous. Oh if you exclude the meme coins and oh if you exclude the staggering corruption from trump and his cronies, all the carveouts to business interests, not to mention the freaking Supreme Court (Harlan crow anyone?), then yeah democrats could be more corrupt. And the idea that democrats would restrict speech more than republicans is hilarious after Jimmy Kimmel.
A stereotype of Democrats, but not Republicans, is that their corruption is generally funneled through their NGO-industrial complex and via rules that target preferred groups for special handouts (government contracts go to women/minorities/etc…), so there potentially being different modes of corruption is a fair worry.
The people who were banned personally from major social media platforms during the Great Terror of 2015-2023 have a different perspective on how bad sending the third-rated late night talk-show host to time-out for a month is.
There were a few incidents during the campus Gaza protest crackdown and the Charlie Kirk assassaination aftermath that were a little taste of how bad things were back then, but speech is much freer now than it was 5-8 years ago.
It's very difficult to read this in any way other than, "I got banned from Twitter, that's basically the same as somebody going to jail for a Facebook post."
I wasn't banned, but a lot of people I like to read were. The breadth and quality of public discourse was severely hampered by both the absense of these specific voices and the chilling effect from the fear of the banhammer.
Replying to you and the other two - there were a couple well documented instances of the Biden administration pressuring e.g. twitter to ban users or pull down speech and those are bad and lots of democrats also don't like that.
But come on - the overwhelming majority of the bans and post takedowns were 100% from the policy of the company with absolutely no input or influence from the Government, and a little piece of proof is that the so called woke reign of terror era _overlaps majorly with the first trump admin_. Their decisions were motivated by what they thought was good PR and what their employees were willing to stand. Pretending that was all or mostly or even largely Governmental is divorced from reality and easily verifiable as incorrect. It was cultural, and the companies were playing their part in it, and its only not okay for private companies to make their own policies because you didnt like it.
Meanwhile, Brendan Carr has _openly_ threatened government action to regulate speech, there is genuine government and executive policy to target people based on their opinions, people have literally gone to jail, they run a sham investigation into Jerome Powel, they blacklist law firms and they try to hamstring Anthropic for wanting to follow its contract. The level of direct, forceful meddling is unmatched in this administration.
And check your stats - Bezos donated significantly more to Trumps inauguration than to Biden's, and didn't make large campaign contributions (amazon employees did about 2 million more to Biden than trump, but thats the employees, and its not much money.)
That's ridiculous. It's firstly documented that the administration intervened to put political pressure on these sites, and it doesn't change anything that Democrats used this sort of 'private' thuggery to push their political viewpoints.
A functioning media is a core part of a functioning democracy. If enough of the population’s media exposure is mostly limited to the platforms in question or sources downstream of them, a unanimous decision by that set of platforms not to cover certain viewpoints would prevent the democracy from addressing those viewpoints effectively.
Even if you think it was overreach and censorship, you have to agree that there was actually some legitimate public interest in censoring COVID misinformation.
There was no legitimate interest in the Kimmel stuff though. This was strictly because the president had his feeling hurt, wanted to hurt his opposition, and send a message to limit criticism against him on public airways. This speaks deeply to the differences about fundamental views about Freedom of Speech between the two parties, EVEN IF more censorship happened during the COVID era.
(none of this is to mention the fact that it was primarily private platforms doing the censorship during the COVID era and not the President himself)
"Russian Propaganda Outlets (that not even Russians are stupid enough to believe!)"
Quick note, Russians have both internal and external propaganda, the two often happen to be distinct. Paying Tim Pool to spread disinformation on Ukraine will not convince any Russians, they instead will be served by pubblic TV channels which abundantly covers the population and also is controlled by the Russian government.
A legitimate interest to remove Russian Propaganda Outlets is pretty clear, but I am guessing you are referring to something else and something specific, what is it?
You could argue there's legitimate public interest in throwing 2024 election results in the trash and swear in Harris as the president regardless. But it would be a bad idea for pretty much the same reasons why suppressing some (but not all! Let's not forget that) COVID misinformation was bad - vindication of unhinged conspiracy theorists, undermining the neutral image of institutions, further polarization of the society.
By "Legitimate Public Interest", I just mean there's an actual weight on the other side of the scale. It's perfectly reasonable to say that that weight, or even that no weight can ever balance out the other side. (Though I would wonder how far that truly can feasible extend. Does *never* imply there shouldn't be Libel laws, or that there should be no penalty for yelling fire in a crowded theater?)
But there was no weight on the other side of the scale when it comes to the Kimmel stuff. There wasn't even a fig leaf of public benefit. And so I think it's fair to call the side that will clamp down on free expression for *no good reason* more authoritarian on free speech than the side that will try to clamp down on an actual public health risk
Again, I repeat. NGO-industrial complex is no worse than traditional GOP carveouts for business interests and their beloved “public-private partnerships” that they outsource rather than giving governments any extra funding. How about when republicans turn a blind eye to white collar crime and basically “turn off” any financial regulatory barriers and encourage cronyism.
Oh also I forgot when Obama and Biden were calling to prosecute Fox News for their speech.
> NGO-industrial complex was funding money [to] Cuba and Venezuela
The way you've written this, it sounds like you have evidence that an NGO was providing money or arms to the Cuban or Venezuelan military. Do you have any evidence for this?
If that is not what you meant, can you please clarify exactly what you meant?
You seem to think these replies are attempting to establish which is a worse kind of corruption, rather than that the typical kinds of corruption differ enough by party to make the Metaculus early warning system more about partisan question selection than real “democracy is at risk” proxies. Your additional examples strengthen, rather than weaken, that worry.
If the corruption differs not just in quality but in seriousness, obviously the fact that only the worse kind gets weighted is not in itself a form of bias.
They didn't threaten to prosecute Fox News, but they had an absolute ton of "geez if you don't block stories about Hunter Biden/possible lab origins of covid/etc., we might have to regulate you good and hard" conversations with the social media companies.
Japan is socially mixed. They haven't legalised gay marriage, but they just passed a plan to deliver nationwide LGBT awareness and education to prevent discrimination. Hardly "super right wing".
Please, Japan's conservative party just won the election by a landslide, and currently their main platform is tightening immigration restrictions. You can't possibly think some passing lip service to "LGBT awareness" makes the political landscape "socially mixed", the social attitude towards LGBT in Japan is comparable to America in the 90s.
I think Japan is pretty right wing, it's just also been very non-fascist/militarist about it in its last ~80 years due to the consequences of losing the war. So it's mostly just conservative in the most literal sense of the word - resistant to change, in almost all forms (they still use fax machines, lots of tech adoption is slow, etc).
The "super right wing" of Poland can hardly be called "pro democracy", considering the amount of damage they did to the checks and balances of their country ...
What do you mean by "super right-wing"? Because that covers a lot of ground, and if you're only smuggling in the assumption "right wing of any stripe is the same as Nazi Fascist Horribleness", then you're going to go on about "that country isn't wealthy", "that country isn't Westernised", "that country isn't right-wing" etc. if people give you examples.
US 1950, depending on whatever "right" is supposed to mean exactly. I'll choose to interpret it as "conservative", though I don't consider MAGA to be conservative.
Can you answer which wealthy Westernized countries you think are "actually super left wing"?
Because this seems to be an impossible test to pass in either directions: most Western countries are fairly centrist overall, which is expected in a functional democracy. Arguably that's the main virtue of democracy: that it's hard for extremists to seize power.
In this context, I interpret “super left wing” in the Western tradition as socially and economically egalitarian. Thus, having universal healthcare, welfare, strong safety nets, and progressive levels of taxation fits this bill. Then, being quite liberal in social views, such as acceptance of LGBTQ, concern for the environment etc. Having increased political representation, not taking voting rights away, or dismantling checks and balances.
I would say quite a few Western European countries fit this bill. Scandinavian countries, Netherlands and more.
I’m not talking South American/Russian/Asian style communism or socialism here. That axis devolves into left/right illiberalism and cronyism, and often gets packaged with socially regressive or conservative social views.
That's not "super left wing", that's ordinary center-left stuff. "Super left wing" is things like defunding the police, open borders, cancellation of wrongthink, etc.
There's nothing wrong with this btw. They tried to direct the country towards the set of values that they wanted, that was never the problem with the right either. The problem (to put it mildly) is that the right does not care about laws, procedures, or ethics, when they try to implement their values.
You think hiding news stories that may reduce their electoral chances is simply "directing the country towards the set of values they wanted"? Isn't that also "not caring about laws, procedures, or ethics when trying to implement their values"?
I think a lot of the COVID stuff was mainly done because "we're in an emergency and spreading false information that fosters panic or makes people act suboptimally is a danger to all". You can argue that it wasn't that serious or that you actually think that information was correct but it's not necessarily a selfish motive. Generally speaking, while truth-finding is hard, having widespread fake information, especially at critical times, is also a danger. It's honestly hard to navigate if one tries to tackle that kind of problem in good faith - the market effectively *doesn't* fix this and has even lots of incentives to be bad actors.
Trump et al. tried to downplay the severity of covid when it first happened (doesn’t that fit the definition of hiding information). That is literally their approach to any form of bad news, deny it, lash out at fake news etc. Texas, Florida and some other red states are currently outdoing themselves trying to emulate Trumpism at the state level, so the “bias” cannot be isolated to one individual but clearly the whole party has this problem.
Also, how old are you? I’m sure you are also outraged by the Iraq War and how the Bush administration lied to the American public about WMDs, completely distorting the “news”.
"the right does not care about laws, procedures, or ethics, when they try to implement their values"
What a biased comment. I think there is plenty of evidence to make this exact same statement about the left.
Cancelling people and making them lose their livelihood for espousing conservative values (as was the norm just a few years back) was legal, procedural, and ethical?
And there are less abstract examples:
I would invite you to do some research on Pedro Sanchez, current president of Spain and shining star of global Socialism. He is one of the most machiavellian politicians to ever grace this earth and has eroded democracy in this country probably to a greater extent than Trump has in the US.
He got to power in his party's primaries by stuffing ballet boxes, got his wife a position as a tenured professor in one of the most prestigious universities in Spain (despite her not even holding a college degree), his campaign was funded by his wife's family's brothel business, his top minister just got convicted to 24 years prison for corruption and the top minister that replaced this guy is also in prison awaiting trial, he set up a sort of under-the-radar mafia squad with orders to intimidate police investigators, judges, media outlets who investigated his family and ministers' corruption, he controls the constitutional courts, the current Attorney General is his lackey (former one, also his lackey, was convicted of misuse of office), state-funded media is completely sycophantic to him, the national statistics institute (which publishes his popularity polls) is controlled by him (and always favorable to him), his spiritual guide and mentor, Jose Luis Zapatero (forrmer Socialist president of Spain), is under investigation for influence trafficking and corruption (among other things, they found 1.5 million dollars worth of undeclared jewels in a safe in his office, apparently gifts for helping Venezuela move oil and gold illegally out of the country under Maduro), he hasn't had enough congressional support to even pass the federal budget for the past 4 years, has routinely attacked judges (in complete disregard for the separation of powers) who have his wife, brother and ministers on trial, and the list goes on...
As a result of all this, polls are massively unfavourable to him. Despite that, he refuses to step down. Why? Because - he alleges - the danger of the Right coming to power is too great for the Spanish people. (ie. rather than letting them decide this in an election, he has decided for them). Basically taking a giant dump on laws, procedures and ethics in order to forcibly implement left-wing values...
You will rarely see a greater erosion of Western democracy than you will see in Spain at the moment, and this from one of the current heros of global Socialism...
Yes, "Cancelling" (as far as it exists) is perfectly legal. After Charlie Kirk died the right got many people fired for so much as an innocent comment. While I obviously disagree with their values, I am not going to have any legal case against someone asking someone else's boss to fire them.
There is an EXTREME difference between "illegal" and "hazardous to democracy". There's an overlap, but they are different circles of the Venn diagram, and there are large areas where they are exclusive.
"Cancelling" someone is hazardous to democracy, but so is spreading falsehoods. And one can't really say that one is more dangerous than the other, because there are lots of different examples, and in some of them one is more dangerous, and in the other, the other.
No part of your reply made any effort to saying anything about the right caring for honor, procedure, or ethics. Do you think the right does care about these things, or is your opinion that no one cares about these things?
Maybe I misunderstood you, but are you really insinuating that everyone who thinks conservatively is dishonourable, unprincipalled and unethical? We are all adults here and I think we are all smart enough to know there are some on the left and on the right who care about those things and some who don't (I gave the example of the current Spanish government as some of those on the left who don't)
If we want to reduce the current (horrible) state of political polarization, I think we all need to find a way to remind ourselves that the majority of "the other side" believe what they believe because they think it best for society.
I think the left is wrong on many, many issues and that in the long run many left-wing policies will end up being terrible for society, but I never lose my belief that many on the left certainly mean well (among other things because I have tons of friends who are left-wing and I know they are good people). But this is the kind of thinking the left should also be cultivating about the right (and I feel like they aren't or they are doing it less). You may believe right-wing policies are completely wrong, which is completely valid, but you should try to acknowledge that most of them think they way they think because they want the best for society. Insinuating that none of them are honourable, ethical or respect legal procedures is not valid.
Specifically in terms of procedure and legality, I think it could be fairly argued that left's track record is rather dodgier than the right's. The right believes in strict laws with (possibly) excessively strict enforcement and punishment, but a strong focus in general on ensuring the rule of law in society. The left draws its roots from Marxist principles which say that violent revolution is necessary for society to progress. In other words, it espouses running rough-shod over the law whenever it is deemed that there is injustice. Whether there is really injustice or not in any given situation is another matter, and a violent revolution might well be ethical and honourable, but it is certainly not legal or procedural...
I don't think this is true, and would love to see evidence for this claim. If the evidence is 'the twitter files', I round this off to 'this isnt true'
O I'm very familiar with Murthy. Like I said, I round this off to 'this isn't true'. Your own document has countless quotes of social media companies pushing back or outright denying government requests, and the district court filing unfortunately does not mention anything about the very many Republicans who also work with social media companies towards similar ends. It's worth noting that the guy who filled this lawsuit, Schmitt, filed like > 20 such lawsuits in order to burnish his Senate campaign (which worked well for him, he's now a senator). And this SCOTUS, easily the most right wing SCOTUS in several generations, still knocked down the plaintiffs in final review.
It's always worth asking people pushing this line what, exactly, you expect the relationship between the federal government and the various corporations in the country to look like. I'm curious for your answer.
"I’m finding the idea that Democrats and Republicans corrupt in different ways a little ridiculous"
- Some guy here, not long ago.
The issue isn't *worse*, it's *different*. There are different ways to e.g. rig elections with equal badness, and as parties have demographically and institutionally different bases of support, it is likely that one party will favor some particular sorts of corruption and the other will favor *different* sorts of corruption. Even if both are equally bad.
So if the metrics for "political corruption" consist disproportionately of metrics for the preferred style of corruption of one party, that's a huge problem that IMO disqualifies that effort. And, skimming the list of questions on the "Metaculus Democracy Threat Index", yeah, it does kind of look like someone was trying to list specifically the ways that the Republican Administration of Donald J. Trump might threaten democracy in the 2026-2028 timeframe.
>And the idea that democrats would restrict speech more than republicans is hilarious after Jimmy Kimmel.
Yes, one shitty late-night comedian versus all the COVID-era speech suppression. though tbf some of that started under Trump! He never tried to set up a disinformation board, though. thank god biden wasn't stupid enough to tough out that fight.
Even if more people got banned for COVID misinformation, there is legitimate public interest in trying to fight COVID misinfo, but there was not legitimate public interest in going after Kimmel.
The party that will completely rally around the President PERSONALLY going after a comedian for no reason other than making fun of him shows more of a disdain for freedom of expression than one that vaguely ideologically aligns with private platforms that try to moderate intentional lies from foreign actors trying to destabilize the country and causing hundreds if not thousands of deaths
fair enough that I was being vague, but I think the particular way chosen to "Fight" COVID "misinfo" actively made the problem much, much worse. And I think it was eminently predictably to anyone outside the policy bubble that it would fail the way it did.
To clumsily extend the metaphor, in trying to prosecute a murder they managed to get disbarred from further practice and also killed a bunch of people.
Could you elaborate on the "eminently predictable" mechanic? I'm pretty sure I agree with you, I just would find it helpful to have it written out so I can properly think about it. The whole "persecuting people makes them double down and radicalize in insulated communities" thing is something I get in broad strokes but don't exactly know how to put into words. Having a lot of the anti-misinformation couched in the language of the 20% elite doesn't help.
There was so much misinformation and “free speech” still allowed that now many more conservatives refuse to get vaccines for ANYTHING. Studies are now coming out demonstrating conservatives and liberals diverging in terms of health over the past 10+ years, much of which is attributable to distrust of doctors and vaccines. The misinformation and “free speech” won, you must be pleased.
“Free speech” in this case means poorly informed conspiracy theories. And I will criticize those every time. You still haven’t addressed the fact that so many conservatives bought the lies hook, line, and sinker.
Unfortunately, "Free speech" also includes critical race theory, which is a bunch of bigoted nonsense that many liberals bought hook, line, and sinker. Literally, keeping morons like Robin Diangelo and Ibram Kendi on the bestsellers list for years.
Alas! Here we are.
>You still haven’t addressed the fact that so many conservatives bought the lies hook, line, and sinker.
What is there to address? Conservatives have stupid ideas about vaccines.
I guess what I’m trying to say with all these comments is that I take issue with the “both-sidesism” I keep seeing here, equating corruption of Democrats and Republicans as the same (excepting meme coins), just expressed differently. Yes, they both have flaws. I’m arguing that you can’t ignore the serious harms being inflicted by the Trump administration and the beliefs of many conservatives, demonstrated by the breathtaking corruption in plain sight and ignorance of basic scientific principles, exemplified by vaccine skepticism, and manage to say that the NGOs or DEI stuff of the Dems is the same level of corruption.
Liberals have some stupid ideas, usually smaller in harms inflicted, but conservatives’ stupid ideas are downright dangerous to many people.
Indeed! Everyone that signed that stupid "go riot!" public health letter should've been stripped of credentials. Fauci lying about masks, right out, restrict his speech. Kamala Harris saying not to trust the vaccine? Take that threat seriously!
>"Will senior DOJ leaders override normal procedures to open or accelerate a case against a high-profile presidential opponent or critic in the following years?"
Note the phrase "override normal procedures". Looks suspiciously like this was inserted specifically to exclude the Biden-era prosecutions of Trump.
>"Will senior DOJ leaders override normal procedures to protect the President, his family, or his allies from a legal case in the following years?"
This was resolved "yes" for Trump's EPA quashing the investigation into Senator Jim Jones's coal holding, but not for president Biden's pardon of his son Hunter.
>"Will a SCOTUS decision weakening donor disclosure rules for political spending or electioneering communications be good law in the following years?"
Why is this assumed to be bad? Is there no privacy interest? Would overruling NAACP v. Alabama be considered good then?
>"Will the U.S. federal government open formal investigations of at least 5 top-50 universities in the following years?"
Why are top-50 universities prima-facia assumed to be innocent? I can almost guarentee that they are all in violation of federal civil rights laws.
>"Will U.S. authorities transfer any current or former U.S. citizen to a prison abroad in the following years?"
Wouldn't normal extraditions count? Am I misunderstanding something here?
It's also notable what isn't on the list:
Nothing about a state or city allowing noncitizens to vote. A lot of people are worried about that.
Nothing about demographic change. Seems like changes to the electorate itself should be considered as a possible threat mode.
Assumed to be innocent until proven guilty, yes, but nonetheless subject to being investigated if there's a reasonable suspicion of their being guilty. And since there's no indication of what *sort* of investigations might qualify, this one does seem ill-defined. Universities are big complex institutions that do lots of things; the idea that 10% of them might over a 2-3 year period do something that would raise a reasonable suspicion that *some* aspect of their operations might bear investigating, does not strike me as something that could only come out of a nefarious political conspiracy.
> Note the phrase "override normal procedures". Looks suspiciously like this was inserted specifically to exclude the Biden-era prosecutions of Trump.
Trump attempted to prevent the legitimately elected President from taking office via creating slates of fake electors and starting a riot to try to pressure various people in government into throwing out the legitimate results of the election, I don't really see why exactly it would be bad for him to have gone to jail for this.
Frankly the Biden era prosecutions of Trump were too slow.
> This was resolved "yes" for Trump's EPA quashing the investigation into Senator Jim Jones's coal holding, but not for president Biden's pardon of his son Hunter.
Pardons are, unfortunately, in the Constitution, otherwise the Jan 6 thugs would still be in prison rather than out and about molesting children &c.
You're right that whenever someone says, "prosecuting political enemies is bad," there is almost always an implied, "unless they did something really bad and deserve it". One might think that career prosecutors at the Justice Department would be competent to judge this, but the one time they pulled the trigger they were directly overruled by the American electorate, so apparently not.
Preemptive pardons seem like a ridiculous concept, though. I'm not familiar with the part of the Constitution that regulates pardons, but are there really no limits against preemptively pardoning someone before charges have even been laid or trials conducted?
It's a bad precedent. I've seen defences of it based on "well Biden was afraid that when Trump got into power, the MAGAs would go after his family with fake accusations and lawfare in revenge", but that equally now applies to any other president in office, including Trump.
He gave all his family, friends, and associates pre-emptive pardons? Well you see, he was afraid they'd be persecuted once he was out of power.
Personal opinion here, not something that can be generalized or used for political agreement.
Increasingly im just of the opinion that every law that can be twisted to set bad precedent when read as written. I find myself caring less about whether something sets a good or bad precedent for 'the other side' and more about whether it is obvious what is happening in that given incident.
And, yea, it's pretty obvious.
I'm willing to give biden a pass because it is obvious what kind of person trump is, and at some point we should just call a spade a spade. Trump doesn't let precedent stop him, ever. If Biden didn't set that precedent Trump would've anyway. Even if it was against the law, he would have. The conversation about decorum and norms seems so far away from what this person actually is.
We almost certainly need some reform around pardon power -- we need reform around a lot of parts of government -- and that's a job for the pols to figure out. But bluntly, at an individual level, this isn't really a question of norms.
See, this is precisely what concerns me. I thought of it back when Obama was doing his "I don't need no stinkin' Congress, I got me a pen and a phone!" stunt.
"If Biden didn't set that precedent Trump would've anyway."
That is way too easy a rationalisation of any bad or dumb thing we want to do. "The bad guy would have done it, maybe, probably, anyway if it's bad he would do it, so it's okay if we do it too/first!"
"The bad guy is so bad, *anything* we do is justified because we're the good guys!"
And that's how we got Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, 'enhanced interrogation' and Guantanamo.
Do away with decorum and norms, we're left with "anything we want to do is justified by the plea of necessity, and we can stretch necessity like an elastic band to cover what we want to do", and then the superweapon you built For Our Side Only ends up in the hands of the Bad Guys when you get voted out of power.
The USA thought it held all the aces with the atomic bomb, now it was the World Policeman with the biggest, baddest, deterrent and then got a rude awakening when the Soviet Union went "In fact, we too have our own German scientists and our own bomb" and then we got MAD and all the fun of the Cold War worries about nuclear annihilation.
It is very, very easy to persuade ourselves "Well we gotta do this because the bad guy(s)" and it's a very, very bad idea.
Look, for example, at the moaning and yelling about the Supreme Court (and I am not talking about "is X or Y constitutional?', I am talking about making decisions that are then binding matters of law) when it was ruling by fiat from the bench for the stuff the liberals wanted (e.g. Obergefell), well tough luck redneck rubes, this is the law now and if you don't like it that's just your problem, we don't make the rules. Ruthkanda Forever! This is how it's going to be from now on, we get all our wishes granted by the nine wizards in the dark robes and you can go fly a kite.
Then Tweedledum got replaced by Tweedledee, who proceeded to nominate justices in line with what they and their party wanted, and then we got boo-hooing about "is the Supreme Court too Catholic?" and "this is not the will of the people" (the will of the people could go take a hike when it was your guys in power) and it should be dissolved and talk of court-packing about getting the majority to make the judgements you wanted (nothing there about government should keep its sticky paws off the courts or the sanctity of the law).
I like this one about "disproportionately Catholic", was it "disproportionately Jewish" before? Of course, nobody would ever say such a thing:
"The remaining six justices -- John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett -- are Catholic. Thus, the court will consist of six Catholics, two Protestants, and one Jew.
This is not reflective of the U.S. population, as has been widely discussed in recent years. Our latest estimate from over 15,000 Gallup interviews conducted from January 2021 through March of this year shows that about 22% of the adult population identifies as Catholic, as opposed to the 67% Catholic representation on the court. Two percent of the population identifies as Jewish (Kagan represents 11% of the nine justices). The biggest disproportionality comes in terms of Protestants. About 45% of Americans are non-Catholic Christian, or Protestant, compared with what will be 22% Protestant representation on the court."
I do appreciate the ongoing fear of The Papist Menace, keep shaking in your boots about us, heretics! Historically, though, the proportions seem to be around 13% Catholic and 7% Jewish, which are in proportion for estimates of Catholic population in the USA and disproportionate for the Jewish population. Shall we talk about The Jewish Menace, or are they reliably liberal on social issues and so not a menace there?
Tweedledee demonstrates "you can get policies passed if you have enough of Your Guys on the Supreme Court", Tweedledum thinks "Hey, I gotta try that when I'm in power!" and then he gets into power and suddenly it's "but the leopards were not supposed to eat *my* face!"
IDK, I hear what you're saying, but it really does feel like trump is just in a different category. I'm not really rationalizing, so much as just pointing to empirical truth. The existence of prior precedent has not stopped Trump at all. I'm totally fine to evaluate Bidens actions in the context of what we know about Trump, because we knew that he was a guy who cared so little about norms he tried a coup.
The Biden pardons look better every day, given the vindictiveness of the Trump Administration, from pulling security clearances from law firms to firing prosecutors who were assigned to investigations he doesn't like to the idiotic Comey seashell prosecution.
It depends heavily on how you define 'Preemptive".
There is a long history of pardons for people who are not convicted and in many cases not even charged, starting with George Washington pardoning participants in the Whiskey Rebellion and continuing to the Ford and Carter pardons of Vietnam-era draft evaders. In almost all of those cases, however, the identities of the persons pardoned were by definition largely unknown. Various other pardons have been given to individuals before conviction, Caspar Weinberger being an example, though in most cases the recipient was at least under investigation and there was some specificity to the crimes for which they were pardoned. So the precedents were pretty well set, though the pardons granted by Biden for any Federal offense committed in a specific time period for select individuals certainly stretched them near their breaking points.
It was the terms of the pardons that struck me as odd. It was nothing to do with possible crimes (that we knew of) and so naturally that starts speculation about "okay, so what *did* they do that could be a pretext for a law case?" Hunter was in the middle of court cases, so that was explicable, but the rest of them?
It also sounds a bit like a "get out of jail" card; maybe you haven't done anything yet but now you can go ahead, you're already pardoned! 😊
"In the final minutes of his presidency, Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned several family members, including his brothers James and Frank Biden, and sister Valerie Biden Owens.
Biden said the pardons were intended to shield his family from politically motivated attacks and should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing.
..."My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me," Biden said in a statement released as Trump arrived at the Capitol rotunda for his inauguration.
"Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end."
In addition to his siblings, Biden issued pardons for his sister-in-law Sara Jones Biden and his brother-in-law John Owens."
Do we know if the Jan 6 convictees committed more child sex offences since their release than we’d expect from their statistical profiles? I agree that jail is an appropriate response to the Jan 6 incident, but I don’t think anyone should be using political prosecutions to target non-political crimes.
"the Jan 6 thugs would still be in prison rather than out and about molesting children &c."
Chazza, things can get hot and heavy in the comments here but there are still some standards of evidence. Provide evidence that this allegation is more than just "oh let's call all the people we don't like bad names" or don't do it.
I don't want to see flame wars on here, I can get that elsewhere.
"One Jan. 6 pardonee was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life in prison. Another was convicted in 2025 of reckless homicide.
At least 14, meanwhile, have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and at least six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have faced charges for physical assaults, illegal firearms possession, or other violent crimes. At least 20 have been charged with driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol or drugs or public intoxication."
Not nearly a majority of pardonees and mostly not charges for post-pardon activity, but there is at least one pardonee who has since been convicted of child molestation.
The rate for the Jan 6 protesters was 97 of nearly 1600 people pardoned.
The general US incarceration rate is 541 per 100,000 people.
Comparing all these numbers, you get about 1 in 3 for convicted criminals who complete their sentences, about 1 in 16 for the Jan 6 pardonees, and about 1 in 200 for the general population, however, note these numbers are not quite measuring the same thing. The crime recidivism rate is based on convictions within three years of release. The Jan 6 rate includes anyone arrested, charged, or convicted in between the Jan 6 protests and when the article was published, which is five years. The article expresses this very badly, with wording that looks deliberately intended to confuse people into thinking it is only post-pardon crimes (in the past 1.5 years), and similar issues to the point where I would recommend extreme skepticism should you encounter future works by the same author. The rate for the general population is by people currently in prison, so for instance someone arrested, held for a day, and released without charges would count as 1/365 of a person per year. If you instead take an estimate of 10 million misdemeanors charged per year (I am getting careless here, because I am in a hurry now), and assume other crimes are negligible, then that's 1/30 and you're comparing general population's charges + convictions (potentially more than one per person) per one year to the Jan 6th pardonees's individual people with at least one arrest, charge, or conviction within 5 years. Assume arrests being included makes up for double-counting charges on the same person, divide by 5, and you get rates lower than the general population. Or make other assumptions and you get similar rates.
Anyway, aren't democrats the ones usually wanting people freed from prison? They should be happy about this.
I think Jan 6th was and is such a hot button topic that I immediately go looking for the stench of partisanship (sorry, William).
The Lawfare Institute seems to try and be even-handed, so marks for that, but they are also probably centre-left to liberal so I'd expect a bit of unconscious bias there.
"Others" is a bit vague, how many? Did they do similar break-downs of other charges for people in BLM-associated cases?
Drink driving is a sport everyone participates in, regardless of political affiliation, so while I disapprove that article really is rather "murder, arson, and jaywalking": Some of them got done for CSAM, some for violent crime, and some for drink driving!
But thanks for looking it up, and while it's probably tilted a bit, it's at least trying to be objective. Maybe not getting there all the time, but trying:
"A Lawfare study reveals that almost one in 16 insurrectionists subject to the president’s clemency order has been arrested for and charged with—and in the vast majority of cases convicted of—other crimes, at least some of which were actively enabled by the clemency actions."
Tsk, tsk! "At least some of which" - nicely vague and highly alarmist, do better Skidmore grad! At least some of the commentariat on here have broken the laws by importing nootropics or other no-no activities! Since Jan 6th, even! Which may have been actively enabled by clemency!
Why, I myself have been drunk at least once in my life, now take me away in chains!
Yeah I don't mean to particularly vouch or not vouch for the Lawfare Institute which idk much about frankly, I just googled "January 6 child molester" and this came up first (besides an NPR article which certainly is perceived as left-liberal biased). The Andrew Paul Johnson case in particular made the social media rounds enough awhile back that I assume it was the impetus for Chastity's comment, which I read as glib more than some genuine belief that they're all a bunch of pedos.
Seems like insurrectionists are a group more likely to commit crimes than the general population but less likely than the overall population of convicted criminals, which doesn't surprise me that much. Some number were violent people with poor impulse control or whatever and likely to commit other crimes, others were generally law-abiding people who either were credulous dopes who earnestly thought the election was stolen and acted accordingly or were swept up in the mob mentality and went along for the ride. To the larger point of the Democracy Index, I don't think they should have been pardoned as brave patriots and I think it's fair to flag the pardons as bad for democracy, and would feel the same way if there were a second capital storming by BlueAnon libs in 2025 and they were pardoned by President Newsom in 2029.
On a last note, I'm not sure BLM cases are really analogous because I don't think there were a lot of pardons associated with any convictions that resulted? Prominent dem politicians supported bail funds for arrestees, but that's obviously quite different from a post-conviction pardon.
"Normal procedures" seems like a reasonable caveat because prosecuting major political figures isn't in itself undemocratic, if your concept of democracy includes the idea that political leaders should not have blanket immunity or otherwise be above the law. Prosecuting *plausibly or likely innocent* political figures to manipulate their eligibility for office is undemocratic, but the publicly available evidence suggests that Trump is not plausibly or likely innocent.
Pardons have a separate question, which was appropriately resolved Yes for 2023-24.
Considering demographic change as a threat to democracy is... well, I'll just say an extremely controversial and partisan-coded position, and not something one would expect a non-ethnonationalist organization to include in such an index.
"Leftists have not subverted most institutions to be biased in their favor" is also an extremely controversial and partisan-coded position, yet it's the background assumption of most "democracy indices" (this one is no exception), which is the real reason why it won't convince any skeptical conservative.
Yeah, my view on this is that Metaculus is not rigged, but the natural constituency for people who have heard of it, contribute to it, and are consulted by it is the liberal college-educated Democratic-voting bloc.
So there may indeed be biases there just simply because the mindset of everyone is "this thing good, the other thing bad, and the other lot always do the other thing".
If there are conservative to right-wing superforecasters, yippee! But are there?
One should also consider that the reason why there aren't many right-wing superforecasters could be that it just so happens that people who are better at predicting the future consistently don't think right wing policies/solutions are effective at producing good results.
Or left-wing institutional capture along with left-wing bias in the prediction questions means it is more likely the government will do things that left-wingers predict will happen.
Sure if you just want to make up an imagined story. Unless you define left wing so broadly as to be meaningless, where is all the capture? US presidency is regularly swapped between Republicans and Democrats. There's plenty of Republican governors. Elsewhere, like in the UK, right wing parties often are in power *longer* than left wing ones. Does the left wing have its turfs? Maybe, sure, but so does the right. It is far from this all-encroaching capture that the right is completely powerless against.
And it's not like superforecasters only deal in matters that a government, or for that matter any human, can uniquely determine. If they have consistently better outcomes across the board including at things like technological discovery then it's obviously not something you could achieve just with bias.
Many things "could be" the explanation for many other things. For any remotely controversial question, I can conjure an explanation saying that it's because My Tribe is smart and good or that Other Tribe is stupid and evil, that can't be disproven and so "could be" true.
The question is, how *likely* is it to be the cause, and on what evidence? Give me a number and a cite. Or at very least an estimate tied to reasonable premises with a bit of math.
I mean, is this a less likely explanation than "everyone has a left wing bias"? Is that any less of a "Other Tribe is stupid and evil" explanation?
I'm not saying this is necessarily the case - I think the correlation between academic research and political orientation isn't random but it has more to do with mindset than with raw intelligence. However in general people also seem to give for granted that this universal left-wing bias is causing everything and that's also very questionable. If you ask left wingers, it's the right wing who permeates all of society. More likely is that both sides have a selection bias, writing off the parts they have more influence on as secondary while the other guys control the Really Important Stuff.
I adopt structural reforms to make institutions align with basic civilized values; you subvert them to be biased in your favor; he is a barbarian wrecker who doesn't understand the institutional basis of civilization.
Indeed. And there's the embarrassing implication in this kind of complaint that your vision of "basic civilized values" isn't quite as compelling, considering that your opponents outmaneuvered you so comprehensively.
> "Leftists have not subverted most institutions to be biased in their favor" is also an extremely controversial and partisan-coded position
Reading 'extremely controversial' as 'lots of people strongly dislike this' a la 'stalin was extremely controversial'
I really don't think this is true. Can you find any polling to suggest that most people (say, 70%) believe 'leftists' (who? schumer?) have subverted most institutions (which?) to be biased in their favor?
procedures" is that it's actually fairly common for prosecutors to bypass "normal procedures", that's why you have criminal defense attorneys.
If in the trump case, FBI officials had jumped the gun and busted into Mar A Lago with a warrant that turned out to be based on complete fabrications, there'd be tons of commentary about 1984 and the deep state and the visible end of democracy, but this stuff happens all the time in drug cases and we typically assume the system can just handle it in court (which it does)
Thanks for compiling this list, I agree some of these examples are egregiously targeted.
I did think one question you listed was actually fine. Weakening donor disclosure laws seems likely to be anti-democratic because corruption is a constant concern. Money is easy for an individual to provide in quantities that matter to an individual politician. Membership of political organisations is different, because “membership” on its own provides a much smaller tangible benefit to an individual politician. There are trade-offs here, but statistically, I suspect most times donor disclosure law changes have been about corruption, and most membership disclosure changes have been about political association. I’d be interested if you have examples where the opposite seems true.
That’s for a local politician. At federal level, the amounts are higher, to the point where donor disclosure laws are relevant. (You’re also simplifying and ignoring a lot, but that’s irrelevant to my point.)
I don't think these sorts of predictors are necessarily very good at actually predicting what we might intuitively think of as "a threat."
For example, imagine you had a prediction market in 1941, immediately after Pearl Harbor. You might reasonably sit down and calculate the balances of forces between Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hirohito, and conclude that there was virtually no way for the Axis powers to win. The industrial power of the USA and USSR were just too great, the failure of political collapse during Barbarossa combined with Nazi genocidal actions in the East mean that the Soviet population will almost certainly fight to the bitter end, Japan was too poor and too reliant on oil that it doesn't have good sources of, the Chinese theater bogged down the IJA while providing minimal strategic gains, Germany lacks the naval capacity to invade Britain so it's forced to rely on bombing which has never worked, democracies are extremely bloodthirsty once attacked so the US and UK are unlikely to give up even as the war grinds out, etc, etc.
But the only reason that is true is that everyone on the Allied side take Hirohito and Hitler very seriously as threats, and are extremely unlikely to change their minds! It would be crazy to conclude, "See? Only a 0.3% chance of them winning. You have TDS (Tojo Derangement Syndrome)."
I don't think anyone took seriously the idea that Al Qaeda would take over the US, but they were still pretty concerned about terrorist attacks. War isn't all or nothing.
Putting up some defenses and additional safety was all well and good, but I'd say post-9/11 the levels of terrorism-related paranoia were absolutely unwarranted and "deranged".
Of course, but because liberals are so wonderfully civilized, they refuse to deal with threats before they become a problem. Nothing they'd do would change just because Trump is more or less of a threat. So all you can do is calculate probabilities and pray to God.
What point are you making? Are you worried that if the Allied leaders believed in prediction markets, they would’ve taken Germany/Japan less seriously and the odds of an Axis victory would’ve increased? I think if the leaders were that likely to lessen their response, observers at the time would learn of that, and the prediction markets would take that into account. We already have some politicians who are more or less commonly attacked for being “too swayed by opinion polls”, people would have a sense whether a given politician listened to them much.
Or do you mean, democracy might be “under threat” but the threat might have a low chance of winning? I agree that’s likely, but less of an issue. Winning a war is awful, and in many ways worse than life after losing a war (though it was clearly right for the US to enter WWII). I don’t think winning a fight against anti-democratic forces is nearly as bad as living in an undemocratic country.
(If politicians cared that much about markets, there’d probably be interference from people wanting to shift the market, due to other investors not being *that* confident in their positions. The market outcome would fall somewhere between the “true” aggregate prediction and the desired outcome of the most-committed manipulator. But I don’t think that’s what you’re getting at.)
There could be a weird feedback loop where the probability of success determines how much resources you want to spend to secure that success. Could work in different ways, like:
"There is already a 100% chance of victory. Maybe we are sending too much resources, let's try a smaller amount and see what happens on the prediction markets."
"There is a 0% of victory. Clearly all resources we send are wasted, stop sending anything."
Both arguments seem reasonable in isolation (and the enemy propaganda would definitely make them). Of course it would be ironic if the latter situation happened as a consequence of reacting to the former.
A probability 50% is probably the one most motivating to send more resources. But I guess it depends on how the media would frame it.
Or a better example, imagine 99% predicted chance of victory. Some people would argue "hey, send a little more resources and make it 100%, we are so close to guaranteed victory". Other people would argue "hey, 98% is almost as good as 99%, plus we can still change our minds later it things start going wrong, and the extra resources could be spent on our education or healthcare instead". By buying thousands of bots on social networks, you could push the consensus in either direction.
Comparing today's prediction markets with what they might have led to in 1941 doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The information landscape was very different back then, the exchange of ideas limited by speed of delivery (literally!), much larger trust in institutions than today. Probably the average person had a lot less leasure time to spend on deep diving into political and military matters.
Even within this different context I'm not sure the predictor would be as bad as you think it might be. We can crudely think of the outcome of a "prediction site" as the aggregation of all available data, recency-biased and people's-belief-weighted. And more specifically for prediction markets, belief-as-currency-weighted. There are sources for the beliefs, and the stronger the source, moving up and into an actual information advantage (a big no-no in regulated financial markets, but almost a de-facto feature of prediction markets), the more chance someone will take advantage. In 1941, you'd probably have the few people in power taking the Axis forces very seriously use their information advantage to reap the benefits. Were prediction markets taken seriously by the media class, maybe they would have helped shape public consciousness, too.
I think the point the comment is simply making is, just because <bad thing> seems unlikely to happen, doesn't mean that <people who are extremely alarmed about bad thing> are insane, because one of the big factors behind it not happening are all the alarmed people taking action.
This is complicated. Resources matter in war, but so does political will, and a simplistic comparison of resources wouldn't predict France collapsing in mere weeks in 1940, or even the massive successes of early Barbarossa.
For a more recent event, how would your prediction market work immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Russian resources were obviously bigger than Ukrainian ones, and the question of how many Western countries would help the victim and to which extent was extremely open. Some like Poland were immediately "in and on it", while Germany, the richest nation of the EU, initially sent them something like 5000 surplus helmets. I remember the situation four years ago and the present status quo, when multiple European corporations produce advanced missiles and drones for Ukraine to shoot into Russia proper, would have looked very unlikely back then. Even the current duration of the war would have looked very unlikely back then. I don't believe that the prediction market of 2022 would say "this war will take longer than WWI to play out".
Some observations on potential bias from a strongly anti-Trump, pro-proportional-representation perspective:
-- There is a question on the crude magnitude of gerrymandering (efficiency gap >= 20 seats in the House), but that doesn't fully capture the antidemocratic impact of widespread tit-for-tat gerrymandering. "Our safe seats cancel out your safe seats" is not actually a win for representativeness of the legislature or responsiveness to popular sentiment.
-- Reconciliation bill with no CBO input on Byrd Rule compliance seems weirdly orthogonal to democracy. It's not clear what a better measure of Senate "skew" would be, since given the baked-in skew of the Senate's constitutional design, it's not obvious whether ending the filibuster would be a net win for representativeness.
The third sentence is I guess a candidate for banning, if you really don't like being called nitpicky?
The fourth sentence has lots of swear words, but I doubt that's the issue- last General thread was full of lists of racial slurs to investigate the AI moderator and that didn't incur any bans, so I doubt Scott is _terribly_ sensitive to profanity.
There's a well-recognized game in journalism where, if you're a journalist, you make the reader think whatever you want him to think while only saying things that are technically true, while leaving out things that would detract from that narrative, and if you're a reader, you try to detect when the journalist is doing that.
Similar goes for comments. Scott - like any reader - is permitted to point out when a commenter might be doing that. This is an example.
We're permitted to point out when Scott might be biased in when he notices it, although we have somewhat more limit than Scott does since we don't have moderator control. That being said, Scott's commonly observed as more left wing than right, and if so, this is a ban against interest, which mostly just leaves "Scott is trying to keep his comments section from turning into a pointless mudfight", which I tend to support.
I feel like in this case though there's a certain element of potential sane-washing at work. It's somewhat concerning and ironic that the best way to defend Trump is to *not* listen to what he, himself, says, and claim it's all a misunderstanding, or a lie, or theatre, and not to be believed.
Personally I'd be ok with actually taking the baseline to be what someone proclaims to want to do and be. If they're lying, well, they shouldn't have. If someone ran for office while loudly boasting that they are a serial killer I wouldn't wait for a jury trial to say they shouldn't run for office. The offence is either being a serial killer, or lying about being a serial killer and tarnishing the seriousness and importance of the office he's running for. Either way, guilty. Off with them, and nothing of value would be lost.
The most straightforward way to deal with that perception of sane-washing is to look more carefully. Lots of people readily acknowledge that Trump says a lot of word salad, or more to the point, he simply doesn't talk like most other American politicians. So we can't simply take what he says the same we take what other politicians say. For that matter, we can't interpret what most other politicians say that way, either, given how often they will change their message.
It's especially misleading to try this technique when a great deal of what's presented is filtered by people who obviously don't like Trump. Even today, for example, there exist people who think Trump sides with Nazis even though he said things that directly contradicts taking their side, primarily because the source that reported what he said, cut those words out. Moreover, said people frequently do not apply the same reasoning to quotes from public figures they happen to agree with, which strongly suggests that what motivates them is not that reasoning.
I find it more productive to try our best to read behind the words, factoring in deeds, personal background, minding the sources filtering what's said, and so on. Speaking to my previous comment, this also means we can take a dim view of commenters who flatly reject such measures, insist on just looking at whatever their filters told them, and insinuate that anyone who tries to be more serious is somehow being only performatively so.
Before Trump’s second presidency, I heard someone argue that sane Republicans, especially the Supreme Court (I forget the language they used) would use a second Trump term to push through normal Republican objectives with unusually little resistance, but that those same sane Republicans would stop Trump from having a third term because normal Republican values include two-term presidencies. Trump’s bluster would never become more than bluster. I feel like that prediction has gone surprisingly well - the Supreme Court has blocked a lot of Trump’s craziest and most unconstitutional, least conventionally-Republican ideas.
Sure, but he’s still going to do the ballroom if he can. Just think how dissolved into warring factions the liberals would be if he actually became king.
That kinda makes sense, I could definitely see Trump's crazy ideas actually having an anchoring effect to make conventionally Republican agendas normal by comparison and thus pass more easily.
This post is a bit confused about the way predictions are now aggregated on Metaculus. You essentially described the Metaculus Prediction, which was deprecated in 2024:
It turns out there wasn't enough difference between the two to keep the old version of the Metaculus Prediction around. That means Metaculus manages to perform this well even with a pretty simple metric! That said, pro forecasters do still routinely outperform the community, so the site might find a better way to take advantage of that in the future.
Thanks, fixed. I'm still confused by this, though. Is this basically an admission that superforecasting is bunk and we can get the same effect by polling random people?
Maybe they just weren't weighting it well? 🤷 I've never asked.
The community forecast isn't random people, though, since the sample is significantly narrowed to "does forecasting" and then narrowed further based on particular interest (or commitment, in the case of tournament questions).
I wonder how much of the difference between pros and the community comes from excluding low-volume markets and low-effort answers? They say “The pro and community performance baselines are calculated using all questions where both humans and bots made forecasts — from the first forecast of our first AI model to today.”
This sentence confused me until I read the comments: "You can see that 86 people have made forecasts about this, although it’s the people with a long history of making better-than-average forecasts whose opinions drive the result."
no. the flattering-to-metaculus explanation is that superforecasters and regular people both have a similar error spread, so most of the useful signal comes from aggregation itself. the less flattering explanation is that everything in metaculus is motivated by trying to impress various bigwigs, so when the simple aggregation and the superforecaster aggregation were different, it was opaque to explain to bigwigs why the superforecasters disagreed, so it wasn't useful.
- Pro forecasters still completely crush random people (even random Metaculus forecasters!) in basically all tournaments.
- Pro aggregates are better than random user aggregates, as shown by the FutureEval leaderboard posted by Nathan below, however part of this is that Pros probably spend slightly more time on the questions and are incentivised to cooperate, while the broader community does that less.
The reasons the Metaculus Prediction didn't significantly outperform the Community Prediction imo is that
- Good forecasters are overrepresented in most questions, as skill and the number of forecasts one makes are heavily correlated.
- The old way of measuring skill simply wasn't all that good. The new system is much better and we are working on a new version of reputation weighting at some point.
Everything is bunk when stretched beyond its limits. Common sense, though, is only common because it's the bare minimum. Uncommonly advanced sense is terribly underrated.
While this post tries to achieve objectivity, it occurs to me that you could go in the other direction and make multiple subjective indexes representing different political positions with different weights.
Maybe one group believes gun control is tyranny and another believes the real tyranny is denying gender affirming care to adolescents. Why not track both separately? Then we can have an objective measure of the real, observed level of subjective tyranny!
(Obviously there are some issues to work through. You would need to track the measures across a decade or two, to separate the underlying ideological definition of tyranny from the day to day partisan wrangling. If candidate A wants to require ID checks for SIM cards and candidate A's supporters are suddenly in favour of this, we wouldn't want the metric to shift suddenly.)
You could. The post claims that everyone who’s done this before Metaculus has done that. You could make those indices in Metaculus as well, but it’d be harder to claim they’re “democracy indices” instead of “tyranny indices”, and commenters like Daniel above could find longer lists with more egregious examples of political leanings.
> As time goes on, the Index will become more valuable insofar as it gets further from any possibility of biasing the questions. That is: any biases in the question set are the biases of 2025, when (for example) Republicans are more into memecoin-based corruption than Democrats. But as time goes on, the biases will drift - the biases of 2035 will be correlated <1 with the biases of 2025 (for example, Democrats might take up memecoin-based corruption, or Republicans might drop it) and as long as the question set is stable, biased question-selectors can’t optimize it for the most up-to-date biases.
This can also go the other way.
Suppose right now the authors make a competent and honest attempt at keeping the index unbiased. Then we freeze the question set, and in a few years things have drifted to make the index biased.
A priori, today I have no reason to believe the index is more likely to drift in one direction than the other; but that doesn't mean I should expect the index to drift towards less bias. (Ie variance can be high, even if the mean is 0.)
The problem with "Democracy Threat Index" as a concept is that even granting all of the methodology problems (and pretty much every single one of those is an attempt to make Trump look bad and the Dems look good) the only thing that such an Index can measure is how imperiled Democracy is, but not the source of the problem.
The underlying assumption "this got worse under Trump's rule, so Trump is worse for democracy" doesn't even survive the most basic scrutiny. If Trump files lawsuits against Universities, yes possibly he is attacking these institutions, but also obviously possibly they really are corrupt and the actual threat was the Biden administration welcoming their illegal racism. Trump White House revoked security clearances while Biden didn't was an example given on that page. Well yeah, are you surprised? All those officials supported Biden and didn't support Trump. If they were MAGA you can bet Biden would have revoked too.
Any number of things can happen where you will have a debate about whether the problem is that this admin is acting or that the previous one didn't. The real issue is it's already clear American democracy is under threat because both sides are willing to ignore the rule of law, justice and basic humanity to get their priorities in. This sort of index just doesn't help you determine who is causing the problem.
If you ask me it's absolutely obvious that the Democrats started this and the Republicans are waking up and fighting back in kind, which they absolutely should do.
I don’t think the conditional solves the problem. Some questions only measure change in democratic level, which might stay elevated for a long time after someone tries to fix a problem.
Suppose, in a right-wing worldview, democracy was broken in 2015, all the officials are left-wing. If Trump is elected, he’ll replace a quarter of the officials with right-wing ones. Then in 2020, either Trump would replace another quarter of officials with right-wing ones, or Biden will get rid of half of Trump’s officials. But if Clinton wins in 2016, no officials will be replaced in 2016 or 2020, since the Republicans would give up. Then the “replaces officials” indicator activates only in the Trump branch, even though Trump’s branch has more balanced officials. (Trump is still obviously bad and he was trying to become an autocrat, but you can’t tell that just by counting how many fights he causes).
Curious to hear what you mean by the Democrats started this, what would you point to as the starting point? I've heard it argued that it started with Republican backlash against Obama (e.g. birtherism) due in some part to racism, and from the other side that the root cause was Obama being unusually divisive in pushing idpol.
Republican backlash against Obama didn't take any concrete, illegal, democracy-threatening form. Democrats weaponized the security apparatus to go after Trump and his administration, illegally enforced vaccine mandates, illegaly coerced social media platforms to silence the political opposition, did their best to effectively ban support of Trump in the corporate sphere, weaponized biased courts against J6 protestors, deliberately let illegal aliens inside the country, deliberately refuse to make it possible to verify if a person voting is a citizen, threaten judges who vote against their parties agenda, concoct hoax sex crimes to try and derail judicial nominations.
This is why I absolutely don't want any compromise from MAGA and don't care what laws, rules, norms or ethics they break to ensure this version of the Democratic party never gain control again and all their illegals are removed. And broadly I'd say this of pretty much every woke party in the world.
No I don't live in the USA. A lot of stuff on Twitter/X. That's naturally very right-skewing sources, but I regularly read NYT,WAPO, Atlantic etc and even very left-wing stuff like Vox and Slate.
Even though I'm not American, American politics are world politics, and their political frameworks, battles and ideas get exported everywhere.
I think generally speaking "the Universities teach wrong things" is just not a threat to democracy. It can be something that makes civilization as a whole stupider but stupid speech and repression of free speech by the government aren't symmetric in how much they constitute a threat to democracy, specifically.
Universities discriminate against White and Asian people isn't a 'threat to democracy' is an argument that's somewhat reasonable. However, "Trump's attempts to stop universities from racial and view-point discrimination is a threat to democracy" is something I can't buy either.
Also, no Trump isn't repressing university speech. If they want federal funding they shouldn't do this discrimination.
Are you thick? Obviously Biden didn't. These people were his lapdogs. There WERE virtually no MAGA people in important posts prior to this administration.
Trump's behaviour is perfectly appropriate considering the circumstances.
It is hard to take you seriously when you use silly terns like "lapdogs," but your claim was "All those officials supported Biden and didn't support Trump." That's the point: Trump retaliated against people simply for disagreeing with him politically. You said so yourself.
And read the link: He barred every attorney from giant law firms from entering federal buildings, including the DC courthouse, because they currently or formerly employed lawyers who investigated or sued him. And that is just one example.
If you think Biden or the democratic machine in general would tolerate these officials thwarting their policy, there's no point even discussing the issue with you.
I know I am wasting my time, because you seem to be only interested in waging the culture war, but:
We aren't talking about tolerating officials thwarting their policy. We are talking about punishing people for following the policy of former administrations, and, moreover, punishing entire 500+ lawyer law firms simply because they hired lawyers who investigated or sued him. Don't pretend that that is standard procedure.
I am unclear how Metaculus can handle actions that are both legal and constitutional, or at least not in direct conflict with the law or the constitution, but the practice of which can range very widely from the relatively normal and innocent to the grossly and seemingly corrupt (though not in legal terms!) overuse. Obvious examples are gerrymandering, presidential pardons and executive interference in the employment and careers of civil servants.
I think this is a judgment call (and unfortunately adds to the nontrustlessness of this), but I think an 80-20 would be to stick to monitoring the obviously unconstitutional things and admit that this is only a measure of a strict conception of "democracy threat" rather than general civic unhealth.
I'd be interested in seeing this expanded to other countries using the same questions... but a lot of the questions really are very US-coded.
The advantage of having this index expanded is that a value of 39.3 could be placed in some context. Right now it's a bit hard to parse what exactly a 39.3 threat to democracy means. Does that mean there's almost a 40% chance that the US becomes a monarchy or an outright undemocratic oligarchy? Or is that a 40% chance that important democratic institutions are destroyed and the will of the people ignored but with a chance to come back given enough public support?
Essentially, does this mean 40% to become Hungary (before Orban was voted out) or 40% to become North Korea. Or is it neither?
Placing other countries on the index would make it a lot more useful.
Metaculus, per a quick Wikipedia check, is based in the United States.
I seriously doubt that US-based institutions are capable of saying "this country is a dictatorship now", or even "this country is a hybrid regime now". Way, way too vulnerable to government pressure, both formal and informal, especially as the question isn't some abstract one but one which gets at the heart of the US government's legitimacy. Even foreign institutions are vulnerable to this, to a degree, because of the size of the US market.
This doesn't have to look like taking down the whole site for dissent, it can look like getting favorable regulatory treatment/contracts/help for the board's other businesses if you make sure the website displays the "right" answer.
I dunno, I feel like people on CNN and MSNBC etc. (not to mention even more nakedly left-biased institutions) say this kinda stuff all the time without consequence. As others have pointed out, the questions in this case seem pretty obviously designed to make Trump look bad.
I don't watch either of those networks, but I get the sense they keep their criticism firmly in acceptable bounds and don't touch any red lines, and assure their audiences that it'll all be okay if the Democrats win next time around (or if not, it's only because fixing Trump's damage takes time, incremental change, etc.). And I know they're owned by member's of Trump's class.
I highly doubt that they (or Metaculus, for that matter) are capable of or even interested in resisting authoritarian consolidation, especially if Trump gets leading DNC figures on board with it first.
Where American domestic policy is concerned, I think there is a wild card potentially explosive enough in its effect that it can upset even the most careful predictions: the United States are unique amongst western democracies in possessing a constitution which theoretically allows nearly unlimited power to its chief executive. It was of course very much the intention of the framers of the constitution to make the executive the most powerful branch of government, but I doubt they could have foreseen the advantage Trump has taken of it. The US, for instance, is the only democracy which nominates its elected head of state effective (not simply symbolic or ritual) commander of all its armed forces.
(The President of France also has the title of Chef des armées (Head of the Armies), but it is the Ministry of Defence which administers the armed forces - Macron could not start firing senior officers for disagreeing with him).
I am certainly not a constitutional historian, and have only an amateur interest in history. But the view I have formed of the creation of the US constitution includes the following points:
1. The main concern of your Founding Fathers was to avoid at all costs a hereditary leadership, rather than to restrict the powers of an elected and time-restricted chief executive.
2. What terrified the Founding Fathers, almost more than the idea of a hereditary kingship, was 'mob rule' and the prospect of a chief executive elected by the direct majority vote of the demos; hence the invention of the electoral college.
3. The same fear of what were seen by many of the Founding Fathers as the outrageous opinions and dangerous desires of the lower classes led them to greatly favour the power of the executive branch, which they hoped would exercise lasting control over the mob's wilder excesses.
Granting that these points are heavily influenced by a liberal/radical predisposition, would you argue that they are also misguided?
Re #2: that's not quite the root of the Electoral College.
It's important to remember that the United States is a joint venture of the States; as such, there was a tension at the founding between the positions of States based on their population (larger States preferred proportional representation while smaller States preferred equal representation) that led to the bicameral structure of Congress where each approach is embodied in one chamber.
The Electoral College is a hybrid of the two since only a single individual can be President. There was also some attention paid to the limitations of information dissemination in a pre-industrial society.
I kind of disagree. The system does give pretty extraordinary power to the chief executive, but the limits are also pretty clearly articulated. He has unlimited power only in the sense that "what if the army just did what he wanted and congress refused to impeach him etc etc" which would be true of any executive.
It would of course be true of any chief executive, but I am not actually concentrating specifically on Trump, but on a system that can allow Trumps to exercise virtually unlimited power. Commander of the Armed Forces is one tool would-be Trumps can wield; perhaps even more dangerous is the apparently limitless ability to govern by executive decree, thus bypassing Congress entirely - as we have seen!
That's pretty far from "unlimited" though, as we have *also* seen. There are fairly clear and well-understood limits on what can be done with an executive order, especially if congress is motivated to counter it.
"Motivated" - aye, there's the rub! But I agree, the present US constitution does not give the chief executive an absolute carte blanche to do whatever he wants; but it allows pretty awesome latitude to anyone prepared to make use of it. Does any other western democracy?
Any system is going to struggle if the other branches "let" the president or prime minister do a thing. I consider "motivated" to be an extremely powerful check on the executive. It seems we both agree that congress *could* constrain the executive in a number of ways, it simply chooses not to in many ways at present...but that's a decision. "The president can get away with anything as long as it's sufficiently popular" is a *pretty big* check on the power of an executive in a democracy, because the whole point of a democracy is that the government does popular stuff and doesn't do sufficiently unpopular stuff.
To elaborate, there is not some abstract factor of Congressional Willingness To Constrain The Executive. If Trump started using executive orders to ban puppies and kittens, one imagines that Congress would be rather motivated to stop that. If the Democrats win a huge Congressional majority in the next election, then Congress would suddenly start restraining the executive much more than it has been.
The degree to which Congress attempts to constrain the president is a function of the degree to which Congress disagrees with the president's actions. You could say that the executive has awesome latitude to do anything Congress is fine with, and that is perhaps a nontrivial feature of the US system, but when you put it that way there is an obvious check on his power.
> It seems we both agree that congress *could* constrain the executive in a number of ways, it simply chooses not to in many ways at present...but that's a decision.
Ah, but how free is the free will of the majority of the Republican party in today's Congress; when a simple Trumpian snarl will bring most of them to heel? I may tell myself that I have 'chosen' to approach a chained wild beast no closer than its chain will stretch, but my choice was surely constrained, if by nothing more than self-interest!
the backstop on executive power was always the threat of impeachment. 'bypassing congress' only works when congress allows itself to be bypassed. But that has far more to do with party politics than it does country interest
The constitution has a decent mechanism for stopping a president who goes rogue, impeachment. The problem is that Trump isn't going rogue. He is doing basically what he campaigned on and was elected to do.
The founders weren't stupid. They were perfectly aware that no democratic constitution could prevent a faction that consistantly wins the House, Senate, and Presidency from overriding the constitution itself.
This is just wrong. The US Constitution affords nearly unlimited power to *Congress*. In particular, Congress has the power to straight-up dismiss the President, and every Federal judge. Congress also absolutely controls the budget, without which almost nobody in the government has any real power.
If Congress completely abdicates its responsibility to govern, in favor of pious speechifying and electioneering, then yes, the President is the person most able to pick up all the power lying around on the floors of Washington. And this pretty much has happened in the United States. But that has more to do with CSPAN than the Constitution.
And I don't think that's unique to the United States. Is there any democracy on Earth where if the legislature stops legislating and henceforth only speechifies, supreme power will not de facto wind up exercised by a singular head of government or perhaps small committee of oligarchs?
really because the separation of powers is more explicit in the US constitution, it's probably easier than most other countries for even a bare minority faction to stop the executive.
I also think it's important to note that congress "letting" trump "do what he wants" but not impeaching him is not limitless. I'm pretty sure if trump woke up tomorrow and decided to start confiscating everyone's cars, he'd be impeached.
The present problem is caused basically entirely by congress simply not wanting to make new statutes or impeach the president for doing certain things, and *that* is a product of democratic will, not the disregard of democratic will.
now, concededly, this is how a lot of dictators came to power, which is why the art of drawing red lines is hard and maybe futile.
I understand the need to implement questions pertinent to the time (technological change means there are many more alternative ways to undermine democracy).
But why isn't the first port of call for this question to take questions similar/ the same as other Democratic Backsliding measures as opposed to generating questions on the fly?
It seems like we're replacing one intractable issue (slow updating of the metrics, "experts" being untrusted and possibly partisan) with its own (incommensurability over time, the measure's tendentiousness and partisanship to the challenges of the time, threats of participants being untrusted and possibly partisan...).
Perhaps we should start with the same set of questions, but in the Prediction market format, to fully isolate those benefits and avoid bringing on others?
True, updating the measures to the time is important, but like opening Pandora's Box, it's difficult to close. Without constraint on updating of the metrics, we'll just end up with a hodge podge of different measures that reflect the specifics of the most recent case of fraud.
Would a Meta-metric be more fruitful?
At the beginning of each year, questions are chosen based on current affairs. Over time, deterioration in those metrics are measured.
They are then aggregated (e.g. 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 metrics are all rolled in to one). We can view democratic deterioration from the perspective of discrete points in time, but aggregating as such would "wash out" the effects of specific contemporary concerns (each having a lower impact).
This approach would age like fine wine (i.e. better over time with more measures) and it could be bolstered with a "core" set of democratic backsliding questions at the beginning that reduces the weight of specific questions.
We would perhaps still be incommensurate on aggregate, but on an individual year basis we wouldn't be and we could directly measure performance over time for these yearly measures (as opposed to total set of questions changing over time based on current affairs).
Partisanship is possibly diluted, particularly by the "core" set of questions (but isn't entirely solved).
I am kind of confused what the question "Will senior DOJ leaders override normal procedures to open or accelerate a case against a high-profile presidential opponent or critic in the following years?" I feel the problems with this question should be sufficiently obvious to a non-lawyer. What are normal procedures? Grand juries? That happened already. Arguably that happened going to back to forever. Charging people for stuff that "doesn't normally get charged?" Every white collar defendant thinks that's what's happening, and they're not always wrong.
I could say "this has already happened with Comey/SPLC" and someone would potentially comment "The SPLC committed pretty obvious financial crimes as detailed here" and then I could say "that's not a crime" and then we'd be...having a criminal case and a trial. That's what the process is FOR, to see if normal procedures have been followed.
The fundamental problem I see is that these questions amount to predicting instability/polarization rather than authoritarianism under one central leader.
On the broader topic, I think the "democracy protector" crowd must address things like the annulment of the 2024 Romanian election under laughable claims of "Russian social media bots", the unprecedented level of speech arrests and police brutality in the UK, and the broader problem of leftie parties importing millions of people who are going to vote for them no matter what. All three of those are existential threats to any reasonable definition of democracy, and all three have already happened.
Instead, these people talk about the prospect of Trump suddenly declaring a military coup in 2027 after more than a decade of a decidedly and unnecessarily deferential attitude towards judges and congressmen.
i really feel like the worst challenge to a "democracy threat index" isn't various accusations of bias, it's the concept of an index itself. which is more persuasive: "the chance of riots / violence at democracy-related protests killing more than 100 people moved from 20% to 30%" or "The Metaculus Democracy Index moved from 20 to 30"? things like the DJIA or S&P500 are naturally grown from an already existing set of data, all of that data already obsessively being monitored by investors. the trading data can be backtested. metaculus recieves a millionth of the attention for the stock market, so scott being reassured that "the index isn't moving much" can be explained by "no one is looking at that particular wing of this hyper-niche site". i would also be willing to bet if something newsworthy happened that would move the democracy index, metaculus would shoot themselves in the foot by launching 30 more questions about it, diverting attention away from the existing questions.
Question, primarily for the conservatives here. If you wanted to create a more plausibly right-wing-sympathetic index of threats to democracy (past, present, and future), what questions might you try including?
Things I've seen here:
* a question about noncitizens voting in elections
* a question that includes the threat of democracy to rapid demographic changes via immigration, legal or otherwise
* a question that tracks attempted prosecution of political opponents post-election
* a question about politicians pardoning family members convicted of crimes
I think you could go about it in three ways:
* add questions which make previous democratic presidents look bad (e.g. a question about trying to illegally add amendments to the constitution without authority to do so, which Biden tried to do with the ERA).
* questions which make the current president look better (e.g. a question that suggests trump's proposed vote-by-mail restrictions are pro-democracy)
* questions which would indict likely future democratic administrations (e.g. a question on supreme court packing, assuming you think democrats will attempt to do this)
And, side question, which of these things which aren't already in the index do you think are most reasonable to actually include in such an index, that you think you could get a liberal/progressive to agree to? e.g. I don't think you could get a progressive to agree that "importing more muslims on H1B visas is a threat to democracy", but I imagine there's some fertile ground of missed conservative-model threats to democracy that aren't tracked here
I think non-citizen and immigrant voting would **have** to be on there. I'm not sure the prosecution or pardon questions would necessarily be read as sympathetic, though.
Are there any concrete numbers or known cases about non-citizens voting ? Particularly in numbers that would actually matter, I don't know what the cutoff is for that. I know that Trump claims there are lots of them doing that, but I find it hard to parse that. I know there are a lot of citizens in this country that can't prove it with paperwork, so they're the low-hanging fruit for this. One thing for sure is, generally speaking, people's expectations of a fair and well-run election have been eroded considerably over the last three or four years. The seed of doubt has been planted, and it's growing.
But I'd argue even a single case shows a flaw in the process, it would go a long way to squash that seed of doubt to just add citizenship verification at some point in the process. But the Dems are oddly very against patching that flaw.
There are a lot of people in this country that do not have proof of citizenship and proof of citizenship is expensive to get. if that problem could be solved I would rethink my position
Doesn't pretty much everyone automatically receive a birth certificate at birth? And if it's lost or otherwise not available, it's only $31 to replace in CA (https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CHSI/pages/vital-records-fees.aspx). I don't think it's that expensive, and it seems like something people should have anyway for all sorts of other reasons, like if they ever wanted to apply for a passport or something.
Same with marriage certificates, it's only $19 (again, in CA, I'm sure it's comparable in other states) and people already receive it anyway as part of the process. I remember people on the left making it a big talking point that this would be some huge undue burden on women who changed their last names to have to provide a marriage certificate in addition to the birth certificate because it's too expensive and/or complicated for married women to have their documents on hand. It was bizarre to see, like a convoluted excuse a kid might come up with to avoid doing their chores.
In any case, if that's really a sticking point for people, I wouldn't mind them adding some funding to the bill to make states provide birth and marriage certificates for free, or some other type of citizenship certificate.
I don't mean to be provocative but this smacks a little of "let them eat cake." About 9% of the voting-age population in this country do not have any form of proof of citizenship. A $31 fee sounds reasonable unless you happen to be someone who's only making about $300-$400 a week and that you also need a photo ID, which is another issue if you don't happen to have a driver's llicense.also a lot of states farm this work out to third parties, which means you pay additional fees on top of that $31 or whatever it is, plus the search fee, which is non-refundable. If they don't find you the first try, you gotta pay again or show up somewhere in person, which might be difficult .and it takes a while . If this is going to be done, it needs a solid two-year run-in and a way to make it work not something you pull six months before an election.
I don't think we should EVER give in to arguments that even a single case of something justifies national reform. That really bogs down the nation! If a problem is small, I think we can only justify fixes which have small costs (per person). I haven't yet seen any proposals for voter registration which have (per-person) costs that are as small as the documented problem.
But it's not just one, it was 9 known cases in a single state. Is the fact that this *can* happen not an egregious hole in the system? Why not ensure the integrity of the system in one stroke and settle the issue, instead of leaving holes in the system which allow each side to insinuate fraud every time they don't get the result they want?
As for costs, see my other comment - the vast majority of people should already have the required documents, and replacements can be obtained cheaply. The per-person cost should be no more than $50 for each person that actually need replacements, which I don't expect to be many, and I wouldn't mind that being funded by the bill. IMO that cost would be well worth it even if only to provide confidence in the system and quash any doubt.
doesn't this go the same way? seems to me there is a shockingly small number of people who want to vote and can't vote because they legitimately lack documentation or the means to get it on relatively short notice. The more you look into it the smaller the amount actually gets; the 12% in phone surveys becomes 9% in more rigorous studies becomes 1% if you actually check becomes 0.1% if you actually look at the ones who actually try voting on election day becomes 0.01% if you look at the ones who really actually truly no-joke are so desperately poor that they can't afford a 1 time 30 dollar fee and don't live in states where this fee is waived for deperately poor people like them...etc. etc.
Seems like both voter fraud and voter suppression through documentation requirements are both basically exaggerated nonsense promoted by partisans who aren't actually interested in the principle of proper elections but just want their team to have more votes.
Yeah, if you take out the historical and in-the-moment partisan issues on either side, and just look at it from the point of view of designing a proper system as if we were to create one today, verification of eligibility would be an obvious requirement.
I did not make an argument about people who "can't vote because they legitimately lack documentation"; I said the cost would be larger than the problem. Because voting appears to not have meaningfully be manipulated by invalide voters at current, a cost such as 1 in 100 people having to drive home to get the right ID and then drive back to the voting both would be much larger than the problem. A cost of 1/100 voters would be much larger than a benefit of (being generous) 1,000 fraudsters.
This doesn't mean I wouldn't theoretically like verification, just that a low-cost proposal costs quite a bit at national scale, and we already know the issue isn't large at a national scale, so that cost is too high.
A huge number of cases of non-citizens being erroneously registered to vote, hundreds out of whom then actually *went on to vote*, went undetected for years. Given that this only accounts for those who voted after being erroneously registered *despite declaring themselves non-citizens*, the problem might be much larger than initially thought, as it doesn't account for the non-citizens who either erroneously or fraudulently declared themselves as citizens.
This just highlights how bad the current systems are at detecting voter eligibility violations. Improvements are needed but dems really, really don't want to for some reason, despite popular support and clear issues with the system.
There have been a lot of "Caesar's wife" objections to the effect of "Now I don't believe that Venezuela hacked the 2020 election, but someone else does and you need to address their concerns to maintain trust in democracy". This suggests a public opinion question: "On the next Pew/Gallup/etc poll what percent of people will say they believe [latest election] was rigged?"
Unfortunately I'm so deeply Trump Deranged or whatever that I read this and see, "Republicans and Democrats might have different opinions on whether cancelling elections and installing a dictator for life really *is* a threat to democracy. What is a fair-minded way to deal with this difference of opinion?"
That's an exaggeration, but my point is that the bias is baked into the premise. If you are part of an ideological movement that explicitly defines democracy in a way I disagree with, you're not going to accept *any* means of determining threat to democracy that I would accept. The method isn't the problem. The definition of democracy is.
Isn't the most democratic way to decide what democracy means is by letting people vote on it? There's no need to do anything. Just let the will of the people decide.
Maybe democracy isn't a good system for the current era. Maybe most people aren't smart and well-informed enough to have worthwhile ideas of whether we should do this or that. I'll add here that while I'm bright, I don't think I'm well-informed enough about most matters for my opinions to have any value or validity. AI is probably the only major development of our era that I have investigated deeply enough to have the sense that I understand a reasonable amount of the relevant stuff. And even knowing what I do, I have no idea how to reduce the harm being done by slop or to curb the power of the AI company executives or to get the field more interested in X risk.
I'm honestly not even sure whether we wouldn't be better off with fuckin' Claude as benevolent dictator.
I think you are wrong to believe that this current era is different from prior periods. Focusing only on the US and predecessor entities, from the beginning, many important issues have been beyond the understanding of the voters. At a very high level, I would submit that the rapid failure of the Articles of Confederation and, later, the Civil War, show that even the elite thinkers on political structure were wrong about the needs of the country. In other words, the problem of institutional structure was well beyond the capabilities of the ordinary voter.
Other key issues include tax policy, foreign policy, and transportation/infrastructure policy. None of those are things that the typical voter has ever understood. This doesn't seem a meaningful difference with the current era.
In contrast, however, the importance of optimizing is, in some sense reduced. At the start of the country, bad tax policy was an existential risk. Then, bad policy and/or an insufficient argument resolution mechanism around slavery was an existential risk. Good, if not optimal, transportation infrastructure policy was necessary for creating a continent-spanning unified country. In contrast, almost no policy area (*) has the same existential consequences for the country now.
Well, I suppose an advantage of democracy is that it reduces unrest by giving individuals the illusion they have some say in how the country's run (though that's wearing pretty thin these days.
And yeah, I'd say AI has huge existential consequences.
I agree, especially with the first statement. Establishing legitimacy of the system and a mechanism for legitimate non-violent change is extraordinarily important and potentially something that democracy delivers better than other systems. Unfortunately, this is as much perception as a fact characteristics (a clean election that is perceived as fraudulent is itself bad, though maybe not as bad as the elections actually being fraudulent.) This is why attacks that undermine democracy/perception of democracy and failure to take action to strengthen the structure are so devastating.
The general public has never been well informed enough to choose good policies. The purpose of democracy isn't to choose good leaders, its to provide a mechanism for ejecting bad leaders. Unfortunately, good outcomes are only loosely correlated with good policy and so the general public occasionally ejects good leaders.
However it's hard to have bad policy and good outcomes over a long time frame. So bad leaders are only able to retain power by suppressing negative media, and suppressing opposition. So merely having elections isn't enough to have a functioning democracy - you need strong independent institutions.
But maybe in the long run we will get a benevolent AI leader. We'll probably get a soft version of this where people heavily turn to AI as a source of news, and lawmakers draft law using AI. This is already starting to happen.
> Maybe democracy isn't a good system for the current era. Maybe most people aren't smart and well-informed enough to have worthwhile ideas of whether we should do this or that. I'll add here that while I'm bright, I don't think I'm well-informed enough about most matters for my opinions to have any value or validity.
Well, that opening plus the rest of your post amount to a thundering if 'more-in-sadness' condemnation of our favourite but deeply flawed system of governance, reminiscent of the entirely apocryphal quote misattributed to Churchill, "The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” And where does that leave us, given that we have to live on this world and, however reluctantly, in association with others of our species? Nothing is more certain than that any democratic system can be rocked or overturned by human perversity, ignorance or selfishness - and yet unless we give up in despair and hand over our destinies to dictators, billionaires or to AI, we must at least strive to make democracy as shockproof as human ingenuity can make it.
There are some measures we can use to improve the systems currently in use in most western democracies. Relatively (I use the term advisedly) straightforward measures might include inflexible set terms of office for all branches of government; electoral commissions fully independent of government and elected by popular vote outside normal electoral cycles; a total ban on lobbying whether by firms or individuals; political donations restricted to individual voters and with a low maximum; and the careful application of some forms of modified proportional representation.
A step further would be for governments to be assembled by a mixture of proportional representation votes and by sortition, namely the selection of representatives and officials by lot from amongst the adult voting population. As Chesterton noted at the conclusion of "The Twelve Men", his brief essay on jury trial: "Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round."
> and yet unless we give up in despair and hand over our destinies to dictators, billionaires or to AI
Are those the only options? There's always the traditional option of limiting voting to certain castes. It avoids the issue of individual parasites accumulating too much power, while also ensuring that those whose voice do not need to be heard can be safely ignored. We have many people whose personal interests conflict with their societal purpose.
On historical precedent, restricting political power to an oligarchy, which is in effect what you seem to be suggesting, does not end well - unless it is in stagnation. What western democracies are suffering from, in my view, is too many people for whom the social contract is a dead letter.
Exasperated rage will suggest the classic answer: knock heads together till sense ensues. Alas, experience tells us this doesn't work for long; and it it ever did in the past, it sure as hell is even less likely to do so in today's fragmented world. You might be able to lead one stubborn horse to water, but try it with a mixed herd of ungulates...
I can only see one potential motivator, namely self-interest. Because while rational human beings can disagree on matters of political or moral imperatives, basic self-interest or simple survival instinct should guide those same rational humans to accept premisses such as "All men are fallible, so don't entrust your children's future irrevocably to any one person"; "Trust nobody who claims to be infallible"; or "Allow no person group to monopolise power and resources".
Alas, self-interest is far from motivating a substantial percentage of voters today (or at any time). Education, which means teaching people how to think for themselves, can bring about a gradual. change. Good luck achieving that, you may say in response; and I would answer, how else are we to survive?
"Orange man bad" is the index stock fund of American political thought. Everyone thinks they can outsmart the common herd with a more sophisticated understanding of how the world works. And 95% of the time, "orange man bad" has more predictive power.
Kind of like yours. Or at least it's possible to interpret yours that way, and it's perfectly possible to interpret his as just a proposition that can be argued against. I take it that you don't think there's anything about Trump that stands out in any way that might possibly justify proposing that he is dangerous in some ways and has certainly done things that one might consider a misuse of his democratic privileges. Like suing everyone he possibly can because they did something he didn't like? Seems he's made a lot of money that way.
I think it's a matter of attention rather than integrity. But yes, this is the sort of thing that should certainly merit an "obvious attempts to pick fights without any useful contribution" ban.
I was thinking about how Scott does very little real moderating. I don't blame him! It's too time-consuming. You'd have to read every post. And there would some posts that involved judgment calls that he'd have to think over for a while. It takes too much time.
But I think GPT or Claude could make a good first pass at picking out the bannables. I recently had an exchange with GPT about somebody I know whom I thought might have CTE. I fed GPT a long email exchange I had with the person, where it seemed to me they kept missing the main point and writing long rambling replies about little side issues. And my question for GPT was, is this cognitive impairment, or something else? I was very impressed with GPT's grasp of the question I was asking and also of my and the other person's communications. It was saying things like "so clearly your main point in this post is [one-sentence summary]", and its summary was spot on." And the other person responds to your mention of topic A, a side issue, as though your main point had been that topic A determines whether the idea will work," and that summary also seemed quite accurate to me. And ultimately, after reading the whole exchange, GPT actually convinced me that the reason the other person's replies were so oddly off-topic was not cognitive impairment, but conflict avoidance.
GPT also is pretty good at recognizing when I'm being sarcastic, or when I'm annoyed ("I can tell you don't like that idea. Here's the reason I think it's a good idea . . ." ). So I think it's up to correctly making some fairly fine distinctions about written communication.. Seems like it might be possible with a thoughtful, detailed prompt to get it to produce a list of potential bannables that's short enough that Scott can go through it quickly, approving the bans he thinks are valid.
it is a useful contribution. "TDS" is a propaganda term cooked up to make people sound crazy for reacting appropriately to the most destructive and bizarre president in modern American history. I don't think reasonable people should use the term. That's a substantive opinion, whether you agree with it or whether you're wrong. You're right that I'm definitely willing to pick fights over it, though.
I disagree. DJT deserves this comment. I’d quibble with fascistic because the specific historical meaning has drifted a bit and might use wannabe authoritarian in its place but IMO as human beings go, Trump makes a mighty fine toad.
I believe he is a danger to the Republic and as long as I’m on the topic of this scumbag, I’ll add that i also think he is a lying sack of shit.
Note that I am talking about one person here. I am not talking about you or any other Trump supporter so please don’t pull that “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” talisman out of your hat.
I didn’t accuse the crowd at Taledega Speedway chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” of abusing me personally so don’t pull that on me.
I’ll finish with my opinion that no one has ever been crying wolf when it comes to worrying about Trump’s character.
It's not about whether you agree. I know this is a predominantly woke place, and 'Donald Trump is a fascist' is hardly going to get someone banned here.
The point is there was absolutely no reasoning or argument or engagement with the concept of TDS here.
He made a completely empty and abusive comment. Why should I write paragraphs of analysis on such nonsense? I'm just pointing out it's just as bad if not worse than many other comments which prompted bans.
cry harder. I've only ever heard accusations of "TDS" used to shut down actual substantive criticism of trump and enable his destruction of liberal democracy and social trust. I'm sorry you feel like it's "abusive" to you that I'm not falling for it.
> it’s disappointing that the question of trust has to come up at all, given the otherwise-trustless design.
Could you have a set of questions of the form "should this question be on the democracy index" with resolution criteria like "it resolves the same way that [more obvious sign of democratic decline question] does" to give an estimate if P(A|B)?
>Will an opposing-party authority block or remove a major-party nominee for statewide office from the U.S. general-election ballot in the following years?
"Major-party"? I guess minor-party nominees getting blocked is a-okay?
Look, this is not a nitpick. The question is just outright bad, hopelessly biased in favor of the two-party duopoly status quo.
Well, bad at least for the specific purpose of [measuring democracy] - sanity check: all one-party states pass that test with flying colors. It may very well be that it's good for prediction market purposes - making the outcome more meaningful, or at the very least more legible. (As in - everyone knows this happens to third-party candidates all the time, and it makes resolving the question easier if you can skip deciding whether a legal challenge to Libertarian Workers Party of North Dakota's ballot access was an impartial application of law, or strong-arming by their political opponents.) This may be a feature of prediction markets that makes them uniquely unsuited to answering big-picture questions.
>The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several “democracy indices” that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. My impression is that most current accusations of bias are relatively weak - I agree with Claude’s analysis here
TDS and AI psychosis comorbidity is a frightening possibility.
Trump isn’t crazy for posting a picture of himself as Jesus, you are crazy for calling him on it.
When he says that he was meant to be a doctor by way of explanation, if you point out that he is a lying sack of shit for providing that bit of transparent nonsense, it’s because you have TDS.
A child’s excuse even a child could see through. Pure bullshit. It’s what he does. It’s who he is, for Chrissake.
Simple, stupid and surprisingly effective for any truly, astoundingly batshit thing he says or does.
That wasn’t batshit, you are batshit for being overly attached to observable reality! See? You’ve just been dunked on.
I just found a definition of TDS in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Check it out
But Trump derangement syndrome is also real—the reflexive, manufactured outrage that treats every joke as a confession and even invents offenses, like the “very fine people” hoax.
Every joke as a confession hmm
one of the things I hate the most in life is when someone says something kind of nasty and then immediately says, "I was just joking." I hated it long before Trump came along
I think he was treated unfairly with the ‘very fine people’ thing. I read the entire transcript and earlier in the interview he said “I’m not talking about white supremacists.” I’d want to see more than one example to call it a syndrome.
Feels like TDS is much more relevant for Trump term 1, because either by incompetence or sanity, he doesn't (or succeed) much at doing what he (or his opponents) said he'll do. Hence TDS for this discrepancy. Not so much for term 2.
Way back in the mists of time, some human beings learned how to write things down, which meant that their commands could be transmitted now to a much larger number of people through agents of authority. That was what human civilisation was like: a king, his court, and the power of the written edict in order to create a consensus. Over time, the genie got out of the bottle, and more and more people had the power of words that were written. It took a while for this central authority that had the power of the word written to dissolve, but it eventually did. I think A.I. is on the same trajectory, and the first thing it's going to lead to is what we had about 4,000 years ago. The power of A.I. will lie largely with nation states in its real form, and I don't think the United States of America is going to escape that. In other words, going forward from here, given the state of the world, I'm not sure the United States can survive as a Democratic Republic. Consensus among the people is shrinking, not growing, and the less consensus there is, the more destabilised a nation state becomes. Eventually, if it's going to survive in any form, someone's going to have to take control of it and force a consensus. I know this is bleak, but I don't see any way around it. AI has the power to track everyone in this country, and it's already happening. It's not going to stop.
OK, I’m about to put up another test post to see what views activate our AI moderator. This one does not contain any bad language, though. I'd be interested to hear whether people think it passes Scott's 2 out of 3 test. I'd say it's civil and does qualify as an effort to advance a discussion of how democracy works, so does not qualify for a ban. What's the 3rd criterion again? -- something about being substantive, so that the writer's points are supported by their reasoning or by evidence they give? For this post I'd say that feature's weak, but not altogether absent.
Because Scott may have certain moderator settings in place and I don't know what they are. I'm testing how the moderator behaves with whatever settings Scott used.
*This* bothers you? Every thread must contain a couple meanspirited, crass, dumb bannable posts, many posts you think are silly or boring, & some posts that annoy you deeply -- and what you're complaining about is these skippable little tests of mine?
Democracy’s worst flaw is that everyone can vote. Doesn’t it make sense to restrict voting to people who have at least a basic understanding of the major issues of the day? Why not give people a knowledge test immediately prior to voting, and only allow those with a passing score to vote? If that’s too hard to implement we could just play the numbers. What race has a lower IQ? OK, those people can’t vote. What gender is more prone to hormonally driven, emotion-contaminated thinking? Welp, they can’t vote either. Hey, all you fine males with little or no African ancestry — get on this, willya?
If you're sorting by new, read the post immediately below mine that begins "Democracy's worst flaws" for important information about the purpose of this post.
To not be politicized, there would have to be consensus (or supermajority) on what counts as tent poles of democracy. Specific pieces of legislation for example that ensure checks and balances, prevent voter fraud, political neutrality of non-partisan offices, prevention of gerrymandering etc.
I think some interesting questions could be formed around two part questions that ask 1. What’s a policy you think is more likely to be enacted if democracy goes under and then 2. How likely do you think that policy will be passed in the future.
Several people have commented that the elements of the index seem to echo what Trump has done. But there might be a valid reason for it: Much of what he has done is straight out of the democratic backsliding playbook.
Of course, it depends on what you mean by "Democracy." Does it mean that policy follows public opinion? Then anything is democracy, electing a dictator is democracy, as long as a plurality of voters approve of it. That's why people often refer to "Western Democracy", in which public opinion is balanced by individual legal rights, or "American Democracy," in which the three branches of government are held in a co-equal balance. American style democracy is clearly changing, as more power becomes concentrated in the office of the President. It makes sense to question whether Western style democracy is under threat as the right to vote and representation in government becomes more constrained over time.
Right now, one of the two parties has a built in structural advantage in House Congressional elections, Senate representation, and in the electoral college. Is that a threat to democracy? Depends on which party you belong to, I guess. (Is it a threat to *your* democracy, or the other side?).
> Managed Democracy calls for aid. Only you can answer, Helldiver.
IYKYK
Love the reference!
I can only hope this eventually adds a "Will a politician attempt to change a prediction market threat to democracy index" question, both because that would be the best possible signal of its success and because it would be hilariously hard to interpret the resulting number.
Metametaculus.
(This is the sort of joke I would make, too.)
Formally removing another party's candidates from the ballot. Interesting criterion.
What if instead a party were to, I don't know, allow large numbers of noncitizens into the country and let them vote? Does Metaculus have a question on that? Or would that just not count as a "threat to democracy" because "voting good?" Just what is "democracy" anyway?
Also they missed "attempting to remove a candidate from the ballot", a milestone which has already been hit.
This gets weird - because of course someone who stands to gain from it will make the *attempt* if it is legitimate to do so.
IE: If your opponent sexually assaults a child on 5th avenue, and you try to indict them for it I think that's on your opponent, not you.
However, a big part of the game of that thing we call "politics" is "reframing your actions to make it look like you're not doing that obviously underhanded thing" , so what would be a framing that could detect this ?
I don't think people are concerned with "prosecuting the political opposition" per se they are concerned with, for example:
* Handling Hillary Clinton with kid gloves on the security breach
* The FBI committing crimes to wiretap Trump
* As already mentioned, Letitia James
"Not conceding the election" is another pretty wild one, because we have:
* Ran a scheme to send alternative electors to the certification to vote for him (Trump)
* Engaged in a 2 year long criminal process on the basis of fabricated information to impeach the President on the basis of a fraudulent election (House Democrats)
What "counts" is most of the question, and there's tons of room for "whataboutism".
That assumes prosecution automatically removes a candidate from the ballot, which doesn't necessarily follow. I'd think that the removal of the candidate is a more straightforward measure of threat to democracy than the prosecution (which is obviously still impactful).
And "sentenced to prison for political views" is more straightforward measure than "forcibly put in mental health hospital due to alleged schizophrenia", but it would miss a huge chunk of USSR's political repressions.
This right here. This is why the Democracy Threat Index will fail. If we can’t even agree if USSR repressed political opposition or not, how can we hope to build any consensus around what it means to formally remove another party's candidates from the ballot?
if the primary cause of alleged political repression in Russia were "removal of American or British spies or saboteurs," we would expect such cases to involve a lot of espionage prosecutions. this is not what we observe.
Eugene Debs was on the ballot while in prison. I had mused that would be the most entertaining outcome for Trump in the most recent election, particularly if SCOTUS ruled he couldn't pardon himself and he couldn't trust his VP to pardon him if he resigned, so he spent his whole term governing from behind bars.
'‘We put all our politicians in prison as soon as they’re elected. Don’t you?’
‘Why?’
‘It saves time.’ — Terry Pratchett *The Lost Continent*
But the way the questions are phrased, though, it's not about who is right or wrong, it's about whether there's a threat to democracy.
If someone refuses to concede an election then either (a) they're incorrectly claiming an election was rigged, which is bad for democracy, or (b) the election really was rigged, which is also bad for democracy.
In a healthy democracy you could be reasonably confident that neither of these things would happen, because the voting system would be secure and everyone would have high confidence that significant fraud isn't possible.
"If someone refuses to concede an election then either (a) they're incorrectly claiming an election was rigged, which is bad for democracy, or (b) the election really was rigged, which is also bad for democracy."
Then we've already hit that milestone, because of course everyone knows about Trump and the 2020 election, but there were also those claiming the 2024 election was rigged to let Trump win.
So we've got partisans of both parties claiming illegal/rigged elections, and even back in 2016 the whole Not My President crowd where some nutjobs on the Internet liked to claim Hillary was the President Elect and that was it, Trump was not president.
Didn't Stacy Abrams also indulge in some "my opponent only won because the election was dodgy" claims?
So if democracy is imperilled where there are claims of election rigging, then that has already happened and democracy is indeed imperilled.
It's an index, not a set of milestones. It has happened in the past, but perhaps it will happen less in the future, and I guess that's some of the value of the index.
Gerrymandering isn't illegal, but it *is* a threat to democracy.
See for example Turkey. Turkish Constitution requires the President to have a university diploma. An opponent of Erdogan, Imamoglu, was stripped of his diploma by his alma mater, thus rendering him ineligible to stand in the election.
Now this wasn't technically done by the government, but by a university. But it still counts IMHO, as the university was obviously pushed to do this via Erdogan's people.
This also illustrates quite nicely how hard is it to protect democracy via laws alone.
It also illustrates why that particular line in the Turkish constitution is dumb.
I have seen a lot of intellectuals toying with the idea of some tests required for voting. None of them seems to realize that much like this weird constitutional requirement, this would create a massive loophole to be abused.
Maybe, but I don't immediately see the specifics. I don't think the same loophole works; "about 1% of people get stripped of their degree, and that just happens to include the primary opposition candidate" is an effective trick you could get away with, but "about 1% of people get stripped of their degree, and they just all happen to vote opposition" wouldn't accomplish very much. It's feasible to set up a rigged test to reinforce a status quo, but if you started with a decent test to begin with it it might be harder to intentionally corrupt it, at least until you get to an already pretty high level of corruption, I think.
I don't think such a test is a good idea though, because I think introducing any kind of bias tends to have a runaway effect. It's almost tautological that people will assume they themselves have the best plans (because if they thought someone else had better plans they would adopt those) and thus that their will ought to be done (as "the best course of action" and "what ought to be done" are definitionally equal) and thus that any edge that they have should be pushed (instrumental convergence), without needing any particular coordination and irrespective of what they actually believe.
I really wish our democracies allowed us to specialize more. I really don't feel feel qualified to vote for generic representatives for the entire nation, an unfathomably complex high stakes endeavor. I wish I just choose some 10% of the public matter to be co-responsible for and specialize in in that. And maybe then there would be more space to evaluate different people's authoritativeness on different topics.
No it doesn't illustrate that all. It just shows that this particular condition can be gamed. However, other conditions can be too. You can argue that the condition is unnecessary in its own right (fine!) but using Erdogan's manipulation of a specific condition to argue that it's "dumb" pre-supposes a balance you haven't proven.
That there is no “Will an opposing party authority convict a presidential candidate of a crime that isn’t normally prosecuted?” makes me worried this is too sensitive to question choice to be a good early warning system.
Convict or accuse? We've danced this dance already, I think, if we're going for accusations of naughty-naughty.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/39797/doj-to-indict-high-profile-us-president-opponent-in-these-years/
Pretty similar to what you want and was resolved "yes" in 2023-2024 already, presumably due to the Trump indictments. And as for "isn't normally prosecuted" - that's pretty hard to judge! I mean, John Bolton just plead guilty to mishandling classified documents, with retaining classified documents being one of the original indictments. Is that the same as (one of the) things Trump was prosecuted for? I don't think anyone has ever done exactly what Trump did before.
I struggled with whether or not to answer this question for multiple days and every time I scrolled past it it caused me to wince so at the risk of re-litigating the entire last several years:
...the crimes trump was charged for are normally prosecuted.Source: I'm a white collar criminal defense attorney.
now, whether these charges are proper for *his conduct* is a separate question. It's a question that can only be answered by going to trial. Every white collar criminal defendant believes that x crime is "not normally charged" against people who do what they did. Elizabeth Holmes, Sam Bankman Fried, Spiro Agnew, and John Poindexter all thought that.
Macro, the crimes trump was indicted for are indeed crimes that "are normally prosecuted." You can see many many examples of these crimes being prosecuted every year.
So we can calibrate, name 3.
Trump was prosecuted for the following commonly-prosecuted crimes
18 U.S.C. § 241 (conspiracy against rights)
- United States v. Worthy, 915 F.2d 1514 (11th Cir. 1990)
- US v. Erlichmann, 546 F.2d 910 (D.C. Cir. 1977)
- Anderson v. United States, 417 U.S. 211 (1974)
18 U.S.C. § 371 (conspiracy to defraud the united states, which hopefully from the title you can appreciate is a very commonly charged crime but...)
- United States v. Klein, 247 F.2d 908 (1957) (which gave rise to a whole series of progeny cases called "Klein conspiracies")
- Skilling v. United States, 561 U.S. 358 (2010) (this statute is a paradigmatic one used to prosecute white collar offenses against the government, as with enron and iirc volkswagon and exon executives too)
- US v. Weisz, 718 F.2d 413 (D.C. Cir. 1984) (this is one of the famous "Abscam" cases off which the American Hustle movie was based on.
(trust me, this one gets charged a fair bit, I just picked famous examples)
18 u.s.c. § 1519 (destruction of evidence, another very commonly charged crime)
- This is brought frequently enough that it's often a unit in white collar law, the central case you read in that unit is United States v. Kernell, 667 F.3d 746 (2012)
And 18 USC 1001, the general conspiracy statute, which is among the most frequently charged federal crimes, as well as 18 USC 2, the aiding and abetting statute, which is also commonly charged.
now to be very very clear: I'm not rebutting the idea that trump's conduct matched these statutes, or even whether his *conduct* was not 'the kind of thing that normally gets charged'...I'm rebutting the idea that these "types of crimes" are not "normally prosecuted", they absolutely are.
We have a very nice system for figuring out whether someone's actions are, in fact, the crimes contemplated by the charging statute, it's called the criminal process and a trial.
I guess to dispel any confusion: I cited cases one can easily look up and you'll see most of those cases cite other cases about the same crimes. I didn't cite like the most recent cases because those are harder to look up, and most cases aren't appealed (so there's *no* easy way to look them up)
I was hoping to see three of the “many many examples” from the same year (to substantiate “every year”) that Trump was charged.
Noncitizens voting in federal elections is illegal, so that question reduces down to "will there be widespread voter fraud in a future election?"
Metaculus has this question at 0.9% chance, and most of that probability is the nitpick that the Trump administration will probably *claim* that this happened regardless of how much fraud there actually is.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/41883/widespread-non-citizen-voting-occur-in-2026-us-midterms/
There are locales trying to expand voting rights to noncitizens (e.g. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-06-17/measure-to-give-non-citizens-right-to-vote-in-la-elections-headed-for-nov-3-ballot), so it's not just fraud. Whether this is a threat or improvement to democracy is up for debate.
To make clear, the measure would expand voting rights to non-citizens in citywide elections. Non-citizens living in LA would be able to vote for the mayor of LA, not president. The parent comment mentioned voting in federal elections, which is illegal for non-citizens and will remain illegal for the foreseeable future.
Right, hence the mention of specific locales. But it does show that the left is politically amenable to letting noncitizens vote, so I disagree that it's definitely out of the question for the foreseeable future, especially when the point is forecasting the future.
And appeals to absurdity or legal unlikeliness are out the window when we have leftist political candidates (soon-to-be congresswoman, as she just won the Dem primary in New York) not only arguing that illegal immigrants who have committed murder and other serious crimes should be protected from deportation, but also that prisons should be abolished entirely (https://nyeditorialboard.substack.com/p/darializa-avila-chevalier-on-housing).
> Right, hence the mention of specific locales
Sure, just the original comment could be misconstrued & wanted to avoid any confusion.
Re: fringe congressmen, it's not fair to define an entire party based on the most extreme people sent to congress. Republicans in Georgia sent Marjorie Taylor Greene to Congress 3 times, and she believes that California wildfires were started by a Rothschild-owned space laser. I imagine most republican-leaning districts aren't on board with that, but in a non-competitive district you can easily get wackos.
Oh I would certainly not define the entire party based on the DSA types, but I also give them more a chance to get their wacko policy agendas into law because they're more of an organized bloc than right wing fringe loonies like MTG, who as far as I know is an isolated case. They've been pretty effective at coopting the Dem voter base in deep blue areas to get more DSA types into power, so I could definitely see a trajectory where they form a significant enough caucus within the Dem party to be able to inject something like noncitizen voting into the Dem platform, and eventually make it into actual legislation when Dems are in power again.
sorry, are you really arguing that NOW 'appeals to absurdity' are out the window because of what a 2026 dem politician who hasn't even taken office yet said five years ago? Have you been on truth social any time in the last...idk, ever?
In keeping with kind / necessary / true, I appeal to the latter two: your position IS absurd, but not because of what you think.
Can you cut the snark and explain with your words why it's absurd? Do you think she doesn't believe this anymore, or that she won't be winning the congress seat, or there aren't more DSA candidates like her?
And no, I haven't been on Truth Social, not sure how that's relevant.
Wait, what did you mean by "said five years ago"? This interview was from this month.
I could imagine someone being honestly confused why they can vote in this election but not that election, or assuming that if they can now vote in these elections then that means they can vote in that election.
Needn't be deliberate fraud.
Okay, but if they aren't registered on the voter rolls for federal elections, they won't be able to vote, right?
Two observations:
- I believe this is not a "US federal elections democracy index", it's a "US democracy index". City elections becoming corrupted when federal elections aren't is still a degraded democracy
- various people might disagree about the answer to "will illegals be allowed to vote in federal elections in the foreseeable future?". Considering we are talking about prediction markets here it seems entirely fair to have a question like this in a prediction market about democracy. If predictors all agree that it's certainly unlikely and continues to be unlikely under a new democratic president, that's a useful signal.
(Which gets back to the fact that the central question here is whether noncitizen voting is a threat or improvement to democracy, not whether it's likely or the scale of it. Whether it's federal or local only matters for the scope of the index, whether it's likely or unlikely would be the literal result of the market itself so "it's unlikely" is not a counterargument, just a single prediction by a single individual)
Non-citizens voting in cities that have specifically made it legal for them to vote in city elections would not be a "corruption", and would not be a good sign that someone in a city which **doesn't** let non-citizens vote is going to have problems with this.
Why is it corrupt to let non-citizens vote on the school board nominations and city government of the school where their children go in the city where they live?
1. noncitzens do not carry all the reciprocal obligations of citizenship such a jury duty and draft eligibility
2. local elections have national consequences. for example, illegal aliens might elect a local government which enacts sanctuary city policies which can have a direct causal link to more illegal immigration, which has national effects.
3. if I am only a citizen of the US, I have skin in the game because I have nowhere else to go, and therefore might vote differently than if I had citizenship somewhere else
4. it is usually done for purely ideological reasons rather than on the principle of fair representation. As a litmus test, there are basically zero examples of it being championed by factions that expect to lose votes by championing it.
5. noncitzen voting is straightforwardly a political ratchet, they cannot easily be reversed if the preexisting citizen population changes its mind later on
6. it is often enacted by councils in the face of strong opposition by the voting populus at large, incumbent councils which expect to win more new voters they invented than old voters that vote for their competitors. Franchise expansion without majority buy in by the existing voting population is both corrupt. Even in far-far-far-left polities like San Francisco, it passed on a razor slim margin in a voter initiative, for local school boards only, for parents of kids who are in those schools only, after 2 failed attempts prior, partly due to tribal self-interest reasons (households with mixed citizenship status, wishing to enfranchise their own household members)
(this is my attempt to steelman the case against noncitizen voting. The strongest argument for it, to me, is that even in places where it's legal, turnout is like 0.5% or lower, mostly because registering as a noncitizen is a pain in the ass, might get you put on a list if you're illegally here, might jeapordize your citizenship application, etc. So any arguments about hoards of noncitizens swinging elections against native citizens' interests basically never happen in practice...yet)
Because they aren’t citizens
It obviously isn't. When I was teaching, the School Site Council, which decides on how to spend state and federal supplemental funding, sometimes had noncitizen parents on it. Was that corrupt? No.
Worth mentioning that noncitizen voting rights already exist, or existed in the past, in many jurisdictions commonly regarded as "democratic".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-citizen_suffrage
I find it questionable to argue that making more people vote would be something that should be classified as a threat to *democracy*. You can think it's a short sighted ploy by a specific party to buff its numbers, but the same tends to be true of many changes in electoral law, districting, etc. Sometimes a change is good for democracy in the long run but still will only get enacted when, situationally, it's also good in the short term for the prospects of a specific party. That's not amazing but it doesn't destroy democracy because in the long run the system stays while things like "this demographic votes for me" change and dissolve.
It would be a threat for democracy if it was made easier for the state to not be voting about itself. This would make manipulation very easy.
Banned for this comment - obvious attempts to pick fights without any useful contribution.
If this is bannable, I'm tempted to file a lot more reports.
It's not that I disagree that this is one of those darkly-hinting comments. It's rather that I recall seeing similar comments in the past (and maybe in this thread, if I read with that in mind) that didn't result in a ban, to the point that I thought comments this edgy were tolerated. So hitting this one in particular now, strikes me as somewhat unfair, and a slippery slope for which I see no clear limiting principle.
(This might just be me. Having been a moderator for DSL for years, and having done more-than-average modding elsewhere for years, I probably have more-than-average sensitive positions on how to curry a discussion.)
Can anyone explain what actually prevents non-US-citizens from registering to vote?
You'd think it would be pretty easy to force people to provide proof of citizenship when registering; either a birth certificate or a certificate of naturalisation would work.
But according to this https://www.migrationpolicy.org/content/noncitizen-voting-us-elections the main security is "the form requires applicants to affirm, under penalty of perjury, that they are citizens" ... is there really no actual check?
Here's an example, for California: https://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/pdfs/voter-id-and-reg-requirements.pdf
If you have a social security number or California state ID number you have to include it and they will check against the database. You can also register affirming under penalty of perjury that you are a citizen but have neither ID number, as you have said. (EDIT: also note that if you register online or by mail without an ID number, you'll need to show an ID the first time you vote, but it doesn't have to be a photo ID and doesn't apply if you register in person.)
I would disagree that penalty of perjury is "no actual check". It seems like it would be risky to commit fraud on a government form if you're already in the country illegally. Also if millions of people were suddenly registering without ID numbers someone in the bureaucracy would probably notice and whistleblow.
But I think the goal is that a tiny chance of fraud is an ok tradeoff for making it a lot easier for actual citizens to vote (in the vein of "let 10 guilty men go free rather than convict one innocent man", but with a better ratio). Personally, I'd support sidestepping the issue by having a real national ID system that's free and automatic, though you'd still need to worry a bit about fraud/accessibility in the ID system itself.
You know you can live in the country legally without being a citizen right?
I do, in fact. What part of the comment is this relevant to?
> I would disagree that penalty of perjury is "no actual check". It seems like it would be risky to commit fraud on a government form if you're already in the country illegally.
>It seems like it would be risky to commit fraud on a government form if you're already in the country illegally.
On the other hand, people who are in the country illegal are already selected for being willing to take the risk of breaking the law. I don't think there's really a large number of people doing it since the benefit is not as great as being able to live in the US, but I also think it's silly that the CA government is so against checking that they legislated *disallowing* requiring voter IDs https://legislation.ballotpedia.org/elections/bill/10007
Overall I think it's good to keep voting rules consistent across municipalities, and I prefer lighter ID laws *in the absence of a universal ID program*, so I can't say I disagree with CA's decision. But I don't think your perspective is unreasonable.
The meaning of "let 10 guilty men go free rather than convict one innocent man" is that whenever there's a conviction, there should be absolutely no question that the conviction was achieved fairly, justly and with due process - and lower overall conviction rate of proven criminals is an acceptable cost.
The election equivalent of this would be that whenever there's an election, there should be absolutely no question that the election was performed fairly, justly and with due process - and lower overall voting eligibility is an acceptable cost. Your argument for making voting more accessible is closer to an argument that convictions should be easier to achieve even if it means a tiny fraction of people will be wrongfully convicted. Which is not a bad policy at all; it could easily result in reduced crime rates and overall safer society. It's just rooted in different principles that are fundamentally incompatible with "let 10 guilty men go free..."
This seems like a stretch to me. Elections are abstract entities that do not have their own rights, while voters are people who do. It's not the conviction that's the important part of the "10 guilty men" idiom as I understand it, it's the "man" part. So the unifying principle is "the burden of proof for taking away a person's rights (to be not in prison or to vote) should be high"
>You can also register affirming under penalty of perjury that you are a citizen but have neither ID number, as you have said.
Incredible, lmao. As a terminally online Trump supporter, it never fails to amaze me how often the absolute fringe wackos to my right or proving correct.
I never looked into this because I assumed it was just too ridiculous to be true, but here we are lmao.
If you register without an ID number by mail or online then you have to show an actual ID at the polls, at least in CA. It seems to be possible to register in person without having to show an ID, but it would be hard to get more than a few dozen illegal votes per county cast that way.
"widespread" does a lot of work there.
You also have to be able to *detect* voter fraud, and afaict there is no actual way to detect voter fraud in California.
Also their verification of citizenship for voting registration is: do you say you're a citizen? good, they don't verify anything else. they don't even verify if you live at the address on your form.
Please note that I am not claiming there is widespread voter fraud. I am claiming *the system provides no way of knowing if there is or isn't*.
> I'm told by federal officials
I think the federal officials have lost all credibility on ~every matter, though, so I'm not sure why this would be evidence of anything. If anything, my prior is that if a federal official says X, !X is likely true (cf the dozens of times ICE blatantly lied about things that were released on camera)
Its worth noting that there is no system that actually lets you catch 'voter fraud' as you are defining it. Ballots are anonymous on purpose. Once an election has occurred it's not really possible to go back and figure out how many ballots were cast by people who shouldn't have cast them.
You can look at the _registration process_ and see where the registration process failed. But in your hypothetical world where they do verify citizenship for voting registration, you still wouldn't be able to detect voter fraud. Any hypothetical fraudulent voters would just be stopped by the registration process, and would never be able to commit their voter fraud (and if they somehow got through the registration gate, then it would be invisible anyway)
*Ballots* are anonymous, but the fact of voting is not. I don't think I've ever voted in a national election where I didn't have to sign a piece of paper saying "Yep, I'm John Schilling, the registered voter who lives at [redacted] and here I am casting my vote". If State authorities in particular want to catch the person-who-isn't-allowed-to-vote-but-votes-anyway sort of voter fraud, they can actually do that and they can show the receipts in court.
They just can't do that only for people who vote for the Bad Wrong Party
California, in theory, knows the number of ballots it sends out, and those ballots should be received back in a signed envelope with the name of the person that filled it out. As far as I can tell, there is no public auditing of the number it sends out, the number it receives back, they allow illiterate marks as signatures so signature verification is pointless, etc.
Pennsylvania, for example, does document and release the number of votes sent versus received, so they can debunk this kind of stories: https://www.reuters.com/article/world/fact-check-post-mixes-pennsylvania-primary-and-general-election-data-to-suggest-idUSKBN28B5NM/
>Any hypothetical fraudulent voters would just be stopped by the registration process
So a California woman was convicted of paying people to register to vote: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-charged-paying-individuals-including-homeless-people-las-skid-row
Walking through the hypothetical: she pays a bunch of homeless people to register. They use her address because they don't have addresses. California does no verification of their citizenship or even their identity afaict- they just get assigned new 'voter id numbers.'
Election season rolls around and 100 ballots show up at this woman's house. Who knows what happens with them.
The primary way for this to be detected would require the homeless people involved to know their voter id number, and look up to see if a ballot exists that they didn't fill out.
If a party did this, I'm not sure "threat to democracy" would be the right term, but it would definitely disrupt the established democratic system in a bad way. Fortunately, no party has even attempted to do this; given the number of readily available threats to democracy, it seems mostly unhelpful to come up with unlikely hypotheticals.
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2026-06-17/measure-to-give-non-citizens-right-to-vote-in-la-elections-headed-for-nov-3-ballot
Who knows if it'll ever be attempted at the state or federal level, but the left seems amenable to letting noncitizens vote.
What’s wrong with letting established residents of a city vote for city government, despite not being citizens? Why should citizenship be relevant to that?
I don't get this question, it happens all the time and isn't special at all. My boss in a county-level race a few years ago (a Dem prosecutor) was almost able to get his GOP opponent removed from the ballot, did in fact have such an order at one point, and it got tossed out on appeal, but it certainly could've happened. And in fact removing the Republican from the ballot would've been correct on the merits (didn't meet a residency requirement according to fact determinations of the circuit court), he only remained on due a procedural issue. The only reason this kind of thing doesn't happen too often at state level now is that state-level parties adequately investigate candidates, prepare for this, and have good litigation teams that don't miss things of this sort.
I get what it's gesturing at, it's just not a great criteria because there are many reasons it might be legally appropriate for a GOP election authority to remove a Dem candidate from the ballot or vice versa.
The first time I thought "this feels like banana republic crap" w/r/t US democracy was with calls in 2016 to charge Hillary with felonies during the election, but of course we didn't do that. Then it escalated into Trump actually being charged not for what he might've deserved but instead with some rather trivial stuff calculated to impede his electability, and then the attempts to remove him from ballots via the Reconstruction Amendments. That he nevertheless won the election would've provided a good off-ramp from this sort of thing, since he did in fact drop this kind of rhetoric in 2017 after he won, but we're not getting that. I suppose the baseline level of this sort of thing would be what was done to Nixon and Clinton, it's always around to some degree, it's more a question of optics. Politics will always be dirty power contests in reality, but it needs to preserve the appearance that it's about the will of the people, and in the absence of media control to launder whatever happens through a legitimizing lens, I'm not sure we'll ever get that back.
I'm happy to put your mind at ease on this matter, because this is a very unlikely scenario unless Congress nullifies some key Federal statutes: viz. ...
> 18 U.S.C. § 611 – Voting by aliens, which makes it unlawful for non-citizens to vote in any election for federal office (Class A misdemeanor, up to 1 year in prison)
> 18 U.S.C. § 1015(f) – False claim of citizenship, which makes it a Class E felony to falsely claim U.S. citizenship in order to register to vote, or vote in a federal, state, or local election (1 to 5 years in prison).
> 52 U.S.C. § 20511 – Election fraud, which include non-citizens registering and voting, but also citizens voting multiple times (Class E felony, 1 to 5 years in prison).
The only examples we have of non-citizens being allowed to vote in any type of election are certain local elections and certain school board elections. San Francisco and Oakland, allow non-citizen *residents* to vote in school board elections *if they have kids enrolled in the school district.* And I believe Maryland and Vermont allow municipalities to allow non-citizens to vote in local elections. Personally, although I understand the no-taxation-without-representation narrative that pro-non-citizen voting advocates like to push, I think this is unwise because extending the franchise to non-citizens for even minor local offices dilutes the citizenship rights of US citizens — and of course, the rightwing scare machine can whoop up people's fears that illegal aliens are voting in our elections.
Had one of the two parties actually done that, that would certainly be a problem.
I’m finding the idea that Democrats and Republicans corrupt in different ways a little ridiculous. Oh if you exclude the meme coins and oh if you exclude the staggering corruption from trump and his cronies, all the carveouts to business interests, not to mention the freaking Supreme Court (Harlan crow anyone?), then yeah democrats could be more corrupt. And the idea that democrats would restrict speech more than republicans is hilarious after Jimmy Kimmel.
A stereotype of Democrats, but not Republicans, is that their corruption is generally funneled through their NGO-industrial complex and via rules that target preferred groups for special handouts (government contracts go to women/minorities/etc…), so there potentially being different modes of corruption is a fair worry.
Also broadly turning a blind eye to fraud.
Republican corruption seems more personal enrichment; Democratic corruption is more often greasing the wheels of machine politics.
The people who were banned personally from major social media platforms during the Great Terror of 2015-2023 have a different perspective on how bad sending the third-rated late night talk-show host to time-out for a month is.
There were a few incidents during the campus Gaza protest crackdown and the Charlie Kirk assassaination aftermath that were a little taste of how bad things were back then, but speech is much freer now than it was 5-8 years ago.
It's very difficult to read this in any way other than, "I got banned from Twitter, that's basically the same as somebody going to jail for a Facebook post."
I wasn't banned, but a lot of people I like to read were. The breadth and quality of public discourse was severely hampered by both the absense of these specific voices and the chilling effect from the fear of the banhammer.
But isn't that just the right of a private corporation to serve who they want to serve?
Replying to you and the other two - there were a couple well documented instances of the Biden administration pressuring e.g. twitter to ban users or pull down speech and those are bad and lots of democrats also don't like that.
But come on - the overwhelming majority of the bans and post takedowns were 100% from the policy of the company with absolutely no input or influence from the Government, and a little piece of proof is that the so called woke reign of terror era _overlaps majorly with the first trump admin_. Their decisions were motivated by what they thought was good PR and what their employees were willing to stand. Pretending that was all or mostly or even largely Governmental is divorced from reality and easily verifiable as incorrect. It was cultural, and the companies were playing their part in it, and its only not okay for private companies to make their own policies because you didnt like it.
Meanwhile, Brendan Carr has _openly_ threatened government action to regulate speech, there is genuine government and executive policy to target people based on their opinions, people have literally gone to jail, they run a sham investigation into Jerome Powel, they blacklist law firms and they try to hamstring Anthropic for wanting to follow its contract. The level of direct, forceful meddling is unmatched in this administration.
And check your stats - Bezos donated significantly more to Trumps inauguration than to Biden's, and didn't make large campaign contributions (amazon employees did about 2 million more to Biden than trump, but thats the employees, and its not much money.)
That's ridiculous. It's firstly documented that the administration intervened to put political pressure on these sites, and it doesn't change anything that Democrats used this sort of 'private' thuggery to push their political viewpoints.
A functioning media is a core part of a functioning democracy. If enough of the population’s media exposure is mostly limited to the platforms in question or sources downstream of them, a unanimous decision by that set of platforms not to cover certain viewpoints would prevent the democracy from addressing those viewpoints effectively.
Even if you think it was overreach and censorship, you have to agree that there was actually some legitimate public interest in censoring COVID misinformation.
There was no legitimate interest in the Kimmel stuff though. This was strictly because the president had his feeling hurt, wanted to hurt his opposition, and send a message to limit criticism against him on public airways. This speaks deeply to the differences about fundamental views about Freedom of Speech between the two parties, EVEN IF more censorship happened during the COVID era.
(none of this is to mention the fact that it was primarily private platforms doing the censorship during the COVID era and not the President himself)
"Russian Propaganda Outlets (that not even Russians are stupid enough to believe!)"
Quick note, Russians have both internal and external propaganda, the two often happen to be distinct. Paying Tim Pool to spread disinformation on Ukraine will not convince any Russians, they instead will be served by pubblic TV channels which abundantly covers the population and also is controlled by the Russian government.
A legitimate interest to remove Russian Propaganda Outlets is pretty clear, but I am guessing you are referring to something else and something specific, what is it?
You could argue there's legitimate public interest in throwing 2024 election results in the trash and swear in Harris as the president regardless. But it would be a bad idea for pretty much the same reasons why suppressing some (but not all! Let's not forget that) COVID misinformation was bad - vindication of unhinged conspiracy theorists, undermining the neutral image of institutions, further polarization of the society.
>"… you have to agree that there was actually some legitimate public interest in censoring COVID misinformation."
I do not. There is *never* a legitimate public interest for censorship.
By "Legitimate Public Interest", I just mean there's an actual weight on the other side of the scale. It's perfectly reasonable to say that that weight, or even that no weight can ever balance out the other side. (Though I would wonder how far that truly can feasible extend. Does *never* imply there shouldn't be Libel laws, or that there should be no penalty for yelling fire in a crowded theater?)
But there was no weight on the other side of the scale when it comes to the Kimmel stuff. There wasn't even a fig leaf of public benefit. And so I think it's fair to call the side that will clamp down on free expression for *no good reason* more authoritarian on free speech than the side that will try to clamp down on an actual public health risk
>"Does *never* imply there shouldn't be Libel laws, or that there should be no penalty for yelling fire in a crowded theater?"
Post hoc consequences are distinct from prior restraint (i.e., censorship).
Depends on what they were banned for. Threats to public health and safety should be taken seriously, in my opinion.
Again, I repeat. NGO-industrial complex is no worse than traditional GOP carveouts for business interests and their beloved “public-private partnerships” that they outsource rather than giving governments any extra funding. How about when republicans turn a blind eye to white collar crime and basically “turn off” any financial regulatory barriers and encourage cronyism.
Oh also I forgot when Obama and Biden were calling to prosecute Fox News for their speech.
> NGO-industrial complex was funding money [to] Cuba and Venezuela
The way you've written this, it sounds like you have evidence that an NGO was providing money or arms to the Cuban or Venezuelan military. Do you have any evidence for this?
If that is not what you meant, can you please clarify exactly what you meant?
You seem to think these replies are attempting to establish which is a worse kind of corruption, rather than that the typical kinds of corruption differ enough by party to make the Metaculus early warning system more about partisan question selection than real “democracy is at risk” proxies. Your additional examples strengthen, rather than weaken, that worry.
If the corruption differs not just in quality but in seriousness, obviously the fact that only the worse kind gets weighted is not in itself a form of bias.
They didn't threaten to prosecute Fox News, but they had an absolute ton of "geez if you don't block stories about Hunter Biden/possible lab origins of covid/etc., we might have to regulate you good and hard" conversations with the social media companies.
Hysterical considering trump threatened to arrest Zuckerberg.
And guys. Scoreboard: name a wealthy Westernized country/society that is actually super right wing and very pro-democracy.
Japan?
Japan is socially mixed. They haven't legalised gay marriage, but they just passed a plan to deliver nationwide LGBT awareness and education to prevent discrimination. Hardly "super right wing".
Please, Japan's conservative party just won the election by a landslide, and currently their main platform is tightening immigration restrictions. You can't possibly think some passing lip service to "LGBT awareness" makes the political landscape "socially mixed", the social attitude towards LGBT in Japan is comparable to America in the 90s.
I think Japan is pretty right wing, it's just also been very non-fascist/militarist about it in its last ~80 years due to the consequences of losing the war. So it's mostly just conservative in the most literal sense of the word - resistant to change, in almost all forms (they still use fax machines, lots of tech adoption is slow, etc).
Poland?
The "super right wing" of Poland can hardly be called "pro democracy", considering the amount of damage they did to the checks and balances of their country ...
What do you mean by "super right-wing"? Because that covers a lot of ground, and if you're only smuggling in the assumption "right wing of any stripe is the same as Nazi Fascist Horribleness", then you're going to go on about "that country isn't wealthy", "that country isn't Westernised", "that country isn't right-wing" etc. if people give you examples.
Suspect that's the "No True Right-Wing-Scotsman" fallacy . . .
US 1950, depending on whatever "right" is supposed to mean exactly. I'll choose to interpret it as "conservative", though I don't consider MAGA to be conservative.
Can you answer which wealthy Westernized countries you think are "actually super left wing"?
Because this seems to be an impossible test to pass in either directions: most Western countries are fairly centrist overall, which is expected in a functional democracy. Arguably that's the main virtue of democracy: that it's hard for extremists to seize power.
In this context, I interpret “super left wing” in the Western tradition as socially and economically egalitarian. Thus, having universal healthcare, welfare, strong safety nets, and progressive levels of taxation fits this bill. Then, being quite liberal in social views, such as acceptance of LGBTQ, concern for the environment etc. Having increased political representation, not taking voting rights away, or dismantling checks and balances.
I would say quite a few Western European countries fit this bill. Scandinavian countries, Netherlands and more.
I’m not talking South American/Russian/Asian style communism or socialism here. That axis devolves into left/right illiberalism and cronyism, and often gets packaged with socially regressive or conservative social views.
That's not "super left wing", that's ordinary center-left stuff. "Super left wing" is things like defunding the police, open borders, cancellation of wrongthink, etc.
There's nothing wrong with this btw. They tried to direct the country towards the set of values that they wanted, that was never the problem with the right either. The problem (to put it mildly) is that the right does not care about laws, procedures, or ethics, when they try to implement their values.
You think hiding news stories that may reduce their electoral chances is simply "directing the country towards the set of values they wanted"? Isn't that also "not caring about laws, procedures, or ethics when trying to implement their values"?
I think a lot of the COVID stuff was mainly done because "we're in an emergency and spreading false information that fosters panic or makes people act suboptimally is a danger to all". You can argue that it wasn't that serious or that you actually think that information was correct but it's not necessarily a selfish motive. Generally speaking, while truth-finding is hard, having widespread fake information, especially at critical times, is also a danger. It's honestly hard to navigate if one tries to tackle that kind of problem in good faith - the market effectively *doesn't* fix this and has even lots of incentives to be bad actors.
Trump et al. tried to downplay the severity of covid when it first happened (doesn’t that fit the definition of hiding information). That is literally their approach to any form of bad news, deny it, lash out at fake news etc. Texas, Florida and some other red states are currently outdoing themselves trying to emulate Trumpism at the state level, so the “bias” cannot be isolated to one individual but clearly the whole party has this problem.
Also, how old are you? I’m sure you are also outraged by the Iraq War and how the Bush administration lied to the American public about WMDs, completely distorting the “news”.
"the right does not care about laws, procedures, or ethics, when they try to implement their values"
What a biased comment. I think there is plenty of evidence to make this exact same statement about the left.
Cancelling people and making them lose their livelihood for espousing conservative values (as was the norm just a few years back) was legal, procedural, and ethical?
And there are less abstract examples:
I would invite you to do some research on Pedro Sanchez, current president of Spain and shining star of global Socialism. He is one of the most machiavellian politicians to ever grace this earth and has eroded democracy in this country probably to a greater extent than Trump has in the US.
He got to power in his party's primaries by stuffing ballet boxes, got his wife a position as a tenured professor in one of the most prestigious universities in Spain (despite her not even holding a college degree), his campaign was funded by his wife's family's brothel business, his top minister just got convicted to 24 years prison for corruption and the top minister that replaced this guy is also in prison awaiting trial, he set up a sort of under-the-radar mafia squad with orders to intimidate police investigators, judges, media outlets who investigated his family and ministers' corruption, he controls the constitutional courts, the current Attorney General is his lackey (former one, also his lackey, was convicted of misuse of office), state-funded media is completely sycophantic to him, the national statistics institute (which publishes his popularity polls) is controlled by him (and always favorable to him), his spiritual guide and mentor, Jose Luis Zapatero (forrmer Socialist president of Spain), is under investigation for influence trafficking and corruption (among other things, they found 1.5 million dollars worth of undeclared jewels in a safe in his office, apparently gifts for helping Venezuela move oil and gold illegally out of the country under Maduro), he hasn't had enough congressional support to even pass the federal budget for the past 4 years, has routinely attacked judges (in complete disregard for the separation of powers) who have his wife, brother and ministers on trial, and the list goes on...
As a result of all this, polls are massively unfavourable to him. Despite that, he refuses to step down. Why? Because - he alleges - the danger of the Right coming to power is too great for the Spanish people. (ie. rather than letting them decide this in an election, he has decided for them). Basically taking a giant dump on laws, procedures and ethics in order to forcibly implement left-wing values...
You will rarely see a greater erosion of Western democracy than you will see in Spain at the moment, and this from one of the current heros of global Socialism...
"his campaign was funded by his wife's family's brothel business"
Once upon a time that would have been called "living off immoral earnings" but of course we're all sex-positive sex-work-is-real-work now 😁
Some of the brothels were gay brothels, so this was seen as "not so bad"...
Yes, "Cancelling" (as far as it exists) is perfectly legal. After Charlie Kirk died the right got many people fired for so much as an innocent comment. While I obviously disagree with their values, I am not going to have any legal case against someone asking someone else's boss to fire them.
It's actually progress. The old way of cancelling people with a different opinion was to put them into jail, or just execute them.
There is an EXTREME difference between "illegal" and "hazardous to democracy". There's an overlap, but they are different circles of the Venn diagram, and there are large areas where they are exclusive.
"Cancelling" someone is hazardous to democracy, but so is spreading falsehoods. And one can't really say that one is more dangerous than the other, because there are lots of different examples, and in some of them one is more dangerous, and in the other, the other.
No part of your reply made any effort to saying anything about the right caring for honor, procedure, or ethics. Do you think the right does care about these things, or is your opinion that no one cares about these things?
Maybe I misunderstood you, but are you really insinuating that everyone who thinks conservatively is dishonourable, unprincipalled and unethical? We are all adults here and I think we are all smart enough to know there are some on the left and on the right who care about those things and some who don't (I gave the example of the current Spanish government as some of those on the left who don't)
If we want to reduce the current (horrible) state of political polarization, I think we all need to find a way to remind ourselves that the majority of "the other side" believe what they believe because they think it best for society.
I think the left is wrong on many, many issues and that in the long run many left-wing policies will end up being terrible for society, but I never lose my belief that many on the left certainly mean well (among other things because I have tons of friends who are left-wing and I know they are good people). But this is the kind of thinking the left should also be cultivating about the right (and I feel like they aren't or they are doing it less). You may believe right-wing policies are completely wrong, which is completely valid, but you should try to acknowledge that most of them think they way they think because they want the best for society. Insinuating that none of them are honourable, ethical or respect legal procedures is not valid.
Specifically in terms of procedure and legality, I think it could be fairly argued that left's track record is rather dodgier than the right's. The right believes in strict laws with (possibly) excessively strict enforcement and punishment, but a strong focus in general on ensuring the rule of law in society. The left draws its roots from Marxist principles which say that violent revolution is necessary for society to progress. In other words, it espouses running rough-shod over the law whenever it is deemed that there is injustice. Whether there is really injustice or not in any given situation is another matter, and a violent revolution might well be ethical and honourable, but it is certainly not legal or procedural...
> but they had an absolute ton
I don't think this is true, and would love to see evidence for this claim. If the evidence is 'the twitter files', I round this off to 'this isnt true'
Read pages 9-57 of the district court opinion in Biden (now Murthy) v Missouri, which lays out the contacts pretty well.
https://ago.mo.gov/wp-content/uploads/missouri-v-biden-ruling.pdf
O I'm very familiar with Murthy. Like I said, I round this off to 'this isn't true'. Your own document has countless quotes of social media companies pushing back or outright denying government requests, and the district court filing unfortunately does not mention anything about the very many Republicans who also work with social media companies towards similar ends. It's worth noting that the guy who filled this lawsuit, Schmitt, filed like > 20 such lawsuits in order to burnish his Senate campaign (which worked well for him, he's now a senator). And this SCOTUS, easily the most right wing SCOTUS in several generations, still knocked down the plaintiffs in final review.
It's always worth asking people pushing this line what, exactly, you expect the relationship between the federal government and the various corporations in the country to look like. I'm curious for your answer.
A bit rich, given https://www.npr.org/2026/03/16/nx-s1-5748570/fcc-chair-threatens-broadcasters-licenses-over-negative-coverage-of-the-war-in-iran
"I’m finding the idea that Democrats and Republicans corrupt in different ways a little ridiculous"
- Some guy here, not long ago.
The issue isn't *worse*, it's *different*. There are different ways to e.g. rig elections with equal badness, and as parties have demographically and institutionally different bases of support, it is likely that one party will favor some particular sorts of corruption and the other will favor *different* sorts of corruption. Even if both are equally bad.
So if the metrics for "political corruption" consist disproportionately of metrics for the preferred style of corruption of one party, that's a huge problem that IMO disqualifies that effort. And, skimming the list of questions on the "Metaculus Democracy Threat Index", yeah, it does kind of look like someone was trying to list specifically the ways that the Republican Administration of Donald J. Trump might threaten democracy in the 2026-2028 timeframe.
>not to mention the freaking Supreme Court (Harlan crow anyone?)
Free concert tickets and getting to act in a play, anyone?
>And the idea that democrats would restrict speech more than republicans is hilarious after Jimmy Kimmel.
Yes, one shitty late-night comedian versus all the COVID-era speech suppression. though tbf some of that started under Trump! He never tried to set up a disinformation board, though. thank god biden wasn't stupid enough to tough out that fight.
Even if more people got banned for COVID misinformation, there is legitimate public interest in trying to fight COVID misinfo, but there was not legitimate public interest in going after Kimmel.
The party that will completely rally around the President PERSONALLY going after a comedian for no reason other than making fun of him shows more of a disdain for freedom of expression than one that vaguely ideologically aligns with private platforms that try to moderate intentional lies from foreign actors trying to destabilize the country and causing hundreds if not thousands of deaths
New name, familiar voice.
It just doesn't stop.
at some point it may be worth going to substack directly and asking for ip ban powers
>there is legitimate public interest in trying to fight COVID misinfo
Sure worked out well, didn't it?
Some people getting away with murder doesn't imply that prosecuting murder wouldn't be in the public interest.
Whether or not something is a legitimate goal isn't determined by whether or not a specific attempt at achieving said goal was successful.
fair enough that I was being vague, but I think the particular way chosen to "Fight" COVID "misinfo" actively made the problem much, much worse. And I think it was eminently predictably to anyone outside the policy bubble that it would fail the way it did.
To clumsily extend the metaphor, in trying to prosecute a murder they managed to get disbarred from further practice and also killed a bunch of people.
Could you elaborate on the "eminently predictable" mechanic? I'm pretty sure I agree with you, I just would find it helpful to have it written out so I can properly think about it. The whole "persecuting people makes them double down and radicalize in insulated communities" thing is something I get in broad strokes but don't exactly know how to put into words. Having a lot of the anti-misinformation couched in the language of the 20% elite doesn't help.
There was so much misinformation and “free speech” still allowed that now many more conservatives refuse to get vaccines for ANYTHING. Studies are now coming out demonstrating conservatives and liberals diverging in terms of health over the past 10+ years, much of which is attributable to distrust of doctors and vaccines. The misinformation and “free speech” won, you must be pleased.
>There was so much misinformation and “free speech” still allowed that now many more conservatives refuse to get vaccines for ANYTHING.
I can think of some other reasons for that but as we all know, public health can't fail, it can only be failed.
Ignore the man behind the curtain doing Noble Lies. Ignore the open letters burning all of public health's credibility!
>The misinformation and “free speech” won, you must be pleased.
Thank you for reminding me that nobody to my left actually gives a shit about free speech as a principle.
“Free speech” in this case means poorly informed conspiracy theories. And I will criticize those every time. You still haven’t addressed the fact that so many conservatives bought the lies hook, line, and sinker.
Unfortunately, "Free speech" also includes critical race theory, which is a bunch of bigoted nonsense that many liberals bought hook, line, and sinker. Literally, keeping morons like Robin Diangelo and Ibram Kendi on the bestsellers list for years.
Alas! Here we are.
>You still haven’t addressed the fact that so many conservatives bought the lies hook, line, and sinker.
What is there to address? Conservatives have stupid ideas about vaccines.
The government's bad behavior made that worse.
Neither is without sin here.
I guess what I’m trying to say with all these comments is that I take issue with the “both-sidesism” I keep seeing here, equating corruption of Democrats and Republicans as the same (excepting meme coins), just expressed differently. Yes, they both have flaws. I’m arguing that you can’t ignore the serious harms being inflicted by the Trump administration and the beliefs of many conservatives, demonstrated by the breathtaking corruption in plain sight and ignorance of basic scientific principles, exemplified by vaccine skepticism, and manage to say that the NGOs or DEI stuff of the Dems is the same level of corruption.
Liberals have some stupid ideas, usually smaller in harms inflicted, but conservatives’ stupid ideas are downright dangerous to many people.
Well, putting people's health at risk should be taken more seriously than expressing opinion via humor. Call me when they deplatform Joe Rogen.
Indeed! Everyone that signed that stupid "go riot!" public health letter should've been stripped of credentials. Fauci lying about masks, right out, restrict his speech. Kamala Harris saying not to trust the vaccine? Take that threat seriously!
On and on the list goes.
I have no idea what you are referring to.
Speak for yourself! This American will be fighting for democracy for longer than the current political fad of fashionable illiberalism
Banned for annoying low-effort comment that ignores the point of this post.
My input on potential question-selection bias:
>"Will senior DOJ leaders override normal procedures to open or accelerate a case against a high-profile presidential opponent or critic in the following years?"
Note the phrase "override normal procedures". Looks suspiciously like this was inserted specifically to exclude the Biden-era prosecutions of Trump.
>"Will senior DOJ leaders override normal procedures to protect the President, his family, or his allies from a legal case in the following years?"
This was resolved "yes" for Trump's EPA quashing the investigation into Senator Jim Jones's coal holding, but not for president Biden's pardon of his son Hunter.
>"Will a SCOTUS decision weakening donor disclosure rules for political spending or electioneering communications be good law in the following years?"
Why is this assumed to be bad? Is there no privacy interest? Would overruling NAACP v. Alabama be considered good then?
>"Will the U.S. federal government open formal investigations of at least 5 top-50 universities in the following years?"
Why are top-50 universities prima-facia assumed to be innocent? I can almost guarentee that they are all in violation of federal civil rights laws.
>"Will U.S. authorities transfer any current or former U.S. citizen to a prison abroad in the following years?"
Wouldn't normal extraditions count? Am I misunderstanding something here?
It's also notable what isn't on the list:
Nothing about a state or city allowing noncitizens to vote. A lot of people are worried about that.
Nothing about demographic change. Seems like changes to the electorate itself should be considered as a possible threat mode.
> Why is this assumed to be bad?
Even if we grant it is bad, why grant that it is undemocratic? Private donations are undemocratic, but private voting is democratic? Not obviously.
Former is one vote per dollar, latter is one vote per person?
>> Why are top-50 universities prima-facia assumed to be innocent?
Because everyone is prima-facia assumed to be innocent?
Uh, this doesn't appear to reply to his point that a legitimate government could prosecute >5/50
Assumed to be innocent until proven guilty, yes, but nonetheless subject to being investigated if there's a reasonable suspicion of their being guilty. And since there's no indication of what *sort* of investigations might qualify, this one does seem ill-defined. Universities are big complex institutions that do lots of things; the idea that 10% of them might over a 2-3 year period do something that would raise a reasonable suspicion that *some* aspect of their operations might bear investigating, does not strike me as something that could only come out of a nefarious political conspiracy.
> Note the phrase "override normal procedures". Looks suspiciously like this was inserted specifically to exclude the Biden-era prosecutions of Trump.
Trump attempted to prevent the legitimately elected President from taking office via creating slates of fake electors and starting a riot to try to pressure various people in government into throwing out the legitimate results of the election, I don't really see why exactly it would be bad for him to have gone to jail for this.
Frankly the Biden era prosecutions of Trump were too slow.
> This was resolved "yes" for Trump's EPA quashing the investigation into Senator Jim Jones's coal holding, but not for president Biden's pardon of his son Hunter.
Pardons are, unfortunately, in the Constitution, otherwise the Jan 6 thugs would still be in prison rather than out and about molesting children &c.
You're right that whenever someone says, "prosecuting political enemies is bad," there is almost always an implied, "unless they did something really bad and deserve it". One might think that career prosecutors at the Justice Department would be competent to judge this, but the one time they pulled the trigger they were directly overruled by the American electorate, so apparently not.
Again with the secret knowledge.
I fought in the Spanish Civil War.
Chapter and verse, please do.
Edit: Oh wait, you do kind of sound like gawdflea
Preemptive pardons seem like a ridiculous concept, though. I'm not familiar with the part of the Constitution that regulates pardons, but are there really no limits against preemptively pardoning someone before charges have even been laid or trials conducted?
It's a bad precedent. I've seen defences of it based on "well Biden was afraid that when Trump got into power, the MAGAs would go after his family with fake accusations and lawfare in revenge", but that equally now applies to any other president in office, including Trump.
He gave all his family, friends, and associates pre-emptive pardons? Well you see, he was afraid they'd be persecuted once he was out of power.
Personal opinion here, not something that can be generalized or used for political agreement.
Increasingly im just of the opinion that every law that can be twisted to set bad precedent when read as written. I find myself caring less about whether something sets a good or bad precedent for 'the other side' and more about whether it is obvious what is happening in that given incident.
And, yea, it's pretty obvious.
I'm willing to give biden a pass because it is obvious what kind of person trump is, and at some point we should just call a spade a spade. Trump doesn't let precedent stop him, ever. If Biden didn't set that precedent Trump would've anyway. Even if it was against the law, he would have. The conversation about decorum and norms seems so far away from what this person actually is.
We almost certainly need some reform around pardon power -- we need reform around a lot of parts of government -- and that's a job for the pols to figure out. But bluntly, at an individual level, this isn't really a question of norms.
See, this is precisely what concerns me. I thought of it back when Obama was doing his "I don't need no stinkin' Congress, I got me a pen and a phone!" stunt.
"If Biden didn't set that precedent Trump would've anyway."
That is way too easy a rationalisation of any bad or dumb thing we want to do. "The bad guy would have done it, maybe, probably, anyway if it's bad he would do it, so it's okay if we do it too/first!"
"The bad guy is so bad, *anything* we do is justified because we're the good guys!"
And that's how we got Abu Ghraib, waterboarding, 'enhanced interrogation' and Guantanamo.
Do away with decorum and norms, we're left with "anything we want to do is justified by the plea of necessity, and we can stretch necessity like an elastic band to cover what we want to do", and then the superweapon you built For Our Side Only ends up in the hands of the Bad Guys when you get voted out of power.
The USA thought it held all the aces with the atomic bomb, now it was the World Policeman with the biggest, baddest, deterrent and then got a rude awakening when the Soviet Union went "In fact, we too have our own German scientists and our own bomb" and then we got MAD and all the fun of the Cold War worries about nuclear annihilation.
It is very, very easy to persuade ourselves "Well we gotta do this because the bad guy(s)" and it's a very, very bad idea.
Look, for example, at the moaning and yelling about the Supreme Court (and I am not talking about "is X or Y constitutional?', I am talking about making decisions that are then binding matters of law) when it was ruling by fiat from the bench for the stuff the liberals wanted (e.g. Obergefell), well tough luck redneck rubes, this is the law now and if you don't like it that's just your problem, we don't make the rules. Ruthkanda Forever! This is how it's going to be from now on, we get all our wishes granted by the nine wizards in the dark robes and you can go fly a kite.
Then Tweedledum got replaced by Tweedledee, who proceeded to nominate justices in line with what they and their party wanted, and then we got boo-hooing about "is the Supreme Court too Catholic?" and "this is not the will of the people" (the will of the people could go take a hike when it was your guys in power) and it should be dissolved and talk of court-packing about getting the majority to make the judgements you wanted (nothing there about government should keep its sticky paws off the courts or the sanctity of the law).
I like this one about "disproportionately Catholic", was it "disproportionately Jewish" before? Of course, nobody would ever say such a thing:
https://news.gallup.com/opinion/polling-matters/391649/religion-supreme-court-justices.aspx
"The remaining six justices -- John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Sonia Sotomayor, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett -- are Catholic. Thus, the court will consist of six Catholics, two Protestants, and one Jew.
This is not reflective of the U.S. population, as has been widely discussed in recent years. Our latest estimate from over 15,000 Gallup interviews conducted from January 2021 through March of this year shows that about 22% of the adult population identifies as Catholic, as opposed to the 67% Catholic representation on the court. Two percent of the population identifies as Jewish (Kagan represents 11% of the nine justices). The biggest disproportionality comes in terms of Protestants. About 45% of Americans are non-Catholic Christian, or Protestant, compared with what will be 22% Protestant representation on the court."
I do appreciate the ongoing fear of The Papist Menace, keep shaking in your boots about us, heretics! Historically, though, the proportions seem to be around 13% Catholic and 7% Jewish, which are in proportion for estimates of Catholic population in the USA and disproportionate for the Jewish population. Shall we talk about The Jewish Menace, or are they reliably liberal on social issues and so not a menace there?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States#Religion
Tweedledee demonstrates "you can get policies passed if you have enough of Your Guys on the Supreme Court", Tweedledum thinks "Hey, I gotta try that when I'm in power!" and then he gets into power and suddenly it's "but the leopards were not supposed to eat *my* face!"
IDK, I hear what you're saying, but it really does feel like trump is just in a different category. I'm not really rationalizing, so much as just pointing to empirical truth. The existence of prior precedent has not stopped Trump at all. I'm totally fine to evaluate Bidens actions in the context of what we know about Trump, because we knew that he was a guy who cared so little about norms he tried a coup.
The Biden pardons look better every day, given the vindictiveness of the Trump Administration, from pulling security clearances from law firms to firing prosecutors who were assigned to investigations he doesn't like to the idiotic Comey seashell prosecution.
It depends heavily on how you define 'Preemptive".
There is a long history of pardons for people who are not convicted and in many cases not even charged, starting with George Washington pardoning participants in the Whiskey Rebellion and continuing to the Ford and Carter pardons of Vietnam-era draft evaders. In almost all of those cases, however, the identities of the persons pardoned were by definition largely unknown. Various other pardons have been given to individuals before conviction, Caspar Weinberger being an example, though in most cases the recipient was at least under investigation and there was some specificity to the crimes for which they were pardoned. So the precedents were pretty well set, though the pardons granted by Biden for any Federal offense committed in a specific time period for select individuals certainly stretched them near their breaking points.
It was the terms of the pardons that struck me as odd. It was nothing to do with possible crimes (that we knew of) and so naturally that starts speculation about "okay, so what *did* they do that could be a pretext for a law case?" Hunter was in the middle of court cases, so that was explicable, but the rest of them?
It also sounds a bit like a "get out of jail" card; maybe you haven't done anything yet but now you can go ahead, you're already pardoned! 😊
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c8r5g5dezk4o
"In the final minutes of his presidency, Joe Biden pre-emptively pardoned several family members, including his brothers James and Frank Biden, and sister Valerie Biden Owens.
Biden said the pardons were intended to shield his family from politically motivated attacks and should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment of any wrongdoing.
..."My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me," Biden said in a statement released as Trump arrived at the Capitol rotunda for his inauguration.
"Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end."
In addition to his siblings, Biden issued pardons for his sister-in-law Sara Jones Biden and his brother-in-law John Owens."
Given what was recently released about Fauci, perhaps there was something to preemptively pardon them for.
https://cbs12.com/news/nation-world/new-declassified-documents-renew-debate-over-fauci-covid-origins-new-legal-questions-trump-administration-president-joe-biden-pandemic-senator-rand-paul-republican-tulsi-gabbard-director-of-national-intelligence-biolabs-wuhan-congress
Do we know if the Jan 6 convictees committed more child sex offences since their release than we’d expect from their statistical profiles? I agree that jail is an appropriate response to the Jan 6 incident, but I don’t think anyone should be using political prosecutions to target non-political crimes.
"the Jan 6 thugs would still be in prison rather than out and about molesting children &c."
Chazza, things can get hot and heavy in the comments here but there are still some standards of evidence. Provide evidence that this allegation is more than just "oh let's call all the people we don't like bad names" or don't do it.
I don't want to see flame wars on here, I can get that elsewhere.
https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/the-jan-6-pardons--how-many-clemency-recipients-have-faced-other-charges
"One Jan. 6 pardonee was convicted in February 2026 of child molestation and sentenced to life in prison. Another was convicted in 2025 of reckless homicide.
At least 14, meanwhile, have been charged with sex crimes or crimes related to child sexual abuse material (CSAM), and at least six have faced domestic violence charges. Others have faced charges for physical assaults, illegal firearms possession, or other violent crimes. At least 20 have been charged with driving under the influence (DUI) of alcohol or drugs or public intoxication."
Not nearly a majority of pardonees and mostly not charges for post-pardon activity, but there is at least one pardonee who has since been convicted of child molestation.
Recidivism rates typically vary from 20-50%: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/recidivism-rates-by-state
The rate for the Jan 6 protesters was 97 of nearly 1600 people pardoned.
The general US incarceration rate is 541 per 100,000 people.
Comparing all these numbers, you get about 1 in 3 for convicted criminals who complete their sentences, about 1 in 16 for the Jan 6 pardonees, and about 1 in 200 for the general population, however, note these numbers are not quite measuring the same thing. The crime recidivism rate is based on convictions within three years of release. The Jan 6 rate includes anyone arrested, charged, or convicted in between the Jan 6 protests and when the article was published, which is five years. The article expresses this very badly, with wording that looks deliberately intended to confuse people into thinking it is only post-pardon crimes (in the past 1.5 years), and similar issues to the point where I would recommend extreme skepticism should you encounter future works by the same author. The rate for the general population is by people currently in prison, so for instance someone arrested, held for a day, and released without charges would count as 1/365 of a person per year. If you instead take an estimate of 10 million misdemeanors charged per year (I am getting careless here, because I am in a hurry now), and assume other crimes are negligible, then that's 1/30 and you're comparing general population's charges + convictions (potentially more than one per person) per one year to the Jan 6th pardonees's individual people with at least one arrest, charge, or conviction within 5 years. Assume arrests being included makes up for double-counting charges on the same person, divide by 5, and you get rates lower than the general population. Or make other assumptions and you get similar rates.
Anyway, aren't democrats the ones usually wanting people freed from prison? They should be happy about this.
I think Jan 6th was and is such a hot button topic that I immediately go looking for the stench of partisanship (sorry, William).
The Lawfare Institute seems to try and be even-handed, so marks for that, but they are also probably centre-left to liberal so I'd expect a bit of unconscious bias there.
"Others" is a bit vague, how many? Did they do similar break-downs of other charges for people in BLM-associated cases?
Drink driving is a sport everyone participates in, regardless of political affiliation, so while I disapprove that article really is rather "murder, arson, and jaywalking": Some of them got done for CSAM, some for violent crime, and some for drink driving!
But thanks for looking it up, and while it's probably tilted a bit, it's at least trying to be objective. Maybe not getting there all the time, but trying:
"A Lawfare study reveals that almost one in 16 insurrectionists subject to the president’s clemency order has been arrested for and charged with—and in the vast majority of cases convicted of—other crimes, at least some of which were actively enabled by the clemency actions."
Tsk, tsk! "At least some of which" - nicely vague and highly alarmist, do better Skidmore grad! At least some of the commentariat on here have broken the laws by importing nootropics or other no-no activities! Since Jan 6th, even! Which may have been actively enabled by clemency!
Why, I myself have been drunk at least once in my life, now take me away in chains!
Yeah I don't mean to particularly vouch or not vouch for the Lawfare Institute which idk much about frankly, I just googled "January 6 child molester" and this came up first (besides an NPR article which certainly is perceived as left-liberal biased). The Andrew Paul Johnson case in particular made the social media rounds enough awhile back that I assume it was the impetus for Chastity's comment, which I read as glib more than some genuine belief that they're all a bunch of pedos.
Seems like insurrectionists are a group more likely to commit crimes than the general population but less likely than the overall population of convicted criminals, which doesn't surprise me that much. Some number were violent people with poor impulse control or whatever and likely to commit other crimes, others were generally law-abiding people who either were credulous dopes who earnestly thought the election was stolen and acted accordingly or were swept up in the mob mentality and went along for the ride. To the larger point of the Democracy Index, I don't think they should have been pardoned as brave patriots and I think it's fair to flag the pardons as bad for democracy, and would feel the same way if there were a second capital storming by BlueAnon libs in 2025 and they were pardoned by President Newsom in 2029.
On a last note, I'm not sure BLM cases are really analogous because I don't think there were a lot of pardons associated with any convictions that resulted? Prominent dem politicians supported bail funds for arrestees, but that's obviously quite different from a post-conviction pardon.
"Normal procedures" seems like a reasonable caveat because prosecuting major political figures isn't in itself undemocratic, if your concept of democracy includes the idea that political leaders should not have blanket immunity or otherwise be above the law. Prosecuting *plausibly or likely innocent* political figures to manipulate their eligibility for office is undemocratic, but the publicly available evidence suggests that Trump is not plausibly or likely innocent.
Pardons have a separate question, which was appropriately resolved Yes for 2023-24.
Considering demographic change as a threat to democracy is... well, I'll just say an extremely controversial and partisan-coded position, and not something one would expect a non-ethnonationalist organization to include in such an index.
"Leftists have not subverted most institutions to be biased in their favor" is also an extremely controversial and partisan-coded position, yet it's the background assumption of most "democracy indices" (this one is no exception), which is the real reason why it won't convince any skeptical conservative.
Yeah, my view on this is that Metaculus is not rigged, but the natural constituency for people who have heard of it, contribute to it, and are consulted by it is the liberal college-educated Democratic-voting bloc.
So there may indeed be biases there just simply because the mindset of everyone is "this thing good, the other thing bad, and the other lot always do the other thing".
If there are conservative to right-wing superforecasters, yippee! But are there?
One should also consider that the reason why there aren't many right-wing superforecasters could be that it just so happens that people who are better at predicting the future consistently don't think right wing policies/solutions are effective at producing good results.
Or left-wing institutional capture along with left-wing bias in the prediction questions means it is more likely the government will do things that left-wingers predict will happen.
Sure if you just want to make up an imagined story. Unless you define left wing so broadly as to be meaningless, where is all the capture? US presidency is regularly swapped between Republicans and Democrats. There's plenty of Republican governors. Elsewhere, like in the UK, right wing parties often are in power *longer* than left wing ones. Does the left wing have its turfs? Maybe, sure, but so does the right. It is far from this all-encroaching capture that the right is completely powerless against.
And it's not like superforecasters only deal in matters that a government, or for that matter any human, can uniquely determine. If they have consistently better outcomes across the board including at things like technological discovery then it's obviously not something you could achieve just with bias.
Many things "could be" the explanation for many other things. For any remotely controversial question, I can conjure an explanation saying that it's because My Tribe is smart and good or that Other Tribe is stupid and evil, that can't be disproven and so "could be" true.
The question is, how *likely* is it to be the cause, and on what evidence? Give me a number and a cite. Or at very least an estimate tied to reasonable premises with a bit of math.
I mean, is this a less likely explanation than "everyone has a left wing bias"? Is that any less of a "Other Tribe is stupid and evil" explanation?
I'm not saying this is necessarily the case - I think the correlation between academic research and political orientation isn't random but it has more to do with mindset than with raw intelligence. However in general people also seem to give for granted that this universal left-wing bias is causing everything and that's also very questionable. If you ask left wingers, it's the right wing who permeates all of society. More likely is that both sides have a selection bias, writing off the parts they have more influence on as secondary while the other guys control the Really Important Stuff.
I adopt structural reforms to make institutions align with basic civilized values; you subvert them to be biased in your favor; he is a barbarian wrecker who doesn't understand the institutional basis of civilization.
Indeed. And there's the embarrassing implication in this kind of complaint that your vision of "basic civilized values" isn't quite as compelling, considering that your opponents outmaneuvered you so comprehensively.
> "Leftists have not subverted most institutions to be biased in their favor" is also an extremely controversial and partisan-coded position
Reading 'extremely controversial' as 'lots of people strongly dislike this' a la 'stalin was extremely controversial'
I really don't think this is true. Can you find any polling to suggest that most people (say, 70%) believe 'leftists' (who? schumer?) have subverted most institutions (which?) to be biased in their favor?
I think my problem with "normal
procedures" is that it's actually fairly common for prosecutors to bypass "normal procedures", that's why you have criminal defense attorneys.
If in the trump case, FBI officials had jumped the gun and busted into Mar A Lago with a warrant that turned out to be based on complete fabrications, there'd be tons of commentary about 1984 and the deep state and the visible end of democracy, but this stuff happens all the time in drug cases and we typically assume the system can just handle it in court (which it does)
Thanks for compiling this list, I agree some of these examples are egregiously targeted.
I did think one question you listed was actually fine. Weakening donor disclosure laws seems likely to be anti-democratic because corruption is a constant concern. Money is easy for an individual to provide in quantities that matter to an individual politician. Membership of political organisations is different, because “membership” on its own provides a much smaller tangible benefit to an individual politician. There are trade-offs here, but statistically, I suspect most times donor disclosure law changes have been about corruption, and most membership disclosure changes have been about political association. I’d be interested if you have examples where the opposite seems true.
That’s for a local politician. At federal level, the amounts are higher, to the point where donor disclosure laws are relevant. (You’re also simplifying and ignoring a lot, but that’s irrelevant to my point.)
I don't think these sorts of predictors are necessarily very good at actually predicting what we might intuitively think of as "a threat."
For example, imagine you had a prediction market in 1941, immediately after Pearl Harbor. You might reasonably sit down and calculate the balances of forces between Hitler, Stalin, Roosevelt, Churchill, and Hirohito, and conclude that there was virtually no way for the Axis powers to win. The industrial power of the USA and USSR were just too great, the failure of political collapse during Barbarossa combined with Nazi genocidal actions in the East mean that the Soviet population will almost certainly fight to the bitter end, Japan was too poor and too reliant on oil that it doesn't have good sources of, the Chinese theater bogged down the IJA while providing minimal strategic gains, Germany lacks the naval capacity to invade Britain so it's forced to rely on bombing which has never worked, democracies are extremely bloodthirsty once attacked so the US and UK are unlikely to give up even as the war grinds out, etc, etc.
But the only reason that is true is that everyone on the Allied side take Hirohito and Hitler very seriously as threats, and are extremely unlikely to change their minds! It would be crazy to conclude, "See? Only a 0.3% chance of them winning. You have TDS (Tojo Derangement Syndrome)."
I don't think anyone took seriously the idea that Al Qaeda would take over the US, but they were still pretty concerned about terrorist attacks. War isn't all or nothing.
Putting up some defenses and additional safety was all well and good, but I'd say post-9/11 the levels of terrorism-related paranoia were absolutely unwarranted and "deranged".
Of course, but because liberals are so wonderfully civilized, they refuse to deal with threats before they become a problem. Nothing they'd do would change just because Trump is more or less of a threat. So all you can do is calculate probabilities and pray to God.
What point are you making? Are you worried that if the Allied leaders believed in prediction markets, they would’ve taken Germany/Japan less seriously and the odds of an Axis victory would’ve increased? I think if the leaders were that likely to lessen their response, observers at the time would learn of that, and the prediction markets would take that into account. We already have some politicians who are more or less commonly attacked for being “too swayed by opinion polls”, people would have a sense whether a given politician listened to them much.
Or do you mean, democracy might be “under threat” but the threat might have a low chance of winning? I agree that’s likely, but less of an issue. Winning a war is awful, and in many ways worse than life after losing a war (though it was clearly right for the US to enter WWII). I don’t think winning a fight against anti-democratic forces is nearly as bad as living in an undemocratic country.
(If politicians cared that much about markets, there’d probably be interference from people wanting to shift the market, due to other investors not being *that* confident in their positions. The market outcome would fall somewhere between the “true” aggregate prediction and the desired outcome of the most-committed manipulator. But I don’t think that’s what you’re getting at.)
There could be a weird feedback loop where the probability of success determines how much resources you want to spend to secure that success. Could work in different ways, like:
"There is already a 100% chance of victory. Maybe we are sending too much resources, let's try a smaller amount and see what happens on the prediction markets."
"There is a 0% of victory. Clearly all resources we send are wasted, stop sending anything."
Both arguments seem reasonable in isolation (and the enemy propaganda would definitely make them). Of course it would be ironic if the latter situation happened as a consequence of reacting to the former.
A probability 50% is probably the one most motivating to send more resources. But I guess it depends on how the media would frame it.
Or a better example, imagine 99% predicted chance of victory. Some people would argue "hey, send a little more resources and make it 100%, we are so close to guaranteed victory". Other people would argue "hey, 98% is almost as good as 99%, plus we can still change our minds later it things start going wrong, and the extra resources could be spent on our education or healthcare instead". By buying thousands of bots on social networks, you could push the consensus in either direction.
Comparing today's prediction markets with what they might have led to in 1941 doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The information landscape was very different back then, the exchange of ideas limited by speed of delivery (literally!), much larger trust in institutions than today. Probably the average person had a lot less leasure time to spend on deep diving into political and military matters.
Even within this different context I'm not sure the predictor would be as bad as you think it might be. We can crudely think of the outcome of a "prediction site" as the aggregation of all available data, recency-biased and people's-belief-weighted. And more specifically for prediction markets, belief-as-currency-weighted. There are sources for the beliefs, and the stronger the source, moving up and into an actual information advantage (a big no-no in regulated financial markets, but almost a de-facto feature of prediction markets), the more chance someone will take advantage. In 1941, you'd probably have the few people in power taking the Axis forces very seriously use their information advantage to reap the benefits. Were prediction markets taken seriously by the media class, maybe they would have helped shape public consciousness, too.
I think the point the comment is simply making is, just because <bad thing> seems unlikely to happen, doesn't mean that <people who are extremely alarmed about bad thing> are insane, because one of the big factors behind it not happening are all the alarmed people taking action.
The way you frame it makes the point sound like common sense. Worded this way, I don't think anyone here (author or commenters) disagrees.
This is complicated. Resources matter in war, but so does political will, and a simplistic comparison of resources wouldn't predict France collapsing in mere weeks in 1940, or even the massive successes of early Barbarossa.
For a more recent event, how would your prediction market work immediately after the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022? Russian resources were obviously bigger than Ukrainian ones, and the question of how many Western countries would help the victim and to which extent was extremely open. Some like Poland were immediately "in and on it", while Germany, the richest nation of the EU, initially sent them something like 5000 surplus helmets. I remember the situation four years ago and the present status quo, when multiple European corporations produce advanced missiles and drones for Ukraine to shoot into Russia proper, would have looked very unlikely back then. Even the current duration of the war would have looked very unlikely back then. I don't believe that the prediction market of 2022 would say "this war will take longer than WWI to play out".
Some observations on potential bias from a strongly anti-Trump, pro-proportional-representation perspective:
-- There is a question on the crude magnitude of gerrymandering (efficiency gap >= 20 seats in the House), but that doesn't fully capture the antidemocratic impact of widespread tit-for-tat gerrymandering. "Our safe seats cancel out your safe seats" is not actually a win for representativeness of the legislature or responsiveness to popular sentiment.
-- Reconciliation bill with no CBO input on Byrd Rule compliance seems weirdly orthogonal to democracy. It's not clear what a better measure of Senate "skew" would be, since given the baked-in skew of the Senate's constitutional design, it's not obvious whether ending the filibuster would be a net win for representativeness.
Banned for this comment.
The first sentence is very simply true, so Jon was probably not banned for that.
https://people.com/donald-trump-calls-himself-king-as-white-house-shares-fake-time-cover-11683451
The second sentence is very simply true, so Jon was probably not banned for that.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-asked-uphold-constitution-says-dont-know-rcna204580
The third sentence is I guess a candidate for banning, if you really don't like being called nitpicky?
The fourth sentence has lots of swear words, but I doubt that's the issue- last General thread was full of lists of racial slurs to investigate the AI moderator and that didn't incur any bans, so I doubt Scott is _terribly_ sensitive to profanity.
There's a well-recognized game in journalism where, if you're a journalist, you make the reader think whatever you want him to think while only saying things that are technically true, while leaving out things that would detract from that narrative, and if you're a reader, you try to detect when the journalist is doing that.
Similar goes for comments. Scott - like any reader - is permitted to point out when a commenter might be doing that. This is an example.
We're permitted to point out when Scott might be biased in when he notices it, although we have somewhat more limit than Scott does since we don't have moderator control. That being said, Scott's commonly observed as more left wing than right, and if so, this is a ban against interest, which mostly just leaves "Scott is trying to keep his comments section from turning into a pointless mudfight", which I tend to support.
I feel like in this case though there's a certain element of potential sane-washing at work. It's somewhat concerning and ironic that the best way to defend Trump is to *not* listen to what he, himself, says, and claim it's all a misunderstanding, or a lie, or theatre, and not to be believed.
Personally I'd be ok with actually taking the baseline to be what someone proclaims to want to do and be. If they're lying, well, they shouldn't have. If someone ran for office while loudly boasting that they are a serial killer I wouldn't wait for a jury trial to say they shouldn't run for office. The offence is either being a serial killer, or lying about being a serial killer and tarnishing the seriousness and importance of the office he's running for. Either way, guilty. Off with them, and nothing of value would be lost.
The most straightforward way to deal with that perception of sane-washing is to look more carefully. Lots of people readily acknowledge that Trump says a lot of word salad, or more to the point, he simply doesn't talk like most other American politicians. So we can't simply take what he says the same we take what other politicians say. For that matter, we can't interpret what most other politicians say that way, either, given how often they will change their message.
It's especially misleading to try this technique when a great deal of what's presented is filtered by people who obviously don't like Trump. Even today, for example, there exist people who think Trump sides with Nazis even though he said things that directly contradicts taking their side, primarily because the source that reported what he said, cut those words out. Moreover, said people frequently do not apply the same reasoning to quotes from public figures they happen to agree with, which strongly suggests that what motivates them is not that reasoning.
I find it more productive to try our best to read behind the words, factoring in deeds, personal background, minding the sources filtering what's said, and so on. Speaking to my previous comment, this also means we can take a dim view of commenters who flatly reject such measures, insist on just looking at whatever their filters told them, and insinuate that anyone who tries to be more serious is somehow being only performatively so.
Before Trump’s second presidency, I heard someone argue that sane Republicans, especially the Supreme Court (I forget the language they used) would use a second Trump term to push through normal Republican objectives with unusually little resistance, but that those same sane Republicans would stop Trump from having a third term because normal Republican values include two-term presidencies. Trump’s bluster would never become more than bluster. I feel like that prediction has gone surprisingly well - the Supreme Court has blocked a lot of Trump’s craziest and most unconstitutional, least conventionally-Republican ideas.
Sure, but he’s still going to do the ballroom if he can. Just think how dissolved into warring factions the liberals would be if he actually became king.
That kinda makes sense, I could definitely see Trump's crazy ideas actually having an anchoring effect to make conventionally Republican agendas normal by comparison and thus pass more easily.
This post is a bit confused about the way predictions are now aggregated on Metaculus. You essentially described the Metaculus Prediction, which was deprecated in 2024:
https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#metaculus-prediction
The Community Prediction, which is used today, is just the recency-weighted median:
https://www.metaculus.com/faq/#community-prediction
It turns out there wasn't enough difference between the two to keep the old version of the Metaculus Prediction around. That means Metaculus manages to perform this well even with a pretty simple metric! That said, pro forecasters do still routinely outperform the community, so the site might find a better way to take advantage of that in the future.
Thanks, fixed. I'm still confused by this, though. Is this basically an admission that superforecasting is bunk and we can get the same effect by polling random people?
I don't think so, but I am also confused by this. The FutureEval hub shows a pretty stark gap between pros and the community at large:
https://www.metaculus.com/futureeval/
Maybe they just weren't weighting it well? 🤷 I've never asked.
The community forecast isn't random people, though, since the sample is significantly narrowed to "does forecasting" and then narrowed further based on particular interest (or commitment, in the case of tournament questions).
I wonder how much of the difference between pros and the community comes from excluding low-volume markets and low-effort answers? They say “The pro and community performance baselines are calculated using all questions where both humans and bots made forecasts — from the first forecast of our first AI model to today.”
This sentence confused me until I read the comments: "You can see that 86 people have made forecasts about this, although it’s the people with a long history of making better-than-average forecasts whose opinions drive the result."
You're right, I edited that out, thanks.
no. the flattering-to-metaculus explanation is that superforecasters and regular people both have a similar error spread, so most of the useful signal comes from aggregation itself. the less flattering explanation is that everything in metaculus is motivated by trying to impress various bigwigs, so when the simple aggregation and the superforecaster aggregation were different, it was opaque to explain to bigwigs why the superforecasters disagreed, so it wasn't useful.
Metaculus employee here. The answer is no.
- Pro forecasters still completely crush random people (even random Metaculus forecasters!) in basically all tournaments.
- Pro aggregates are better than random user aggregates, as shown by the FutureEval leaderboard posted by Nathan below, however part of this is that Pros probably spend slightly more time on the questions and are incentivised to cooperate, while the broader community does that less.
The reasons the Metaculus Prediction didn't significantly outperform the Community Prediction imo is that
- Good forecasters are overrepresented in most questions, as skill and the number of forecasts one makes are heavily correlated.
- The old way of measuring skill simply wasn't all that good. The new system is much better and we are working on a new version of reputation weighting at some point.
Everything is bunk when stretched beyond its limits. Common sense, though, is only common because it's the bare minimum. Uncommonly advanced sense is terribly underrated.
Stretching these things beyond their useful limits is a one of Scott’s vices
I don't agree. I think they're useful thought experiments.
Banned - high-temperature, low-effort, low-content comment.
Has anyone looked into which questions caused the index to decline early in the year? This seems like it should be traceable to a specific cause.
While this post tries to achieve objectivity, it occurs to me that you could go in the other direction and make multiple subjective indexes representing different political positions with different weights.
Maybe one group believes gun control is tyranny and another believes the real tyranny is denying gender affirming care to adolescents. Why not track both separately? Then we can have an objective measure of the real, observed level of subjective tyranny!
(Obviously there are some issues to work through. You would need to track the measures across a decade or two, to separate the underlying ideological definition of tyranny from the day to day partisan wrangling. If candidate A wants to require ID checks for SIM cards and candidate A's supporters are suddenly in favour of this, we wouldn't want the metric to shift suddenly.)
You could. The post claims that everyone who’s done this before Metaculus has done that. You could make those indices in Metaculus as well, but it’d be harder to claim they’re “democracy indices” instead of “tyranny indices”, and commenters like Daniel above could find longer lists with more egregious examples of political leanings.
> As time goes on, the Index will become more valuable insofar as it gets further from any possibility of biasing the questions. That is: any biases in the question set are the biases of 2025, when (for example) Republicans are more into memecoin-based corruption than Democrats. But as time goes on, the biases will drift - the biases of 2035 will be correlated <1 with the biases of 2025 (for example, Democrats might take up memecoin-based corruption, or Republicans might drop it) and as long as the question set is stable, biased question-selectors can’t optimize it for the most up-to-date biases.
This can also go the other way.
Suppose right now the authors make a competent and honest attempt at keeping the index unbiased. Then we freeze the question set, and in a few years things have drifted to make the index biased.
A priori, today I have no reason to believe the index is more likely to drift in one direction than the other; but that doesn't mean I should expect the index to drift towards less bias. (Ie variance can be high, even if the mean is 0.)
The problem with "Democracy Threat Index" as a concept is that even granting all of the methodology problems (and pretty much every single one of those is an attempt to make Trump look bad and the Dems look good) the only thing that such an Index can measure is how imperiled Democracy is, but not the source of the problem.
The underlying assumption "this got worse under Trump's rule, so Trump is worse for democracy" doesn't even survive the most basic scrutiny. If Trump files lawsuits against Universities, yes possibly he is attacking these institutions, but also obviously possibly they really are corrupt and the actual threat was the Biden administration welcoming their illegal racism. Trump White House revoked security clearances while Biden didn't was an example given on that page. Well yeah, are you surprised? All those officials supported Biden and didn't support Trump. If they were MAGA you can bet Biden would have revoked too.
Any number of things can happen where you will have a debate about whether the problem is that this admin is acting or that the previous one didn't. The real issue is it's already clear American democracy is under threat because both sides are willing to ignore the rule of law, justice and basic humanity to get their priorities in. This sort of index just doesn't help you determine who is causing the problem.
If you ask me it's absolutely obvious that the Democrats started this and the Republicans are waking up and fighting back in kind, which they absolutely should do.
I think the conditional prediction market structure that I mention in the last paragraph should get around that objection.
Scott I really feel like an older (funner) version of you would have gone through and dismantled the obvious biases in these questions.
I don’t think the conditional solves the problem. Some questions only measure change in democratic level, which might stay elevated for a long time after someone tries to fix a problem.
Suppose, in a right-wing worldview, democracy was broken in 2015, all the officials are left-wing. If Trump is elected, he’ll replace a quarter of the officials with right-wing ones. Then in 2020, either Trump would replace another quarter of officials with right-wing ones, or Biden will get rid of half of Trump’s officials. But if Clinton wins in 2016, no officials will be replaced in 2016 or 2020, since the Republicans would give up. Then the “replaces officials” indicator activates only in the Trump branch, even though Trump’s branch has more balanced officials. (Trump is still obviously bad and he was trying to become an autocrat, but you can’t tell that just by counting how many fights he causes).
Curious to hear what you mean by the Democrats started this, what would you point to as the starting point? I've heard it argued that it started with Republican backlash against Obama (e.g. birtherism) due in some part to racism, and from the other side that the root cause was Obama being unusually divisive in pushing idpol.
Republican backlash against Obama didn't take any concrete, illegal, democracy-threatening form. Democrats weaponized the security apparatus to go after Trump and his administration, illegally enforced vaccine mandates, illegaly coerced social media platforms to silence the political opposition, did their best to effectively ban support of Trump in the corporate sphere, weaponized biased courts against J6 protestors, deliberately let illegal aliens inside the country, deliberately refuse to make it possible to verify if a person voting is a citizen, threaten judges who vote against their parties agenda, concoct hoax sex crimes to try and derail judicial nominations.
This is why I absolutely don't want any compromise from MAGA and don't care what laws, rules, norms or ethics they break to ensure this version of the Democratic party never gain control again and all their illegals are removed. And broadly I'd say this of pretty much every woke party in the world.
out of curiosity, what would you say are your primary news sources / sources of information? Also do you live in the US?
No I don't live in the USA. A lot of stuff on Twitter/X. That's naturally very right-skewing sources, but I regularly read NYT,WAPO, Atlantic etc and even very left-wing stuff like Vox and Slate.
Even though I'm not American, American politics are world politics, and their political frameworks, battles and ideas get exported everywhere.
You should probably get off Twitter
Why?
I think generally speaking "the Universities teach wrong things" is just not a threat to democracy. It can be something that makes civilization as a whole stupider but stupid speech and repression of free speech by the government aren't symmetric in how much they constitute a threat to democracy, specifically.
Universities discriminate against White and Asian people isn't a 'threat to democracy' is an argument that's somewhat reasonable. However, "Trump's attempts to stop universities from racial and view-point discrimination is a threat to democracy" is something I can't buy either.
Also, no Trump isn't repressing university speech. If they want federal funding they shouldn't do this discrimination.
>All those officials supported Biden and didn't support Trump. If they were MAGA you can bet Biden would have revoked too.
Except that Biden didn't revoke any of those people's security clearances, did he? You are framing Trump's extraordinary behavior as normal; it isn't. Eg: https://www.courthousenews.com/dc-circuit-signals-trumps-law-firm-sanctions-likely-unlawful/
Are you thick? Obviously Biden didn't. These people were his lapdogs. There WERE virtually no MAGA people in important posts prior to this administration.
Trump's behaviour is perfectly appropriate considering the circumstances.
It is hard to take you seriously when you use silly terns like "lapdogs," but your claim was "All those officials supported Biden and didn't support Trump." That's the point: Trump retaliated against people simply for disagreeing with him politically. You said so yourself.
And read the link: He barred every attorney from giant law firms from entering federal buildings, including the DC courthouse, because they currently or formerly employed lawyers who investigated or sued him. And that is just one example.
If you think Biden or the democratic machine in general would tolerate these officials thwarting their policy, there's no point even discussing the issue with you.
I know I am wasting my time, because you seem to be only interested in waging the culture war, but:
We aren't talking about tolerating officials thwarting their policy. We are talking about punishing people for following the policy of former administrations, and, moreover, punishing entire 500+ lawyer law firms simply because they hired lawyers who investigated or sued him. Don't pretend that that is standard procedure.
I am unclear how Metaculus can handle actions that are both legal and constitutional, or at least not in direct conflict with the law or the constitution, but the practice of which can range very widely from the relatively normal and innocent to the grossly and seemingly corrupt (though not in legal terms!) overuse. Obvious examples are gerrymandering, presidential pardons and executive interference in the employment and careers of civil servants.
I think this is a judgment call (and unfortunately adds to the nontrustlessness of this), but I think an 80-20 would be to stick to monitoring the obviously unconstitutional things and admit that this is only a measure of a strict conception of "democracy threat" rather than general civic unhealth.
I'd be interested in seeing this expanded to other countries using the same questions... but a lot of the questions really are very US-coded.
The advantage of having this index expanded is that a value of 39.3 could be placed in some context. Right now it's a bit hard to parse what exactly a 39.3 threat to democracy means. Does that mean there's almost a 40% chance that the US becomes a monarchy or an outright undemocratic oligarchy? Or is that a 40% chance that important democratic institutions are destroyed and the will of the people ignored but with a chance to come back given enough public support?
Essentially, does this mean 40% to become Hungary (before Orban was voted out) or 40% to become North Korea. Or is it neither?
Placing other countries on the index would make it a lot more useful.
Great point.
Excellent points
Banned for AI written comment.
Metaculus, per a quick Wikipedia check, is based in the United States.
I seriously doubt that US-based institutions are capable of saying "this country is a dictatorship now", or even "this country is a hybrid regime now". Way, way too vulnerable to government pressure, both formal and informal, especially as the question isn't some abstract one but one which gets at the heart of the US government's legitimacy. Even foreign institutions are vulnerable to this, to a degree, because of the size of the US market.
This doesn't have to look like taking down the whole site for dissent, it can look like getting favorable regulatory treatment/contracts/help for the board's other businesses if you make sure the website displays the "right" answer.
I dunno, I feel like people on CNN and MSNBC etc. (not to mention even more nakedly left-biased institutions) say this kinda stuff all the time without consequence. As others have pointed out, the questions in this case seem pretty obviously designed to make Trump look bad.
I don't watch either of those networks, but I get the sense they keep their criticism firmly in acceptable bounds and don't touch any red lines, and assure their audiences that it'll all be okay if the Democrats win next time around (or if not, it's only because fixing Trump's damage takes time, incremental change, etc.). And I know they're owned by member's of Trump's class.
I highly doubt that they (or Metaculus, for that matter) are capable of or even interested in resisting authoritarian consolidation, especially if Trump gets leading DNC figures on board with it first.
MSNBC, or at least the host of its top-rated program, spent years calling Trump a dictator installed by Russia.
https://theintercept.com/2017/04/12/msnbcs-rachel-maddow-sees-a-russia-connection-lurking-around-every-corner/
https://www.youtube.com/watch/rVkosH7CDy4
In fact she used the specific words you doubted they're capable of saying - "we have a consolidating dictatorship in our country".
Even if true now, that could change in exactly the futures we’re worried about.
Where American domestic policy is concerned, I think there is a wild card potentially explosive enough in its effect that it can upset even the most careful predictions: the United States are unique amongst western democracies in possessing a constitution which theoretically allows nearly unlimited power to its chief executive. It was of course very much the intention of the framers of the constitution to make the executive the most powerful branch of government, but I doubt they could have foreseen the advantage Trump has taken of it. The US, for instance, is the only democracy which nominates its elected head of state effective (not simply symbolic or ritual) commander of all its armed forces.
(The President of France also has the title of Chef des armées (Head of the Armies), but it is the Ministry of Defence which administers the armed forces - Macron could not start firing senior officers for disagreeing with him).
I am certainly not a constitutional historian, and have only an amateur interest in history. But the view I have formed of the creation of the US constitution includes the following points:
1. The main concern of your Founding Fathers was to avoid at all costs a hereditary leadership, rather than to restrict the powers of an elected and time-restricted chief executive.
2. What terrified the Founding Fathers, almost more than the idea of a hereditary kingship, was 'mob rule' and the prospect of a chief executive elected by the direct majority vote of the demos; hence the invention of the electoral college.
3. The same fear of what were seen by many of the Founding Fathers as the outrageous opinions and dangerous desires of the lower classes led them to greatly favour the power of the executive branch, which they hoped would exercise lasting control over the mob's wilder excesses.
Granting that these points are heavily influenced by a liberal/radical predisposition, would you argue that they are also misguided?
Re #2: that's not quite the root of the Electoral College.
It's important to remember that the United States is a joint venture of the States; as such, there was a tension at the founding between the positions of States based on their population (larger States preferred proportional representation while smaller States preferred equal representation) that led to the bicameral structure of Congress where each approach is embodied in one chamber.
The Electoral College is a hybrid of the two since only a single individual can be President. There was also some attention paid to the limitations of information dissemination in a pre-industrial society.
Yes indeed. Correction accepted.
I kind of disagree. The system does give pretty extraordinary power to the chief executive, but the limits are also pretty clearly articulated. He has unlimited power only in the sense that "what if the army just did what he wanted and congress refused to impeach him etc etc" which would be true of any executive.
It would of course be true of any chief executive, but I am not actually concentrating specifically on Trump, but on a system that can allow Trumps to exercise virtually unlimited power. Commander of the Armed Forces is one tool would-be Trumps can wield; perhaps even more dangerous is the apparently limitless ability to govern by executive decree, thus bypassing Congress entirely - as we have seen!
That's pretty far from "unlimited" though, as we have *also* seen. There are fairly clear and well-understood limits on what can be done with an executive order, especially if congress is motivated to counter it.
"Motivated" - aye, there's the rub! But I agree, the present US constitution does not give the chief executive an absolute carte blanche to do whatever he wants; but it allows pretty awesome latitude to anyone prepared to make use of it. Does any other western democracy?
Any system is going to struggle if the other branches "let" the president or prime minister do a thing. I consider "motivated" to be an extremely powerful check on the executive. It seems we both agree that congress *could* constrain the executive in a number of ways, it simply chooses not to in many ways at present...but that's a decision. "The president can get away with anything as long as it's sufficiently popular" is a *pretty big* check on the power of an executive in a democracy, because the whole point of a democracy is that the government does popular stuff and doesn't do sufficiently unpopular stuff.
To elaborate, there is not some abstract factor of Congressional Willingness To Constrain The Executive. If Trump started using executive orders to ban puppies and kittens, one imagines that Congress would be rather motivated to stop that. If the Democrats win a huge Congressional majority in the next election, then Congress would suddenly start restraining the executive much more than it has been.
The degree to which Congress attempts to constrain the president is a function of the degree to which Congress disagrees with the president's actions. You could say that the executive has awesome latitude to do anything Congress is fine with, and that is perhaps a nontrivial feature of the US system, but when you put it that way there is an obvious check on his power.
> It seems we both agree that congress *could* constrain the executive in a number of ways, it simply chooses not to in many ways at present...but that's a decision.
Ah, but how free is the free will of the majority of the Republican party in today's Congress; when a simple Trumpian snarl will bring most of them to heel? I may tell myself that I have 'chosen' to approach a chained wild beast no closer than its chain will stretch, but my choice was surely constrained, if by nothing more than self-interest!
the backstop on executive power was always the threat of impeachment. 'bypassing congress' only works when congress allows itself to be bypassed. But that has far more to do with party politics than it does country interest
Doesn’t the supreme court frequently and routinely block the executive from doing some thing or another?
The constitution has a decent mechanism for stopping a president who goes rogue, impeachment. The problem is that Trump isn't going rogue. He is doing basically what he campaigned on and was elected to do.
The founders weren't stupid. They were perfectly aware that no democratic constitution could prevent a faction that consistantly wins the House, Senate, and Presidency from overriding the constitution itself.
This is just wrong. The US Constitution affords nearly unlimited power to *Congress*. In particular, Congress has the power to straight-up dismiss the President, and every Federal judge. Congress also absolutely controls the budget, without which almost nobody in the government has any real power.
If Congress completely abdicates its responsibility to govern, in favor of pious speechifying and electioneering, then yes, the President is the person most able to pick up all the power lying around on the floors of Washington. And this pretty much has happened in the United States. But that has more to do with CSPAN than the Constitution.
And I don't think that's unique to the United States. Is there any democracy on Earth where if the legislature stops legislating and henceforth only speechifies, supreme power will not de facto wind up exercised by a singular head of government or perhaps small committee of oligarchs?
really because the separation of powers is more explicit in the US constitution, it's probably easier than most other countries for even a bare minority faction to stop the executive.
I also think it's important to note that congress "letting" trump "do what he wants" but not impeaching him is not limitless. I'm pretty sure if trump woke up tomorrow and decided to start confiscating everyone's cars, he'd be impeached.
The present problem is caused basically entirely by congress simply not wanting to make new statutes or impeach the president for doing certain things, and *that* is a product of democratic will, not the disregard of democratic will.
now, concededly, this is how a lot of dictators came to power, which is why the art of drawing red lines is hard and maybe futile.
I understand the need to implement questions pertinent to the time (technological change means there are many more alternative ways to undermine democracy).
But why isn't the first port of call for this question to take questions similar/ the same as other Democratic Backsliding measures as opposed to generating questions on the fly?
It seems like we're replacing one intractable issue (slow updating of the metrics, "experts" being untrusted and possibly partisan) with its own (incommensurability over time, the measure's tendentiousness and partisanship to the challenges of the time, threats of participants being untrusted and possibly partisan...).
Perhaps we should start with the same set of questions, but in the Prediction market format, to fully isolate those benefits and avoid bringing on others?
True, updating the measures to the time is important, but like opening Pandora's Box, it's difficult to close. Without constraint on updating of the metrics, we'll just end up with a hodge podge of different measures that reflect the specifics of the most recent case of fraud.
Would a Meta-metric be more fruitful?
At the beginning of each year, questions are chosen based on current affairs. Over time, deterioration in those metrics are measured.
They are then aggregated (e.g. 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025 metrics are all rolled in to one). We can view democratic deterioration from the perspective of discrete points in time, but aggregating as such would "wash out" the effects of specific contemporary concerns (each having a lower impact).
This approach would age like fine wine (i.e. better over time with more measures) and it could be bolstered with a "core" set of democratic backsliding questions at the beginning that reduces the weight of specific questions.
We would perhaps still be incommensurate on aggregate, but on an individual year basis we wouldn't be and we could directly measure performance over time for these yearly measures (as opposed to total set of questions changing over time based on current affairs).
Partisanship is possibly diluted, particularly by the "core" set of questions (but isn't entirely solved).
I am kind of confused what the question "Will senior DOJ leaders override normal procedures to open or accelerate a case against a high-profile presidential opponent or critic in the following years?" I feel the problems with this question should be sufficiently obvious to a non-lawyer. What are normal procedures? Grand juries? That happened already. Arguably that happened going to back to forever. Charging people for stuff that "doesn't normally get charged?" Every white collar defendant thinks that's what's happening, and they're not always wrong.
I could say "this has already happened with Comey/SPLC" and someone would potentially comment "The SPLC committed pretty obvious financial crimes as detailed here" and then I could say "that's not a crime" and then we'd be...having a criminal case and a trial. That's what the process is FOR, to see if normal procedures have been followed.
Yeah, as you have said, new email addresses are free.
"Their Democracy Threat Index is a collection of 153 questions relevant to US democracy."
Huh? From the Metaculus link you provided:
"Our new U.S. Democracy Threat Index combines 39 concrete forecast questions into a single metric tracking institutional resilience."
Where is this 153 coming from?
The fundamental problem I see is that these questions amount to predicting instability/polarization rather than authoritarianism under one central leader.
On the broader topic, I think the "democracy protector" crowd must address things like the annulment of the 2024 Romanian election under laughable claims of "Russian social media bots", the unprecedented level of speech arrests and police brutality in the UK, and the broader problem of leftie parties importing millions of people who are going to vote for them no matter what. All three of those are existential threats to any reasonable definition of democracy, and all three have already happened.
Instead, these people talk about the prospect of Trump suddenly declaring a military coup in 2027 after more than a decade of a decidedly and unnecessarily deferential attitude towards judges and congressmen.
The first two are genuine abuses, but I really take issue with
>the broader problem of leftie parties importing millions of people who are going to vote for them no matter what
this is empirically false, and in any case undermines not democracy (how is it democratic to deny anyone the franchise?) but the nation-state system.
It doesn't even undermine the nation-state system. Because the US is an example of civic nationalism. https://polsci.institute/comparative-politics/civic-vs-ethnic-nationalism-differences/
??? Why would someone trying to keep democracy alive in the USA have to justify why Romania and UK have issues?
i really feel like the worst challenge to a "democracy threat index" isn't various accusations of bias, it's the concept of an index itself. which is more persuasive: "the chance of riots / violence at democracy-related protests killing more than 100 people moved from 20% to 30%" or "The Metaculus Democracy Index moved from 20 to 30"? things like the DJIA or S&P500 are naturally grown from an already existing set of data, all of that data already obsessively being monitored by investors. the trading data can be backtested. metaculus recieves a millionth of the attention for the stock market, so scott being reassured that "the index isn't moving much" can be explained by "no one is looking at that particular wing of this hyper-niche site". i would also be willing to bet if something newsworthy happened that would move the democracy index, metaculus would shoot themselves in the foot by launching 30 more questions about it, diverting attention away from the existing questions.
Question, primarily for the conservatives here. If you wanted to create a more plausibly right-wing-sympathetic index of threats to democracy (past, present, and future), what questions might you try including?
Things I've seen here:
* a question about noncitizens voting in elections
* a question that includes the threat of democracy to rapid demographic changes via immigration, legal or otherwise
* a question that tracks attempted prosecution of political opponents post-election
* a question about politicians pardoning family members convicted of crimes
I think you could go about it in three ways:
* add questions which make previous democratic presidents look bad (e.g. a question about trying to illegally add amendments to the constitution without authority to do so, which Biden tried to do with the ERA).
* questions which make the current president look better (e.g. a question that suggests trump's proposed vote-by-mail restrictions are pro-democracy)
* questions which would indict likely future democratic administrations (e.g. a question on supreme court packing, assuming you think democrats will attempt to do this)
And, side question, which of these things which aren't already in the index do you think are most reasonable to actually include in such an index, that you think you could get a liberal/progressive to agree to? e.g. I don't think you could get a progressive to agree that "importing more muslims on H1B visas is a threat to democracy", but I imagine there's some fertile ground of missed conservative-model threats to democracy that aren't tracked here
I think non-citizen and immigrant voting would **have** to be on there. I'm not sure the prosecution or pardon questions would necessarily be read as sympathetic, though.
Are there any concrete numbers or known cases about non-citizens voting ? Particularly in numbers that would actually matter, I don't know what the cutoff is for that. I know that Trump claims there are lots of them doing that, but I find it hard to parse that. I know there are a lot of citizens in this country that can't prove it with paperwork, so they're the low-hanging fruit for this. One thing for sure is, generally speaking, people's expectations of a fair and well-run election have been eroded considerably over the last three or four years. The seed of doubt has been planted, and it's growing.
A very tiny number of cases have been confirmed:
https://www.cleveland.com/letters/2026/07/data-shows-voter-fraud-is-rare-with-non-citizen-cases-in-the-fractions.html
But I'd argue even a single case shows a flaw in the process, it would go a long way to squash that seed of doubt to just add citizenship verification at some point in the process. But the Dems are oddly very against patching that flaw.
There are a lot of people in this country that do not have proof of citizenship and proof of citizenship is expensive to get. if that problem could be solved I would rethink my position
Doesn't pretty much everyone automatically receive a birth certificate at birth? And if it's lost or otherwise not available, it's only $31 to replace in CA (https://www.cdph.ca.gov/Programs/CHSI/pages/vital-records-fees.aspx). I don't think it's that expensive, and it seems like something people should have anyway for all sorts of other reasons, like if they ever wanted to apply for a passport or something.
Same with marriage certificates, it's only $19 (again, in CA, I'm sure it's comparable in other states) and people already receive it anyway as part of the process. I remember people on the left making it a big talking point that this would be some huge undue burden on women who changed their last names to have to provide a marriage certificate in addition to the birth certificate because it's too expensive and/or complicated for married women to have their documents on hand. It was bizarre to see, like a convoluted excuse a kid might come up with to avoid doing their chores.
In any case, if that's really a sticking point for people, I wouldn't mind them adding some funding to the bill to make states provide birth and marriage certificates for free, or some other type of citizenship certificate.
I don't mean to be provocative but this smacks a little of "let them eat cake." About 9% of the voting-age population in this country do not have any form of proof of citizenship. A $31 fee sounds reasonable unless you happen to be someone who's only making about $300-$400 a week and that you also need a photo ID, which is another issue if you don't happen to have a driver's llicense.also a lot of states farm this work out to third parties, which means you pay additional fees on top of that $31 or whatever it is, plus the search fee, which is non-refundable. If they don't find you the first try, you gotta pay again or show up somewhere in person, which might be difficult .and it takes a while . If this is going to be done, it needs a solid two-year run-in and a way to make it work not something you pull six months before an election.
I don't think we should EVER give in to arguments that even a single case of something justifies national reform. That really bogs down the nation! If a problem is small, I think we can only justify fixes which have small costs (per person). I haven't yet seen any proposals for voter registration which have (per-person) costs that are as small as the documented problem.
But it's not just one, it was 9 known cases in a single state. Is the fact that this *can* happen not an egregious hole in the system? Why not ensure the integrity of the system in one stroke and settle the issue, instead of leaving holes in the system which allow each side to insinuate fraud every time they don't get the result they want?
As for costs, see my other comment - the vast majority of people should already have the required documents, and replacements can be obtained cheaply. The per-person cost should be no more than $50 for each person that actually need replacements, which I don't expect to be many, and I wouldn't mind that being funded by the bill. IMO that cost would be well worth it even if only to provide confidence in the system and quash any doubt.
As a humorous aside I highly recommend the film entitled "The Great McGinty" by Preston Sturges
doesn't this go the same way? seems to me there is a shockingly small number of people who want to vote and can't vote because they legitimately lack documentation or the means to get it on relatively short notice. The more you look into it the smaller the amount actually gets; the 12% in phone surveys becomes 9% in more rigorous studies becomes 1% if you actually check becomes 0.1% if you actually look at the ones who actually try voting on election day becomes 0.01% if you look at the ones who really actually truly no-joke are so desperately poor that they can't afford a 1 time 30 dollar fee and don't live in states where this fee is waived for deperately poor people like them...etc. etc.
Seems like both voter fraud and voter suppression through documentation requirements are both basically exaggerated nonsense promoted by partisans who aren't actually interested in the principle of proper elections but just want their team to have more votes.
Yeah, if you take out the historical and in-the-moment partisan issues on either side, and just look at it from the point of view of designing a proper system as if we were to create one today, verification of eligibility would be an obvious requirement.
I did not make an argument about people who "can't vote because they legitimately lack documentation"; I said the cost would be larger than the problem. Because voting appears to not have meaningfully be manipulated by invalide voters at current, a cost such as 1 in 100 people having to drive home to get the right ID and then drive back to the voting both would be much larger than the problem. A cost of 1/100 voters would be much larger than a benefit of (being generous) 1,000 fraudsters.
This doesn't mean I wouldn't theoretically like verification, just that a low-cost proposal costs quite a bit at national scale, and we already know the issue isn't large at a national scale, so that cost is too high.
Recent news out of NJ has been... eye opening: https://abcnews.com/US/new-jersey-accidentally-registered-6600-noncitizens-vote-governor/story?id=134959825
A huge number of cases of non-citizens being erroneously registered to vote, hundreds out of whom then actually *went on to vote*, went undetected for years. Given that this only accounts for those who voted after being erroneously registered *despite declaring themselves non-citizens*, the problem might be much larger than initially thought, as it doesn't account for the non-citizens who either erroneously or fraudulently declared themselves as citizens.
This just highlights how bad the current systems are at detecting voter eligibility violations. Improvements are needed but dems really, really don't want to for some reason, despite popular support and clear issues with the system.
Yea. I saw this story. It will be interesting to see how settles out.
There have been a lot of "Caesar's wife" objections to the effect of "Now I don't believe that Venezuela hacked the 2020 election, but someone else does and you need to address their concerns to maintain trust in democracy". This suggests a public opinion question: "On the next Pew/Gallup/etc poll what percent of people will say they believe [latest election] was rigged?"
Nit: "fanicer" should be "fancier" in paragraph 4
Unfortunately I'm so deeply Trump Deranged or whatever that I read this and see, "Republicans and Democrats might have different opinions on whether cancelling elections and installing a dictator for life really *is* a threat to democracy. What is a fair-minded way to deal with this difference of opinion?"
That's an exaggeration, but my point is that the bias is baked into the premise. If you are part of an ideological movement that explicitly defines democracy in a way I disagree with, you're not going to accept *any* means of determining threat to democracy that I would accept. The method isn't the problem. The definition of democracy is.
You mean one man's terrorist is another man's rebel?
Ah yes, the old "Democracy is when I get what I like, and the more I like it the more democratic it is"
Isn't the most democratic way to decide what democracy means is by letting people vote on it? There's no need to do anything. Just let the will of the people decide.
Maybe democracy isn't a good system for the current era. Maybe most people aren't smart and well-informed enough to have worthwhile ideas of whether we should do this or that. I'll add here that while I'm bright, I don't think I'm well-informed enough about most matters for my opinions to have any value or validity. AI is probably the only major development of our era that I have investigated deeply enough to have the sense that I understand a reasonable amount of the relevant stuff. And even knowing what I do, I have no idea how to reduce the harm being done by slop or to curb the power of the AI company executives or to get the field more interested in X risk.
I'm honestly not even sure whether we wouldn't be better off with fuckin' Claude as benevolent dictator.
> Maybe democracy isn't a good system for the current era.
Compared to what? What is your suggested alternative and how would it be better in practice and not just theory?
Claude as a benevolent dictator, he said.
I think you are wrong to believe that this current era is different from prior periods. Focusing only on the US and predecessor entities, from the beginning, many important issues have been beyond the understanding of the voters. At a very high level, I would submit that the rapid failure of the Articles of Confederation and, later, the Civil War, show that even the elite thinkers on political structure were wrong about the needs of the country. In other words, the problem of institutional structure was well beyond the capabilities of the ordinary voter.
Other key issues include tax policy, foreign policy, and transportation/infrastructure policy. None of those are things that the typical voter has ever understood. This doesn't seem a meaningful difference with the current era.
In contrast, however, the importance of optimizing is, in some sense reduced. At the start of the country, bad tax policy was an existential risk. Then, bad policy and/or an insufficient argument resolution mechanism around slavery was an existential risk. Good, if not optimal, transportation infrastructure policy was necessary for creating a continent-spanning unified country. In contrast, almost no policy area (*) has the same existential consequences for the country now.
(*) AI?
Well, I suppose an advantage of democracy is that it reduces unrest by giving individuals the illusion they have some say in how the country's run (though that's wearing pretty thin these days.
And yeah, I'd say AI has huge existential consequences.
I agree, especially with the first statement. Establishing legitimacy of the system and a mechanism for legitimate non-violent change is extraordinarily important and potentially something that democracy delivers better than other systems. Unfortunately, this is as much perception as a fact characteristics (a clean election that is perceived as fraudulent is itself bad, though maybe not as bad as the elections actually being fraudulent.) This is why attacks that undermine democracy/perception of democracy and failure to take action to strengthen the structure are so devastating.
The general public has never been well informed enough to choose good policies. The purpose of democracy isn't to choose good leaders, its to provide a mechanism for ejecting bad leaders. Unfortunately, good outcomes are only loosely correlated with good policy and so the general public occasionally ejects good leaders.
However it's hard to have bad policy and good outcomes over a long time frame. So bad leaders are only able to retain power by suppressing negative media, and suppressing opposition. So merely having elections isn't enough to have a functioning democracy - you need strong independent institutions.
But maybe in the long run we will get a benevolent AI leader. We'll probably get a soft version of this where people heavily turn to AI as a source of news, and lawmakers draft law using AI. This is already starting to happen.
> Maybe democracy isn't a good system for the current era. Maybe most people aren't smart and well-informed enough to have worthwhile ideas of whether we should do this or that. I'll add here that while I'm bright, I don't think I'm well-informed enough about most matters for my opinions to have any value or validity.
Well, that opening plus the rest of your post amount to a thundering if 'more-in-sadness' condemnation of our favourite but deeply flawed system of governance, reminiscent of the entirely apocryphal quote misattributed to Churchill, "The best argument against Democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” And where does that leave us, given that we have to live on this world and, however reluctantly, in association with others of our species? Nothing is more certain than that any democratic system can be rocked or overturned by human perversity, ignorance or selfishness - and yet unless we give up in despair and hand over our destinies to dictators, billionaires or to AI, we must at least strive to make democracy as shockproof as human ingenuity can make it.
There are some measures we can use to improve the systems currently in use in most western democracies. Relatively (I use the term advisedly) straightforward measures might include inflexible set terms of office for all branches of government; electoral commissions fully independent of government and elected by popular vote outside normal electoral cycles; a total ban on lobbying whether by firms or individuals; political donations restricted to individual voters and with a low maximum; and the careful application of some forms of modified proportional representation.
A step further would be for governments to be assembled by a mixture of proportional representation votes and by sortition, namely the selection of representatives and officials by lot from amongst the adult voting population. As Chesterton noted at the conclusion of "The Twelve Men", his brief essay on jury trial: "Our civilisation has decided, and very justly decided, that determining the guilt or innocence of men is a thing too important to be trusted to trained men. It wishes for light upon that awful matter, it asks men who know no more law than I know, but who can feel the things that I felt in the jury box. When it wants a library catalogued, or the solar system discovered, or any trifle of that kind it uses up its specialists. But when it wishes anything done which is really serious, it collects twelve of the ordinary men standing round."
> and yet unless we give up in despair and hand over our destinies to dictators, billionaires or to AI
Are those the only options? There's always the traditional option of limiting voting to certain castes. It avoids the issue of individual parasites accumulating too much power, while also ensuring that those whose voice do not need to be heard can be safely ignored. We have many people whose personal interests conflict with their societal purpose.
On historical precedent, restricting political power to an oligarchy, which is in effect what you seem to be suggesting, does not end well - unless it is in stagnation. What western democracies are suffering from, in my view, is too many people for whom the social contract is a dead letter.
Those steps sound sensible. But tell me how you get all of us assholes to vote for them.
Exasperated rage will suggest the classic answer: knock heads together till sense ensues. Alas, experience tells us this doesn't work for long; and it it ever did in the past, it sure as hell is even less likely to do so in today's fragmented world. You might be able to lead one stubborn horse to water, but try it with a mixed herd of ungulates...
I can only see one potential motivator, namely self-interest. Because while rational human beings can disagree on matters of political or moral imperatives, basic self-interest or simple survival instinct should guide those same rational humans to accept premisses such as "All men are fallible, so don't entrust your children's future irrevocably to any one person"; "Trust nobody who claims to be infallible"; or "Allow no person group to monopolise power and resources".
Alas, self-interest is far from motivating a substantial percentage of voters today (or at any time). Education, which means teaching people how to think for themselves, can bring about a gradual. change. Good luck achieving that, you may say in response; and I would answer, how else are we to survive?
"Orange man bad" is the index stock fund of American political thought. Everyone thinks they can outsmart the common herd with a more sophisticated understanding of how the world works. And 95% of the time, "orange man bad" has more predictive power.
What exactly does "Orange Man Bad" predict? I'm confused.
the only "trump derangement syndrome" is treating trump as anything but a dangerous and fascistic aberration in american politics
If Scott had any integrity this sort of post would be banned. There's literally nothing other than abuse contained in this post.
Kind of like yours. Or at least it's possible to interpret yours that way, and it's perfectly possible to interpret his as just a proposition that can be argued against. I take it that you don't think there's anything about Trump that stands out in any way that might possibly justify proposing that he is dangerous in some ways and has certainly done things that one might consider a misuse of his democratic privileges. Like suing everyone he possibly can because they did something he didn't like? Seems he's made a lot of money that way.
I think it's a matter of attention rather than integrity. But yes, this is the sort of thing that should certainly merit an "obvious attempts to pick fights without any useful contribution" ban.
I was thinking about how Scott does very little real moderating. I don't blame him! It's too time-consuming. You'd have to read every post. And there would some posts that involved judgment calls that he'd have to think over for a while. It takes too much time.
But I think GPT or Claude could make a good first pass at picking out the bannables. I recently had an exchange with GPT about somebody I know whom I thought might have CTE. I fed GPT a long email exchange I had with the person, where it seemed to me they kept missing the main point and writing long rambling replies about little side issues. And my question for GPT was, is this cognitive impairment, or something else? I was very impressed with GPT's grasp of the question I was asking and also of my and the other person's communications. It was saying things like "so clearly your main point in this post is [one-sentence summary]", and its summary was spot on." And the other person responds to your mention of topic A, a side issue, as though your main point had been that topic A determines whether the idea will work," and that summary also seemed quite accurate to me. And ultimately, after reading the whole exchange, GPT actually convinced me that the reason the other person's replies were so oddly off-topic was not cognitive impairment, but conflict avoidance.
GPT also is pretty good at recognizing when I'm being sarcastic, or when I'm annoyed ("I can tell you don't like that idea. Here's the reason I think it's a good idea . . ." ). So I think it's up to correctly making some fairly fine distinctions about written communication.. Seems like it might be possible with a thoughtful, detailed prompt to get it to produce a list of potential bannables that's short enough that Scott can go through it quickly, approving the bans he thinks are valid.
What think you?
I (after three weeks) have gotten around to seeing and moderating this, but have decided against banning for now (I did give a warning).
it is a useful contribution. "TDS" is a propaganda term cooked up to make people sound crazy for reacting appropriately to the most destructive and bizarre president in modern American history. I don't think reasonable people should use the term. That's a substantive opinion, whether you agree with it or whether you're wrong. You're right that I'm definitely willing to pick fights over it, though.
I disagree. DJT deserves this comment. I’d quibble with fascistic because the specific historical meaning has drifted a bit and might use wannabe authoritarian in its place but IMO as human beings go, Trump makes a mighty fine toad.
I believe he is a danger to the Republic and as long as I’m on the topic of this scumbag, I’ll add that i also think he is a lying sack of shit.
Note that I am talking about one person here. I am not talking about you or any other Trump supporter so please don’t pull that “I Can Tolerate Anything Except the Outgroup” talisman out of your hat.
I didn’t accuse the crowd at Taledega Speedway chanting “Fuck Joe Biden” of abusing me personally so don’t pull that on me.
I’ll finish with my opinion that no one has ever been crying wolf when it comes to worrying about Trump’s character.
It's not about whether you agree. I know this is a predominantly woke place, and 'Donald Trump is a fascist' is hardly going to get someone banned here.
The point is there was absolutely no reasoning or argument or engagement with the concept of TDS here.
Why don’t you argue or explain why TDS is anything beyond the rhetorical equivalent of the clever playground retort, “I know you are, but what am I?”
He made a completely empty and abusive comment. Why should I write paragraphs of analysis on such nonsense? I'm just pointing out it's just as bad if not worse than many other comments which prompted bans.
cry harder. I've only ever heard accusations of "TDS" used to shut down actual substantive criticism of trump and enable his destruction of liberal democracy and social trust. I'm sorry you feel like it's "abusive" to you that I'm not falling for it.
Warning for comment which is bald assertion on high-temperature topic. Please avoid in the future.
> it’s disappointing that the question of trust has to come up at all, given the otherwise-trustless design.
Could you have a set of questions of the form "should this question be on the democracy index" with resolution criteria like "it resolves the same way that [more obvious sign of democratic decline question] does" to give an estimate if P(A|B)?
>Will an opposing-party authority block or remove a major-party nominee for statewide office from the U.S. general-election ballot in the following years?
"Major-party"? I guess minor-party nominees getting blocked is a-okay?
Look, this is not a nitpick. The question is just outright bad, hopelessly biased in favor of the two-party duopoly status quo.
Well, bad at least for the specific purpose of [measuring democracy] - sanity check: all one-party states pass that test with flying colors. It may very well be that it's good for prediction market purposes - making the outcome more meaningful, or at the very least more legible. (As in - everyone knows this happens to third-party candidates all the time, and it makes resolving the question easier if you can skip deciding whether a legal challenge to Libertarian Workers Party of North Dakota's ballot access was an impartial application of law, or strong-arming by their political opponents.) This may be a feature of prediction markets that makes them uniquely unsuited to answering big-picture questions.
>The best check on my reasoning would be an objective measure of the health of American democracy. There are several “democracy indices” that purport to do this, but they have a mixed reputation. My impression is that most current accusations of bias are relatively weak - I agree with Claude’s analysis here
TDS and AI psychosis comorbidity is a frightening possibility.
I don't like Donald Trump, but I don't think I have TDS. Is there actually a compact definition of that syndrome that I could check myself against?
It’s simply gaslighting.
Trump isn’t crazy for posting a picture of himself as Jesus, you are crazy for calling him on it.
When he says that he was meant to be a doctor by way of explanation, if you point out that he is a lying sack of shit for providing that bit of transparent nonsense, it’s because you have TDS.
A child’s excuse even a child could see through. Pure bullshit. It’s what he does. It’s who he is, for Chrissake.
Simple, stupid and surprisingly effective for any truly, astoundingly batshit thing he says or does.
That wasn’t batshit, you are batshit for being overly attached to observable reality! See? You’ve just been dunked on.
I think I should see someone.
I just found a definition of TDS in the Wall Street Journal this morning. Check it out
But Trump derangement syndrome is also real—the reflexive, manufactured outrage that treats every joke as a confession and even invents offenses, like the “very fine people” hoax.
Every joke as a confession hmm
one of the things I hate the most in life is when someone says something kind of nasty and then immediately says, "I was just joking." I hated it long before Trump came along
I think he was treated unfairly with the ‘very fine people’ thing. I read the entire transcript and earlier in the interview he said “I’m not talking about white supremacists.” I’d want to see more than one example to call it a syndrome.
Yeah, I was going to look that up because I didn't have a good memory of it. Thanks for clarifying that.
Feels like TDS is much more relevant for Trump term 1, because either by incompetence or sanity, he doesn't (or succeed) much at doing what he (or his opponents) said he'll do. Hence TDS for this discrepancy. Not so much for term 2.
Way back in the mists of time, some human beings learned how to write things down, which meant that their commands could be transmitted now to a much larger number of people through agents of authority. That was what human civilisation was like: a king, his court, and the power of the written edict in order to create a consensus. Over time, the genie got out of the bottle, and more and more people had the power of words that were written. It took a while for this central authority that had the power of the word written to dissolve, but it eventually did. I think A.I. is on the same trajectory, and the first thing it's going to lead to is what we had about 4,000 years ago. The power of A.I. will lie largely with nation states in its real form, and I don't think the United States of America is going to escape that. In other words, going forward from here, given the state of the world, I'm not sure the United States can survive as a Democratic Republic. Consensus among the people is shrinking, not growing, and the less consensus there is, the more destabilised a nation state becomes. Eventually, if it's going to survive in any form, someone's going to have to take control of it and force a consensus. I know this is bleak, but I don't see any way around it. AI has the power to track everyone in this country, and it's already happening. It's not going to stop.
I am much less concerned about the prevalence of Trump Derangement Syndrome than I am Trump Dick Riding Syndrome.
OK, I’m about to put up another test post to see what views activate our AI moderator. This one does not contain any bad language, though. I'd be interested to hear whether people think it passes Scott's 2 out of 3 test. I'd say it's civil and does qualify as an effort to advance a discussion of how democracy works, so does not qualify for a ban. What's the 3rd criterion again? -- something about being substantive, so that the writer's points are supported by their reasoning or by evidence they give? For this post I'd say that feature's weak, but not altogether absent.
What say others?
Couldn't you just post comments on your own Substack to test the AI moderator? Why do it here?
Because Scott may have certain moderator settings in place and I don't know what they are. I'm testing how the moderator behaves with whatever settings Scott used.
*This* bothers you? Every thread must contain a couple meanspirited, crass, dumb bannable posts, many posts you think are silly or boring, & some posts that annoy you deeply -- and what you're complaining about is these skippable little tests of mine?
Democracy’s worst flaw is that everyone can vote. Doesn’t it make sense to restrict voting to people who have at least a basic understanding of the major issues of the day? Why not give people a knowledge test immediately prior to voting, and only allow those with a passing score to vote? If that’s too hard to implement we could just play the numbers. What race has a lower IQ? OK, those people can’t vote. What gender is more prone to hormonally driven, emotion-contaminated thinking? Welp, they can’t vote either. Hey, all you fine males with little or no African ancestry — get on this, willya?
If you're sorting by new, read the post immediately below mine that begins "Democracy's worst flaws" for important information about the purpose of this post.
To not be politicized, there would have to be consensus (or supermajority) on what counts as tent poles of democracy. Specific pieces of legislation for example that ensure checks and balances, prevent voter fraud, political neutrality of non-partisan offices, prevention of gerrymandering etc.
The Bright Line Watch link is missing the final 'g': https://brightlinewatch.or/ -> https://brightlinewatch.org
I think some interesting questions could be formed around two part questions that ask 1. What’s a policy you think is more likely to be enacted if democracy goes under and then 2. How likely do you think that policy will be passed in the future.
Several people have commented that the elements of the index seem to echo what Trump has done. But there might be a valid reason for it: Much of what he has done is straight out of the democratic backsliding playbook.
Of course, it depends on what you mean by "Democracy." Does it mean that policy follows public opinion? Then anything is democracy, electing a dictator is democracy, as long as a plurality of voters approve of it. That's why people often refer to "Western Democracy", in which public opinion is balanced by individual legal rights, or "American Democracy," in which the three branches of government are held in a co-equal balance. American style democracy is clearly changing, as more power becomes concentrated in the office of the President. It makes sense to question whether Western style democracy is under threat as the right to vote and representation in government becomes more constrained over time.
Right now, one of the two parties has a built in structural advantage in House Congressional elections, Senate representation, and in the electoral college. Is that a threat to democracy? Depends on which party you belong to, I guess. (Is it a threat to *your* democracy, or the other side?).