Elon Musk lives a very interesting life. Such a person's world-view probably cannot be losslessly reduced to familiar and widely adopted labels. They become far too idiosyncratic.
Didn't mean to say it was broadly false. Dynamist is not a familiar or a widely adopted label. It sounds very fitting.
To evaluate how good the label is:
If most people could name no other Dynamist on the spot, the label might end up meaning "just Musk things". The label still has some value, if you can look up Dynamism on Wiki and get maybe some other figures and understand Musk better. However if Musk himself never did that, it might also be deceptive.
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I think there's a very good argument to be made that Dominic Cummings is rationalist (dynamist would probably fit him too). In the sense that those ideas are referenced in his thinking and his actions. But not "a rationalist" in that he doesn't interact with the larger community and his writing has a different focus.
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I think that when you say someone is conservative, liberal, libertarian, leftist or green you can properly distill a lot of info about a person to whom this applies. You can predict most of their opinions and their reasoning just from that. If you need more "out there" labels, they are still helpful to get a vibe, but those people cannot be so easily reduced. If you researched the Dynamist label a lot, but then have a chat with Musk about a random topic, his takes would probably still surprise you. If I only knew that Cummings was a powerful British rationalist, I'd not guess he was the driving force behind Brexit.
I think Jacobin Magazine article is on the right track on where Elon stands: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/musk-tesla-robert-heinlein-libertarianism-technocracy , though I strongly disagree with the article's sentiment. In a nutshell, Musk was heavily influenced by Robert Heinlein growing up. He *is* the Man Who Sold The Moon, albeit with Mars replacing the moon.
The political meaning of Heinlein-influenced is rather blurry, as Heinlein started off very far to the Left, advocating for intentional inflation, a universal basic income, and a cornucopia of socialist goodies. He turned hard to the Right after an extended visit to the Soviet Union, writing the fascist-feeling "Starship Troopers" soon thereafter. Heinlein eventually settled for a sort of libertarian ideology, but it was not the axiomatic/dogmatic libertarianism which characterizes the LP.
Even when Heinlein was a hard Leftist, he was a huge believer in democracy, the American system, and private gun ownership. He also believed in the need for heroes.
Where Heinlein continued to differ from "real" libertarians:
* Continued belief that compound interest could lead to excess concentration of wealth.
* He wasn't against having some welfare as long as the welfare state didn't throttle the doers.
* He didn't think liberty and high population density could mix. He wrote repeatedly that the libertarian components of the American constitution were side effects of our frontier origins. A closed frontier and increasing population would lead to a bureaucratic state where "Civil Servant is semantically equivalent to Civil Master."
Today's correlation between population density and party affiliation, along with the Left becoming more authoritarian, shows that Heinlein was onto something.
Only read Starship Troopers and listened to Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Troopers had... lots of abstinence. I'm not sure line marriages would work, but maybe on Luna it would? It was also not posited to be a necessarily common arrangement, just not uncommon.
What stood out to me, was that it was basically like a Roman family clan, but with the members being equals. A marriage that never dies. As for the other sexual dynamics in that book (performative appreciative looks being taken as genuine compliment, one bad touch and get 'liminated), I don't know. Y-O as the self-admitted fat breeding cow for little Chine babies was... certainly an arrangement. But the world was so lovingly strange.
And it made me really sad, I can't play "double or nothing" at the supermarket, because our world is just incredibly uptight and overregulated.
Haven't read any other Heinlein. From the wiki summaries, it seemed all a bit whacky and incest-focussed? Anything to recommend?
I read "Starship Troopers". It gets called "fascist" a lot, but I don't see how the society depicted matches the common definition. No dictatorial power, no strong regimentation of society and economy, no forcible suppression of opposition. At least none that we ever see. So I don't really get why people call it "fascist", at all. We do not have a real world example that matches this fictional society.
Book was a bit boring, but actually writing out a mathematically axiomatic version of Heinlein's (xeno) ethics is on my to-do list.
Think it's because of the "only veterans can vote" thing. "Fascist" isn't really the right term, though I'm not sure what is and so I'm not surprised people use the handy one.
That’s a good point. I think one could also beneficially look at what specific politicians have changed their specific positions on a given issue over time.
Yea, that'd be a strange case of both sides blowing towards the far left in a hurry, making even the Republican move seem extreme though moving towards the middle in the process.
Another awkward experiment would be if the people stay the same but overthrow a tyrannical government (maybe set up by a foreign conqueror). Political positions of the elected officials would change drastically, but become more in line with the population.
Yeah, that's exactly the problem when analyzing politics...just focusing on policies is not that reasonable without looking at the underlying "drivers", e.g. philosophy or just broader progress throughout modern history...I guess the advantage of just analyzing policies is that they can be quantified more easily than other aspects of politics...
I don't have kids yet but am actively considering leaving and this is a major reason - I wouldn't want to have kids in American schools (or on american streets, which seem to actively want to murder anyone not in a truck).
I don't think there's a lot of room for other countries to take the mantle, though - USSR is gone, China's running into both declining governance and aging population issues, EU is too decentralized/obstructive and also has aging population issues. I think there's some growth room for smaller first world countries like UK/Israel (maybe some others) that still have growing populations and semi-functional institutions to take some of the pie away, but I don't see the British Empire rising again.
If you want somewhere peaceful and pedestrian friendly which also has good prospects for the future, and all the big countries don't appeal, you could always look at the small countries like Estonia, the Scandinavians, Singapore, Monaco, Australia and New Zealand... lots of options beyond the big players that dominate the news.
Do the active shooter drills bother you because of the hysteria of the drills, or are you concerned about the off-the-charts low probability that your kids will be the victim of such an event? No school has to have these drills. Its like taking a parachute with you on a commercial jetliner, "just in case."
I remember growing up with the constant fear that Regan and Gorbachev were going to blow up the world. It was a shame because of the fear-mongering, not the actual risk. The likelihood that any particular person will be the victim of random gunfire in the US is statistically insignificant.
Freeway car accidents where little children are ejected from vehicles and ground into hamburger meat happen far more "regularly" and yet we tolerate that. A world where perception is more important than reality is what I refer to as "hell."
I grew up with active shooter drills. I can honestly say that they never really scared me. Our school always just called them “lockdown drills” and it was pretty much like a fire drill in terms of stress (but no blaring alarm, so actually less stressful).
I actually remember when our school went on lockdown once, and it was a pretty bland memory.
So overall, I’d say that I thought it was comparable to any other drill, and my memory is most other students acting similarly. Perhaps that’s changed in the past 10 years, but I certainly don’t think it was comparable to cold-war war bomb drills. Maybe ask to sit in on such a drill and judge for yourself at your local school?
Maybe? I have no memory of such a conversation, nor does my father, so it apparently wasn’t too bad. Probably it depends on you, your kid, and how the school handles it. I also think that in my experience non-Americans are much more freaked out by American gun violence than Americans are, so it might hit harder for you and your family
First, you might not have to explain. There is a Daniel Tiger episode with a fire drill, where the grown-ups don't explain anything except what the kids have to do. Maybe this works.
Second, your kids will have to internalize the fact that there are bad people who want to hurt them anyway.
Third, fire drills are a lot more necessary and frequent, and, at least to some kids, very disturbing.
Fourth, if I was you, I wouldn't move to any country close to a certain nuclear power that likes waging territorial wars. In the US, at least, you don't get nuclear drills, and hopefully for some good reasons.
Fifth, do you really decide whether to move countries based on what you have to explain to your kids?
It's in the same neighborhood as tornado drills. Both seem reasonable to me, but of course I grew up in the midwest (and therefore grew up with tornado drills).
How much more valuable do you consider the lives of kids killed in school shootings than the lives of kids killed in tornados, then?
If the idea is that policies like this should take into account anything other than the number of lives saved, like the intentionality of the perpetrator, then your decision model inherently values some lives more than others.
I think learning Dutch would be fun, and I'd certainly try. I find learning languages enjoyable, though I'm hardly any sort of great polyglot. I already do business with customers there in English, so work-wise it seems like I'd be alright for some time at least.
My wife interviewed for a job in Montreal last year. I green lighted that, but didn't really want to move. After the last few weeks, I've been regretting it, a bit. If it gets too bad over the next decade that's where we'll go.
In conversational English, a (real) penis is synonymous with maleness. I am not required to list every possible edge case exception. Would you object if I said 'humans are bipedal' because I didn't consider conjoined twins and amputees?
I am not saying such a thing--a deformed or surgically removed penis (or limb) does not make a biological XY male a female (or unhuman). Of course some men can be feminized to some degree and they can present themselves as women if they like. But in doing so, they must forfeit their right to compete against biological women in elite athletic competitions where biological men have a natural, innate, and insuperable physical advantage. To do otherwise clearly unfair to biological women.
Rare edge case--I don't know. How many de la Chapelle syndrome athletes are there? Biologically normal XY males are not edge cases though--they clearly have the unfair masculine advantage.
But going by phenotype means you have to treat biomedically transitioning trans people like they have a complicated intersex condition, and you can't just go around saying "you're a man and you'll always be a man" or whatnot. If you want to be mean to trans people and draw black-and-white lines phenotype is a bad tool for that.
I think I'd be mostly fine with this if it was the ask, honestly. I might quibble on exact definitions but the part that I don't like is "Listen, this person was born male, and now they've had X amount of treatments that make them roughly approximate female, but I'm asking you to fully pretend they are 1:1 equivalent with female".
If you for some reason need to have policies for women that distinguish based on masculinization during development and not just present androgen levels, the details of someone's childhood socialization, et cetera, then it should be possible to write these policies without reference to cisgender/transgender status. Transgender women are statistically different from cisgender women, but for pretty much any given difference between trans women and cis women you might want to do policy about, it's plausible that some cis women also exhibit the difference.
The bailey: gender is a spectrum with no absolute categorical distinctions possible.
The motte: There are genuinely intersex people who are e.g. XXY or androgen-insensitive XY women
The problem with the motte here is that it explains about 0.1% of actual transgenderism and if people claiming to be transgender were limited to the category of clear biologically-ambiguous individuals then no one would have any political problems with it whatsoever.
"The problem with the motte here is that it explains about 0.1% of actual transgenderism"
I think this is factually incorrect, for two reasons:
1. The vast majority of trans people choose to transition because they have gender dysphoria, and there's considerable evidence showing that gender dysphoria has biological (specifically, neurological and hormonal) roots: Most notably, brain scans have shown that male-to-female trans people have neural structures that are different from normal males (in a way that bears some resemblance to how those neural structures look in normal females), and vice-versa for female-to-male trans people, even before those trans people have started medically transitioning. There's also some evidence that M2F trans people have lower testosterone levels and/or higher estrogen levels than normal males, and F2M trans people have lower estrogen levels and/or higher testosterone levels than normal females. Also, studies of fetal development have indicated that sexual differentiation in the brain and central nervous system may occur at a different time than sexual differentiation of the genitals and endocrine system, which provides an explanation for how such a mismatch might occur. In other words, I think having gender dysphoria *is* an intersex condition, just one that isn't outwardly visible. Since nearly all trans people attest to experiencing gender dysphoria, this would mean that your figure is basically the reverse of what it should be, and >99% of actual transgenderism can be explained by the Motte you're describing.
50 years ago, a lot of people believed that being gay was either a choice or a psychological disorder to be "cured," but now most people accept that gay people are born that way. I think the same thing will happen with trans people over time.
2. The vast majority of trans people choose to medically transition via Hormone Replacement Therapy, which results in rather dramatic changes to the body. M2F trans people develop feminized breasts from taking estrogen, F2M trans people develop deeper voices as well as facial and chest hair. Their overall physiques change to more closely resemble their preferred gender as a result of changes in muscle growth and body fat apportioning, and even their facial features change to some degree. A trans person who's been on Hormone Replacement Therapy for a year or more has effectively become intersex in every meaningful sense. In fact, they even need to be treated as people with intersex conditions for medical purposes (for instance, M2F trans people have the same risk of breast cancer as normal females and they're advised to get periodic mammograms as they age, but they can also develop prostate cancer like normal males and should get periodically screened for that as well). So again, if your Motte is "there are people with a mix of male and female sex characteristics," then trans people (or at least the ones who've had HRT, which is most of them) fit in that group.
Gender dysphoria isn't clear biological evidence. It's not clear that it's evidence for anything at all, actually. Even if it is in some sense biologically real, its categorical boundaries are certainly less well-defined than are those for gender, which I find somewhat ironic.
" there's considerable evidence showing that gender dysphoria has biological "
Yeah I just disagree here. The evidence is, at best, vague. But regardless of how much credibility you want to put in that evidence, there is no rationale whereby "oh this person is woman" is the parsimonious interpretation over "this person is a man with some hormonal abnormalities". I would defer to Chesterton's Fence before amending fundamental, broad-reaching, and socially useful categories in order to cater to a tiny minority of people who may be (and likely are) simply suffering from a socially-contagious psychiatric disorder.
I think Scott's "The Categories Were Made For Man" - while rhetorically delightful - is profoundly wrong. The categories for gender are absolutely not arbitrary and weird. Yes, there are exceedingly rare exceptions like XXY. I maintain that that is nothing but a motte for the larger transgender movement, which IMO has become a trendy catch-all for emotionally disturbed teens who are desperate for an identity to define them. It used to be kids just went goth for a while; now they start taking estrogen and changing their pronouns.
"50 years ago, a lot of people believed that being gay was either a choice or a psychological disorder to be "cured," but now most people accept that gay people are born that way. I think the same thing will happen with trans people over time."
I don't. I think the trans phenomenon is an outgrowth of identity politics run amok and I think future cultures will regard it as a bizarre symptom of a deeply disordered culture.
"if your Motte is "there are people with a mix of male and female sex characteristics," then trans people (or at least the ones who've had HRT, which is most of them) fit in that group."
What they're like after HRT is irrelevant. That's like saying someone's Napoleon delusion is legitimate because he learned french and stopped showering. You can justify anything that way - it's like some twisted version of Goodhart's Law. No, the trans motte is "there are obvious intersex conditions like XXY" which they use for the much larger bailey of "anyone who feels like gender x is gender x".
I believe that BWS92082 wanted the decision to be made based on "penises" rather than "non-penis things that look like penises" so this seems like a weird gotcha.
I think that if you seriously considered the matter, you'd notice that there are hypothetical Republican platforms you would consider more extremist than this.
I agree weird right-wing crap like Q-Anon is wrong. And the majority of Republican politicians agree with me. The majority of Democrat politicians, in contrast, support men in women's sports.
An odd limb to base your political position on. Like can we remember the great social movements of history and government? Who gets to vote? Who should pay more taxes? What wars are just?
What should the gender requirements and rules of athletic competitions be?
To try to thread a needle of offering what I think is a useful clarification while trying to avoid getting dragged into the trans part of this discussion, I think it's overly narrow to construe sport as being "squarely entertainment only" and of no further value.
Youth sports don't exist just to entertain their audiences as a viewing experience. That "it builds character" stuff actually has more truth to it than I think sometimes we (especially those of us who, like me, had a school experience defined by bad relationships with "the jocks") can always recognize.
I agree that sports can be done for the benefit of the participants, too. But then the problematic of people with different hormone profiles doing differently well doesn't come up nearly as much:
There are already vast performance differences in amateur and youth sports. So there's already well established mechanisms to deal with that, ie to match people up based on skill.
That system only breaks down at the highest levels, where you can't just bump people up to the next higher league any more.
(I'm not saying that the problem we talked about doesn't exist at all here, just that it's much less of a problem than for sports that are performed as a spectacle for viewers.)
As an aside, I feel reminded that chess has two global rankings: one for women, and an open one for everyone.)
Well yes, the meme has a “me” character so obviously it’s written for people who believe the “me” character’s position is roughly correct, or at least relatable.
But even if we assume the new progressive position is correct, we can make a few observations:
1. The “fellow liberal” does not call their past self a bigot. They make no acknowledgment that they used to have a similar position.
2. The “fellow liberal” does not distinguish between the centrist and the right-winger.
3. The “fellow liberal” attacks people rather than ideas.
Thank you both for insightful comments that relate to the topic as raised and didn't attack the author for making the wrong arguments, but instead directly addressed the premise in the abstract. I was beginning to wonder why I was here.
But that's the thing that really flags the "me" character in the middle as a conservative, whatever they may think of themselves: they think that the Overton window should not move from the point it was at when they grew up.
I say this being very unsympathetic to what "progressive" means lately, yet still considering myself leaning on that side. But we should appreciate people who don't need to excuse themselves for being "conservative" about something. People who worry about the environment are definitely very conservative in a certain axis, and people who worry about excessive taxes are conservative in an obvious sense *and* an important part of the conversation.
Most of the transformative technological change was already in place in 2008. The conditions of the world are roughly the same. So the Overton window is either still adjusting to the new reality (quite plausible) or drifting randomly in an arbitrary direction, in which case one should not be concerned with where one falls within.
That makes sense if we are talking solely about correctness. The "Bigot!" call probably alludes to something stronger than calling the centrist guy incorrect: condemning the formerly liberal position as unacceptable, beyond the pale, and (often) to be suppressed and its expression punished. Calling a position extreme is also often a tool to paint it as beyond the pale.
It's reasonable to say that someone shouldn't be condemned as beyond the pale and an extremist for holding one's opinion constant, regardless of whether that opinion happens to be correct.
Yes. (However, it's reasonable to point out that in politics the word has connotations beyond the descriptive sense, and to argue that it's wrong to use the word with those connotations in this case.)
Last time this came up he said he didn't think it was a coup attempt because Trump eventually told the rioters to go home. I've never seen him address the votes to overturn the election that happened the same day.
Oh, I frequently find Scott extraordinarily frustrating and disappointing, about 90% of the time-often a sad waste of a very bright mind, IMHO due to a serious difficulty in being objective about his priors. But that other 10% is extraordinarily valuable, so I persist.
for curiosity sake, out of the 90% that is frustrating and disappointing what share goes against your prior beliefs, and same question for the 10% that is valuable? so far you've only provided n=1 where you classified something as disappointing (i assume based on your personal views) without first reading the post where he discusses his arguments. Interested about the other data points. (but for fox's sake let's not get into the coup or not debate, not a topic I care about given it was a moronic move by both rioters and trump that never had a prayer of accomplishing anything)
As far as I can tell, Trump did the absolute minimum condemnation of the rioters required for ass-covering/plausible deniability later: "See, I told them to knock it off! I'm not to blame!" It's not like he actually thought the rioters were in the wrong.
Could be Trump was talking about troops to defend himself against the D muscle massing in the capital, not to enforce public order against his own side.
I thoroughly agree. I'd even call it an endorsement. He also didn't tell them to go home until the riot had already failed. But apparently both sides are the same, it's proven with data science.
Once a political party decides to support their leader in *trying to overturn the results of a legitimate election,* I say they've won the "more extreme party" award hands down.
The Trump campaign filed multiple lawsuits alleging election fraud, and all these lawsuits were thrown out, some by Republican-appointed judges. Then Trump escalated to trying to pressure the Georgia secretary of state, followed by the January 6 fustercluck.
Thrown out on random BS legal jargon instead of thrown out because of analyzing the underlying issues, weighing the evidence, and determining a lack of voter fraud are really different.
Yes, but the liberals are cringe, like gays and trannies, and are trying to arrest the people involved in the coup, so when you think about it there's really no difference between them. /s
I shouldn't have to illustrate this as sarcasm, but apparently this is the level of rhetoric we're actually operating on. we're lucky you can't post images in the comment thread or else I'd probably be seeing soyjacks here.
Yeah I had even forgot about Dailey in Chicago in 1960. What is really unprecedented is full court press of “The only way we are going to lose this is if they cheat.” Heads I win tails you lose. The effort that started even before polling day and continued to intensify to Jan 6.
And I guess is still going on in a way.
The sheer brazenness of the whole affair defies belief.
The Russia collusion narrative, supported by the fabricated Steele dossier which was paid for by campaign funds, and which was actually endorsed by the entire Democratic wing of Congress (Jan. 6 was condemned by everybody except the closest Trump allies) came much closer to *actually overturning the results of a legitimate election* than a bunch of unorganized MAGA plebes milling around the interior of the Capitol for a couple hours.
On top of that, in polling, the number of Democrats who believe 2016 was “stolen” is not all that far off the number of Republicans that think 2020 was “stolen”.
I agree Jan 6 was uniquely bad in a previously unimaginable way, however I ultimately do not come to this view. A good baseline is that in the last poll I heard a small majority considered the Antifa/BLM riots in total as worse than Jan 6. One event matching dozens is remarkable - it should be noted this was at a point at which Jan 6 was much more fresh in everyone's mind than the riots
However, consider direct fatalities. Cursory google says at least 25 have died in Antifa riots (source: Guardian). There was one incident of cold blooded political/tribal murder in which Antifa people were *dancing in the streets* after the news got around. Nobody was intentionally killed on Jan 6 except the rioter who attempted to get into the room with congressmen
That's just a small start however. I understand that the rise in homicides in general is in the area of over a thousand people a year. Sure, put on the brakes real quick and don't take that number as one to one attributable to 'defund the police'. But it's got to be a sizable fraction doesn't it? Yearly, apparently. I consider it in this way: a man with lethal doses of multiple drugs in a manic state died of heart failure under duress from a neck pressure control 'technique' that was literally in the books. And this was taken to be so unquestionably an act of intentional and societal oppression that police departments were actually defunded - in opposition to 80% of residents of high crime neighborhoods who support increased or continued levels of funding
This is very extreme. This is so extreme that 80% of people in high crime neighborhoods oppose it. And I hardly ever hear of claimed ingroup/outgroup deaths that aren't like George Floyd - where there's even some credibility that it could indicate a society wide systemic oppression. In my view it's extremely out of range of any real interpretation of actual events. This is an ideology stamping reality with its assumptions, good and hard, and to the tune of hundreds of deaths every year
Did Jan 6 have any 'reality credibility'? I think it had more. It's as simple as the openly stated action of a billionaire opponent of Trump to fund state government bodies with over 100 million dollars for get out the vote advertising specifically targeted at liberal areas of swing states. There were states with 20-1 skews of spending in liberal vs conservative areas. This is certainly more consequential than any amount of on the streets cheating could have been. Just as optics help drive the oppression narrative the optics were uniquely bad for the 2020 election, where it appeared Trump had won because it was not understood how many mail in ballots there were and how much they would go Democrat
By no means am I excusing Trump. He literally celebrated the riot with a tweet about the violation of a 'holy supermajority' vote for him. Meanwhile Jan 6 people are still in prison without trial and I presume there remains a general organized effort to systematically bail out Antifa/BLM rioters. The perspective that leads to defunding police departments is more extreme in its separation from reality and in its consequences on the same
I think it's astonishing that the crowd in front of the Capitol was chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and Trump knew it, and did not immediately speak out against it! Can you imagine a crowd chanting "Hang Joe Biden" back in 2012 and Obama just chilling in the White House, saying to himself, eh, no big deal?
So now instead of the GOP attempting to kill Pence, it's part of a crowd at one particular protest "chanting" (as opposed to shooting at, or any sort of actual violence against Pence), which wasn't sponsored by the party itself? Is that the motte, then?
The Secret Service tried to evacuate Pence. They held him in a guarded parking garage in the capital. Did you watch those crazy fucks with their bear spray, crushing a cop in a doorway?
It was part of an attempt to breach the capitol during the certification of an election. At the behest of a president who was pressuring Pence into doing something unconstitutional.
Yes, I saw many hours of video from that day. In exactly zero of them did any of the protestors/rioters/capital trespassers use one of the many firearms they owned to attack Pence or his security. Apparently, they weren't very serious about killing him. Bear spray? Really? That's not exactly deadly force. No one has ever been killed using bear spray.
You'd have been better to go with fire extinguisher, or stick with a sign/flag on it.
You saw cops being beaten and the one crushed in the doorway and the belts of zip ties. And yes we saw a fire extinguisher being thrown along with flag pole.
You are ignoring the argument. An attempt to kill someone one (if one existed) doesn't require the actual assault. If someone takes a gun to a person's house with the intent to kill them, but the would be killer is wrongly informed and the would-be victim isn't there, that's still an attempted murder. It's just a failed attempt.
Similarly, if someone tries to kill someone, but turns away because the person is too well guarded, that's still an attempted murder.
If there was an intent to murder Pence, I'd say the issue was more competency than seriousness.
[I am not a Trumpist, at all, but I think your frame of reference may be silly, so I'm taking a crack at reductio ad absurdum]
I can imagine a Montagnard chanting to hang a Girondin, because it actually happened, and those guys were literally *way* less progressive than modern democrats, so, yeah. We actually, historically, retrospectively, tolerate a heck of a lot of internecine fighting from our political leaders. Plus actual violence. Eldridge Cleaver, stuff like that.
i mean, when people chant let's go brandon it's not actually a call to have intercourse with the president. realistically i would guess that 90% of the people who chanted that slogan didn't mean anything by it, and maybe 1% would've actually done any physical harm if they had been handed the veep at that time (although that's maybe still enough for a lynching! mobs have weird dynamics)
Who is saying that, exactly? I've heard there were people chanting "Hang Pence" or something similar, but I took that as overheated rhetoric. So please provide names of Democratic elites saying, without substantiation, that someone aligned with the GOP was trying to kill Pence.
Yes this is exactly what I was thinking, a little bit disheartened to see it brushed off with an ironic footnote. It genuinely is the case that one side tried to overturn a legitimate election! Even picking the most extreme things from the mainstream Democratic party doesn't really come close in scope.
With all due respect, these two things are not even remotely comparable. A president's supporters entering the capital building to interrupt the counting of electoral votes due to false claims of voter fraud spread by the Trump himself is not even close to a less significant series of riots neither aimed at overturning an election nor backed by the mainstream Democratic party.
I'm glad you see it. If you scan through the comments overall, you'll see that a large majority of posters do not, but rather are simply pressing object-level perspectives without regard for Scott's warning.
David's saying that that belief underlies a lot of people's opinions. I think that's an overstatement. Apparently there were people shouting "Hang Pence," and apparently Pence's Secret Service detail was extremely worried for multiple reasons. I'm not sure all that amounts to "attempted to kill their own Vice President". But there sure is some smoke there.
Also worth noting that there is audio recording of Trump saying that the "Hang Mike Pence" chants were "just common sense". Which I suppose doesn't technically count as attempting to kill his own Vice President, but in terms of extremism, I sure have a hard time imagining Biden saying the same thing about Harris (or Bush Jr. saying the same thing about Cheney, or literally any other POTUS/VPOTUS pair you can think of).
To answer your question, it typically does not. It's value neutral and mostly measures relativity. If you said Yes, and many people who otherwise vote with you say No (or vice versa), Or if people whom you normally vote against agree with your vote, you move relative to those others. Over a large volume of votes, the relative positions become apparent without actually measuring any actual content of the vote/issue in question. So procedural votes where everyone votes together tend to show as neutral... Party line votes show as relative only for the sake of defining the "sides", and the interesting votes are what's left to look at.
Not really. You can cherry pick and it'll change the overall slightly but the power of this method is that it essentially works regardless of the legislative text, intent, etc. It's literally math based, Yeah or Nay, binary based statistical analysis. It doesn't know or care if a particular bill was to eat babies or send refugees to the moon. It only cares in the overall trends of how you vote on all of the votes.
Well, sure, my thought was that "only include bills which were passed" would *also* be neutral on the content of bills, but might not be neutral with regards to whether the bills were intended to be passed by those who introduced them.
But, you're saying that it doesn't change the results substantially? Alright.
All of the vote data is public, as is the analysis software. You don't need to know even any bill title or content, all you enter is Voted Yea or Nay. And you get out these magic graphs that show you where each legislator is relative to all of the rest of them. That's all it does.
That is not a good way to think. "Literal math" in a complicated analysis very rarely follows from a set of fundamentally sane axioms, like proofs in Euclidean geometry, but rather is a end result of applying a particular choice of exact definition, and the definition was someone's subjective idea to describe an intuitive concept.
Small modifications to the definitions and assumptions, or, to the "math", usually produce wildly different figures. If the figures don't make sense, there is a good chance that your plot represents something different than you thought.
Unless you've used the DWNominate code and actually know what you're talking about (which you don't), all of the above is pure nonsense. It's statistical analysis, and all it does is compare series of votes to find relative positioning among voters. It doesn't even label axes, that purely is an interpretative thing.
This is not specific to any particular algorithm, it is a fact from the basic principles: you can get very different results by choosing the metric, algorithm and problem definition differently. Pleads to "math" and "statistical analysis" as self-justifying magic is something that I strongly dislike, because that encourages magical thinking and spreads confusion instead of illumination.
"It's statistical analysis, and all it does is compare series of votes to find relative positioning among voters."
Yes. It is more useful to state the definitions loud and clear.
If the only thing you have going on is the relative positioning of the voters, you have a population distribution of votes cast by voters. You can characterize the shape of the distribution ... but it is impossible to quantify if the population location moves relative to some fixed reference point over time. To the extent the same congresspersons' opinion changes (and their vote on the exact same bill would change) over time it would no make sense to interpret the relative voting patterns over time. (Which was what Unsigned Integer speculated.)
DW-Nominate comes up with wild answers for who is liberal or conservative. It comes up with, tautologically, accurate answers for who tows the leadership line.
In theory, the movements of both parties should be irrelevant to whether their positions are justified. The interesting question to me is: why does this discussion matter so much to people? What about the parties’ grand narratives make the ideological changes of the other party a relevant fact?
Whilst that may be true, Scott does point out above that nineteenth-century Democrats were somewhat different to modern ones, so I think that is probably a point of very minor relevance. After all, hopefully we're all in agreement that the Democrats no longer support the right of states to determine if slavery is legal or not?
And I will see that change as relevant when Joe 'the Republicans want to put all y'all back in chains' Biden is removed from public office and no longer permitted a voice in his party, *along with every other activist and politico who repeats this kind of slander.*
A lot of political messaging argues that the other party is taking more extreme positions compared to the recent past. It seems fair to argue back if that's not the case.
I think the intuitive basis for this is that most people don't think that they themselves were crazy or bad people 10 or 20 years ago. So if you say, "This party has gotten farther from where I was 10 or 20 years ago," particularly "much farther," then that implies (in a somewhat logically dubious manner) that they've gotten closer to crazy or bad.
I think this is a lot of it. Barack Obama, during his first campaign (less than 15 years ago!), officially did not support gay marriage. Today mainstream Democrats aren’t willing to include the word “woman” in a proposed abortion rights law.
The culture war has moved fast and yesterday’s progressives are todays bigots.
we have a wing of one party that wants struggle sessions, and another party of domestic terrorists. people i guess want to know which is more extreme, and which has a chance of saving itself.
In practice you as a voter don't get to vote for specific policy positions, you're stuck voting for one party or the other.
And if you're one of those basically-kinda-moderate people who might one way or the other and thus decide every election, you're very susceptible to claims of "Hey, those other guys are extreme, we're much closer to your basically-kinda-moderate positions".
The meme implicitly gives part of the answer - for people who've switched "sides", it's a way to defend against accusations of hypocrisy or apostasy.
Wright is saying "I didn't abandon you Democrats because I abandoned my views; it's you that changed around me".
I have *actually* swung somewhat toward social conservatism (not much on the economic axis and effectively zilch on liberty), but much of that happened *after* I was effectively kicked out of SJ spaces because they'd changed around me.
The parties don't have grand narratives in any meaningful sense: they don't talk about them in advertising; they don't seem to use them in any kind of decision-making framework; etc. The grand narrative which comes through to outsiders is always some variation on stopping the march of evil, which of course refers to the other team.
So I answer your first question in light of the second: this discussion matters so much to people because it matters so much to the parties.
This is what frustrates me to no end about the whole DW-NOMINATE thing. How closely party members vote to each other tells you nothing about how extreme their positions are. That congressional voting trend could be explained as "Republicans are getting much more extreme, and therefore are becoming ever more effective at enforcing purity in their politicians." It could equally plausibly be explained as "Democrats are getting much more extreme, and therefore more and more of their politicians are defecting from their causes to save their hides with their constituents, while simultaneously repelling Republicans who might once have been willing to cross the aisle." Joe Manchin being a good example of the latter case.
I also tend to think that "ordinary Americans" are centrist on an orthogonal way to elite Americans - specifically, slightly conservative on social issues and slightly liberal on social issues, in line with Trump but contra your NYT Republican who's fiscally conservative but socially liberal.
Many of us are just mathematically literate enough to appreciate the lottery-like long odds of our vote making a difference that's far lower that our winning the lottery would be (deciding between two people whose ideas we strongly dislike). You don't have to be extreme, merely complex enough that your political values don't entirely line up with one party such that the other party look like demons.
You don't vote to make a difference, you vote because it is the right thing to do. It is a non-consequentalist act similar to not littering. (I hope) you don't litter even though chucking just one empty PET bottle out of your car obto the street also won't make a difference. I would recommend looking up FDT to get an appreciation for non-consequentaist acts in the rationalist canon.
In a close election your probability of switching the election with one vote is significantly greater than 1/population. (In the model where everyone votes independently randomly, which is admittedly a bad model, it is on the order of 1/sqrt(population))This means that since the effect of swinging the election scales with population you're expected value of impact from voting is quite high
Well, your model isn't really applicable in the real world. And in any case, would probably point to political activisism being perhaps a good auw of your time (ie getting other people to vote), much more than worrying about just your own one single vote.
1/sqrt(population) is still pretty small, and the options on offer are fairly similar in practice. (And things get more complicated in other voting systems.)
Another question is what else you could be doing with your time. Either for yourself or from an Effective Altruism point of view, if you prefer that.
That assumes an election where the probability curve is centered on a tie. In a more typical election, where it might be a fairly steep curve centered on 55:45, the chance of your vote switching drops dramatically.
Chucking one empty PET bottle out of my car means that I'm making somebody bend down and pick up a slimy disgusting PET bottle, and then carry it for half a mile while picking up other trash.
That's annoying enough that it's consequentially worth some effort to avoid imposing on someone else. (I say as someone who used to litter and then started doing volunteer highway cleanup on occasion.)
The question is: why does noone clean it? Is it because it's just massively inconvenient to do so? Or because the trash doesn't bother anyone? If it's the first case, then the consequentialist argument for not littering is even stronger than on a street. If it's ACTUALLY the second, and this litter won't bother anyone significantly before it degrades, litter away. Noone should care if you litter something that won't bother anybody.
Flip it around. Suppose that you litter something biodegradable in a remote forest, like some scraps of cardboard you brought for tinder. Do you think that's equivalent to littering a PET bottle? Or is the badness of littering significantly determined by its consequences?
My not littering has a trivial chance of saving Earth from ecological collapse, but it doesn't have a trivial chance of making a neighbor's experience of this park a lot more pleasant.
In fact, I live in Korea, where cities don't typically have public trash cans, and it's not uncommon to find piles of trash on the curb. People put trash on top of other trash until the cleaning crew comes, and presumably trash on top of trash affects aesthetics less than throwing it onto a clear lawn or something.
I think this is a typical-minding; you may well be right for the sort of non-voter that not only reads this blog and comments, but I doubt we’re representative.
You mistake me for someone who is in your milieu. I’m not. I was singularly impressed by how bad this post was and that’s why I’m here. The people who read this blog that I know and interact with regularly consist of myself.
I'll bet that's a product of your social circle/class, though, and may not be representative of non-voters in general. There are a lot of people out there who don't vote simply because they find politics boring and its at a certain remove from their day to day lives, so they ignore it.
I am a non-voter because I think voting in a universal >18 y/o suffrage system is a silly political show. It took me a while to arrive at the conclusion that only the vetted, with stake in the game should be voting. If voting were restricted to ex-servicememers--or--property owners--or--people who make a monthly payroll then I would participate again. But right now my vote is just awash in a sea of stupidity.
What magical thing happens at the age of 18 that makes the average person all the sudden able to understand and vote on the complex issues that face our nation? I'm 50 years old, I have run a business with 15 employees, (paid the employer contribution to their taxes) served my country in foreign wars, made a mortgage payment, successfully raised 5 prosocial oriented children. I have demonstrated that I am more than willing to take risks for the sake of the larger body. Its not an ego thing. It's objectively measurable reality.
Should there be any qualifications to voting at all? My list is probably, admittedly, on a continuum way to the right of most people, but it is rational. Is voting a right? Or is it just one way that a nation can include citizens in the process? In all of human history, before countries had elections, were all those people being denied a basic right that we just found out about relatively recently?
Indeed, Heinlein was right. And I'm constantly reminded of Turtledove's aliens who are agast at the human use of Snout Counting as a way to make policy decisions. As stated elsewhere in this thread, I played the game, got a seat at the table, bet long and hard, and it's so rigged you can't believe it until you witness it up close and personal. A direct result
I've never served in the military, don't own any property, and don't have a monthly income. I also have a Master's Degree in Political Science. Do you really think I'm less qualified to vote than some random guy who happened to inherit a house from his parents?
No offense, I don't know you, but you seem the perfect example of someone I think should be kept as far from voting as possible. Buy/Acquire a piece of property and defend it, and earn an income by proving to others that you produce something of value they will pay for, and maybe you'd have a reasonable stake in the decision making process. Your Master's? Double disqualified IMHO.
That said, personally, I no longer believe in any voting process at all. I'm a full on Voluntaryist these days: I refuse to consent to anything decided by others. Violate my voluntary consent at your peril. Nobody has the right to dictate the life of another, no matter how big your gang is.
Part of Scott's argument was that turning 18 doesn't magically give you an understanding of civics or law or policy issues or how the world works. Fair enough, but buying a house doesn't magically give you an understanding of any of that stuff either, and in my opinion it's an extremely bad proxy. Someone can inherit a house from their family without doing anything to earn it, or buy a house for very cheap because they live in a poor rural area where land and housing are far less expensive than normal. Is a rural Alabaman homeowner really more qualified to vote than a wealthier, more successful, and more educated New York City renter, simply because he happens to live in a place where housing is 20 times cheaper?
Given my education, I do have a greater understanding of civics and law and policy issues than most people, but his standards would exclude me from voting. So if his goal is really to ensure that voting is limited to people who actually understand politics, then the particular standards he's established fail miserably at that. This suggests that either he hasn't thought his idea out very well, or that his actual goal is simply to limit voting to people who are statistically likely to agree with him on the object-level issues.
For someone with a Master's in Politics (or more likely because of), you have quite a blind spot. The issue isn't that someone with property and valuable productivity is more likely to be educated on any particular issue, but that they have a real and concrete stake on the outcome. They caretake, because they own it. It's an extension of the tragedy of the commons problem.
Ownership and self-reliance trumps educated welfare and dependance on others who provide.
Congrats on the worthless degree. It'll feed you well as the world burns.
Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty obvious how ludicrous these people are. I don’t own any property either but I’d wager my investments are worth more than their house.
That I don’t feel like my homebuying options are particularly great near my job is a weird basis for deciding I shouldn’t vote.
What really gets me is that, even beyond all the ethical and practical problems I've mentioned, it's just such an obvious attempt to rig the system in a way that would benefit their side. "Democracy, but only when it produces the outcomes I want." Which is not really a democracy at all; the entire point of democracy is that it's a truce of sorts, wherein you sometimes have to accept outcomes you don't like or agree with, because that's the necessary price of having a say at all. It's far from perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than hashing every issue out through violence, or taking orders from a strongman (who can also enact policies you don't like, while leaving you with far less recourse to do anything about it).
I'm sure if some left-liberal suggested restricting the vote solely to people with college degrees (or people with a Master's, or people with a Doctorate), these people would all be aghast, and rightly so. But only because that would result in the other team having a massive advantage at the polls; they're perfectly fine with equally undemocratic restrictions that would give their side the massive advantage.
Oh, definitely. It’s a whole genre, in fact, complete with dumb self-serving arguments. When I was in college, Bryan Caplan wrote a whole book about voter irrationality that boiled down to “they’re all irrational because they don’t vote libertarian”!
Personally I like positive yearly tax balance (as in you're funding the state, instead of the state funding you) as a proxy for contributing to society, and thus deserving a voice in its direction. In the spirit of Shapley values, it also flows from the reality that if all people meeting this condition refuse to contribute, there is no state anymore.
The problem with this (leaving aside the more general problems with restricting the right to vote, which I addressed in my reply to your other post) is that whether someone counts as a net taxpayer is purely a function of the current tax policy, which is subject to constant change by the Legislature. Technically, under your proposed model, anyone who receives a tax return equal to or greater than the amount they paid in taxes would be ineligible to vote that year, but the threshold for what level of income qualifies someone for refundable tax credits varies from year to year at the whims of Congress. Thus, it would become trivially easy for federal politicians to game the system, changing the income tax system to arbitrarily expand or narrow the range of people who could vote in a way that served their own personal or partisan interests. This is doubly bad, since it would allow for an unprecedented level of political corruption and naked power grabs, while also giving politicians a perverse incentive to distort the tax system in ways that could be quite damaging for the overall economy.
I still think something similar has to be done sooner or later, though. We are nearing massive technological unemployment, followed by UBI or expansion of existing wealth transfers, followed by collapse as those who can still contribute are taxed more and more until they go full Atlas Shrugged and leave for somewhere else.
I'd be less concerned about it if it didn't already happen in the EU. Due to demographics, several EU countries - perhaps a majority of them? I know of eastern EU and the Mediterrean states - are largely ruled by their retirees, who are an extremely large and important voting bloc despite being completely economically irrelevant. This breeds massive resentment as intergenerational solidarity is slowly turning into intergenerational warfare. I've heard a lot of the sentiment that SARS-CoV-2 was a blessing as it culled old people.
Voting from a plurality of independent opinions is often more effective at producing good outcomes than expert or stakeholder decision making. This is just a fact, because stakeholders and even experts simply cannot be aware of all of the relevant facts. That's why central planning always fails at scale while markets typically work well.
I've considered your position seriously before, but on balance, I think it's just factually wrong to conclude that it would be a superior system.
The problem with this whole analysis is, it tries to quantify things without defining the parameter in question ("extreme") in any clear way, much less providing any sensible methodology or theory for how such a parameter could actually be quantified. So it's all opinion, based on what madness someone chooses to believe is more extreme than some other madness (freedom is letting teenagers get assault rifles and murder little children vs. social justice is wokism and all that implies.)
For my two cents, I think both parties, and most Americans have moved far in the direction of what I call victimitarianism, an extremely poisonous attitude that even moderates seem infatuated with these days. Who's the biggest victim? That's why everyone is so upset about how extreme people they disagree with has gotten. The overwhelming appeal of victimhood seems to have caused our whole political system to turn especially rancid, so it's not about fixing what's wrong or making things better, but how we can show it's us whose rights are the ones being violated. Ugh! Walt Kelly once titled a book, We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us, and that's never been more true than now.
> The problem with this whole analysis is, it tries to quantify things without defining the parameter in question ("extreme") in any clear way, much less providing any sensible methodology or theory for how such a parameter could actually be quantified
I disagree, I think the point of this analysis is to propose multiple different definitions of "extreme" and ways in which it could be quantified, and see what happens when we use each of them.
The conclusion is then (somewhat inevitably) "well, it depends", and everyone is happy.
Isn't the implication of your policy positions argument that a Republican advocating for segregation, women being banned from the workforce, and for the abolition of income taxes wouldn't be "extreme"?
Doesn't that strike you as completely fucking absurd?
Yeah, and Scott has chosen a framing that makes it impossible for conservatives to ever become "more extreme". The phrase is meaningless in a context where the right could be electing literally segregationists and claiming to not be extreme. Moral progress is real, FFS.
Nonsense. Garrison represented a big healthy slice of the American electorate. He was quite popular in his day. Maybe you're thinking of John Brown or John Wilkes Booth -- *they* were extremists, and neither came to a happy end.
Well, 10% of the population is not that small. For example, it's about twice the fraction of the population in the South that owned slaves at the time. Ross Perot got 8% of the vote in 1992.
The 1840s are also a good distance from the 1850s, and there are a lot of other reasons why Northerners might not identify as abolitionists in that earlier era -- not because they didn't believe owning blacks was wrong, but because they thought there had to be a better way than direct (and probably violent) confrontation. This is the era of Clay, of repeated attempts at compromise and some kind of evolutionary extinction or at least limitation of slavery. I think it's quite probable much more than 10% agreed with Garrison on the principles (slavery is wicked) but not so many on the methods for solving the problem[1].
Of course, as the 1850s came and went, positioned hardened extremely, and by the end of that time the North was sufficiently convinced to go to war, which is a pretty extreme solution, no less extreme than anything Garrison advocated. So I think a better characterization of Garrison is that he represented a popular philosophy but not, until events proved it neccessary, a very popular practical approach to the problem. This doesn't really fit the bill of radical extremism for me. It's not Lenin in 1917, it's not the Paris Commune in 1848, where the very principle at issue are in bitter contest.
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[1] I dismiss the Post column as mere fashion-conscious retconning.
Indeed. I think I'm much more extreme -- relative to my time -- for refusing to support any politician who favors subsidy of animal exploitation. And I don't even think that's very extreme at all, as I'm not about to go John Brown anytime soon!
But segregation's not that extreme a position these days. To pick one example at random, plenty of universities are bringing it back in small ways, like graduation ceremonies filtered by race:
This wouldn't show up directly in Scott's data, of course, as these are not decisions being voted on by national-level party members. But, segregation in general is clearly not outside the Overton Window, so the various Republican segregationist politicians in Congress and the Senate are probably not that extreme either.
I think the better argument is that while the sort of segregation Hari mentioned is silly and wrong, the sort conservatives supported in the past was worse. This seems like a pretty uncontroversial claim to me.
How about a golf club just for whites? Or a private college? We have a volunteer Army, would it be OK if we had whites-only battalions and black-only battalions?
The freedom to associate comes with the freedom to not associate. It should be OK for any group to do it, using any dimensions they want. If they come across as intolerant bigots to the general population and their idea fails, sobeit. Anyway, why would you want to force some group to accept you there? America is a huge country, everyone can find a place they fit in now.
Could you point to the Republican segregationist politicians in the House and the Senate? I'm having a hard time thinking of any, but, for example, even the Democrat in the White House has a segregationist past, mostly because when he started, that was a common Democratic Party position.
And by this I mean, someone who has proposed an actual segregationist policy.
I'm not claiming that any Rs are segregationists; I'm saying that even if they were Scott's argument would still say they hadn't "gotten more extreme" because this was a normal conservative position in 1900.
EDIT: oh sorry you were replying to Hari; my mistake!
Again. One side is wrong in an objectively terrible way. Elections operating on a heads I win tails you lose basis. This isn’t a Coke vs Pepsi discussion.
I feel like every time someone comes in and cites this as a reason one side is clearly wrong, a bunch of people point out that the dems were OK with cities being burned down to move policy, or a bunch of stuff like that.
And I get that this wasn't good, right? It's a good reason not to like Trump. But it's like, OK, party-line communications go super-mega-overboard, they shoot for the stars hoping to hit the moon; their side is completely innocent in all ways and anything the other side did is literally the worst thing ever.
Most people on both sides are at least kinda aware of this mechanism. And every time I see you doing this, I want to be like "hey, you know you aren't supposed to swallow THE WHOLE THING, right?". Like you can know this is bad and also know that the left being cool with an entire summer of arson and riots was probably pretty bad too and maybe do the math on why people might strike a balance between the two.
I disagree with the left being cool with a summer of arson and riots. I know I wasn’t. When the Minnesota Governor came on television and said that people in my neighborhood should pack a go bag I was pretty unhappy.
I think the overwhelming majority of Democrats think violence and property destruction are definitely not okay.
There have been 200 felony arrests in the Twin Cities stemming from that destruction. There would be many more if they had all been recorded on CCTV.
The capital riot was very bad but in point of fact it wasn't a coup attempt. A very weak perimeter gave an angry mob an opportunity to get inside the building and some of them took it on the spur of the moment. "coup attempt" implies some sort of coherent organized plan to overthrow the government, which was absent. "coup attempt" also implies a lot of violence, but nobody got shot except by police. Media inflated the "death toll" headline with an unrelated meth OD and 2 heart attacks among a crowd of tens of thousands, the vast majority of whom never set foot in the capitol. And contrary to early media reports about Sicknick's martyrdom, the examiner found no evidence of blunt trauma and the investigation confirmed he died of natural causes: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer?s=r
The 2020 BLM riots were an OOM more deadly and you could very plausibly argue that various democratic politicians bear as much responsibility for inciting those as trump for his incitement of the capitol riot. In both cases the politicians never actually told people to riot, but in both cases the politicians made recklessly false claims that made a lot of people very angry. Looking at the percentage of African-Americans who got shot by police, in isolation, without comparing it to the violent crime rates, is about as silly as testing precinct vote totals for Benford's law without checking for a pattern in the sizes of the precincts.
Here I'm curious if you're going to watch the Jan 6 hearings, or at least read the final report. The question is not whether the capital riot was in and by itself a coup attempt, it's whether it was an intentional part of a much broader sequence of coordinated moves by multiple parties to prevent the peaceful transfer of government, i.e., a coup. Hopefully we can agree that if Trump had a series of meetings and conversations in which he and his advisors worked out a multi-pronged strategy to prevent Biden from becoming president after each state certified its election and in aggregate Trump lost, that would constitute an attempted coup. We seem to have the broad outlines. Pence, under pressure of the capital riot if necessary, unconstitutionally declines to certify the votes from battleground states under GOP control, who have illegal shadow slates of electors pre-selected. After Pence does his part in the coup, those legislatures declare their elections invalid and vote to submit their shadow electors. Enough states do this to cast the presidential election in doubt sufficient to trigger a vote in Congress, where each state delegation gets one vote and the GOP hold a numerical advantage. Trump "wins". Now it's up to the Jan 6 committee (and the DOJ) to make the case if that's what really happened. I would stipulate that if it's only about the capital riot, and Trump's sole personal involvement was firing up the crowd and snickering while it played out, then that's not a coup. I'm interested to see how the DOJ roll-up proceeds. If the leadership of the Proud Boys and of the Oath Keepers—now charged with seditious conspiracy—were repeatedly meeting with people (e.g., Stone) who were themselves in frequent direct communication with Trump in the lead-up to Jan 6, that's harder to simply dismiss as just politics as usual. Per your Floyd riots point, if it turns out that the national BLM leadership was in frequent meetings with Schumer and Pelosi's staff in June of 2020, I would want that investigated too.
When we like the new government, we call it a revolution. When we don't like the new government, we call it a coup. These are just Russell conjugations.
No political party has accepted an electoral outcome this century.
2000 it was hanging cads, 2004 there were more theories, 2008 Obama was born in Kenya, 2012 ACORN stole it, 2016 we were all treated to Trump-Russia investigations and fisa court abuses, and 2020 there was a small riot in which no buildings burned...
The unwillingness to accept outcomes is escalating... but 2020 really just continues the trend. Who's knows 2024 we might have gun fights.
I am not arguing about any current R politician or position. I think it's incontrovertible that if you took a 1900s conservative and put them in Congress they would be seen as incredibly extreme. If the Rs pivoted to 1900s conservative positions, that would be becoming more extreme. But Scott is arguing that that would just be staying in the same place as they were in the 1900s, so you couldn't argue that that is becoming more extreme. It's a reductio of Scott's policy positions argument. I don't think Rs are, in fact, presenting 1900s conservative political positions.
Scott's point is that from the point of view of any individual it will always look this way. If you had lived since 1900 and thought that 1900-era positions were normal then it would definitely look like both parties had got pretty extreme, with the Democrats in the lead.
Elon Musk isn't 130, he's 50, which means he probably thinks of 1990 as being pretty normal. From the perspective of someone who started out as a moderate in 1990, the meme would definitely look pretty accurate.
I decided to look it up. William McKinney was the republican candidate for president in 1900, William Jennings Bryan the democratic candidate. Honestly William McKinney doesn't sound too far off from modern Republicans. Yes he would stand out like a sore thumb, but in general he asked foe higher tarrifs, paid lip service to civil rights issues, and generally called for higher patriotism. WJB was most know for his anti gold standard stance, calls for pacifism, and strict religious views to the extent that later in his life (post presidential runs) he called for abolishing teaching evolution. To me that sounds like the republican candidate would be less of a complete alien to his party to than the democratic candidate. It's a sampling size of 1 so almost entirely meaningless however.
It's not literally impossible for the right-wing to get more extreme. They would just need to shift further right than they started. And since the United States was founded by Whigs, that would be obviously possible! You brought up segregation, but I would go further back and point to the Dred Scott decision as an example of the law moving in a more extreme direction than it started.
Yes, thank you! I think plenty of conservatives today would cheer if the SC abolished gay marriage. I am comfortable calling that extreme with regard to today's society. I don't really care how people in the year 1900 thought about it.
I found a recent poll, current positions on gay marriage are about 70% pro and 30% against. (In 1996 it was about 30% pro and 70% against).
An opinion held by 30% of the population can't reasonably be called "extreme", it's just... not the majority view. Overturning gay marriage in 2022, or instituting it in 1996 isn't "extreme", though it's not particularly democratic.
To me, this comment seems like a perfect example of what the original meme was talking about.
I remember when some of the leftist members of parliament in my country were against gay marriage. It was only two decades ago that this position was common everywhere.
Now they (and apparently you) want to call conservatives "extreme" (and quuickly thereafterwards "far right extremists" ) for simply... not succumbing to peer pressure?
When I use "extreme" I am not talking about from the perspective of a person in 1900, and I don't think anyone does. That is the entire point. Surely you would agree that someone being pro-slavery would be an extreme position? Yet if we did this article from the perspective of a person in 1850, the anti-slavery position is the extremist position.
The abolition of slavery is definitely the extremist position still; it's just domestic privately held slavery that's unthinkable.
Chinese muslims forced into years of working for the state in prison factories? Only extremists are protesting against that; or they wouldn't be the largest source of imported goods.
Not necessarily. Scott mentions a hypothetical where the conservative party advocated for truly regressive policies, such as the handmaid's tale. If they also wanted to bring segregation back at this point, it would qualify as extreme in a way that is noticable.
By the *moving in the preferred direction* framing, conservatives can't really be the more extreme party, at least if they are somewhat close to the literal meaning of conservative. (EDIT: This framing admits many different sub-framings, with different starting years.)
By the *diverging from the median* framing, both parties will usually be about equally extreme at any given time. But individual politicians might be much more extreme. If you want to take "moral progress" into account, and by that you mean the changing views of the median person, this is the framing to use.
By the *ideological purity* and the *crazier messaging* framings, either party could be more extreme.
Just replying to comment that I agree with this, thought about it too, and hope Scott sees and responds to it as well. Like you said, the method Scott used makes it so that whichever party is more progressive is automatically the extreme one.
The method guarantees that during periods of polarisation combined with progressive advance, whoever is more progressive is becoming extreme more quickly.
During periods of depolarisation combined with progressive advance, the softening conservatives would be changing more quickly. During periods of polarisation combined with outright reaction, the reactionaries would be becoming extreme more quickly. We just aren't in either of those situations at the moment.
It depends on when your starting point is. None of these things have been promoted by either party for at least 50 years, so readopting them now would be extreme.
One of the weaknesses of Yeglesias's post is that his baseline is McCain's campaign. McCain ran as a maverick, and was more moderate than most of the Republican Party. The leader of Republicans in the House, John Boehner, was to McCain's right, although he would be forced out by intraparty conflict. The leader of Republicans in the Senate was Mitch McConnell, who still holds that position.
This post takes 1994 as the starting year, presumably because that's when PEW's data starts. Note, however, that if you take 2004 as the starting year with the same data, you would get a different conclusion. Although the "more than they are currently doing" clause is undoubtedly relevant here, especially since this starting point is in the middle of a Republican presidency.
I think if Republicans had been consistently advocating that since (eg) 1960, and Democrats had been advocating ever-stronger forms of racial integration, then the best way to describe this would be "the Republican position has stayed the same over time, the Democratic position has gotten more extreme over time, and the Democrats happen to be right".
This seems like a weird way to use the word "extreme", just to avoid having to say that a position that stays the same over time can also become more extreme over time.
"Which party has gotten more extreme?" is a classic disguised query (see https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb/p/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg). The question itself isn't what we care about; it's a proxy for it. And much of the argumentation in this thread is between people who want to answer completely different questions, but are both using these words.
In the case of Elon's usage at least, the cartoon is a depiction of his experience. He held the same positions over a period of time, and the party he used to feel represented those positions moved away from him. In that context, the actual meaning of extreme IS 'moved farther away from historical positions.'
There are other perfectly reasonable underlying queries that one could mean by asking which party has gotten more extreme, and they're not wrong. They're just not actually relevant to Elon's usage of it.
Good point. What if instead of talking about "extreme" we focused on the specific scenario posed by the meme? If you were slightly left-of-centre in (say) 1990 and haven't changed your views since, then which party would represent you better in 2022?
Well, in that case, I guess we should stop calling ISIL and other terrorist groups as "Islamic extremists". After all, in medieval times both Christians and Muslims believed in the necessity for a theocratic dictatorship that persecuted unbelievers, so clearly the terrorist groups working to bring that about today are the moderates and we Western secularists must be the extremists for abandoning that idea.
More generally, "extremist" has no clear meaning separate from its use as a term of abuse, so if you're going to acknowledge that an "extreme" position can be right, there's no point calling positions "extreme" in the first place.
I like that a lot and can find no problem with it.
Just taboo the word "extreme" and "moderate" in all politicial discussions.
They obscure communication by piling on too many implicit, ambiguous assumptions, that will reliably differ between speaker and listener with different political positions. Shed more heat than light.
In the framing of "conservatives prefer the status quo, liberals prefer change" then the outcome of any analysis of divergence from current status quo is going to self-evidently show liberals as changing more. Eg everyone in society has gotten more liberal on homosexuality, but the relative difference between democrats and republicans has stayed steady.
I would argue that your second question, "Which party has diverged more from ordinary Americans?", is the relevant question. Societal norms change over time, nobody supports slavery now, etc. Perception of extremity has to do with how far you diverge from the average viewpoint on a subject. In my opinion 538s average of expected voter turnout is a poor measure of this.
I'd suggest this as a test: If you take the Pew charts of "growing gaps" and ask how far each position is from the *average* viewpoint. As an example, for the first question "Government regulations of business usually do more harm than good", the average position is 45% agree, with 63% of Republicans agreeing and 30% of Dems. So Republicans are 18 points away from the average, while Dems are 15 points away.
Using this (admittedly simple) method on the other 9 questions results in Republicans diverging more from the average in every single one, for an average divergence of 20.3 points as compared to democrats 15.9.
The world gets more and more "liberal" (for a lack of the better word) with every year. This was the case for the past almost 600 years. Obviously there is some local randomness in the real world, during short periods of time the world or a country can get less "liberal", but the long time trend is obvious.
A centrist from 1900s would be far right or hard conservative by todays standards. It is absolutely pointless to compare todays policies to 1900s policies. Everyone became way more "liberal" (or "leftist") in those years: democrats and republicans alike.
So we must compare democrats and republicans to the current centrist baseline. Or at least to the average centrist baseline of the past 10 years or something. And yes, it is impossible to define what this baseline really is.
I don't believe the trend has gone back 600 years. Prior to the industrial revolution I think the world was so different it's hard to compare to today.
No his question is a perfectly valid one, historically. Absolutism was a very different animal than what came before. Louis XIV wouldn't have been able to do what he did in an earlier era.
I really do believe so. I think this was the case after the Renaissance and onwards.
Yes, it is hard or impossible to compare modern life and concepts to the life and concepts of 600 years ago. But to the extend it could be done, I think it does hold.
After Renaissance. Development of a crude scientific method and empirical approach to life and "truth" (as opposed to religious dogma that was prevalent for the past 500 or more years) had forced Europe (or at least parts of Europe) in a more liberal direction. Reformation, scientific method, first proto liberal philosophers are all a product of the Renaissance.
I know that Mencius Moldbug associates the Reformation/Protestantism with the left, but that's because he associates the right with good order and the left with destruction of it. By modern liberal standards, Martin Luther doesn't really seem to be an improvement over what preceded him. Then again, by modern liberal standards Andrew Jackson was worse than the Federalists even though the triumph of his Democratic party over the Federalists is a clear example of how politics moves "left" over time.
That doesn't really make sense unless you simply define liberal as "modern" and conservative as "not modern". You could also argue that seeing as liberals are on the left, that leftists like communism and (classical) communist ideas have been in retreat for a long time, that the world has been getting more right wing over time, and that the "conservative" position of the 1900 was in reality a pretty left wing position.
Public spending as a share of GDP has increased by hundreds of percent since 1900 in all developed countries I can think of. Anyone who wanted to cut public spending to those levels today would be seen as a right-wing extremist. That seems, to me, like the world has gotten more left wing on the economic axis.
In the USA it's increased a lot, yes, but the USA was unusually libertarian. I was talking about the whole world. Most of the world spent the 20th century as a hotbed of dictators and Communists for whom 100% of GDP was public spending!
Yes, but e.g. Russia went from 100% to ~30%. You can say, well, Russia wasn't a "developed country" but that's tautological - any country in which public spending is 100% of the GDP is so broken it can never be developed to the standards of countries with much lower levels of spending. Likewise with the capitalist revolution in China.
So this boils down to a question of whether state retrenchment in some countries offsets the growth of the state in other countries. My gut sense is yes just because there are so many of those countries even if we often forget about them in the west, and they were very large.
Even so, you're correct that the arguments against leftist levels of public spending were largely lost in western countries.
Hey, why takes communism as the left-wing norm rather than anarchism or (even more radical) anarcho-primitivism? Then the left has been in retreat even more! :)
Left or liberal != communism for me. I was talking more about human rights and minority protections and, yes, "equality", but not in the communism sense.
The world does not move ever leftwards. You only think so because the arc of history leads to today's values. But who knows where it will go in the future?
Yes, but it isn't a trend. It only looks that way because you aren't comparing your views of what progress is to what people in the past thought progress was.
Ignoring the liberal vs. left (which I wouldn't consider the same thing, e.g. I would say that China and India have both gotten more liberal and moved right over the last 30 years). I think the claim, which I'm sympathetic too, is that there's a bit of a sharpshooter fallacy going on here in that what we call 'liberal' or even more so 'left' isn't some platonic ideal but influenced/reflective of how society actually developed. If we went back 600 years ago and asked folks to define liberal would they do so consistently with how we do so today? If not then there's likely at least some of this effect in play.
as a more concrete example: if we asked a European hundreds of years ago what the "progress-minded, forward looking, equitable and egalitarian" (trying to operationalize "progressive" and decouple it from the single word) world of tomorrow would look like, it'd likely involve a whole heck of a lot more Christianity than our world does.
Yes, that is basically my claim. I think a recent survey here put it best with one of its options to a question asking the the definition of progress: "Progress is tautological - the values we have now always say the values we have now are good".
I also do not think you would have to go back 600 years - try 100, or probably even 50.
Obviously they would view it totally differently. Our views and beliefs did not just magically appear. They grew from our history and evolution of our beliefs. Technology plays a big part too. People lived in a totally different world 600 years ago.
Over 600 years we went on a parade away from the extreme low personal freedom levels enjoyed under feudalism, towards quite a bit in the early 1800s-early 1900s, which an expansionist state has been rolling back ever since.
Liberalism isn't leftism. I don't think that the world actually drifts ever-leftward. I do think that it has become much more liberal, and it has made it much harder to be an autocrat.
"The world gets more and more "liberal" (for a lack of the better word) with every year." depends on weighting I guess. China is getting less liberal. India is getting less liberal. That's over a third of the world population right there. Haven't done the mental tabulation to see if I can get to 50%+ but doesn't seem impossible. Russia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Indonesia (?) etc.
I think what we have observed can be summarized very simply:
1. Americans as a whole have moved to the left.
2. The American political parties have become polarized, with relatively leftist Republicans becoming Democrats and relatively rightist Democrats becoming Republicans. American politics becoming nationalized accounts for a significant portion of this (perhaps around half).
Nearly everything else we have observed seems like a natural consequence of the above two trends.
I’m not sure those “relatively leftist Republicans” became Democrats. I think they became Trump’s base.
As I see it, today’s Republicans are fundamentally more willing to stick together as a group than Democrats. To a great extent, they used to *be* Democrats not that long ago. The big cultural political party flip in the 1970s made a lot of my previously Democrat urban family into Republicans.
But this meant they were now in bed with rural religious conservatives. My relatives laughed at those people. They mocked their purity rings and their homophobia. They stuck with them for the political clout, but were pulled further and further to the cultural right all through the 2000s. All the while, the capacity of the rural right to generate appealing candidates devolved until Ted Cruz was the best they could get for president. My family and millions of people like them thought he was gross. And in walked Trump.
As I see it, 2016 was a natural consequence of people being dragged so far out of their natural political alignment for so long that Trump seemed like a good idea.
This isn’t to say my family are closet liberals. They’re Catholic and thus pro-life. Even so, they were fine with their teenage daughters asking for birth control. But they’re not excited about them asking to be called “him” or “they”. They earnestly fear Marxism in all its manifestations.
They were always like this, but it used to be possible to be this way as a Democrat. Eventually, it wasn’t possible to be this way as a Republican, either. But there were enough people like my family in the GOP by 2016 that they dragged it where they wanted to go.
The overall picture is more complicated than a slide from left to right or vice versa; Democrats might have had more visible diversity this century, but Republicans might have been more of a mixed bag.
Not on guns. The median position on guns has moved right over just about any window you care to choose.
Not on abortion. Window matters a bit more on abortion but the median voter has moved well to the right on abortion.
Not on unions. The labor movement continues it's long, slow death.
Not on taxes. Even taking Scotts very convenient window, taxes have been cut by Bush, raised very slightly on one group Obama, then cut again by Trump. Widen that window to Reagan or Ike and those differences become much more stark.
Americans as a whole have only moved left if you ignore large policy areas where they've moved right. Americans as a whole have moved, in some cases left, in some cases right. Scott, for his own (pretty good) reasons, doesn't care for the left. Hence the post.
“Right on abortion” only if you count post-Roe, and only if you only count legislation as opposed to opinion polling.
I don’t think voter opinions based on polls have moved strongly to the right - the median has been in the mushy “some restrictions, especially late term, but generally legal” for a long time.
On the other hand, Roe itself (and it’s follow ons) was pretty extreme, basically making it very difficult to restrict abortion before the third trimester, which is notably to “the left” of almost all of Europe.
To a large extent I think both *parties* have gotten more extreme on the issue - the Dems used to be much more willing to soften rhetoric on abortion to salve their Catholic wing and rural Dems who tended toward social conservatism. The saga of Bart Stupak during the ACA debate is illustrative.
There are many windows over which support for guns has gone down (e.g. 2009-2019)
The issue is substantially confounded by the violent crime wave we had in the 1970s through 1990s, which likely happened for demographic reasons. Many data series start in that time period, and thus pick up that signal, which is more a reaction to current events than a fundamental attitude.
This seems like the explanation best supported by the evidence. It also makes sense when you simply compare the US against the rest of the world - we're still a very right-wing country compared to our global peers, and it's not surprising that the left in a right-wing country would move toward where most of the world is.
I wish I had something more constructive to say here, but mostly my response to this analysis is that it's both terrible and fairly typical of a certain kind of rationalist "Hi I just landed from Mars and here are my trenchant observations on your weird Earth behaviors" thinking. It reads like the anti-Tocqueville: it has no real feeling for the subject. It would be like if I tried to name the best classical composer by, say, analyzing streaming data and performing a computer analysis of melody and tempo.
It's not that I can't critique specific elements of this piece. It's just sort of...what's the point? Read Yglesias on politics. Read Scott on esoteric intellectual musings, AI, medical arcana, and the like.
I think the major thing is that Yglesias, seemingly along among elite commentators, regularly notes that, as an elite commentator, he thinks a lot of things only elite commentators do.
One of the reasons I like Yglesias is that he supports both things like YIMBYism and Drag Queen Story Hour.
He's prepared to sacrifice some of the things he supports by backing candidates who oppose them who are more likely to get elected - that's what he means by "popularism". If you asked him his actual opinions on trans people, I'm pretty sure he has no problem with trans women in sport. But he's prepared to throw them under the bus to get other policies that he thinks are more important.
That last makes him very unusual for a voter, but quite normal for a politician.
Even when I disagree with Yglesias, it's obvious that his understanding of politics is pretty deep and comprehensive. In contrast, posts like this are basically just an attempt at justifying gut instincts with shallow knowledge and a cursory Google or two.
I wish I had something more constructive to say here, but mostly my response to this comment is that it’s both terrible and fairly typical of a certain kind of commenter “I demand rigor and insight from blogs I read, but feel no need to be constructive and insightful myself in my criticism; rather I simply carp disdainfully about the tone and how it makes me feel” thinking.
Yep, believe me I knew this would set some people off. Of course, you are weirdly projecting that I objected to the tone of the piece or "how it made me feel" -- the tone isn't the issue in the least. But this sort of pushback is pretty typical. Other people's opinions are rooted in their "feelings," yours are rooted in...who knows.
Again, it would be really easy to pick this piece apart. The first point, which treats politics as a sort of mathematical puzzle in which conservatives wish to stay at point zero and progressives wish to move towards infinity is about as conceptually incoherent an analysis of politics as I can imagine.
It's not like there aren't actual political theorists who have actually useful theories and frameworks for explaining the dynamics of political disagreement, parties, etc. You can find them if you're interested. You won't find them here.
There's nothing wrong with spherical-cow models if you don't have a better one though.
You ask three experts how many cows you can fit in a pen that's 30 metres by 30 metres. Expert 1 tells you that the answer is as many as god wills it to be. Expert 2 tells you that you are an evil cow-enslaver for even considering the question. Expert 3 uses a spherical cow model and gives you an answer which is, given your knowledge of the shape of a cow, probably right to within 30% or something.
The model where "conservatives" sit still and "progressives" move off to infinity isn't supposed to be the final word on anything, it's just a thought experiment to illustrate one way in which it might seem true that the Democrats are always getting more extreme.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's never cost-free, and as an empiricst and investor I am keenly aware of opportunity cost, not to mention how quickly sunk cost issues arise.
That is, there is often significant value in saying "I don't know, and I decline to speculate fruitlessly." It keeps the mind clear and the awareness high so that when some data come along that *does* matter you're in the best possible mental state to appreciate it. Your mind is not clouded with a pre-existing model you need to unload, your attention is more keenly on the incoming data because you've got nothing else.
It's my experience, for what it's worth, that the world suffers far more often from premature conclusions than being too hesitant to entertain theories.
Yeah, I’m sure your girlfriend who goes to another school would be able to just tear this analysis apart, but so far you have one objection and it’s so vague as to be worthless. Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.
completely off topic but 4 years ago when i read "them/they" applied to singular person it always confused me. Nowadays it's when I read "he" when it could be a "she" that am confused (why "they" wasn't used instead).
Could you give an example of a specific critique you have of the data analysis in this piece (if you do have issues with the data analysis)? I find the discussion below on the motivating model quite unconvincing because I read that as a simple hypothesis which was then tested rather than intended to be the final word in how to understand the two parties. I think I'd probably understand what you were getting at better if you could give a specific critique of the data analysis, which is obviously intended to be data analysis rather than fall somewhere on a musing / model / claim spectrum, and that therefore was unambiguously 'terrible'
This seems basically correct. It's fine to muse on something where you have little idea about the theoretical framework, but it rarely produces excellent and sharp analysis, as you will spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel, and usually not a very good wheel (although perhaps you can come up with some feature that people who knew the wheel already haven't considered). This is amateurism in both the good and the bad sense of the word.
Although I would say read Nate Silver rather than Matt Yglesias for this particular issue. He's an actual expert.
I would be very interested in someone naming the best classical composer via streaming data and computer analysis (well, more the later than the former.) And there are music theorists/music cognition researchers who attempt to figure out which tempos, rhythms, and chords are "objectively" best from an amateur and expert standpoint. It's not the end-all-be-all on "taste," but there are some interesting and consistent findings.
There’s a lot of bizarre stuff going on here that (I claim) ultimately will have a lot to do with societal narratives and not just polling data.
There are more people than ever saying “the two-party system is rigged; it’s a perpetual outrage cycle all designed to keep the same people in power!” And they have a point.
Then there are people pointing out the radicalization on both sides…especially (insert side here)! And they have a point.
Andrew Yang has a plan to use math to unite us all, right and left alike. He is more pro-abortion than a median of the country, and more pro-gay than ANYONE ten years ago. He is….right-coded for some reason.
Meanwhile, your acquaintances from college who called themselves fiscally conservative (aka, anti-populist, I guess?) but socially liberal are now Barstool conservatives who love Joe Rogan and political incorrectness and are anti-elite, very self-consciously.
Meanwhile, Democrats are suddenly the war-hawks these past months? Even the squad? Some say?
Some of this can be sorted out by ignoring the distorted narratives social media can provide, focusing on data, etc. But those narratives can become reality—the two-way street between (social) media and political reality has never been stronger or more obvious. (Paging Dr. Baudrillard)
So. It’s weird.
(The solution, of course, is for Scott to rethink his criticisms of MacIntyre and pick up a copy of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity.)
In response to your second parenthetical paragraph, I don't think there's any right-wing equivalent these days, but I think there was, as recently as the Bush administration.
In 2003, if you had certain types of (in retrospect, sensible) anti-war opinions you were anti-American, you didn't Support The Troops, you were in favour of Letting The Terrorists Win. And of course, you were With Us Or Against Us.
The example I recall was the Dixie Chicks. Not exactly a political expulsion, but they pretty much lost their careers by being against the war, because most of their supporters code Red Tribe/Conservative/Republican. Both parties were so pro war that there weren't a lot of political dissenters.
Dixie Chick's were especially *unwise* because they dissed the USA publicly at an international event. Stateside, an antiwar statement (around, perhaps, playing their *phenomenal* 'Travelin Soldier') would have gotten blowback but also support on the grounds that 'free country, man' is still a guiding principle. But their remarks were overwhelming political and their venue was seen as cowardly and traitorous.
People who sent them death threats were wrong, which should not have to be said but, ya know, this freaking era.
I'd say that the main assymetry these days is that the left has narratives at all, which aren't obviously about the other side, and the right doesn't, which consigns it to being barren, reactive and resentful. My pet theory is that this has to do with the different trajectories of the prominent extreme leftist and rightist ideologies of the last centruy, that is, fascism and communism. Whereas fascism's reputation got so thoroughly destroyed that the intellectual right doesn't dare coming anywhere near it, the left has managed to rehabilitate much of the communist agenda and repackage it as progressivism.
As recently as a year ago, the Democratic Socialists of America, which has some high-profile members in congress, had eliminating third-party ownership of firms on their platform. They wanted companies to be 100% employee owned or government owned, or some combination of the two. When I look on their website today, I can't find that exact language. They still want to "end capitalism" but are less explicit about what that means.
For the first, how about requiring government approval before you drill for oil or build a pipeline on private property? For the second, how about government subsidies for one form of energy generation but not another? Both of these fall well short of the Communist ideal, but they are in the same direction, and since the *arguments* for them are familiar collectivist arguments, with which Lenin would be pretty comfortable (just not going far enough), people are not unreasonably suspicious.
It might be different if the progressives had this long history of having a firm stopping point, where you might hear "no, no, this is going too far, we can't freaking legally *require* everyone to buy health insurance of a certain type we specify, because that would be interfering deeply within the rights of the average joe to do whatever the hell he wants with his earnings...sorry, the public benefit will have to get along without this one."
I mean, show me *any* collectivist proposal that was ever rejected by the American left as going too far, as interfering with individual liberty too much. They are certainily routinely rejected as "we can't get the God-damned other side to vote with us on this one," and sometimes because they would cost too much, but I've yet to hear of one defeated on the grounds of some hypothetical devotion to individual liberty and rights, nevermind the good of the many.
> Meanwhile, your acquaintances from college who called themselves fiscally conservative (aka, anti-populist, I guess?) but socially liberal are now Barstool conservatives who love Joe Rogan and political incorrectness and are anti-elite, very self-consciously.
Where is the weird in that? How many of those folk were pro-political correctness in the nineties and naughties? I certainly wasn't.
Over time I have indeed become more abti-elitist, but that's because the elite culture has changed more than I did.
I think the thing I hate most about this debate is the inbuilt expectation that there is such a thing as a "correct" policy, and both parties should pursue it.
In this case that assumption cashes out in this way: if party X has changed its political positions over the years, then we can be certain that at least some of the time, party X is not correct. Therefore we can't trust party X. Conversely, if a party has never changed its position, then even if we don't know they're right, they're at least consistent.
But what if politics is a conversation, in which people discuss and explore different ideas based on the current situation, without any requirement of eternal correctness, then views changing over time wouldn't be a bad thing.
I mean, this argument can go either way, but I just hate the way it often smuggles in a notion of eternal correctness without acknowledging it. I think this notion twists the debate.
Like the case of the dog that didn't bark in the night, the analysis does not mention the nomination of Donald Trump two times compared to Clinton and Biden.
Trump was an extremely toxic candidate in terms of character and morality compared to either Clinton or Biden, regardless of ideology or policies.
I think who a party nominates for president is telling.
I'm hoping that both parties nominate people of better character and morality in 2024 than someone like Donald Trump.
We use the word “extreme” and “radical” to mean multiple, only usually overlapping, things.
The New Deal was extreme, radical, and popular. So, too, the dissolution of the German monarchy. Etc.
We judge this concept just as much by what came before as what people agree with now. This is most easily accessible outside politics where there are radical engineering solutions or extreme sentences fro criminals and so on.
The other narrative: Biden tried to rig an election, and succeeded. Attempts to investigate fraud in the 2020 election have been stymied by corrupt forces at every turn.
That's the narrative... But we're supposed to be rationalists and we have access to the mark Meadows text messages. Like we know the "massive corruption + stolen election" was always going to brought up if the results were favorable to Trump.
Voter Participation in 2020 and the US population in 2020 were higher than in 2016.
Both the Republican and Democrat got more votes than in 2016. Either Trump 2020 or Biden 2020 would defeat Trump 2016 or Hillary 2016. That's not particularly peculiar.
Bellwether counties are bellwether counties until they aren't. Bill Clinton won Arkansas, Republicans used to be competitive in California.
The bellwether argument isn't a good one. It's basically unfalsifiable. If Biden does better in swing/"bellwether" places then it's "isn't it so convenient that he happened to do better in the exact places where it matters the most?" If he does worse, then it's "isn't it so convenient that he won despite losing the places that are usually predictive?"
More generally, this sort of "Biden won with an unlikely set of circumstances" type logic can even more obviously be used against trump in 2016. You're telling me that trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by more than anyone ever has, while winning the election, because he just so happened to overperform his national showing in the exact amount to win 3 swing states by less than 1% each (and Florida by less than 1.5% to boot)? And in opposition to what the polls said? But trump supporters are fine with all that.
As for winning more votes then losing, I wonder what work "substantially" is doing there, but you can always find a "first" like this. Obama was the first (since the Civil War at least) to do the opposite - get fewer votes than the original election and still win. Bush was (I think?) the first to have his *challenger* do this - get more votes than the previous challenger and still *lose*. I bet you could find a thing like this for Clinton, Reagan, Nixon...
As a rationalist you should also acknowledge that when your voting policy consists of:
1. Mail ballots in envelopes out to a bunch of households.
2. Have drop-boxes setup all around the city in random parts of town where people can just dump completed ballots into.
3. Treat every ballot deposited in those boxes as real and accurate and count it.
4. Get massive dumps of ballots from random people that you have no way to verify and count those slowly for days on end while keeping out poll-watchers.
Don't know if I agree with all of these (e.g. I think the drop boxes are generally for mail-in ballots, not just a loose ballot with no identifying info on it), but focusing on the last part - "fraud is an inevitability". If you mean fraud in the sense of "someone somewhere votes when/where they shouldn't" then I agree, but I think that's true in basically every election, in a country of 330 million people. If you mean fraud in the sense of "massive coordinated effort that changes the outcome" then I don't agree.
But if something like that massive effort existed then it seems to me that the more likely culprit is a failed attempt on the trump side. They're the ones who weirdly outperformed the polls, even after the pollsters adjusted their models to make up for the last time they weirdly outperformed the polls. They're the ones who had the biggest gains in specific concentrated areas, namely many big cities, where voter fraud is allegedly rampant. They're the ones who outperformed in swing states relative to the whole country. They're the ones who otherwise demonstrated a willingness to bend the rules around elections.
As a rationalist you should acknowledge that when your policy consists of:
1. Holding an election on a national scale
You'll know that fraud is an inevitability.
How *much* fraud, is a much more interesting question. But the claim that the fraud is simultaneously large enough to swing elections, but so perfectly hidden as to be immeasurably small, is going to require a bit more support than "It's possible for someone to conduct fraud under this system".
Back in the day when I first found out about LessWrong, I really enjoyed how Eliezer talked about "The Fallacy of Gray". It's sad that now, many rationalists hide all kinds of obviously incorrect nonsense behind this exact fallacy.
You know, if that's the case, he's really incredibly and stupendously incompetent.
I mean, there he is Commander in Chief, the Big Kahuna. At any point in the four long years he was in office, he can order the 101st Airbone out to "provide security" for vote counting, say, or while Congress considers his special "votes for candidates with names that start with T should count double" bill.
More, he has the entire Federal government apparatus at his fingertips. Spies, military force, millions of workers, trillions of dollars, from which no doubt a billion here or there could've been diverted without anyone noticing, the power to appoint whomever the hell he wants to any key position...and in his last year he's in the middle of a pandemic, when voters have *already* shown themselves willing to put up with pretty drastic executive action for the sake of public safety. You'd have to be a complete nimrod to be unable to extend your term in office, Putin style, with all that power, wealth, and opportunity at your command.
If with all this massive power Trump couldn't do as well as a generic ambitious platoon leader in a scruffy Central American state, and has to fall back on sending goofballs with painted faces and antler hats to roam around the Capitol and hoot randomly, without any clear plan or bakcup, or hire washed-up lawyers to babble about the kraken on national TV, and just freaking meekly accept when random state-level courts rule against him -- I mean, what a maroon, it's like Moe, Curly, and Shemp took turns at playing President.
Is that what you really think happened? He genuine wanted to, genuinely tried, but was just unbelievably incompetent about it?
Nonsense. I *am* judging the leader on his actual observable record. I'm *not* the one hypothesizing about what might have happened, if things had gone differently, or what people might have intended without saying so.
I am saying any coup, by definition, successful or no, exhibits signs of an effort to violently overthrow the government. Note the necessary adverb "violently" -- a *nonviolent* overthrow of the government is called "an election".
If you were the ADA trying to persuade a jury that Joe tried to rob a bank, because he demanded that a teller give him some money, asserting he had said money in his account, and the defense observes that (1) Joe did not make any kind of plan to rob the bank, had never cased the place and didn't have a getaway car idling outside when he went in, that (2) Joe had a gun in his pocket but did not take it out or threaten the teller with it, that (3) Joe never actually said "give me the money or else," and that (4) Joe left the bank after the teller told him to piss off, merely shouting epithets on his way out and having had to be told by the security guard to move the fuck along -- then you are not going to get a conviction.
People will very reasonably think you have wildly overcharged, that Joe might be guilty of disorderly conduct and being an asshole, but the clear intent to *rob a bank* -- defined as use force to take money that wasn't his -- is not there.
Trump was certainly an asshole and behaved badly. But planning and trying to execute a coup? A freaking violent overthrow of the US government? You have to be in the grips of some deep ideological trance to buy that one.
Sure, but you'd at least expect some evidence of an *attempt* if that was his serious intention and he wasn't a complete doofus. Where is the damning testimony from military commanders who refused his orders to detain Nancy Pelosi in a secret location? Where are the documents outlining the conspiracy, naming who would lead the squad that broke into the NPR newsroom and forced Cokey Roberts at gunpoint to announce that thankfully Dear Leader would not need to stand for re-election? Where are the legions of operatives paid to infiltrate local boards of election in the 2017-2019 timeframe to try to make sure the votes in 2020 got counted the right way? Surely they can't *all* be loyal enough to take their secrets to the grave.
>You know, if that's the case, he's really incredibly and stupendously incompetent.
The first six words are unnecessary.
Your argument basically amounts to "the only way the 'attempt to overturn an election' narrative makes sense is if we assume that Donald Trump or someone similar was President in 2020, but the thought of Donald Trump being President is completely insane, therefore there was no attempt to overturn an election". And I would have agreed with that argument before 2016, but here we are.
Well, but that's entirely inconsistent with his ability to be elected in the first place. And for that matter, his not being insanely incompetent at being President. He got a lot of judges confirmed, he didn't nuke China, he didn't sign a pact with Russia to invade Ukraine, he was able to get his tax cut passed, et cetera. You or I may or may not have liked his Administration, but it did not go as it would have if someone with an IQ of 75 had the job -- and that's what would be required for someone to genuinely have a desire to ignore the Constitution and stay in office, and yet do nothing whatsoever to accomplish that with the vast power he wielded *as* President.
But, like, Biden also does not seem to be especiaIly competent and yet he was elected.
I thought you guys (I an not an American) have something like "separation of powers" in the Constitution that is supposed to guard against president declaring himself a dictator? If it is so inefective that just about anyone could disable it, in what sense you are more free country than, say, Russia?
Honestly, I am being sarcastic, because you seem totally deranged. Of course Trump tried to overturn an election, whole world watched it with amazement; here is a long wikipedia page about it, with copious citations. But perhaps you think that it is a disinfo operation by Soros or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election
You don’t think impeaching a president over fabricated and obviously ludicrous campaign oppo is extreme? You don’t think spending the entire 2016-2020 period insisting the election was stolen by Russia is extreme?
No, it's not. Many periods in American history have had such periods of political vitriol and peaceful (if angry) struggle. "Extreme" is calling out the Army to arrest your opponents and having them shot extrajudicially. "Extreme" is dissolving the legislature. "Extreme" is Vladimir Putin or Ugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or Augusto Pinochet.
If we mis-use words like "extreme" when conditions are far short of "extreme," the only result, deeply regrettable, is that we desensitize people to those words. Your opponents think, welp I'm going to be called "extreme" no matter *what* I do -- so why bother trying to be restrained? Why bother trying to stay within *any* norms?
Hysterical language can beget the very extremity it supposedly opposed. It should be shunned.
It's also possible - likely even - that plenty of the people who voted for him (especially more sophisticated Republicans) thought he was a complete idiot but trusted that he would lower taxes and that they could tolerate the rest of the nonsense.
Which, if your overriding political issue is taxes, even worked out.
I don't think he was extreme. But extreme cannot be measured by the percent of the vote you get. Politicians in general but Trump especially sell a complete line of BS about what their priorities are to get votes. Nobody voted for a coup. If there was a coup, that would be extreme. Thus being voted for does not mitigate extremism.
And yet, somehow half the country thought Clinton and Biden were "extremely toxic candidates in terms of character and morality compared to Trump", so perhaps your analysis is missing something about reality beyond "My outgroup is evil!"
The fact is, there isn't that much of a difference between Trump/Clinton/Biden in how favorably huge segments of the American public feel about them. Pretending Trump was some huge outlier in unpopularity reveals more about someone's bubble than about reality.
Was Trump more of a deliberate clown, and did he have a different personality/style than the more subdued Clinton or Biden? Absolutely, but that says nothing about "character and morality". Clinton's list of character and morals related scandals (at least as far as the right is concerned) go on for decades and if you're reading the right-leaning press, pointing out Biden's lies, which the WH then has to walk back, is practically a daily occurrence.
There's nobody in that list for whom large segments of the population don't consider them severely dishonest.
I'll just say that Biden's unfavorables have to do with inflation and economic issues mostly relating to the COVID pandemic's effects on international trade than any toxicity, so that's a misleading cite, there. For that matter, I don't think you can make the leap from unfavorability to toxicity. Trump's toxicity and his popularity or lack there of were only weak correlated, at best-indeed, at times his toxicity increased his popularity, IMHO.
Do you think that the people who actually have unfavorable views about Biden would agree that their views are because of the COVID pandemic's effects on international trade, rather than any toxicity on Biden's part? (Definition: the quality of being very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way.)
Wow, you really think Trump was uniquely immoral? You've heard of Bill Clinton, correct? Do I really need to detail all his moral failings, including the multiple rape/sexual assault and corruption allegations? His Presidency wasn't even that long ago, but I don't recall Trump having sex with a 24-year-old intern in the Oval Office, for example.
Trump wasn’t all that sleazier than Clinton or even “bad touch Biden” - he’s just (much) less good, sometimes intentionally so, at being sleazy in the ways that politics have come to accept. He’s less accustomed to the insider etiquette of political sleaze, and being an uncouth up outsider, he has fewer friends to cover for him when he slips.
(1) The abandonment of the ambassador at Benghazi followed by the lies and evasion of responsibility, (2) covering for her husband's sexual assaults, particularly as a candidate but also later -- you don't think she knew about Juanita Broaddrick? Clinton's flights on Epstein's "Lolita Express?" -- and perhaps (3) Whitewater, not so much because it was big, but because had it not been covered up by the good ol' boy network in Arkansas it might have forestalled her husbands higher ambitions, so it was sort of key.
I dispute that. Her knowingly contributing fake data into the Steele Dossier to enable wiretapping of a Presidential candidate definately makes the top 3.
I don't think that Trump was extraordinarily toxic; I mean, yes, his personality was pretty terrible, but he wasn't a demon in the flesh. However, IMO his unexpected electoral victory broke the Democratic party. If he merely won in what people thought would be a close race, I think the Democrats could've handled it. If he pulled off a surprise victory while acting like a run-of-the-mill establishment Republican, they could've handled it. But the combination of Trump being Trump, and him coming out of left field, completely shattered their confidence and forced them to re-evaluate everything about themselves. As the result, the Democratic party retooled all of its systems and put them on the war footing. Their only mission now is to prevent the next Trump; nothing else matters, and anyone who says otherwise is the enemy.
The bigger post 2016 switch was substantial portions of the media (CNN in particular?) becoming way less shy about being openly partisan. Not cancel culture per se, but publicly declaring your political opponents to be despicable liars got more mainstream.
First off, Trump was the incumbent president the second time he was elected. Incumbents basically always win their nomination, and very often win their reelection. I think it’s fair to critique the Republicans for nominating him the first time, but a bit oblivious of political reality to critique them for the second time.
Biden only ever ran once, so he can’t be nominated.
And regardless of how your felt about Hillary and Biden, she wasn’t a strong candidate and imo it was clearly the right move for Dems to go to Biden rather than running her a second time.
I do have one pretty major criticism here - where you look at 'which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans' values, you're just looking at opinion polls on party popularity / popular descriptors used for the parties. This tells you something, obviously, but voters may be essentially expressing: 'I'll still vote for party x' or 'I think party x is still less crazy than party y'. It doesn't mean that parties haven't moved away from voters' core values!
A much better test would be to look (over time) at opinion polls on what policies voters actually support, and see to what degree parties actually offer up these policies or a crazier version. However this might be a whole post in itself!
One issue here is that as I understand it polling on issues is generally pretty unreliable. It's easy to tilt it one way or another based on how you phrase the question, and it's harder to verify the results compared to election polling where you can see if the polls correctly predicted the votes.
I am a bit surprised you say "I think the Wright/Musk meme is clearly about the changing-policy-positions-since-some-starting-time question". I would argue for Musk and similar people, it's much more about the overall ideology represented by these groups (in other words, culture war stuff) rather than any specific policy. Moreover, I think the meme reflects the more extreme of the parties (woke "progressive" is clearly a younger and more left kind of democrat).
sure, but the calculations in this post don't focus on culture-war topic policy. And it's not clear that culture-war policy actually reflects the full scope and intensity of culture-war.
It’s very obviously about what they see and who ats them on Twitter. I don’t have any illusions that Musk, at least, isn’t extremely focused on Twitter politically.
Yeah, if I had to guess what Musk was thinking about when he posted that, it was probably trans people. Some policy involved (i.e. states banning a handful of trans girls from playing sports), but mostly it's a culture war and signaling issue right now.
Trans issues are interesting to me because I’m pretty sure the conservative position is driven by Politics II: The Search For Content. When I was a kid in a very conservative state, they weren’t really controversial. They were seen as unfortunate people with a medical condition or freaks but fundamentally no threat (or place) in broader culture qua trans-ness.
They have now become controversial in a way that’s very odd and not in the Reuters Odd way.
I do think that shift in the Republican curve might be why the perception Democrats have is the way it is. That departure from previous mild leftward trends would feel like a major pivot to the right even if it was in some ways just a return to past tendencies. I can also point you to policies that current Republicans would consider much, much too liberal which Nixon and Reagan championed, like the EPA. So it's not remotely straightforward.
Wikipedia tells me that plurality/FPTP voting (which most of the US uses) is not a Condorcet method, so the Median Voter Theorem won't necessarily hold, will it?
Correct. This is why Approval Voting is the only sane alternative, and why TPTB have fought it and even rarely added the toxic Ranked Choice nonsense into use to poison the well.
Ranked Choice seems fine (assuming it's what I think it is, Single Transferable Vote)? I was under the impression it's one of the many methods that's "as good as possible", not strictly worse than the other good alternatives.
It's definitely, without a doubt, better than FPTP, because that's a very low bar.
STV has two big issues: its opacity, and the sheer size of ballot papers that frequently results (my Senate paper for the Aus federal election a few weeks ago had 79 candidates - 13 ungrouped independents, 8 grouped independents, and varying numbers of candidates from 22 parties). It has a third smaller issue, which is that the tactical-voting situations in STV are much more likely than those in its sister system IRV - I call this smaller mostly because of the opacity preventing people from noticing it.
Not convinced it's worse than Approval, though. IRV I would say is better as long as you're fine with single-winner; Approval has *terrible* tactical voting problems, though not quite as bad as plurality (lol).
Approval Voting is simple: vote for all of the candidates you would be ok with. Period. It leads to maximum group satisfaction.
All of the alternatives like IRV and that includes any "ranking" system, end up super complex, elections become confusing messes, ballots become too complex to fill out with intent, and worse to count. He who counts the votes...
The resistance to using Approval is not about the tactics, it's about those people who would lose power, who make the rules and don't want them to change.
I'm also Australian, and while the various truly unaffiliated independents are too hard to keep track of, the various microparties tend to be pretty clear on what they stand for even if one isn't super politically engaged.
eg. I think the Legalise Cannibis party has a solid chance of winning a seat.
That's not really what I'm getting at. The issue is that when your ballot paper is that physically large and has that many boxes, a substantial percentage of people will refuse to vote fully or switch to donkey vote after some threshold. A decent chunk of votes get exhausted IIRC.
Plurality isn't the problem here IMO because most races tend to have only two realistic candidates. I would point instead at factors like primaries and district boundaries as the main culprits in incentivizing polarization/radicalization among elected officials.
Nonsense. You are looking at the results and saying it's the natural order, instead of an artifact of the system in use.
Go research it, look at the real world examples and realize that the only reason we don't use Approval Voting (which is so small a change that all voting machines would support it now, and people intuitively understand it) is because it would entirely ruin the Current Political Monopoly of Power.
You're preaching to the choir. I think plurality is bad, approval is good, and ranked choice is fine. I'm just saying that in this narrow instance, plurality is far from the biggest problem.
Well, you're kind of preaching to the choir. I tend to blame political inertia rather than a Grand Conspiracy. But you get the point.
It's not paranoid to call it a conspiracy if you've attempted to changed the method and seen how both sides refuse. I've been in the sausage factory, and trust me, inertia isn't what fills the skins.
The thing about plurality is that because of its massive, obvious clone dependence, it enforces a two-party system in practice - and between those two candidates it does, in fact, elect whoever is preferred by a majority.
So you can use a weak version of the MVT to say that *of the two parties* whoever is closest to MV will win.
Ah, true. I guess most voting methods are pretty similar with two cadidates. But I guess the choice of plurality voting itself has negative effects on how well-represented people are in general, even if the median is slightly more represented by one party than the other.
Although - since voting is optional, wouldn't it also be possible that the most radical candidate would inspire the most people to vote?
I mean, yes, it does break down if there are substantial effects from radical voters refusing to vote for moderate-but-preferred candidates (it doesn't break down substantially from people in the middle abstaining, as that is presumably symmetric around the indifference point).
And yes, I agree that plurality prevents a centre party from exploiting a gap between its inevitable two parties - that's why I said "a weak version of the MVT" - and that it allows relatively-easy policy capture. I'm not at all defending plurality outright, just Scott's use of a weak MVT on a plurality system.
But there has to be some such substantial effect, right? Otherwise you'd expect one of the parties to move much closer to the median voter and win all the time. And then the other one would move closer, and so on until their policies are the same. In the current system, I think this still holds (though they might not converge on the median voter, but on some other rank according to the structural advantage). But this is clearly not what we see - their policies are different. Something is pushing the parties' policies away from the median. This has interested me for a while, and I'm not sure what this driving force is. I'm curious if you ideas.
My ideas are:
1) Primaries. There, each candidate has to be close to the median voter of their party's primaries, not to the overall median voter, to win. It's awkward for them to change their positions completely before the general elections ("flip flop"), and so there is a gap in policies.
2) Radical voters not voting for a moderate-but-preferred candidate. If at some point when the two main candidates are too far from your radical position, you vote for neither (instead of the lesser evil, you vote for a third candidate or abstain entirely), then it stops being always optimal for the candidates to move closer to the median voter, and instead they also have to pander to the radicals to get their votes. This means it could be a better rational strategy for radicals too, if they want to affect candidates' policy and not just leave all the influence to the median voter. This is the same if we replace "vote for" with "donate to", where it might be more common.
3) Echo chamber. Party elites, politicians, donors hang out with one another in an echo chamber, and think their preferred policies are everyone's favorites, and so adopt and support them, not noticing that it takes away votes. This is Matt Yglesias's constant point about Democrats.
4) Politics is not a 1-dimensional spectrum. If there are multiple dimensions, and voters vote for the "nearest" candidate to their positions, then there is no longer a median. Though actually I think it's still optimal for the candidates to converge to the same policies.
WRT #2 there are certainly voters that abstain or go third-party, but my guess is that it's mostly either from actual "I don't know who the lesser evil is" (i.e. being near the indifference point - a moderate) or from "mutual personal scumminess" and "sick of politics" things that don't match up well to ideology.
Yeah I agree, it's fair to say the MVT probably holds in the US for the two major parties. There is still a pretty big caveat though, which is that either side may, on average, have moved any given amount towards the edges without changing the median voter. I think Scott kind of addressed this in the part about how rhetoric may have become more extreme.
This question has never really been of great interest to me. Any attempt to answer it is going to need a heap of dubious definitional and methodological assumption. For example, the first interpretation: Saying "oh we've changed the least since 1900" is just kind of silly to my mind as a benchmark. Like, what if you were to set it to 1000 AD? Clearly in the ordinary meaning of extremism positions become extreme over time. Still, good on you for trying tackle these questions.
To my mind the only variant of this question which makes any sense is your least favorite, the second one:
"Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?"
But I don't share some of the assumptions you've used in tackling it. People don't fully understand the political views of politicians. People barely even partially understand the political views of politicians. They just have vague images and impressions. This isn't their fault, politicians deliberately manipulate them. You can forget about the median voter theorem.
The right way to answer the second question would be to:
1. Come up with a battery of policy questions.
2. Establish the be position of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress on those questions.
3. Establish the position of the public on those questions.
4. Work out which groups [Republican politicians, Democratic politicians, voters] are closest.
There's an optional intermediate step where you work out how much voters and politicians care about the different questions, so you don't just weight all policy areas as equal by default, but that sounds fiddly. Best to skip it.
I suggest as a test, compiling:
A) One question on Dovishness v Hawkishness
B) One question on crime
C) One question of welfare
D) One question on unions
E) One question on LGBTQ issues
F) One question on immigration
G) One question on climate change
H) One question on the minimum wage
Best to use specific questions- actual binary policy choices- that nonetheless are broadly reflective of a whole area.
This will tell us, at least roughly, who is actually closer to the voters.
>But I don't share some of the assumptions you've used in tackling it. People don't fully understand the political views of politicians. People barely even partially understand the political views of politicians. They just have vague images and impressions. This isn't their fault, politicians deliberately manipulate them. You can forget about the median voter theorem.
Another, I think more accurate way of phrasing this is that (at least the vast majority of) politicians do not actually HAVE political views. Not really. They adopt the policy positions and messaging that they think will allow them to retain power.
Over time both parties have moved left but the Democrats have moved further left. Obviously the median voter in any prior time period would be considered right wing today. In addition, the median person at any time in human history would be considered right wing today, as would the median person in most countries in the world today.
Well, both parties believe that we should not have race-based slavery, but the Democrats also think we should maybe do affirmative action or reparations too.
Half of the Republicans (so, about 25% of adults) act as badly towards black people as the other 75% lets them. Look at any reaction to news events involving a black person on right wing media/online. Look at disparate impact in hiring/promotion (remember, most people are not acting with animus, but a few are, and that shows up in the statistics). Look at the disparate impact in sentencing between R and D judges. Look at the treatment of agricultural labor. Look at the support given to businesses that would rather close than bargain with a union. Look at the inherent assumptions in the term "Job Creator."
These are all examples where a large number of people are being as close as they can get to chattel slavery without being jailed. The evidence is circumstantial, but it all points to ~1/4 of USA adults preferring race based slavery to the current status quo.
I really don't think this is remotely useful. If you're trolling, fine; if you're not, you need to meet (maybe befriend?) some real-life people from outside of your tribe.
Via activating my brain, I know that prison labor and exploited migrant labor, while both disgusting, are not actually race-based slavery. Also Trump passed the First Step Act and one consequence of stronger border control is reducing the amount of exploited migrant laborers.
That doesn't answer the question. On what grounds do you characterize it as "left"? In your original comment, you say that both parties are against some form of race-based discrimination, but the Democrats want to keep other forms of it. So I'd characterize any move away from racial politics as a rightward shift.
Because the term "left" has a meaning that is not determined by "whatever the Democrats/Republicans happen to be doing at that moment." For the most obvious counterexample, the Republicans and Democrats are generally agreed to have switched left/right at some point, so the Democrats are now the left-wing party and the Republicans are now the right-wing party.
The simple answer as to why race-based slavery is "right wing" is that the meaning of words is decided on collectively, and the sorts of people who say that it's a "left-wing" position are the same as the sort who proclaim that Lenin was actually a right-winger, i.e. a small minority who are generally motivated by a desire to exclude anything bad from their entire half of politics.
If you want a more sophisticated answer, you can look at any of the definitions that broadly align with the normal use of left/right. In moral foundations theory, which is probably best, the primarily/largely conservative half of the moral spectrum are authority, sanctity/purity, and loyalty, which are much easier to square with race-based slavery than care, fairness, or liberty (held by both sides, but the left cares about them almost exclusively, whereas the right tends to balance them).
(Also, this is why "race-based discrimination" doesn't really quite work as an explanation of right/left. If the race-based discrimination is in-group, then it's right wing, but most Democrats, like most Americans, are white (and a bunch of them are Asians, who also don't benefit from affirmative action), so it is not derived from a sense of loyalty but from a sense of fairness. A policy intended to assist specifically white people would, on the other hand, be motivated by in-group loyalty, at least for all plausible near-future Americas.)
Anecdote I know but a telling one: Obama's position on the Border and Gay Marriage from a decade ago would be considered far-right now. But everyone studies their shoes when he talks about the border now cos he's your dad's favourite brother and your mother will slap you in the car if you say anything.
I would say it's perfectly clear that Reagan, let alone Eisenhower, wouldn't have a place in today's Republican party - they would be considered unacceptably liberal.
But if you want examples:
* The Republican party knowingly and deliberately pushes the lie that the 2016 election was stolen.
* The Republican party, once actually a driving force in conservationism, is now actively hostile to environmental policies, and wallows in climate conspiracy theories.
* The president gave a shout-out to actual fascists; few in his part objected.
* Race issues. It's not that they haven't improved there, but they're certainly further to the right of the political middle than they were 75 years ago.
* Abortion. Even Reagan did his best not to talk about it. Now it's perhaps *the* lithmus test for a Republican candidate.
* Health insurance. Since we're talking about the party position compared to the typical voter's position, the Republican party is now *way* to the right of voters, opposing the very popular Affordable Care Act.
Eisenhower spent most of his life in a segregated armed forces and had no trouble with the idea. he presided over a federal government that had no OSHA, no EPA, no medicare, and vastly less generous social security and welfare programs, but did spend 50% of its money and fully 10% of GDP on the military. As a general he ordered america's enemies' cities carpet bombed, and actively embraced doing so with nuclear weapons as president. It was a country where being gay was illegal and that was more comfortable with segregation than women in most workplaces. In other words, he makes ron paul look like bernie sanders.
> The Republican party knowingly and deliberately pushes the lie that the 2016 election was stolen.
I love this typo. It makes my point better than I ever could.
> is now actively hostile to environmental policies, and wallows in climate conspiracy theories.
So, for decades, environmental regulation has expanded and expanded, and you think republicans eventually saying "enough is enough" is moving to the right? again, eisenhower, your supposed liberal, literally didn't have an EPA and saw no reason to create one. So how on earth is this a move left?
> * The president gave a shout-out to actual fascists; few in his part objected.
No, he didn't.
> Race issues. It's not that they haven't improved there, but they're certainly further to the right of the political middle than they were 75 years ago.
Let's put aside you're making my point for me here. Please what units are that scale measured in. be precise.
>* Health insurance. Since we're talking about the party position compared to the typical voter's position,
No, we aren't. we're talking about movement over time. but nice of you to try to move goals posts. really sells the idea that you're acting in good faith.
You don't seem to understand the line of argument here. It isn't that the Republican party hasn't improved on these issue - it's that it has become further to the right, relatively, to the political center, which has moved _more_.
Obviously the Republican party is better on race now than in the 50's - this doesn't mean that it's *also* not further to the right of the voter average than it used to be.
I remember all three of Reagan's campaigns quite well, and I was old enough to vote in both of the successful campaigns, and the idea that he would be utterly out of place in today's Republican Party is complete nonsense.
Specifically, from 1900-1960 both parties were white supremacist parties, and had lots of overlap in members ideologies.
Then the Democratic party decided that they could win more by being the party of Blacks and other minorities. And the Republicans responded by becoming more and more anti-minority as a primary plank (Nixon's Southern Strategy)
Then in 1994, Newt Gingrich threw away the committee system, and made the congressional Republican delegation subordinate to the Republican party. And at some point Mitch McConnel did the same for the Seneta (in both cases, there were a few maverick Republicans, but 90% of the caucas fell in line)
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s conservative Ds and liberal Rs were driven out of office by either primaries, or losing to "the real thing" in the general election, or just attrition, leading to fully coherent parties in congress.
Civil rights legislation was able to pass in the face of opposition from southern Democrats because of Republicans voting with northern Democrats. I don't think it's right to say they had all been white supremacist, rather they just hadn't been willing to fight the southern Dems over it after Reconstruction.
I don't think so - parties are less polarized on race than ten years ago (Trump notably outperformed the last few republican candidates with racial minorities), but Trump is generally considered more polarizing than e.g. Bush.
I'm very impressed with the commentary here-very thoughtful and even-handed.
There are at least two things being conflated here, I think. There is a difference between what political elites and movers and shakers (generally, the electeds, the party apparatchiks, and rich people) think and want, and what the base thinks and wants.
I tend to focus more on the elites. In that realm, I'd be interested in what people see on the left, if anything, that is the equivalent of the January 6 insurrection which now seems to have the support or connivance of nearly all Republicans in Congress, or of Representatives MT Greene or Boebert, or the national effort to convince people that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. Or the resistance to common-sense gun control measures like requirements for training, age over 21, etc.
I don't see it, but that may be my blinders. But if I'm not wearing blinders, then that looks like pretty clear evidence that the Republicans have become much more extreme than the Democrats.
The Democrats lied for 5 years about Russiagate and claimed Russia stole the election for Trump. They tried two impeachments, arrested Trump cabinet officials and are still arresting officials with no involvement in Jan 6. There were national riots fueled by BLM and Antifa.
The first sentence is not true about Democratic elites. The impeachments were not extreme IMHO, but were rather responses to documented bad acts by Trump. The national riots had nothing to do with Democratic elites.
They were certainly a break with precedent. They were the first time impeachment of a President was used as political censure rather than a serious attempt at removing a President. And if you think that isn't true: Both times there was insufficient support in the Senate to convict and Pelosi acknowledged as much in the post-vote interviews.
No, the Republicans had a majority in the Senate and Clinton was only saved by defecting Republicans. Which makes it look more like previous impeachment trials than Trump's.
I'll see if I can dig up the links. I saw it on the news at the time. She was directly asked about the fact the Senate had basically already said it would acquit. And she said she did it because it made him impeached and he'd be impeached forever even if he was let off.
So yes, a huge break in precedent by the Democrats.
Yes, Democrats claimed that Russia helped Trump win the election, but Hillary *conceded* immediately after losing in 2016. There was no concerted movement by *elected Democratic officials* to overturn Trump's election in 2016.
Also, while there were, lamentably, BLM and Antifa riots, how many Democratic politicians (as opposed to ultra-lefty activists and commenters on Twitter) supported them? A small handful of far left Congresspeople, yes, but Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, etc. never supported riots. In contrast, hardly anyone in the Republican party dared to stand up to Trump over January 6. Liz Cheney did, and her Republican colleagues in Congress stripped her of her leadership position for it.
True, but there's a lot of false inequivalence going on too.
A lot of "Sure, party A has done some bad things but they're not as bad as party B because party A has never done this one incredibly specific bad thing". Which is probably true if you want to choose your incredibly specific bad thing carefully enough, but for any reasonably broad reference class I think you'll find that there's a matching misdeed for any other misdeed you might care to name.
> but Hillary *conceded* immediately after losing in 2016. There was no concerted movement by *elected Democratic officials* to overturn Trump's election in 2016.
She conceded, then spent years saying the election was stolen, that trump was illegitimate, and got the FBI to gin up years of fake investigation of trump. that's far worse than anything trump did.
> Pelosi, Schumer, etc. never supported riots
the current VP literally raised money to bail them out of jail.
More generally, there's the issue that if you're already winning, you don't need or want to take big risks, and there's a broad sense in the West that the "left" is winning. So the excesses of SJ, at the elite level, look more like gradually-constricting totalitarianism than revolution.
1. That’s Australia. Shall we now talk about Hungary, where American far-righters actually go to support Irban’s regime? Not clear where any of that gets us in talking about the US.
2. The Aussie Greens are clearly not mainstream.
3. The linked doc doesn’t talk about banning parties, as far as I could tell.
4. What’s your basis for “the Left is winning? Where specifically is the Left winning, and on what issues?
I'm going to respond to this, and then to nothing else from you, because your comments don't add value. Here's why:
1. I was clearly saying that the Australian example is inapt on this point, not universally. That's abundantly clear; you distorted it. I'm not going to engage with people who distort my positions-life is too short.
2. That's one issue; I asked about issues. And how you can say the left is winning in the face of the anti-trans legislation in place like Texas is beyond me.
I'm done with you. Go have a good life somewhere else.
It is entirely good-faith. I'm refusing to engage with answers which are non-responsive to points I make. Answers which do not respond to points I make are not "fair" under any reasonable definition I'm familiar with. What about them seems fair to you, and what about what I'm saying seems to be lacking good-faith?
#1: I am Australian and have more knowledge about Australia than I do about the US. I did note the attenuated relevance; I say "attenuated" because the Anglosphere is increasingly getting politically melted together by the Internet, and Oz/US weren't especially far apart to begin with.
#2: They win HoR seats, as I said - that is, there are multiple single-winner electorates in which they are the outright-preferred party (specifically, inner-city seats inside the "latte line"). As also noted, they got 12% of the vote nationwide. This party is not a little deal.
#3: The code of conduct section:
"The Greens will establish a code of conduct for Members of Parliament to ensure that they do not use their public office and parliament to condone far right extremism or normalise racism. It would bind Members to recognise the value and contribution of First Nations people, to recognise and value diversity and to reject discriminatory or exclusionary statements."
This requirement is not compatible with the policies of the "far-right" One Nation Party and United Australia Party, so if this were to happen their Senators would be ejected from Parliament for failing to follow the code of conduct. This is so obvious a consequence that one can reasonably assume it's the intention of the Greens' policy. I spoke with precision; the parties themselves wouldn't be banned, but they'd be banned from sitting in Parliament (and thus having any power).
Also, the "hate speech" section:
"Politicians and prominent public figures in Australia often engage in racist hate speech that has gone from dog whistling to fanning the flames of racial conflict. There is currently no criminal prohibition of hate speech at the federal level.
[...]
The Australian Greens will address this by adding hate speech to the Criminal Code Act and legislate that where an offence is motivated by hate or prejudice against a particular group, the courts consider that an aggravating circumstance when sentencing."
In context, this raises a spectre of "ONP and UAP can't campaign on their policies without risk of being arrested".
#4: Um. 20 years ago gay marriage was only barely thinkable, transsexualism was a footnote with a long series of psychiatric assessments required and near-zero public awareness, and the range of opinions you could voice without social penalty extended a long way further conservative than it does now. Those are the blatantly-obvious ones; feminism and racial issues are somewhat more of a mixed bag.
Do note that I put the term "left" in scare quotes, as this is mostly centred around the cultural axis rather than the economic one.
I don't think you can really use gun control here - Republicans have historically been pretty consistent on it, and it's not hard to find issues where Democrats (or both parties) are equally dumb (I have my own opinions on what counts as dumb, which I'm guessing aren't universal - but then, neither is gun control). And republicans are at least correct in thinking that if they concede some gun control measures democrats will push for more.
My read of the illegal breakin parts of Jan 6 (because there was a more huge demonstration/protest going on) is that it was not significantly different from the riotous protests in 2016, and the elite response to Trump, from manufacturing the Russian interference through covering up evidence of Bidens corruption (Hunters laptop) constitute just as worrying a trend, esp with the backdrop of the BLM riots, the government overreach on pandemic controls, and the ongoing cheering on of Stacy Abrams.
I also likely completely disagree with you on the meme of 'commonsense gun control' and whether or not it's unreasonable to expect young men to not shoot children if they have the chance, but that's a different conversation.
I'm confused about whether he's saying it is or isn't reasonable to expect young men not to shoot children. It's reasonable to expect it from most of them, and most of them don't! But a sample size of tens of millions will have some crazy people.
Yes. It is reasonable to expect that young men won't shoot children. And it is unreasonable to wholesale curtail the rights of the millions minus X on account of X crazy people.
Freddie DeBoer had a great article not to long back that discussed only the Democratic side of things - basically saying that the media apparatuses and public faces of the party are extremely out of touch with average America while the policy-makers themselves continue to be ineffectual and moderate, either because they can't or because they won't pass more bold legislation.
If I'm being my usual biased self, I think the extremism is a reaction to a system that has completely broken down. If one party manages to hold every branch of government, they can get through one spending or tax bill a year. That's a rare confluence and is still always going to be a disappointment.
From a game theory perspective, the best play for opposition is to block all legislation, so that they can blame all problems on majority inaction. And the best play for the majority is always going to be to *not* pass legislation as long as they can tell their base it's the other guy's fault it didn't pass. Voters naturally respond by saying "these bozos aren't doing anything, we need more extreme action." And then that polarization makes it even harder to pass stuff, and a vicious cycle ensues.
I'd say this is a both sides thing, but Republicans get off a little easier because their priorities are better aligned - nobody in their base objects to a tax cut. Democrats have to use their one bite at the apple to fix the whole world.
But they don't block all legislation. Congress passes lots of bills. Hundreds of billions in bipartisan spending. It's just that they prevent anything vaguely controversial from getting through.
I'd argue that the bar for "vaguely controversial" has become so high that Congress is essentially non-functional. In 2021 there were 130 laws passed, most of which were laws making minor adjustments to existing laws, dedicating monuments, and otherwise doing things that neither party's base would consider to be pursuing solutions to the country's problems. And 2021 was a fairly good year for bipartisanship, since we did have a couple bipartisan spending bills (the infrastructure bill and covid relief extension), and both did eventually pass.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that hundreds of billions in bipartisan spending get passed yearly, but mostly because that strikes me as a number that only sounds large because of denominator blindness. No large scale social programs are getting created (or, if that's not your thing, no large scale social programs are getting repealed). We may fry some small fish here and there still, but mostly we're in stasis. That could be that most people are okay with the status quo or it could be dysfunction. I haven't done a deep dive on the data, but it doesn't seem to me like most people are okay with the status quo.
> I'd argue that the bar for "vaguely controversial" has become so high that Congress is essentially non-functional.
In my experience this is mostly a position by people who have policy preferences that are either not in a majority or just a slight majority. And are frustrated they aren't able to get their policy preferences enacted. The real objection is usually not actually "nothing is getting done" because I can then point to lots of things getting done (as you concede). The issue is that it's "stasis" which usually means "I can't get the reforms I want done."
I'm assuming you're a Democrat. Would you really feel better if Republicans took a trifecta and abolished the filibuster and lowered taxes, abolished almost all welfare, banned abortion nationally, repealed all gun laws, and abolished every public sector union? Because that would certainly not be stasis. But I have the sneaking suspicion most Democrats would suddenly start defending the filibuster.
If there is a principled case for it I would be interested in hearing it. The best I can think of is that government and policy stability is bad for some reason. Because lowering the bar to getting things done primarily allows small majorities to seesaw back and forth.
I am a Democrat, but just barely, and, tbh, one of the few people who doesn't think the status quo is so bad. And I support abolishing the filibuster.
I don't support any of the Republican policies that you mention, but I do support a public debate based on data, instead of vague ideas of what it would look like if a party got to do any of the things in their platform. I support a world where people pass/repeal laws, those acts either help or hurt people, and then that influences elections. I think that would both lower the temperature, and lead to better policy, because we could actually see what policies work and which don't.
The U.S. is a vetocracy by design. There's good historical reason for that, but those reasons no longer apply to the way either party treats the federal government. It's time to have a government that responds to the people occasionally, even if I personally think "the people" often get it wrong.
Do I support *some* protections against wholesale implementation of policy that up to 49% of the country might disagree with? Sure. But we're way way past that.
I continue to dispute the claim that "lots of things" are getting done. The Democrats hold both chambers of the House and Senate and have not managed to implement even part of their agenda. Likewise, Trump made a lot of noise but other than a tax cut, the Republicans passed no major legislation during his tenure. Most presidents have historically kept 80-90% of their campaign promises, recent presidents are more like 20-30%. And that's not from lack of trying, it's because fewer laws are being passed, and those laws are smaller in scope.
> Do I support *some* protections against wholesale implementation of policy that up to 49% of the country might disagree with? Sure. But we're way way past that.
What specific protections would you want? How would you defend them when whichever side in the majority is blocked by them? What's the principled distinction to draw it at (say) 55 Senators and not 60?
> The Democrats hold both chambers of the House and Senate and have not managed to implement even part of their agenda.
The Democrats only hold both by extremely thin margins. The issue is that you need almost every single Democrat to agree and the truth is that Joe Manchin and Kamala Harris don't actually agree on a lot of things. Build Back Better fell apart because of internal Democratic politics, not because of Republicans. I mean, yes, theoretically Republicans could have saved the Democrats. But if the Democrats had actually voted in lockstep it would have gotten through.
The last time Democrats had like 55-60 votes we got the AMA which was a major piece of legislation.
In 2010. I agree that building back better failed due to internal politics. Because maintaining your rhetorical position is better in modern politics than compromising with members of your own party to pass laws. Which was my whole point.
But as for protections: big fan of the executive veto and *some* level of judicial review.
Look, dude, you're waiting on an opponent who isn't going to show up. I'm not a rabid partisan. I don't think we should pass massive, sweeping legislation that costs a fortune and dramatically changes our society.
But it's completely predictable that if a party can win majorities in both houses of Congress, win the presidency, and still only pass one major policy initiative every two decades, people are going to get frustrated, they're going to get turned off from incrementalism, and they're going to gravitate towards radicals. That's why it's important to find a reasonable balance between protecting the minority party and allowing the majority to do some stuff, whichever party the majority happens to be. And in the process, we get concrete data on whether policy proposals actually work. Instead of arguing about the awful things that *would* happen if one or the other party managed to pass another part of its platform in like 2040 or whatever.
Wouldn't the first question be massively confounded by "what's legislatively possible?"
Like, presumably gay people in the 1900s wanted to get married too. They might have thought it was an impossible pipe dream in a country where you could go to jail for sodomy, but if you asked them about their ideal pipe-dream society they would probably say something along the lines of "I would like to live openly with my partner with equivalent rights to a heterosexual couple," just like a modern proponent of gay marriage would. Is it really accurate to say that gay people in 2022 are "more extreme" than gay people in 1900, just because the people in 2022 have enough support to achieve that goal and the people in 1900 don't?
There's a great (in some horrifying sense of the word) editorial piece in Buzzfeed News I read a couple years ago arguing that it's moderate milquetoast neoliberalism of the highest order to support gay marriage, to the point where the result of Obergefell v Hodges was largely to set back the gay community. The argument was similar to what Unsigned Integer mentions: marriage as an institution is fundamentally heterosexual in origin, therefore carries establishment connotations, and is therefore a flawed ideal.
Found it; it's even worse than I remembered. The conceit is the Buttigieg 2020 campaign, and the continuous lecturing anti-marriage thread throughout is in service of a central argument casting Pete Buttigieg as not really gay, because he doesn't identify as "a queer leftist." Not allowed to be truly LGBT, because the LGBT in-group rejects the "conservative-approved nuclear family."
Also, there would be a lot more opposition to marriage as an ideal in the queer community, but the AIDS epidemic both strongly selected for the most monogamous male homosexuals and forced nearly everyone to step back from the free love Era.
In part, though, your question answers itself. Cruising and hookup culture were not 'part' of gay culture, they *were* gay culture, in an Era less permissive on the heterosexual side. Times have changed.
So, in other words, “ the AIDS epidemic both strongly selected for the most monogamous male homosexuals and forced nearly everyone to step back from the free love Era” is just your own opinion, ungrounded in facts?
I don’t know that gay people in the 1900s generally considered themselves defective. IIRC Havelock Ellis’s case studies give a different picture - most gay people had no wish fo become straight, and resented societal persecution. And there are a few writings from the 19th century and early 20th that contain basically modern understandings of the gay rights problem, and even mention the idea of gay marriage in passing.
I suspect that the idea of gay marriage has always been somewhat popular among “normie” gays, even when it was opposed by an activist class.
The loudest, most vocal LGB activists (I'm specifically not including the TQIA+, since those are separate issues) have definitely moved on from "we want to live openly with our partners with equivalent rights to het couples" to "we demand equal representation in mainstream culture (movies, TV, music, advertising) to het couples" and "we demand that anybody who expresses disapproval of our lifestyle be ostracized from polite society", which seems "more extreme" to the ~90% of the rest of the population that is straight.
Why the discomfort with being disgustingly “both-sides-ist”. I think these two sides are quite clearly "crazy" in their messaging, in the sense that they both consistently advance wildly false messages.
Really appreciate the way Scott incorporated feedback. The conclusions didn't shift from the first draft (IE, democrats are moving left, conservatives aren't really moving right), but the context clarifies what that actually MEANS. Your second graphic is exactly on point: if the original image had the conservative saying "death to all sodomites" in every panel, it suddenly becomes a lot less effective as a "dunk" on "extreme" "woke liberals".
Also, this line is key to the whole thing: "from the point of a 1990s Democrat who expected both parties to keep moving left at the same rate forever, it must look like Republicans have suddenly and unilaterally defected from this happy equilibrium." From my (far left) perspective, the utility of the conservative position was that they prevented truly stupid policies from going too far, albeit at the cost of occasionally squelching good policies by accident. This is probably a pretty condescending way of describing conservatives (IE, they are really just very cautious liberals), but at this point we've all been drifting "left" for 200+ years, so perhaps they can forgive my presumption that we shared a common cause.
I know Scott's been careful with politically sensitive content, but this kind of analysis is genuinely great, as was the discussion.
> I may not be as wise as Matt Yglesias, but I am wise enough not to declare one side the winner without an ironclad dataset to back me up. I can’t think of a sufficiently good one that doesn’t feel cherry-picked.
This study asks a bunch of questions which seem to be fairly close to "how dumb and goddamn crazy are you," including "Do you ever think: we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of [Opposing party] in the public today just died?" (20% Dem, 15% Rep) and "If [Opposing party] are going to behave badly, they should be treated like animals." (about 15% Dem, 20% Rep), and "Many [Opposing party] lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals." (About the same between parties, maybe 1% leads for Republicans.) and "What if [Opposing party] win the 2020 presidential election? How much do you feel violence would be justified then?" (18% Dem, 14% Rep).
My overall vibe from looking at the included data: maybe a marginal victory for Rs, but neither side is looking particularly better than the other. Like, maybe the Rs are 10% less crazy, as a whole, but not much more than that.
In short, people think that their opponents dehumanize them far more than their opponents actually do, on both sides of the aisle, but that doesn't stop them from using this to then turn around justify dehumanizing their opponents for real. In more depth:
"Abstract:
The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for subverting democratic norms to hurt the opposing party..."
Given the sample size and the variance between the two samples, I don't think any of these are significantly different across the parties given the limited data set.
Hardly encouraging data, though there's also the issue of polls as attire.
I look at 2 examples of party extremism, 'abolish police', and '2020 election was stolen'. one party seems to have a slightly better immune response to crazy.
Almost 70 %of democrats believed vote totals were changed by Russia in the 2016 election according to a yougov poll. Not changed as in "Russian propaganda convinced people to vote for Trump using stolen emails or falsehoods" but "Russia changed actual vote totals". There's no evidence that happened. Is that equivalent?
That’s not really comparable. Russia targeting the 2016 election was a major story and it united with general distrust of voting machines.
The 2020 narrative of Biden stealing the election didn’t have any basis in current events. It was just Trump saying that and Republicans repeating it as a sign of loyalty.
Though to your point "people just interpret questions about election validity with whether they liked the result", that number did drop 20 points (84 -> 65) after the election.
What do you mean by conjunctive fallacy here? The poll was about a single event (Russia changed vote totals). What other event is "in conjunction" to cause this fallacy?
i would not be suprised if event 1 polled lower than event 2.
but the larger effect is probably from 'tampering'. the poll should have asked 'succesfully changed vote totals'. otherwise, some may interpret it strictly to mean 'change vote totals', others may think it means an attempt to change totals, and others may just read it as 'meddling'.
Hasson's follow up post is also quite amusing
<quote>Imagine if two years into Hillary's presidency, 2/3 of Republicans thought she won because the Chinese tampered with voting tallies, despite no evidence whatsoever of China tampering with voting tallies. Journo Twitter would be apoplectic</quote>
Shouldn’t it drop? It’s an outlier election where someone who was massively unpopular, lacking a political career, possessing little backing, and hated by their own party won.
In any case this is not a policy position in the same way as "2020 election was stolen and Congress should refuse / should have refused to certify the election result."
It's also not as destabilizating to the country to say "foreign interference occurred and we need to beef up election security" vs "the other party schemed to rig the election (we can be sure of this because our party leader said it) so we must throw out the results and maybe* overthrow the other party by force." [* by which I mean that this is a fringe position but one with a clear base of support]
Unfortunately the link to the poll is dead so we can't see how it was asked or if they're including both democrats who strongly believe and only somewhat believe. Would you agree that the majority of democrats falsely believed that Russia changed vote totals?
Do you think many people believe that the election was illegitimate, but that Congress should certify the fraudulent results? That'd be odd. In the absence of any polls asking about whether to certify results, it's reasonable to conclude that people who believed that vote counts were illegitimate don't think they should be certified.
Regardless of whether voters supported refusing to certify the election, 11 members of congress(including mine) decided to:
There's not really a good way to measure "destabilization" but I'd consider accusing a rival party of rigging an election through colluding with a foreign power to be as destabilizing as accusing a rival party of rigging an election through less specific methods.
I don't recall the 2016 story as "Russia changed vote totals" but as a broad and overblown meme that "Russia interfered" plus a meme that "Trump colluded" (which I never bought). I remember a trove of DNC emails (but not RNC emails) being released, I remember... something about Facebook Ads and Russian trolls? I don't remember "Russia hacked voting machines" or whatever the allegation was, but apparently 52% of Democrats thought so. Not sure if that's a representative sample either; I didn't bring up this poll, I merely fact-checked it.
> reasonable to conclude that people who believed that vote counts were illegitimate don't think they should be certified
fair enough, the correlation should be strong anyway.
I think the ambiguity of phrases like "hacked the election" and some news stories about the possibility could lead 50-70% of Democrats to think votes were changed.
yes, that was the point, which immune response is better. abolish got support in the 40s for about a month before crashing. Most of these ideas are not that popular. There is media and twitter capture, and many people are deathly afraid of opposing them, so they are problems...but the voters don't support them by majority. A loud 40% can do some damage in our election system. But Ds still need to convince senators from West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, and Arizona to pass a bill. And they see what happens in i.e. the Virginia Governor race when they get too stupid.
"Defund the police" and "abolish police" are drastically different - a tiny, tiny minority of leftists (who mostly hate Democrats and don't identify as such) want to abolish the police, while a merely small minority of Democrats want to "defund the police" meaning divert money away from police budgets toward social programs.
The existence of the term doesn't equate to it having any traction whatsoever in government. The police haven't been defunded outside of a very few locales, let alone abolished, and no Dems in Congress are trying to do anything like abolishing police. You can't attribute something to a political party just because non-politicians who are in the same general political wing as them advocate for it. That same logic would let you levy all manner of unfair attacks at the GOP for the things right-wing extremists say.
<quote>You can't attribute something to a political party just because non-politicians who are in the same general political wing as them advocate for it.</quote>
Perhaps it is not fair, but this is what the average voter will do when the party or its affiliates do not push back against it enough.
It gets no traction in government because even in progressive cities, it loses at the ballot box.
And I wouldn't say its all 'non-politicians', the squad have certainly danced around the topic
As an affiliate of the Democratic Party I say that “defund the police” is one of the stupidest fucking ideas ever attached to the party.
I could do the that with Caps Lock on if would aid in distancing us from that idea, but that would make it look like I’m shouting and people from Minnesota are too polite for that.
Really, I read it in passing a couple times but I was dealing with the rioting following George Floyd’s death and still wiping my mail with isopropyl alcohol during that period and I missed the super glue, epoxy resin attachment of the idea to the Democratic mainstream.
Did Tucker Carlson or that gay looking women with the short dark hair and the eyebrows on MSNBC have something to do with this?
I don’t watch cable news. Come to think of it I’m not on any social media either. Maybe that’s where it came from.
In case that's paywalled for you, the key statement is "The [Los Angeles] City Council cut the LAPD by $150 million in July, after massive protests following Floyd's death, pledging to put the proceeds into disenfranchised communities. Council members quickly set aside $60 milliion[1], using much of those funds to balance the budget, leaving about $89 million for various programs."
Now it's possible you consider Los Angeles some kind of weird little backwater, although its the 2nd largest city in the US, 1 out of 4 Californians live in LA County, and indeed 1 out of every 33 Americans.
Or maybe you consider $150 million pocket change or something. But the consequences are quite measureable:
"Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called Wednesday for an 8.5% increase in the Police Department’s operating budget, providing a major boost to overtime pay while also seeking to fill hundreds of vacant positions....would increase the Los Angeles Police Department' operating budget by $149 milion...Reaching that target may be a heavy lift. The LAPD has been steadily losing officers due to retirement and resignations..."
"The push for more money at the LAPD could easily become an issue in the June 7 primary city election...Los Angeles had 397 homicides last year — the most since 2006..."
So to summarize, around here, the second largest metropolitan area in the entire United States: (1) there sure was a significant defunding of the police, (2) it led to bad outcomes, sharply rising crime, including murders, and (3) voters are really pissed off about that, and even in deeply Democratic LA County those who were previously all in favor of "defund the police" are realizing, sphincters clenched, that The People are coming for them and they are not happy, not happy at all. Hence a lot of backpedaling, denial of the past[2], saying it was all just fringe-talk that got out of hand, nobody really meant it, nosirree bob...
I doubt anyone will be fooled.
--------------------
[1] I left this sentence in the quote, because I just love the cynical opportunism in the City Council using about 1/3 of what they cut to shovel into their general spending, only reserving 2/3 for the stated purpose of community services.
So, following the logic, a 7.x% cut in police spending led to massive increases in crime, during a period in which crime has spiked across the entire US. Now that they're getting an 8.5% increase to their highest funding ever, we should expect crime in LA, over the next few years, to fall to the lowest levels ever.
It's a useful example, for sure, but many cities and towns that *didn't* cut their police budgets also saw an increase in homicides.
Reading your articles, what stands out to me is your point [1] (defund the police advocates aren't asking for more stump removal!) as well as what defund the police advocates said about the City Council's decision... Quite negative.
What I'm really interested to see is what happens once LA's highest-ever anti-homelessness budget kicks in. IMO that will test "defund" principles more than single-digit-%age cuts to police budgets amidst a national wave of homicides. If it doesn't work... That'll be informative.
Will it? You're telling me that if an x% rise in spending on homeless spending changes the homeless population, you'll believe there's a correlation, but when there's already a significant increase in violent crime following a y% cut in police spending...why, that might mean anything! Could be pure coincidence!
That tells me all I need to know about your intellectual integrity on this point. You will cherish the evidence that supports your preferred narrative, and discard that which does not.
I’d expect ideological purity as a response to extremism in the other party. Much easier to vote in unison if the proposed legislation is so far away from the center that legislators across districts feel they can vote in the same direction without getting voted out.
A version of this conversation has been going on in the NRx for quite some time now. In the mainstream of society (politics, law, the academy, entertainment) the rhetoric is controlled by the left. Even their chosen name "progressive" makes it so their policies are seen by pretty much everyone as part of a long arc of moral progress. We are told that they, and their ideas will be on the "right side of history." This means moving leftward is a foregone conclusion, by both sides. It is why, for example, whenever we elect "the first transgendered furbaby to mayor of a city of over 200,000" the resounding chorus from both sides is "there is still so much work to be done." If everyone agrees to that proposition, I wonder "what does the end state look like? How will we know when we have arrived? Can it be achieved without massive reeducation, coercion, confiscation and even mass death?"
What happens to me if I DON'T put a rainbow sticker in my business window? I don't hate anyone, I am just indifferent to your cause.
The right, spineless and really, really wanting to be part of the cool crowd, follows these rules of polite society, thereby putting themselves at a severe disadvantage because they are conceding from the very start what is OK and not OK to say. This is like letting the enemy on a battlefield determine the rules of engagement before the fighting starts.
It is also why, meaningless words like "racist" are so effective at shutting down conversations. There is a deep, sophisticated continuum of positions on race/ethnicity, but you would never know that if you were an alien who landed here and only had the mainstream as your source of information. There are only "racists" and everyone else.
As a DOD contractor, I was subjected last year to the "extremism stand down day" which was a day of propaganda designed to chill any conversations about anything interesting or substantial. Apparently, the Biden DODs definition of "extremist" is "anyone who takes their oath to the constitution seriously." Since I am a retired army major, and I fit that description, I have to shut up or risk being labeled an extremist.
On the other hand, the 2A was written when the most powerful weapon on earth was an 8" ball hurled from a cannon that could knock over a wall. I am not an idiot. Of course, I wish to "progress." But I am not interested in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Representative, constitutional republicanism preserved freedom for a very long time.
It doesn't hurt that I am only one generation away from true oppression. My father was imprisoned and tortured for his wrong think before he escaped communism.
Its also important to think about this from an almost space-time continuum perspective. There is no place on the timeline of history, (dating back to way before even the enlightenment if you want) that does not wind us up right back here. Its kind of how the nature of time and existence works. So the polls about rewinding to some previous policy placeholder history point are silly.
And so, under those circumstances, the republicans operate as a spoonfull of sugar that helps the medicine of leftist "progress" go down. They are the pretend opposition, designed to give the slow kids time to catch up. But the point of an institution, if nothing else is to stay the same--to propel whatever time-honored values it was founded on into the future by way of traditions and customs, etc. This applies to marriage, the church, the Boy Scouts or whatever.
All of this is why when marrying a wheelbarrow becomes a thing, the republicans will be saying "we must preserve marriage for gays and straights only!! As we have always done!" It's also the reason they must start any conversation about (race/women/gays whatever) with "you know I have a lot of black friends, so I am not a racist." Its the key to unlocking access to the discussion.
None of this is an accident. It is leftist ideologues who gave us ideas with massive-death causing notions such as "year zero" (nothing behind us, everything in front of us).
The distance from the median voter position is also not particularly interesting to me. It makes an assumption about central tendency that is provably false.
I suppose a standard argument for NRx deserves the standard response:
Things dont always pull left,if you don't ignore economics. We live in a world where markets reign, huge corporations reign, and the richest have personal spaceships. The traditional left have seen the collapse of communism in Russia, the embrace of markets in China, and the abandonment of planned economies and equality of outcome in the west.
I'm struggling to understand what the point of the exercise is. I mean, it's very easy to identify a party that has gotten out of touch with voters: they stop winning elections. Neither party has stopped winning elections -- indeed, if anything, elections at the national level have turned into a serious of freaking nailbiters that is surprising to those of us who lived through e.g. Reagan 1984, Nixon 1972, LBJ 1964.
So regardless of anyone's fancy theoretical model, the direct empirical evidence is perfectly clear: both parties are "in touch with" and represent in important ways a big slice of American voters, at least 40% of the electorate each, who pretty much vote for them all the time, every time. We don't need to explore that question in more subtle and brilliant ways, because the blunt answer stares us in the face every fourth November.
It's definitely worth asking *why* the situation is as static as it appears. Why doesn't one party just finally run away with it? Why can't Americans make up their freaking minds? I wonder if it isn't a concomitant of so much information flow, which parties didn't have 50 years ago. These days, you kind of know well ahead of time if you're seriously out of step with the voters -- here's Nate Silver to tell you with graphs 'n' charts, if nothing else. So the parties can adjust in real time to ensure they stay competitive.
And, in the other direction, they don't want to *overshoot* -- the Democrats don't want to move so far towards the right that they capture 70% of the vote, because that's basically wasting the sacrifice they're making by compromising on their core values. They want to be just barely conservative enough to win, 50% of the voters plus 1. And Republicans are the same, they want to be just barely liberal enough to win, 50% of the voters plus 1.
But the ability to gather the information and tune your messaging to "target" your policies and public image so accurately, to avoid accidentally losing relevance, or accidentally overshooting, is unprecedented. Maybe that's what's different.
The problem with this idea is that First Past the Post voting prevents any party other than the major two from winning any elections. If minor parties and independents were an option for voters, I expect the major parties would both have to reconsider a lot of issues they dropped the ball on.
The reason people don't go for them is that they know they would be wasting their vote. Michael Bloomberg decided not to run for president because he knew he would have a spoiler effect on the party that agreed with him more, and voters understand this too. In countries with approval voting or ranked choice, this doesn't happen.
Congress' approval rating is at rock bottom, so I feel like there might be a whole lot of people who would love to kick out both major parties, if they had the option.
By this criterion you're "wasting" your vote every time you vote for someone who is more than 100/N% (where N = number of voters) behind in a two-party race, since your vote can't possibly make a difference. One vote is almost never a tie-breaker. If your criteria for not "wasting" your vote is that it alone changes the outcome, you will pretty much waste it every single time you vote.
Perhaps a better way of putting it is that FPtP creates coordination problems that IRV doesn't.
If 51% of the population prefers Mary Moderate to Danny Democrat or Robbie Republican, but still expect Danny or Robbie to win, then they'll wind up voting for Robbie or Danny just to prevent the other one getting in.
Here in Australia my electorate was recently won by a supposedly-moderate independent. I don't like her or trust her myself, but I can appreciate the fact that our electoral system allows this to happen; I don't think it would be likely with FPTP.
Look, *any* system of voting is not going to be ideal, if for no other reason than that we can't actually make a precise definition of "ideal." It's obviously not everyone getting what he wants, because that's impossible. So what is it then? We get rapidly into the weeds, with everyone adducing his own particular definition of "what is the next best thing if you can't get exactly what you want?"
I don't think any of this really matters. By me it's the answer to two binary questions (1) Do you have a say in who constitutes your government? (2) Can you exercise that say without fear of violence?
If the answer to both is "yes" then I conclude that the government that results is pretty much what the people want, and if you're a voter you have no serious grounds for complaint. If you feel strongly enough about something, you have a fair chance to affect the outcome. Granted, you will have to persuade a lot of other people to care about it, too, if they don't already, and that's the *really* hard part. You may also have some modest barriers to overcome -- you have to get past entrenched behavior, conventional wisdom, requirements here and here for supermajorities, et cetera. But the opportunity to change the outcome peacefully is there, and that's all you can ask for in a republic.
A lot of times when people complain of the system being "rigged" against them, or people who think like them, it boils down to "we object to the fact that we have to get x% more than a bare majority on our side to bring home our point." And I'm just not super sympathetic to that point of view. You're basically asking for the power to ride over the wishes of a larger minority than you otherwise can, which is not a social or positive goal by itself, regardless of how noble the other aims are. Impositions on the minority are an ugly but alas necessary aspect of a democracy. By me the larger the political arena (going from local to federal elections, say), the harder and harder it should be to put in place any law/regulation/action that doesn't have almost universal support. I would be OK if my local city council passed ordinances on straight majority, the state legislature had to come up with 60% in favor, and Congress had to come up with 80% in favor.
I agree with Melvin's answer - or you can look at the US and check the number of independents, Greens or Libertarian party members winning elections. It just doesn't happen in FPTP.
I do think it's kind of a waste of time voting, which is why I'm glad my government forces me to. Otherwise I think all the smart people wouldn't bother voting and do something else.
I choose to interpret this as there are fewer ideologically committed and politically naive Greens and Libertarian American voters, that those with those tendencies recognize they are in the minority, and figure out with which much bigger group they can stand aligning -- and then do it. That is, people are behaving more like adults, recognizing they aren't going to get their way exactly, and figuring out how to score half a loaf instead of none.
Maybe it would be cooler to actually elect some Green/Libertarian Senator, and watch him negotiate artfully with the big parties to achieve half a loaf. But I have a hard time really giving much of a damn. I already know the government isn't going to act like the government *I* would most prefer. At the very best it's going to represent what the average prejudiced unreflective self-centered IQ 100 human being -- a wretched peasant -- wants. I have very low hopes. This is why I'm a champion of individual liberty. To my mind, the majority is going to be wrong and obnoxious in about 75% of what it does, so what I most want is to have the power to be left alone by it.
The issue is that if you're a hyper-liberal Green Party supporter, the FPTP system forces you to form a coalition with moderates. It doesn't matter if 48% of the voters are Green and 2% are moderate. The major party will still need to move significantly right to catch those 2%.
Electoral systems exist that apportion power proportionally, so that if there was a sizeable number of far-lefties, there would be a sizeable number of far-lefty legislators, and then 2% of the legislators would be moderate lefties.
IMO that doesn't change policy much - coalition building still has to occur between those two groups. But part of the point of democracy is to make people feel involved and listened to, and having a representative that speaks more directly to your views can do that, as well as offloading all that nasty coalition work onto people whose job it is to do it.
It doesn't change it at all, as you recognize in the last paragraph. The only difference between a multl-party parlaimentary system and what we have is that the negotation and coalition building happens at the professional level, between the elected members, in a parlaimentary system, whereas in ours it has to happen within the party, and directly between voters. Sometimes quite literally, e.g. if you live in a caucus state, this is exactly what you do, you go down to the church and you argue with everybody else about which candidate you want, and you make all the compromises right there, in person, face to face.
There are advantages to the multi-party system. Yes, people feel more "listened to" for what that's worth[1], and the fact that the coalition building and negotation happens at the pro level means it's more respectful, sophisticated. On the other hand, because the negotiation is more detached from the people, people are likely to feel more disenfranchised (cf. Brexit), and the system probably responds more slowly to changes in the popular mood.
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[1] If I felt listened to, and also had $5, I could get a nice coffee at Starbucks, for example, and I like coffee.
I mean, consider extending your analogy to the Presidency itself. Instead of voting for *one* President, we elect a small cadre of Presidents, say 5 or 6. We get 3-4 sort of familiar Presidents like what we usually get in elections, plus 1-2 weirdos -- a passionate Green, a neo-Nazi, whatever. And then the Presidents negotiate among themselves for who is going to appoint Supreme Court Justices, who is going to propose the budget. Or maybe they argue about it and make joint decisions.
That's basically the equivalent. Would it be better than what we have? In some ways, maybe. If you were a constituent of one of the weirdos, you'd know you always had the ear of the President, so you'd definitely feel listened to. We can imagine the 5 Presidents would probably negotiate in a more informed and sophisticated way. On the other hand, they might also agree on some pact for their own personal reasons that kind of betrayed some of the constituencies, and blame it (unfairly) on a necessity for negotation -- they would have a lot more in common with each other than with us, the voters, so they might...not be quite as responsive.
I don't have much more to say on this topic except that I think you're giving the "people feel that their government is responsive to them" point a bit of a short shrift. True, good policy-making is one point of a government but it's not the only purpose. In fact, if I had to name the single most important thing a government does, I'm not sure that "pass good laws" would be it.
Possibly equally important is this: it provides a means of relatively non-violent dispute resolution that most people agree to be bound by. The legitimacy of that dispute resolution mechanism is what protects us from people enacting their own (generally violent) justice.
A major advantage of democracy as a form of government is decreased chance of the populace rejecting the legitimacy of the government - if people believe they are partially responsible for picking their government, they are less likely to embrace extreme measures to overthrow that government.
The U.S. system evidently is not currently making people feel like they have a genuine voice in the government. And as a result a lot of folks think of the government as less legitimate than they have in the past. Now, I think part of this is that we've raised a generation of folks (both left and right) who think everyone secretly agrees with them on everything and that some shadowy Oppressive Forces are keeping us all down. That's a broader cultural issue.
But part of it is that most of my (admittedly far-left) social circle does not feel they've ever been able to elect a representative that truly speaks for them. And from growing up in a baptist church I can tell you that the far-right feels the same. The fact that every candidate is definitionally a compromise candidate has real costs in terms of the legitimacy-making function of democracy. Even assuming that there's no real difference in the policy that gets made, that's a larger loss than just some abstract psychological damage. It's a dagger through the heart of the whole system.
You're not forced in any way to form a coalition with anybody by fptp. You can write your own name in the presidential ballot in most states (and should be allowed to in all states and for all races).
That's like saying "you're not forced in any way to eat. You can just not eat instead." Sure, but the consequences are fatal. You can absolutely write your own name in the presidential ballot in most states (including mine), and lose. But if you want to win an election in a fptp race, you need a plurality of people on your side.
> both parties are "in touch with" and represent in important ways a big slice of American voters
Or equally out of touch with voters. I'm more on that side - there seem to be internal structural forces in both parties making them a bit crazy in various ways, and since they keep winning half the time anyway (because the other party is also a bit crazy) there's not enough incentive to move them out of it (arguably if they did, the other party would start losing until it got a bit more in touch, at which point we'd go back to a 50/50 split - but I suspect forcing the other party to be more in touch isn't a big enough prize to make either party want to pay the cost of becoming more in touch first. And this isn't something a lone defector within the party can do - they're mostly big structural issues driven by party aides and messaging structures).
If you find my top-level comment that starts with "Wikipedia", Ofir has written some suggestions as to what might be going on. They all seems plausible to me, so I'm gonna sleep on it before replying to them.
Equally out of touch, yeah. 2016: “which of these scandal-plagued senior citizens do you want for president?” Everyone with a brain: “I don’t want a scandal-plagued senior citizen for president!” Both political parties: “Too bad - that’s all we’ve got this year!” Ugh.
I don’t think I understand the question. When Teddy Roosevelt invited a Black man to dinner at the White House an arch conservative southern Democratic Senator was quoted in the New York Times as saying they’d have to hang 50 n$$$$$$s to repair the damage.
The first Republican elected governor of Texas since reconstruction was William Clements in 1987. Did rural Texas change dramatically from 1920 to 1980 in overall outlook?
So much has changed it’s hard to keep track. It’s sort of like gay marriage. Now that 70% of people support it Republicans claim they never opposed it.
And don’t get started on liberal northern republicans vs conservative southern democrats.
Yeah, as much as the internet has the potential for positive impact on politics it seems to have had, so far, more of a negative one. Between Republicans falling for every lie they enjoy hearing on Facebook, and Democrats getting caught up in virtue-signaling cancel mob garbage, the internet has brought a hell of a lot of heat and a lot less light to every culture war topic
Your point about how social media and narrowly-targeted partisan media both make "nutpicking" easier than in the past is a very good point that I hadn't come across before.
Do we have any folks who were very opposed to gay marriage c. 1995 who now think it’s totally fine? Or any any other issue where the general consensus has changed?
I was very opposed to gay marriage c. 1995 and am now in favor. Of course in 1995 I was 7.
Tanner Greer argues that culture changes come from generational churn rather than individuals changing their minds. In other words, someone's grandma might have been as racist in 1995 as she was in 1960, but she's not as racist in 2021 as she was in 1960 because she's dead.
Both are important and revered traditions. Marriage is by definition heterosexual. Bar mitvahs are by definition Jewish. If you want to create a different new tradition, that's fine--just don't conflate two things that are inherently different.
Whose definition? Dictionaries are recorders of usage, not legislators of language.
The difference between a bar mitzvah and a marriage is that one is still linked to a particular religion by the name.
If you said, "traditional welcoming ceremonies into adulthood" instead of bar mitzvah, that would be more accurate.
Similarly, "mark two people as being bonded in the eyes of the larger society" would be a way to define marriage.
You could add to the definition to make it nearly explicitly heterosexual "mark two people as being bonded in the eyes of the larger society for the purpose of bearing children"
Any religious organization is still free to marry or not marry people. It's only the government, an explicitly secular and legal organization, that's required to "marry" two adults of any gender.
It is impossible to oppose gay "marriage" because marriage has no value beyond getting a piece of paper to legitimize an already existing romantic relationship. If you believe that marriage has canonical form (as Catholics and Orthodox Christians do --about 1.4 billion of the worlds population) what the government calls "marriage" is irrelevant. However, there are severe social sanctions for talking like that out loud, no matter how little "hate" you have for anyone. So we all have to live like it is a thing.
I'm not sure about that. There is plenty of writing out there by the true believers who have actually stated their goal was to tear down the nuclear intact family from the beginning. Not just have white pickett fences with slightly altered family configurations behind them.
In 1995 I was a devout Catholic and hence was opposed to gay marriage (and gay sex) on religious grounds, because I believed it was against God's will. I have since become an atheist, and by the time Obergefell rolled around in 2015, I supported it and was happy about it.
I, for one, had that view into the 2000s, as did everyone in my family. Views started to seriously change as more people came out of the closet and being opposed to gay marriage ceased to be abstract.
Given that the Supreme Court ruling makes sexual orientation discrimination a civil rights issue, and denying people a civil right is a crime for which you get put in prison, not to mention losing your job, I question the 'general consensus' framing.
Of course, the relentless media cheering section might have done that all on its own.
Correct. As justice Alito pointed out in his dissent in that case, the only place you can really be safely "against" it is in some dark corner of your closet in your house--just whisper it to yourself. Otherwise you risk risk legal ramifications. Now, we can argue whether or not that is a good thing, but its no longer debatable that denying this "right" will land you in court to be held accountable.
While I don't think that this silencing is acceptable for any civil right, it's a pity that those who don't agree to other rights- like, oh, to keep and bear arms - can't be subject to the same repercussions.
Could you imagine being in fear of losing your livlihood because you said we should confiscate guns? Holy crap that would be awesome.
Edit. But if you suggest that, all things being equal, the ideal family configuration is a man and woman raising the biological kids they made together for life, you are an absolutely intolerant monster.
I was pretty anti-gay in general back in high school, which was early nineties. By 1995 I was ok (more or less) with gay people, but would have thought the idea of them getting married was ridiculous. I continued to think it was a shocking and weird overreach until the early 2000s, when I became close friends with a gay guy, at which point I changed my mind.
On another area where the consensus has changed, in 1993 I did a high school research paper on concealed carry laws and came out strongly pro. (This was controversial to a bit unpopular back then). Since, concealed carry has become the left of the overton window (or perhaps a bit past) and constitutional carry is the middle, debatable position. Meanwhile I've become strongly anti-gun and would like to see something close to full confiscation, followed by a much more limited and licensed version of ownership, with nothing like concealed carry allowed. In this case I've moved well to the left while the politics have moved right, which is different from the gay marriage case where I moved with the times.
Overall, gun control is very popular but conservatives are very successful at converting practical questions in abstract, ideological and identity-focused ones.
It seems like the exact opposite. People will waive abstract linguistic "ban assault weapons" flags but when it gets down to physical reality, the attitude is far more concrete: "come and take it"
As someone who was elected to State level lawmaker status, and had my votes (along with the rest of the entire House, all 400 of us) analyzed with the equivalent of DW-Nominate... Democrats tend to vote in a sheep-like herd (flock?), with few strays. Republicans do not, in general, and spread far wider. This leads to an interesting artifact that the norm of Democrats tend to be fairly stable (as a whole, they have gone more left over time, but within a short span, not much deviation) and the wide range of Republican positions (aka big tent) tends to cause some Republicans to seem further "out there", as an average, this pulls the R grouping average somewhat further "right" than the actual "center mass" would actually appear. Historically you can see this, if you look for the outliers like Ron Paul, and realize they ruin the "grading on a curve". That just doesn't happen with Democrats. Even today, Manchin might be an rare exception, but Romney, Collins, and Murkowski are not, and a handful of other R Senators would be nearby in DW Nominate rendering.
NH, right? By far the largest lower chamber among state legislatures, and all that... given that you have relevant experience, how important would you say the size of a representative legislative body is? That is, is there something fundamentally better (more representative of constituent beliefs, etc.) about having legislative bodies of considerable size where each individual assemblyman represents a relatively small population?
Actually even more important: it's much harder to bribe (cough) I mean "influence" a large legislative body... The lobbyists focus on the Senate (24), and a handful of key legislators in the House. Follow the Money.
The small size of representation helps, but... Representing 4000 people doesn't mean you poll them constantly, but you do listen. You'll still disappoint some (who likely didn't vote for you anyway) but even people who did vote for you might not understand the issue the way you do, so... A Republic works because it's not the same as direct democracy
Also the annual pay: $100 a year. not $100k. One crisp Benjamin. And Taxes are taken out too.
But despite all of the above, it's still broken and doesn't work. Even in the best place (I could list other positives over other legislatures), it's still not functioning.
Yes. A fantastic microcosm of this was Joe Liberman. At one point he was the party's nominee for vice president. Just two years later, he was purged from the party for being a pro-Iraq war democrat. Right down the line on every other issue, he was deemed unacceptable for that one thing. I can't recall the republican analog to this. There are pro-choice republicans. Republicans who are for stricter gun laws. Gay republicans who are married. You name it. They all get to stay.
Yes, I figured someone would think of one example that seems to go against this overall trend. It's why I hesitate to use anecdotal data. But as the original comment here points out, in the aggregate, the democrats require much more homogeneity on issues than the Republicans do. The machine springs into action to attack the wandering lost soul with much more ferocity. Heck, I wish there was a conservative party that did that in order to hold the line on the last few shreds of "America" that still exist.
Lieberman was the VP nominee in 2000. He ran for President as a Democrat in 2004. H was successfully primaried in 2006, but ran against the nominated Democrat and won with the majority of his support coming from Republicans. Despite this, he continued to caucus with the Democrats and was given committee assignments including a chairmanship in 2007. He was not purged.
Consider also that the Iraq war was almost certainly the most important issue of of that decade.
If you are looking for a Republican analog, the closest I could think of would be Liz Cheney, though I'm not sure the comparison is fair between the Iraq War issue and the Protecting Donald Trump issue.
She is an interesting analog. Yes, I think you are correct re: 2010. Trump has endorsed a primary challenger to her again this year, so I suppose we can see how that goes as well.
Oh boy, I don't think this is a very good analysis at all.
The generic ballot metric is the most facially ridiculous. In 2018, the Democrats won the overall popular vote by 8.4 points. Today, the Republicans lead by 2.3 points. The net difference is huge in politics. Either the parties have undergone a massive shift in 4 years, the general public has, or the generic ballot is a terribly lazy proxy for "closeness to the ordinary American" that is much more affected by fundamentals than deep ideological differences. Put another way: if you had done this exact analysis in 2018, you'd have come to the opposite conclusion, and I don't see any attempt to justify why.
I'm also not a fan of your take on the Pew polls. The problem brought up by the commenter you mentioned is a lot more significant than you seem to realize -- you get different answers depending on your starting point. Why is 1994 a more sensible starting point than 2004? Or 2001? Or for that matter 2008, as in the original stolen meme? The other obvious objection to this metric is that averaging the questions is meaningless. Some of the questions are obviously correlated with others, meaning the real value they're measuring -- e.g. "are you fiscally conservative" -- counts multiple times toward the naive average. Even if that weren't the case, it's very likely that these questions are weighted differently when it comes to the perception of what's extreme. The race question is one that's going to spark a lot of strong emotions while the foreign policy question is largely academic to most Americans, so weighting them equally isn't very informative. It's good that this data exists, but the choice of questions was made in a different political world -- we have to take that into account when we look at it today.
You're correct about the limitations of DW-NOMINATE. The long-term data isn't very useful for direct comparisons in my opinion. I would say the medium-term data (say, the span of a typical political career) is still meaningful, but I trust it most on a short-term basis. The Pew polarization graphic is good, but I would be careful about extrapolating from it; it just tells us how strongly people identify with the labels "liberal" and "conservative", it doesn't tell us anything about what those labels actually mean at a given point in time. I also don't like how it jumps from 2004 straight to 2014; that's consistent with a story of equal polarization, but it's also consistent with the story "Side A was fine in 2004, but went crazy in 2010, so now I only vote for Side B". Since the point of the post is to distinguish between those stories and identify sides A and B, the graph isn't too helpful.
"Conclusion: Obviously your party is normal and the other one has gone completely off the rails. I’m being disgustingly “both-sides-ist” by even pretending there could be any possible equivalence. When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup, it will be the fault of cowards like me who refuse to call out how one party is infinitely worse than the other on this axis."
You know, just because you snarkily preempt it doesn't make it wrong.
Indeed, this why I'm severely blackpilled, and predicted this current mess more than 10 years ago, and walked away from politics. Logic and reason are not welcome in politics at all. And even in this "smart" subset, I see too many people who spout outright fictions they believe fervently to be true, and have no interest in the painful facts. (Intentionally vague, because they can't even see it, denial ain't just a river) We have hit the iceberg already, and few can swim, never mind the lack of lifeboats.
Hi Scruffy, I sympathize with your feelings, just, I have to question your logic here: "I walked away from politics" and "Logic and reason are not welcome in politics."
Do you not see the problem? It's like that right-wing slogan: "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns!" If all the logical, reasonable people self-select out of following/participating in politics, then politics will be full off... illogical, unreasonable, bat-guano-insane people. [Iron-Man voice] Not a great plan.
I summarized it above. Logic and facts didn't matter, Democrats voted like sheep to tow the party line, Republicans were fractured into coalitions which usually but not always led to the RINOs siding with the Ds, lobbying interests steered things thru a small minority via money and inside deals... I could go on, and on... A Supreme Court that defied logic, Governors and other elected officials who ignored their oaths of office, News Media that NEVER got the story right (and often spun it into lies and fiction)...
In other words, same as the rest of the USA. Slightly less corrupt, slightly more accessible. I worked hard and passed laws, and watched them be ignored because nobody in charge wants to be held accountable. I lost numerous other battles to pass measures on a variety of fronts. All for naught. At some point, you realize the game is rigged and the only way to win is not to play.
I got politically involved in something for a few years, entrusted with a minor responsibility to keep craziness at bay. When keeping the craziness at bay became harder, I felt obligated to gut it out for as long as I could. In retrospect, I don't think gutting it out for as long as I did was good for me. I'm alienated from what I had supposed were pretty stable political habits because of it, and I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. Maybe it will in a few years, but for now, I'm done.
Scruffy had a much bigger responsibility than mine. If he says he's done his time and it has to be someone else's turn now, I'm inclined to believe him.
I've found that it's very easy to find data to support both sides of most major political disagreements. For example, I think I can competently argue the gun control debate from both sides, with quite a bit of evidence and data for both perspectives.
I find that surprising given that there’s no evidence gun control reduces crime because we have no way to account for mistaken defenses. That is, how many DGUs are unjustified and therefore actually assaults with a deadly weapon.
Nearly all DGUs are on the say-so of the user who admits they fired no shots and no one was arrested. This means, naturally, that we have no way to quantify whether these were, in fact, defensive rather than a paranoid ass pulling a gun on just some dude.
Right - there's data that shows that defensive gun use is frequent, and the pro-gun side of the argument can easily point to some pretty big numbers. The other side can provide the exact weakness you cited; the data is poorly categorized, and also indicates a general problem of violence which can be associated with the proliferation of guns, because most credible estimates indicate that there are more gun crimes than DGUs and at least some %age of DGUs (we don't know how many! the data again is not very clear) are gun defense against a gun-wielding attackers.
My biggest bias against self reported DGU stats is it basically paints a picture is that without gun ownership, if you basically say that without every DGU, a crime or murder would've been committed, the US would be a violent place w/ more death and disorder per capita than even many 3rd world countries out there, and that just doesn't make sense.
Do I think DGU's happen? Sure. I just think that they matter in such a long way to determine gun policy isn't really actually true.
I do wish the "crazier worldview/messaging" had gotten more of a treatment, because I suspect it's where a lot of the meat lies. Others have stated and I agree that many people are completely or mostly tuned out on policy except for perhaps two or three sacred cows. I believe thinkers vastly overestimate how much the average voter ponders about fed hikes, the GDP, or edicts on the airspeed of unladen swallows.
Ultimately, these notions about one or the other becoming extreme come down to your lived experience more than anything else. In my experience, living in the southeast, it seems as though my family and friends have bifurcated, with one subgroup becoming obsessed with conspiracy, racial resentment/fear and the downfall of America and the other just shaking their head in disbelief at the whiplash. I suspect that several people here have had vastly different experiences depending on their geography and local culture and those lived experiences are what people are arguing over. Which is not to say there's not an absolute answer somewhere, and, I believe, it's easy to say at the very least that both parties are getting way more extremist in posture: preparing for war, instead of hoping for peace.
I think this is absolutely the right way to frame the question of how the "average American" sees polarization (which might be different from polarization in policy or rhetoric from politicians).
I definitely have left-leaning friends/acquaintances for whom every single life event is political. They feel vaguely guilty about enjoying a nice day because of global warming. A friend's marriage is a display of bourgeois decadence instead of a happy day between two friends. Relationship discussions are all framed in terms of the politics of gender and sexuality. Do I agree with them more than their political opponents? ...probably. Do I also find them about ten billion times more annoying? Absolutely. Veganism might be a morally superior worldview but it comes off as "extreme" because until recently meat eaters didn't just walk up to people eating a salad and lecture them.
Of course, this is all contextual. My in-laws are the same way, making every single thing that happens about politics, but super conservative. If I had to hang out with them all the time I'd find them at least equally annoying. Probably more, because spending an hour in a room with my father-in-law makes me want to put my head through a wall.
Yea, I believe we live a mirror existence, except I don't think I have any liberal in-laws. I do, however, have have some lefty friends I talk politics with online and while they're a swell group of folks, I do have to limit to a few hrs a week or I get that same desire for ad-hoc cranial house remodeling.
The worst for me is the dear relatives that don't have a throttle button, and can't take hints to not talk about things [right now]. I can easily take that our policies don't align entirely, if we could only mostly talk about things that we have more agreement on. It doesn't have to be ONLY agreement all the time, just more than disagreement.
I’d also like to point out that a lot of this is deeply influenced by tactical decisions the parties make. A core of the thesis when given from the left by, say, Yglesias, has to do with Obamacare and its similarities to Republican proposals of yesteryear.
Republicans didn’t oppose Obamacare because it was extreme, however. Anyone with a working memory knows that they opposed *all* of Obama’s proposals (that became major news items) in a bid to win elections by creating a contrast.
It’s why Secret Congress is an extant and much more moderate thing.
And of course, extreme posturing in Washington, whether tactical or, I think, increasingly genuine, also feeds back into the public sentiment, primarily through media streams that no long even come close to agreeing on a shared reality. Anecdotally, I've had multiple members of my family call me at different times saying something like: "You gotta turn on Tucker, you won't believe the latest latest plot big tech/dems/whatever are doing to steal your vote and destroy the country". I'm so flabbergasted whenever it happens, I literally don't know how to handle it, and it always creates a fight because I don't go turn it on and become immediately consumed with righteous republican rage. It feels like pod people have replaced my folks sometimes. But I see the insane tweets from lefties on Twitter, and I assume that being related to one of them has to be a hell of an experience too. But these radicalized folks then go and vote for more practitioners of these extremist tactics, and the loop cycles anew.
The thing that mystifies me is that these are people who presumably participate in society, including through work, who have some knowledge of what various organizations are like on the inside, yet have exotic imaginings like this.
It's funny because I've been in blue states my whole life and right now I'm the one having whiplash as I realize that the gulf between me ("moderately center-right", I thought) and moderate-left friends is so gaping, it's getting harder to be in general social discussions: the baseline assumptions about the world have changed. In that sense, the Musk meme speaks to me very much.
While there has been leftward movement from both parties on social issues, there has certainly been bipartisan rightward shifts on some others. A couple of examples are the consistent lowering of coporate income tax since 1950, and Republicans giving up on environmental regulation - George H.W. Bush set up an ETS for sulfur emissions, George W. Bush refused to sign up to Kyoto.
It might be people's relative weighting of these issues that determine what they think about the overall direction of public policy (along with their own relative position on these issues).
For example: both the Republican and Democratic parties of today do not resemble their 1975 selves. Similarly, while Dubya Bush and Condeleeza Rice are considered part of a neocon Republican era - the neoconservative movement actually originated among liberals - one reason why Dubya Bush is now a "good" Republican in Democrat eyes. In particular, the neoconservative movement was created by liberals who wanted foreign interventions to promote democracy and liberal values - which the War on Terrah basically is.
The neoliberal movement, in contrast, also originates as liberals but consists of liberals who want free trade, free markets and so forth - in contrast to traditional blue collar opposition to mass immigration (read up on labor leader's views prior to Bill Clinton).
As you clearly don't seem to understand what the signaling is, also that Dubya is a way to distinguish between father and son, it seems there is no point further attempting to remedy your lack of shared understanding.
I feel like this whole thing is a dismal attempt to define a normative state of the world which is basically the whole game of rhetoric to begin with. When the US is attacked by the Japanese, is "respond by doing nothing" the normative response? Or is "build a big military and fight back"? "Normativity" entails counter-factuals and I don't see this being addressed in the post.
Is "we should do nothing to respond to climate change", "we should do nothing to respond to greedy bankers tanking the economy", normative? Sometimes you will need new policy to uphold the status quo.
Broadly, people don't really have coherent normative accounts. Conservatives and Progressives will have normative outcomes and normative means to achieve these outcomes and the latter don't really follow from the former.
There is also a difference between how the world is in fact and in law. For instance, I don't think the rights of women have changed that much in the past hundred years but our attitudes have changed.
I think there's a flawed premise underlying this, which is that policies are innately "left" or "right" or "conservative" or "progressive", and then we can look at how a politician votes on a bunch of these policies and calculate how left or right wing they are.
There have been times when you could look at US politics and identify some clear ideology that was driving policies, but overall (and perhaps increasingly) I don't think that's true. MAGA is not an ideology or philosophy, and Republicans in the Trump era are not meaningfully "conservative", they're just focused on echoing whatever Trump says. Liz Cheney is, by basically every measure, one of the most conservative members of the House, but lost her leadership position to Elise Stefanik, who is a centrist by normal measurements.
Is the Republican House delegation with Stefanik as the third ranking member more conservative than with Cheney in that position? That's a hard argument to make. Are they more likely to be subservient to Trump's whims? Absolutely.
So...has the Republican party become more conservative over time? I'm not even sure what that means. The party in 1984 was pretty good at reflecting Reaganism, and in 2020 was pretty good at reflecting whatever Trump says. By the standards of 2020, that makes the 2020 party more conservative than the party of 1984, but only because we've redefined the terms. Meanwhile I think the reverse is equally true (that is, that 1980s conservatives would consider the 1980s party to be more conservative).
I just don't know there's much useful being said here.
Edit: And to be clear, I think the same thing is true of Democrats, but Republicans give some clearer examples.
I think there's an important angle that you and Yglesias are both missing.
You and Yglesias are both talking about who's gotten more extreme over time in terms of their object-level positions. But frequently, when people say "extreme", they don't actually mean "extreme in terms of object-level positions", they mean "illiberal". Less concerned with meta-level principles such as free speech, the rule of law, and democratic/republican government government, and concerned more and more only with gaining power, extracting the rewards of such, and (sometimes) pushing their object-level positions, whatever those might be.
(You sort of touch on this with #3, and sort of again with #4, but not exactly.)
And, it does seem that both parties have gotten more illiberal in the past decade-and-change (although it's worth noting that both parties have as far as I'm aware *always* been pretty illiberal in a number of ways, as is clear from the fact that we don't live in a basically-libertarian state). But I also think it's really obvious which party has gotten *more* illiberal faster (I don't think it's close).
In the interest of not getting my comment deleted, I won't say which, but, my point is I think this is an angle you are ignoring. "Extreme" often doesn't mean "extreme", it often means "illiberal", and this is something you didn't examine.
(I also think it's a lot more important. There's nothing wrong with being *extreme*, per se... if you're right, why *not* be extreme about it? But the increase in illiberalism is a real danger.)
I...am confused which party you think has gotten more extreme by this metric. Actually, I am also confused about which party *I* think has gotten more extreme by this metric.
I think Sniffnoy makes a good point about one way of understanding extremism. When I read it, as well as Jonathan F's somewhat related comment, and jon37's and Melvin's comments on hostile rhetoric, I thought of Carl Schmitt's book The Concept of the Political (1932).
Schmitt was a German reactionary who opposed the Nazis until they took power, at which point he joined them. He objected to Weimar liberal constitutionalism for limiting the power of the executive and for leaving the question of supreme values up to each individual.
For him, politics was about friends and enemies, identified by intensely held values. He argued it was deceitful and unnatural to debate peacefully, because rational debate over conflicting values was impossible. Political opponents were enemies who were ready to fight to the death, if necessary - or else were deluded about what politics is.
The West German constitution was written to keep former Nazis like Schmitt out of power. In other words, the state would only tolerate the anti-Nazi ingroup. This article says that Schmitt revised his 1932 position in 1960 (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/02/liberalism-for-losers-carl-schmitts-the-tyranny-of-values/). The new, weaker Schmitt claimed that a constitution which tolerated every view was, in fact, a desirable way to avoid civil violence, even though it was still inevitable that the elected ruling party would engage in oppressive behavior.
A possible measure of extremism:
1. No Schmitt: Embraces liberal constitutionalism.
2. Weak Schmitt: Submits to a liberal constitutional order, but implies that dictatorship would be morally justified, because getting society's values correct is of the highest importance.
3. Deep Schmitt: Prepares to imprison/kill the outgroup and install a dictator.
I think the most relevant debate in these comments is not about policies (not most of them, at least) but about who departs from level 1, and how often, and how seriously.
This study asks a bunch of questions which seem to be fairly close to "how dumb and goddamn crazy are you," including "Do you ever think: we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of [Opposing party] in the public today just died?" (20% Dem, 15% Rep) and "If [Opposing party] are going to behave badly, they should be treated like animals." (about 15% Dem, 20% Rep), and "Many [Opposing party] lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals." (About the same between parties, maybe 1% leads for Republicans.) and "What if [Opposing party] win the 2020 presidential election? How much do you feel violence would be justified then?" (18% Dem, 14% Rep).
My overall vibe from looking at the included data: maybe a marginal victory for Rs, but neither side is looking particularly better than the other. Like, maybe the Rs are 10% less crazy, as a whole, but not much more than that."
What we need here is values for what the voters believe, and what politicians of each party believe. While it's very safe to say that each party is more extreme than its voters are, it's non-trivial to to compare which is more. I personally believe that Republican politicians went extreme earlier, but that Democrats have have done their best to catch up recently, but I can't support this with the numbers, which kinda defeats the point.
To be fair, it should be "states decide law on abortion" vs "nation wide $15 hour minimum wage" as the current minimum wage fight isn't an end point (something like UBI is).
I think what's missing is the sense that political space isn't a one-dimensional "left vs right" axis but a complex many-dimensional space, with each dimension representing a different issue. You can have one dimension for "How high should the top marginal tax rate be?" and another one for "Gay marriage?" and another one for "Slavery?"
In any given decade, most of these issues are non-controversial and almost everyone is on one side, while some other issues are controversial and split the populace. As the years go by, some issues like slavery and gay marriage get conclusively resolved in one direction or the other (slavery in the Republicans' direction, gay marriage in the Democrats') and others remain controversial (taxes). The result is that the populated fraction of political space shifts around slowly in this multi-dimensional space, and the "left-right" axis at any given time whirls around to point in the direction that best divides two clusters of people.
Since the 1950s the basic direction things have been moving is this: "social" issues have tended to wind up getting resolved in the "left" direction and "economic" issues have tended to wind up getting resolved in the "right" direction. At this very moment (perhaps for reasons pointed to in Scott's article on class) the controverial issues are almost all "social" so the left-right axis seems to point in a "social issues only" direction. This gives the impression that everything has gone the Democrats' way for a long time; we tend to forget the issues on which they lost because the issues of the present day no longer seem anything like them.
DW-NOMINATE actually does have two dimensions. The first is typically labelled "economic" and the other "regional", as it divided the northern & southern wings of the Democratic party.
There are two more possible interpretations of "becoming more extreme": which party's presidential candidates are more different from their respective predecessors, and which party is violating more political taboos.
In terms od presidential candidates, this is probably just another case of reverse incumbency. In 2008, Obama was a bigger departure from Kerry than McCain was from Bush. In 2016, Trump was a bigger departure from Romney than Clinton was from Obama.
For taboos, it's tricky. I think the relevant type of thing is, specifically, breaking a taboo about America's deep political assumptions: something like "let's replace democracy with communism" or "let's bring back the monarchy". Both parties have (in my opinion) been doing this kind of thing at an alarming rate recently.
Republican supreme court shenanigans, like refusing to hold hearings until after an election, are bad. So far the Democrats haven't matched them, but if Roe is overturned, court-packing is a worrying possibility. Tit-for-tit supreme court tinkering could fatally undermine an essential institution.
Rejecting the legitimacy of lost elections is another one. Trump's ridiculous histrionics, and his party's embrace of his conspiracy theory, are the most obvious and probably most damaging case. Unfortunately, Democrats aren't exactly innocent here. Large segments of the party view the last two Republican presidents as fundamentally illegitimate, and Stacy Abrams has gone even longer than Trump has without acknowledging an election defeat (and has received almost nothing but praise from her party for it). Al Gore conceding the election for the sake of the country was not that long ago. Yet I can't imagine either party's nominee doing the same today.
In the ways that matter most, both parties have gotten too extreme. This formula for a headline, "[Party X] has destroyed [democratic institution Y] in order to win [short term fight Z]" is worryingly plausible for either X, any Y, and any Z.
Thanks for this perspective, I think it's a good one.
Another interpretation of "more extreme" relates to the viciousness with which the party attacks those who disagree, and I think this is what drives a lot of the perceived extremism of the Democrats.
I think that the Democrats have, in recent decades, become a lot more aggressive and vicious in the way they attack those who disagree with them on pretty much any issue. Take a contrary or moderate line and you're immediately branded an "-ist" or a "-phobe". A high-profile moderate like Musk (or Scott) is constantly getting bombarded with attacks from the left, but seldom from the right.
As further evidence I submit the existence of /r/enlightenedcentrism, a space where leftists mock centrists for daring to think that there might be some sort of equivalence between left and right. I know of no equivalent space where centrists are mocked by the right.
So if you're the median American voter, you probably find that the Democrats are too far left for you on some issues and the Republicans are too far right on others. But if the Democrats are constantly calling you an "-ist" and a "-phobe" and trying to get you fired for failing to agree with them on their issues of the week, and the Republicans aren't, then it's easy to believe that the Democrats are more extreme even if you're precisely equidistant from both parties in policy terms.
An accusation of sexual assault with no corroborating evidence and named people at the same party disputing the claims being used in an attempt to derail a nomination.
Expanding it to circuit courts, it was Democrats who started the judicial filibuster fight in Bush Junior's first term, and then turned around and blocked filibusters when it was no longer convenient for them. I'd contend that's at least as bad as declining to hold an up or down vote instead of having a pro-forma hearing in which they rejected Garland.
It's mutual escalation while claiming tit-for-tat all the way down.
The problem with using DW-NOMINATE is that it shows that "the squad" of lefty Democrats are relatively moderate, because they don't always vote with the rest of the party (due to being further left). If Republicans used to have a bunch of Ron Pauls who voted against their party, and they get replaced by centrists, that would show up as the party getting more extreme.
There's been serious, significant ideological change in the parties - i.e., not just moving right or left, but what moving right or left means - that I don't think you're necessarily accounting for. Conservatism aims for different things now then it did under Bush, aimed for different things under Bush then under Goldwater, and different things under Goldwater then under Coolidge.
"I think the Wright/Musk meme is clearly about the changing-policy-positions-since-some-starting-time question, and that it’s right to point to the Democrats as the main driver there."
Phrasings like this give me an impulse to bring up the "Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?" question yet again, because they make it sound like a political party has been driving the change. On some topics (like LGBT issues) the country as a whole has moved left, and the Democratic Party & the Republican Party have mostly been along for the ride.
Ultimately, I think this discussion is all so much cruft. But I think maybe it's actually pro-social in some ways to focus on it rather than policy. We, at least in the United States, are the inheritors of perhaps the most dramatic era of peace and prosperity (here insert all the usual caveats about it being imperfect, not benefiting everyone equally, possible backsliding from some big govt/big business/big labor idyll of the 60s, etc., etc. forever) in history. The hard work and the dying is done, and the enormous luck has been taken advantage of. All we need to do is not to fuck it up.
As an attempt to come up with something you can actually quantify, this seems to me very difficult to answer, partly because parties are not point sources and their members don't move in lockstep. If you want to study changes in positions, use the quadrennial party platforms: they're each single documents and have unambiguous texts. That solves most of the problems regarding parties being chaotic sets. The main problem is that in the US party platforms are meaningless in terms of actual policy to be pursued, they're just a place where you can say things that make people feel good.
Another problem is that movement of position is not a single variable. It's possible that Party A is moving left faster than Party B is moving right at one point, and then vice versa at another. Indeed, I believe that change has actually taken place.
This is unfair to the dems, as the reps 2020 platform was just their 2016 platform re-release— which by your measure would make the reps maximully moderate. Also, how would you quantify that?
I guess the way to test 4, if you really wanted to, would be to ask average voters to make predictions on political, but not directly policy, questions, such as “will Trump be criminally charged in the next 5 years” or “will courts find that one or more states’ results in a major election was changed due to voter fraud in the next five years” and see who does better. This is the best proxy for “not crazy” and “in touch with reality” I can think of. You would have half the questions chosen by a dem partisan, and half by a rep partisan, to hopefully not get a set of questiosn biased one direction or another.
I don’t really like this idea, but can y’all think of a better way?
Also, before reading this, I predicted the answers would be 1: dems 2: intdeterminate 3: depends how you measure, different measures will give you different things 4: reps. Since my other threee are right, I am sticking by my fourth one
(For the record, my political ideology is complicated, but the DW would say I was in the red clusture)
I think the issue with your suggestion is that polls aren't a good way of measuring predictions. People won't even accurately predict their own behavior: for example, if you ask a group of voters "How would Joe Biden officiating a gay marriage affect your willingness to vote for him," you'll probably get a substantial number of Democrats saying it makes them more likely to vote for him (even though they were going to vote for him anyway) and a substantial number of Republicans saying it makes them less likely to vote for him (even though they were already not going to vote for him).
Similarly, if you ask "Will Trump be criminally charged in the next 5 years", you'll get some people who don't pay much attention to politics going "Gee, if they're asking the question, it must be at least a little bit possible, right?" and answering yes, and other people who hate Trump answering "yes" as an expression of frustration/wishful thinking even though they wouldn't actually bet money on it happening.
It also doesn't account for weird things happening. If you asked someone in 2008, "Will Donald Trump be elected President in the next decade", I would argue that answering "no" wouldn't have been "crazy".
So I'd suggest instead using factual questions without the prediction element, where "factual" is determined by some combination of experts and international consensus. Stuff like "Did evolution occur?" or "Was Barack Obama born in the U.S" are my left-leaning suggestions, though I'm sure a conservative could come up with a few from the other angle.
So those are valid issues, but I think there are ways around them. First, you make the predictions something objectivly resolvable, so that you don’t get problems like “I would totally vote for him cause of gay marriage” situations. This is slightly different from your suggestions as the answer is determined in the future, and is not based on some experts making the decision now. This could be something like “will Trump be impeached in the wake of the Mueller report by date X” or “will Biden be impeached for stealing the election by date X.” Things which no one, not even the crazyest Q cultist, can say happened if they did not.
For uninformed voters making guesses based on the questions, I guess you just hope their guesses are random, and that your sample size is large enough they don’t mess stuff up.
Having an odd ball like Trump wouldn’t really mess with the study, as both R’s and D’s would be equally likely to not predict he would run and win, so they wouldn’t lose points relative to each other, which is the key metric.
In terms of incentivising people to actually try, instead of using partisan wish fufillment to make their predictions, you simply tell them the purpose of the study, but frame it as “whichever party has the most accurate predictions of reality is smarter and more in touch with reality and gets to rub it in the face of the outgroup” which should make people want to do good predictions.
As for the “factual questions” thing, the only way I see that working is to have half the questions being chosen by partisans of each side. As a consertive, one that comes to mind is “what % of guns deaths in the US invovled a rifle [which most popular gun control arguements focus on]” and see who gets closest to the correct figure of 3%*
Sorry for the lengh, I just think the idea is really interesting and want to think it through.
I see what you mean about incentivizing people to make good predictions; that could work.
The only issue with something like “will Biden be impeached for stealing the election by date X" is it doesn't distinguish between "people who think Biden stole the election" and "people who don't think Biden stole the election, but believe Republicans are partisan enough to impeach him for it anyway if they took back the House", which are not necessarily equally crazy positions. But I take your point that it could work with that kind of prediction in general.
I think the Wright/Musk diagram talks about people who subscribe to the political philosophies. They are not exactly talking about parties, so this post does not negate/affirm the original diagram in the first place. For example, almost every progressive has bones to pick with the Democrats for not being good enough on policy issues (think back to how many people preffered Bernie to Biden, but had to settle for him anyway). Contrarily, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican party are rare (you might find an odd few at the National Review). The parties don't reflect the broader culture. The point of the diagram is to see if the ideological points conservatives and progressives make in the culture war sans electoral politics are more extreme or not. Musk/Wright would say that progressives have become more radical.
"Contrarily, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican party are rare (you might find an odd few at the National Review)."
What's your source for this? Cause my people vote on both sides, but mostly Republican, and the only people they are more disgusted with than DC Republicans are DC Democrats.
Furthermore, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican Party are so common that in 2016 they rejected all of the Republican Party's chosen candidates in favour of granting the Presidential Primary to an outsider.
I agree Republicans aren't necessarily "fond" of the Republican party, but this example is a poor one for a couple of reasons:
The "Party's chosen candidates" racked up over 50% of the primary vote versus only 45% for Trump even though he had the advantage of getting near unanimous results in late contests after the nomination had wrapped up. As a matter of fact, the first state in which voters didn't prefer "not-Trump" was New York in mid-April.
It is by no means clear how many of those who voted for Trump in the 2016 Republican primary could responsibly be called conservative. Elsewhere in the thread there is mention of how "liberal" and "conservative" are moving targets... but to whatever extent conservatism is a real defined ideology advanced by the likes of Burke or Locke and exemplified by the politics like Reagan's, it is hard to imagine Trump was the first choice of any conservative even in 2016 - much less now.
So, the evidence of the Primary is really evidence that plurality-wins voting with more than two options makes for contests that don't reflect the attitudes of the voters very well at all, and secondarily that the Republican party includes populists alongside conservatives.
Going back to the objectionable statement "Contrarily, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican party are rare (you might find an odd few at the National Review)." - If we charitably rephrase to say that conservatives have historically voted almost exclusively for the Republican Party's nominee (at least until 2020, anyway) - I don't know that there is anything to argue with here.
Why do we assume that both the left and the right change over time (in a 'progressive' direction as certain changes to society stick over time while others are forgotten), but centrists stay the same?
Also, let's take another look at the Pew polls! Don't most of them actually show both parties moving in the same direction until the early 2000s, and then splitting and moving off in opposite directions?
This piece's analysis focuses on one dimension: the location of individual groups on a left-right partisan axis. It tries to do so via judging how far along that axis the parties have moved in terms of officially preferred policies; which parties are the furthest from "ordinary" (meaning, median) Americans; which party's legislative votes are more consistent; which party considers the other more "extreme", and so forth. Other axes exist in politics, which is why so many political discussions and arguments have an orthogonal, talking-past-each-other quality. Here are some I can think of.
We have to start somewhere, so let's upgrade our level of sophistication to "the Libertarian party circa 1999". One can imagine the partisan policy preferences themselves along a social axis and an economic axis. In that sense it seems to me that policy in the country has moved in a libertarian direction, rather than leftward or rightward - the welfare and regulatory state has degraded while gay marriage and marijuana have been legalized, etc. (Arguably the social trends are reversing, especially wrt abortion).
There are dimensions beyond those - militarism for example. Or one could imagine every sharply partisan issue as its own axis; one-dimensional policy preference analysis can assume that there are very few people with odd combinations of positions - pro-gun + pro-abortion, anti-war + constitutional originalism, universal healthcare and bigotry, etc - but I don't believe that's necessarily or empirically true.
Another potential measurement is, to what extent do people have contempt for the character of opposing partisans. If I am in party X and I believe everyone in party Y is brainwashed / idiotic / sociopathic, as soon as you signal affinity with Y - no matter how moderate your actual beliefs are - I'm going to have a bad reaction. This goes hand in hand with how pluralist people are - i.e. willing to accept the other party being in charge for a while. It seems quite obvious that contempt is increasing and pluralism is decreasing.
Finally, there is the question of how *powerful* the extremist factions are. An unspoken assumption of polling is that the country being polled is a democracy; if it's not, the poll doesn't present very useful information. If a group of 20% of the population decides that might makes right, and happens to control all the might, then it moves the country as a whole toward its political position - even if most of the population is moving in an opposite direction.
It is for this reason that the aspect of partisan rancor and extremism that concerns me most is the behavior of police, rather than the behavior of college students, shitposters, standup comedians, or HR departments.
Indeed, even moderates like Tim Pool have begun discussing the situation as breaking down into Authoritarian vs Libertarian.
Lockdowns/Masks/etc showed us how many will go along and comply, and even worse, trust that Big Brother has their best interest to the point of lining up and medicating. It's scary.
For welfare, during the Obama administration, Medicaid was expanded and income-dependent subsidies for private health insurance were made available. What recently outweighs those?
"When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup, it will be the fault of cowards like me who refuse to call out how one party is infinitely worse than the other on this axis."
I find it hard to imagine how this could be applied to both parties, but that is merely a statement about my imagination. Anyone want to describe a plausible coup plot by the Democrats that could be carried out in the next decade?
From the point of view of (certain) Republicans, liberal Supreme Court rulings have been a gigantic coup where duly passed laws were stricken down and federal government was allowed to assume powers never mentioned in the Constitution. So were for example immigration laws that was democratically passed, and not challenged by SCOTUS, but never enforced. Or media/tech companies suppressing discussion of right wing viewpoints that voters might take into account, etc.
The point is not that these things are equivalent to Jan 6. But people who don't see how they can benefit from democracy, in the sense of people living in an area where most see things in a certain way being able to run their own affairs, lose respect for it over time.
Easy enough - another round of the plague overlaps a major election - either a toss up or leaning left, and the relaxed poll security/enhanced 'voter's rights' permits enough ballot stuffing to get enough incumbents in to control both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Then they pack - excuse me, *reform* - the SCOTUS and continue with the quiet purging of anyone who doesn't sign on to DIE principles until most everyone in a position to carry out any government edict is all left wing, or going along because they know what's good for them.
On edit- your imagination also doesn't include the four years of obstruction to Trump by "the deep state" which probably both decreased the impact of Trumps crazier ideas and policies, and made him more paranoid and crazy by the end of it. While not a coup, this active obstruction was not exactly 'fair play' either. Combined with stuff like the made up charges of Russian collusion and the constant media hysteria, the effect was to look like active attempts to thwart elected officials.
Can you describe a plausible coup plot by Republicans that could be carried out in the next decade? (And no, a bunch of weirdoes from 4chan running around the capitol doesn't count as a "plausible coup attempt")
If we hold ourselves to speculations about the future instead of the past, one plausible coup scenario is if the Republican governor of a swing state (say, Pennsylvania) said that if Democrats won his state in 2024 he'd work with his secretary of state to ensure that Republican electors were chosen anyway. I would definitely be on the lookout for anything like that.
Not to say that I grant your premise! Many coup-like activities occurred in the first week of 2021 among elected members of the government, not just people running around the capitol. To think of only 4 off the top of my head: the phone call to Georgia, the submission of phony elector slates to the federal government without always clear indication that they were alternate, the pressure to get Pence to announce alternate electors, and the Republican plans to object to 7 states (enough to flip the election results) in Congress until the riot made most of them too ashamed to try that kind of bullshit.
1. I think the "2022 generic ballot" is an extremely over-simplified metric for measuring "Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?". Basic political science tells us that midterms are always going to swing against the party currently in power. And even though I do tend to lean towards Republicans being more extreme, I don't think the YouGov poll is good evidence for that either - one single poll is just an incredibly over-simplified way of viewing the question.
If you're going to use election results, midterms are a particularly terrible example because some voters will be voting to put a check on the party in power, with the full understanding that the opposition party won't actually be able to do anything either without having the White House. Voting Republican in 2022 won't (immediately) put Republicans in control of the country, it will just leave Democrats with less control than they have now. And if we look at Presidential elections, which I would argue are more representative both because voters understand they're going to have a stringer and more immediate effect and because they get higher turnout? Democrats have won the popular vote seven times in the last thirty years, and Republicans only once.
And if you're going to use polls, I think it would make for a stronger analysis to compare polling on the actual policy issues Americans say are most important to them to the party platforms. I haven't done this analysis, so I don't know exactly how it would turn out, but I think a more rigorous analysis is needed before making a claim on this one.
2. Your analysis here focuses on politicians and parties, but the original meme just says "left" and "right". To me, that includes people other than elected officials.
I imagine that a lot of right-leaning people who think of "the left" as being extreme are including activists, college students, the media, randos on Twitter who try to "cancel" people for minor transgressions, etc., in that claim - probably as much or more than they're thinking of Joe Biden's or Chuck Schumer's policy positions.
Similarly, if you were to ask me whether "the right" has gotten more extreme since 2008, I wouldn't just ask myself whether Donald Trump is more extreme than John McCain (though I think that he was), or whether the 2022 Republican members of Congress are more extreme than the 2008 Republicans were (a more complicated question). I'd also ask myself whether Trump *supporters* were more extreme than McCain *supporters* - and I think January 6 proves that they clearly are. I'd also be thinking about the most popular right-wing media outlets, the frequency of domestic terror attacks fueled by right-wing/alt-right ideology, etc.
3. "Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?"
Your answer is a cop-out, and the fact that you acknowledge it's a cop-out doesn't make it any less of a cop-out. A few possible ways of answering this question:
a.) How do the parties' worldview/messaging compare to their worldview/messaging in 2008 (the time suggesting by the meme)?
b.) How do the parties' worldview/messaging compare to the worldview/messaging of major parties in other Western democracies? To what extent do people in other countries view them as "crazy"?
c.) To what extent are the parties' worldview/messaging based on facts (or "facts") which are believed to be true by most non-political experts?
A seems reasonable, but I think it's too short a time frame.
For b: who cares what those other parties say? Are they in America? Are they American citizens? Why on earth would someone think that matters?
For c, are the non political experts from a group who donates more to Democrats or more to Republicans? Cause if they're academics, they lean left, which I think makes the nonpartisan intent of your question difficult.
The international consensus matters because it's a larger sample size that's going to be less influenced by America-specific biases about what's crazy. For example, 40% of Americans are Young Earth Creationists who don't believe in evolution. Is that a "crazy" position? It doesn't count as "extreme" by most of Scott's metrics, but pretty much any other developed nation could tell you that that's insane.
Similarly, if all the major center-left parties across a large group of countries, each with their own cultural biases, are all in agreement on something, and the Democrats disagree, that could be a hint that the Democrats are extreme/crazy on that position. Not *necessarily* (there could be legitimate reasons why things are different in the U.S., or the Democrats could be the reasonable one), but it's one indicator. Conversely, I would argue that the fact that most right-wing parties accept the existence of human-driven climate change is evidence that the popularity of climate-change denialism among U.S. Republicans is "extreme" in some sense.
And this ties back into "c" - you could get around the question of whether the experts are partisan by looking at the *international* expert consensus. But I would argue that it doesn't entirely matter. I'm sure you're right that, for example, most American climate scientists donate more to Democrats than Republicans. Does that mean that believing in climate change and not-believing in climate change are equally 'crazy' positions?
I'm in the group that thinks Republicans have gotten more extreme, in part due to literally trying to seize power in an undemocratic coup—which I suppose is a hard thing to measure with, but seems relevant.
Another, more measurable indicator for me is that former Republican presidential candidates McCain and Romney—who theoretically ought to have represented the average Republican of the past pretty well—have since been blasted by Trump supporters for being too liberal. In Romney's case, he seems to have fallen well outside the realm of the current Republican party. While I've heard people call Hillary too conservative, I haven't heard anyone claim she's atypically so for the average Democratic politician, and while I haven't heard much about Kerry or Gore, as far as I know they're still considered typical Democrats. I wonder if there's a good metric to account for things like this.
No it wasn't a banana republic sort of coup attempt.
It was the genteel, less obvious kind, where the guns didn't turn out to be necessary. The military would balk at an order to act on that president's specious say so because of the "That's not a lawful order, sir" thing - I hope - So whip up a crowd and send them to the capitol to intimidate your vice president.
"If you aren't strong you won't have a country anymore!" Or Giuliani's reference to 'trial by combat'
All you have to do is overwhelm the police, injuring only a many as necessary, maybe lose one of your own to a police bullet and a couple to natural causes in the process and you are on your way to disrupting the certification of a national election.
Just some flag poles, bears spray, tactical gear, and whatever is at hand, say fire hydrants, may be handy to bludgeon law enforcement. Then scare Pence into nullifying the vote and send the matter back to be resolved by Republican legislatures to send 'alternate' delegates and voila! The correct result!
A coup enacted with a fair bit of force, but without the guns. So by your proof QED No coup.
No, I don't think that really proves anything.
Two of the cops killed themselves within a couple days but really, that's on them isn't it. Look, we didn't need our guns! We didn't even have to set off the explosives. Okay maybe we fucked up the fusing but they weren't necessary, anyway.
So close. If only Pence had wilted or even allowed himself to be removed from the capitol, a Trump boot licker might have assumed control of the certification sending the country into a bona fide constitutional crisis. It would only be prudent to enact martial law at that point.
Troops - the guys with the guns, like the police and bikers, who all love me! - on the streets! Oh, the possibilities of staying in office would have been endless.
Leaving aside the coup meme, I don't think you see this as rightleaning voters do/did. Both Romney and McCain ran as more liberal Republicans, mostly in the hopes of winning against a much more liberal Democrat candidate. Romney was from Massachusetts, and to be Republican in Massachusetts, particularly to be a successful governor, meant being more liberal than the average conservative. And McCain wasn't a typical anything, ever. So, no, not representing 'the average Republican voter', and I am curious why you thought so?
Each of them won the Republican primary election. Is there a better person to represent Republican voters at that time than the person that most of them voted for? (Not a rhetorical question; primary winners can be bad, I’m just unsure if we can do better.)
I am having a hard time seeing why anyone would think that a particular elected official represented them in particular, when it was fairly obvious that the candidates were not some Platonic ideal of "me, but electable" but instead "the least unlikely to oppose my interests of the options presented".
Maybe this is an age difference, or a conservative/liberal difference, I dunno.
This is where we run into the many-dimensionality problem. I contend that while Trump is more extreme than McCain or Romney in demeanour, he's more moderate in actual policy terms than either of them (which is part of the reason why he won an election and they didn't).
In particular, Trump was significantly to the left of McCain or Romney on economic issues (acknowledging that maybe unions aren't the worst thing ever and that what's good for big business isn't necessarily good for the country) without being significantly further right on social issues (and indeed further left on some, like gay marriage).
The big difference is that 2022 Republicans would have no problem talking to 2008 Democrats like myself. We might disagree on a few things, like who won 2020 election, but they will not call me names. Whereas 2022 Democrats will try to destroy my livelihood based on disagreement on just a few things that were mainstream in 2008 - some limits on immigration that should be consistently enforced, no penises in girls' changing rooms. I can live with people passing some laws I disagree with, but if people who won't even talk to me come to power, they will destroy my life. So Democrats going from the party I used to vote for to people who are trying to cancel me in just 14 years seems pretty extreme.
I think most of this question boils down to whether you're measuring what politicians SAY or what they DO. 1994 right wing talk radio lunacy is now more or less the party line, but look at actual laws passed by Republicans in 2017 and it's basically the Reagan agenda.
I think you might have got the wrong end of the stick on question 2. Which party's more popular won't necessarily be the one that's nearer to the median voter on each specific issue if voters don't fit neatly along a political spectrum, and it's all a bit of a spherical cows hypothesis anyway. Features like branding, salience of certain issues, the ability to build a coalition of political minorities who are all passionate about one thing, perceptions of propriety/confidence, and negative partisanship might be able to swamp ideology in voters' preferences.
Surely the way to measure it is to work out what the median (or mean?) public opinion on all the major issues is, and see which party is closer to that. Eg. if the median American thinks interest rates should be 3%, the Democrats think they should be 4% and the Republicans think they should be 1%, the Republicans are more extreme by this metric. Obviously some issues are less numerically quantifiable (abortion should be on-demand/where there's fetal abnormality or a risk to the wellbeing of the mother or siblings/only where there's a risk to the mother's life/illegal), but you could probably find some pseudo-objective means of quantification and then average them all out.
It still seems weird to say that an individual has simultaneously "gotten more extreme" and "hasn't changed their opinion at all," but I think a big part of the theory of progressivism is a model where:
1. Society has a debate
2. Progressives win the debate
3. The debate ends, the law changes, and everyone moves on to the next issue other than a handful of die-hard reactionaries
(Or just skip steps 1 and 2 and hope no-one notices)
The obvious corollary to this is "judging people by the standards of the time" - there's a big difference between someone who's pro-slavery in 1750 (in a society that has slavery and only a small minority objects to it) and someone who's pro-slavery in 2022 (where you've advocating for a massive break from social norms, presumably based on a moral theory that's independent of them). Being pro-slavery in 2022 seems very extreme. Being pro-slavery in 1750 doesn't seem very extreme, so a three-hundred year old who hasn't changed their mind must logically have got more extreme? (This feels a bit Zeno-ish to me, but I think the logic checks out...)
> Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?
I agree that this question is dumb as phrased, but I think there is a steelman of it latent in the imprecision of the language you're using to define it. To wit:
> I do so under duress: I think this is a dumb question. A corollary of the Median Voter Theorem says that both parties should be the same distance from the average voter.
There are senses in which this is true, but only for very particular meanings of "distance", and in fact the meaning of "distance" you have to use to make this true is specifically designed to eliminate extremity: namely, the median.
The median voter theorem says that parties will form an equilibrium around the median voter. But the median is the centerpoint of the *rank* of the distribution. That is, it flattens the curvature of the tail! The curvature of the tail is the exact thing that people mean by "extreme"!.
Consider an elecotorate composed of 100 standard liberals and 100 conservatives. The median voter is exactly in the middle of conservativism and liberalism. Now consider 99 stalinists, 1 liberal, 1 conservative, and 99 neo-nazis...and the median voter is in the exact same place. Finally, consider 99 stalinists, 1 liberal, and 100 conservatives. The median still hasn't moved.
In fact, it is this very discrepancy that may allow us to construct a measure. One could reasonably define imbalance at a point in time as: the relative location of the median and the mean. If the mean is to the right of the median, the right wing is more extreme, and vice versa.
This parameter has a name in statistics: the skew. We want to know the skew of the distribution of political views. But what does it mean for a political memeplex to be skewed, exactly? Going back to our toy examples: Let's say we had 100 liberals, 1 conservative, and 99 neo-nazis. If the "conservative" party wants to win, it indeed has to appeal to that median conservative. We can define "appeal" here somewhat simplistically as: it has to be slightly closer to them than the liberals are in meme-space.
That seems like it would enforce a symmetry: If the median voter in a contested memeplex has to be roughly equidistant from the two parties, your original analysis holds. But there is an asymmetry that causes that to break down: negative partisanship. Many people, particularly people in the middle, vote primarily to deny power to the opposing party, not to confer power upon the winning party. They vote out of fear.
What that means is that we can think about an "extremity budget". Each party "wants" to be as extreme as possible, but they have to keep that median voter voting with them. Negative partisanship is the solution: make the median voter fear the other party, and you just bought yourself some extremity points. The more negative partisanship you can instill, the more extreme you get to be.
This actually suggests an indirect measure: we have surveys of negative partisanship. If we make the (large) assumption that parties always "want" to drift further into the tail, and we accept that negative partisanship is the primary mechanism by which they can achieve that, then negative partisanship should track political extremity. The stronger your base's negative feelings about the other party, the larger your extremity budget, and since we have assumed parties always consume their extremity budget, the size of that budget corresponds directly to extremity.
I'm not necessarily staking a claim here that this is definitely a great measure. More just putting it out there as an interesting idea to stimulate discussion.
When a party has no platform against which to measure this dimension, as in GOP 2016, and became the party of Trump, then how do you proceed with this measurement? Is corruption “conservative,” is the never-currently-heard “defund the police” a mark that the left has returned to center? Now that 70 plus % want “pro choice” where is that even on the scale?
Almost regardless of how you might try to quantify this, it's a multidimensional problem, so "who moved more?" would depend on the weights you assigned to the various areas of contention. But "what weights do we give to the various areas of contention?" is and probably always has been a serious area of contention.
So, uh, it's *really* hard to get any objective distance from the politics of your era.
The stumbling block here to deeper understanding of American politics is that you clearly believe there are two parties in America. In fact there is one party, called the The Epstein Party, but it has a puppet in each hand: a donkey on one and an elephant on the other.
No sarcasm here. There is one permanent bureaucracy with one agenda that pretty much keeps chugging along no matter who the president is; when the president is on-side, like Clinton, all the better; but when the president is not on-side, like Trump, they work around him. No wall, no muslim ban, zero swamps drained, nothing of any substance. The core idea in what I said is simply that the positions that are ostensibly at the _top_ of your government, and in particular the president, are actually only at the _front_, and are designed to soak up your attention. The reason why they always swim left is because they want to swim left; the idea that the blue team is pulling left, and the red team is pulling right, and the blue team somehow always wins, is a fiction; the red team is pushing left from behind while facing backwards, and does this simply to mollify reactionary plebs. Having a two party state is just like having a one party state, with some extra steps.
Here in the UK we have a cabinet, and the opposition forms a shadow cabinet, and when Good Team beats Bad Team they swap in man for man; but who here has allowed themselves to come to believe that every single public sector worker from every single department has a shadow worker lurking in the shadows, waiting for their team to win, to swap in as well? Or if they don't, do we imagine that these powerful and relatively unknown figures, after each election, just puke up their ideology and swallow a different one, and set about overwriting their own work? Wouldn't that response from hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, to the switching over of a few dozen in the executive branch, be the tail wagging the dog?
You say that like it's a bad thing. If the permanent bureaucracy can stop crazy ideas like border walls and Muslim bans, good for them.
And things doing always pull.left, because economics. We live in a world where markets reign, huge corporations reign, and the richest have personal spaceships.
The tone of this piece is excellent, managing to avoid plunging into the actual ground-level political disputes during discussion of the meta-level.
Two points:
* Political _partisanship_ is not the same thing as political _extremism_. A country mostly evenly divided into social-justice eco-feminist anti-capitalists and traditionalist libertarian monarchists could very well have their elected representatives cooperating nicely, working towards finding common ground (however limited it might be), and crossing party lines to create legislation. A country where the pressing issue is the dispute over whether to make the tax rate 28.8% or 28.9% could have bitterly fighting parties that hate each other, take crazy steps to ensure that the other party doesn't take power, and vote along party lines exclusively.
* I don't have any data backing this, but I suspect that most members of congress would, throughout their careers, slowly drift towards the political viewpoints common to most people surrounded by well-educated wealthy people in urban areas. Because, you know, they're politicians working in DC. This would, if true, mess up any use of DW-NOMINATE to track shifts, because politicians are not the same between the start and end of their term, and the changes are correlated. (Unless it can track who changes their votes if the _same_ bill is reintroduced in another term, perhaps?)
I have always enjoyed SSC because I generally found it to be on point. Yet, somehow, the focus in this is "taxation" and "lizard people". I feel that is poor framing and ask that things be framed sensibly. For example, what percentage of republican voters believe in lizard people? Is this actually a Republican candidate/voter position?
There are far more relevant equivalents that could be used to represent this discussion in a balanced manner. As you've explicitly said not to mention these, I have purposely excluded them.
I would summarise my point as "why not actually focus on the big ticket items that separate the two parties?".
Regarding the 1800-2020 NOMINATE graph, maybe I'm mistaken while reading it (small, shitty, dusty screen), but it looks like reps are, in fact, polarizing faster than dems, but only because they were less polarized over the course of the 20th century, and are simply catching up (and maybe passing) dems in polarization.
I find the Tumblr votes very interesting, because they say that 90% of responders *don't share* the view of the original meme. The original meme is about people who identify as liberals feeling like _their group_, the liberals, have become more extreme (and left the speaker behind).
I'm someone who identifies as left in most ways (albeit in the UK rather than the US) but wokeism has left me baffled and estranged from a lot of "progressive" positions, so I identify with the original meme; except that I don't think the right are "standing still" either, _but that's not the point_.
I cannot fathom why this post isn’t entirely about biases in perception caused by what Twitter chooses to promote or discourage, whether as an editorial decision or a byproduct of its engagement-seeking algorithm.
Because that’s what the comic is ultimately about and that’s where at least Musk lives much of his life.
I’m also not sure, given that it’s rejected Twitter as the main point of discussion, why this doesn’t reach back further in the debate to when “Republicans are getting more extreme” was established during the Obama era. After all, a major event in this debate was Romney disavowing his own record for something that played better to the national Republican electorate.
I feel like SSC would have something more interesting to say—and, wisely, would have approached it spiraling from some other debate or concept we can have more or, at least, easier clarity on.
Not completely related to the post, but I have a statistics problem that I think DW-NOMINATE (or similar) might fix
Every year I run a prediction tournament amongst my friends, where I ask a few questions about what might happen in the next year. I'd like to be able to compare people's performance from one year to another, but I don't know a good way to do that (for example some year - by random chance - I might set questions that are harder or easier so comparing total score year-by-year is a mug's game).
I've known about DW-NOMINATE for a while and was wondering if I could use something like the bridging method to solve my problem - some players have played for nearly a decade without missing an entry, so could I use their scores over time to identify improvement in others? Does anyone know of an implementation of the algorithm I could take a look at?
Yes, it certainly indicates that Scott is preparing to finish the tack to the right he's been making over the past 7-ish years.
I can't blame him- he's certainly doing it out of a combination of the cocksuckers at the NYT trying to persecute him and because he thinks he'll be able to do more good by following how the country as a whole is being moved. I wish him the best and hope he'll remember to hold on to at least SOME of the principles he espoused in "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For the Categories" instead of throwing all of that under the bus for the sake of expediency.
Better men than him have failed- in fact, to a certain degree, I suspect that it is easier, and not harder, to slide down that path if you're intelligent. A clever mind can come up with all sorts of persuasive justifications for hypocrisy.
It would be nice if I could believe the same, but given his impressive lack of empathy on most issues it appears altogether too easy in my mind. Road to hell, good intentions, etc.
I think talking about political parties at all misses the point of the original meme a bit, though. I identified very strongly with the meme, but I don't have a strong opinion on how far each of the main political parties (either in the US, or in the UK, where I live) has drifted over the past couple of decades. I identified with the meme because I feel like ordinary people on the left have moved a long way to the left, and I've stayed put, meaning my formerly left-wing opinions are seen as right-wing.
It's about what opinions are approved or disapproved of (and how strongly) among friends and family, and what opinions might get you in trouble at work, not about party platforms or politician voting records (many of which may be on topics unrelated to the perceived shift).
(note that this is not the same as the "Which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans?" question that you added in the second draft, even though they both mention ordinary people; my question is about the ordinary people themselves diverging and doesn't mention the parties at all)
Relatedly, sampling "Democrats" and "Republicans" probably won't shed much light on this; you ideally want to sample people who were Democrats 20 years ago, some of whom will still be Democrats, some of whom will be Republicans, and some of whom will be disaffected non-voters (and then likewise for people who were Republicans 20 years ago).
Yes, that's true, particularly in a two-party system like the US (or to a lesser extent the UK). But then, even in Germany the conservative party arguable shifted to the left, leaving a spot open to the AFD...of course Germany being more left-wing than either the UK or US already on most issues...
I first came across this meme in a Facebook post by a left-wing friend, who was sharing the DW-NOMINATE graphs in order to debunk the meme.
Since the meme made me go "YES YES SO MUCH", I tried to look into the data behind the graphs to see what it was based on. It led me along a long multi-step treasure hunt culminating in a physical book that had to be paid for, except the payment site was broken. But one of the pages en route said that *two* dimensions emerged from the clustering, and one of them was the traditional left-right economic axis, and the other was a social one, about things like sexual ethics, immigration, and slavery (slavery itself is presumably a settled issue now, but I expect this axis would include things like reparations for slavery, or affirmative action based on the legacy of slavery).
The graphs were based on the first axis, but I think the meme is based on a dramatic progressive-ward shift along the second axis, which the graphs don't address.
I also think the Political Compass authoritarian-libertarian axis is relevant here. 20 years ago, the right was more authoritarian (War on Terror, the Religious Right, etc). Now, the left has become more authoritarian (people being fired for opinions that were mainstream and unremarkable very recently). The vertical compass axis has changed from slanting right to slanting left. To those of us whose main political orientation is libertarian (in the small-L sense of the Political Compass), it can feel like the left has become "more left" and the right has stayed put or become less right, but to some extent it's just that the left have become more forceful about it and so we notice it more.
This is similar to your "Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?" but not identical. I am saying one side has become more authoritarian, but authoritarian isn't "crazy" or *inherently* bad - the Political Compass shows that some people on both the left and the right approve of it - it's just very unappealing to me (and Musk and Wright).
I think that better explains how people position themselves politically than the "traditional" political compass dimensions do. I think "culture" here can be a combination of the thrive/survive and coupled/decoupled (e.g. a conservative nationalist would be "survive and coupled" while a libertarian progressive would be "thrive and decoupled"...).
That's really funny - the people I know IRL say the Compass is biased such that it puts almost everyone on the left! I guess that probably means it's actually quite balanced...
I'm not convinced by Nerst's critique (even though I often do agree with him). If (as he rightly says) it's supposed to be two independent axes, then its usefulness consists in a pair of coordinates defining a full two-dimensional space, not a set of four neat boxes that are each treated as internally homogenous. It's more useful to say that Alice is strongly left and weakly libertarian and Bob is weakly left and strongly libertarian than to say Alice and Bob are both in the bottom-left quadrant. Bob probably has more in common with a strong libertarian who's just to the right of the vertical axis than he does with Alice.
What I meant was they place all the politicians on the right...as for Nerst, I think that his compass isn't necessarily "four neat boxes", though it got labelled that way, but more like graduations of each ...so basically two coordinates like you rote above...
I was referring to the but where he says "Something novel should emerge in the quadrants. Each intersection ought to be more than just the axis values put together. Interaction ought to produce a result with its own identity that we can recognize as a thing over and above its axis values." That sounds to me like he means each of the four boxes should have a unified identity that's more salient than the pair of coordinates.
The whole thing is weirdly phrased insofar as it seems to assume a correlation between left/right and Democrat/Republican, when both of the latter parties are anchored within a couple of degrees of each other on the center-right.
The "extreme" behavior isn't a left/right thing, it's a kind of "narcissism of small differences" thing.
This is a strange way of discussing this. If one is to compare shifting positions to each other, effects vanish. I feel we should not compare voter sentiment but *policies* both parties enacted and compare those with policies enacted in comparable countries, UK, Germany, France, Canada et cetera.
I would have to look deeper into this but I feel that real-life Democrat policy is pretty much in line with other rightwing liberal parties elsewhere, say the German FDP, while real GOP policy has drifted far to the right of what other conservative parties *do*. No conversative party in the West actively works to roll back abortion rights, for example. Is this not a sign of a party getting extremer, when it leaves the broad consensus of similar parties elsewhere?
That's cherry-picking of issues though, if you look at other issues (e.g. illegal immigration) the Republican Party would be to the left of the leftmost mainstream party just about anywhere else. In any other country, deporting illegal immigrants is a no-brainer -- of course you do, they're illegal. In the US, deporting illegal immigrants has somehow shifted to the far right end of the Overton window if not beyond it.
That's a good point, but I believe it doesn't have much to do with a left/right outlook on the world. In other Western countries immigrantion works differently: You come to the border, ask for political asylum and are automatically legal for the time it takes to process your claim. You may not work while in this process and are supported by the state. If the court decides you are not eligible for asylum, they deport you or keep you in a legal limbo for a while if you deporting would probably kill you. If you go undercover during this you become illegal. It is very hard to find employment without legal status in Europe, you are most likely forced to be supported by relatives or earn money by committing crimes.
This creates a strong incentive for the state to deport you.
In the US it seems that most illegals are able to find work in farming or hospitality (official data says 7 million illegal immigrants in the US are part of the workforce) - that creates an incentive for a right wing party to take it slow. You might hurt businesses in your electorate if you deport immigrants that are gainfully employed. After all, illegals keep the wages down for everyone.
So, while the incentive of the USA to protect their borders is as high as everywhere else, but the incentive to really enact deportations is somewhat less, probably?
Canada, USA, the Eurozone share a place near the top of the development index, the countries you mentioned are far off.
Many of the systemic problems the USA face are different from those that Brazil has to deal with. To name just one set: The NA / Eurozone has an aging population + an influx of immigrants; Brazil has a young, largely unemployed workforce + some educated people moving away.
I actually think that in many ways the US is closer to "Latin" America than it is to Western Europe...certainly in demographics, but also in political attitudes...though it's still closer to Canada, at least the "blue states"...but Western Europe IMO is the real outlier, it is the most WEIRD place in the Word and further away from the "global average" in its values I'd argue...
I disagree here...I think you have to accept the different political realities between nation-states. The US is built on individualism, and thus cannot be compared to Western EU countries...maybe to Canada, but even that's stretching it a bit. This is why I think it's stupid to declare that the "Democrats would be right-wingers in Western Europe" because they have to adapt their policies to the US context, just as the FDP cannot be as libertarian in Germany as they could in the US, Canada or Czech Republic because Germany is among the most left-wing nations on earth...
This is not true. The political theories are the same, regardless of which country you look at. Conversative policies, liberal policies, socialist policies can be (within reason) properly defined.
What you're saying is essentially "I want to misslabel German politics as left-wing or "Democrats as socialist" because in the US right-wing is the middle and Americans tend to define everything from the American normal. You can do that, it's not unsimilar to what Musk does, but isn't is exactly what you think my mistake is?
No, I don't think that's correct. Like I wrote, policies do not happen in a vacuum. They (politicians proposing the policies) have to take into account of what the population affected thinks. And as long as the nation-state remains the major organizing entity for political expression, then one has to take into account the different political cultures between different nations (or other entities in which politics take place). For Example, where do you place the Chinese Communist Party in terms of their "policies"? I don't think it's obvious from a US or European perspective...so, no, (unfortunately) the nation-state sets the parameters which control political expression...
> the Republicans have a structural advantage: small, rural states get just as many Senators as bigger states, so Republican votes are worth more, at least in the Senate.
I don't see how this follows. Surely that just means small, rural states have a structural advantage. They can give that advantage to whichever party they want, it's not inherently a Republican advantage.
Thank you, Scott. Your work here mainly makes me feel like caring so much about this stuff is all just a waste of time because I can’t control it. Here is a silly short story to illustrate the point.
Suppose we found out there really WAS a galactic federation and earth was a test case but there was a split in the galactic federal bureaucracy and they were running this A/B test on earth and we were in a holdout group for some new policy that ….
Would you _want_ to know more? Would you benefit from finding out that yes almost all global elites really are working under groups of space lizards but it turns out true are multiple groups of space lizards all intently focused on what happens to earth? Suppose they have their OWN squabbles between them which are vaguely mirrors to our own, but it gets really weird because they guided our cultural evolution to resolve their own squabble, and it’s not working out as either group expected. Do you really want to know the details?
Meanwhile I’m still not the dad and parent I want to be. So why focus time and energy into this insanely complex system that I can’t control? The only answer seems to be “because system claims to want my input.” When I tell it “neither of these choices make sense to me,” it responds, “no no the stakes are infinite, you must choose.”
And so I conclude, the only reasonable move is not to play.
I find this analysis to be well done and ambiguous, as the nature of the beast truly is. I do have a question... people were asking what happened with polarization, you used these questions to look at how polarization has happened, but in this blog we don't discuss WHY it is or isn't important.
Personally, I find these conversations moot and that they perpetuate the negative aspects of polarization. I think we need to stop labeling people on a political spectrum that can't possibly capture the nuance and complexity of humans and society....
e.g. you can't take a few hundred million people, line them up left to right and cluster them because your clustering analysis will depend on those arbitrary categories. The only reason WHY I see this question as important, is because we live in a two party society... but like I said I prefer the meta conversations that seek to undo this two party stranglehold through initiatives like ranked choice voting.
A couple of years ago Democrats had the chance to collectively choose one person to represent them. They went with Joe Biden, who is largely a traditional establishment incrementalist politician.
When Republicans made a similar choice, they went with Donald Trump, who mostly stood for smashing up the establishment and winning at all costs. This was exemplified by his (and much of his party's) willingness to go to any lengths to hold on to the presidency after the 2020 election, regardless of the actual votes cast - recall e.g. their take that Pence could choose the next president by unilaterally choosing not to count certain states' votes, which would have been a pretty terrible precedent for future presidential elections.
This is strong evidence that the Republican Party has become more extreme faster.
I think the correct way to evaluate is to see how extreme the parties seem to historians in the future, obviously that is impossible.
But I think looking back in history you can look back and sense the things that are weird dead ends, that were popular among one side in politics but never could be the mainstream view and you can see what view today are similar.
"Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?"
It feels like the fact that there's Republican congresspeople who support QAnon is hard evidence on this? Is there anyone on the left in Congress who is equally extreme? Genuine question. (Or maybe you're thinking about the median Republican in Congress instead of the mean, and a few crazies doesn't pull the median much?)
"When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup" Also, given the fact that a bunch of Republican Congresspeople support Jan 6, that Trump asked Georgia to change the vote outcome, etc., do you actually believe the possibility of this is symmetric between the parties? Implying that other people are saying one party is "infinitely worse" on this axis is a cop-out; one party can clearly be worse on this axis right now without being infinitely worse.
Put differently: If you had to bet on which party would seize (or try to seize) power in an undemocratic coup in the next 20 years, which would you bet on? With what odds? If you think it's actually 50-50, I'd take that bet with you.
• Which party has gotten more extreme faster from the perspective of other Western Liberal Democracies?
An outsider view from a Nordic country:
Democrats are traditionally moderate center-right to center. Typically in sync with Europe in social issues, sometimes behind. Right on the economy and more religious. Classical liberals with moderate social democrats at the edge. People like Bernie Sanders push policies that have already been implemented in Europe.
Republicans _were_ conservative right and Christian right up to 2010. Economically Republicans are instinctively business capitalists, not market capitalists. Very traditional Christian values.
Changes after 2010:
Democrats still have a centrist policy and but performative and reactionary rhetoric defines them from the left. The real fight inside the party is between the young and the old. Democrats don't act radical in practice.
The republican core support is not conservative anymore. GOP has adopted radical-right agenda and rhetoric that points towards illiberal democracy. Victor Orban's Hungary is an example of similar ideas in Europe. Degrading norms concerning the rule of law in Poland is an another example. Republican party is doing radically actions and even extremist actions.
----
Definitions for words I use. They are right/left axis neutral in a strict political science sense.
"conservative" - wants to keep the current values and policies mostly intact. Left or right conservatives exist.
"radical", "radical-right", "radical-left" - opposite of conservative. Works within the current democratic and legal framework for fundamental changes in the system. Non-revolutionary civil disobedience where you break the laws to change the current system is as far as radical goes. You can be left/right/religious/or centrist radical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_centrism
"extremism", "extreme-right","extreme-left" - extreme measures needed to change the system completely. Revolutionary, violent overthrow possible.
Well, I am from (ok maybe not quite) Northern Europe too...but I think that analyzing politics outside of Northern Europe with a Northern European lens will lead to highly distorted results...I don't think many people from Northern Europe (or for that matter, from most other countries) realize this, but Northern Europe is I would argue the only place where altruism won over individualism (on a society-wide level, that is), and of course the reason for that is WW 2...but other place are much more on the "survive" spectrum than on the "thrive" spectrum (even the US, despite being wealthier than Western Europe, but I guess it's because they didn't live through WW 2 and didn't take the lessons from that war...). Thus, Northern Europe really is an outlier in terms of politics Worldwide... the only comparable places, outside of Western Europe, are the other Anglo Settler-societies (minus the US if including the "red states"). Thus, while I agree with you from a Western EU perspective, that's a perspective that is very particular and thus is interesting to hear from, but isn't applicable to the US or basically the vast majority of nations worldwide...
I think you’re too quick to poo-poo “extreme relative to the average voter”. Clearly it’s a hard metric to assess. But on issues like gay marriage the public has shifted a lot; being pro Gay marriage went from a fringe belief to the overwhelming majority in a decade. Maybe two? When you measure from matters a lot, which presumably drives the generational divides on such issues.
But also, after losing an election Republican leaders tried to cheat and overturn votes, and when that failed they committed violent sedition against the US. They also cheated to stack the judiciary. Those acts are extreme but not captured by any metric you can find because they each only have one precedent in American history. The Tea Party/Q wing of the GOP is unhinged, but there was explicit neo-Nazi symbolism at CPAC so you can’t sweep the crazies under the rug; they are influencing the GOP mainstream.
Balanced against that, Progressives have historically-extreme positions on the environment, the economy, gender and sexuality, and pronouns.
With so many dimensions, you have to ask “extreme at what?” Existential issues at the top of your priority stack like the livability of our planet or the continued existence of America as a democracy seem like they matter more than pronouns, no matter how far you are from historical positions or modern voters on pronouns. I guess if you listen to Tucker Carlson enough, maybe you’d disagree.
Wow, yeah this is a loaded topic. From my experience it seemed like progressives were moving farther left while Republicans were fairly static, maybe moving left on a few issues. For instance most Republicans now support gay marriage. What I find interesting though is this obsession of showing the world you aren't the one who has changed. Progressives may have gone farther left over time, but does that mean the policies they support are therefore extreme or bad? They are still winning elections, people are voting for them.
Yes. Because progress has been the norm in the Western World, at least, since the enlightenment...of course, there are various ways to define "progress", but if people haven't changed their position since the Paleolithic, homo sapiens still would be living in caves...
A more interesting question to me - is this Congress historically partisan (feels like the grand total of swing votes is like 2 Dem Senators)? And can we blame earmark reform for eliminating the lubricant that let bipartisanship function?
Wow Scott. It's amazing that when you take out all the stuff the Republicans have won and moved right on (guns, abortion, taxes, unions), *and* start the clock the year of a major rightwards alignment (the Republican Revolution and the Contract with America), it looks like Democrats are moving left. You don't have a finger on the scale here, you're standing on it. This is a disappointing post.
not an American. I’m pretty sure that conservatives moved right on unions and on the State, for sure. Attitudes to abortion were hardly more liberal.
However there was a clear sea change in the US from Trump on, on the left. If you can find any democrats espousing ending white supremacy, or self identification, or defunding the police in 1995, I’m all ears. The democrats were even opposed to gay marriage back then.
It does amaze that intelligent American adults with a concept of an outside view seem to frequently have the view:
My sides racism, riots and falsely saying an election was fraudulent is not worth talking about, but the other side doing it is evil and a threat to democracy.
As a European centre leftist, more left on economics than culture, there’s a spectre haunting these debates and it’s the spectre of trans - particularly self identification.
The social issues like tolerance for drugs and homosexuality are now the norm. The conversations I had about gay marriage in law school in 2008 in an open lecture would now be sufficient to get dozens of students and a handful of teachers expelled today for being intolerant bigots or what have you. As we all know, even Obama came out against gay marriage in 2008. Look how far we've come on that issue.
There used to be a bunch of people that identified with democrats because they despised the absurd fundamentalist religious beliefs pushed from the right all the way up through the Bush years. These types of Republicans seemed laughably stupid and it was impossible to vote for them.
Unfortunately now that's how I feel about the left and the drawing speaks to that. I just can't get on board with the parts of wokeness that seem illogical, regressive, and lead to absurd consequences. I'm also sick of being forced to implicitly accept a woke political opinion in a professional or social setting or risk losing status. The Musk drawing was a pretty good example of how many people feel in this area.
I know brother. Me too. The courage to just say things that are not popular must be weighed by my obligations to care for my family as the primary bread winner (by a long shot). It sucks.
Another important part is the generational aspect to this. You touch on it a little but for something over decades it should be addressed explicitly. When Colin looks at his “fellow liberals” 20 years ago he is thinking about other young people like himself. When he thinks about “fellow liberals” today those are new young people, not people from 20 years ago who changed their mind. Similarly, the right didn’t change its mind about prison for sodomy, rather, people who held that position got old and died. So everyone looks around themselves saying “I haven’t changed my views since I was 16, but the world around me is moving all over the place” and can all be accurately describing their view, while getting the generational differences all wrong.
I can't speak for Colin, but when I first saw the meme and agreed with it, I meant the "fellow liberals" of my own early-Millennial generation. I don't have much interaction with 20-year-olds.
Fair enough. I guess that’s why I was thinking a data-based analysis by cohort would be useful to figure out if it is changes within a cohort or cohorts changing.
"Among Republicans, 79% said they would press a magic button that replaced current policies/institutions/norms with those of 1990; among Democrats, only 33% would."
What? One third of Tumblr Democrats wanted to go back to the 90's? When gay marriage was illegal? ...Did they understand the question? This throws the survey results into serious doubt for me, unless someone has an explanation.
As a foreign observer I think both major parties in the US have changed a lot, have moved very far from ordinary citizens, have become "ideologically pure" (which is a bad thing), and have embraced entirely crazy worldviews and tactics.
I apologize because I'm not a US citizen and so this isn't my business, but I think both main parties in the US should split in a moderate half and a radical half. I guess the two moderate parties would be able to work together.
OK, this is a good point, but why do you assume that a combination of moderate left and moderate right working together would not care about the American people and not work in their best interests? Perhaps it has been often so, but I don't think it is necessarily so.
All combinations of [moderate / radical], [right / left], and [care / don't care (about the people)] exist. Just choose moderates that care about the people and are strong/smart enough to resist the inevitable pressures to betray the people.
Your point is that moderates are intellectually lazy because they don't care enough, and only partisan extremists care enough to understand and change things.
But I disagree.
I see myself as a radical centrist who dislike extremists of both sides *precisely because* they are intellectually lazy and consume partisan propaganda without making any effort to understand. They are just happy to belong to one or the other camp, and are more interested in virtue signaling than in actual political outcomes.
One can be a moderate centrist in the sense of disliking both extremes, and still be an engaged citizen who strives for a better world. Not a perfect world, which is impossible, but a better world, which is possible if enough people work hard and smart enough.
Sorry for misunderstanding your point, and thanks for making it clearer. I still disagree. Question: what do you propose instead of “a positive attitude and elbow grease?”
- My impression of extremism in the GOP has a lot more to do with what they are willing to do to get their way than with their actual goals. I grew up with very conservative parents and was a registered Republican for many years; the goals are not surprising. Things like prosecuting abortion as murder were things I heard about all the time as a kid in the 90s.
The "Green Bay Sweep," however, was shocking. So many Congresscritters obviously holding their vomit down to go along with Trump's worst excesses was shocking.
- I wonder how much of this sentiment (not fact - sentiment) that the left has moved too far left comes down explicitly to gender politics.
I'll throw this out there and then people can tear me to shreds:
Democrats have gotten more extreme, Republicans have gotten more insane. Republican policies haven't changed all that much, but their paranoia, hostility, and willingness to believe the worst about everyone who isn't on the right have gone up gone up; meanwhile, their ability to think rationally....way down, of course. On the left, a different kind of paranoia (as well as an obsession with egalitarianism) has pushed them in the direction of adopting ever more extreme policy positions: the 1st Amendment is now deemed a terrible constitutional flaw, the equal protection clause needs to go so we can ensure equality of outcome, national borders are racist, we need wealth redistribution to alleviate the problem of billionaires having more stuff than everyone else, shrink the economy on purpose to save the planet. Believe all women, even when they lie, etc.
So I would say Scott's Both Sides-ism is not wrong, but needs some clarification.
I don't see why we need to carve out the 'on paper policy' from the 'tactics / norm violations'. The other arguably has just as much an impact on society and the future than any policy, and iirc they actually passed an empty platform at the last convention.
I think this results in democrats being more detrimental (but fixable) in the short-term, with republicans being more detrimental in the long-term, but permanent.
"On the other hand, the Median Voter Theorem just says where you have to be in order to win. If you are dumb and bad and want to fail, you can be anywhere! "
Fairly accurate description of the Biden administration's legislative strategy thus far.
I appreciated this analysis, but I think it tended to focus on a limited number of variables that (to overly generalize) tend to 'cosplay' more how politics is conducted. This is commensurate with what has happened inside some of the work I've done with rationalist-community folks on a few political initiatives, where the first day usually starts with me spending a lot of time reiterating variations of, "It doesn't really work like that".
(Source: I am one of those much-reviled behind-the-scenes DC-insider-types)
Perhaps by virtue of that orientation - which, to be clear, is also my own potential source of bias - the most operative metric of 'extremism' is far more straightforward and less hypothetical. If we want to look at whether 'the 90s policy equilibrium' holds sway in one political party or the other, I think we can very easily simply look at the people who were shaping it in the '90s (or whatever our preferred time period is) and see what kind of influence they hold today.
By that metric, the answer is unambiguously, "The Republicans have become far more extreme." I work with high-profile Ds and Rs on a number of different issues. The Clinton-era Ds occupy many of the most powerful positions in the White House. The Bush-era Rs are uniformly excluded from official positions and harbor very little discursive public relevance (indeed, it usually backfires in this very "#RINO" way).
You can also look at large-scale dollars supporting political causes. Many of the most stalwart last-three-decade supporters of D initiatives are still channeling colossal amounts of money towards mainstream Ds. By contrast, look how assertively folks like e.g. the Koch network and its affiliates have run away from the baseline right.
I can walk through a more thorough analysis than I have the time (or discretion) to do in this post, but I think the main takeaway is that the variables you're focusing on - while not bad - tend to be the kind of things that feed narrativist rather than causalist understandings of politics.
(My only other issue IMO is that the caveat you acknowledge - "who is proceeding at what rate and in what direction" vs. "who has diverged from point X" - is I think pretty clearly both the factual and experiential thing people tend to be referring to, and is the 'main thing' rather than an aside. But that's simply a preference assertion on my part and not really an actual argument).
Another way of phrasing this is that anyone interested in having a serious conversation about politics needs to know and understand who e.g. Mike Donilon is.
Another possibility to explain that observation is that the Democrat machine rewards playing the game and changing policy stances as it is convenient, while the Republican machine tends to reward consistent support for particular issues and punishes playing the game (becoming an insider). One could test that by looking at official positions and statements of the Clinton Ds then and now and comparing them, likewise with the remaining Rs. Likewise you could compare the positions and voting behavior of current Rs with those they replace to see if the voting behavior stayed with the seat, as it were.
*nodnod*. I think the policy positions of Obama --> H. Clinton --> Biden are extremely heavily-clustered relative to McCain --> Romney --> Trump (which was broadly speaking a libertarianism --> protectionism shift within four years) but I'm admittedly biased towards the tax/economics dimension of things and this is hardly a robust analysis.
Agreed when it comes to trade and some economics; Republicans seemed to swap positions with Democrats when it comes to freer trade. Although how much of that is only in relation to China (on both sides) I don't know. Much of the "white working class" moving towards the Republicans might also account for some of that, or perhaps was caused by it?
I expect that on social issues and immigration there has probably been a pretty sharp swing for the D's, Obama notably being anti-gay marriage at the time, and Biden... well Biden has been all over the place since the 90's. Bit of a weathervane that one. I haven't seen as much of that in the R's; I think in the 90's I would have correctly predicted the later Republican stance on gay marriage based on current trends (and remember having early discussions about "why not just make it a civil contract?").
Although describing any of McCain's positions as even broadly speaking "libertarianism" is a little strange to this libertarian type :) It's been a long time since he was believably for smaller government, lower taxes or free trade, but then most Republicans can be described that way. From a "Republican adjacent" position there always seems to be a lot of frustration within the party regarding politicians that promise smaller government, lower taxes, etc. but then keep producing the normal ever growing government. I think that explains a fair bit of Republican politician turn over compared to Dems, as "more government programs" is usually a popular promise with the D electorate, and what politicians usually want to do anyway.
I think what you've established here is that Clintonistas make good apparatchiks. But we already knew that.
We also already knew Bush is out of favor generally among Republicans, but I think this has very little to do with culture war issues, or even right-left-center issues in general, and much more to do with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars he left behind.
>Among Democrats, about 60% thought the Republicans had gotten more extreme faster, 10% thought they’d gotten more extreme faster, and 30% weren’t sure.
>Among Republicans, the numbers were the exact same, only in the opposite direction.
That doesn't mean what you imply it means. Among evolutionists, most will say that creationists are believing non-scientific things because of bias. Among creationists, most will say exactly the same thing about evolutionists. But one is correct and one isn't. I could say the same thing about homeopaths and allopaths.
I don't know how you can look at that Pew data and say that it's clear conservatives have held pat while progressives have shifted left. I was an infant in 1994. That's not my - and likely not for the majority of other readers here - frame of reference. There's pretty clearly an inflection point in the early 2000s where conservatives dramatically shifted right compared to progressives largely maintaining the same - or slower - rate of movement left.
Ahhh – I didn't realize the second part of your comment was only referring to the Pew data. I thought you were claiming that there was a "pretty clearly an inflection point" based on some other evidence/info and I wasn't sure what that might be.
I think part of the problem with this question is that people aren't really thinking of Dems/Republicans but Blue/Red Tribe.
You'd need a whole extra layer of analysis to say how much of the crazy that comes out of blue tribe highbrow media (E.G. The 1619 Project), that comes out of lowbrow media (gestures vaguely at twitter mobs), is endorsed by the Democratic party. And the equivalent for the red tribe. Not to mention which tribe's fringes are crazier.
I'm always surprised when users can't resist indulging their recreational outrage over data posts that don't get on a pulpit to give them their 2 minutes of hate. Even though I shouldn't be. Real "I tried getting David Shor fired" energy.
Good content. Social media has opened a pandora's box qua mob behavior (or extremism if you prefer), but I wonder if broad temperament will grow immune to its effects or the exacerbation will only get worse.
Perhaps the lizard point is a better way to measure to extremism.
Election fraud or racial discrimination claims might have no evidence, but it is a normal thing that happens involving mortal humans.
What percentage of people and officials in each party believe things that require suspending any form of link to reality like cannibals building tunnels or nearby racist statues making people worse at maths.
P.S excluding religion because that is obviously a different thing.
It seems to me that the DW-NOMINATE data support the first conclusion that liberal policy is more constantly changing. It's easier to hit a stationary target than a moving one, so we would expect a party whose policies are in flux will have more difficulty reaching consensus. After all, it takes time to build consensus.
Perhaps a better way to read the DW-NOMINATE data would be to see it as a barometer for which party's policies are more consistent (and therefore easier to reach consensus on) over time. Are there obvious periods of change in the data that can be correlated to significant policy/directional changes in the party platforms?
The problem with this whole line of analysis is that it assumes a stable left-right spectrum of political views, when in fact the definitions of "left" and "right" change considerably over time. Specifically, both terms represent large, diverse coalitions, and the constituencies in these coalitions shift, both gradually and suddenly. For example, the upheaval of the 1960s that created the "new left" moved a portion of the "working-class" constituency from the "left" coalition to the "right" one, and much of the "white-collar-professional" constituency, as well as the "Southern Black" constituency, from the "right" coalition to the "left" one. This shift gradually expanded over the subsequent few decades, until the recent upheaval of the 2010s, in which a portion of the "business/corporate" constituency moved from the "right" coalition to the "left" one, while a portion of the "minority" constituency moved from the "left" coalition to the "right" one.
With each of these tectonic shifts, the definitions of "left" and "right" change to conform to the new coalitions' constituents, largely mooting questions about how the parties have moved along a left-right spectrum that is itself in flux. For example, while Wright and Musk are probably correct that the "left" and "right" coalitions have shifted under their feet, moving them from their perceived "center" position closer to that of the "right", there are at the same time many people--so-called "never-Trumpers", many of whom are demographically very similar to Wright and Musk--who would argue that the "right" has scooted off in an extreme direction, moving them from the center closer to the "left" coalition's position. And of course they're both correct--the coalitions have actually shifted along multiple dimensions, and which dimensions matter more to them determines which coalition they perceive as having traveled furthest from them.
This is an excellent point. Depending on what basket of issues/values are important to you, you could make the argument that the Republicans have become more left-wing (abandoning support for free trade, adopting anti-corporate/pro-working-class rhetoric) over recent years at the same time the Democrats have become more right-wing (abandoning support for broad free expression, toning down anti-corporate/pro-working-class rhetoric). As a libertarian, I've noticed both parties becoming more authoritarian, but not necessarily any more extremely "left" or "right." Economically speaking, it often seems like the parties are more similar now than they've ever been in my lifetime.
Well, that's mostly a US-centric POV though. It's I think an artifact of the two-party system that this is seen this way...there are of course areas where it changes what it means to be "right-wing" or "left-wing", but if you agree that being for egalitarian communitarianism is left-wing, and hierarchical individualism right-wing, then the definitions cannot change simply on what population groups support which parties that consider themselves to be "left" or "right".
You compare parties to voters. Comparing parties to voters makes perfect sense in regards to mean voter theory. But what about comparing parties to the total population?
The ratio of voters to non-voters is not symmetrical between parties.
Voters skew significantly older relative to the total population. They skew non-hispanic relative to the general population. They skew educated. They skew towards being middle class or more affluent. They skew slightly churchgoing. They skew slightly Republican aligned and conservative aligned.
From the perspective of “what is the Wright-Musk meme about?”, I think it’s about what’s going on in their social circles/on Twitter, which are surely dominated by people with high levels of education. This group has been shifting left, with Trump causing the trend accelerate, and that is what I think they’re responding to.
This is such a strange way to quantify things, borders on lying with data. If you start with the premise that civilization is not static and that it, I don't know, it *civilizes* over time, you would set up the roles of Democrats and Republicans differently. Democrats change things, Republicans conserve. Conservation of what works in a system is important (see: Jonathan Haidt). But if we assume that change is necessary, a moral force, than suggesting that "hey, conservatives have wanted slaves and submissive women consistently since pre-America, and therefore they are more consistent and reasonable," you're being disingenuous. You need some way to say in a modern world of potential abundance, we have more room for humane moral policies and equitable divisions, and trying to roll back the clock on rights, environment and mass violence is definitely more extreme. We might even find a way to measure it - both parties say one thing, do another, but which one is embracing more institution-breaking norms? I submit the one normalizing the resistance of free and fair elections is definitely not a "business-as-usual" party.
The center is the US administrative state, the executive branch bureaucracies. After D-FDR won 1932 running against the spendy busybody R-Hoover, he fired 100k R federal employees. Then he changed to a big government tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. By 1933 he hired 500k D federal employees and the Democrats went from a small-government, states-rights party to the party of big government. D-LBJ and D-JFK changed civil service law to formalize D party organizations as public service unions.
Why bother with ancient history? Because ever since the Democrats have monopolized the US administrative state. Therefore, the Democrats are the part of the center. And, the center has expanded wildly. The tail now wags the dog. Elected D now obey bureaucrat orders. Making them even more centrist.
Democrats have captured the "US administrative state" by drawing in the sort of people who work in the bureaucracies. They did this by creating huge numbers of jobs for "knowledge workers" to staff the big programs (Medicare, Social Security, Civil Rights, welfare, and so on). Then we entered into a deadlock on legislation, which led to the bureaucracies "filling in" the laws already passed by Congress. Fortunately for them, the legislature hates passing bills (other than spending bills), which gives the bureaucrats full reign. (Not to mention recently the President ruling by "executive action" instead of executing actual laws.) Once some of those pesky Trump judges are gone, there will be a unified bureaucratic regime that will never be voted out of office. Voting will became a vestigial, fruitless act.
Working in the DOD for 20 years I saw this every day. When push comes to shove, everyone who works in one of the countless monolithic government buildings is a democrat.
Wow, another conspiracy...no, I think it's simply that people who are drawn to administrative jobs, especially in the public service, will be left-leaning...after all, why should they vote for a party that disparages them and wants to lay them off? (Similarly to farmers or oil engineers voting for Conservative parties...).
There were a lot of comments already and I had a peek and saw the “You are a poopie head” “No *you* are the poopie head!” stuff going on and got caught up in midstream. Oops. I would have phrased some of my statements below differently or not commented at all if I had read the essay in full.
Democrats have become more extreme in rhetoric, no question. Their party line no longer allows biological distinctions between men and women.
Republicans have become more extreme in tactics. Noticing that Democrats have successfully captured every institution, they support less democratic methods of restoring balance.
My opinions on stuff would be pretty standard in 1990, but increasingly I think the only way to reverse course is for a new Caesar to emerge.
"the only way to reverse course is for a new Caesar to emerge"
Jesus Haploid Christ. Wow. Okay. It's not every day I see someone openly saying that dictatorship/tyranny is the best option, but here we are.
Leaving aside the fact that said "new Caesar" would presumably have to shed a lot of innocent blood in order to seize power, I have a question for you: Why do you assume that life for you and people like you would be better under this "new Caesar"? Would this dictator have the exact true correct beliefs on trans women and immigration and guns and the environment and taxes and everything else? Why? Why would you expect this to be the case?
Life would be better for me because I rank higher in a competence hierarchy than I do in the inverted (leftist) one. The exact true correct beliefs on those topics are the ones that are a) obvious and b) the ones that just about everyone held prior to 1960 or 2014, depending on how close one is to academia.
Leftists have to invert reality because it grants them patronage of the low-status. Rightists don't do this and so can make decisions based on actual ROI.
IDK...I think you are betraying your partisan bias here...You believe in hierarchies, so you a are a right-winger...lefties don't believe in hierarchies though...so, no, this won't solve the problem, at least not for any non-conservatives...
It's important to realize that the categories "liberal" and "conservative", "left" and "right" and "Republican" and "Democrat" all change over time, and also change in relation to each other. Thus if you go far enough back, comparisons really are meaningless. (When I was teaching US history, I used to tell my students that if they mapped any antebellum political party onto either of the current ones, they weren't capturing the historical thought at work). As a very rough analogy, it's similar to the way that baseball statisticians often disregard 19th century stats, simply because the game was too different to really compare.
Two other things are important to note: first, there was a long process—one of the well-known phenomena to American historians—whereby, over the course of the 20th century the Republicans and Democrats more-or-less switched constituencies: where the south used to be reliably Democratic, it became reliably Republican, and where New England used to be reliably Republican, it has become reliably Democratic. (There are lots of caveats here I am skipping.) If you look at turn of the century maps from circa 1900 and circa 2000, they are close to mirror images of each other. This process was not entirely complete by 1965—it is usually argued that the passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 & 1965 respectively are what caused the final push—but it was well on its way. (This is complicated by the fact that some long-time conservatives Southern Democrats never changed parties (some did, not all), but were then replaced with Republicans who voted very similarly if not identically to them and who were their clear political heirs. This process took a while.) In some ways it only finalized in 1994 with Gingrich's takeover of Congress. But the heart of it was 1932-1965, I think.
The other important thing to note is that in the 20th century American politics changed dimensionality. In the 1950s you needed two variables to chart the political positions of congressmen; by 2000 you needed only one. (To oversimplify, in addition to liberal/conservative there was an axis about racial views.) This too makes such calculations tricky.
Oh, and while "right" and "left" were regularly used in Europe since the French Revolution, they were a later import to the U.S. The telling anecdote here is that Irving Berlin wrote "God Bless America" in 1918 and then stuck it in a drawer for 20 years before releasing it in 1938. But when he did, he had to make a few changes. In particular, the line "Through the night with the light from above" in 1938 had been "Through the night to the right [something]" in 1918. But, he said in a letter, he couldn't use that in 1938, because "to the right" would read as political at that point (as opposed to meaning just "to the moral"). A good sign of culture change.
So when can we go back to? That's a tough question. I think we can go back at least to 1965: at that point the parties were *fairly* recognizable. And you might say that even as far back as the 1920s the parties were recognizable enough to compare. Any further than that, however, you get a muddle: throughout the progressive era both the Republicans and Democrats variously aimed for and fought the progressive mantle (see the mess that is the 1912 election).
All of which is to say, I strongly suggest not trying to extend these calculations back that far. It's not true that in 1900 conservatives wanted prison for sodomy and liberals wanted a monetary fine, because it *just wasn't a political issue*. It's like asking the parties' view on the gold standard today. Yes, there are a few fringe people who have views on it... most people don't think about it and probably don't know what it is or what they would think about it. It's the wrong way to judge the parties. So please, leave off the 1880 and 1900 analogies; they'll be more confusing than anything else.
A few years ago I would have agreed with the conclusions of this post. A couple of years ago I might have still landed there though with significant misgivings.
But today? Sorry, no. Only one of our political parties has actually literally tried to overturn a national election.
And still to this moment insists that it was in the right to do so.
And is right now, openly and without apology, preparing itself to try again and "finish the job" the next time they lose an election.
A dozen U.S. senators of one party, and only one, traveled to sit and talk behind closed doors with Vladimir Putin literally on the 4th of July. Only one party's core activists just held their annual national convention in Hungary and gave a standing ovation to Victor Orban.
Only one party's Vice President of the United States has had to reject the demand by its POTUS to illegally intervene in the constitutional process of counting electoral ballots, and had his political standing within that party trashed for having done so.
Etc, etc. Anyone paying any attention can now add a dozen more entries to this list.
That change in the GOP renders this whole discussion, at best, quaint.
(a) This false meme, which is a lie in multiple ways, needs to be retired.
(b) Even If it was true, that response would be the ultimate false equivalency.
Suppose it was true that the Democratic Party and/or its national senior leadership had "cheered on" the 2020 race riots. On that alternate-Earth I hope that party has been punished at the ballot box and its national leaders driven from office.
That sequence of events would still be a dramatically-lesser threat to our republic than is a national party which conspired and attempted to overturn the results of a national election; is openly preparing to try it again and "finish the job" the next time they lose a national election; and now openly consorts with and seeks to emulate authoritarians like Orban and Putin.
None of which you provide any backup for, because none of it is true. So you've demonstrated only that it is a more detailed false meme and that you can repeat lies using larger number of syllables.
One rookie city mayor, who was driven out of politics altogether a few months after the interview that you link to, represents the leadership of a national party? Yea okay sure....sorry but the ravings of just another online rando aren't worth wasting any further time on, so, bye.
This was excellent bait to get people to reveal whether or not they need banned. Also an interesting analysis that conforms pretty closely to my perceptions, so of course I like it!
Thinking about this piece more, I think my biggest issue with it is that I'm not sure it's asking the most useful question: it doesn't engage much with the question of objective truth, which I would think should matter for a rationalist analysis.
I'll start my explanation with a fake/constructed example: imagine you had an Orange Party and a Purple Party, and the Orange Party believed the moon was made of cheese, and the Purple Party thought it was made of rock. In the past, almost everyone believed the moon was made of cheese, but now 20% of the Orange Party and 90% of the Purple Party have concluded that it's actually rock. The public is roughly split down the middle on the question. We can also imagine for the sake of this hypothetical that the Orange Party are well-mannered policy wonks whose messaging of their moon-cheese beliefs mostly takes the form of politely suggesting that the country should allocate lots of money into sending cheese-mining machines into space to solve the hunger crisis, while the many members of the Purple Party will loudly insist that they think anyone who believes the moon is made of cheese is a moron who shouldn't be in office.
At least three of your metrics suggest the Purple Party is more extreme - their beliefs have changed more over time, there are fewer dissidents to the party orthodoxy, and their messaging is more "extreme". But I would argue that it's highly relevant, to the extent this is all just a proxy for deciding which party is "better", that THE MOON IS NOT MADE OF CHEESE. Does it matter if the Purple Party is voting in lockstep if they're *right*? Is it some kind of problem that their beliefs have changed, when their past beliefs were wrong and their current beliefs are correct?
So to move back to the real world, let's consider two examples for which I believe there are factual answers: evolution (and whether it should be taught in school) and the existence of human-driven climate change. Several of your metrics would suggest Democrats are more "extreme" on these issues than Republicans. I would argue that that's evidence that the questions you're asking are not very useful.
Now, I'm obviously coming at this from a liberal perspective. I'm sure the conservative commenters on here could come up with examples in the opposite direction. And most policy questions don't have as obvious of a factual answer as "is evolution real?" does. I certainly don't expect you to try to evaluate all the existing evidence on every point of American political contention. But I would think a rationalist analysis would want to at least acknowledge "to what extent does this party create policies based on real-world evidence" as an important question, even if it's not one that you feel you can answer in a blog post.
And finally: I do feel that there's an ethical/moral dimension that you're leaving out, which many people on both sides are keeping in mind when they talk about the other party's extremism. You gesture to this with your "conservatives want a jail sentence for gay people" example. Of course, even most conservatives don't actually want jail sentences for gay people, but I would argue that there is an ethical difference between, say, "people should be able to fire their employees just for being gay" and "people should not be able to fire their employees just for being gay" - that is, that regardless of any of the metrics you suggest, the former is inherently a more extreme position.
In terms of "is evolution real?"...do Democrats agree that evolution may lead to different distributions of mental traits - such as the Big 5, time preference, differnt pathologies, and intelligence - among different groups of people? Or is that not the kind of evolution that is 'real' for the left?
As for whether or not an employer can fire someone for being gay, how about the not-radical-at-all position that regardless of the morality of one firing or another, the government has no business getting involved in private business hiring and firing?
Yes, it would be a massive change...like forcing normalization of homosexuality, transgender, and same-sex marriage. Or legalizing abortion until birth. Or pushing for voting rights for noncitizen illegal aliens.
Hi Katie, yes!! Thank you so much for saying this! I'm kind of stunned by Scott's complete avoidance of the "which party's policies more closely correspond to reality?" aspect of this issue.
A priori one would find it an exceedingly unlikely hypothesis that an entire major political party, commanding the allegiance of 40-60% of Americans nationwide, and completely dominant in at least a dozen states (which describes both of them) would have come unmoored from reality, while the other one stays firmly rational. You're basically arguing that Americans can be split into the Rational Sensible People (who join one party, and for some reason concentrate in a few states) and Delusional Freaks (who join the other, and also oddly enough congregate in certain other states).
This is (1) exceedingly unlikely, just on the grounds that most human beings have to be reasonably in touch with reality just to survive their daily life, and the Delusional Freek states seem able to function at the economic and state/local level as well as the other set, and (2) it sounds like the sort of partisan cheerleading that's as common as crabgrass. ("We're not only right, They are irrational!") In light of both the reasonable person can be expected to set a pretty high standard of proof for the proposition.
A much more reasonable starting assumption is to assume that both parties have (1) positions and beliefs that are sensible and almost universally approved, (2) other positions and beliefs where reasonable men can and do disagree, and (3) a rather small set of both that are more or less either bones thrown to their loony fringe, or hazing rituals, to which a nonloony might subscribe only to prove he's so loyal he can swallow a few impossible things before breakfast if the party asks him to.
"You're basically arguing that Americans can be split into the Rational Sensible People (who join one party, and for some reason concentrate in a few states) and Delusional Freaks (who join the other, and also oddly enough congregate in certain other states)."
No, I'm arguing that there's a spectrum of rationality to delusion. I don't think either party is exactly at the endpoints of that spectrum, but determining exactly where the parties lie along that spectrum should be key to a rationalist analysis. I gave the Purple/Orange Party thing as an extreme example to illustrate my point: that if a party's belief on any particular issue is based in delusion, then Scott's metrics for measuring extremism will fail for that particular issue.
Basically, if there are, say, two provably factually incorrect things believed by a majority of one party which the party's leaders use as justification for making important policies, and seven provably factually incorrect things believed by a majority of the other party used by *that* party's leaders to drive policy, I think that's a worthwhile point of analysis.
Or to put it in your terms: yes, both parties have a combination of the three types of beliefs you mention (sensible/up for debate/loony). But if the percentage breakdown of that is, say, 50/30/20 for one party, and 60/35/5 for the other, then I think that's an interesting metric to consider (among the other possible metrics for extremism).
That's especially true if we start narrowing it down from "beliefs" to "beliefs being used to justify major changes to policy or which make up a large portion of that party's messaging." The problem, to me, is when the loony fringe of a party stops being on the fringes.
Imho major problem with the question "Which Party’s Policy Positions Have Changed More In Their Preferred Direction Since Some Starting Year?" is that it is very sensitive to the choice of a baseline year.
Pew, in the data featured in the post, has chosen 1994, which pretty unabimguously makes Democrats more extreme in that sense. But this this might be (I have not done my own research, so I ought to hedge a lot) just because an era between the Fall of Communism and the Great Recession happened to be in many respects high tide of the Right in the Western World.
Perhaps if 2010, or 1980, or even 1970 were chosen as a baseline, then answer to this question would be different.
But it is true that this uncertainty pertains only to post WW2 era - Western World before that was clearly far more rightwing in our sense, since it started being a recognizable thing.
I think a frustration many feel is in the past a 51% Republican victory meant a moderate gov't. Today a 51% Democratic victory means a moderate gov't. But a 51% Republican victory means the GOP gets everything they want, might as well make it 100%. Sure there are occassional exceptions (McCain killing the attempt to kill Obamacare), but those are certainly getting fewer in the future.
By % here, I mean seats won. Of course it isn't helping that Republican governments more and more are won with a majority of voters rejecting them.
Childish performance art there. Bad form too since Buffalo where people actually died isn't that long ago.
I also get that you hate the First Amendment, but then the SC did rule that it is legal to protest at people's homes so, well here we are.
More importantly the GOP got quite a bit given how consistently is fails to win the popular vote. The impression is the GOP gets what they want with 45% of the vote what the Dems would need 60% to get. While you can for a while say 'thems the rules', that only will work so far before the system breaks....esp. since the GOP has discovered they can just ignore most of the informal rules that kept the system going when it fits their needs.
"Lol, sorry, you don't get to wave around random atrocities to justify the ones your side is committing." - I've committed no atrocities. Nor have I advocated or encouraged anyone to do so. If you want to play the "all liberals are responsible for anything a person I think is liberal has done despite being promptly arrested and charged by a liberal administration" game, well the sword can cut both ways quite well.
"I must have missed it when the Supreme Court overturned Title 18, Section 1507, of the U.S. Code, which very clearly makes protests for the purpose of intimidating judges into changing their rulings illegal."
1. The Congress cannot overturn the first amendment.
2. The SC cannot legitimately hear a case on protests at their homes because of the obvious conflict of interest.
3. The law applies equally to the home and courthouse which means if you read it as banning all protest, then for the last 75+ years there's been felonies committed almost daily outside the SC in Washington DC yet no one noticed.
4. The court did rule that bans of protests outside the homes of abortionists violated the First. These are the rules. Deal with them.
"Anyway, I don't want to hear peacocking about the First Amendment from the sort of person who enthusiastically supports censorship as long as it's a monopolistic corporation..."
Yawn, another nitwit who pretends Twitter has a monopoly on speech.....as he complains on substack, or Facebook, or Tik Tok, or YouTube, or Truth, or Redit, or wordpress, or a zillion uncountable URLs. Tsk tsk.
We'll leave aside the fact that the Court has clearly pointed out corporations enjoy first amendment rights. I mean really, why do I know more about your side than you do? How have your masters done right by you when they've left you so impotent and unable to handle yourself in discussion?
OK except we had a President who lost the popular vote and a thin majority in congress for 4 years after 8 years of Obama. And Roe is about to go down because of the after impact of that limited victory for the GOP.
Who gets more of what they want if they get a slim majority these days? Sure each side perceives they aren't getting what they should but I think the reality is the GOP gets more. Now libertarians may feel unhappy but libertarians have *never* won an election in the US. The degree they should feel cheated is only the degree that you consider the GOP to be a proxy for a libertarian proxy. As they say your mileage will vary with that idea.
And the lesson of Jan 6 to liberals was that no, not even winning an election is enough anymore. It's a power grab and one side will not play ethically anymore.
No and one candidate was opposed to anything other than peaceful protest while the other candidate embraced people fighting it out in the street (provided 'his people' won). Fortunately the former won despite the efforts on Jan 6.
As someone who has (unfortunately) spent quite a bit of time in and among activist circles on both Left and Right, it blows my mind how literally everyone gives their supporters the exact same peptalk: "[outgroup] is better organized, better funded, and more willing to get their hands dirty; that's why we keep losing. You think those [outgroups] are sitting around complaining about things being unfair? Hell no, they're out there right now stealing our lunch, laughing at how ineffectual we are. We need to stop prattling on about "principles" and start bashing in kneecaps, or we'll be living [1984/the Handmaid's Tale/insert your chosen dystopia here] after next year's election." Every political gathering, of any ideological group, that I've ever attended involved somebody giving some version of this speech. And they're all 100% earnestly convinced that they're describing reality.
Well put. It reminds me vaguely of Barbara Tuchman's pop history book "The Guns of August" where she describes both sides of the coming World War confidently telling their citizens that the war would be over by Christmas, because their long-restrained but finally released righteous fury would overwhelm the untermenschen in a jiffy.
I think there is a frame-loaded nature to the question as well; at a mechanical level, if you stick to your beliefs without updating them while everyone around you is changing theirs, you will eventually, inexorably, be at the extreme end of the distribution (in the non-normative / statistical sense of the word). But the normative conclusions from this observation depend on your ethical frame of reference; if you're a deontologist operating from a fixed interpretation of a set of rules like the Bible, then that set of rules is your frame of reference, and everyone else is moving relative to it; it's a morally bad thing that your long-held and immutable beliefs are now in the minority, and it's the others who are getting more extreme/bad (also, because the mean is moving relative to you, any increase in variance means that the position on the opposite side of the mean from you is moving twice as fast, vs. an observer considering things from a frame fixed at the mean).
And on the other hand, if you believe in moral progress and don't have immutable "laws", and update your beliefs along with the shifting mean (i.e. the (I think) standard progressive/liberal world-view), then social consensus is your frame to make observations from, and by the moderate liberal reference frame it's the conservatives (and the woke progressives) that are increasingly extreme.
As in Physics, the frame of reference determines who is moving and who is stationary, and I suspect this makes part of the discussion essentially unresolvable.
2. Is it worth considering another definition of "extreme", something like "preserving vs. abandoning norms"?
3. Is the "width of the spectrum" increasing actually a separate phenomenon than the mean shifting; increased polarization vs. change in beliefs in the population?
In more detail:
Is it even valid to use the one-dimensional "left/right" spectrum to cluster politicians any more? My takeaway from 2016 was that a new "populist/establishment" axis became more salient, Sanders and Trump being the respective parties' incarnations of that new axis of rhetoric.
I suppose it might be reasonable to question that on the grounds of it just being rhetoric, since Trump's major policy achievement was the pro-establishment / anti-populist corporate tax cut that anti-Trumpists like Romney thoroughly approved of. But the China trade-war and resulting tariffs/protectionism seemed quite anti-establishment-Republican to me.
I'll try to comply with your pre-moderation request by simply suggesting that it's worth considering an axis of "conserving institutions/norms vs. tearing them down", on which the general Trump playbook of declining to nominate appointees to seats (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/mar/16/donald-trump/why-trump-appointments-have-lagged-behind-other-pr/) seems to be at least a break from the norm of Republican presidents, and "Find me the votes" is the more concerning break from established norms that underlies many Democrats' claims that the Republican party is the increasingly-extreme one. I think you could make the case that Sanders would have engaged in more "tear down the institutions" behaviors so this is not a purely one-sided claim, but it is (to me?) clear that the Trumpists have taken over the Republican party, while the Sanders/progressive wing has not decisively defeated the Biden/establishment wing of the Democrats (nor has it been completely squashed). And so I think there is an axis here that would be interesting to investigate and try to quantify.
I also think it's worth noting measures of political polarization (increasing in the US over the last few decades, though apparently now approaching "normal levels" of polarization from a historically-abnormally low baseline), which supports the increased "width of the spectrum" in the diagram above, potentially independently from the shift in the mean. Relatedly, it's worth considering the axes along which polarization occurs (IIRC with 2016 being an important and rare "pole flip" from Republican party being wealth-polarized vs. Democrat party being education-polarized, to Republican party being negatively-wealth-polarized vs. Democrat party being both wealth- and education-polarized.) This is tackled in Ezra Klein's book "Why we're polarized", discussed in http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/260-why-were-polarized-ezra-klein/ and also http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/248-are-democrats-being-irrational-david-shor/.
To clarify (in case it wasn't clear), I was specifically thinking of political/governmental norms, such as "honor the results of elections" where any examples of Democrats attempting to create new norms would definitely be worth considering too. (I suppose creating a new norm doesn't always imply abandoning some old countervailing norm, though I suspect in many cases you can frame it as such?)
I think cultural norms such as "permit/deny gay marriage" are fully-covered by the existing conversation on social conservativism vs. liberalism, i.e. the contents of the original blog post, so I don't have anything to add there.
...are you not aware of the widespread "selected not elected" memes re Bush, the case of Stacy Abrams (widely celebrated on the Democrat side) and the *deep* opposition and TDS following the 2016 election? I mean, it's not exactly new news, contesting an election.
Do you think these cases led to as much change in the Democratic Party post 2000 as has occurred in the Republican Party between 2020-2022? It seems to still be a big deal for Red Tribe, part of purity tests, campaign platforms, and active pushes to select new judges/election officials, even after the legal challenges were made and rejected.
To me the difference seems to be what happens after the courts consider and reject the contested claims, not the fact that the claims were made in the first place.
Is there anything similar for Democrats post-2000? I’m less familiar with that time period so would love to hear more contrasting examples.
I think it's funny that you essentially just get the obvious out of the way first and then bounce around some. Yes, we know from first principles that leftists are driving overton's window and thus are constantly 'more extreme' and have been since forever (Fascist revolutions withstanding. And no, you're not in one). Cthulhu swims left and everyone should know this by now. That is the ONLY thing we know, because the following question is impossible to parse in this context:
What is the 'objective' domain of viable policy? Because if there is a hard wall we're coming up against, that makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between living in the precursor to the glorious gay luxury space communism utopia or the inexorably falling Babylon, and figuring that out requires being good at the very things humans will never be good at.
This is subjective and fuzzy and all those bad things, but...
I generally try to summon up my idea of an ur-Democrat/Republican from 10, 20, whatever years ago, compare it against the modern equivalent.
And then I try to summon up the mind-state of Belisarius from 10, 20, whatever years ago, and imagine how I would have reacted to modern Democrat versus modern Republican.
In both instances, I think the Democrats come off as more 'extreme'. They've moved significantly leftward on pretty much all social issues, and moderately leftward on many economic ones. (With maybe an exception for free trade support)
In the latter instance, I think that 10-20 years ago Belisarius would recognize most Republican positions as being the same, or having moved leftward. The worst thing that pops up is embarrassment at them voting for the guy from The Apprentice.
See also https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-mismeasurement-of-polarization, which points out that, for example, “Senator George Pendleton of Ohio, who served during the late 19th century, scored a -0.42, and was therefore one of the more liberal members of Congress in American history. He was significantly more liberal than, say, today's Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who scores a -0.37. Yet Pendleton voted against many pension bills and public-works projects — virtually the only types of government spending at the time. He was also a noted opponent of the 13th Amendment, which put an end to slavery. Menendez is a standard-issue 21st-century Democrat: He supports a host of measures — from massive expansions of federal spending to family-planning funding under Medicaid — that would have made Pendleton blanch. And presumably, Menendez is a fan of the 13th Amendment.”
So DW-NOMINATE scores are not valid to compare legislators from different legislative sessions.
So Musk's meme is correct, Democrats have "gotten more extreme", because they no longer think homosexuality is a bad thing, whereas Republicans aren't so sure.
DW nominate doesn't prove what is claimed here. Imagine the only political issue was the number of buttons on the space force uniforms. Debate rages back and forth, with the hardcore half of democrats wanting 4, moderate halves of both parties wanting 6, and the hardcore half of republicans wanting 8. That gives the republican party an average nominate score of 7.5 and the democrats 2.5, because the range of debate is 8-4
Now, over time, there are some elections and a new crop of super liberal 2 buttoners are elected and make up 1/3 of the democratic members while the republicans remain evenly split between 8 and 6 buttons. how do the scores change? well, now the range of debate isn't 8-4, it's 8-2, the democratic score goes UP to just under 5, while the republican party goes up to 8.75. And if the republicans give up on 8 buttons entirely and go over to 6 buttons, their score shoots up to 10, while the democratic score shoots up to 6.6. In other words, because of the way nominate works, by getting more liberal and trying to be less polarizing, the republicans look more extreme and democrats more moderate, the exact opposite of what actually happened in our toy model, because the terms of debate shifted.
Nominate has some uses, but despite claims made for it, it cannot measure partisan drift over time unless goalposts remain fixed, which they never do.
Making a divide R and D, seems to miss a whole section of the population, that hates both parties. ~equally. The only congressmen I liked are those that have been driven away from the system. Because it's party first, self second and maybe constituents or country third.
Well if we put aside the whole alternate reality of the Trump presidency - which is pretty difficult - I’d say the progressives at the edge of the Democratic Party have become more extreme. ‘Birthing person’? Really? Defund the police? A ridiculous slogan, a worse idea.
I think it was Bill Maher that said when your ideas start to look like headlines in The Onion, it’s time to reevaluate what the hell you are thinking.
I think it's fairly safe to say that the party that runs against Motherhood, Apple Pie, and America's historical heroes is pretty darned extreme.
The Republican Party has changed as well. It has become much more blue collar. In some respects Trump has moved the party leftward. Trump was trying to enforce a national picket line in order to raise blue collar wages. Reminds me of Dick Gephardt. And then there was Trump's foreign policy of talking to Evil Dictators and gaining independence from the Middle East through tapping into our immense reserves of dirty energy. Those were Jimmy Carter's policies.
This country has had a not-quite-viable third party that pops up to the surface once in a while. This party is suspicious of both big government and wealthy elites. This party has also been anti-immigration. It surfaced as the American Party back in the early days of our republic. It resurfaced as the Populist Party in the late 1800s. It came back as the Reform Party in the latter part of the 20th Century. It came to actual power just recently as Trump led them in a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Whether the takeover will hold remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Democratic Party has turned into that mix of elitism and socialism foretold in Gary Allen's "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" -- with a healthy helping of active anti patriotism and anti Christianity thrown in for good measure.
Great framing of the question(s), but I’d like to point out some data nuance that can help you home in on answers. First, I think we don’t have to go back to 1880 as a possible party divergence point, we can simply ask when the percentage of party-line votes in Congress began to significantly escalate. And what we know is that party-line voting went from around 60% in the early 1970’s to around 90% on average today (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1065912917722233).
Some might be tempted to say that even 60% is large, but we have to keep in mind the countervailing tradeoff, which is that citizens want parties to embody some kind of “brand,” otherwise a politician’s party ID offers no prediction of how she will vote. We also want disagreements between the parties, else we may drift into a united front of elites, with no genuine choices for voters. So we can stipulate that some party-line voting is good, but given that our political institutions (federalism, balance of powers, bicameral legislatures, etc) push us toward compromise in the exercise of government power, party-line voting as a near-constant feature of the system signals democratic breakdown.
Next, it's critical to differentiate between party shifting—meaning that some significant core of a political party has moved its policy preferences (the analysis that follows doesn’t overly depend on how you conceptualize how that core is comprised, e.g., loyal voters, donors, bosses in smoke rooms, etc)—and party sorting, which is when people who think alike gather into a single party.
The latter is a significant driver of the apparent gap that Pew pollsters get the vapors over—Democrats who were pro-gun became Republican, Republicans who were pro-environment became Democrats, and so on. Widening gaps between parties, then, is not evidence of a shift in the preferences of American voters so much as a grouping of conservatives in one party, and liberals in the other. You can peruse the very reliable American National Election Studies data (https://electionstudies.org/resources/anes-guide/) to see that American opinions about most issues, be they welfare, crime, taxes, the military, etc, haven’t deviated significantly over the past 50 years.
This matters because the implication of our question is that the parties are moving not just away from each other, but from the voters. Another way of looking at this is that neither party is necessarily moving away from what Americans want. Each party is just specializing its appeal to only a subset of the American populace. And in doing so, each party alienates a significant portion of Americans.
Now, your reference to the Median Voter Theorem might get us past this impasse, insofar as each party has an incentive to “soften” its positions to win 50% + 1 of the electorate, in confidence that even if its most ardent supporters are unhappy with this squishiness, they have no viable alternative. The only problem with invoking the MVT is that it was upended by Ken Arrow in 1950 (https://web.archive.org/web/20110720090207/http://gatton.uky.edu/Faculty/hoytw/751/articles/arrow.pdf). In a nutshell, because American (indeed, human) political preferences are not distributed on a single left-right continuum, there is no satisfying the Median Voter, because who the Median Voter is depends on what issue we’re talking about.
The beautiful reality about American voters is that most of them don’t fall onto the liberal-conservative scale in a way that suits political scientists. This voter wants more welfare spending AND the death penalty, that one wants lower taxes AND gun control. In a multi-dimensional policy space, the Median Voter Theorem runs into real trouble.
Little wonder, then, that the political class has focused so intensely on trying to instill hatred in voters for the Other Party. If you come to the ballot box with your particular, uniquely ordered concerns about abortion, crime, inflation, and so on, you can’t be counted on to toe the party line. But if the chief notion in your mind, come vote time, is how the Other Party is destroying America, then you’re willing to eat whatever line of horseshit your party leaders are selling.
Viewed in that light, the question kind of falls apart, because which party became more extreme, faster doesn’t matter nearly so much as the present reality that both parties are invested in destroying civil society, and increasingly exercising power undemocratically via judges and unelected executive agency officials. In that light they are both extreme, and dangerous.
DW Nominate is a shitty site. They come up with insane lists of who is more liberal than who because they only track adherence to party leadership policy rather than actual ideology.
The whole Democrat v Republican scenario is a false dichotomy. There are more independents in my state than Democrats, and it was independents who elected both O'Bummer and The Orange Menace.
One party supported a literal coup instead of peacefully ceding power in the last Presidential election. One party is about to turn women into birthing vessels by confusing insemination with consent to motherhood. But let’s worry about too many pronouns or genders or “birthing people” being a phrase instead because thinking is hard and red party make strong ooga ooga noises.
This post is somewhat disappointing. You opened up with a meme asserting that while 2008 liberals became 2020 woke progressives, conservatives didn't budge. And then you spent the rest of the article mostly talking about Democrats and Republicans. These are two very different dichotomies and for someone like you, it's disingenuous to conflate them.
Any honest discussion of liberalism, progressivism, and conservatism necessarily needs to at least try to define them. During the 2020 protests, there were "liberal" protestors marching with banners saying "Death To Liberals!". If you treat "leftist" and "liberal" as if they were simply synonyms, that just doesn't make sense. If you actually define "liberal", then it makes sense.
"Conservative" is a boring term, since it typically just stands as an antonym to progressive, indicates a desire to return to a bygone era, or represents alignment with some repressive faction. By that last meaning, to me and from a 90s progressive's perspective, the woke people can certainly *feel* conservative, but nobody would ever call them that.
As to whether the Republicans have gotten more "extreme", I think that's a very hard case to make. The Bush administration had millions of Americans chanting "USA!" in jingoistic fervor, manufactured a casus belli to invade a country, got a million people killed, passed the patriot act...And we're somehow asserting that Trump-era Republicans are more extreme than that?
And to the question of whether the Democrats have gotten more "extreme", typically people would point to the actions of the woke progressives. Except that woke progressives are a minority of Democrats(that one article said 8% of the general population. With 60% voter turnout, that would mean they're something like 25% of voting Democrats?) Certainly the woke crowd is trying to their damnedest to give the appearance of being extreme, but the identity politics battlefront is the culture war which is happening mostly external to party politics. The woke folk may be political extremists in the politics of the academy, in hollywood/entertainment, in the professions, and in corporations, but that doesn't map directly to the Democratic party.
Roughly, I think, in a similar way to your proposal. Both options break the two party duopoly. They give voters the opportunity to vote their consciences, rather than voting strategically. And the multiple parties do roughly what your interest groups do, except more dynamically (there's no set number) and more simply.
I see. It did look at first glance like 240 was a set number, but I see that it isn’t. That’s not important though; it’s the complication that concerns me.
According to Wikipedia, 85 countries use party-list proportional representation, which would be my first choice (though other options are certainly possible if that one turns out to be less than ideal for some reason): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation.
Thank you for the link to ElectionScience. I will study it:
From my proposal:
>>VOTING FOR ELECTORS
Elector candidates must belong to the group they are campaigning to represent. Candidates for each group would be shown on the online ballot in random order identified by full name and email ID. Every online ballot would be randomized independently.
Voters vote for up to 10 Elector candidates who belong to their group: maximum of 10 choices even if the group has more than 10 Electors. A voter can vote for only one Elector if desired.
A voter would mark their desired choices on the screen, and when finished, indicate: DISPLAY. The terminal would display the voter's choices in the order selected. (This is not a ranking.)<<
What I describe is APPROVAL VOTING.
Certainly most first-world countries have a better voting system then the US. However none of them use REAL ELECTORS. As you might guess, that it is a key feature of my proposal: Rodes.pub/RealElectors.
Another point is that the proposal does not change the basic structure of the US government: Congress, President, Supreme Court.
I'm sure someone could make a persuasive case that the US should adopt Parliamentary Democracy. But not me.
Would you be interested to learn that from over here (Germany) many people (including me) have the strong impression that USA has one party with two right wings?
I'm Australian and I get the same impression as well. No public healthcare, at-will employment, and a complete inability to sensbility regulate firearms stick out to me.
Honestly I find it kind of insane that the Democracts can be described as left-wing in any meaningful sense when they continually falter on material issues regarding labour and social welfare. The biggest tell is Americans using 'liberal' to describe a left-winger when many other developed nations use it to describe committed centrists and conservatives.
To me part of the problem is that we can't easily untangle the function from its derivatives
Like, you can be called conservative because you want the political situation to stay exactly as it is (to the extent that this means anything in changing material conditions)
But you can also be considered conservative if you want a constant rate of change, as is allowed by current political institutions
Or maybe you want the political institutions to change to adapt to the way the public opinion evolves, but no faster
Or maybe you want the institutions to push public opinion, but not necessarily in the direction that it would spontaneously evolve
So in the end, are you "progressive" only of you want an exponential rate of change along all political spectra?
I don't think anyone thinks that, even the most leftists (although I suspect it's a common mechanism by which liberals are depicted as 'not really on the left')
So yeah, in my eyes any conservative/progressive spectrum will result in an unclear mess.
Since there has been so much disagreement here and doesn’t seem to be a shared observable reality at times I’ll mention my news sources so you can adjust for my biases. NYT, WaPo, PBS, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Politico. I avoid cable news and social media.
The Handmaid's Tale analogy really does not work at all because, as you've amply demonstrated within the post, Democrats have moved at least approximately proportionally to the average voter, leaving each party about as far away from centre.
I know you say you don't care about divergence from the average voter, but your hypothetical doesn't hit the right intuition levers at all if you don't also stipulate that the average position of the populace is equidistant from Handmaid's Tale theocracy and current boring Democrat policy.
"Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?"
This is vague enough to be virtually unanswerable. I think a better framing of this question would be "Which party is more willing to challenge the legitimacy and authority of the government as a whole, and support tactics that break precedent and undermine long-term stability?" I think that gets to the heart of the issue here, and it's the sort of thing that can at least roughly be measured objectively. (Most likely, the answer is "whichever party isn't currently in control of Congress," but maybe one party is more guilty of it than the other once you account for that?)
from what i see republicans were relatively unchanged (if not they outright moved to the left) from the 90s to 00s, but got more extreme in the 10s. the democrats have been moving to the left the whole time. imo this validates musk's picture, though if you wanted to be pixel perfect the republican would be walking slightly rightwards starting in the 3rd panel.
One party tried to overthrow the government and blocj the result of free elections to install a de facto dictator, the other ove thinks you should be kind to all people.
Yes, that definitly warrants a balanced look at funny Elon Musk memes.
I read your blog and the one before for about ten years now. I am afraid this is where we part.
Holy God, is this a *deliberate* attempt to violate Scott's rule? "(Please don’t post comments with “How is this not obvious when [outgroup] has done [worst and craziest thing the outgroup has done], and [ingroup] is just doing [most moderate thing ingroup has done, framed to sound extra innocuous]!”, or I’ll delete them.)"
This is interesting but there's some conversation missing here that could be more interesting. And here's the topic that would illuminate more the the preceding topic:
Why does it matter to progressives if they have gotten more progressive? Are you opposed to the idea you're more distant and polarized from others?
The same question could be asked to those who consider themselves more extreme/polarized on the right. Why does it matter if liberals think you're more extreme?
Is it important we label ourselves the "normal" ones and our adversaries the extreme ones? What if your party or ideology is winning more hearts and minds? Must you insist that you're NOT extreme?
It seems obvious but I don't recall being explicit but extreme ideology is merely relative. I guess what matters is either should we all be closer in believing the same thing? If not, then how should we live with those who believe severely different things?
I'd imagine answers would be something like
- fight a common enemy
- convince the other side you're correct
- censor the other side to gather more support for your side
I'm late to the party but I'm throwing my hat into the ring anyway.
I think Howard Zinn partially anticipated this argument a long time ago when he said "You can't be neutral on a moving train." It's interesting to see that Democrats have moved from their policy positions more recently than conservatives, and I can't say that I anticipated this to be true. But It also fits the ethos of both parties. Traditionalism is a foundational aspect of conservatism. Progressivism and liberalism go hand in hand. In retrospect it feels predictable that policy positions would change quicker for the Democrats. I can't be certain this is historically true, but it seems likely, or at least coherent, that this is true historically and mostly unrelated to extremism.
I wrote a whole post on my blog about this if you think it's an interesting line of thought.
If the more progressive party always got more progressive faster, then parties would always diverge with time. This is not observed in history; depolarisation happens.
That's a good point. In support of my view a lot to some of this depolarization may be when when conservatives catch up to progressives, for example, I think conservatives track progressives (with a lag) on positions like decriminalization of homosexuality, climate change, and historically civil rights, women's rights and welfare. For example, on women's rights of civil rights the left may have gotten "more extreme faster" but with historical hindsight the extremeness of the positions has flattened. The key takeaway here being that over decades the majority of the political spectrum shifted greatly on these issues, and the depolarization is not necessarily a return to an original policy position.
I think my perspective then involves questions like "should women be allowed to vote" and the answers eventually bottoming out for both parties. The continued progressification of the party would come from novel questions, like "is gender reliant biology" or similar.
To be clear, I'm only talking about a certain subset of special cases. And certainly there's questions which could/should likely track in opposite directions, such as "should America adopt communism."
I think there's a third set of cases where my model doesn't hold at all, and might be more what you were initially thinking about. Questions like "what is the ideal sales tax rate" should presumably fluctuate around some middle value and not allow for continued divergence with time.
The foundational problem of most analysis of this meme is that "left" and "right" are not synonymous with "Democrats" and "Republicans."
In the original meme, when the lefty screams "bigot!" it's reflecting cultural shifts, not policy shifts.
PS - the meme was developed by a college professor who felt the PC/woke avalanche in his workplace over the past 10 years, which is a pure cultural reflection.
I am not sure if there can be any objective measurement of what is considered socially tolerant and intolerant.
What is considered to be tolerant attitudes evolves over time with the culture. Historically, the lefties have been out in front and setting the table for expanding tolerance in the culture.
Currently, however, the lefties appear to have flipped towards orienting their movement toward expanding what intolerant speech is. I think this meme is all about this shift from expanding tolerance to expanding intolerance on the left.
The misconstrual of culture with politics is, in my view, a savvy technique the Right has deployed to directly link Democratic policy with the Woke Cultural Revolution.
Objectively, these are only tenuously linked to-date.
First, it simply had not occurred to me that, by nature, a progressive party will move more than a conservative one. It's an obvious point, but one that I had missed, so kudos.
The minor criticism is that you can't really call the Democratic Party before Woodrow Wilson "Progressive." It was liberal, sure, but liberal in the sense of "classical liberal," broadly speaking, which was the status quo, more-or-less, so they didn't necessarily advocate for change. I'm just saying that you've got to be careful in drawing conclusions using data that far back.
The major criticism is that I really think you missed the issue in "Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?". For that issue, you really need to determine what median *positions* are, and see how the positions of the parties have moved relative to them. I suspect the results would be interesting.
(However, there's another way to frame the distinction between parties: That one party has fixed goals, and the other has unfixed, unlimited ones. This is not the same slice, but will result in similar outcomes, and I think is more (but not entirely) accurate. Conservatives don't want to go back to the past because it's the past, but because it represents a more-ideal state. Progressives don't have an ideal state in mind; they just want to keep moving "forward," whatever that means, so that their agenda is, in principle, unlimitedly radical.)
Surprised you didn't mentioned this analysis of party manifestos (one could say official party positions).
It shows that Reps stayed roughly the same from 2000 to 2016 but Democrats sharply turned left after 2008. Dovetails with Zach Goldbergs documentation of the great-awokening around 2010.
> Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?
> I think this is a dumb question. A corollary of the Median Voter Theorem says that both parties should be the same distance from the average voter.
What the f*ck? This is not what the "Median Voter Theorem" says, and it's not a corollary either. And then (presumably because you already rejected the idea) you don't find any historical data that might measure any movement that might exist. And then you call a six-point difference (54-49) "tiny" for some reason.
I don't think Joe Sixpack votes D or R simply based on how "far" they are from him, partly because I don't think Joe Sixpack actually knows how far each of them are from him. I think it's more like this: Joe Sixpack is hearing what Tucker Carlson and a variety of negative ads are saying about Democrats, and/or they're hearing what CNN or MSNBC commentators and a variety of negative ads are saying about Republicans, making a decision somehow about who's worse, and voting against the seemingly worse one.
Even when I judge candidates (mostly by going to their websites and looking at their platforms) it's not a simple "distance" measurement. I'm also looking at, for instance, what they might realistically accomplish or (more likely) veto if elected, versus opinions that aren't likely to influence actual legislation. Also it's sensitive to *who else is running in the same district*. It doesn't matter that in the next city over there's a Republican who seems moderate vs a crazy Democrat who wants to shut down the nuclear plant and whose solution to the housing crisis is rent controls... it only matters that in *this* district the Republican is a dirtbag I'm eager to defeat.
And I remember there's a regular commenter here at ACX who vowed he would stop voting for any Democrats from now on, seemingly not because of distance between him and Democrats vs the distance between him and Republicans, but because "Scientific American" went full woke. How does the "mean voter theorem" account for all this? (it doesn't?) How does it account for gerrymandering? (it doesn't.)
Some districts are "safe". In a safe district the same candidate always wins. Maybe one year the candidate wins with 55% of the vote, and in another year, 75%. The makeup of Congress stays the same even though we can see that (i) the opinions of voters are changing or (ii) the opponent is changing or (iii) perceptions of the winning candidate are changing. Clearly then, it is possible for one or both parties to move in relation to to the average voter, without this having any effect on the makeup of Congress.
Trump is way more extreme than Biden is, and in ways that presidents usually aren't. This makes it seem like the Republicans are way more extreme.
However, Trump was something of an outlier compared to historical Republican candidates.
If you go back to, say, 2012, when Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama, the difference simply isn't nearly as large. Same went for McCain in 2008. This makes it look like the Republicans are far more moderate and less extreme than they appear today. The old prototypical Republican candidatate is very different from Trump.
This could mean that the difference is mostly just because Trump was a particularly extremist president.
Comparing Trump to Eisenhower versus, say, Hillary Clinton to JFK, I think it's pretty easy to see where things diverged more - but that's not necessarily reflective of the party as a whole.
Moreover, prior to JFK, there was a socialist who ran for president on the side of the Democrats. So the Democrats actually came closer to the center from there.
Which ties into another issue: your dataset may just be looking at the wrong time period.
The 1990s is kind of a bad time to look at this. There was a major realignment that started in the 1960s, and in 2000, we had a very different set of coalitions. We have also seen a very significant change in the Republican party since 2016.
As such, I think your dataset is probably looking at the wrong years. If you compare 1960 to today, you're going to get very different answers, and I think if you compared 1990 to today, you'd get different answers.
Moreover, I think that dataset doesn't capture some of the more extreme views of things that have changed on the Republican side very well - for example, there's not a question about religion. That would be especially true relative to the pre-Moral Majority Republicans.
And thirdly, that data set feels like the sort of thing that a Democrat might write. If you took a Trump Republican, and had them ask ten questions, you might get a different response as well, because the questions that were asked there are the sort of thing that a Democrat would largely use to show how they are better morally than a Republican.
If you were to instead ask about, say, vaccinations, it's pretty obvious that the Republican party view on that has gone highly divergent to where it was even just a decade ago.
As such, I'm not sure you can really draw useful conclusions in this regard as if you ask about the right data set, you can probably get whatever answer you want.
I think both parties have taken a hard jerk towards extremism since 2016, but the Democrats have done a better job of containing it from the party leadership, while the Republicans have failed at that. Extremists in both parties are far more visible and vocal than they were in the 1990s.
I'd love to see your last point expanded a bit further. Progressives feel that Conservatives have radicalised if, for example, instead of advocating for 2010 morality and policies in 2020, they propose we go back to the 90s or 80s. Is there a dataset to check this hypothesis?
It appears the two parties play politics at the most meta of levels in opposing strategies. When Republicans get radically desperate with messaging. Democrats let them, and play it calm to appear normal. When Democrats get radical with messaging, Republicans play the calm normal game. Democrats use to be the radical in messaging, but Trump changed that. Now the Democrats appear to be the rational calm party; which I believe they are embracing.
Elon Musk lives a very interesting life. Such a person's world-view probably cannot be losslessly reduced to familiar and widely adopted labels. They become far too idiosyncratic.
Didn't mean to say it was broadly false. Dynamist is not a familiar or a widely adopted label. It sounds very fitting.
To evaluate how good the label is:
If most people could name no other Dynamist on the spot, the label might end up meaning "just Musk things". The label still has some value, if you can look up Dynamism on Wiki and get maybe some other figures and understand Musk better. However if Musk himself never did that, it might also be deceptive.
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I think there's a very good argument to be made that Dominic Cummings is rationalist (dynamist would probably fit him too). In the sense that those ideas are referenced in his thinking and his actions. But not "a rationalist" in that he doesn't interact with the larger community and his writing has a different focus.
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I think that when you say someone is conservative, liberal, libertarian, leftist or green you can properly distill a lot of info about a person to whom this applies. You can predict most of their opinions and their reasoning just from that. If you need more "out there" labels, they are still helpful to get a vibe, but those people cannot be so easily reduced. If you researched the Dynamist label a lot, but then have a chat with Musk about a random topic, his takes would probably still surprise you. If I only knew that Cummings was a powerful British rationalist, I'd not guess he was the driving force behind Brexit.
I think Jacobin Magazine article is on the right track on where Elon stands: https://jacobin.com/2022/05/musk-tesla-robert-heinlein-libertarianism-technocracy , though I strongly disagree with the article's sentiment. In a nutshell, Musk was heavily influenced by Robert Heinlein growing up. He *is* the Man Who Sold The Moon, albeit with Mars replacing the moon.
The political meaning of Heinlein-influenced is rather blurry, as Heinlein started off very far to the Left, advocating for intentional inflation, a universal basic income, and a cornucopia of socialist goodies. He turned hard to the Right after an extended visit to the Soviet Union, writing the fascist-feeling "Starship Troopers" soon thereafter. Heinlein eventually settled for a sort of libertarian ideology, but it was not the axiomatic/dogmatic libertarianism which characterizes the LP.
Even when Heinlein was a hard Leftist, he was a huge believer in democracy, the American system, and private gun ownership. He also believed in the need for heroes.
Where Heinlein continued to differ from "real" libertarians:
* Continued belief that compound interest could lead to excess concentration of wealth.
* He wasn't against having some welfare as long as the welfare state didn't throttle the doers.
* He didn't think liberty and high population density could mix. He wrote repeatedly that the libertarian components of the American constitution were side effects of our frontier origins. A closed frontier and increasing population would lead to a bureaucratic state where "Civil Servant is semantically equivalent to Civil Master."
Today's correlation between population density and party affiliation, along with the Left becoming more authoritarian, shows that Heinlein was onto something.
Only read Starship Troopers and listened to Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Troopers had... lots of abstinence. I'm not sure line marriages would work, but maybe on Luna it would? It was also not posited to be a necessarily common arrangement, just not uncommon.
What stood out to me, was that it was basically like a Roman family clan, but with the members being equals. A marriage that never dies. As for the other sexual dynamics in that book (performative appreciative looks being taken as genuine compliment, one bad touch and get 'liminated), I don't know. Y-O as the self-admitted fat breeding cow for little Chine babies was... certainly an arrangement. But the world was so lovingly strange.
And it made me really sad, I can't play "double or nothing" at the supermarket, because our world is just incredibly uptight and overregulated.
Haven't read any other Heinlein. From the wiki summaries, it seemed all a bit whacky and incest-focussed? Anything to recommend?
Agreed, Starship Trooper was a bit dull.
I'll give "Strangers in a Strange Land" a listen then. Thank you.
Thanks, very interesting stuff.
I read "Starship Troopers". It gets called "fascist" a lot, but I don't see how the society depicted matches the common definition. No dictatorial power, no strong regimentation of society and economy, no forcible suppression of opposition. At least none that we ever see. So I don't really get why people call it "fascist", at all. We do not have a real world example that matches this fictional society.
Book was a bit boring, but actually writing out a mathematically axiomatic version of Heinlein's (xeno) ethics is on my to-do list.
Think it's because of the "only veterans can vote" thing. "Fascist" isn't really the right term, though I'm not sure what is and so I'm not surprised people use the handy one.
Someone not getting assassinated is fortunate news, though?
Yeah agreed, that'd be nice.
No. Threatening judges is pretty fucked up.
Please define "Communism"...also, radical politcis can be right-wing ("neoreactionary") too...
That’s a good point. I think one could also beneficially look at what specific politicians have changed their specific positions on a given issue over time.
Yea, that'd be a strange case of both sides blowing towards the far left in a hurry, making even the Republican move seem extreme though moving towards the middle in the process.
Another awkward experiment would be if the people stay the same but overthrow a tyrannical government (maybe set up by a foreign conqueror). Political positions of the elected officials would change drastically, but become more in line with the population.
Yeah, that's exactly the problem when analyzing politics...just focusing on policies is not that reasonable without looking at the underlying "drivers", e.g. philosophy or just broader progress throughout modern history...I guess the advantage of just analyzing policies is that they can be quantified more easily than other aspects of politics...
Get involved with your school board. Ask them to do tornado drills instead. You as an individual have much more influence at the local level.
I don't have kids yet but am actively considering leaving and this is a major reason - I wouldn't want to have kids in American schools (or on american streets, which seem to actively want to murder anyone not in a truck).
I don't think there's a lot of room for other countries to take the mantle, though - USSR is gone, China's running into both declining governance and aging population issues, EU is too decentralized/obstructive and also has aging population issues. I think there's some growth room for smaller first world countries like UK/Israel (maybe some others) that still have growing populations and semi-functional institutions to take some of the pie away, but I don't see the British Empire rising again.
If you want somewhere peaceful and pedestrian friendly which also has good prospects for the future, and all the big countries don't appeal, you could always look at the small countries like Estonia, the Scandinavians, Singapore, Monaco, Australia and New Zealand... lots of options beyond the big players that dominate the news.
Do the active shooter drills bother you because of the hysteria of the drills, or are you concerned about the off-the-charts low probability that your kids will be the victim of such an event? No school has to have these drills. Its like taking a parachute with you on a commercial jetliner, "just in case."
I remember growing up with the constant fear that Regan and Gorbachev were going to blow up the world. It was a shame because of the fear-mongering, not the actual risk. The likelihood that any particular person will be the victim of random gunfire in the US is statistically insignificant.
Freeway car accidents where little children are ejected from vehicles and ground into hamburger meat happen far more "regularly" and yet we tolerate that. A world where perception is more important than reality is what I refer to as "hell."
This is actually another big reason to consider leaving America- its car crash fatality rate is like four times the rest of the rich worlds'.
I grew up with active shooter drills. I can honestly say that they never really scared me. Our school always just called them “lockdown drills” and it was pretty much like a fire drill in terms of stress (but no blaring alarm, so actually less stressful).
I actually remember when our school went on lockdown once, and it was a pretty bland memory.
So overall, I’d say that I thought it was comparable to any other drill, and my memory is most other students acting similarly. Perhaps that’s changed in the past 10 years, but I certainly don’t think it was comparable to cold-war war bomb drills. Maybe ask to sit in on such a drill and judge for yourself at your local school?
Maybe? I have no memory of such a conversation, nor does my father, so it apparently wasn’t too bad. Probably it depends on you, your kid, and how the school handles it. I also think that in my experience non-Americans are much more freaked out by American gun violence than Americans are, so it might hit harder for you and your family
First, you might not have to explain. There is a Daniel Tiger episode with a fire drill, where the grown-ups don't explain anything except what the kids have to do. Maybe this works.
Second, your kids will have to internalize the fact that there are bad people who want to hurt them anyway.
Third, fire drills are a lot more necessary and frequent, and, at least to some kids, very disturbing.
Fourth, if I was you, I wouldn't move to any country close to a certain nuclear power that likes waging territorial wars. In the US, at least, you don't get nuclear drills, and hopefully for some good reasons.
Fifth, do you really decide whether to move countries based on what you have to explain to your kids?
It's in the same neighborhood as tornado drills. Both seem reasonable to me, but of course I grew up in the midwest (and therefore grew up with tornado drills).
Or sharks
How much more valuable do you consider the lives of kids killed in school shootings than the lives of kids killed in tornados, then?
If the idea is that policies like this should take into account anything other than the number of lives saved, like the intentionality of the perpetrator, then your decision model inherently values some lives more than others.
I can't speak for you, but I've thought about moving out of the US to somewhere like the Netherlands.
I think learning Dutch would be fun, and I'd certainly try. I find learning languages enjoyable, though I'm hardly any sort of great polyglot. I already do business with customers there in English, so work-wise it seems like I'd be alright for some time at least.
My wife interviewed for a job in Montreal last year. I green lighted that, but didn't really want to move. After the last few weeks, I've been regretting it, a bit. If it gets too bad over the next decade that's where we'll go.
What about when an abnormally large clitoris looks like an abnormally small penis?
If there's no Y chromosome, she's not a biological male so she's free to compete in women's sports.
You said penis. The presence or absence of a penis is the criteria.
Do you wish to further refine your position?
In conversational English, a (real) penis is synonymous with maleness. I am not required to list every possible edge case exception. Would you object if I said 'humans are bipedal' because I didn't consider conjoined twins and amputees?
I would certainly object if you said an amputee wasn't human because he wasn't bipedal, which is a much closer analogy to what you're doing here.
I am not saying such a thing--a deformed or surgically removed penis (or limb) does not make a biological XY male a female (or unhuman). Of course some men can be feminized to some degree and they can present themselves as women if they like. But in doing so, they must forfeit their right to compete against biological women in elite athletic competitions where biological men have a natural, innate, and insuperable physical advantage. To do otherwise clearly unfair to biological women.
Should everyone with de la Chapelle syndrome be allowed to compete in women's sports, then?
Rare edge case--I don't know. How many de la Chapelle syndrome athletes are there? Biologically normal XY males are not edge cases though--they clearly have the unfair masculine advantage.
The bailey: male phenotype
The motte: male genotype
A common pattern, but a pretty weird one. IMO the bailey is much more defensible considering the existence of e.g. androgen insensitive XY women.
But going by phenotype means you have to treat biomedically transitioning trans people like they have a complicated intersex condition, and you can't just go around saying "you're a man and you'll always be a man" or whatnot. If you want to be mean to trans people and draw black-and-white lines phenotype is a bad tool for that.
You might be onto something there.
I think I'd be mostly fine with this if it was the ask, honestly. I might quibble on exact definitions but the part that I don't like is "Listen, this person was born male, and now they've had X amount of treatments that make them roughly approximate female, but I'm asking you to fully pretend they are 1:1 equivalent with female".
If you for some reason need to have policies for women that distinguish based on masculinization during development and not just present androgen levels, the details of someone's childhood socialization, et cetera, then it should be possible to write these policies without reference to cisgender/transgender status. Transgender women are statistically different from cisgender women, but for pretty much any given difference between trans women and cis women you might want to do policy about, it's plausible that some cis women also exhibit the difference.
The bailey: gender is a spectrum with no absolute categorical distinctions possible.
The motte: There are genuinely intersex people who are e.g. XXY or androgen-insensitive XY women
The problem with the motte here is that it explains about 0.1% of actual transgenderism and if people claiming to be transgender were limited to the category of clear biologically-ambiguous individuals then no one would have any political problems with it whatsoever.
"The problem with the motte here is that it explains about 0.1% of actual transgenderism"
I think this is factually incorrect, for two reasons:
1. The vast majority of trans people choose to transition because they have gender dysphoria, and there's considerable evidence showing that gender dysphoria has biological (specifically, neurological and hormonal) roots: Most notably, brain scans have shown that male-to-female trans people have neural structures that are different from normal males (in a way that bears some resemblance to how those neural structures look in normal females), and vice-versa for female-to-male trans people, even before those trans people have started medically transitioning. There's also some evidence that M2F trans people have lower testosterone levels and/or higher estrogen levels than normal males, and F2M trans people have lower estrogen levels and/or higher testosterone levels than normal females. Also, studies of fetal development have indicated that sexual differentiation in the brain and central nervous system may occur at a different time than sexual differentiation of the genitals and endocrine system, which provides an explanation for how such a mismatch might occur. In other words, I think having gender dysphoria *is* an intersex condition, just one that isn't outwardly visible. Since nearly all trans people attest to experiencing gender dysphoria, this would mean that your figure is basically the reverse of what it should be, and >99% of actual transgenderism can be explained by the Motte you're describing.
50 years ago, a lot of people believed that being gay was either a choice or a psychological disorder to be "cured," but now most people accept that gay people are born that way. I think the same thing will happen with trans people over time.
2. The vast majority of trans people choose to medically transition via Hormone Replacement Therapy, which results in rather dramatic changes to the body. M2F trans people develop feminized breasts from taking estrogen, F2M trans people develop deeper voices as well as facial and chest hair. Their overall physiques change to more closely resemble their preferred gender as a result of changes in muscle growth and body fat apportioning, and even their facial features change to some degree. A trans person who's been on Hormone Replacement Therapy for a year or more has effectively become intersex in every meaningful sense. In fact, they even need to be treated as people with intersex conditions for medical purposes (for instance, M2F trans people have the same risk of breast cancer as normal females and they're advised to get periodic mammograms as they age, but they can also develop prostate cancer like normal males and should get periodically screened for that as well). So again, if your Motte is "there are people with a mix of male and female sex characteristics," then trans people (or at least the ones who've had HRT, which is most of them) fit in that group.
"transition because they have gender dysphoria"
Gender dysphoria isn't clear biological evidence. It's not clear that it's evidence for anything at all, actually. Even if it is in some sense biologically real, its categorical boundaries are certainly less well-defined than are those for gender, which I find somewhat ironic.
" there's considerable evidence showing that gender dysphoria has biological "
Yeah I just disagree here. The evidence is, at best, vague. But regardless of how much credibility you want to put in that evidence, there is no rationale whereby "oh this person is woman" is the parsimonious interpretation over "this person is a man with some hormonal abnormalities". I would defer to Chesterton's Fence before amending fundamental, broad-reaching, and socially useful categories in order to cater to a tiny minority of people who may be (and likely are) simply suffering from a socially-contagious psychiatric disorder.
I think Scott's "The Categories Were Made For Man" - while rhetorically delightful - is profoundly wrong. The categories for gender are absolutely not arbitrary and weird. Yes, there are exceedingly rare exceptions like XXY. I maintain that that is nothing but a motte for the larger transgender movement, which IMO has become a trendy catch-all for emotionally disturbed teens who are desperate for an identity to define them. It used to be kids just went goth for a while; now they start taking estrogen and changing their pronouns.
"50 years ago, a lot of people believed that being gay was either a choice or a psychological disorder to be "cured," but now most people accept that gay people are born that way. I think the same thing will happen with trans people over time."
I don't. I think the trans phenomenon is an outgrowth of identity politics run amok and I think future cultures will regard it as a bizarre symptom of a deeply disordered culture.
"if your Motte is "there are people with a mix of male and female sex characteristics," then trans people (or at least the ones who've had HRT, which is most of them) fit in that group."
What they're like after HRT is irrelevant. That's like saying someone's Napoleon delusion is legitimate because he learned french and stopped showering. You can justify anything that way - it's like some twisted version of Goodhart's Law. No, the trans motte is "there are obvious intersex conditions like XXY" which they use for the much larger bailey of "anyone who feels like gender x is gender x".
I believe that BWS92082 wanted the decision to be made based on "penises" rather than "non-penis things that look like penises" so this seems like a weird gotcha.
Not good enough. I demand an abnormally large clitoris that looks like an abnormally large penis, hyena-style.
That is hardly the bottom line.
I think it is the bottom line--literally.
I think that if you seriously considered the matter, you'd notice that there are hypothetical Republican platforms you would consider more extremist than this.
I agree weird right-wing crap like Q-Anon is wrong. And the majority of Republican politicians agree with me. The majority of Democrat politicians, in contrast, support men in women's sports.
An odd limb to base your political position on. Like can we remember the great social movements of history and government? Who gets to vote? Who should pay more taxes? What wars are just?
What should the gender requirements and rules of athletic competitions be?
Seems sort of small.
Whilst I have views on this, shouldn't the decision test with sports authorities (and insurers, to let my views sneak in slightly)?
Well, mostly with sports viewers. It's squarely entertainment only, after all and has no further value.
To try to thread a needle of offering what I think is a useful clarification while trying to avoid getting dragged into the trans part of this discussion, I think it's overly narrow to construe sport as being "squarely entertainment only" and of no further value.
Youth sports don't exist just to entertain their audiences as a viewing experience. That "it builds character" stuff actually has more truth to it than I think sometimes we (especially those of us who, like me, had a school experience defined by bad relationships with "the jocks") can always recognize.
I agree that sports can be done for the benefit of the participants, too. But then the problematic of people with different hormone profiles doing differently well doesn't come up nearly as much:
There are already vast performance differences in amateur and youth sports. So there's already well established mechanisms to deal with that, ie to match people up based on skill.
That system only breaks down at the highest levels, where you can't just bump people up to the next higher league any more.
(I'm not saying that the problem we talked about doesn't exist at all here, just that it's much less of a problem than for sports that are performed as a spectacle for viewers.)
As an aside, I feel reminded that chess has two global rankings: one for women, and an open one for everyone.)
It has far wider implications than just sport though.
Well yes, the meme has a “me” character so obviously it’s written for people who believe the “me” character’s position is roughly correct, or at least relatable.
But even if we assume the new progressive position is correct, we can make a few observations:
1. The “fellow liberal” does not call their past self a bigot. They make no acknowledgment that they used to have a similar position.
2. The “fellow liberal” does not distinguish between the centrist and the right-winger.
3. The “fellow liberal” attacks people rather than ideas.
Thank you both for insightful comments that relate to the topic as raised and didn't attack the author for making the wrong arguments, but instead directly addressed the premise in the abstract. I was beginning to wonder why I was here.
But that's the thing that really flags the "me" character in the middle as a conservative, whatever they may think of themselves: they think that the Overton window should not move from the point it was at when they grew up.
I say this being very unsympathetic to what "progressive" means lately, yet still considering myself leaning on that side. But we should appreciate people who don't need to excuse themselves for being "conservative" about something. People who worry about the environment are definitely very conservative in a certain axis, and people who worry about excessive taxes are conservative in an obvious sense *and* an important part of the conversation.
Why should the Overton window move?
Most of the transformative technological change was already in place in 2008. The conditions of the world are roughly the same. So the Overton window is either still adjusting to the new reality (quite plausible) or drifting randomly in an arbitrary direction, in which case one should not be concerned with where one falls within.
That bears no relation to my point:
> Why should the Overton window move?
I'm not judging whether it should move. I'm just pointing out that saying that it should not move is right about the definition of being conservative.
That makes sense if we are talking solely about correctness. The "Bigot!" call probably alludes to something stronger than calling the centrist guy incorrect: condemning the formerly liberal position as unacceptable, beyond the pale, and (often) to be suppressed and its expression punished. Calling a position extreme is also often a tool to paint it as beyond the pale.
It's reasonable to say that someone shouldn't be condemned as beyond the pale and an extremist for holding one's opinion constant, regardless of whether that opinion happens to be correct.
IMO it's reasonable to say yes, while the same opinion by a 30 years old would be extreme.
EDIT: to put it in another way: the 85 years old segregationist is not extreme for his age cohort.
To put it in yet another way: it's not reasonable to call it extreme in the disparaging sense.
Yes. (However, it's reasonable to point out that in politics the word has connotations beyond the descriptive sense, and to argue that it's wrong to use the word with those connotations in this case.)
I'd like to see Scott address this.
Last time this came up he said he didn't think it was a coup attempt because Trump eventually told the rioters to go home. I've never seen him address the votes to overturn the election that happened the same day.
Really? That's disappointing.
If you think that's bad, I'd avoid clicking on any Scott post related to race, gender, or politics.
Oh, I frequently find Scott extraordinarily frustrating and disappointing, about 90% of the time-often a sad waste of a very bright mind, IMHO due to a serious difficulty in being objective about his priors. But that other 10% is extraordinarily valuable, so I persist.
for curiosity sake, out of the 90% that is frustrating and disappointing what share goes against your prior beliefs, and same question for the 10% that is valuable? so far you've only provided n=1 where you classified something as disappointing (i assume based on your personal views) without first reading the post where he discusses his arguments. Interested about the other data points. (but for fox's sake let's not get into the coup or not debate, not a topic I care about given it was a moronic move by both rioters and trump that never had a prayer of accomplishing anything)
I feel exactly the other way around. It's a sign of his bright mind that he isn't cowed by this sort of hysteria.
As far as I can tell, Trump did the absolute minimum condemnation of the rioters required for ass-covering/plausible deniability later: "See, I told them to knock it off! I'm not to blame!" It's not like he actually thought the rioters were in the wrong.
Could be Trump was talking about troops to defend himself against the D muscle massing in the capital, not to enforce public order against his own side.
That minimum is different from a coup.
Saying "I didn't mean it" after you fail doesn't mean you never tried...
What coups end with "I didn't mean it"?
Not a coup, but a putsch seems like the right word.
A mass trespass seems like a better description to me, and even that isn't entirely clear since the buildings involved are allegedly public.
I thoroughly agree. I'd even call it an endorsement. He also didn't tell them to go home until the riot had already failed. But apparently both sides are the same, it's proven with data science.
I wish I could say, Wouldn’t we all? I’d be wrong.
+1,000,000
Once a political party decides to support their leader in *trying to overturn the results of a legitimate election,* I say they've won the "more extreme party" award hands down.
The Trump campaign filed multiple lawsuits alleging election fraud, and all these lawsuits were thrown out, some by Republican-appointed judges. Then Trump escalated to trying to pressure the Georgia secretary of state, followed by the January 6 fustercluck.
Thrown out on random BS legal jargon instead of thrown out because of analyzing the underlying issues, weighing the evidence, and determining a lack of voter fraud are really different.
You're bringing up blatantly trying to steal elections like it's 2001 instead of 2022.
Undoubtedly. Attempting a coup is in an entirely other league. This should scare the shit out of all of us.
“Look I just need you to find me 11,000 votes.”
Nothing. Nothing close to this has ever happened in the last 100 years.
It was an attempt to destroy the Republic.
The Republican Party still is too cowardly to denounce The Big Lie.
Yes, but the liberals are cringe, like gays and trannies, and are trying to arrest the people involved in the coup, so when you think about it there's really no difference between them. /s
I shouldn't have to illustrate this as sarcasm, but apparently this is the level of rhetoric we're actually operating on. we're lucky you can't post images in the comment thread or else I'd probably be seeing soyjacks here.
How about 1960 when Johnson "delivered" Texas to ensure that JFK won? Nixon did not challenge it but there were some serious shenanigans there.
Anywhere to read about this? The Wikipedia page doesn't mention anything untoward going on: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidential_election_in_Texas
My bad, I was confusing 1948 and 1960. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal
At that time Richard Nixon, thinking he might have been schwanged, conceded for the good of the country. Richard Nixon!
I think Texas was legit though. Illinois, maybe not. The Daley 'machine' delivered Illinois.
“Look I just need you to find me 11,000 votes.” isn't an actual quote from Trump.
It’s on tape.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wjw2ekfp0oM
Yes, it is. That's how everyone can easily know your quote isn't an actual quote. You could also try the transcript.
Okay I listened to the whole call. One hour. It sounds much worse than the brief clip. Trump lies, threatens and bullies like a Mafia Don.
The FBI and GBI have investigated this. All complaints have been investigated. The court determined Donald Trump lost.
Trump say he must have won because he, Trump says so.
Listen for yourself.
What do you see in this guy? This fella has turned pure shamelessness into a super power.
Come. Machine politics was a thing well into the 20th century. Consider the career of Harry Truman and the Pendergast machine.
Yeah I had even forgot about Dailey in Chicago in 1960. What is really unprecedented is full court press of “The only way we are going to lose this is if they cheat.” Heads I win tails you lose. The effort that started even before polling day and continued to intensify to Jan 6.
And I guess is still going on in a way.
The sheer brazenness of the whole affair defies belief.
The Russia collusion narrative, supported by the fabricated Steele dossier which was paid for by campaign funds, and which was actually endorsed by the entire Democratic wing of Congress (Jan. 6 was condemned by everybody except the closest Trump allies) came much closer to *actually overturning the results of a legitimate election* than a bunch of unorganized MAGA plebes milling around the interior of the Capitol for a couple hours.
On top of that, in polling, the number of Democrats who believe 2016 was “stolen” is not all that far off the number of Republicans that think 2020 was “stolen”.
Nobody said that Trump or the Republicans politicians were any more competent than the LARPers that elected them.
Coups often appear farcical unless they work. https://acoup.blog/2021/01/15/miscellanea-insurrections-ancient-and-modern-and-also-meet-the-academicats/
I agree Jan 6 was uniquely bad in a previously unimaginable way, however I ultimately do not come to this view. A good baseline is that in the last poll I heard a small majority considered the Antifa/BLM riots in total as worse than Jan 6. One event matching dozens is remarkable - it should be noted this was at a point at which Jan 6 was much more fresh in everyone's mind than the riots
However, consider direct fatalities. Cursory google says at least 25 have died in Antifa riots (source: Guardian). There was one incident of cold blooded political/tribal murder in which Antifa people were *dancing in the streets* after the news got around. Nobody was intentionally killed on Jan 6 except the rioter who attempted to get into the room with congressmen
That's just a small start however. I understand that the rise in homicides in general is in the area of over a thousand people a year. Sure, put on the brakes real quick and don't take that number as one to one attributable to 'defund the police'. But it's got to be a sizable fraction doesn't it? Yearly, apparently. I consider it in this way: a man with lethal doses of multiple drugs in a manic state died of heart failure under duress from a neck pressure control 'technique' that was literally in the books. And this was taken to be so unquestionably an act of intentional and societal oppression that police departments were actually defunded - in opposition to 80% of residents of high crime neighborhoods who support increased or continued levels of funding
This is very extreme. This is so extreme that 80% of people in high crime neighborhoods oppose it. And I hardly ever hear of claimed ingroup/outgroup deaths that aren't like George Floyd - where there's even some credibility that it could indicate a society wide systemic oppression. In my view it's extremely out of range of any real interpretation of actual events. This is an ideology stamping reality with its assumptions, good and hard, and to the tune of hundreds of deaths every year
Did Jan 6 have any 'reality credibility'? I think it had more. It's as simple as the openly stated action of a billionaire opponent of Trump to fund state government bodies with over 100 million dollars for get out the vote advertising specifically targeted at liberal areas of swing states. There were states with 20-1 skews of spending in liberal vs conservative areas. This is certainly more consequential than any amount of on the streets cheating could have been. Just as optics help drive the oppression narrative the optics were uniquely bad for the 2020 election, where it appeared Trump had won because it was not understood how many mail in ballots there were and how much they would go Democrat
By no means am I excusing Trump. He literally celebrated the riot with a tweet about the violation of a 'holy supermajority' vote for him. Meanwhile Jan 6 people are still in prison without trial and I presume there remains a general organized effort to systematically bail out Antifa/BLM rioters. The perspective that leads to defunding police departments is more extreme in its separation from reality and in its consequences on the same
You don't think it's a bit of overblown rhetoric, to say the GOP attempted to kill Pence? Really?
I think it's astonishing that the crowd in front of the Capitol was chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and Trump knew it, and did not immediately speak out against it! Can you imagine a crowd chanting "Hang Joe Biden" back in 2012 and Obama just chilling in the White House, saying to himself, eh, no big deal?
So now instead of the GOP attempting to kill Pence, it's part of a crowd at one particular protest "chanting" (as opposed to shooting at, or any sort of actual violence against Pence), which wasn't sponsored by the party itself? Is that the motte, then?
The Secret Service tried to evacuate Pence. They held him in a guarded parking garage in the capital. Did you watch those crazy fucks with their bear spray, crushing a cop in a doorway?
Remember the context.
It was part of an attempt to breach the capitol during the certification of an election. At the behest of a president who was pressuring Pence into doing something unconstitutional.
Yes, I saw many hours of video from that day. In exactly zero of them did any of the protestors/rioters/capital trespassers use one of the many firearms they owned to attack Pence or his security. Apparently, they weren't very serious about killing him. Bear spray? Really? That's not exactly deadly force. No one has ever been killed using bear spray.
You'd have been better to go with fire extinguisher, or stick with a sign/flag on it.
You saw cops being beaten and the one crushed in the doorway and the belts of zip ties. And yes we saw a fire extinguisher being thrown along with flag pole.
You are ignoring the argument. An attempt to kill someone one (if one existed) doesn't require the actual assault. If someone takes a gun to a person's house with the intent to kill them, but the would be killer is wrongly informed and the would-be victim isn't there, that's still an attempted murder. It's just a failed attempt.
Similarly, if someone tries to kill someone, but turns away because the person is too well guarded, that's still an attempted murder.
If there was an intent to murder Pence, I'd say the issue was more competency than seriousness.
Oh, and you're ignoring the argument.
Again, who do you claim among Democratic elites is asserting that someone aligned with the GOP was attempting to kill Pence?
[I am not a Trumpist, at all, but I think your frame of reference may be silly, so I'm taking a crack at reductio ad absurdum]
I can imagine a Montagnard chanting to hang a Girondin, because it actually happened, and those guys were literally *way* less progressive than modern democrats, so, yeah. We actually, historically, retrospectively, tolerate a heck of a lot of internecine fighting from our political leaders. Plus actual violence. Eldridge Cleaver, stuff like that.
How would the Dems fare if held to the “most extreme thing chanted at a BLM riot” standard?
i mean, when people chant let's go brandon it's not actually a call to have intercourse with the president. realistically i would guess that 90% of the people who chanted that slogan didn't mean anything by it, and maybe 1% would've actually done any physical harm if they had been handed the veep at that time (although that's maybe still enough for a lynching! mobs have weird dynamics)
1. I agree with what drosophilist says. And which Democratic elites are saying that?
Who is saying that, exactly? I've heard there were people chanting "Hang Pence" or something similar, but I took that as overheated rhetoric. So please provide names of Democratic elites saying, without substantiation, that someone aligned with the GOP was trying to kill Pence.
Yes this is exactly what I was thinking, a little bit disheartened to see it brushed off with an ironic footnote. It genuinely is the case that one side tried to overturn a legitimate election! Even picking the most extreme things from the mainstream Democratic party doesn't really come close in scope.
Are you not aware of the 2016 inauguration riots?
With all due respect, these two things are not even remotely comparable. A president's supporters entering the capital building to interrupt the counting of electoral votes due to false claims of voter fraud spread by the Trump himself is not even close to a less significant series of riots neither aimed at overturning an election nor backed by the mainstream Democratic party.
You think the 2016 riots weren't aimed at stopping Trump from taking the Presidency. And you think Pelosi, et al, aren't supportive of that.
As they say, *com'on, son.*
"How is this not obvious when [outgroup] has done ..."
I'm glad you see it. If you scan through the comments overall, you'll see that a large majority of posters do not, but rather are simply pressing object-level perspectives without regard for Scott's warning.
Well, I just wanted to say "thank you for doing this".
I'm sorry who exactly "attempted to kill their own Vice President"?
David's saying that that belief underlies a lot of people's opinions. I think that's an overstatement. Apparently there were people shouting "Hang Pence," and apparently Pence's Secret Service detail was extremely worried for multiple reasons. I'm not sure all that amounts to "attempted to kill their own Vice President". But there sure is some smoke there.
Also worth noting that there is audio recording of Trump saying that the "Hang Mike Pence" chants were "just common sense". Which I suppose doesn't technically count as attempting to kill his own Vice President, but in terms of extremism, I sure have a hard time imagining Biden saying the same thing about Harris (or Bush Jr. saying the same thing about Cheney, or literally any other POTUS/VPOTUS pair you can think of).
To answer your question, it typically does not. It's value neutral and mostly measures relativity. If you said Yes, and many people who otherwise vote with you say No (or vice versa), Or if people whom you normally vote against agree with your vote, you move relative to those others. Over a large volume of votes, the relative positions become apparent without actually measuring any actual content of the vote/issue in question. So procedural votes where everyone votes together tend to show as neutral... Party line votes show as relative only for the sake of defining the "sides", and the interesting votes are what's left to look at.
I wonder, would the results look any different if we only considered the votes on measures that actually pass?
Not really. You can cherry pick and it'll change the overall slightly but the power of this method is that it essentially works regardless of the legislative text, intent, etc. It's literally math based, Yeah or Nay, binary based statistical analysis. It doesn't know or care if a particular bill was to eat babies or send refugees to the moon. It only cares in the overall trends of how you vote on all of the votes.
Well, sure, my thought was that "only include bills which were passed" would *also* be neutral on the content of bills, but might not be neutral with regards to whether the bills were intended to be passed by those who introduced them.
But, you're saying that it doesn't change the results substantially? Alright.
All of the vote data is public, as is the analysis software. You don't need to know even any bill title or content, all you enter is Voted Yea or Nay. And you get out these magic graphs that show you where each legislator is relative to all of the rest of them. That's all it does.
>It's literally math based
That is not a good way to think. "Literal math" in a complicated analysis very rarely follows from a set of fundamentally sane axioms, like proofs in Euclidean geometry, but rather is a end result of applying a particular choice of exact definition, and the definition was someone's subjective idea to describe an intuitive concept.
Sometimes the mathematical definition produces wildly unintuitive results, because aligning math with out intuition is hard. Here is what can happen with correlation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation#/media/File:Correlation_examples2.svg
Small modifications to the definitions and assumptions, or, to the "math", usually produce wildly different figures. If the figures don't make sense, there is a good chance that your plot represents something different than you thought.
Unless you've used the DWNominate code and actually know what you're talking about (which you don't), all of the above is pure nonsense. It's statistical analysis, and all it does is compare series of votes to find relative positioning among voters. It doesn't even label axes, that purely is an interpretative thing.
This is not specific to any particular algorithm, it is a fact from the basic principles: you can get very different results by choosing the metric, algorithm and problem definition differently. Pleads to "math" and "statistical analysis" as self-justifying magic is something that I strongly dislike, because that encourages magical thinking and spreads confusion instead of illumination.
"It's statistical analysis, and all it does is compare series of votes to find relative positioning among voters."
Yes. It is more useful to state the definitions loud and clear.
If the only thing you have going on is the relative positioning of the voters, you have a population distribution of votes cast by voters. You can characterize the shape of the distribution ... but it is impossible to quantify if the population location moves relative to some fixed reference point over time. To the extent the same congresspersons' opinion changes (and their vote on the exact same bill would change) over time it would no make sense to interpret the relative voting patterns over time. (Which was what Unsigned Integer speculated.)
DW-Nominate comes up with wild answers for who is liberal or conservative. It comes up with, tautologically, accurate answers for who tows the leadership line.
DWNominate has no concept of liberal or conservative. Its doing math. Your interpretation is yours and yours alone.
As I said, I've been a subject of it. It was quite accurate in describing my relative position wrt the 399 others in the body.
In theory, the movements of both parties should be irrelevant to whether their positions are justified. The interesting question to me is: why does this discussion matter so much to people? What about the parties’ grand narratives make the ideological changes of the other party a relevant fact?
Which is weak as all hell, considering that Dems invented that tactic.
Whilst that may be true, Scott does point out above that nineteenth-century Democrats were somewhat different to modern ones, so I think that is probably a point of very minor relevance. After all, hopefully we're all in agreement that the Democrats no longer support the right of states to determine if slavery is legal or not?
And I will see that change as relevant when Joe 'the Republicans want to put all y'all back in chains' Biden is removed from public office and no longer permitted a voice in his party, *along with every other activist and politico who repeats this kind of slander.*
If only the Democrats could be like the Republicans and only have presidents who were entirely factual and truthful eh?
A lot of political messaging argues that the other party is taking more extreme positions compared to the recent past. It seems fair to argue back if that's not the case.
I think the intuitive basis for this is that most people don't think that they themselves were crazy or bad people 10 or 20 years ago. So if you say, "This party has gotten farther from where I was 10 or 20 years ago," particularly "much farther," then that implies (in a somewhat logically dubious manner) that they've gotten closer to crazy or bad.
I think this is a lot of it. Barack Obama, during his first campaign (less than 15 years ago!), officially did not support gay marriage. Today mainstream Democrats aren’t willing to include the word “woman” in a proposed abortion rights law.
The culture war has moved fast and yesterday’s progressives are todays bigots.
we have a wing of one party that wants struggle sessions, and another party of domestic terrorists. people i guess want to know which is more extreme, and which has a chance of saving itself.
on the left i give you pol-pot, stalin, mao etc. on the right i guess hitler and mussolini. maybe putin? not an easy choice between the two must say.
In practice you as a voter don't get to vote for specific policy positions, you're stuck voting for one party or the other.
And if you're one of those basically-kinda-moderate people who might one way or the other and thus decide every election, you're very susceptible to claims of "Hey, those other guys are extreme, we're much closer to your basically-kinda-moderate positions".
The term in political science is "thermostatic public opinion". Voters perceive policy moving in a certain way, and then get opposed to that.
The meme implicitly gives part of the answer - for people who've switched "sides", it's a way to defend against accusations of hypocrisy or apostasy.
Wright is saying "I didn't abandon you Democrats because I abandoned my views; it's you that changed around me".
I have *actually* swung somewhat toward social conservatism (not much on the economic axis and effectively zilch on liberty), but much of that happened *after* I was effectively kicked out of SJ spaces because they'd changed around me.
The parties don't have grand narratives in any meaningful sense: they don't talk about them in advertising; they don't seem to use them in any kind of decision-making framework; etc. The grand narrative which comes through to outsiders is always some variation on stopping the march of evil, which of course refers to the other team.
So I answer your first question in light of the second: this discussion matters so much to people because it matters so much to the parties.
This is what frustrates me to no end about the whole DW-NOMINATE thing. How closely party members vote to each other tells you nothing about how extreme their positions are. That congressional voting trend could be explained as "Republicans are getting much more extreme, and therefore are becoming ever more effective at enforcing purity in their politicians." It could equally plausibly be explained as "Democrats are getting much more extreme, and therefore more and more of their politicians are defecting from their causes to save their hides with their constituents, while simultaneously repelling Republicans who might once have been willing to cross the aisle." Joe Manchin being a good example of the latter case.
"Ordinary Americans" should include non voters of which there are mannnny. Focusing only on voters skews the results of this question dramatically.
I also tend to think that "ordinary Americans" are centrist on an orthogonal way to elite Americans - specifically, slightly conservative on social issues and slightly liberal on social issues, in line with Trump but contra your NYT Republican who's fiscally conservative but socially liberal.
There was a viral graph awhile back which apperently supports this, at least the “new right” claimed it did
https://cis.org/Krikorian/SocialLiberalEconomicConservative-Mirage-Immigration-Edition
typo, you wrote "slightly conservative on social issues and slightly liberal on social issues"
I would assume that most non-voters don't have strong political opinions one way or the other, hence the non-voting.
A small number of non-voters might be non-voters because their political views are so extreme that no party comes close to them.
Either way I think they're not that important to this analysis.
You would assume wrong.
Many of us are just mathematically literate enough to appreciate the lottery-like long odds of our vote making a difference that's far lower that our winning the lottery would be (deciding between two people whose ideas we strongly dislike). You don't have to be extreme, merely complex enough that your political values don't entirely line up with one party such that the other party look like demons.
You don't vote to make a difference, you vote because it is the right thing to do. It is a non-consequentalist act similar to not littering. (I hope) you don't litter even though chucking just one empty PET bottle out of your car obto the street also won't make a difference. I would recommend looking up FDT to get an appreciation for non-consequentaist acts in the rationalist canon.
How is voting The Right Thing to do? It's about as useful as praying..
Exactly. This means that not voting is somehow objectively "wrong."
In a close election your probability of switching the election with one vote is significantly greater than 1/population. (In the model where everyone votes independently randomly, which is admittedly a bad model, it is on the order of 1/sqrt(population))This means that since the effect of swinging the election scales with population you're expected value of impact from voting is quite high
Well, your model isn't really applicable in the real world. And in any case, would probably point to political activisism being perhaps a good auw of your time (ie getting other people to vote), much more than worrying about just your own one single vote.
1/sqrt(population) is still pretty small, and the options on offer are fairly similar in practice. (And things get more complicated in other voting systems.)
Another question is what else you could be doing with your time. Either for yourself or from an Effective Altruism point of view, if you prefer that.
That assumes an election where the probability curve is centered on a tie. In a more typical election, where it might be a fairly steep curve centered on 55:45, the chance of your vote switching drops dramatically.
I don't vote because voting is the wrong thing to do.
Chucking one empty PET bottle out of my car means that I'm making somebody bend down and pick up a slimy disgusting PET bottle, and then carry it for half a mile while picking up other trash.
That's annoying enough that it's consequentially worth some effort to avoid imposing on someone else. (I say as someone who used to litter and then started doing volunteer highway cleanup on occasion.)
Good point. Then what about littering at places no one cleanes, like in the middle of a forest not usually visited by hikers?
The question is: why does noone clean it? Is it because it's just massively inconvenient to do so? Or because the trash doesn't bother anyone? If it's the first case, then the consequentialist argument for not littering is even stronger than on a street. If it's ACTUALLY the second, and this litter won't bother anyone significantly before it degrades, litter away. Noone should care if you litter something that won't bother anybody.
Flip it around. Suppose that you litter something biodegradable in a remote forest, like some scraps of cardboard you brought for tinder. Do you think that's equivalent to littering a PET bottle? Or is the badness of littering significantly determined by its consequences?
My not littering has a trivial chance of saving Earth from ecological collapse, but it doesn't have a trivial chance of making a neighbor's experience of this park a lot more pleasant.
In fact, I live in Korea, where cities don't typically have public trash cans, and it's not uncommon to find piles of trash on the curb. People put trash on top of other trash until the cleaning crew comes, and presumably trash on top of trash affects aesthetics less than throwing it onto a clear lawn or something.
That doesn’t track with my experience. Non-voters I’ve known seem to have political views utterly dominated by extreme cynicism and disgust.
I think this is a typical-minding; you may well be right for the sort of non-voter that not only reads this blog and comments, but I doubt we’re representative.
You mistake me for someone who is in your milieu. I’m not. I was singularly impressed by how bad this post was and that’s why I’m here. The people who read this blog that I know and interact with regularly consist of myself.
I'll bet that's a product of your social circle/class, though, and may not be representative of non-voters in general. There are a lot of people out there who don't vote simply because they find politics boring and its at a certain remove from their day to day lives, so they ignore it.
It would be very weird if this was a systematic quality of furries.
I am a non-voter because I think voting in a universal >18 y/o suffrage system is a silly political show. It took me a while to arrive at the conclusion that only the vetted, with stake in the game should be voting. If voting were restricted to ex-servicememers--or--property owners--or--people who make a monthly payroll then I would participate again. But right now my vote is just awash in a sea of stupidity.
It’s nice that you’ve come to a conclusion about voting that’s also, I’d guess, aggrandizing to your own ego.
Thankfully, people like you don’t vote. If only you could be convinced not to participate in other ways as well.
What magical thing happens at the age of 18 that makes the average person all the sudden able to understand and vote on the complex issues that face our nation? I'm 50 years old, I have run a business with 15 employees, (paid the employer contribution to their taxes) served my country in foreign wars, made a mortgage payment, successfully raised 5 prosocial oriented children. I have demonstrated that I am more than willing to take risks for the sake of the larger body. Its not an ego thing. It's objectively measurable reality.
What you’re saying is that you’re an Internet conservative with a lot of ego behind their tedious political views.
I don’t know why I or anyone else would ever care, not just about your experience, but about your existence simpliciter.
Should there be any qualifications to voting at all? My list is probably, admittedly, on a continuum way to the right of most people, but it is rational. Is voting a right? Or is it just one way that a nation can include citizens in the process? In all of human history, before countries had elections, were all those people being denied a basic right that we just found out about relatively recently?
Indeed, Heinlein was right. And I'm constantly reminded of Turtledove's aliens who are agast at the human use of Snout Counting as a way to make policy decisions. As stated elsewhere in this thread, I played the game, got a seat at the table, bet long and hard, and it's so rigged you can't believe it until you witness it up close and personal. A direct result
I've never served in the military, don't own any property, and don't have a monthly income. I also have a Master's Degree in Political Science. Do you really think I'm less qualified to vote than some random guy who happened to inherit a house from his parents?
No offense, I don't know you, but you seem the perfect example of someone I think should be kept as far from voting as possible. Buy/Acquire a piece of property and defend it, and earn an income by proving to others that you produce something of value they will pay for, and maybe you'd have a reasonable stake in the decision making process. Your Master's? Double disqualified IMHO.
That said, personally, I no longer believe in any voting process at all. I'm a full on Voluntaryist these days: I refuse to consent to anything decided by others. Violate my voluntary consent at your peril. Nobody has the right to dictate the life of another, no matter how big your gang is.
Part of Scott's argument was that turning 18 doesn't magically give you an understanding of civics or law or policy issues or how the world works. Fair enough, but buying a house doesn't magically give you an understanding of any of that stuff either, and in my opinion it's an extremely bad proxy. Someone can inherit a house from their family without doing anything to earn it, or buy a house for very cheap because they live in a poor rural area where land and housing are far less expensive than normal. Is a rural Alabaman homeowner really more qualified to vote than a wealthier, more successful, and more educated New York City renter, simply because he happens to live in a place where housing is 20 times cheaper?
Given my education, I do have a greater understanding of civics and law and policy issues than most people, but his standards would exclude me from voting. So if his goal is really to ensure that voting is limited to people who actually understand politics, then the particular standards he's established fail miserably at that. This suggests that either he hasn't thought his idea out very well, or that his actual goal is simply to limit voting to people who are statistically likely to agree with him on the object-level issues.
For someone with a Master's in Politics (or more likely because of), you have quite a blind spot. The issue isn't that someone with property and valuable productivity is more likely to be educated on any particular issue, but that they have a real and concrete stake on the outcome. They caretake, because they own it. It's an extension of the tragedy of the commons problem.
Ownership and self-reliance trumps educated welfare and dependance on others who provide.
Congrats on the worthless degree. It'll feed you well as the world burns.
Yeah, I mean, it’s pretty obvious how ludicrous these people are. I don’t own any property either but I’d wager my investments are worth more than their house.
That I don’t feel like my homebuying options are particularly great near my job is a weird basis for deciding I shouldn’t vote.
What really gets me is that, even beyond all the ethical and practical problems I've mentioned, it's just such an obvious attempt to rig the system in a way that would benefit their side. "Democracy, but only when it produces the outcomes I want." Which is not really a democracy at all; the entire point of democracy is that it's a truce of sorts, wherein you sometimes have to accept outcomes you don't like or agree with, because that's the necessary price of having a say at all. It's far from perfect, but it's certainly a lot better than hashing every issue out through violence, or taking orders from a strongman (who can also enact policies you don't like, while leaving you with far less recourse to do anything about it).
I'm sure if some left-liberal suggested restricting the vote solely to people with college degrees (or people with a Master's, or people with a Doctorate), these people would all be aghast, and rightly so. But only because that would result in the other team having a massive advantage at the polls; they're perfectly fine with equally undemocratic restrictions that would give their side the massive advantage.
Oh, definitely. It’s a whole genre, in fact, complete with dumb self-serving arguments. When I was in college, Bryan Caplan wrote a whole book about voter irrationality that boiled down to “they’re all irrational because they don’t vote libertarian”!
It’s just a mind trap for morons, tbh.
Personally I like positive yearly tax balance (as in you're funding the state, instead of the state funding you) as a proxy for contributing to society, and thus deserving a voice in its direction. In the spirit of Shapley values, it also flows from the reality that if all people meeting this condition refuse to contribute, there is no state anymore.
The problem with this (leaving aside the more general problems with restricting the right to vote, which I addressed in my reply to your other post) is that whether someone counts as a net taxpayer is purely a function of the current tax policy, which is subject to constant change by the Legislature. Technically, under your proposed model, anyone who receives a tax return equal to or greater than the amount they paid in taxes would be ineligible to vote that year, but the threshold for what level of income qualifies someone for refundable tax credits varies from year to year at the whims of Congress. Thus, it would become trivially easy for federal politicians to game the system, changing the income tax system to arbitrarily expand or narrow the range of people who could vote in a way that served their own personal or partisan interests. This is doubly bad, since it would allow for an unprecedented level of political corruption and naked power grabs, while also giving politicians a perverse incentive to distort the tax system in ways that could be quite damaging for the overall economy.
Those are all important problems, yeah.
I still think something similar has to be done sooner or later, though. We are nearing massive technological unemployment, followed by UBI or expansion of existing wealth transfers, followed by collapse as those who can still contribute are taxed more and more until they go full Atlas Shrugged and leave for somewhere else.
I'd be less concerned about it if it didn't already happen in the EU. Due to demographics, several EU countries - perhaps a majority of them? I know of eastern EU and the Mediterrean states - are largely ruled by their retirees, who are an extremely large and important voting bloc despite being completely economically irrelevant. This breeds massive resentment as intergenerational solidarity is slowly turning into intergenerational warfare. I've heard a lot of the sentiment that SARS-CoV-2 was a blessing as it culled old people.
Voting from a plurality of independent opinions is often more effective at producing good outcomes than expert or stakeholder decision making. This is just a fact, because stakeholders and even experts simply cannot be aware of all of the relevant facts. That's why central planning always fails at scale while markets typically work well.
I've considered your position seriously before, but on balance, I think it's just factually wrong to conclude that it would be a superior system.
The problem with this whole analysis is, it tries to quantify things without defining the parameter in question ("extreme") in any clear way, much less providing any sensible methodology or theory for how such a parameter could actually be quantified. So it's all opinion, based on what madness someone chooses to believe is more extreme than some other madness (freedom is letting teenagers get assault rifles and murder little children vs. social justice is wokism and all that implies.)
For my two cents, I think both parties, and most Americans have moved far in the direction of what I call victimitarianism, an extremely poisonous attitude that even moderates seem infatuated with these days. Who's the biggest victim? That's why everyone is so upset about how extreme people they disagree with has gotten. The overwhelming appeal of victimhood seems to have caused our whole political system to turn especially rancid, so it's not about fixing what's wrong or making things better, but how we can show it's us whose rights are the ones being violated. Ugh! Walt Kelly once titled a book, We Have Met the Enemy and It Is Us, and that's never been more true than now.
> The problem with this whole analysis is, it tries to quantify things without defining the parameter in question ("extreme") in any clear way, much less providing any sensible methodology or theory for how such a parameter could actually be quantified
I disagree, I think the point of this analysis is to propose multiple different definitions of "extreme" and ways in which it could be quantified, and see what happens when we use each of them.
The conclusion is then (somewhat inevitably) "well, it depends", and everyone is happy.
Isn't the implication of your policy positions argument that a Republican advocating for segregation, women being banned from the workforce, and for the abolition of income taxes wouldn't be "extreme"?
Doesn't that strike you as completely fucking absurd?
Yeah, and Scott has chosen a framing that makes it impossible for conservatives to ever become "more extreme". The phrase is meaningless in a context where the right could be electing literally segregationists and claiming to not be extreme. Moral progress is real, FFS.
Nonsense. Garrison represented a big healthy slice of the American electorate. He was quite popular in his day. Maybe you're thinking of John Brown or John Wilkes Booth -- *they* were extremists, and neither came to a happy end.
Well, 10% of the population is not that small. For example, it's about twice the fraction of the population in the South that owned slaves at the time. Ross Perot got 8% of the vote in 1992.
The 1840s are also a good distance from the 1850s, and there are a lot of other reasons why Northerners might not identify as abolitionists in that earlier era -- not because they didn't believe owning blacks was wrong, but because they thought there had to be a better way than direct (and probably violent) confrontation. This is the era of Clay, of repeated attempts at compromise and some kind of evolutionary extinction or at least limitation of slavery. I think it's quite probable much more than 10% agreed with Garrison on the principles (slavery is wicked) but not so many on the methods for solving the problem[1].
Of course, as the 1850s came and went, positioned hardened extremely, and by the end of that time the North was sufficiently convinced to go to war, which is a pretty extreme solution, no less extreme than anything Garrison advocated. So I think a better characterization of Garrison is that he represented a popular philosophy but not, until events proved it neccessary, a very popular practical approach to the problem. This doesn't really fit the bill of radical extremism for me. It's not Lenin in 1917, it's not the Paris Commune in 1848, where the very principle at issue are in bitter contest.
---------------
[1] I dismiss the Post column as mere fashion-conscious retconning.
"And Garrison burned a copy of the Constitution, which isn't the sort of thing moderates tend to do."
He also said about the most concise non-moderate line ever: "That which is not just is not law."
Indeed. I think I'm much more extreme -- relative to my time -- for refusing to support any politician who favors subsidy of animal exploitation. And I don't even think that's very extreme at all, as I'm not about to go John Brown anytime soon!
But segregation's not that extreme a position these days. To pick one example at random, plenty of universities are bringing it back in small ways, like graduation ceremonies filtered by race:
- https://www.washington.edu/omad/black-graduation-ceremony/
- https://hsdm.harvard.edu/event/harvard-black-and-latinx-graduation-ceremonies
- https://diversity.utexas.edu/multiculturalengagement/black-graduation/
- https://www.bu.edu/articles/2019/umoja-convocation/
This wouldn't show up directly in Scott's data, of course, as these are not decisions being voted on by national-level party members. But, segregation in general is clearly not outside the Overton Window, so the various Republican segregationist politicians in Congress and the Senate are probably not that extreme either.
An optional party for black people is not the same as segregation.
So an optional party for whites only would not be segregation?
I think the better argument is that while the sort of segregation Hari mentioned is silly and wrong, the sort conservatives supported in the past was worse. This seems like a pretty uncontroversial claim to me.
How about a golf club just for whites? Or a private college? We have a volunteer Army, would it be OK if we had whites-only battalions and black-only battalions?
The freedom to associate comes with the freedom to not associate. It should be OK for any group to do it, using any dimensions they want. If they come across as intolerant bigots to the general population and their idea fails, sobeit. Anyway, why would you want to force some group to accept you there? America is a huge country, everyone can find a place they fit in now.
Could you point to the Republican segregationist politicians in the House and the Senate? I'm having a hard time thinking of any, but, for example, even the Democrat in the White House has a segregationist past, mostly because when he started, that was a common Democratic Party position.
And by this I mean, someone who has proposed an actual segregationist policy.
In you view, under what circumstances can slavery be rational and good?
I'm not claiming that any Rs are segregationists; I'm saying that even if they were Scott's argument would still say they hadn't "gotten more extreme" because this was a normal conservative position in 1900.
EDIT: oh sorry you were replying to Hari; my mistake!
I misread James' comment as stating that there were Republicans who were segregationists, instead of stating a hypothetical scenario.
Sure, that's understandable. Thanks.
"How is this not obvious when [outgroup] has done ..."
The outgroup argument doesn’t hold water here. Trump tried to overturn the election. This is pretty black and white. Coups are objectively bad.
"No no really my side just is obviously right ..."
Again. One side is wrong in an objectively terrible way. Elections operating on a heads I win tails you lose basis. This isn’t a Coke vs Pepsi discussion.
I feel like every time someone comes in and cites this as a reason one side is clearly wrong, a bunch of people point out that the dems were OK with cities being burned down to move policy, or a bunch of stuff like that.
And I get that this wasn't good, right? It's a good reason not to like Trump. But it's like, OK, party-line communications go super-mega-overboard, they shoot for the stars hoping to hit the moon; their side is completely innocent in all ways and anything the other side did is literally the worst thing ever.
Most people on both sides are at least kinda aware of this mechanism. And every time I see you doing this, I want to be like "hey, you know you aren't supposed to swallow THE WHOLE THING, right?". Like you can know this is bad and also know that the left being cool with an entire summer of arson and riots was probably pretty bad too and maybe do the math on why people might strike a balance between the two.
I disagree with the left being cool with a summer of arson and riots. I know I wasn’t. When the Minnesota Governor came on television and said that people in my neighborhood should pack a go bag I was pretty unhappy.
I think the overwhelming majority of Democrats think violence and property destruction are definitely not okay.
There have been 200 felony arrests in the Twin Cities stemming from that destruction. There would be many more if they had all been recorded on CCTV.
The capital riot was very bad but in point of fact it wasn't a coup attempt. A very weak perimeter gave an angry mob an opportunity to get inside the building and some of them took it on the spur of the moment. "coup attempt" implies some sort of coherent organized plan to overthrow the government, which was absent. "coup attempt" also implies a lot of violence, but nobody got shot except by police. Media inflated the "death toll" headline with an unrelated meth OD and 2 heart attacks among a crowd of tens of thousands, the vast majority of whom never set foot in the capitol. And contrary to early media reports about Sicknick's martyrdom, the examiner found no evidence of blunt trauma and the investigation confirmed he died of natural causes: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-media-lied-repeatedly-about-officer?s=r
The 2020 BLM riots were an OOM more deadly and you could very plausibly argue that various democratic politicians bear as much responsibility for inciting those as trump for his incitement of the capitol riot. In both cases the politicians never actually told people to riot, but in both cases the politicians made recklessly false claims that made a lot of people very angry. Looking at the percentage of African-Americans who got shot by police, in isolation, without comparing it to the violent crime rates, is about as silly as testing precinct vote totals for Benford's law without checking for a pattern in the sizes of the precincts.
That's kind of what it looked like to me. A bunch of protesters getting caught up in the moment is not an organized coup. Its why I don't like crowds.
Here I'm curious if you're going to watch the Jan 6 hearings, or at least read the final report. The question is not whether the capital riot was in and by itself a coup attempt, it's whether it was an intentional part of a much broader sequence of coordinated moves by multiple parties to prevent the peaceful transfer of government, i.e., a coup. Hopefully we can agree that if Trump had a series of meetings and conversations in which he and his advisors worked out a multi-pronged strategy to prevent Biden from becoming president after each state certified its election and in aggregate Trump lost, that would constitute an attempted coup. We seem to have the broad outlines. Pence, under pressure of the capital riot if necessary, unconstitutionally declines to certify the votes from battleground states under GOP control, who have illegal shadow slates of electors pre-selected. After Pence does his part in the coup, those legislatures declare their elections invalid and vote to submit their shadow electors. Enough states do this to cast the presidential election in doubt sufficient to trigger a vote in Congress, where each state delegation gets one vote and the GOP hold a numerical advantage. Trump "wins". Now it's up to the Jan 6 committee (and the DOJ) to make the case if that's what really happened. I would stipulate that if it's only about the capital riot, and Trump's sole personal involvement was firing up the crowd and snickering while it played out, then that's not a coup. I'm interested to see how the DOJ roll-up proceeds. If the leadership of the Proud Boys and of the Oath Keepers—now charged with seditious conspiracy—were repeatedly meeting with people (e.g., Stone) who were themselves in frequent direct communication with Trump in the lead-up to Jan 6, that's harder to simply dismiss as just politics as usual. Per your Floyd riots point, if it turns out that the national BLM leadership was in frequent meetings with Schumer and Pelosi's staff in June of 2020, I would want that investigated too.
There would have been no America without a rebellion.
Was the 2014 revolution in Ukraine objectively bad? The elected president was removed from power by a mob.
When we like the new government, we call it a revolution. When we don't like the new government, we call it a coup. These are just Russell conjugations.
No political party has accepted an electoral outcome this century.
2000 it was hanging cads, 2004 there were more theories, 2008 Obama was born in Kenya, 2012 ACORN stole it, 2016 we were all treated to Trump-Russia investigations and fisa court abuses, and 2020 there was a small riot in which no buildings burned...
The unwillingness to accept outcomes is escalating... but 2020 really just continues the trend. Who's knows 2024 we might have gun fights.
You aren’t one of those small land owners that the Bolsheviks didn’t like very much are you? <joke>
What does this have to do with the thread you're responding to?
The user name kulak was the Russian term for a small land owner. The Bolsheviks used them as one of their scapegoats during the Stalin era.
Too obscure a reference I suppose.
Bill Clinton was the last President whose election was fully considered legit by the opposition.
So from that standpoint the Jan 2021 refusal to accept Biden's victory was what's now become an American tradition.
I am not arguing about any current R politician or position. I think it's incontrovertible that if you took a 1900s conservative and put them in Congress they would be seen as incredibly extreme. If the Rs pivoted to 1900s conservative positions, that would be becoming more extreme. But Scott is arguing that that would just be staying in the same place as they were in the 1900s, so you couldn't argue that that is becoming more extreme. It's a reductio of Scott's policy positions argument. I don't think Rs are, in fact, presenting 1900s conservative political positions.
Scott's point is that from the point of view of any individual it will always look this way. If you had lived since 1900 and thought that 1900-era positions were normal then it would definitely look like both parties had got pretty extreme, with the Democrats in the lead.
Elon Musk isn't 130, he's 50, which means he probably thinks of 1990 as being pretty normal. From the perspective of someone who started out as a moderate in 1990, the meme would definitely look pretty accurate.
I decided to look it up. William McKinney was the republican candidate for president in 1900, William Jennings Bryan the democratic candidate. Honestly William McKinney doesn't sound too far off from modern Republicans. Yes he would stand out like a sore thumb, but in general he asked foe higher tarrifs, paid lip service to civil rights issues, and generally called for higher patriotism. WJB was most know for his anti gold standard stance, calls for pacifism, and strict religious views to the extent that later in his life (post presidential runs) he called for abolishing teaching evolution. To me that sounds like the republican candidate would be less of a complete alien to his party to than the democratic candidate. It's a sampling size of 1 so almost entirely meaningless however.
> Scott has chosen a framing that makes it impossible for conservatives to ever become "more extreme".
Well I suppose that's true by definition. The question then is whether the Republicans are really a conservative party.
It's not literally impossible for the right-wing to get more extreme. They would just need to shift further right than they started. And since the United States was founded by Whigs, that would be obviously possible! You brought up segregation, but I would go further back and point to the Dred Scott decision as an example of the law moving in a more extreme direction than it started.
Yes, thank you! I think plenty of conservatives today would cheer if the SC abolished gay marriage. I am comfortable calling that extreme with regard to today's society. I don't really care how people in the year 1900 thought about it.
I found a recent poll, current positions on gay marriage are about 70% pro and 30% against. (In 1996 it was about 30% pro and 70% against).
An opinion held by 30% of the population can't reasonably be called "extreme", it's just... not the majority view. Overturning gay marriage in 2022, or instituting it in 1996 isn't "extreme", though it's not particularly democratic.
To me, this comment seems like a perfect example of what the original meme was talking about.
I remember when some of the leftist members of parliament in my country were against gay marriage. It was only two decades ago that this position was common everywhere.
Now they (and apparently you) want to call conservatives "extreme" (and quuickly thereafterwards "far right extremists" ) for simply... not succumbing to peer pressure?
When I use "extreme" I am not talking about from the perspective of a person in 1900, and I don't think anyone does. That is the entire point. Surely you would agree that someone being pro-slavery would be an extreme position? Yet if we did this article from the perspective of a person in 1850, the anti-slavery position is the extremist position.
Silliness.
The abolition of slavery is definitely the extremist position still; it's just domestic privately held slavery that's unthinkable.
Chinese muslims forced into years of working for the state in prison factories? Only extremists are protesting against that; or they wouldn't be the largest source of imported goods.
Democrats support Asian Quotas at top colleges.
I don't feel the debate on this kind of thing can ignore that.
Not necessarily. Scott mentions a hypothetical where the conservative party advocated for truly regressive policies, such as the handmaid's tale. If they also wanted to bring segregation back at this point, it would qualify as extreme in a way that is noticable.
He has chosen to discuss four different framings.
By the *moving in the preferred direction* framing, conservatives can't really be the more extreme party, at least if they are somewhat close to the literal meaning of conservative. (EDIT: This framing admits many different sub-framings, with different starting years.)
By the *diverging from the median* framing, both parties will usually be about equally extreme at any given time. But individual politicians might be much more extreme. If you want to take "moral progress" into account, and by that you mean the changing views of the median person, this is the framing to use.
By the *ideological purity* and the *crazier messaging* framings, either party could be more extreme.
“We’re exactly as racist and sexist as we were twenty years ago!”
Just replying to comment that I agree with this, thought about it too, and hope Scott sees and responds to it as well. Like you said, the method Scott used makes it so that whichever party is more progressive is automatically the extreme one.
Not necessarily.
The method guarantees that during periods of polarisation combined with progressive advance, whoever is more progressive is becoming extreme more quickly.
During periods of depolarisation combined with progressive advance, the softening conservatives would be changing more quickly. During periods of polarisation combined with outright reaction, the reactionaries would be becoming extreme more quickly. We just aren't in either of those situations at the moment.
So your disagreement hinges on "conservatives moving to the LEFT = more extreme"?
There was a reason I listed reactionary periods as well.
Here’s hoping.
"How is this not obvious when [outgroup] has done ..."
It depends on when your starting point is. None of these things have been promoted by either party for at least 50 years, so readopting them now would be extreme.
One of the weaknesses of Yeglesias's post is that his baseline is McCain's campaign. McCain ran as a maverick, and was more moderate than most of the Republican Party. The leader of Republicans in the House, John Boehner, was to McCain's right, although he would be forced out by intraparty conflict. The leader of Republicans in the Senate was Mitch McConnell, who still holds that position.
This post takes 1994 as the starting year, presumably because that's when PEW's data starts. Note, however, that if you take 2004 as the starting year with the same data, you would get a different conclusion. Although the "more than they are currently doing" clause is undoubtedly relevant here, especially since this starting point is in the middle of a Republican presidency.
Which Republican is advocating for those things?
I think if Republicans had been consistently advocating that since (eg) 1960, and Democrats had been advocating ever-stronger forms of racial integration, then the best way to describe this would be "the Republican position has stayed the same over time, the Democratic position has gotten more extreme over time, and the Democrats happen to be right".
It is hard for me to square this comment with how you chose to (not) caveat the beginning of your conclusion section.
This seems like a weird way to use the word "extreme", just to avoid having to say that a position that stays the same over time can also become more extreme over time.
"Which party has gotten more extreme?" is a classic disguised query (see https://www.lesswrong.com/s/SGB7Y5WERh4skwtnb/p/4FcxgdvdQP45D6Skg). The question itself isn't what we care about; it's a proxy for it. And much of the argumentation in this thread is between people who want to answer completely different questions, but are both using these words.
In the case of Elon's usage at least, the cartoon is a depiction of his experience. He held the same positions over a period of time, and the party he used to feel represented those positions moved away from him. In that context, the actual meaning of extreme IS 'moved farther away from historical positions.'
There are other perfectly reasonable underlying queries that one could mean by asking which party has gotten more extreme, and they're not wrong. They're just not actually relevant to Elon's usage of it.
Good point. What if instead of talking about "extreme" we focused on the specific scenario posed by the meme? If you were slightly left-of-centre in (say) 1990 and haven't changed your views since, then which party would represent you better in 2022?
Well, in that case, I guess we should stop calling ISIL and other terrorist groups as "Islamic extremists". After all, in medieval times both Christians and Muslims believed in the necessity for a theocratic dictatorship that persecuted unbelievers, so clearly the terrorist groups working to bring that about today are the moderates and we Western secularists must be the extremists for abandoning that idea.
More generally, "extremist" has no clear meaning separate from its use as a term of abuse, so if you're going to acknowledge that an "extreme" position can be right, there's no point calling positions "extreme" in the first place.
I like that a lot and can find no problem with it.
Just taboo the word "extreme" and "moderate" in all politicial discussions.
They obscure communication by piling on too many implicit, ambiguous assumptions, that will reliably differ between speaker and listener with different political positions. Shed more heat than light.
Only if we use a medieval year as the starting year. Not if we use, say, 1990, or if we use the "distance from ordinary people" framing.
In the framing of "conservatives prefer the status quo, liberals prefer change" then the outcome of any analysis of divergence from current status quo is going to self-evidently show liberals as changing more. Eg everyone in society has gotten more liberal on homosexuality, but the relative difference between democrats and republicans has stayed steady.
I would argue that your second question, "Which party has diverged more from ordinary Americans?", is the relevant question. Societal norms change over time, nobody supports slavery now, etc. Perception of extremity has to do with how far you diverge from the average viewpoint on a subject. In my opinion 538s average of expected voter turnout is a poor measure of this.
I'd suggest this as a test: If you take the Pew charts of "growing gaps" and ask how far each position is from the *average* viewpoint. As an example, for the first question "Government regulations of business usually do more harm than good", the average position is 45% agree, with 63% of Republicans agreeing and 30% of Dems. So Republicans are 18 points away from the average, while Dems are 15 points away.
Using this (admittedly simple) method on the other 9 questions results in Republicans diverging more from the average in every single one, for an average divergence of 20.3 points as compared to democrats 15.9.
staying still when the world changes can mean you are getting more extreme. consider someone today giving medical advice from the 1850s
Yup.
The world gets more and more "liberal" (for a lack of the better word) with every year. This was the case for the past almost 600 years. Obviously there is some local randomness in the real world, during short periods of time the world or a country can get less "liberal", but the long time trend is obvious.
A centrist from 1900s would be far right or hard conservative by todays standards. It is absolutely pointless to compare todays policies to 1900s policies. Everyone became way more "liberal" (or "leftist") in those years: democrats and republicans alike.
So we must compare democrats and republicans to the current centrist baseline. Or at least to the average centrist baseline of the past 10 years or something. And yes, it is impossible to define what this baseline really is.
I don't believe the trend has gone back 600 years. Prior to the industrial revolution I think the world was so different it's hard to compare to today.
It really has, since the 1400s puts you into the early decline of feudalism.
Is the rise of monarchist autocracy actually more liberal than feudal decentralization? Honestly seems likely the opposite is true.
It’s weird you think the particular title of the autocrat matters.
Autocrats in non-monarchist system are selected less nepotistically and therefore are more likely to be competent, so yes, it does matter.
Though that wasn't my point at all, anyway.
I don’t think you have a point, actually.
No his question is a perfectly valid one, historically. Absolutism was a very different animal than what came before. Louis XIV wouldn't have been able to do what he did in an earlier era.
Once again: you are concentrating non the title of the absolutist.
I really do believe so. I think this was the case after the Renaissance and onwards.
Yes, it is hard or impossible to compare modern life and concepts to the life and concepts of 600 years ago. But to the extend it could be done, I think it does hold.
How would you say things got "more liberal" during the Renaissance?
After Renaissance. Development of a crude scientific method and empirical approach to life and "truth" (as opposed to religious dogma that was prevalent for the past 500 or more years) had forced Europe (or at least parts of Europe) in a more liberal direction. Reformation, scientific method, first proto liberal philosophers are all a product of the Renaissance.
I know that Mencius Moldbug associates the Reformation/Protestantism with the left, but that's because he associates the right with good order and the left with destruction of it. By modern liberal standards, Martin Luther doesn't really seem to be an improvement over what preceded him. Then again, by modern liberal standards Andrew Jackson was worse than the Federalists even though the triumph of his Democratic party over the Federalists is a clear example of how politics moves "left" over time.
I feel like you are confusing liberalism and the "left" as you see it. Human rights and communism have little to do with each other.
That doesn't really make sense unless you simply define liberal as "modern" and conservative as "not modern". You could also argue that seeing as liberals are on the left, that leftists like communism and (classical) communist ideas have been in retreat for a long time, that the world has been getting more right wing over time, and that the "conservative" position of the 1900 was in reality a pretty left wing position.
Public spending as a share of GDP has increased by hundreds of percent since 1900 in all developed countries I can think of. Anyone who wanted to cut public spending to those levels today would be seen as a right-wing extremist. That seems, to me, like the world has gotten more left wing on the economic axis.
In the USA it's increased a lot, yes, but the USA was unusually libertarian. I was talking about the whole world. Most of the world spent the 20th century as a hotbed of dictators and Communists for whom 100% of GDP was public spending!
I don't think the US differs all that much from other developed countries in this respect. E.g. Sweden's gone from 8% in 1900 to 43% today.
Yes, but e.g. Russia went from 100% to ~30%. You can say, well, Russia wasn't a "developed country" but that's tautological - any country in which public spending is 100% of the GDP is so broken it can never be developed to the standards of countries with much lower levels of spending. Likewise with the capitalist revolution in China.
So this boils down to a question of whether state retrenchment in some countries offsets the growth of the state in other countries. My gut sense is yes just because there are so many of those countries even if we often forget about them in the west, and they were very large.
Even so, you're correct that the arguments against leftist levels of public spending were largely lost in western countries.
Hey, why takes communism as the left-wing norm rather than anarchism or (even more radical) anarcho-primitivism? Then the left has been in retreat even more! :)
Left or liberal != communism for me. I was talking more about human rights and minority protections and, yes, "equality", but not in the communism sense.
I imagine that criteria varies depending on which rights and which minorities.
The world does not move ever leftwards. You only think so because the arc of history leads to today's values. But who knows where it will go in the future?
We don't know. But I would say a 600 year old trend is a good indication or what will come next.
Yes, but it isn't a trend. It only looks that way because you aren't comparing your views of what progress is to what people in the past thought progress was.
Hmm?
Ignoring the liberal vs. left (which I wouldn't consider the same thing, e.g. I would say that China and India have both gotten more liberal and moved right over the last 30 years). I think the claim, which I'm sympathetic too, is that there's a bit of a sharpshooter fallacy going on here in that what we call 'liberal' or even more so 'left' isn't some platonic ideal but influenced/reflective of how society actually developed. If we went back 600 years ago and asked folks to define liberal would they do so consistently with how we do so today? If not then there's likely at least some of this effect in play.
as a more concrete example: if we asked a European hundreds of years ago what the "progress-minded, forward looking, equitable and egalitarian" (trying to operationalize "progressive" and decouple it from the single word) world of tomorrow would look like, it'd likely involve a whole heck of a lot more Christianity than our world does.
Yes, that is basically my claim. I think a recent survey here put it best with one of its options to a question asking the the definition of progress: "Progress is tautological - the values we have now always say the values we have now are good".
I also do not think you would have to go back 600 years - try 100, or probably even 50.
Obviously they would view it totally differently. Our views and beliefs did not just magically appear. They grew from our history and evolution of our beliefs. Technology plays a big part too. People lived in a totally different world 600 years ago.
Over 600 years we went on a parade away from the extreme low personal freedom levels enjoyed under feudalism, towards quite a bit in the early 1800s-early 1900s, which an expansionist state has been rolling back ever since.
Depends on your definition of freedom. Not being able to kill other people freely, you can say, is in infringement on your freedom.
Liberalism isn't leftism. I don't think that the world actually drifts ever-leftward. I do think that it has become much more liberal, and it has made it much harder to be an autocrat.
"The world gets more and more "liberal" (for a lack of the better word) with every year." depends on weighting I guess. China is getting less liberal. India is getting less liberal. That's over a third of the world population right there. Haven't done the mental tabulation to see if I can get to 50%+ but doesn't seem impossible. Russia, Afghanistan, Turkey, Indonesia (?) etc.
I think what we have observed can be summarized very simply:
1. Americans as a whole have moved to the left.
2. The American political parties have become polarized, with relatively leftist Republicans becoming Democrats and relatively rightist Democrats becoming Republicans. American politics becoming nationalized accounts for a significant portion of this (perhaps around half).
Nearly everything else we have observed seems like a natural consequence of the above two trends.
I’m not sure those “relatively leftist Republicans” became Democrats. I think they became Trump’s base.
As I see it, today’s Republicans are fundamentally more willing to stick together as a group than Democrats. To a great extent, they used to *be* Democrats not that long ago. The big cultural political party flip in the 1970s made a lot of my previously Democrat urban family into Republicans.
But this meant they were now in bed with rural religious conservatives. My relatives laughed at those people. They mocked their purity rings and their homophobia. They stuck with them for the political clout, but were pulled further and further to the cultural right all through the 2000s. All the while, the capacity of the rural right to generate appealing candidates devolved until Ted Cruz was the best they could get for president. My family and millions of people like them thought he was gross. And in walked Trump.
As I see it, 2016 was a natural consequence of people being dragged so far out of their natural political alignment for so long that Trump seemed like a good idea.
This isn’t to say my family are closet liberals. They’re Catholic and thus pro-life. Even so, they were fine with their teenage daughters asking for birth control. But they’re not excited about them asking to be called “him” or “they”. They earnestly fear Marxism in all its manifestations.
They were always like this, but it used to be possible to be this way as a Democrat. Eventually, it wasn’t possible to be this way as a Republican, either. But there were enough people like my family in the GOP by 2016 that they dragged it where they wanted to go.
The overall picture is more complicated than a slide from left to right or vice versa; Democrats might have had more visible diversity this century, but Republicans might have been more of a mixed bag.
>1. Americans as a whole have moved to the left.
Not on guns. The median position on guns has moved right over just about any window you care to choose.
Not on abortion. Window matters a bit more on abortion but the median voter has moved well to the right on abortion.
Not on unions. The labor movement continues it's long, slow death.
Not on taxes. Even taking Scotts very convenient window, taxes have been cut by Bush, raised very slightly on one group Obama, then cut again by Trump. Widen that window to Reagan or Ike and those differences become much more stark.
Americans as a whole have only moved left if you ignore large policy areas where they've moved right. Americans as a whole have moved, in some cases left, in some cases right. Scott, for his own (pretty good) reasons, doesn't care for the left. Hence the post.
“Right on abortion” only if you count post-Roe, and only if you only count legislation as opposed to opinion polling.
I don’t think voter opinions based on polls have moved strongly to the right - the median has been in the mushy “some restrictions, especially late term, but generally legal” for a long time.
On the other hand, Roe itself (and it’s follow ons) was pretty extreme, basically making it very difficult to restrict abortion before the third trimester, which is notably to “the left” of almost all of Europe.
To a large extent I think both *parties* have gotten more extreme on the issue - the Dems used to be much more willing to soften rhetoric on abortion to salve their Catholic wing and rural Dems who tended toward social conservatism. The saga of Bart Stupak during the ACA debate is illustrative.
There are many windows over which support for guns has gone down (e.g. 2009-2019)
The issue is substantially confounded by the violent crime wave we had in the 1970s through 1990s, which likely happened for demographic reasons. Many data series start in that time period, and thus pick up that signal, which is more a reaction to current events than a fundamental attitude.
Good thing we aren't in the middle of another violent crime spike, then. /s
This seems like the explanation best supported by the evidence. It also makes sense when you simply compare the US against the rest of the world - we're still a very right-wing country compared to our global peers, and it's not surprising that the left in a right-wing country would move toward where most of the world is.
I wish I had something more constructive to say here, but mostly my response to this analysis is that it's both terrible and fairly typical of a certain kind of rationalist "Hi I just landed from Mars and here are my trenchant observations on your weird Earth behaviors" thinking. It reads like the anti-Tocqueville: it has no real feeling for the subject. It would be like if I tried to name the best classical composer by, say, analyzing streaming data and performing a computer analysis of melody and tempo.
It's not that I can't critique specific elements of this piece. It's just sort of...what's the point? Read Yglesias on politics. Read Scott on esoteric intellectual musings, AI, medical arcana, and the like.
I'm very curious about whether most readers of this blog would agree with "read Yglesias on politics". Personally, I don't care for his writing.
I think the major thing is that Yglesias, seemingly along among elite commentators, regularly notes that, as an elite commentator, he thinks a lot of things only elite commentators do.
One of the reasons I like Yglesias is that he supports both things like YIMBYism and Drag Queen Story Hour.
He's prepared to sacrifice some of the things he supports by backing candidates who oppose them who are more likely to get elected - that's what he means by "popularism". If you asked him his actual opinions on trans people, I'm pretty sure he has no problem with trans women in sport. But he's prepared to throw them under the bus to get other policies that he thinks are more important.
That last makes him very unusual for a voter, but quite normal for a politician.
I like Yglesias and I read his blog regularly, although I don't always agree with him (then again, I feel the same way about our esteemed host).
Even when I disagree with Yglesias, it's obvious that his understanding of politics is pretty deep and comprehensive. In contrast, posts like this are basically just an attempt at justifying gut instincts with shallow knowledge and a cursory Google or two.
I find myself disagreeing with him a lot but he makes interesting points often enough that I still read him sometimes.
I agree with "read Yglesias on politics."
I'm a pretty hardcore and well read libertarian, and to my surprise I find myself agreeing with 80-90% of Yglesias writing.
Maybe a moderate leftist who (and this is essential!) understands Economics is a government I could like!
I came to this blog from Yglesias, and to Yglesias from Noah Smith, and to Noah from the neolibs.
WE are more than you think
I wish I had something more constructive to say here, but mostly my response to this comment is that it’s both terrible and fairly typical of a certain kind of commenter “I demand rigor and insight from blogs I read, but feel no need to be constructive and insightful myself in my criticism; rather I simply carp disdainfully about the tone and how it makes me feel” thinking.
Yep, believe me I knew this would set some people off. Of course, you are weirdly projecting that I objected to the tone of the piece or "how it made me feel" -- the tone isn't the issue in the least. But this sort of pushback is pretty typical. Other people's opinions are rooted in their "feelings," yours are rooted in...who knows.
Again, it would be really easy to pick this piece apart. The first point, which treats politics as a sort of mathematical puzzle in which conservatives wish to stay at point zero and progressives wish to move towards infinity is about as conceptually incoherent an analysis of politics as I can imagine.
It's not like there aren't actual political theorists who have actually useful theories and frameworks for explaining the dynamics of political disagreement, parties, etc. You can find them if you're interested. You won't find them here.
Think of it as a very simplified model which is not that interested in realism, a common thing to construct because it's easy to understand.
"Consider a spherical cow..."
There's nothing wrong with spherical-cow models if you don't have a better one though.
You ask three experts how many cows you can fit in a pen that's 30 metres by 30 metres. Expert 1 tells you that the answer is as many as god wills it to be. Expert 2 tells you that you are an evil cow-enslaver for even considering the question. Expert 3 uses a spherical cow model and gives you an answer which is, given your knowledge of the shape of a cow, probably right to within 30% or something.
The model where "conservatives" sit still and "progressives" move off to infinity isn't supposed to be the final word on anything, it's just a thought experiment to illustrate one way in which it might seem true that the Democrats are always getting more extreme.
Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It's never cost-free, and as an empiricst and investor I am keenly aware of opportunity cost, not to mention how quickly sunk cost issues arise.
That is, there is often significant value in saying "I don't know, and I decline to speculate fruitlessly." It keeps the mind clear and the awareness high so that when some data come along that *does* matter you're in the best possible mental state to appreciate it. Your mind is not clouded with a pre-existing model you need to unload, your attention is more keenly on the incoming data because you've got nothing else.
It's my experience, for what it's worth, that the world suffers far more often from premature conclusions than being too hesitant to entertain theories.
Yeah, I’m sure your girlfriend who goes to another school would be able to just tear this analysis apart, but so far you have one objection and it’s so vague as to be worthless. Forgive me if I don’t hold my breath.
And the fact that the “actual political theorists” converge on an opinion more in keeping with your own has nothing to do with this?
I like the way he says “actual political theorists” as if there are real ones and fake ones, or as if a credential or status confers correctness.
He could be Richard Hanania trolling under a pseudonym.
completely off topic but 4 years ago when i read "them/they" applied to singular person it always confused me. Nowadays it's when I read "he" when it could be a "she" that am confused (why "they" wasn't used instead).
Could you give an example of a specific critique you have of the data analysis in this piece (if you do have issues with the data analysis)? I find the discussion below on the motivating model quite unconvincing because I read that as a simple hypothesis which was then tested rather than intended to be the final word in how to understand the two parties. I think I'd probably understand what you were getting at better if you could give a specific critique of the data analysis, which is obviously intended to be data analysis rather than fall somewhere on a musing / model / claim spectrum, and that therefore was unambiguously 'terrible'
This seems basically correct. It's fine to muse on something where you have little idea about the theoretical framework, but it rarely produces excellent and sharp analysis, as you will spend a lot of time re-inventing the wheel, and usually not a very good wheel (although perhaps you can come up with some feature that people who knew the wheel already haven't considered). This is amateurism in both the good and the bad sense of the word.
Although I would say read Nate Silver rather than Matt Yglesias for this particular issue. He's an actual expert.
Nate Silver has a BA in econ and is a blogger.
Matt Yglesias took his degree in philosophy and is a blogger.
Scott Alexander is a licensed psychiatrist and a blogger.
You cannot be serious. One of these people famously does this for a living, and you want to merely compare degrees?
Scott also blogs for a living.
Did his line of work become political statistics while I wasn't looking?
No, he’s a blogger, like Silver and Yglesias.
I would be very interested in someone naming the best classical composer via streaming data and computer analysis (well, more the later than the former.) And there are music theorists/music cognition researchers who attempt to figure out which tempos, rhythms, and chords are "objectively" best from an amateur and expert standpoint. It's not the end-all-be-all on "taste," but there are some interesting and consistent findings.
I don’t have much to add, this puts it better than I could.
Did this article get re uploaded? I could have sworn I read this before.
Scott posted it previously as subscriber-only content.
Not a subscriber, but could explain how a mixup could have happened more easily.
There’s a lot of bizarre stuff going on here that (I claim) ultimately will have a lot to do with societal narratives and not just polling data.
There are more people than ever saying “the two-party system is rigged; it’s a perpetual outrage cycle all designed to keep the same people in power!” And they have a point.
Then there are people pointing out the radicalization on both sides…especially (insert side here)! And they have a point.
Andrew Yang has a plan to use math to unite us all, right and left alike. He is more pro-abortion than a median of the country, and more pro-gay than ANYONE ten years ago. He is….right-coded for some reason.
Meanwhile, your acquaintances from college who called themselves fiscally conservative (aka, anti-populist, I guess?) but socially liberal are now Barstool conservatives who love Joe Rogan and political incorrectness and are anti-elite, very self-consciously.
Meanwhile, Democrats are suddenly the war-hawks these past months? Even the squad? Some say?
Some of this can be sorted out by ignoring the distorted narratives social media can provide, focusing on data, etc. But those narratives can become reality—the two-way street between (social) media and political reality has never been stronger or more obvious. (Paging Dr. Baudrillard)
So. It’s weird.
(The solution, of course, is for Scott to rethink his criticisms of MacIntyre and pick up a copy of Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity.)
In response to your second parenthetical paragraph, I don't think there's any right-wing equivalent these days, but I think there was, as recently as the Bush administration.
In 2003, if you had certain types of (in retrospect, sensible) anti-war opinions you were anti-American, you didn't Support The Troops, you were in favour of Letting The Terrorists Win. And of course, you were With Us Or Against Us.
The example I recall was the Dixie Chicks. Not exactly a political expulsion, but they pretty much lost their careers by being against the war, because most of their supporters code Red Tribe/Conservative/Republican. Both parties were so pro war that there weren't a lot of political dissenters.
I am pretty firmly anti-antiwar, but the way the left treated Cindy Sheehan is still sickening.
Dixie Chick's were especially *unwise* because they dissed the USA publicly at an international event. Stateside, an antiwar statement (around, perhaps, playing their *phenomenal* 'Travelin Soldier') would have gotten blowback but also support on the grounds that 'free country, man' is still a guiding principle. But their remarks were overwhelming political and their venue was seen as cowardly and traitorous.
People who sent them death threats were wrong, which should not have to be said but, ya know, this freaking era.
Francis Fukuyama got disinvited from Neo-con gatherings after coming out against the Iraq War.
It didn't help that back then even the Democrats were all (bar IIRC a single vote) in favour of the whole War on Terror
It's hardly an original observation to me to note that the only thing more dangerous than polarization is bipartisan consensus.
I'd say that the main assymetry these days is that the left has narratives at all, which aren't obviously about the other side, and the right doesn't, which consigns it to being barren, reactive and resentful. My pet theory is that this has to do with the different trajectories of the prominent extreme leftist and rightist ideologies of the last centruy, that is, fascism and communism. Whereas fascism's reputation got so thoroughly destroyed that the intellectual right doesn't dare coming anywhere near it, the left has managed to rehabilitate much of the communist agenda and repackage it as progressivism.
Presumably that comes after eating the rich.
As recently as a year ago, the Democratic Socialists of America, which has some high-profile members in congress, had eliminating third-party ownership of firms on their platform. They wanted companies to be 100% employee owned or government owned, or some combination of the two. When I look on their website today, I can't find that exact language. They still want to "end capitalism" but are less explicit about what that means.
For the first, how about requiring government approval before you drill for oil or build a pipeline on private property? For the second, how about government subsidies for one form of energy generation but not another? Both of these fall well short of the Communist ideal, but they are in the same direction, and since the *arguments* for them are familiar collectivist arguments, with which Lenin would be pretty comfortable (just not going far enough), people are not unreasonably suspicious.
It might be different if the progressives had this long history of having a firm stopping point, where you might hear "no, no, this is going too far, we can't freaking legally *require* everyone to buy health insurance of a certain type we specify, because that would be interfering deeply within the rights of the average joe to do whatever the hell he wants with his earnings...sorry, the public benefit will have to get along without this one."
I mean, show me *any* collectivist proposal that was ever rejected by the American left as going too far, as interfering with individual liberty too much. They are certainily routinely rejected as "we can't get the God-damned other side to vote with us on this one," and sometimes because they would cost too much, but I've yet to hear of one defeated on the grounds of some hypothetical devotion to individual liberty and rights, nevermind the good of the many.
I think this diagnosis is spot on—thanks for the response!
> Meanwhile, your acquaintances from college who called themselves fiscally conservative (aka, anti-populist, I guess?) but socially liberal are now Barstool conservatives who love Joe Rogan and political incorrectness and are anti-elite, very self-consciously.
Where is the weird in that? How many of those folk were pro-political correctness in the nineties and naughties? I certainly wasn't.
Over time I have indeed become more abti-elitist, but that's because the elite culture has changed more than I did.
I think the thing I hate most about this debate is the inbuilt expectation that there is such a thing as a "correct" policy, and both parties should pursue it.
In this case that assumption cashes out in this way: if party X has changed its political positions over the years, then we can be certain that at least some of the time, party X is not correct. Therefore we can't trust party X. Conversely, if a party has never changed its position, then even if we don't know they're right, they're at least consistent.
But what if politics is a conversation, in which people discuss and explore different ideas based on the current situation, without any requirement of eternal correctness, then views changing over time wouldn't be a bad thing.
I mean, this argument can go either way, but I just hate the way it often smuggles in a notion of eternal correctness without acknowledging it. I think this notion twists the debate.
Like the case of the dog that didn't bark in the night, the analysis does not mention the nomination of Donald Trump two times compared to Clinton and Biden.
Trump was an extremely toxic candidate in terms of character and morality compared to either Clinton or Biden, regardless of ideology or policies.
I think who a party nominates for president is telling.
I'm hoping that both parties nominate people of better character and morality in 2024 than someone like Donald Trump.
He tried - is still trying - to overturn an election. You don’t think that’s extreme?
I don’t see any reason to believe that extreme measures must also be unpopular.
Not really, no.
We use the word “extreme” and “radical” to mean multiple, only usually overlapping, things.
The New Deal was extreme, radical, and popular. So, too, the dissolution of the German monarchy. Etc.
We judge this concept just as much by what came before as what people agree with now. This is most easily accessible outside politics where there are radical engineering solutions or extreme sentences fro criminals and so on.
The other narrative: Biden tried to rig an election, and succeeded. Attempts to investigate fraud in the 2020 election have been stymied by corrupt forces at every turn.
Are you serious? This isn’t a Philip K Dick novel.
Hey, be polite. For Melvin, maybe it is a Philip K Dick novel. \s
That's the narrative... But we're supposed to be rationalists and we have access to the mark Meadows text messages. Like we know the "massive corruption + stolen election" was always going to brought up if the results were favorable to Trump.
Voter Participation in 2020 and the US population in 2020 were higher than in 2016.
Both the Republican and Democrat got more votes than in 2016. Either Trump 2020 or Biden 2020 would defeat Trump 2016 or Hillary 2016. That's not particularly peculiar.
Bellwether counties are bellwether counties until they aren't. Bill Clinton won Arkansas, Republicans used to be competitive in California.
The bellwether argument isn't a good one. It's basically unfalsifiable. If Biden does better in swing/"bellwether" places then it's "isn't it so convenient that he happened to do better in the exact places where it matters the most?" If he does worse, then it's "isn't it so convenient that he won despite losing the places that are usually predictive?"
More generally, this sort of "Biden won with an unlikely set of circumstances" type logic can even more obviously be used against trump in 2016. You're telling me that trump lost the popular vote in 2016 by more than anyone ever has, while winning the election, because he just so happened to overperform his national showing in the exact amount to win 3 swing states by less than 1% each (and Florida by less than 1.5% to boot)? And in opposition to what the polls said? But trump supporters are fine with all that.
As for winning more votes then losing, I wonder what work "substantially" is doing there, but you can always find a "first" like this. Obama was the first (since the Civil War at least) to do the opposite - get fewer votes than the original election and still win. Bush was (I think?) the first to have his *challenger* do this - get more votes than the previous challenger and still *lose*. I bet you could find a thing like this for Clinton, Reagan, Nixon...
As a rationalist you should also acknowledge that when your voting policy consists of:
1. Mail ballots in envelopes out to a bunch of households.
2. Have drop-boxes setup all around the city in random parts of town where people can just dump completed ballots into.
3. Treat every ballot deposited in those boxes as real and accurate and count it.
4. Get massive dumps of ballots from random people that you have no way to verify and count those slowly for days on end while keeping out poll-watchers.
You'll know that fraud is an inevitability.
Don't know if I agree with all of these (e.g. I think the drop boxes are generally for mail-in ballots, not just a loose ballot with no identifying info on it), but focusing on the last part - "fraud is an inevitability". If you mean fraud in the sense of "someone somewhere votes when/where they shouldn't" then I agree, but I think that's true in basically every election, in a country of 330 million people. If you mean fraud in the sense of "massive coordinated effort that changes the outcome" then I don't agree.
But if something like that massive effort existed then it seems to me that the more likely culprit is a failed attempt on the trump side. They're the ones who weirdly outperformed the polls, even after the pollsters adjusted their models to make up for the last time they weirdly outperformed the polls. They're the ones who had the biggest gains in specific concentrated areas, namely many big cities, where voter fraud is allegedly rampant. They're the ones who outperformed in swing states relative to the whole country. They're the ones who otherwise demonstrated a willingness to bend the rules around elections.
As a rationalist you should acknowledge that when your policy consists of:
1. Holding an election on a national scale
You'll know that fraud is an inevitability.
How *much* fraud, is a much more interesting question. But the claim that the fraud is simultaneously large enough to swing elections, but so perfectly hidden as to be immeasurably small, is going to require a bit more support than "It's possible for someone to conduct fraud under this system".
Back in the day when I first found out about LessWrong, I really enjoyed how Eliezer talked about "The Fallacy of Gray". It's sad that now, many rationalists hide all kinds of obviously incorrect nonsense behind this exact fallacy.
Yup.
You know, if that's the case, he's really incredibly and stupendously incompetent.
I mean, there he is Commander in Chief, the Big Kahuna. At any point in the four long years he was in office, he can order the 101st Airbone out to "provide security" for vote counting, say, or while Congress considers his special "votes for candidates with names that start with T should count double" bill.
More, he has the entire Federal government apparatus at his fingertips. Spies, military force, millions of workers, trillions of dollars, from which no doubt a billion here or there could've been diverted without anyone noticing, the power to appoint whomever the hell he wants to any key position...and in his last year he's in the middle of a pandemic, when voters have *already* shown themselves willing to put up with pretty drastic executive action for the sake of public safety. You'd have to be a complete nimrod to be unable to extend your term in office, Putin style, with all that power, wealth, and opportunity at your command.
If with all this massive power Trump couldn't do as well as a generic ambitious platoon leader in a scruffy Central American state, and has to fall back on sending goofballs with painted faces and antler hats to roam around the Capitol and hoot randomly, without any clear plan or bakcup, or hire washed-up lawyers to babble about the kraken on national TV, and just freaking meekly accept when random state-level courts rule against him -- I mean, what a maroon, it's like Moe, Curly, and Shemp took turns at playing President.
Is that what you really think happened? He genuine wanted to, genuinely tried, but was just unbelievably incompetent about it?
Nonsense. I *am* judging the leader on his actual observable record. I'm *not* the one hypothesizing about what might have happened, if things had gone differently, or what people might have intended without saying so.
I am saying any coup, by definition, successful or no, exhibits signs of an effort to violently overthrow the government. Note the necessary adverb "violently" -- a *nonviolent* overthrow of the government is called "an election".
If you were the ADA trying to persuade a jury that Joe tried to rob a bank, because he demanded that a teller give him some money, asserting he had said money in his account, and the defense observes that (1) Joe did not make any kind of plan to rob the bank, had never cased the place and didn't have a getaway car idling outside when he went in, that (2) Joe had a gun in his pocket but did not take it out or threaten the teller with it, that (3) Joe never actually said "give me the money or else," and that (4) Joe left the bank after the teller told him to piss off, merely shouting epithets on his way out and having had to be told by the security guard to move the fuck along -- then you are not going to get a conviction.
People will very reasonably think you have wildly overcharged, that Joe might be guilty of disorderly conduct and being an asshole, but the clear intent to *rob a bank* -- defined as use force to take money that wasn't his -- is not there.
Trump was certainly an asshole and behaved badly. But planning and trying to execute a coup? A freaking violent overthrow of the US government? You have to be in the grips of some deep ideological trance to buy that one.
I mean, "Trump is bad at getting the government to do what he wants" is not exactly a take from Mars.
Sure, but you'd at least expect some evidence of an *attempt* if that was his serious intention and he wasn't a complete doofus. Where is the damning testimony from military commanders who refused his orders to detain Nancy Pelosi in a secret location? Where are the documents outlining the conspiracy, naming who would lead the squad that broke into the NPR newsroom and forced Cokey Roberts at gunpoint to announce that thankfully Dear Leader would not need to stand for re-election? Where are the legions of operatives paid to infiltrate local boards of election in the 2017-2019 timeframe to try to make sure the votes in 2020 got counted the right way? Surely they can't *all* be loyal enough to take their secrets to the grave.
>You know, if that's the case, he's really incredibly and stupendously incompetent.
The first six words are unnecessary.
Your argument basically amounts to "the only way the 'attempt to overturn an election' narrative makes sense is if we assume that Donald Trump or someone similar was President in 2020, but the thought of Donald Trump being President is completely insane, therefore there was no attempt to overturn an election". And I would have agreed with that argument before 2016, but here we are.
"You know, if that's the case, he's really incredibly and stupendously incompetent." I mean, um, yes?
Well, but that's entirely inconsistent with his ability to be elected in the first place. And for that matter, his not being insanely incompetent at being President. He got a lot of judges confirmed, he didn't nuke China, he didn't sign a pact with Russia to invade Ukraine, he was able to get his tax cut passed, et cetera. You or I may or may not have liked his Administration, but it did not go as it would have if someone with an IQ of 75 had the job -- and that's what would be required for someone to genuinely have a desire to ignore the Constitution and stay in office, and yet do nothing whatsoever to accomplish that with the vast power he wielded *as* President.
But, like, Biden also does not seem to be especiaIly competent and yet he was elected.
I thought you guys (I an not an American) have something like "separation of powers" in the Constitution that is supposed to guard against president declaring himself a dictator? If it is so inefective that just about anyone could disable it, in what sense you are more free country than, say, Russia?
Honestly, I am being sarcastic, because you seem totally deranged. Of course Trump tried to overturn an election, whole world watched it with amazement; here is a long wikipedia page about it, with copious citations. But perhaps you think that it is a disinfo operation by Soros or something. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_United_States_presidential_election
You don’t think impeaching a president over fabricated and obviously ludicrous campaign oppo is extreme? You don’t think spending the entire 2016-2020 period insisting the election was stolen by Russia is extreme?
No, it's not. Many periods in American history have had such periods of political vitriol and peaceful (if angry) struggle. "Extreme" is calling out the Army to arrest your opponents and having them shot extrajudicially. "Extreme" is dissolving the legislature. "Extreme" is Vladimir Putin or Ugo Chavez, Fidel Castro or Augusto Pinochet.
If we mis-use words like "extreme" when conditions are far short of "extreme," the only result, deeply regrettable, is that we desensitize people to those words. Your opponents think, welp I'm going to be called "extreme" no matter *what* I do -- so why bother trying to be restrained? Why bother trying to stay within *any* norms?
Hysterical language can beget the very extremity it supposedly opposed. It should be shunned.
His nomination happened before that
There has to be a point where that logic breaks down. "Anyone who gets elected can't be extreme" doesn't hold up.
It's also possible - likely even - that plenty of the people who voted for him (especially more sophisticated Republicans) thought he was a complete idiot but trusted that he would lower taxes and that they could tolerate the rest of the nonsense.
Which, if your overriding political issue is taxes, even worked out.
I don't think he was extreme. But extreme cannot be measured by the percent of the vote you get. Politicians in general but Trump especially sell a complete line of BS about what their priorities are to get votes. Nobody voted for a coup. If there was a coup, that would be extreme. Thus being voted for does not mitigate extremism.
And yet, somehow half the country thought Clinton and Biden were "extremely toxic candidates in terms of character and morality compared to Trump", so perhaps your analysis is missing something about reality beyond "My outgroup is evil!"
How do you derive that? I know many who preferred Trump, yet didn't think Clinton/Biden were toxic.
It's a bit extreme language, because I was mirroring the post I was responding to, but for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/08/31/a-record-number-of-americans-now-dislike-hillary-clinton/ showed 56% unfavorables for Clinton, compared to 63% unfavorable for Trump. Not exactly a major difference. Biden's favorable/unfavorable poll numbers are currently worse than Trump's were (https://ballotpedia.org/Ballotpedia%27s_Polling_Index:_Comparison_of_opinion_polling_during_the_Trump_and_Biden_administrations).
The fact is, there isn't that much of a difference between Trump/Clinton/Biden in how favorably huge segments of the American public feel about them. Pretending Trump was some huge outlier in unpopularity reveals more about someone's bubble than about reality.
Was Trump more of a deliberate clown, and did he have a different personality/style than the more subdued Clinton or Biden? Absolutely, but that says nothing about "character and morality". Clinton's list of character and morals related scandals (at least as far as the right is concerned) go on for decades and if you're reading the right-leaning press, pointing out Biden's lies, which the WH then has to walk back, is practically a daily occurrence.
There's nobody in that list for whom large segments of the population don't consider them severely dishonest.
I'll just say that Biden's unfavorables have to do with inflation and economic issues mostly relating to the COVID pandemic's effects on international trade than any toxicity, so that's a misleading cite, there. For that matter, I don't think you can make the leap from unfavorability to toxicity. Trump's toxicity and his popularity or lack there of were only weak correlated, at best-indeed, at times his toxicity increased his popularity, IMHO.
Do you think that the people who actually have unfavorable views about Biden would agree that their views are because of the COVID pandemic's effects on international trade, rather than any toxicity on Biden's part? (Definition: the quality of being very harmful or unpleasant in a pervasive or insidious way.)
I think I was pretty clear in what I wrote. I’m talking about causes, not the ability of a hypothetical voter to introspect.
I am not saying Trump was an outlier in popularity. Or that his policies were extreme.
I am saying that he was more thoroughly despicable a person in term of his character than any person nominated for president in modern history.
Many may have voted for him because they liked his immorality or many may have voted for him despite it.
But in terms of character, he was and is a disgrace. I was embarrassed he was our president.
Wow, you really think Trump was uniquely immoral? You've heard of Bill Clinton, correct? Do I really need to detail all his moral failings, including the multiple rape/sexual assault and corruption allegations? His Presidency wasn't even that long ago, but I don't recall Trump having sex with a 24-year-old intern in the Oval Office, for example.
Good point about Clinton.
Clinton is in second place.
They both should have been thrown out of office.
Yes Trump set a new standard of corruption. He tried to to bully state officials into overturning an election.
Quit with the false equivalencies. Indeed, as if an affair with an intern is the same as an attempted coup.
Trump wasn’t all that sleazier than Clinton or even “bad touch Biden” - he’s just (much) less good, sometimes intentionally so, at being sleazy in the ways that politics have come to accept. He’s less accustomed to the insider etiquette of political sleaze, and being an uncouth up outsider, he has fewer friends to cover for him when he slips.
What, Crooked Hillary? Sure, Trump is a bit of a sleazebag at times, but Clinton was corruption personified.
Well, you certainly can come up with a meme once you've heard one from Trump. What do you think were Hillary's top three acts of corruption?
(1) The abandonment of the ambassador at Benghazi followed by the lies and evasion of responsibility, (2) covering for her husband's sexual assaults, particularly as a candidate but also later -- you don't think she knew about Juanita Broaddrick? Clinton's flights on Epstein's "Lolita Express?" -- and perhaps (3) Whitewater, not so much because it was big, but because had it not been covered up by the good ol' boy network in Arkansas it might have forestalled her husbands higher ambitions, so it was sort of key.
I dispute that. Her knowingly contributing fake data into the Steele Dossier to enable wiretapping of a Presidential candidate definately makes the top 3.
This is probably not in the top 3, but stories like this:
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10882101/Family-late-Clinton-advisor-Mark-Middleton-block-release-files-relating-suicide.html
seem to happen to ex-Clinton aides with potentially damaging information more often than you would expect it to if only chance was involved.
Well, I understand your point, but it's really, really routine for families of suicides to seek to block release of the records about the suicide.
I don't think that Trump was extraordinarily toxic; I mean, yes, his personality was pretty terrible, but he wasn't a demon in the flesh. However, IMO his unexpected electoral victory broke the Democratic party. If he merely won in what people thought would be a close race, I think the Democrats could've handled it. If he pulled off a surprise victory while acting like a run-of-the-mill establishment Republican, they could've handled it. But the combination of Trump being Trump, and him coming out of left field, completely shattered their confidence and forced them to re-evaluate everything about themselves. As the result, the Democratic party retooled all of its systems and put them on the war footing. Their only mission now is to prevent the next Trump; nothing else matters, and anyone who says otherwise is the enemy.
Cancel culture has been going for quite some time, man. Donglegate was back in 2013. Blame Twitter, not Trump.
The bigger post 2016 switch was substantial portions of the media (CNN in particular?) becoming way less shy about being openly partisan. Not cancel culture per se, but publicly declaring your political opponents to be despicable liars got more mainstream.
Sorry, but no. Canceling and post modern CRT pre date Obama.
You can blame Bush if you like - it would be incorrect, but it would fit the cause effect timeline better.
If you ignore their words and look at their actions, Clinton is far more toxic in terms of character and morality than Trump.
First off, Trump was the incumbent president the second time he was elected. Incumbents basically always win their nomination, and very often win their reelection. I think it’s fair to critique the Republicans for nominating him the first time, but a bit oblivious of political reality to critique them for the second time.
Biden only ever ran once, so he can’t be nominated.
And regardless of how your felt about Hillary and Biden, she wasn’t a strong candidate and imo it was clearly the right move for Dems to go to Biden rather than running her a second time.
Fair and good point about Trump being re-nominated.
I do have one pretty major criticism here - where you look at 'which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans' values, you're just looking at opinion polls on party popularity / popular descriptors used for the parties. This tells you something, obviously, but voters may be essentially expressing: 'I'll still vote for party x' or 'I think party x is still less crazy than party y'. It doesn't mean that parties haven't moved away from voters' core values!
A much better test would be to look (over time) at opinion polls on what policies voters actually support, and see to what degree parties actually offer up these policies or a crazier version. However this might be a whole post in itself!
One issue here is that as I understand it polling on issues is generally pretty unreliable. It's easy to tilt it one way or another based on how you phrase the question, and it's harder to verify the results compared to election polling where you can see if the polls correctly predicted the votes.
I am a bit surprised you say "I think the Wright/Musk meme is clearly about the changing-policy-positions-since-some-starting-time question". I would argue for Musk and similar people, it's much more about the overall ideology represented by these groups (in other words, culture war stuff) rather than any specific policy. Moreover, I think the meme reflects the more extreme of the parties (woke "progressive" is clearly a younger and more left kind of democrat).
I mean, you can have policy on culture-war topics.
sure, but the calculations in this post don't focus on culture-war topic policy. And it's not clear that culture-war policy actually reflects the full scope and intensity of culture-war.
It’s very obviously about what they see and who ats them on Twitter. I don’t have any illusions that Musk, at least, isn’t extremely focused on Twitter politically.
Yep, totally agree.
Yeah, if I had to guess what Musk was thinking about when he posted that, it was probably trans people. Some policy involved (i.e. states banning a handful of trans girls from playing sports), but mostly it's a culture war and signaling issue right now.
Trans issues are interesting to me because I’m pretty sure the conservative position is driven by Politics II: The Search For Content. When I was a kid in a very conservative state, they weren’t really controversial. They were seen as unfortunate people with a medical condition or freaks but fundamentally no threat (or place) in broader culture qua trans-ness.
They have now become controversial in a way that’s very odd and not in the Reuters Odd way.
The conservative position is driven by a few things:
1) "Stop telling me what I'm allowed to say" reaction to mandated pronouns
2) Fear of contagion in reaction to awareness campaigns
3) Fear of permanent damage (in particular sterilisation) from overzealous transitioning of kids who in many cases actually will grow out of it.
All the things being reacted to do seem to actually be new.
I do think that shift in the Republican curve might be why the perception Democrats have is the way it is. That departure from previous mild leftward trends would feel like a major pivot to the right even if it was in some ways just a return to past tendencies. I can also point you to policies that current Republicans would consider much, much too liberal which Nixon and Reagan championed, like the EPA. So it's not remotely straightforward.
Wikipedia tells me that plurality/FPTP voting (which most of the US uses) is not a Condorcet method, so the Median Voter Theorem won't necessarily hold, will it?
Correct. This is why Approval Voting is the only sane alternative, and why TPTB have fought it and even rarely added the toxic Ranked Choice nonsense into use to poison the well.
Ranked Choice seems fine (assuming it's what I think it is, Single Transferable Vote)? I was under the impression it's one of the many methods that's "as good as possible", not strictly worse than the other good alternatives.
It's definitely, without a doubt, better than FPTP, because that's a very low bar.
STV has two big issues: its opacity, and the sheer size of ballot papers that frequently results (my Senate paper for the Aus federal election a few weeks ago had 79 candidates - 13 ungrouped independents, 8 grouped independents, and varying numbers of candidates from 22 parties). It has a third smaller issue, which is that the tactical-voting situations in STV are much more likely than those in its sister system IRV - I call this smaller mostly because of the opacity preventing people from noticing it.
Not convinced it's worse than Approval, though. IRV I would say is better as long as you're fine with single-winner; Approval has *terrible* tactical voting problems, though not quite as bad as plurality (lol).
Approval Voting is simple: vote for all of the candidates you would be ok with. Period. It leads to maximum group satisfaction.
All of the alternatives like IRV and that includes any "ranking" system, end up super complex, elections become confusing messes, ballots become too complex to fill out with intent, and worse to count. He who counts the votes...
The resistance to using Approval is not about the tactics, it's about those people who would lose power, who make the rules and don't want them to change.
>Approval Voting is simple: vote for all of the candidates you would be ok with. Period. It leads to maximum group satisfaction.
This is not a Nash equilibrium, so any theoretical results relying on it are unrealistic.
Maximising your voting power in Approval requires you to put your approval cutoff between the candidates most likely to win.
I'm also Australian, and while the various truly unaffiliated independents are too hard to keep track of, the various microparties tend to be pretty clear on what they stand for even if one isn't super politically engaged.
eg. I think the Legalise Cannibis party has a solid chance of winning a seat.
That's not really what I'm getting at. The issue is that when your ballot paper is that physically large and has that many boxes, a substantial percentage of people will refuse to vote fully or switch to donkey vote after some threshold. A decent chunk of votes get exhausted IIRC.
Plurality isn't the problem here IMO because most races tend to have only two realistic candidates. I would point instead at factors like primaries and district boundaries as the main culprits in incentivizing polarization/radicalization among elected officials.
Nonsense. You are looking at the results and saying it's the natural order, instead of an artifact of the system in use.
Go research it, look at the real world examples and realize that the only reason we don't use Approval Voting (which is so small a change that all voting machines would support it now, and people intuitively understand it) is because it would entirely ruin the Current Political Monopoly of Power.
You're preaching to the choir. I think plurality is bad, approval is good, and ranked choice is fine. I'm just saying that in this narrow instance, plurality is far from the biggest problem.
Well, you're kind of preaching to the choir. I tend to blame political inertia rather than a Grand Conspiracy. But you get the point.
It's not paranoid to call it a conspiracy if you've attempted to changed the method and seen how both sides refuse. I've been in the sausage factory, and trust me, inertia isn't what fills the skins.
The thing about plurality is that because of its massive, obvious clone dependence, it enforces a two-party system in practice - and between those two candidates it does, in fact, elect whoever is preferred by a majority.
So you can use a weak version of the MVT to say that *of the two parties* whoever is closest to MV will win.
Ah, true. I guess most voting methods are pretty similar with two cadidates. But I guess the choice of plurality voting itself has negative effects on how well-represented people are in general, even if the median is slightly more represented by one party than the other.
Although - since voting is optional, wouldn't it also be possible that the most radical candidate would inspire the most people to vote?
I mean, yes, it does break down if there are substantial effects from radical voters refusing to vote for moderate-but-preferred candidates (it doesn't break down substantially from people in the middle abstaining, as that is presumably symmetric around the indifference point).
And yes, I agree that plurality prevents a centre party from exploiting a gap between its inevitable two parties - that's why I said "a weak version of the MVT" - and that it allows relatively-easy policy capture. I'm not at all defending plurality outright, just Scott's use of a weak MVT on a plurality system.
But there has to be some such substantial effect, right? Otherwise you'd expect one of the parties to move much closer to the median voter and win all the time. And then the other one would move closer, and so on until their policies are the same. In the current system, I think this still holds (though they might not converge on the median voter, but on some other rank according to the structural advantage). But this is clearly not what we see - their policies are different. Something is pushing the parties' policies away from the median. This has interested me for a while, and I'm not sure what this driving force is. I'm curious if you ideas.
My ideas are:
1) Primaries. There, each candidate has to be close to the median voter of their party's primaries, not to the overall median voter, to win. It's awkward for them to change their positions completely before the general elections ("flip flop"), and so there is a gap in policies.
2) Radical voters not voting for a moderate-but-preferred candidate. If at some point when the two main candidates are too far from your radical position, you vote for neither (instead of the lesser evil, you vote for a third candidate or abstain entirely), then it stops being always optimal for the candidates to move closer to the median voter, and instead they also have to pander to the radicals to get their votes. This means it could be a better rational strategy for radicals too, if they want to affect candidates' policy and not just leave all the influence to the median voter. This is the same if we replace "vote for" with "donate to", where it might be more common.
3) Echo chamber. Party elites, politicians, donors hang out with one another in an echo chamber, and think their preferred policies are everyone's favorites, and so adopt and support them, not noticing that it takes away votes. This is Matt Yglesias's constant point about Democrats.
4) Politics is not a 1-dimensional spectrum. If there are multiple dimensions, and voters vote for the "nearest" candidate to their positions, then there is no longer a median. Though actually I think it's still optimal for the candidates to converge to the same policies.
What do you think?
I think it's mostly #1 and #3.
WRT #2 there are certainly voters that abstain or go third-party, but my guess is that it's mostly either from actual "I don't know who the lesser evil is" (i.e. being near the indifference point - a moderate) or from "mutual personal scumminess" and "sick of politics" things that don't match up well to ideology.
To add: Remember that gerrymandering creates a lot of seats safe against the general election, thus overemphasising #1.
Yeah I agree, it's fair to say the MVT probably holds in the US for the two major parties. There is still a pretty big caveat though, which is that either side may, on average, have moved any given amount towards the edges without changing the median voter. I think Scott kind of addressed this in the part about how rhetoric may have become more extreme.
This question has never really been of great interest to me. Any attempt to answer it is going to need a heap of dubious definitional and methodological assumption. For example, the first interpretation: Saying "oh we've changed the least since 1900" is just kind of silly to my mind as a benchmark. Like, what if you were to set it to 1000 AD? Clearly in the ordinary meaning of extremism positions become extreme over time. Still, good on you for trying tackle these questions.
To my mind the only variant of this question which makes any sense is your least favorite, the second one:
"Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?"
But I don't share some of the assumptions you've used in tackling it. People don't fully understand the political views of politicians. People barely even partially understand the political views of politicians. They just have vague images and impressions. This isn't their fault, politicians deliberately manipulate them. You can forget about the median voter theorem.
The right way to answer the second question would be to:
1. Come up with a battery of policy questions.
2. Establish the be position of the Republicans and Democrats in Congress on those questions.
3. Establish the position of the public on those questions.
4. Work out which groups [Republican politicians, Democratic politicians, voters] are closest.
There's an optional intermediate step where you work out how much voters and politicians care about the different questions, so you don't just weight all policy areas as equal by default, but that sounds fiddly. Best to skip it.
I suggest as a test, compiling:
A) One question on Dovishness v Hawkishness
B) One question on crime
C) One question of welfare
D) One question on unions
E) One question on LGBTQ issues
F) One question on immigration
G) One question on climate change
H) One question on the minimum wage
Best to use specific questions- actual binary policy choices- that nonetheless are broadly reflective of a whole area.
This will tell us, at least roughly, who is actually closer to the voters.
>But I don't share some of the assumptions you've used in tackling it. People don't fully understand the political views of politicians. People barely even partially understand the political views of politicians. They just have vague images and impressions. This isn't their fault, politicians deliberately manipulate them. You can forget about the median voter theorem.
Another, I think more accurate way of phrasing this is that (at least the vast majority of) politicians do not actually HAVE political views. Not really. They adopt the policy positions and messaging that they think will allow them to retain power.
Over time both parties have moved left but the Democrats have moved further left. Obviously the median voter in any prior time period would be considered right wing today. In addition, the median person at any time in human history would be considered right wing today, as would the median person in most countries in the world today.
What are the facts upon which you make the claim in your first sentence.
Well, both parties believe that we should not have race-based slavery, but the Democrats also think we should maybe do affirmative action or reparations too.
Do you have any evidence that a majority of the Republican party acts in a way that indicates they are opposed to race based slavery?
Key point is to look at thier actions, not thier PC poll results.
Half of the Republicans (so, about 25% of adults) act as badly towards black people as the other 75% lets them. Look at any reaction to news events involving a black person on right wing media/online. Look at disparate impact in hiring/promotion (remember, most people are not acting with animus, but a few are, and that shows up in the statistics). Look at the disparate impact in sentencing between R and D judges. Look at the treatment of agricultural labor. Look at the support given to businesses that would rather close than bargain with a union. Look at the inherent assumptions in the term "Job Creator."
These are all examples where a large number of people are being as close as they can get to chattel slavery without being jailed. The evidence is circumstantial, but it all points to ~1/4 of USA adults preferring race based slavery to the current status quo.
I really don't think this is remotely useful. If you're trolling, fine; if you're not, you need to meet (maybe befriend?) some real-life people from outside of your tribe.
Via activating my brain, I know that prison labor and exploited migrant labor, while both disgusting, are not actually race-based slavery. Also Trump passed the First Step Act and one consequence of stronger border control is reducing the amount of exploited migrant laborers.
Why are you characterizing being opposed to race-based slavery as a "left" position if both sides hold that position?
Because it's to the left of the position held in much of the United States in 1860.
That doesn't answer the question. On what grounds do you characterize it as "left"? In your original comment, you say that both parties are against some form of race-based discrimination, but the Democrats want to keep other forms of it. So I'd characterize any move away from racial politics as a rightward shift.
Because the term "left" has a meaning that is not determined by "whatever the Democrats/Republicans happen to be doing at that moment." For the most obvious counterexample, the Republicans and Democrats are generally agreed to have switched left/right at some point, so the Democrats are now the left-wing party and the Republicans are now the right-wing party.
The simple answer as to why race-based slavery is "right wing" is that the meaning of words is decided on collectively, and the sorts of people who say that it's a "left-wing" position are the same as the sort who proclaim that Lenin was actually a right-winger, i.e. a small minority who are generally motivated by a desire to exclude anything bad from their entire half of politics.
If you want a more sophisticated answer, you can look at any of the definitions that broadly align with the normal use of left/right. In moral foundations theory, which is probably best, the primarily/largely conservative half of the moral spectrum are authority, sanctity/purity, and loyalty, which are much easier to square with race-based slavery than care, fairness, or liberty (held by both sides, but the left cares about them almost exclusively, whereas the right tends to balance them).
(Also, this is why "race-based discrimination" doesn't really quite work as an explanation of right/left. If the race-based discrimination is in-group, then it's right wing, but most Democrats, like most Americans, are white (and a bunch of them are Asians, who also don't benefit from affirmative action), so it is not derived from a sense of loyalty but from a sense of fairness. A policy intended to assist specifically white people would, on the other hand, be motivated by in-group loyalty, at least for all plausible near-future Americas.)
Anecdote I know but a telling one: Obama's position on the Border and Gay Marriage from a decade ago would be considered far-right now. But everyone studies their shoes when he talks about the border now cos he's your dad's favourite brother and your mother will slap you in the car if you say anything.
I see no equivalent on the right.
Reagan’s position on immigration is easily an equivalent.
Amnesty is return for crackdown on illegal immigration is a mainstream R position and consistent with Reagan.
It's overwhelmingly clear that Republicans have moved right compared to the political center, and Democrats left to it (i.e., polarization).
From this it follows mathematically that Democrats have moved a further distance to the left than Republicans have.
if it's overwhelmingly clear then you should be able to cite examples. other than gun control, can you name any?
I would say it's perfectly clear that Reagan, let alone Eisenhower, wouldn't have a place in today's Republican party - they would be considered unacceptably liberal.
But if you want examples:
* The Republican party knowingly and deliberately pushes the lie that the 2016 election was stolen.
* The Republican party, once actually a driving force in conservationism, is now actively hostile to environmental policies, and wallows in climate conspiracy theories.
* The president gave a shout-out to actual fascists; few in his part objected.
* Race issues. It's not that they haven't improved there, but they're certainly further to the right of the political middle than they were 75 years ago.
* Abortion. Even Reagan did his best not to talk about it. Now it's perhaps *the* lithmus test for a Republican candidate.
* Health insurance. Since we're talking about the party position compared to the typical voter's position, the Republican party is now *way* to the right of voters, opposing the very popular Affordable Care Act.
* Saying "other than gun control" doesn't actually remove gun control.
> Eisenhower
Eisenhower spent most of his life in a segregated armed forces and had no trouble with the idea. he presided over a federal government that had no OSHA, no EPA, no medicare, and vastly less generous social security and welfare programs, but did spend 50% of its money and fully 10% of GDP on the military. As a general he ordered america's enemies' cities carpet bombed, and actively embraced doing so with nuclear weapons as president. It was a country where being gay was illegal and that was more comfortable with segregation than women in most workplaces. In other words, he makes ron paul look like bernie sanders.
> The Republican party knowingly and deliberately pushes the lie that the 2016 election was stolen.
I love this typo. It makes my point better than I ever could.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trump-is-an-illegitimate-president/2019/09/26/29195d5a-e099-11e9-b199-f638bf2c340f_story.html
> is now actively hostile to environmental policies, and wallows in climate conspiracy theories.
So, for decades, environmental regulation has expanded and expanded, and you think republicans eventually saying "enough is enough" is moving to the right? again, eisenhower, your supposed liberal, literally didn't have an EPA and saw no reason to create one. So how on earth is this a move left?
> * The president gave a shout-out to actual fascists; few in his part objected.
No, he didn't.
> Race issues. It's not that they haven't improved there, but they're certainly further to the right of the political middle than they were 75 years ago.
Let's put aside you're making my point for me here. Please what units are that scale measured in. be precise.
>* Health insurance. Since we're talking about the party position compared to the typical voter's position,
No, we aren't. we're talking about movement over time. but nice of you to try to move goals posts. really sells the idea that you're acting in good faith.
You don't seem to understand the line of argument here. It isn't that the Republican party hasn't improved on these issue - it's that it has become further to the right, relatively, to the political center, which has moved _more_.
Obviously the Republican party is better on race now than in the 50's - this doesn't mean that it's *also* not further to the right of the voter average than it used to be.
I remember all three of Reagan's campaigns quite well, and I was old enough to vote in both of the successful campaigns, and the idea that he would be utterly out of place in today's Republican Party is complete nonsense.
It's a growing racial and ethnic divide. The Democrats and Republicans were far more similar demographically in 1980 than in 2020.
Specifically, from 1900-1960 both parties were white supremacist parties, and had lots of overlap in members ideologies.
Then the Democratic party decided that they could win more by being the party of Blacks and other minorities. And the Republicans responded by becoming more and more anti-minority as a primary plank (Nixon's Southern Strategy)
Then in 1994, Newt Gingrich threw away the committee system, and made the congressional Republican delegation subordinate to the Republican party. And at some point Mitch McConnel did the same for the Seneta (in both cases, there were a few maverick Republicans, but 90% of the caucas fell in line)
Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s conservative Ds and liberal Rs were driven out of office by either primaries, or losing to "the real thing" in the general election, or just attrition, leading to fully coherent parties in congress.
Civil rights legislation was able to pass in the face of opposition from southern Democrats because of Republicans voting with northern Democrats. I don't think it's right to say they had all been white supremacist, rather they just hadn't been willing to fight the southern Dems over it after Reconstruction.
I don't think so - parties are less polarized on race than ten years ago (Trump notably outperformed the last few republican candidates with racial minorities), but Trump is generally considered more polarizing than e.g. Bush.
I'm very impressed with the commentary here-very thoughtful and even-handed.
There are at least two things being conflated here, I think. There is a difference between what political elites and movers and shakers (generally, the electeds, the party apparatchiks, and rich people) think and want, and what the base thinks and wants.
I tend to focus more on the elites. In that realm, I'd be interested in what people see on the left, if anything, that is the equivalent of the January 6 insurrection which now seems to have the support or connivance of nearly all Republicans in Congress, or of Representatives MT Greene or Boebert, or the national effort to convince people that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen. Or the resistance to common-sense gun control measures like requirements for training, age over 21, etc.
I don't see it, but that may be my blinders. But if I'm not wearing blinders, then that looks like pretty clear evidence that the Republicans have become much more extreme than the Democrats.
The Democrats lied for 5 years about Russiagate and claimed Russia stole the election for Trump. They tried two impeachments, arrested Trump cabinet officials and are still arresting officials with no involvement in Jan 6. There were national riots fueled by BLM and Antifa.
The first sentence is not true about Democratic elites. The impeachments were not extreme IMHO, but were rather responses to documented bad acts by Trump. The national riots had nothing to do with Democratic elites.
They were certainly a break with precedent. They were the first time impeachment of a President was used as political censure rather than a serious attempt at removing a President. And if you think that isn't true: Both times there was insufficient support in the Senate to convict and Pelosi acknowledged as much in the post-vote interviews.
The impeachment of Clinton was political censure. And do you have a link to the Pelosi interviews?
No, the Republicans had a majority in the Senate and Clinton was only saved by defecting Republicans. Which makes it look more like previous impeachment trials than Trump's.
I'll see if I can dig up the links. I saw it on the news at the time. She was directly asked about the fact the Senate had basically already said it would acquit. And she said she did it because it made him impeached and he'd be impeached forever even if he was let off.
So yes, a huge break in precedent by the Democrats.
Republicans had a simple majority, not the supermajority required to convict. There was never a chance of conviction.
> The national riots had nothing to do with Democratic elites.
they literally raised money to bail out rioters.
Holy false equivalence, Batman!
Yes, Democrats claimed that Russia helped Trump win the election, but Hillary *conceded* immediately after losing in 2016. There was no concerted movement by *elected Democratic officials* to overturn Trump's election in 2016.
Also, while there were, lamentably, BLM and Antifa riots, how many Democratic politicians (as opposed to ultra-lefty activists and commenters on Twitter) supported them? A small handful of far left Congresspeople, yes, but Biden, Pelosi, Schumer, etc. never supported riots. In contrast, hardly anyone in the Republican party dared to stand up to Trump over January 6. Liz Cheney did, and her Republican colleagues in Congress stripped her of her leadership position for it.
You are correct. There is a lot of false equivalency in this thread.
True, but there's a lot of false inequivalence going on too.
A lot of "Sure, party A has done some bad things but they're not as bad as party B because party A has never done this one incredibly specific bad thing". Which is probably true if you want to choose your incredibly specific bad thing carefully enough, but for any reasonably broad reference class I think you'll find that there's a matching misdeed for any other misdeed you might care to name.
The current vice president called for donations to bail out rioters while buildings were still on fire. No one called out BLM rioters.
> but Hillary *conceded* immediately after losing in 2016. There was no concerted movement by *elected Democratic officials* to overturn Trump's election in 2016.
She conceded, then spent years saying the election was stolen, that trump was illegitimate, and got the FBI to gin up years of fake investigation of trump. that's far worse than anything trump did.
> Pelosi, Schumer, etc. never supported riots
the current VP literally raised money to bail them out of jail.
I mean, this is Australian rather than US, but here ( https://greens.org.au/sites/default/files/2022-04/Greens-2022-Policy-Platform--Anti-Racist--Genuinely-Multicultural-Australia.pdf ) there's a reasonably-mainstream leftist party (won several House of Representatives seats in our election a few weeks ago, and got 12% of the primary vote) that wants to ban our "far-right" parties from sitting in Parliament.
More generally, there's the issue that if you're already winning, you don't need or want to take big risks, and there's a broad sense in the West that the "left" is winning. So the excesses of SJ, at the elite level, look more like gradually-constricting totalitarianism than revolution.
1. That’s Australia. Shall we now talk about Hungary, where American far-righters actually go to support Irban’s regime? Not clear where any of that gets us in talking about the US.
2. The Aussie Greens are clearly not mainstream.
3. The linked doc doesn’t talk about banning parties, as far as I could tell.
4. What’s your basis for “the Left is winning? Where specifically is the Left winning, and on what issues?
I'm going to respond to this, and then to nothing else from you, because your comments don't add value. Here's why:
1. I was clearly saying that the Australian example is inapt on this point, not universally. That's abundantly clear; you distorted it. I'm not going to engage with people who distort my positions-life is too short.
2. That's one issue; I asked about issues. And how you can say the left is winning in the face of the anti-trans legislation in place like Texas is beyond me.
I'm done with you. Go have a good life somewhere else.
This doesn’t seem like good-faith engagement. You got fair answers.
It is entirely good-faith. I'm refusing to engage with answers which are non-responsive to points I make. Answers which do not respond to points I make are not "fair" under any reasonable definition I'm familiar with. What about them seems fair to you, and what about what I'm saying seems to be lacking good-faith?
#1: I am Australian and have more knowledge about Australia than I do about the US. I did note the attenuated relevance; I say "attenuated" because the Anglosphere is increasingly getting politically melted together by the Internet, and Oz/US weren't especially far apart to begin with.
#2: They win HoR seats, as I said - that is, there are multiple single-winner electorates in which they are the outright-preferred party (specifically, inner-city seats inside the "latte line"). As also noted, they got 12% of the vote nationwide. This party is not a little deal.
#3: The code of conduct section:
"The Greens will establish a code of conduct for Members of Parliament to ensure that they do not use their public office and parliament to condone far right extremism or normalise racism. It would bind Members to recognise the value and contribution of First Nations people, to recognise and value diversity and to reject discriminatory or exclusionary statements."
This requirement is not compatible with the policies of the "far-right" One Nation Party and United Australia Party, so if this were to happen their Senators would be ejected from Parliament for failing to follow the code of conduct. This is so obvious a consequence that one can reasonably assume it's the intention of the Greens' policy. I spoke with precision; the parties themselves wouldn't be banned, but they'd be banned from sitting in Parliament (and thus having any power).
Also, the "hate speech" section:
"Politicians and prominent public figures in Australia often engage in racist hate speech that has gone from dog whistling to fanning the flames of racial conflict. There is currently no criminal prohibition of hate speech at the federal level.
[...]
The Australian Greens will address this by adding hate speech to the Criminal Code Act and legislate that where an offence is motivated by hate or prejudice against a particular group, the courts consider that an aggravating circumstance when sentencing."
In context, this raises a spectre of "ONP and UAP can't campaign on their policies without risk of being arrested".
#4: Um. 20 years ago gay marriage was only barely thinkable, transsexualism was a footnote with a long series of psychiatric assessments required and near-zero public awareness, and the range of opinions you could voice without social penalty extended a long way further conservative than it does now. Those are the blatantly-obvious ones; feminism and racial issues are somewhat more of a mixed bag.
Do note that I put the term "left" in scare quotes, as this is mostly centred around the cultural axis rather than the economic one.
I don't think you can really use gun control here - Republicans have historically been pretty consistent on it, and it's not hard to find issues where Democrats (or both parties) are equally dumb (I have my own opinions on what counts as dumb, which I'm guessing aren't universal - but then, neither is gun control). And republicans are at least correct in thinking that if they concede some gun control measures democrats will push for more.
(The insurrection stuff is genuinely more worrying and less symmetric)
Republicans voted for gun control under Clinton! Not consistent.
My read of the illegal breakin parts of Jan 6 (because there was a more huge demonstration/protest going on) is that it was not significantly different from the riotous protests in 2016, and the elite response to Trump, from manufacturing the Russian interference through covering up evidence of Bidens corruption (Hunters laptop) constitute just as worrying a trend, esp with the backdrop of the BLM riots, the government overreach on pandemic controls, and the ongoing cheering on of Stacy Abrams.
I also likely completely disagree with you on the meme of 'commonsense gun control' and whether or not it's unreasonable to expect young men to not shoot children if they have the chance, but that's a different conversation.
Yes, we very much disagree, both on the facts and in opinion.
I'm confused about whether he's saying it is or isn't reasonable to expect young men not to shoot children. It's reasonable to expect it from most of them, and most of them don't! But a sample size of tens of millions will have some crazy people.
Yes. It is reasonable to expect that young men won't shoot children. And it is unreasonable to wholesale curtail the rights of the millions minus X on account of X crazy people.
Freddie DeBoer had a great article not to long back that discussed only the Democratic side of things - basically saying that the media apparatuses and public faces of the party are extremely out of touch with average America while the policy-makers themselves continue to be ineffectual and moderate, either because they can't or because they won't pass more bold legislation.
If I'm being my usual biased self, I think the extremism is a reaction to a system that has completely broken down. If one party manages to hold every branch of government, they can get through one spending or tax bill a year. That's a rare confluence and is still always going to be a disappointment.
From a game theory perspective, the best play for opposition is to block all legislation, so that they can blame all problems on majority inaction. And the best play for the majority is always going to be to *not* pass legislation as long as they can tell their base it's the other guy's fault it didn't pass. Voters naturally respond by saying "these bozos aren't doing anything, we need more extreme action." And then that polarization makes it even harder to pass stuff, and a vicious cycle ensues.
I'd say this is a both sides thing, but Republicans get off a little easier because their priorities are better aligned - nobody in their base objects to a tax cut. Democrats have to use their one bite at the apple to fix the whole world.
But they don't block all legislation. Congress passes lots of bills. Hundreds of billions in bipartisan spending. It's just that they prevent anything vaguely controversial from getting through.
I'd argue that the bar for "vaguely controversial" has become so high that Congress is essentially non-functional. In 2021 there were 130 laws passed, most of which were laws making minor adjustments to existing laws, dedicating monuments, and otherwise doing things that neither party's base would consider to be pursuing solutions to the country's problems. And 2021 was a fairly good year for bipartisanship, since we did have a couple bipartisan spending bills (the infrastructure bill and covid relief extension), and both did eventually pass.
It wouldn't surprise me to learn that hundreds of billions in bipartisan spending get passed yearly, but mostly because that strikes me as a number that only sounds large because of denominator blindness. No large scale social programs are getting created (or, if that's not your thing, no large scale social programs are getting repealed). We may fry some small fish here and there still, but mostly we're in stasis. That could be that most people are okay with the status quo or it could be dysfunction. I haven't done a deep dive on the data, but it doesn't seem to me like most people are okay with the status quo.
> I'd argue that the bar for "vaguely controversial" has become so high that Congress is essentially non-functional.
In my experience this is mostly a position by people who have policy preferences that are either not in a majority or just a slight majority. And are frustrated they aren't able to get their policy preferences enacted. The real objection is usually not actually "nothing is getting done" because I can then point to lots of things getting done (as you concede). The issue is that it's "stasis" which usually means "I can't get the reforms I want done."
I'm assuming you're a Democrat. Would you really feel better if Republicans took a trifecta and abolished the filibuster and lowered taxes, abolished almost all welfare, banned abortion nationally, repealed all gun laws, and abolished every public sector union? Because that would certainly not be stasis. But I have the sneaking suspicion most Democrats would suddenly start defending the filibuster.
If there is a principled case for it I would be interested in hearing it. The best I can think of is that government and policy stability is bad for some reason. Because lowering the bar to getting things done primarily allows small majorities to seesaw back and forth.
I am a Democrat, but just barely, and, tbh, one of the few people who doesn't think the status quo is so bad. And I support abolishing the filibuster.
I don't support any of the Republican policies that you mention, but I do support a public debate based on data, instead of vague ideas of what it would look like if a party got to do any of the things in their platform. I support a world where people pass/repeal laws, those acts either help or hurt people, and then that influences elections. I think that would both lower the temperature, and lead to better policy, because we could actually see what policies work and which don't.
The U.S. is a vetocracy by design. There's good historical reason for that, but those reasons no longer apply to the way either party treats the federal government. It's time to have a government that responds to the people occasionally, even if I personally think "the people" often get it wrong.
Do I support *some* protections against wholesale implementation of policy that up to 49% of the country might disagree with? Sure. But we're way way past that.
I continue to dispute the claim that "lots of things" are getting done. The Democrats hold both chambers of the House and Senate and have not managed to implement even part of their agenda. Likewise, Trump made a lot of noise but other than a tax cut, the Republicans passed no major legislation during his tenure. Most presidents have historically kept 80-90% of their campaign promises, recent presidents are more like 20-30%. And that's not from lack of trying, it's because fewer laws are being passed, and those laws are smaller in scope.
> Do I support *some* protections against wholesale implementation of policy that up to 49% of the country might disagree with? Sure. But we're way way past that.
What specific protections would you want? How would you defend them when whichever side in the majority is blocked by them? What's the principled distinction to draw it at (say) 55 Senators and not 60?
> The Democrats hold both chambers of the House and Senate and have not managed to implement even part of their agenda.
The Democrats only hold both by extremely thin margins. The issue is that you need almost every single Democrat to agree and the truth is that Joe Manchin and Kamala Harris don't actually agree on a lot of things. Build Back Better fell apart because of internal Democratic politics, not because of Republicans. I mean, yes, theoretically Republicans could have saved the Democrats. But if the Democrats had actually voted in lockstep it would have gotten through.
The last time Democrats had like 55-60 votes we got the AMA which was a major piece of legislation.
In 2010. I agree that building back better failed due to internal politics. Because maintaining your rhetorical position is better in modern politics than compromising with members of your own party to pass laws. Which was my whole point.
But as for protections: big fan of the executive veto and *some* level of judicial review.
Look, dude, you're waiting on an opponent who isn't going to show up. I'm not a rabid partisan. I don't think we should pass massive, sweeping legislation that costs a fortune and dramatically changes our society.
But it's completely predictable that if a party can win majorities in both houses of Congress, win the presidency, and still only pass one major policy initiative every two decades, people are going to get frustrated, they're going to get turned off from incrementalism, and they're going to gravitate towards radicals. That's why it's important to find a reasonable balance between protecting the minority party and allowing the majority to do some stuff, whichever party the majority happens to be. And in the process, we get concrete data on whether policy proposals actually work. Instead of arguing about the awful things that *would* happen if one or the other party managed to pass another part of its platform in like 2040 or whatever.
Ah, I'm just barely old enough to remember when "hundreds of billions" was considered a lot of money. The quaint old days.
A lot of Republican voters object to a tax cut. But they object to scary culture war thing more so the Republican elite don't have to care.
Citation for the first sentence? Definition for lots? (Like, hundreds of voters? Or like 45% of voters?)
Wouldn't the first question be massively confounded by "what's legislatively possible?"
Like, presumably gay people in the 1900s wanted to get married too. They might have thought it was an impossible pipe dream in a country where you could go to jail for sodomy, but if you asked them about their ideal pipe-dream society they would probably say something along the lines of "I would like to live openly with my partner with equivalent rights to a heterosexual couple," just like a modern proponent of gay marriage would. Is it really accurate to say that gay people in 2022 are "more extreme" than gay people in 1900, just because the people in 2022 have enough support to achieve that goal and the people in 1900 don't?
Well, TIL
There's a great (in some horrifying sense of the word) editorial piece in Buzzfeed News I read a couple years ago arguing that it's moderate milquetoast neoliberalism of the highest order to support gay marriage, to the point where the result of Obergefell v Hodges was largely to set back the gay community. The argument was similar to what Unsigned Integer mentions: marriage as an institution is fundamentally heterosexual in origin, therefore carries establishment connotations, and is therefore a flawed ideal.
Found it; it's even worse than I remembered. The conceit is the Buttigieg 2020 campaign, and the continuous lecturing anti-marriage thread throughout is in service of a central argument casting Pete Buttigieg as not really gay, because he doesn't identify as "a queer leftist." Not allowed to be truly LGBT, because the LGBT in-group rejects the "conservative-approved nuclear family."
Also, there would be a lot more opposition to marriage as an ideal in the queer community, but the AIDS epidemic both strongly selected for the most monogamous male homosexuals and forced nearly everyone to step back from the free love Era.
1980 really was a different world.
It's kinda hard to poll people who are dead...
In part, though, your question answers itself. Cruising and hookup culture were not 'part' of gay culture, they *were* gay culture, in an Era less permissive on the heterosexual side. Times have changed.
So, in other words, “ the AIDS epidemic both strongly selected for the most monogamous male homosexuals and forced nearly everyone to step back from the free love Era” is just your own opinion, ungrounded in facts?
I don’t know that gay people in the 1900s generally considered themselves defective. IIRC Havelock Ellis’s case studies give a different picture - most gay people had no wish fo become straight, and resented societal persecution. And there are a few writings from the 19th century and early 20th that contain basically modern understandings of the gay rights problem, and even mention the idea of gay marriage in passing.
I suspect that the idea of gay marriage has always been somewhat popular among “normie” gays, even when it was opposed by an activist class.
The loudest, most vocal LGB activists (I'm specifically not including the TQIA+, since those are separate issues) have definitely moved on from "we want to live openly with our partners with equivalent rights to het couples" to "we demand equal representation in mainstream culture (movies, TV, music, advertising) to het couples" and "we demand that anybody who expresses disapproval of our lifestyle be ostracized from polite society", which seems "more extreme" to the ~90% of the rest of the population that is straight.
Why the discomfort with being disgustingly “both-sides-ist”. I think these two sides are quite clearly "crazy" in their messaging, in the sense that they both consistently advance wildly false messages.
Really appreciate the way Scott incorporated feedback. The conclusions didn't shift from the first draft (IE, democrats are moving left, conservatives aren't really moving right), but the context clarifies what that actually MEANS. Your second graphic is exactly on point: if the original image had the conservative saying "death to all sodomites" in every panel, it suddenly becomes a lot less effective as a "dunk" on "extreme" "woke liberals".
Also, this line is key to the whole thing: "from the point of a 1990s Democrat who expected both parties to keep moving left at the same rate forever, it must look like Republicans have suddenly and unilaterally defected from this happy equilibrium." From my (far left) perspective, the utility of the conservative position was that they prevented truly stupid policies from going too far, albeit at the cost of occasionally squelching good policies by accident. This is probably a pretty condescending way of describing conservatives (IE, they are really just very cautious liberals), but at this point we've all been drifting "left" for 200+ years, so perhaps they can forgive my presumption that we shared a common cause.
I know Scott's been careful with politically sensitive content, but this kind of analysis is genuinely great, as was the discussion.
> I may not be as wise as Matt Yglesias, but I am wise enough not to declare one side the winner without an ironclad dataset to back me up. I can’t think of a sufficiently good one that doesn’t feel cherry-picked.
https://www.dannyhayes.org/uploads/6/9/8/5/69858539/kalmoe___mason_ncapsa_2019_-_lethal_partisanship_-_final_lmedit.pdf
This study asks a bunch of questions which seem to be fairly close to "how dumb and goddamn crazy are you," including "Do you ever think: we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of [Opposing party] in the public today just died?" (20% Dem, 15% Rep) and "If [Opposing party] are going to behave badly, they should be treated like animals." (about 15% Dem, 20% Rep), and "Many [Opposing party] lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals." (About the same between parties, maybe 1% leads for Republicans.) and "What if [Opposing party] win the 2020 presidential election? How much do you feel violence would be justified then?" (18% Dem, 14% Rep).
My overall vibe from looking at the included data: maybe a marginal victory for Rs, but neither side is looking particularly better than the other. Like, maybe the Rs are 10% less crazy, as a whole, but not much more than that.
My word, that's... pretty extreme, to say the least. And it's probably not going to get better, judging by https://labs.psych.ucsb.edu/schooler/jonathan/sites/labs.psych.ucsb.edu.schooler.jonathan/files/pubs/landry_et_al._2021.pdf.
In short, people think that their opponents dehumanize them far more than their opponents actually do, on both sides of the aisle, but that doesn't stop them from using this to then turn around justify dehumanizing their opponents for real. In more depth:
"Abstract:
The present research directly replicates past work suggesting that metadehumanization, the perception that another group dehumanizes your own group, erodes Americans’ support for democratic norms. In the days surrounding the 2020 US Presidential Election, American political partisans perceived that their political opponents dehumanized them more than was actually the case. Partisans’ exaggerated metadehumanization inspired reciprocal dehumanization of the other side, which in turn predicted their support for subverting democratic norms to hurt the opposing party..."
Given the sample size and the variance between the two samples, I don't think any of these are significantly different across the parties given the limited data set.
Hardly encouraging data, though there's also the issue of polls as attire.
I look at 2 examples of party extremism, 'abolish police', and '2020 election was stolen'. one party seems to have a slightly better immune response to crazy.
Abolishing police was a tiny fringe stupid slogan. 70% of Republicans ran with “The election was stolen”. Not equivalent.
It was a moronic thing to say. I’ll give you that.
Cops are feeling unloved in some not so big cities like Mpls and enforcement is down. I wouldn’t attribute it all that slogan though.
It’s a pretty complicated situation.
You can watch a fictionalized account of on HBOs “We Own This City”.
Based on Baltimore PD after the Freddie Gray killing. Events parallel Twin Cities unrest after George Floyd. We are a lot smaller though.
Easy on the hyperbole though. Shop lifters in San Francisco may be leaving unmolested but crime isn’t legal in all big cities.
Crime now legal[citation needed]
Maybe not tiny/fringe, but certainly not a majority opinion. And not in their mind, in everyone's mind. It only had democrat support in the 40s for about a month before crashing (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/10/26/growing-share-of-americans-say-they-want-more-spending-on-police-in-their-area/)
But yes, it certainly wasn't benign, and it was certainly higher in media reporting.
Almost 70 %of democrats believed vote totals were changed by Russia in the 2016 election according to a yougov poll. Not changed as in "Russian propaganda convinced people to vote for Trump using stolen emails or falsehoods" but "Russia changed actual vote totals". There's no evidence that happened. Is that equivalent?
https://twitter.com/peterjhasson/status/1064259048902668289
Maybe people just interpret questions about election validity with whether they liked the result. It'd explain a lot.
That’s not really comparable. Russia targeting the 2016 election was a major story and it united with general distrust of voting machines.
The 2020 narrative of Biden stealing the election didn’t have any basis in current events. It was just Trump saying that and Republicans repeating it as a sign of loyalty.
I mostly consume D&D podcasts, old television shows, RPG/game/fantasy lore, and stuff about military history.
It’s good to minimize your consumption of politics, it kills the mind.
I would wager the phrasing caused that result. Some combination of the conjunctive fallacy, and loose interpretation of 'tampering'. See for example (https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distrust-this-years-election-results-than-democrats-after-2016/) that showed a majority of democrats were confident in 2016 election results.
Though to your point "people just interpret questions about election validity with whether they liked the result", that number did drop 20 points (84 -> 65) after the election.
What do you mean by conjunctive fallacy here? The poll was about a single event (Russia changed vote totals). What other event is "in conjunction" to cause this fallacy?
i mean something like:
event 1: vote tallies were tampered
event 2: russia tampered vote tallies
i would not be suprised if event 1 polled lower than event 2.
but the larger effect is probably from 'tampering'. the poll should have asked 'succesfully changed vote totals'. otherwise, some may interpret it strictly to mean 'change vote totals', others may think it means an attempt to change totals, and others may just read it as 'meddling'.
Hasson's follow up post is also quite amusing
<quote>Imagine if two years into Hillary's presidency, 2/3 of Republicans thought she won because the Chinese tampered with voting tallies, despite no evidence whatsoever of China tampering with voting tallies. Journo Twitter would be apoplectic</quote>
Shouldn’t it drop? It’s an outlier election where someone who was massively unpopular, lacking a political career, possessing little backing, and hated by their own party won.
Google says (December 2016): "YouGov poll: 52% of Democrats believe Russia tampered with the vote totals" https://hotair.com/allahpundit/2016/12/27/yougov-poll-52-of-democrats-believe-russia-tampered-with-the-vote-totals-to-get-trump-elected-president-n240862
In any case this is not a policy position in the same way as "2020 election was stolen and Congress should refuse / should have refused to certify the election result."
> [Jan 5, 2021] 7 out of 10 Republicans believe that November’s presidential election was inaccurately certified, according to preliminary numbers from the Fox News Voter Analysis. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/republicans-7-out-of-10-believe-november-election-not-accurately-certified
It's also not as destabilizating to the country to say "foreign interference occurred and we need to beef up election security" vs "the other party schemed to rig the election (we can be sure of this because our party leader said it) so we must throw out the results and maybe* overthrow the other party by force." [* by which I mean that this is a fringe position but one with a clear base of support]
Unfortunately the link to the poll is dead so we can't see how it was asked or if they're including both democrats who strongly believe and only somewhat believe. Would you agree that the majority of democrats falsely believed that Russia changed vote totals?
Do you think many people believe that the election was illegitimate, but that Congress should certify the fraudulent results? That'd be odd. In the absence of any polls asking about whether to certify results, it's reasonable to conclude that people who believed that vote counts were illegitimate don't think they should be certified.
Regardless of whether voters supported refusing to certify the election, 11 members of congress(including mine) decided to:
https://www.cnn.com/2017/01/06/politics/electoral-college-vote-count-objections/index.html
There's not really a good way to measure "destabilization" but I'd consider accusing a rival party of rigging an election through colluding with a foreign power to be as destabilizing as accusing a rival party of rigging an election through less specific methods.
I don't recall the 2016 story as "Russia changed vote totals" but as a broad and overblown meme that "Russia interfered" plus a meme that "Trump colluded" (which I never bought). I remember a trove of DNC emails (but not RNC emails) being released, I remember... something about Facebook Ads and Russian trolls? I don't remember "Russia hacked voting machines" or whatever the allegation was, but apparently 52% of Democrats thought so. Not sure if that's a representative sample either; I didn't bring up this poll, I merely fact-checked it.
> reasonable to conclude that people who believed that vote counts were illegitimate don't think they should be certified
fair enough, the correlation should be strong anyway.
I think the ambiguity of phrases like "hacked the election" and some news stories about the possibility could lead 50-70% of Democrats to think votes were changed.
yes, that was the point, which immune response is better. abolish got support in the 40s for about a month before crashing. Most of these ideas are not that popular. There is media and twitter capture, and many people are deathly afraid of opposing them, so they are problems...but the voters don't support them by majority. A loud 40% can do some damage in our election system. But Ds still need to convince senators from West Virginia, Montana, Ohio, and Arizona to pass a bill. And they see what happens in i.e. the Virginia Governor race when they get too stupid.
I'm not entirely sure which party you're saying is better here.
Maybe a closer comparison would be "2020 election was stolen" vs "2016 election was stolen"?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=77i_pC3lp04
we can do that comparison https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distrust-this-years-election-results-than-democrats-after-2016/
"Defund the police" and "abolish police" are drastically different - a tiny, tiny minority of leftists (who mostly hate Democrats and don't identify as such) want to abolish the police, while a merely small minority of Democrats want to "defund the police" meaning divert money away from police budgets toward social programs.
i dont blame the average voter for not keeping up with the motte and bailey of awful terms democrats give to things. it was also big enough to get traction here https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/12/opinion/sunday/floyd-abolish-defund-police.html
The existence of the term doesn't equate to it having any traction whatsoever in government. The police haven't been defunded outside of a very few locales, let alone abolished, and no Dems in Congress are trying to do anything like abolishing police. You can't attribute something to a political party just because non-politicians who are in the same general political wing as them advocate for it. That same logic would let you levy all manner of unfair attacks at the GOP for the things right-wing extremists say.
<quote>You can't attribute something to a political party just because non-politicians who are in the same general political wing as them advocate for it.</quote>
Perhaps it is not fair, but this is what the average voter will do when the party or its affiliates do not push back against it enough.
It gets no traction in government because even in progressive cities, it loses at the ballot box.
And I wouldn't say its all 'non-politicians', the squad have certainly danced around the topic
As an affiliate of the Democratic Party I say that “defund the police” is one of the stupidest fucking ideas ever attached to the party.
I could do the that with Caps Lock on if would aid in distancing us from that idea, but that would make it look like I’m shouting and people from Minnesota are too polite for that.
Really, I read it in passing a couple times but I was dealing with the rioting following George Floyd’s death and still wiping my mail with isopropyl alcohol during that period and I missed the super glue, epoxy resin attachment of the idea to the Democratic mainstream.
Did Tucker Carlson or that gay looking women with the short dark hair and the eyebrows on MSNBC have something to do with this?
I don’t watch cable news. Come to think of it I’m not on any social media either. Maybe that’s where it came from.
Well, here's the story in my neck of the woods:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-05-26/lapd-funds-reallocation-george-floyd
In case that's paywalled for you, the key statement is "The [Los Angeles] City Council cut the LAPD by $150 million in July, after massive protests following Floyd's death, pledging to put the proceeds into disenfranchised communities. Council members quickly set aside $60 milliion[1], using much of those funds to balance the budget, leaving about $89 million for various programs."
Now it's possible you consider Los Angeles some kind of weird little backwater, although its the 2nd largest city in the US, 1 out of 4 Californians live in LA County, and indeed 1 out of every 33 Americans.
Or maybe you consider $150 million pocket change or something. But the consequences are quite measureable:
https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-04-20/mayor-eric-garcetti-seeks-hike-in-lapd-spending
Nut grafs there:
"Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti called Wednesday for an 8.5% increase in the Police Department’s operating budget, providing a major boost to overtime pay while also seeking to fill hundreds of vacant positions....would increase the Los Angeles Police Department' operating budget by $149 milion...Reaching that target may be a heavy lift. The LAPD has been steadily losing officers due to retirement and resignations..."
"The push for more money at the LAPD could easily become an issue in the June 7 primary city election...Los Angeles had 397 homicides last year — the most since 2006..."
So to summarize, around here, the second largest metropolitan area in the entire United States: (1) there sure was a significant defunding of the police, (2) it led to bad outcomes, sharply rising crime, including murders, and (3) voters are really pissed off about that, and even in deeply Democratic LA County those who were previously all in favor of "defund the police" are realizing, sphincters clenched, that The People are coming for them and they are not happy, not happy at all. Hence a lot of backpedaling, denial of the past[2], saying it was all just fringe-talk that got out of hand, nobody really meant it, nosirree bob...
I doubt anyone will be fooled.
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[1] I left this sentence in the quote, because I just love the cynical opportunism in the City Council using about 1/3 of what they cut to shovel into their general spending, only reserving 2/3 for the stated purpose of community services.
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HblPucwN-m0
So, following the logic, a 7.x% cut in police spending led to massive increases in crime, during a period in which crime has spiked across the entire US. Now that they're getting an 8.5% increase to their highest funding ever, we should expect crime in LA, over the next few years, to fall to the lowest levels ever.
It's a useful example, for sure, but many cities and towns that *didn't* cut their police budgets also saw an increase in homicides.
Reading your articles, what stands out to me is your point [1] (defund the police advocates aren't asking for more stump removal!) as well as what defund the police advocates said about the City Council's decision... Quite negative.
What I'm really interested to see is what happens once LA's highest-ever anti-homelessness budget kicks in. IMO that will test "defund" principles more than single-digit-%age cuts to police budgets amidst a national wave of homicides. If it doesn't work... That'll be informative.
Will it? You're telling me that if an x% rise in spending on homeless spending changes the homeless population, you'll believe there's a correlation, but when there's already a significant increase in violent crime following a y% cut in police spending...why, that might mean anything! Could be pure coincidence!
That tells me all I need to know about your intellectual integrity on this point. You will cherish the evidence that supports your preferred narrative, and discard that which does not.
This "defund the police" has been one of the obvious cases of motte and bailey I have *ever* seen!
I’d expect ideological purity as a response to extremism in the other party. Much easier to vote in unison if the proposed legislation is so far away from the center that legislators across districts feel they can vote in the same direction without getting voted out.
A version of this conversation has been going on in the NRx for quite some time now. In the mainstream of society (politics, law, the academy, entertainment) the rhetoric is controlled by the left. Even their chosen name "progressive" makes it so their policies are seen by pretty much everyone as part of a long arc of moral progress. We are told that they, and their ideas will be on the "right side of history." This means moving leftward is a foregone conclusion, by both sides. It is why, for example, whenever we elect "the first transgendered furbaby to mayor of a city of over 200,000" the resounding chorus from both sides is "there is still so much work to be done." If everyone agrees to that proposition, I wonder "what does the end state look like? How will we know when we have arrived? Can it be achieved without massive reeducation, coercion, confiscation and even mass death?"
What happens to me if I DON'T put a rainbow sticker in my business window? I don't hate anyone, I am just indifferent to your cause.
The right, spineless and really, really wanting to be part of the cool crowd, follows these rules of polite society, thereby putting themselves at a severe disadvantage because they are conceding from the very start what is OK and not OK to say. This is like letting the enemy on a battlefield determine the rules of engagement before the fighting starts.
It is also why, meaningless words like "racist" are so effective at shutting down conversations. There is a deep, sophisticated continuum of positions on race/ethnicity, but you would never know that if you were an alien who landed here and only had the mainstream as your source of information. There are only "racists" and everyone else.
As a DOD contractor, I was subjected last year to the "extremism stand down day" which was a day of propaganda designed to chill any conversations about anything interesting or substantial. Apparently, the Biden DODs definition of "extremist" is "anyone who takes their oath to the constitution seriously." Since I am a retired army major, and I fit that description, I have to shut up or risk being labeled an extremist.
On the other hand, the 2A was written when the most powerful weapon on earth was an 8" ball hurled from a cannon that could knock over a wall. I am not an idiot. Of course, I wish to "progress." But I am not interested in throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Representative, constitutional republicanism preserved freedom for a very long time.
It doesn't hurt that I am only one generation away from true oppression. My father was imprisoned and tortured for his wrong think before he escaped communism.
Its also important to think about this from an almost space-time continuum perspective. There is no place on the timeline of history, (dating back to way before even the enlightenment if you want) that does not wind us up right back here. Its kind of how the nature of time and existence works. So the polls about rewinding to some previous policy placeholder history point are silly.
And so, under those circumstances, the republicans operate as a spoonfull of sugar that helps the medicine of leftist "progress" go down. They are the pretend opposition, designed to give the slow kids time to catch up. But the point of an institution, if nothing else is to stay the same--to propel whatever time-honored values it was founded on into the future by way of traditions and customs, etc. This applies to marriage, the church, the Boy Scouts or whatever.
All of this is why when marrying a wheelbarrow becomes a thing, the republicans will be saying "we must preserve marriage for gays and straights only!! As we have always done!" It's also the reason they must start any conversation about (race/women/gays whatever) with "you know I have a lot of black friends, so I am not a racist." Its the key to unlocking access to the discussion.
None of this is an accident. It is leftist ideologues who gave us ideas with massive-death causing notions such as "year zero" (nothing behind us, everything in front of us).
The distance from the median voter position is also not particularly interesting to me. It makes an assumption about central tendency that is provably false.
I suppose a standard argument for NRx deserves the standard response:
Things dont always pull left,if you don't ignore economics. We live in a world where markets reign, huge corporations reign, and the richest have personal spaceships. The traditional left have seen the collapse of communism in Russia, the embrace of markets in China, and the abandonment of planned economies and equality of outcome in the west.
I'm struggling to understand what the point of the exercise is. I mean, it's very easy to identify a party that has gotten out of touch with voters: they stop winning elections. Neither party has stopped winning elections -- indeed, if anything, elections at the national level have turned into a serious of freaking nailbiters that is surprising to those of us who lived through e.g. Reagan 1984, Nixon 1972, LBJ 1964.
So regardless of anyone's fancy theoretical model, the direct empirical evidence is perfectly clear: both parties are "in touch with" and represent in important ways a big slice of American voters, at least 40% of the electorate each, who pretty much vote for them all the time, every time. We don't need to explore that question in more subtle and brilliant ways, because the blunt answer stares us in the face every fourth November.
It's definitely worth asking *why* the situation is as static as it appears. Why doesn't one party just finally run away with it? Why can't Americans make up their freaking minds? I wonder if it isn't a concomitant of so much information flow, which parties didn't have 50 years ago. These days, you kind of know well ahead of time if you're seriously out of step with the voters -- here's Nate Silver to tell you with graphs 'n' charts, if nothing else. So the parties can adjust in real time to ensure they stay competitive.
And, in the other direction, they don't want to *overshoot* -- the Democrats don't want to move so far towards the right that they capture 70% of the vote, because that's basically wasting the sacrifice they're making by compromising on their core values. They want to be just barely conservative enough to win, 50% of the voters plus 1. And Republicans are the same, they want to be just barely liberal enough to win, 50% of the voters plus 1.
But the ability to gather the information and tune your messaging to "target" your policies and public image so accurately, to avoid accidentally losing relevance, or accidentally overshooting, is unprecedented. Maybe that's what's different.
The problem with this idea is that First Past the Post voting prevents any party other than the major two from winning any elections. If minor parties and independents were an option for voters, I expect the major parties would both have to reconsider a lot of issues they dropped the ball on.
Nah. Minor parties and independents *are* an option for voters. They just don't go for it.
The reason people don't go for them is that they know they would be wasting their vote. Michael Bloomberg decided not to run for president because he knew he would have a spoiler effect on the party that agreed with him more, and voters understand this too. In countries with approval voting or ranked choice, this doesn't happen.
Congress' approval rating is at rock bottom, so I feel like there might be a whole lot of people who would love to kick out both major parties, if they had the option.
By this criterion you're "wasting" your vote every time you vote for someone who is more than 100/N% (where N = number of voters) behind in a two-party race, since your vote can't possibly make a difference. One vote is almost never a tie-breaker. If your criteria for not "wasting" your vote is that it alone changes the outcome, you will pretty much waste it every single time you vote.
Perhaps a better way of putting it is that FPtP creates coordination problems that IRV doesn't.
If 51% of the population prefers Mary Moderate to Danny Democrat or Robbie Republican, but still expect Danny or Robbie to win, then they'll wind up voting for Robbie or Danny just to prevent the other one getting in.
Here in Australia my electorate was recently won by a supposedly-moderate independent. I don't like her or trust her myself, but I can appreciate the fact that our electoral system allows this to happen; I don't think it would be likely with FPTP.
Look, *any* system of voting is not going to be ideal, if for no other reason than that we can't actually make a precise definition of "ideal." It's obviously not everyone getting what he wants, because that's impossible. So what is it then? We get rapidly into the weeds, with everyone adducing his own particular definition of "what is the next best thing if you can't get exactly what you want?"
I don't think any of this really matters. By me it's the answer to two binary questions (1) Do you have a say in who constitutes your government? (2) Can you exercise that say without fear of violence?
If the answer to both is "yes" then I conclude that the government that results is pretty much what the people want, and if you're a voter you have no serious grounds for complaint. If you feel strongly enough about something, you have a fair chance to affect the outcome. Granted, you will have to persuade a lot of other people to care about it, too, if they don't already, and that's the *really* hard part. You may also have some modest barriers to overcome -- you have to get past entrenched behavior, conventional wisdom, requirements here and here for supermajorities, et cetera. But the opportunity to change the outcome peacefully is there, and that's all you can ask for in a republic.
A lot of times when people complain of the system being "rigged" against them, or people who think like them, it boils down to "we object to the fact that we have to get x% more than a bare majority on our side to bring home our point." And I'm just not super sympathetic to that point of view. You're basically asking for the power to ride over the wishes of a larger minority than you otherwise can, which is not a social or positive goal by itself, regardless of how noble the other aims are. Impositions on the minority are an ugly but alas necessary aspect of a democracy. By me the larger the political arena (going from local to federal elections, say), the harder and harder it should be to put in place any law/regulation/action that doesn't have almost universal support. I would be OK if my local city council passed ordinances on straight majority, the state legislature had to come up with 60% in favor, and Congress had to come up with 80% in favor.
I agree with Melvin's answer - or you can look at the US and check the number of independents, Greens or Libertarian party members winning elections. It just doesn't happen in FPTP.
I do think it's kind of a waste of time voting, which is why I'm glad my government forces me to. Otherwise I think all the smart people wouldn't bother voting and do something else.
I choose to interpret this as there are fewer ideologically committed and politically naive Greens and Libertarian American voters, that those with those tendencies recognize they are in the minority, and figure out with which much bigger group they can stand aligning -- and then do it. That is, people are behaving more like adults, recognizing they aren't going to get their way exactly, and figuring out how to score half a loaf instead of none.
Maybe it would be cooler to actually elect some Green/Libertarian Senator, and watch him negotiate artfully with the big parties to achieve half a loaf. But I have a hard time really giving much of a damn. I already know the government isn't going to act like the government *I* would most prefer. At the very best it's going to represent what the average prejudiced unreflective self-centered IQ 100 human being -- a wretched peasant -- wants. I have very low hopes. This is why I'm a champion of individual liberty. To my mind, the majority is going to be wrong and obnoxious in about 75% of what it does, so what I most want is to have the power to be left alone by it.
The issue is that if you're a hyper-liberal Green Party supporter, the FPTP system forces you to form a coalition with moderates. It doesn't matter if 48% of the voters are Green and 2% are moderate. The major party will still need to move significantly right to catch those 2%.
Electoral systems exist that apportion power proportionally, so that if there was a sizeable number of far-lefties, there would be a sizeable number of far-lefty legislators, and then 2% of the legislators would be moderate lefties.
IMO that doesn't change policy much - coalition building still has to occur between those two groups. But part of the point of democracy is to make people feel involved and listened to, and having a representative that speaks more directly to your views can do that, as well as offloading all that nasty coalition work onto people whose job it is to do it.
It doesn't change it at all, as you recognize in the last paragraph. The only difference between a multl-party parlaimentary system and what we have is that the negotation and coalition building happens at the professional level, between the elected members, in a parlaimentary system, whereas in ours it has to happen within the party, and directly between voters. Sometimes quite literally, e.g. if you live in a caucus state, this is exactly what you do, you go down to the church and you argue with everybody else about which candidate you want, and you make all the compromises right there, in person, face to face.
There are advantages to the multi-party system. Yes, people feel more "listened to" for what that's worth[1], and the fact that the coalition building and negotation happens at the pro level means it's more respectful, sophisticated. On the other hand, because the negotiation is more detached from the people, people are likely to feel more disenfranchised (cf. Brexit), and the system probably responds more slowly to changes in the popular mood.
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[1] If I felt listened to, and also had $5, I could get a nice coffee at Starbucks, for example, and I like coffee.
I mean, consider extending your analogy to the Presidency itself. Instead of voting for *one* President, we elect a small cadre of Presidents, say 5 or 6. We get 3-4 sort of familiar Presidents like what we usually get in elections, plus 1-2 weirdos -- a passionate Green, a neo-Nazi, whatever. And then the Presidents negotiate among themselves for who is going to appoint Supreme Court Justices, who is going to propose the budget. Or maybe they argue about it and make joint decisions.
That's basically the equivalent. Would it be better than what we have? In some ways, maybe. If you were a constituent of one of the weirdos, you'd know you always had the ear of the President, so you'd definitely feel listened to. We can imagine the 5 Presidents would probably negotiate in a more informed and sophisticated way. On the other hand, they might also agree on some pact for their own personal reasons that kind of betrayed some of the constituencies, and blame it (unfairly) on a necessity for negotation -- they would have a lot more in common with each other than with us, the voters, so they might...not be quite as responsive.
I don't have much more to say on this topic except that I think you're giving the "people feel that their government is responsive to them" point a bit of a short shrift. True, good policy-making is one point of a government but it's not the only purpose. In fact, if I had to name the single most important thing a government does, I'm not sure that "pass good laws" would be it.
Possibly equally important is this: it provides a means of relatively non-violent dispute resolution that most people agree to be bound by. The legitimacy of that dispute resolution mechanism is what protects us from people enacting their own (generally violent) justice.
A major advantage of democracy as a form of government is decreased chance of the populace rejecting the legitimacy of the government - if people believe they are partially responsible for picking their government, they are less likely to embrace extreme measures to overthrow that government.
The U.S. system evidently is not currently making people feel like they have a genuine voice in the government. And as a result a lot of folks think of the government as less legitimate than they have in the past. Now, I think part of this is that we've raised a generation of folks (both left and right) who think everyone secretly agrees with them on everything and that some shadowy Oppressive Forces are keeping us all down. That's a broader cultural issue.
But part of it is that most of my (admittedly far-left) social circle does not feel they've ever been able to elect a representative that truly speaks for them. And from growing up in a baptist church I can tell you that the far-right feels the same. The fact that every candidate is definitionally a compromise candidate has real costs in terms of the legitimacy-making function of democracy. Even assuming that there's no real difference in the policy that gets made, that's a larger loss than just some abstract psychological damage. It's a dagger through the heart of the whole system.
You're not forced in any way to form a coalition with anybody by fptp. You can write your own name in the presidential ballot in most states (and should be allowed to in all states and for all races).
That's like saying "you're not forced in any way to eat. You can just not eat instead." Sure, but the consequences are fatal. You can absolutely write your own name in the presidential ballot in most states (including mine), and lose. But if you want to win an election in a fptp race, you need a plurality of people on your side.
Why do you want to win an election?
> both parties are "in touch with" and represent in important ways a big slice of American voters
Or equally out of touch with voters. I'm more on that side - there seem to be internal structural forces in both parties making them a bit crazy in various ways, and since they keep winning half the time anyway (because the other party is also a bit crazy) there's not enough incentive to move them out of it (arguably if they did, the other party would start losing until it got a bit more in touch, at which point we'd go back to a 50/50 split - but I suspect forcing the other party to be more in touch isn't a big enough prize to make either party want to pay the cost of becoming more in touch first. And this isn't something a lone defector within the party can do - they're mostly big structural issues driven by party aides and messaging structures).
If you find my top-level comment that starts with "Wikipedia", Ofir has written some suggestions as to what might be going on. They all seems plausible to me, so I'm gonna sleep on it before replying to them.
Equally out of touch, yeah. 2016: “which of these scandal-plagued senior citizens do you want for president?” Everyone with a brain: “I don’t want a scandal-plagued senior citizen for president!” Both political parties: “Too bad - that’s all we’ve got this year!” Ugh.
“Politics is not about uniting people. It's about dividing people. And getting your fifty-one percent.”
—Roger Stone
I don’t think I understand the question. When Teddy Roosevelt invited a Black man to dinner at the White House an arch conservative southern Democratic Senator was quoted in the New York Times as saying they’d have to hang 50 n$$$$$$s to repair the damage.
The first Republican elected governor of Texas since reconstruction was William Clements in 1987. Did rural Texas change dramatically from 1920 to 1980 in overall outlook?
So much has changed it’s hard to keep track. It’s sort of like gay marriage. Now that 70% of people support it Republicans claim they never opposed it.
And don’t get started on liberal northern republicans vs conservative southern democrats.
> Now that 70% of people support it Republicans claim they never opposed it.
Democrats too! Barack Obama still opposed it in 2011.
Studying the motion of Democrats vs Republicans is missing the point. They are bodies orbiting the sun.
The real changes:
Gerrymandering technology => more extreme politicians
Social media => more visibility of how stupid and crazy everyone is
Fragmentation of media => more extremist “official” content to cherry-pick
And an opposing force:
World Wide Web => more knowledge across borders of which policies are working and which aren’t
Yeah, as much as the internet has the potential for positive impact on politics it seems to have had, so far, more of a negative one. Between Republicans falling for every lie they enjoy hearing on Facebook, and Democrats getting caught up in virtue-signaling cancel mob garbage, the internet has brought a hell of a lot of heat and a lot less light to every culture war topic
"World Wide Web => more knowledge across borders of which policies are working and which aren't".
You can find that sort of thing in conventional journalism if you want to...But how many people read the economist?
Your point about how social media and narrowly-targeted partisan media both make "nutpicking" easier than in the past is a very good point that I hadn't come across before.
Do we have any folks who were very opposed to gay marriage c. 1995 who now think it’s totally fine? Or any any other issue where the general consensus has changed?
I was very opposed to gay marriage c. 1995 and am now in favor. Of course in 1995 I was 7.
Tanner Greer argues that culture changes come from generational churn rather than individuals changing their minds. In other words, someone's grandma might have been as racist in 1995 as she was in 1960, but she's not as racist in 2021 as she was in 1960 because she's dead.
Yes they say scientific progress occurs one funeral at a time as well.
I think this is much more a “dead man’s pointy shoes” thing, though, driven by the cold realities of tenure.
My position on gay marriage has always been the same as my position on Catholic bar mitzvahs.
One is religiously coded... Bar mitzvahs. Marriages are most of humanity. I don't understand the revenue.
Both are important and revered traditions. Marriage is by definition heterosexual. Bar mitvahs are by definition Jewish. If you want to create a different new tradition, that's fine--just don't conflate two things that are inherently different.
Whose definition? Dictionaries are recorders of usage, not legislators of language.
The difference between a bar mitzvah and a marriage is that one is still linked to a particular religion by the name.
If you said, "traditional welcoming ceremonies into adulthood" instead of bar mitzvah, that would be more accurate.
Similarly, "mark two people as being bonded in the eyes of the larger society" would be a way to define marriage.
You could add to the definition to make it nearly explicitly heterosexual "mark two people as being bonded in the eyes of the larger society for the purpose of bearing children"
I have no objection to civil unions and other legal bonds between consenting adults. Just don't call an apple an orange.
Any religious organization is still free to marry or not marry people. It's only the government, an explicitly secular and legal organization, that's required to "marry" two adults of any gender.
It is impossible to oppose gay "marriage" because marriage has no value beyond getting a piece of paper to legitimize an already existing romantic relationship. If you believe that marriage has canonical form (as Catholics and Orthodox Christians do --about 1.4 billion of the worlds population) what the government calls "marriage" is irrelevant. However, there are severe social sanctions for talking like that out loud, no matter how little "hate" you have for anyone. So we all have to live like it is a thing.
Marriage has legal ramifications.
That's (part of) what I mean by "legitimize"
Turns out those legal ramifications are important and the part people are worried about.
I'm not sure about that. There is plenty of writing out there by the true believers who have actually stated their goal was to tear down the nuclear intact family from the beginning. Not just have white pickett fences with slightly altered family configurations behind them.
/raises hand
In 1995 I was a devout Catholic and hence was opposed to gay marriage (and gay sex) on religious grounds, because I believed it was against God's will. I have since become an atheist, and by the time Obergefell rolled around in 2015, I supported it and was happy about it.
Yes.
I, for one, had that view into the 2000s, as did everyone in my family. Views started to seriously change as more people came out of the closet and being opposed to gay marriage ceased to be abstract.
Given that the Supreme Court ruling makes sexual orientation discrimination a civil rights issue, and denying people a civil right is a crime for which you get put in prison, not to mention losing your job, I question the 'general consensus' framing.
Of course, the relentless media cheering section might have done that all on its own.
The amount of leaping you’ve done in just two sentences would make a triathlete blush.
You need to engage with politics much less and me not at all.
Bless your heart. May all your efforts to aid others be fruitful and productive.
Correct. As justice Alito pointed out in his dissent in that case, the only place you can really be safely "against" it is in some dark corner of your closet in your house--just whisper it to yourself. Otherwise you risk risk legal ramifications. Now, we can argue whether or not that is a good thing, but its no longer debatable that denying this "right" will land you in court to be held accountable.
While I don't think that this silencing is acceptable for any civil right, it's a pity that those who don't agree to other rights- like, oh, to keep and bear arms - can't be subject to the same repercussions.
Could you imagine being in fear of losing your livlihood because you said we should confiscate guns? Holy crap that would be awesome.
Edit. But if you suggest that, all things being equal, the ideal family configuration is a man and woman raising the biological kids they made together for life, you are an absolutely intolerant monster.
I am actually on Team "No Boots on No Necks", so not so awesome. But the disconnect makes me a bit peeved.
Agreed. I would like to live in the no boots no necks world.
I was pretty anti-gay in general back in high school, which was early nineties. By 1995 I was ok (more or less) with gay people, but would have thought the idea of them getting married was ridiculous. I continued to think it was a shocking and weird overreach until the early 2000s, when I became close friends with a gay guy, at which point I changed my mind.
On another area where the consensus has changed, in 1993 I did a high school research paper on concealed carry laws and came out strongly pro. (This was controversial to a bit unpopular back then). Since, concealed carry has become the left of the overton window (or perhaps a bit past) and constitutional carry is the middle, debatable position. Meanwhile I've become strongly anti-gun and would like to see something close to full confiscation, followed by a much more limited and licensed version of ownership, with nothing like concealed carry allowed. In this case I've moved well to the left while the politics have moved right, which is different from the gay marriage case where I moved with the times.
The politics of guns are very weird.
Overall, gun control is very popular but conservatives are very successful at converting practical questions in abstract, ideological and identity-focused ones.
It seems like the exact opposite. People will waive abstract linguistic "ban assault weapons" flags but when it gets down to physical reality, the attitude is far more concrete: "come and take it"
As someone who was elected to State level lawmaker status, and had my votes (along with the rest of the entire House, all 400 of us) analyzed with the equivalent of DW-Nominate... Democrats tend to vote in a sheep-like herd (flock?), with few strays. Republicans do not, in general, and spread far wider. This leads to an interesting artifact that the norm of Democrats tend to be fairly stable (as a whole, they have gone more left over time, but within a short span, not much deviation) and the wide range of Republican positions (aka big tent) tends to cause some Republicans to seem further "out there", as an average, this pulls the R grouping average somewhat further "right" than the actual "center mass" would actually appear. Historically you can see this, if you look for the outliers like Ron Paul, and realize they ruin the "grading on a curve". That just doesn't happen with Democrats. Even today, Manchin might be an rare exception, but Romney, Collins, and Murkowski are not, and a handful of other R Senators would be nearby in DW Nominate rendering.
It's the most Purple of States. There is an additional clue above in the first sentence.
NH, right? By far the largest lower chamber among state legislatures, and all that... given that you have relevant experience, how important would you say the size of a representative legislative body is? That is, is there something fundamentally better (more representative of constituent beliefs, etc.) about having legislative bodies of considerable size where each individual assemblyman represents a relatively small population?
Actually even more important: it's much harder to bribe (cough) I mean "influence" a large legislative body... The lobbyists focus on the Senate (24), and a handful of key legislators in the House. Follow the Money.
The small size of representation helps, but... Representing 4000 people doesn't mean you poll them constantly, but you do listen. You'll still disappoint some (who likely didn't vote for you anyway) but even people who did vote for you might not understand the issue the way you do, so... A Republic works because it's not the same as direct democracy
Also the annual pay: $100 a year. not $100k. One crisp Benjamin. And Taxes are taken out too.
But despite all of the above, it's still broken and doesn't work. Even in the best place (I could list other positives over other legislatures), it's still not functioning.
Yes. A fantastic microcosm of this was Joe Liberman. At one point he was the party's nominee for vice president. Just two years later, he was purged from the party for being a pro-Iraq war democrat. Right down the line on every other issue, he was deemed unacceptable for that one thing. I can't recall the republican analog to this. There are pro-choice republicans. Republicans who are for stricter gun laws. Gay republicans who are married. You name it. They all get to stay.
Yes, I figured someone would think of one example that seems to go against this overall trend. It's why I hesitate to use anecdotal data. But as the original comment here points out, in the aggregate, the democrats require much more homogeneity on issues than the Republicans do. The machine springs into action to attack the wandering lost soul with much more ferocity. Heck, I wish there was a conservative party that did that in order to hold the line on the last few shreds of "America" that still exist.
Lieberman was the VP nominee in 2000. He ran for President as a Democrat in 2004. H was successfully primaried in 2006, but ran against the nominated Democrat and won with the majority of his support coming from Republicans. Despite this, he continued to caucus with the Democrats and was given committee assignments including a chairmanship in 2007. He was not purged.
Consider also that the Iraq war was almost certainly the most important issue of of that decade.
If you are looking for a Republican analog, the closest I could think of would be Liz Cheney, though I'm not sure the comparison is fair between the Iraq War issue and the Protecting Donald Trump issue.
She is an interesting analog. Yes, I think you are correct re: 2010. Trump has endorsed a primary challenger to her again this year, so I suppose we can see how that goes as well.
Oh boy, I don't think this is a very good analysis at all.
The generic ballot metric is the most facially ridiculous. In 2018, the Democrats won the overall popular vote by 8.4 points. Today, the Republicans lead by 2.3 points. The net difference is huge in politics. Either the parties have undergone a massive shift in 4 years, the general public has, or the generic ballot is a terribly lazy proxy for "closeness to the ordinary American" that is much more affected by fundamentals than deep ideological differences. Put another way: if you had done this exact analysis in 2018, you'd have come to the opposite conclusion, and I don't see any attempt to justify why.
I'm also not a fan of your take on the Pew polls. The problem brought up by the commenter you mentioned is a lot more significant than you seem to realize -- you get different answers depending on your starting point. Why is 1994 a more sensible starting point than 2004? Or 2001? Or for that matter 2008, as in the original stolen meme? The other obvious objection to this metric is that averaging the questions is meaningless. Some of the questions are obviously correlated with others, meaning the real value they're measuring -- e.g. "are you fiscally conservative" -- counts multiple times toward the naive average. Even if that weren't the case, it's very likely that these questions are weighted differently when it comes to the perception of what's extreme. The race question is one that's going to spark a lot of strong emotions while the foreign policy question is largely academic to most Americans, so weighting them equally isn't very informative. It's good that this data exists, but the choice of questions was made in a different political world -- we have to take that into account when we look at it today.
You're correct about the limitations of DW-NOMINATE. The long-term data isn't very useful for direct comparisons in my opinion. I would say the medium-term data (say, the span of a typical political career) is still meaningful, but I trust it most on a short-term basis. The Pew polarization graphic is good, but I would be careful about extrapolating from it; it just tells us how strongly people identify with the labels "liberal" and "conservative", it doesn't tell us anything about what those labels actually mean at a given point in time. I also don't like how it jumps from 2004 straight to 2014; that's consistent with a story of equal polarization, but it's also consistent with the story "Side A was fine in 2004, but went crazy in 2010, so now I only vote for Side B". Since the point of the post is to distinguish between those stories and identify sides A and B, the graph isn't too helpful.
"Conclusion: Obviously your party is normal and the other one has gone completely off the rails. I’m being disgustingly “both-sides-ist” by even pretending there could be any possible equivalence. When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup, it will be the fault of cowards like me who refuse to call out how one party is infinitely worse than the other on this axis."
You know, just because you snarkily preempt it doesn't make it wrong.
This seems to be a very erudite data driven group. Yet strangely when politics is mentioned it all goes out the window.
Indeed, this why I'm severely blackpilled, and predicted this current mess more than 10 years ago, and walked away from politics. Logic and reason are not welcome in politics at all. And even in this "smart" subset, I see too many people who spout outright fictions they believe fervently to be true, and have no interest in the painful facts. (Intentionally vague, because they can't even see it, denial ain't just a river) We have hit the iceberg already, and few can swim, never mind the lack of lifeboats.
Hi Scruffy, I sympathize with your feelings, just, I have to question your logic here: "I walked away from politics" and "Logic and reason are not welcome in politics."
Do you not see the problem? It's like that right-wing slogan: "If you outlaw guns, only outlaws will have guns!" If all the logical, reasonable people self-select out of following/participating in politics, then politics will be full off... illogical, unreasonable, bat-guano-insane people. [Iron-Man voice] Not a great plan.
I did my time, and my forehead was bloody when I left, from the walls. If you think the system is fixable, you haven't been there.
I'm sorry to hear all this. Would you mind telling a little about what was so terrible about working in NH legislature?
I summarized it above. Logic and facts didn't matter, Democrats voted like sheep to tow the party line, Republicans were fractured into coalitions which usually but not always led to the RINOs siding with the Ds, lobbying interests steered things thru a small minority via money and inside deals... I could go on, and on... A Supreme Court that defied logic, Governors and other elected officials who ignored their oaths of office, News Media that NEVER got the story right (and often spun it into lies and fiction)...
In other words, same as the rest of the USA. Slightly less corrupt, slightly more accessible. I worked hard and passed laws, and watched them be ignored because nobody in charge wants to be held accountable. I lost numerous other battles to pass measures on a variety of fronts. All for naught. At some point, you realize the game is rigged and the only way to win is not to play.
Really sorry to hear this. Thank you for your service.
I got politically involved in something for a few years, entrusted with a minor responsibility to keep craziness at bay. When keeping the craziness at bay became harder, I felt obligated to gut it out for as long as I could. In retrospect, I don't think gutting it out for as long as I did was good for me. I'm alienated from what I had supposed were pretty stable political habits because of it, and I don't foresee that changing anytime soon. Maybe it will in a few years, but for now, I'm done.
Scruffy had a much bigger responsibility than mine. If he says he's done his time and it has to be someone else's turn now, I'm inclined to believe him.
This hits hard.
Politics is a mind-killer.
I've found that it's very easy to find data to support both sides of most major political disagreements. For example, I think I can competently argue the gun control debate from both sides, with quite a bit of evidence and data for both perspectives.
I find that surprising given that there’s no evidence gun control reduces crime because we have no way to account for mistaken defenses. That is, how many DGUs are unjustified and therefore actually assaults with a deadly weapon.
Nearly all DGUs are on the say-so of the user who admits they fired no shots and no one was arrested. This means, naturally, that we have no way to quantify whether these were, in fact, defensive rather than a paranoid ass pulling a gun on just some dude.
Right - there's data that shows that defensive gun use is frequent, and the pro-gun side of the argument can easily point to some pretty big numbers. The other side can provide the exact weakness you cited; the data is poorly categorized, and also indicates a general problem of violence which can be associated with the proliferation of guns, because most credible estimates indicate that there are more gun crimes than DGUs and at least some %age of DGUs (we don't know how many! the data again is not very clear) are gun defense against a gun-wielding attackers.
My biggest bias against self reported DGU stats is it basically paints a picture is that without gun ownership, if you basically say that without every DGU, a crime or murder would've been committed, the US would be a violent place w/ more death and disorder per capita than even many 3rd world countries out there, and that just doesn't make sense.
Do I think DGU's happen? Sure. I just think that they matter in such a long way to determine gun policy isn't really actually true.
Is there a way to see who is a paid subscriber and who isn’t and filter for either?
The people that are paid subscribers don’t have the ‘give a gift option’ below their posts.
Ah it also seems that you can click on their name and it will show what substacks they subscribe to and whether it’s paid or not.
I do wish the "crazier worldview/messaging" had gotten more of a treatment, because I suspect it's where a lot of the meat lies. Others have stated and I agree that many people are completely or mostly tuned out on policy except for perhaps two or three sacred cows. I believe thinkers vastly overestimate how much the average voter ponders about fed hikes, the GDP, or edicts on the airspeed of unladen swallows.
Ultimately, these notions about one or the other becoming extreme come down to your lived experience more than anything else. In my experience, living in the southeast, it seems as though my family and friends have bifurcated, with one subgroup becoming obsessed with conspiracy, racial resentment/fear and the downfall of America and the other just shaking their head in disbelief at the whiplash. I suspect that several people here have had vastly different experiences depending on their geography and local culture and those lived experiences are what people are arguing over. Which is not to say there's not an absolute answer somewhere, and, I believe, it's easy to say at the very least that both parties are getting way more extremist in posture: preparing for war, instead of hoping for peace.
I think this is absolutely the right way to frame the question of how the "average American" sees polarization (which might be different from polarization in policy or rhetoric from politicians).
I definitely have left-leaning friends/acquaintances for whom every single life event is political. They feel vaguely guilty about enjoying a nice day because of global warming. A friend's marriage is a display of bourgeois decadence instead of a happy day between two friends. Relationship discussions are all framed in terms of the politics of gender and sexuality. Do I agree with them more than their political opponents? ...probably. Do I also find them about ten billion times more annoying? Absolutely. Veganism might be a morally superior worldview but it comes off as "extreme" because until recently meat eaters didn't just walk up to people eating a salad and lecture them.
Of course, this is all contextual. My in-laws are the same way, making every single thing that happens about politics, but super conservative. If I had to hang out with them all the time I'd find them at least equally annoying. Probably more, because spending an hour in a room with my father-in-law makes me want to put my head through a wall.
Yea, I believe we live a mirror existence, except I don't think I have any liberal in-laws. I do, however, have have some lefty friends I talk politics with online and while they're a swell group of folks, I do have to limit to a few hrs a week or I get that same desire for ad-hoc cranial house remodeling.
This is quite perceptive.
The worst for me is the dear relatives that don't have a throttle button, and can't take hints to not talk about things [right now]. I can easily take that our policies don't align entirely, if we could only mostly talk about things that we have more agreement on. It doesn't have to be ONLY agreement all the time, just more than disagreement.
This sounds fundamentally correct to me.
I’d also like to point out that a lot of this is deeply influenced by tactical decisions the parties make. A core of the thesis when given from the left by, say, Yglesias, has to do with Obamacare and its similarities to Republican proposals of yesteryear.
Republicans didn’t oppose Obamacare because it was extreme, however. Anyone with a working memory knows that they opposed *all* of Obama’s proposals (that became major news items) in a bid to win elections by creating a contrast.
It’s why Secret Congress is an extant and much more moderate thing.
And of course, extreme posturing in Washington, whether tactical or, I think, increasingly genuine, also feeds back into the public sentiment, primarily through media streams that no long even come close to agreeing on a shared reality. Anecdotally, I've had multiple members of my family call me at different times saying something like: "You gotta turn on Tucker, you won't believe the latest latest plot big tech/dems/whatever are doing to steal your vote and destroy the country". I'm so flabbergasted whenever it happens, I literally don't know how to handle it, and it always creates a fight because I don't go turn it on and become immediately consumed with righteous republican rage. It feels like pod people have replaced my folks sometimes. But I see the insane tweets from lefties on Twitter, and I assume that being related to one of them has to be a hell of an experience too. But these radicalized folks then go and vote for more practitioners of these extremist tactics, and the loop cycles anew.
The thing that mystifies me is that these are people who presumably participate in society, including through work, who have some knowledge of what various organizations are like on the inside, yet have exotic imaginings like this.
It's funny because I've been in blue states my whole life and right now I'm the one having whiplash as I realize that the gulf between me ("moderately center-right", I thought) and moderate-left friends is so gaping, it's getting harder to be in general social discussions: the baseline assumptions about the world have changed. In that sense, the Musk meme speaks to me very much.
While there has been leftward movement from both parties on social issues, there has certainly been bipartisan rightward shifts on some others. A couple of examples are the consistent lowering of coporate income tax since 1950, and Republicans giving up on environmental regulation - George H.W. Bush set up an ETS for sulfur emissions, George W. Bush refused to sign up to Kyoto.
It might be people's relative weighting of these issues that determine what they think about the overall direction of public policy (along with their own relative position on these issues).
A nice try, but the devil lies in the details.
For example: both the Republican and Democratic parties of today do not resemble their 1975 selves. Similarly, while Dubya Bush and Condeleeza Rice are considered part of a neocon Republican era - the neoconservative movement actually originated among liberals - one reason why Dubya Bush is now a "good" Republican in Democrat eyes. In particular, the neoconservative movement was created by liberals who wanted foreign interventions to promote democracy and liberal values - which the War on Terrah basically is.
The neoliberal movement, in contrast, also originates as liberals but consists of liberals who want free trade, free markets and so forth - in contrast to traditional blue collar opposition to mass immigration (read up on labor leader's views prior to Bill Clinton).
This is not something I know much about, but the intentional misspellings makes it sound much less credible than it otherwise might.
Because form (correct spelling) is always more important than content.
"War on Terrah" and "Dubya" is clearly intentional signaling, not typos, and therefore part of the content.
As you clearly don't seem to understand what the signaling is, also that Dubya is a way to distinguish between father and son, it seems there is no point further attempting to remedy your lack of shared understanding.
Check out David Harvey's book Neoliberalism.
I feel like this whole thing is a dismal attempt to define a normative state of the world which is basically the whole game of rhetoric to begin with. When the US is attacked by the Japanese, is "respond by doing nothing" the normative response? Or is "build a big military and fight back"? "Normativity" entails counter-factuals and I don't see this being addressed in the post.
Is "we should do nothing to respond to climate change", "we should do nothing to respond to greedy bankers tanking the economy", normative? Sometimes you will need new policy to uphold the status quo.
Broadly, people don't really have coherent normative accounts. Conservatives and Progressives will have normative outcomes and normative means to achieve these outcomes and the latter don't really follow from the former.
There is also a difference between how the world is in fact and in law. For instance, I don't think the rights of women have changed that much in the past hundred years but our attitudes have changed.
I think there's a flawed premise underlying this, which is that policies are innately "left" or "right" or "conservative" or "progressive", and then we can look at how a politician votes on a bunch of these policies and calculate how left or right wing they are.
There have been times when you could look at US politics and identify some clear ideology that was driving policies, but overall (and perhaps increasingly) I don't think that's true. MAGA is not an ideology or philosophy, and Republicans in the Trump era are not meaningfully "conservative", they're just focused on echoing whatever Trump says. Liz Cheney is, by basically every measure, one of the most conservative members of the House, but lost her leadership position to Elise Stefanik, who is a centrist by normal measurements.
Is the Republican House delegation with Stefanik as the third ranking member more conservative than with Cheney in that position? That's a hard argument to make. Are they more likely to be subservient to Trump's whims? Absolutely.
So...has the Republican party become more conservative over time? I'm not even sure what that means. The party in 1984 was pretty good at reflecting Reaganism, and in 2020 was pretty good at reflecting whatever Trump says. By the standards of 2020, that makes the 2020 party more conservative than the party of 1984, but only because we've redefined the terms. Meanwhile I think the reverse is equally true (that is, that 1980s conservatives would consider the 1980s party to be more conservative).
I just don't know there's much useful being said here.
Edit: And to be clear, I think the same thing is true of Democrats, but Republicans give some clearer examples.
I think there's an important angle that you and Yglesias are both missing.
You and Yglesias are both talking about who's gotten more extreme over time in terms of their object-level positions. But frequently, when people say "extreme", they don't actually mean "extreme in terms of object-level positions", they mean "illiberal". Less concerned with meta-level principles such as free speech, the rule of law, and democratic/republican government government, and concerned more and more only with gaining power, extracting the rewards of such, and (sometimes) pushing their object-level positions, whatever those might be.
(You sort of touch on this with #3, and sort of again with #4, but not exactly.)
And, it does seem that both parties have gotten more illiberal in the past decade-and-change (although it's worth noting that both parties have as far as I'm aware *always* been pretty illiberal in a number of ways, as is clear from the fact that we don't live in a basically-libertarian state). But I also think it's really obvious which party has gotten *more* illiberal faster (I don't think it's close).
In the interest of not getting my comment deleted, I won't say which, but, my point is I think this is an angle you are ignoring. "Extreme" often doesn't mean "extreme", it often means "illiberal", and this is something you didn't examine.
(I also think it's a lot more important. There's nothing wrong with being *extreme*, per se... if you're right, why *not* be extreme about it? But the increase in illiberalism is a real danger.)
I...am confused which party you think has gotten more extreme by this metric. Actually, I am also confused about which party *I* think has gotten more extreme by this metric.
Fine by me, since the point of the comment is the metric, not the result! :) :P
I think Sniffnoy makes a good point about one way of understanding extremism. When I read it, as well as Jonathan F's somewhat related comment, and jon37's and Melvin's comments on hostile rhetoric, I thought of Carl Schmitt's book The Concept of the Political (1932).
Schmitt was a German reactionary who opposed the Nazis until they took power, at which point he joined them. He objected to Weimar liberal constitutionalism for limiting the power of the executive and for leaving the question of supreme values up to each individual.
For him, politics was about friends and enemies, identified by intensely held values. He argued it was deceitful and unnatural to debate peacefully, because rational debate over conflicting values was impossible. Political opponents were enemies who were ready to fight to the death, if necessary - or else were deluded about what politics is.
The West German constitution was written to keep former Nazis like Schmitt out of power. In other words, the state would only tolerate the anti-Nazi ingroup. This article says that Schmitt revised his 1932 position in 1960 (https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2021/02/liberalism-for-losers-carl-schmitts-the-tyranny-of-values/). The new, weaker Schmitt claimed that a constitution which tolerated every view was, in fact, a desirable way to avoid civil violence, even though it was still inevitable that the elected ruling party would engage in oppressive behavior.
A possible measure of extremism:
1. No Schmitt: Embraces liberal constitutionalism.
2. Weak Schmitt: Submits to a liberal constitutional order, but implies that dictatorship would be morally justified, because getting society's values correct is of the highest importance.
3. Deep Schmitt: Prepares to imprison/kill the outgroup and install a dictator.
I think the most relevant debate in these comments is not about policies (not most of them, at least) but about who departs from level 1, and how often, and how seriously.
You may be interested in Crimson Wool's comment (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme/comment/7002453?s=r):
"https://www.dannyhayes.org/uploads/6/9/8/5/69858539/kalmoe___mason_ncapsa_2019_-_lethal_partisanship_-_final_lmedit.pdf
This study asks a bunch of questions which seem to be fairly close to "how dumb and goddamn crazy are you," including "Do you ever think: we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of [Opposing party] in the public today just died?" (20% Dem, 15% Rep) and "If [Opposing party] are going to behave badly, they should be treated like animals." (about 15% Dem, 20% Rep), and "Many [Opposing party] lack the traits to be considered fully human—they behave like animals." (About the same between parties, maybe 1% leads for Republicans.) and "What if [Opposing party] win the 2020 presidential election? How much do you feel violence would be justified then?" (18% Dem, 14% Rep).
My overall vibe from looking at the included data: maybe a marginal victory for Rs, but neither side is looking particularly better than the other. Like, maybe the Rs are 10% less crazy, as a whole, but not much more than that."
What we need here is values for what the voters believe, and what politicians of each party believe. While it's very safe to say that each party is more extreme than its voters are, it's non-trivial to to compare which is more. I personally believe that Republican politicians went extreme earlier, but that Democrats have have done their best to catch up recently, but I can't support this with the numbers, which kinda defeats the point.
I think extremeness should be measured against the current status quo.
Unfortunately, I don't know how to score "abortion should be illegal" against "nationwide $15/hr minimum wage"
To be fair, it should be "states decide law on abortion" vs "nation wide $15 hour minimum wage" as the current minimum wage fight isn't an end point (something like UBI is).
Just poll the public. The one with less support is more extreme.
I think what's missing is the sense that political space isn't a one-dimensional "left vs right" axis but a complex many-dimensional space, with each dimension representing a different issue. You can have one dimension for "How high should the top marginal tax rate be?" and another one for "Gay marriage?" and another one for "Slavery?"
In any given decade, most of these issues are non-controversial and almost everyone is on one side, while some other issues are controversial and split the populace. As the years go by, some issues like slavery and gay marriage get conclusively resolved in one direction or the other (slavery in the Republicans' direction, gay marriage in the Democrats') and others remain controversial (taxes). The result is that the populated fraction of political space shifts around slowly in this multi-dimensional space, and the "left-right" axis at any given time whirls around to point in the direction that best divides two clusters of people.
Since the 1950s the basic direction things have been moving is this: "social" issues have tended to wind up getting resolved in the "left" direction and "economic" issues have tended to wind up getting resolved in the "right" direction. At this very moment (perhaps for reasons pointed to in Scott's article on class) the controverial issues are almost all "social" so the left-right axis seems to point in a "social issues only" direction. This gives the impression that everything has gone the Democrats' way for a long time; we tend to forget the issues on which they lost because the issues of the present day no longer seem anything like them.
DW-NOMINATE actually does have two dimensions. The first is typically labelled "economic" and the other "regional", as it divided the northern & southern wings of the Democratic party.
Hey, I commented something very similar to this. Australians, huh.
There are two more possible interpretations of "becoming more extreme": which party's presidential candidates are more different from their respective predecessors, and which party is violating more political taboos.
In terms od presidential candidates, this is probably just another case of reverse incumbency. In 2008, Obama was a bigger departure from Kerry than McCain was from Bush. In 2016, Trump was a bigger departure from Romney than Clinton was from Obama.
For taboos, it's tricky. I think the relevant type of thing is, specifically, breaking a taboo about America's deep political assumptions: something like "let's replace democracy with communism" or "let's bring back the monarchy". Both parties have (in my opinion) been doing this kind of thing at an alarming rate recently.
Republican supreme court shenanigans, like refusing to hold hearings until after an election, are bad. So far the Democrats haven't matched them, but if Roe is overturned, court-packing is a worrying possibility. Tit-for-tit supreme court tinkering could fatally undermine an essential institution.
Rejecting the legitimacy of lost elections is another one. Trump's ridiculous histrionics, and his party's embrace of his conspiracy theory, are the most obvious and probably most damaging case. Unfortunately, Democrats aren't exactly innocent here. Large segments of the party view the last two Republican presidents as fundamentally illegitimate, and Stacy Abrams has gone even longer than Trump has without acknowledging an election defeat (and has received almost nothing but praise from her party for it). Al Gore conceding the election for the sake of the country was not that long ago. Yet I can't imagine either party's nominee doing the same today.
In the ways that matter most, both parties have gotten too extreme. This formula for a headline, "[Party X] has destroyed [democratic institution Y] in order to win [short term fight Z]" is worryingly plausible for either X, any Y, and any Z.
Thanks for this perspective, I think it's a good one.
Another interpretation of "more extreme" relates to the viciousness with which the party attacks those who disagree, and I think this is what drives a lot of the perceived extremism of the Democrats.
I think that the Democrats have, in recent decades, become a lot more aggressive and vicious in the way they attack those who disagree with them on pretty much any issue. Take a contrary or moderate line and you're immediately branded an "-ist" or a "-phobe". A high-profile moderate like Musk (or Scott) is constantly getting bombarded with attacks from the left, but seldom from the right.
As further evidence I submit the existence of /r/enlightenedcentrism, a space where leftists mock centrists for daring to think that there might be some sort of equivalence between left and right. I know of no equivalent space where centrists are mocked by the right.
So if you're the median American voter, you probably find that the Democrats are too far left for you on some issues and the Republicans are too far right on others. But if the Democrats are constantly calling you an "-ist" and a "-phobe" and trying to get you fired for failing to agree with them on their issues of the week, and the Republicans aren't, then it's easy to believe that the Democrats are more extreme even if you're precisely equidistant from both parties in policy terms.
Biden rule.
Bork.
An accusation of sexual assault with no corroborating evidence and named people at the same party disputing the claims being used in an attempt to derail a nomination.
Expanding it to circuit courts, it was Democrats who started the judicial filibuster fight in Bush Junior's first term, and then turned around and blocked filibusters when it was no longer convenient for them. I'd contend that's at least as bad as declining to hold an up or down vote instead of having a pro-forma hearing in which they rejected Garland.
It's mutual escalation while claiming tit-for-tat all the way down.
Bork was given an up and down vote, and shot down in a bipartisan manner.
An up:down ratio of 2:52 on the democratic side and 40:6 on the Republican is not what I would call a bipartisan manner.
The problem with using DW-NOMINATE is that it shows that "the squad" of lefty Democrats are relatively moderate, because they don't always vote with the rest of the party (due to being further left). If Republicans used to have a bunch of Ron Pauls who voted against their party, and they get replaced by centrists, that would show up as the party getting more extreme.
Thanks! I didn't know that. Here's a link:
https://voteview.com/articles/Ocasio-Cortez_Omar_Pressley_Tlaib
There's been serious, significant ideological change in the parties - i.e., not just moving right or left, but what moving right or left means - that I don't think you're necessarily accounting for. Conservatism aims for different things now then it did under Bush, aimed for different things under Bush then under Goldwater, and different things under Goldwater then under Coolidge.
"I think the Wright/Musk meme is clearly about the changing-policy-positions-since-some-starting-time question, and that it’s right to point to the Democrats as the main driver there."
Phrasings like this give me an impulse to bring up the "Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?" question yet again, because they make it sound like a political party has been driving the change. On some topics (like LGBT issues) the country as a whole has moved left, and the Democratic Party & the Republican Party have mostly been along for the ride.
You know it’s going to be fun when the post has 44 likes but almost 300 comments
Ultimately, I think this discussion is all so much cruft. But I think maybe it's actually pro-social in some ways to focus on it rather than policy. We, at least in the United States, are the inheritors of perhaps the most dramatic era of peace and prosperity (here insert all the usual caveats about it being imperfect, not benefiting everyone equally, possible backsliding from some big govt/big business/big labor idyll of the 60s, etc., etc. forever) in history. The hard work and the dying is done, and the enormous luck has been taken advantage of. All we need to do is not to fuck it up.
As an attempt to come up with something you can actually quantify, this seems to me very difficult to answer, partly because parties are not point sources and their members don't move in lockstep. If you want to study changes in positions, use the quadrennial party platforms: they're each single documents and have unambiguous texts. That solves most of the problems regarding parties being chaotic sets. The main problem is that in the US party platforms are meaningless in terms of actual policy to be pursued, they're just a place where you can say things that make people feel good.
Another problem is that movement of position is not a single variable. It's possible that Party A is moving left faster than Party B is moving right at one point, and then vice versa at another. Indeed, I believe that change has actually taken place.
This is unfair to the dems, as the reps 2020 platform was just their 2016 platform re-release— which by your measure would make the reps maximully moderate. Also, how would you quantify that?
I did say that party platforms are meaningless. Did you miss the part where I said that?
I guess the way to test 4, if you really wanted to, would be to ask average voters to make predictions on political, but not directly policy, questions, such as “will Trump be criminally charged in the next 5 years” or “will courts find that one or more states’ results in a major election was changed due to voter fraud in the next five years” and see who does better. This is the best proxy for “not crazy” and “in touch with reality” I can think of. You would have half the questions chosen by a dem partisan, and half by a rep partisan, to hopefully not get a set of questiosn biased one direction or another.
I don’t really like this idea, but can y’all think of a better way?
Also, before reading this, I predicted the answers would be 1: dems 2: intdeterminate 3: depends how you measure, different measures will give you different things 4: reps. Since my other threee are right, I am sticking by my fourth one
(For the record, my political ideology is complicated, but the DW would say I was in the red clusture)
I think the issue with your suggestion is that polls aren't a good way of measuring predictions. People won't even accurately predict their own behavior: for example, if you ask a group of voters "How would Joe Biden officiating a gay marriage affect your willingness to vote for him," you'll probably get a substantial number of Democrats saying it makes them more likely to vote for him (even though they were going to vote for him anyway) and a substantial number of Republicans saying it makes them less likely to vote for him (even though they were already not going to vote for him).
Similarly, if you ask "Will Trump be criminally charged in the next 5 years", you'll get some people who don't pay much attention to politics going "Gee, if they're asking the question, it must be at least a little bit possible, right?" and answering yes, and other people who hate Trump answering "yes" as an expression of frustration/wishful thinking even though they wouldn't actually bet money on it happening.
It also doesn't account for weird things happening. If you asked someone in 2008, "Will Donald Trump be elected President in the next decade", I would argue that answering "no" wouldn't have been "crazy".
So I'd suggest instead using factual questions without the prediction element, where "factual" is determined by some combination of experts and international consensus. Stuff like "Did evolution occur?" or "Was Barack Obama born in the U.S" are my left-leaning suggestions, though I'm sure a conservative could come up with a few from the other angle.
So those are valid issues, but I think there are ways around them. First, you make the predictions something objectivly resolvable, so that you don’t get problems like “I would totally vote for him cause of gay marriage” situations. This is slightly different from your suggestions as the answer is determined in the future, and is not based on some experts making the decision now. This could be something like “will Trump be impeached in the wake of the Mueller report by date X” or “will Biden be impeached for stealing the election by date X.” Things which no one, not even the crazyest Q cultist, can say happened if they did not.
For uninformed voters making guesses based on the questions, I guess you just hope their guesses are random, and that your sample size is large enough they don’t mess stuff up.
Having an odd ball like Trump wouldn’t really mess with the study, as both R’s and D’s would be equally likely to not predict he would run and win, so they wouldn’t lose points relative to each other, which is the key metric.
In terms of incentivising people to actually try, instead of using partisan wish fufillment to make their predictions, you simply tell them the purpose of the study, but frame it as “whichever party has the most accurate predictions of reality is smarter and more in touch with reality and gets to rub it in the face of the outgroup” which should make people want to do good predictions.
As for the “factual questions” thing, the only way I see that working is to have half the questions being chosen by partisans of each side. As a consertive, one that comes to mind is “what % of guns deaths in the US invovled a rifle [which most popular gun control arguements focus on]” and see who gets closest to the correct figure of 3%*
Sorry for the lengh, I just think the idea is really interesting and want to think it through.
*https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/02/03/what-the-data-says-about-gun-deaths-in-the-u-s/
I see what you mean about incentivizing people to make good predictions; that could work.
The only issue with something like “will Biden be impeached for stealing the election by date X" is it doesn't distinguish between "people who think Biden stole the election" and "people who don't think Biden stole the election, but believe Republicans are partisan enough to impeach him for it anyway if they took back the House", which are not necessarily equally crazy positions. But I take your point that it could work with that kind of prediction in general.
I think the Wright/Musk diagram talks about people who subscribe to the political philosophies. They are not exactly talking about parties, so this post does not negate/affirm the original diagram in the first place. For example, almost every progressive has bones to pick with the Democrats for not being good enough on policy issues (think back to how many people preffered Bernie to Biden, but had to settle for him anyway). Contrarily, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican party are rare (you might find an odd few at the National Review). The parties don't reflect the broader culture. The point of the diagram is to see if the ideological points conservatives and progressives make in the culture war sans electoral politics are more extreme or not. Musk/Wright would say that progressives have become more radical.
"Contrarily, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican party are rare (you might find an odd few at the National Review)."
What's your source for this? Cause my people vote on both sides, but mostly Republican, and the only people they are more disgusted with than DC Republicans are DC Democrats.
Furthermore, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican Party are so common that in 2016 they rejected all of the Republican Party's chosen candidates in favour of granting the Presidential Primary to an outsider.
I agree Republicans aren't necessarily "fond" of the Republican party, but this example is a poor one for a couple of reasons:
The "Party's chosen candidates" racked up over 50% of the primary vote versus only 45% for Trump even though he had the advantage of getting near unanimous results in late contests after the nomination had wrapped up. As a matter of fact, the first state in which voters didn't prefer "not-Trump" was New York in mid-April.
It is by no means clear how many of those who voted for Trump in the 2016 Republican primary could responsibly be called conservative. Elsewhere in the thread there is mention of how "liberal" and "conservative" are moving targets... but to whatever extent conservatism is a real defined ideology advanced by the likes of Burke or Locke and exemplified by the politics like Reagan's, it is hard to imagine Trump was the first choice of any conservative even in 2016 - much less now.
So, the evidence of the Primary is really evidence that plurality-wins voting with more than two options makes for contests that don't reflect the attitudes of the voters very well at all, and secondarily that the Republican party includes populists alongside conservatives.
Going back to the objectionable statement "Contrarily, conservatives who aren't fond of the Republican party are rare (you might find an odd few at the National Review)." - If we charitably rephrase to say that conservatives have historically voted almost exclusively for the Republican Party's nominee (at least until 2020, anyway) - I don't know that there is anything to argue with here.
Why do we assume that both the left and the right change over time (in a 'progressive' direction as certain changes to society stick over time while others are forgotten), but centrists stay the same?
Also, let's take another look at the Pew polls! Don't most of them actually show both parties moving in the same direction until the early 2000s, and then splitting and moving off in opposite directions?
This piece's analysis focuses on one dimension: the location of individual groups on a left-right partisan axis. It tries to do so via judging how far along that axis the parties have moved in terms of officially preferred policies; which parties are the furthest from "ordinary" (meaning, median) Americans; which party's legislative votes are more consistent; which party considers the other more "extreme", and so forth. Other axes exist in politics, which is why so many political discussions and arguments have an orthogonal, talking-past-each-other quality. Here are some I can think of.
We have to start somewhere, so let's upgrade our level of sophistication to "the Libertarian party circa 1999". One can imagine the partisan policy preferences themselves along a social axis and an economic axis. In that sense it seems to me that policy in the country has moved in a libertarian direction, rather than leftward or rightward - the welfare and regulatory state has degraded while gay marriage and marijuana have been legalized, etc. (Arguably the social trends are reversing, especially wrt abortion).
There are dimensions beyond those - militarism for example. Or one could imagine every sharply partisan issue as its own axis; one-dimensional policy preference analysis can assume that there are very few people with odd combinations of positions - pro-gun + pro-abortion, anti-war + constitutional originalism, universal healthcare and bigotry, etc - but I don't believe that's necessarily or empirically true.
Another potential measurement is, to what extent do people have contempt for the character of opposing partisans. If I am in party X and I believe everyone in party Y is brainwashed / idiotic / sociopathic, as soon as you signal affinity with Y - no matter how moderate your actual beliefs are - I'm going to have a bad reaction. This goes hand in hand with how pluralist people are - i.e. willing to accept the other party being in charge for a while. It seems quite obvious that contempt is increasing and pluralism is decreasing.
Finally, there is the question of how *powerful* the extremist factions are. An unspoken assumption of polling is that the country being polled is a democracy; if it's not, the poll doesn't present very useful information. If a group of 20% of the population decides that might makes right, and happens to control all the might, then it moves the country as a whole toward its political position - even if most of the population is moving in an opposite direction.
It is for this reason that the aspect of partisan rancor and extremism that concerns me most is the behavior of police, rather than the behavior of college students, shitposters, standup comedians, or HR departments.
Indeed, even moderates like Tim Pool have begun discussing the situation as breaking down into Authoritarian vs Libertarian.
Lockdowns/Masks/etc showed us how many will go along and comply, and even worse, trust that Big Brother has their best interest to the point of lining up and medicating. It's scary.
> ...the welfare and regulatory state has degraded...
Has it? Over what time period? For regulation, is there some metric other than those here (https://regulatorystudies.columbian.gwu.edu/reg-stats) which we can use?
For welfare, during the Obama administration, Medicaid was expanded and income-dependent subsidies for private health insurance were made available. What recently outweighs those?
I agree with your suggestion that contemptuous rhetoric seems like a component of political extremism; I referenced your comment in a separate response (https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/which-party-has-gotten-more-extreme/comment/7006699).
"When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup, it will be the fault of cowards like me who refuse to call out how one party is infinitely worse than the other on this axis."
I find it hard to imagine how this could be applied to both parties, but that is merely a statement about my imagination. Anyone want to describe a plausible coup plot by the Democrats that could be carried out in the next decade?
From the point of view of (certain) Republicans, liberal Supreme Court rulings have been a gigantic coup where duly passed laws were stricken down and federal government was allowed to assume powers never mentioned in the Constitution. So were for example immigration laws that was democratically passed, and not challenged by SCOTUS, but never enforced. Or media/tech companies suppressing discussion of right wing viewpoints that voters might take into account, etc.
The point is not that these things are equivalent to Jan 6. But people who don't see how they can benefit from democracy, in the sense of people living in an area where most see things in a certain way being able to run their own affairs, lose respect for it over time.
Easy enough - another round of the plague overlaps a major election - either a toss up or leaning left, and the relaxed poll security/enhanced 'voter's rights' permits enough ballot stuffing to get enough incumbents in to control both houses of Congress and the Presidency. Then they pack - excuse me, *reform* - the SCOTUS and continue with the quiet purging of anyone who doesn't sign on to DIE principles until most everyone in a position to carry out any government edict is all left wing, or going along because they know what's good for them.
On edit- your imagination also doesn't include the four years of obstruction to Trump by "the deep state" which probably both decreased the impact of Trumps crazier ideas and policies, and made him more paranoid and crazy by the end of it. While not a coup, this active obstruction was not exactly 'fair play' either. Combined with stuff like the made up charges of Russian collusion and the constant media hysteria, the effect was to look like active attempts to thwart elected officials.
Can you describe a plausible coup plot by Republicans that could be carried out in the next decade? (And no, a bunch of weirdoes from 4chan running around the capitol doesn't count as a "plausible coup attempt")
If we hold ourselves to speculations about the future instead of the past, one plausible coup scenario is if the Republican governor of a swing state (say, Pennsylvania) said that if Democrats won his state in 2024 he'd work with his secretary of state to ensure that Republican electors were chosen anyway. I would definitely be on the lookout for anything like that.
Not to say that I grant your premise! Many coup-like activities occurred in the first week of 2021 among elected members of the government, not just people running around the capitol. To think of only 4 off the top of my head: the phone call to Georgia, the submission of phony elector slates to the federal government without always clear indication that they were alternate, the pressure to get Pence to announce alternate electors, and the Republican plans to object to 7 states (enough to flip the election results) in Congress until the riot made most of them too ashamed to try that kind of bullshit.
I mean, the GOP candidate for PA has all but openly said this
Curious!
Three comments:
1. I think the "2022 generic ballot" is an extremely over-simplified metric for measuring "Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?". Basic political science tells us that midterms are always going to swing against the party currently in power. And even though I do tend to lean towards Republicans being more extreme, I don't think the YouGov poll is good evidence for that either - one single poll is just an incredibly over-simplified way of viewing the question.
If you're going to use election results, midterms are a particularly terrible example because some voters will be voting to put a check on the party in power, with the full understanding that the opposition party won't actually be able to do anything either without having the White House. Voting Republican in 2022 won't (immediately) put Republicans in control of the country, it will just leave Democrats with less control than they have now. And if we look at Presidential elections, which I would argue are more representative both because voters understand they're going to have a stringer and more immediate effect and because they get higher turnout? Democrats have won the popular vote seven times in the last thirty years, and Republicans only once.
And if you're going to use polls, I think it would make for a stronger analysis to compare polling on the actual policy issues Americans say are most important to them to the party platforms. I haven't done this analysis, so I don't know exactly how it would turn out, but I think a more rigorous analysis is needed before making a claim on this one.
2. Your analysis here focuses on politicians and parties, but the original meme just says "left" and "right". To me, that includes people other than elected officials.
I imagine that a lot of right-leaning people who think of "the left" as being extreme are including activists, college students, the media, randos on Twitter who try to "cancel" people for minor transgressions, etc., in that claim - probably as much or more than they're thinking of Joe Biden's or Chuck Schumer's policy positions.
Similarly, if you were to ask me whether "the right" has gotten more extreme since 2008, I wouldn't just ask myself whether Donald Trump is more extreme than John McCain (though I think that he was), or whether the 2022 Republican members of Congress are more extreme than the 2008 Republicans were (a more complicated question). I'd also ask myself whether Trump *supporters* were more extreme than McCain *supporters* - and I think January 6 proves that they clearly are. I'd also be thinking about the most popular right-wing media outlets, the frequency of domestic terror attacks fueled by right-wing/alt-right ideology, etc.
3. "Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?"
Your answer is a cop-out, and the fact that you acknowledge it's a cop-out doesn't make it any less of a cop-out. A few possible ways of answering this question:
a.) How do the parties' worldview/messaging compare to their worldview/messaging in 2008 (the time suggesting by the meme)?
b.) How do the parties' worldview/messaging compare to the worldview/messaging of major parties in other Western democracies? To what extent do people in other countries view them as "crazy"?
c.) To what extent are the parties' worldview/messaging based on facts (or "facts") which are believed to be true by most non-political experts?
A seems reasonable, but I think it's too short a time frame.
For b: who cares what those other parties say? Are they in America? Are they American citizens? Why on earth would someone think that matters?
For c, are the non political experts from a group who donates more to Democrats or more to Republicans? Cause if they're academics, they lean left, which I think makes the nonpartisan intent of your question difficult.
The international consensus matters because it's a larger sample size that's going to be less influenced by America-specific biases about what's crazy. For example, 40% of Americans are Young Earth Creationists who don't believe in evolution. Is that a "crazy" position? It doesn't count as "extreme" by most of Scott's metrics, but pretty much any other developed nation could tell you that that's insane.
Similarly, if all the major center-left parties across a large group of countries, each with their own cultural biases, are all in agreement on something, and the Democrats disagree, that could be a hint that the Democrats are extreme/crazy on that position. Not *necessarily* (there could be legitimate reasons why things are different in the U.S., or the Democrats could be the reasonable one), but it's one indicator. Conversely, I would argue that the fact that most right-wing parties accept the existence of human-driven climate change is evidence that the popularity of climate-change denialism among U.S. Republicans is "extreme" in some sense.
And this ties back into "c" - you could get around the question of whether the experts are partisan by looking at the *international* expert consensus. But I would argue that it doesn't entirely matter. I'm sure you're right that, for example, most American climate scientists donate more to Democrats than Republicans. Does that mean that believing in climate change and not-believing in climate change are equally 'crazy' positions?
I'm in the group that thinks Republicans have gotten more extreme, in part due to literally trying to seize power in an undemocratic coup—which I suppose is a hard thing to measure with, but seems relevant.
Another, more measurable indicator for me is that former Republican presidential candidates McCain and Romney—who theoretically ought to have represented the average Republican of the past pretty well—have since been blasted by Trump supporters for being too liberal. In Romney's case, he seems to have fallen well outside the realm of the current Republican party. While I've heard people call Hillary too conservative, I haven't heard anyone claim she's atypically so for the average Democratic politician, and while I haven't heard much about Kerry or Gore, as far as I know they're still considered typical Democrats. I wonder if there's a good metric to account for things like this.
No it wasn't a banana republic sort of coup attempt.
It was the genteel, less obvious kind, where the guns didn't turn out to be necessary. The military would balk at an order to act on that president's specious say so because of the "That's not a lawful order, sir" thing - I hope - So whip up a crowd and send them to the capitol to intimidate your vice president.
"If you aren't strong you won't have a country anymore!" Or Giuliani's reference to 'trial by combat'
All you have to do is overwhelm the police, injuring only a many as necessary, maybe lose one of your own to a police bullet and a couple to natural causes in the process and you are on your way to disrupting the certification of a national election.
Just some flag poles, bears spray, tactical gear, and whatever is at hand, say fire hydrants, may be handy to bludgeon law enforcement. Then scare Pence into nullifying the vote and send the matter back to be resolved by Republican legislatures to send 'alternate' delegates and voila! The correct result!
A coup enacted with a fair bit of force, but without the guns. So by your proof QED No coup.
No, I don't think that really proves anything.
Two of the cops killed themselves within a couple days but really, that's on them isn't it. Look, we didn't need our guns! We didn't even have to set off the explosives. Okay maybe we fucked up the fusing but they weren't necessary, anyway.
So close. If only Pence had wilted or even allowed himself to be removed from the capitol, a Trump boot licker might have assumed control of the certification sending the country into a bona fide constitutional crisis. It would only be prudent to enact martial law at that point.
Troops - the guys with the guns, like the police and bikers, who all love me! - on the streets! Oh, the possibilities of staying in office would have been endless.
Copy that. I’ll give your opinion it’s due.
MOD DECISION: In the context of a previous major warning, I am banning JSTR for this post.
Leaving aside the coup meme, I don't think you see this as rightleaning voters do/did. Both Romney and McCain ran as more liberal Republicans, mostly in the hopes of winning against a much more liberal Democrat candidate. Romney was from Massachusetts, and to be Republican in Massachusetts, particularly to be a successful governor, meant being more liberal than the average conservative. And McCain wasn't a typical anything, ever. So, no, not representing 'the average Republican voter', and I am curious why you thought so?
Each of them won the Republican primary election. Is there a better person to represent Republican voters at that time than the person that most of them voted for? (Not a rhetorical question; primary winners can be bad, I’m just unsure if we can do better.)
I am having a hard time seeing why anyone would think that a particular elected official represented them in particular, when it was fairly obvious that the candidates were not some Platonic ideal of "me, but electable" but instead "the least unlikely to oppose my interests of the options presented".
Maybe this is an age difference, or a conservative/liberal difference, I dunno.
This is where we run into the many-dimensionality problem. I contend that while Trump is more extreme than McCain or Romney in demeanour, he's more moderate in actual policy terms than either of them (which is part of the reason why he won an election and they didn't).
In particular, Trump was significantly to the left of McCain or Romney on economic issues (acknowledging that maybe unions aren't the worst thing ever and that what's good for big business isn't necessarily good for the country) without being significantly further right on social issues (and indeed further left on some, like gay marriage).
McCain in 2008 was against Obama's healthcare proposals. McCain in 2016 voted to preserve Obamacare.
The big difference is that 2022 Republicans would have no problem talking to 2008 Democrats like myself. We might disagree on a few things, like who won 2020 election, but they will not call me names. Whereas 2022 Democrats will try to destroy my livelihood based on disagreement on just a few things that were mainstream in 2008 - some limits on immigration that should be consistently enforced, no penises in girls' changing rooms. I can live with people passing some laws I disagree with, but if people who won't even talk to me come to power, they will destroy my life. So Democrats going from the party I used to vote for to people who are trying to cancel me in just 14 years seems pretty extreme.
I think most of this question boils down to whether you're measuring what politicians SAY or what they DO. 1994 right wing talk radio lunacy is now more or less the party line, but look at actual laws passed by Republicans in 2017 and it's basically the Reagan agenda.
I think you might have got the wrong end of the stick on question 2. Which party's more popular won't necessarily be the one that's nearer to the median voter on each specific issue if voters don't fit neatly along a political spectrum, and it's all a bit of a spherical cows hypothesis anyway. Features like branding, salience of certain issues, the ability to build a coalition of political minorities who are all passionate about one thing, perceptions of propriety/confidence, and negative partisanship might be able to swamp ideology in voters' preferences.
Surely the way to measure it is to work out what the median (or mean?) public opinion on all the major issues is, and see which party is closer to that. Eg. if the median American thinks interest rates should be 3%, the Democrats think they should be 4% and the Republicans think they should be 1%, the Republicans are more extreme by this metric. Obviously some issues are less numerically quantifiable (abortion should be on-demand/where there's fetal abnormality or a risk to the wellbeing of the mother or siblings/only where there's a risk to the mother's life/illegal), but you could probably find some pseudo-objective means of quantification and then average them all out.
It still seems weird to say that an individual has simultaneously "gotten more extreme" and "hasn't changed their opinion at all," but I think a big part of the theory of progressivism is a model where:
1. Society has a debate
2. Progressives win the debate
3. The debate ends, the law changes, and everyone moves on to the next issue other than a handful of die-hard reactionaries
(Or just skip steps 1 and 2 and hope no-one notices)
The obvious corollary to this is "judging people by the standards of the time" - there's a big difference between someone who's pro-slavery in 1750 (in a society that has slavery and only a small minority objects to it) and someone who's pro-slavery in 2022 (where you've advocating for a massive break from social norms, presumably based on a moral theory that's independent of them). Being pro-slavery in 2022 seems very extreme. Being pro-slavery in 1750 doesn't seem very extreme, so a three-hundred year old who hasn't changed their mind must logically have got more extreme? (This feels a bit Zeno-ish to me, but I think the logic checks out...)
> Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?
I agree that this question is dumb as phrased, but I think there is a steelman of it latent in the imprecision of the language you're using to define it. To wit:
> I do so under duress: I think this is a dumb question. A corollary of the Median Voter Theorem says that both parties should be the same distance from the average voter.
There are senses in which this is true, but only for very particular meanings of "distance", and in fact the meaning of "distance" you have to use to make this true is specifically designed to eliminate extremity: namely, the median.
The median voter theorem says that parties will form an equilibrium around the median voter. But the median is the centerpoint of the *rank* of the distribution. That is, it flattens the curvature of the tail! The curvature of the tail is the exact thing that people mean by "extreme"!.
Consider an elecotorate composed of 100 standard liberals and 100 conservatives. The median voter is exactly in the middle of conservativism and liberalism. Now consider 99 stalinists, 1 liberal, 1 conservative, and 99 neo-nazis...and the median voter is in the exact same place. Finally, consider 99 stalinists, 1 liberal, and 100 conservatives. The median still hasn't moved.
In fact, it is this very discrepancy that may allow us to construct a measure. One could reasonably define imbalance at a point in time as: the relative location of the median and the mean. If the mean is to the right of the median, the right wing is more extreme, and vice versa.
This parameter has a name in statistics: the skew. We want to know the skew of the distribution of political views. But what does it mean for a political memeplex to be skewed, exactly? Going back to our toy examples: Let's say we had 100 liberals, 1 conservative, and 99 neo-nazis. If the "conservative" party wants to win, it indeed has to appeal to that median conservative. We can define "appeal" here somewhat simplistically as: it has to be slightly closer to them than the liberals are in meme-space.
That seems like it would enforce a symmetry: If the median voter in a contested memeplex has to be roughly equidistant from the two parties, your original analysis holds. But there is an asymmetry that causes that to break down: negative partisanship. Many people, particularly people in the middle, vote primarily to deny power to the opposing party, not to confer power upon the winning party. They vote out of fear.
What that means is that we can think about an "extremity budget". Each party "wants" to be as extreme as possible, but they have to keep that median voter voting with them. Negative partisanship is the solution: make the median voter fear the other party, and you just bought yourself some extremity points. The more negative partisanship you can instill, the more extreme you get to be.
This actually suggests an indirect measure: we have surveys of negative partisanship. If we make the (large) assumption that parties always "want" to drift further into the tail, and we accept that negative partisanship is the primary mechanism by which they can achieve that, then negative partisanship should track political extremity. The stronger your base's negative feelings about the other party, the larger your extremity budget, and since we have assumed parties always consume their extremity budget, the size of that budget corresponds directly to extremity.
I'm not necessarily staking a claim here that this is definitely a great measure. More just putting it out there as an interesting idea to stimulate discussion.
When a party has no platform against which to measure this dimension, as in GOP 2016, and became the party of Trump, then how do you proceed with this measurement? Is corruption “conservative,” is the never-currently-heard “defund the police” a mark that the left has returned to center? Now that 70 plus % want “pro choice” where is that even on the scale?
Almost regardless of how you might try to quantify this, it's a multidimensional problem, so "who moved more?" would depend on the weights you assigned to the various areas of contention. But "what weights do we give to the various areas of contention?" is and probably always has been a serious area of contention.
So, uh, it's *really* hard to get any objective distance from the politics of your era.
The stumbling block here to deeper understanding of American politics is that you clearly believe there are two parties in America. In fact there is one party, called the The Epstein Party, but it has a puppet in each hand: a donkey on one and an elephant on the other.
Either you forgot the sarcasm tag, or this is a super depressing comment.
No sarcasm here. There is one permanent bureaucracy with one agenda that pretty much keeps chugging along no matter who the president is; when the president is on-side, like Clinton, all the better; but when the president is not on-side, like Trump, they work around him. No wall, no muslim ban, zero swamps drained, nothing of any substance. The core idea in what I said is simply that the positions that are ostensibly at the _top_ of your government, and in particular the president, are actually only at the _front_, and are designed to soak up your attention. The reason why they always swim left is because they want to swim left; the idea that the blue team is pulling left, and the red team is pulling right, and the blue team somehow always wins, is a fiction; the red team is pushing left from behind while facing backwards, and does this simply to mollify reactionary plebs. Having a two party state is just like having a one party state, with some extra steps.
Here in the UK we have a cabinet, and the opposition forms a shadow cabinet, and when Good Team beats Bad Team they swap in man for man; but who here has allowed themselves to come to believe that every single public sector worker from every single department has a shadow worker lurking in the shadows, waiting for their team to win, to swap in as well? Or if they don't, do we imagine that these powerful and relatively unknown figures, after each election, just puke up their ideology and swallow a different one, and set about overwriting their own work? Wouldn't that response from hundreds of thousands of public sector workers, to the switching over of a few dozen in the executive branch, be the tail wagging the dog?
You say that like it's a bad thing. If the permanent bureaucracy can stop crazy ideas like border walls and Muslim bans, good for them.
And things doing always pull.left, because economics. We live in a world where markets reign, huge corporations reign, and the richest have personal spaceships.
The tone of this piece is excellent, managing to avoid plunging into the actual ground-level political disputes during discussion of the meta-level.
Two points:
* Political _partisanship_ is not the same thing as political _extremism_. A country mostly evenly divided into social-justice eco-feminist anti-capitalists and traditionalist libertarian monarchists could very well have their elected representatives cooperating nicely, working towards finding common ground (however limited it might be), and crossing party lines to create legislation. A country where the pressing issue is the dispute over whether to make the tax rate 28.8% or 28.9% could have bitterly fighting parties that hate each other, take crazy steps to ensure that the other party doesn't take power, and vote along party lines exclusively.
* I don't have any data backing this, but I suspect that most members of congress would, throughout their careers, slowly drift towards the political viewpoints common to most people surrounded by well-educated wealthy people in urban areas. Because, you know, they're politicians working in DC. This would, if true, mess up any use of DW-NOMINATE to track shifts, because politicians are not the same between the start and end of their term, and the changes are correlated. (Unless it can track who changes their votes if the _same_ bill is reintroduced in another term, perhaps?)
I think “those attack adds” should be “those attack ads” if it is meant to be ‘advertisements’.
I have always enjoyed SSC because I generally found it to be on point. Yet, somehow, the focus in this is "taxation" and "lizard people". I feel that is poor framing and ask that things be framed sensibly. For example, what percentage of republican voters believe in lizard people? Is this actually a Republican candidate/voter position?
There are far more relevant equivalents that could be used to represent this discussion in a balanced manner. As you've explicitly said not to mention these, I have purposely excluded them.
I would summarise my point as "why not actually focus on the big ticket items that separate the two parties?".
Regarding the 1800-2020 NOMINATE graph, maybe I'm mistaken while reading it (small, shitty, dusty screen), but it looks like reps are, in fact, polarizing faster than dems, but only because they were less polarized over the course of the 20th century, and are simply catching up (and maybe passing) dems in polarization.
I find the Tumblr votes very interesting, because they say that 90% of responders *don't share* the view of the original meme. The original meme is about people who identify as liberals feeling like _their group_, the liberals, have become more extreme (and left the speaker behind).
I'm someone who identifies as left in most ways (albeit in the UK rather than the US) but wokeism has left me baffled and estranged from a lot of "progressive" positions, so I identify with the original meme; except that I don't think the right are "standing still" either, _but that's not the point_.
By my anecdata, it's generational...people over 35, including lifelong lefties don't get wokeism. It's not mysterious that they are left behind.
I cannot fathom why this post isn’t entirely about biases in perception caused by what Twitter chooses to promote or discourage, whether as an editorial decision or a byproduct of its engagement-seeking algorithm.
Because that’s what the comic is ultimately about and that’s where at least Musk lives much of his life.
I’m also not sure, given that it’s rejected Twitter as the main point of discussion, why this doesn’t reach back further in the debate to when “Republicans are getting more extreme” was established during the Obama era. After all, a major event in this debate was Romney disavowing his own record for something that played better to the national Republican electorate.
I feel like SSC would have something more interesting to say—and, wisely, would have approached it spiraling from some other debate or concept we can have more or, at least, easier clarity on.
Not completely related to the post, but I have a statistics problem that I think DW-NOMINATE (or similar) might fix
Every year I run a prediction tournament amongst my friends, where I ask a few questions about what might happen in the next year. I'd like to be able to compare people's performance from one year to another, but I don't know a good way to do that (for example some year - by random chance - I might set questions that are harder or easier so comparing total score year-by-year is a mug's game).
I've known about DW-NOMINATE for a while and was wondering if I could use something like the bridging method to solve my problem - some players have played for nearly a decade without missing an entry, so could I use their scores over time to identify improvement in others? Does anyone know of an implementation of the algorithm I could take a look at?
Any thoughts very welcome!
So Scott, who is left leaning in temperament, action, and self assessment, looks at the current situation and says...'a pox on both your houses'.
Seems to indicate something, and it's not that the left leaning commentariat is correct to jump on Scott for reporting data.
Yes, it certainly indicates that Scott is preparing to finish the tack to the right he's been making over the past 7-ish years.
I can't blame him- he's certainly doing it out of a combination of the cocksuckers at the NYT trying to persecute him and because he thinks he'll be able to do more good by following how the country as a whole is being moved. I wish him the best and hope he'll remember to hold on to at least SOME of the principles he espoused in "The Categories Were Made For Man, Not Man For the Categories" instead of throwing all of that under the bus for the sake of expediency.
Better men than him have failed- in fact, to a certain degree, I suspect that it is easier, and not harder, to slide down that path if you're intelligent. A clever mind can come up with all sorts of persuasive justifications for hypocrisy.
It would be nice if I could believe the same, but given his impressive lack of empathy on most issues it appears altogether too easy in my mind. Road to hell, good intentions, etc.
Really good and interesting post!
I think talking about political parties at all misses the point of the original meme a bit, though. I identified very strongly with the meme, but I don't have a strong opinion on how far each of the main political parties (either in the US, or in the UK, where I live) has drifted over the past couple of decades. I identified with the meme because I feel like ordinary people on the left have moved a long way to the left, and I've stayed put, meaning my formerly left-wing opinions are seen as right-wing.
It's about what opinions are approved or disapproved of (and how strongly) among friends and family, and what opinions might get you in trouble at work, not about party platforms or politician voting records (many of which may be on topics unrelated to the perceived shift).
(note that this is not the same as the "Which party has diverged further from ordinary Americans?" question that you added in the second draft, even though they both mention ordinary people; my question is about the ordinary people themselves diverging and doesn't mention the parties at all)
Relatedly, sampling "Democrats" and "Republicans" probably won't shed much light on this; you ideally want to sample people who were Democrats 20 years ago, some of whom will still be Democrats, some of whom will be Republicans, and some of whom will be disaffected non-voters (and then likewise for people who were Republicans 20 years ago).
Yesss 100%!!!
Yes, that's true, particularly in a two-party system like the US (or to a lesser extent the UK). But then, even in Germany the conservative party arguable shifted to the left, leaving a spot open to the AFD...of course Germany being more left-wing than either the UK or US already on most issues...
I first came across this meme in a Facebook post by a left-wing friend, who was sharing the DW-NOMINATE graphs in order to debunk the meme.
Since the meme made me go "YES YES SO MUCH", I tried to look into the data behind the graphs to see what it was based on. It led me along a long multi-step treasure hunt culminating in a physical book that had to be paid for, except the payment site was broken. But one of the pages en route said that *two* dimensions emerged from the clustering, and one of them was the traditional left-right economic axis, and the other was a social one, about things like sexual ethics, immigration, and slavery (slavery itself is presumably a settled issue now, but I expect this axis would include things like reparations for slavery, or affirmative action based on the legacy of slavery).
The graphs were based on the first axis, but I think the meme is based on a dramatic progressive-ward shift along the second axis, which the graphs don't address.
I also think the Political Compass authoritarian-libertarian axis is relevant here. 20 years ago, the right was more authoritarian (War on Terror, the Religious Right, etc). Now, the left has become more authoritarian (people being fired for opinions that were mainstream and unremarkable very recently). The vertical compass axis has changed from slanting right to slanting left. To those of us whose main political orientation is libertarian (in the small-L sense of the Political Compass), it can feel like the left has become "more left" and the right has stayed put or become less right, but to some extent it's just that the left have become more forceful about it and so we notice it more.
This is similar to your "Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?" but not identical. I am saying one side has become more authoritarian, but authoritarian isn't "crazy" or *inherently* bad - the Political Compass shows that some people on both the left and the right approve of it - it's just very unappealing to me (and Musk and Wright).
Yeah, my usual breakdown of politics is that there are at least 3 dimensions:
1: economic (socialism vs. laissez-faire)
2: social (authoritarian vs. libertarian)
3: cultural (dependent entirely on context and may be more than one dimension)
The cynical view is that everyone's a libertarian when he's losing, hence #2's more mercurial than the others.
I guess...I think this doesn't explain everything though, and I like John Nerst's political compass better (https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-political-compass-part-1-left-and-right/). Basically, it uses Scott Alexander's "Thrive/Survive" spectrum (https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/03/04/a-thrivesurvive-theory-of-the-political-spectrum/ ) and adds another category, coupled and decoupled.
I think that better explains how people position themselves politically than the "traditional" political compass dimensions do. I think "culture" here can be a combination of the thrive/survive and coupled/decoupled (e.g. a conservative nationalist would be "survive and coupled" while a libertarian progressive would be "thrive and decoupled"...).
I don't think the Political Compass is a particularly good tool though...it seems very biased IMO, and basically puts everyone who is not a full-on socialist on the right...I think that John Nerst did a good critique of the political compass (https://everythingstudies.com/2019/03/01/the-tilted-political-compass-part-1-left-and-right/ ).
That's really funny - the people I know IRL say the Compass is biased such that it puts almost everyone on the left! I guess that probably means it's actually quite balanced...
I'm not convinced by Nerst's critique (even though I often do agree with him). If (as he rightly says) it's supposed to be two independent axes, then its usefulness consists in a pair of coordinates defining a full two-dimensional space, not a set of four neat boxes that are each treated as internally homogenous. It's more useful to say that Alice is strongly left and weakly libertarian and Bob is weakly left and strongly libertarian than to say Alice and Bob are both in the bottom-left quadrant. Bob probably has more in common with a strong libertarian who's just to the right of the vertical axis than he does with Alice.
What I meant was they place all the politicians on the right...as for Nerst, I think that his compass isn't necessarily "four neat boxes", though it got labelled that way, but more like graduations of each ...so basically two coordinates like you rote above...
I was referring to the but where he says "Something novel should emerge in the quadrants. Each intersection ought to be more than just the axis values put together. Interaction ought to produce a result with its own identity that we can recognize as a thing over and above its axis values." That sounds to me like he means each of the four boxes should have a unified identity that's more salient than the pair of coordinates.
I haven't seen someone pointing it out but according to the Twitter user below the DW-Nominate graph is meaningless
https://twitter.com/BarneyFlames/status/1519788033763074050
I haven't checked the methodology myself
The whole thing is weirdly phrased insofar as it seems to assume a correlation between left/right and Democrat/Republican, when both of the latter parties are anchored within a couple of degrees of each other on the center-right.
The "extreme" behavior isn't a left/right thing, it's a kind of "narcissism of small differences" thing.
This is a strange way of discussing this. If one is to compare shifting positions to each other, effects vanish. I feel we should not compare voter sentiment but *policies* both parties enacted and compare those with policies enacted in comparable countries, UK, Germany, France, Canada et cetera.
I would have to look deeper into this but I feel that real-life Democrat policy is pretty much in line with other rightwing liberal parties elsewhere, say the German FDP, while real GOP policy has drifted far to the right of what other conservative parties *do*. No conversative party in the West actively works to roll back abortion rights, for example. Is this not a sign of a party getting extremer, when it leaves the broad consensus of similar parties elsewhere?
That's cherry-picking of issues though, if you look at other issues (e.g. illegal immigration) the Republican Party would be to the left of the leftmost mainstream party just about anywhere else. In any other country, deporting illegal immigrants is a no-brainer -- of course you do, they're illegal. In the US, deporting illegal immigrants has somehow shifted to the far right end of the Overton window if not beyond it.
That's a good point, but I believe it doesn't have much to do with a left/right outlook on the world. In other Western countries immigrantion works differently: You come to the border, ask for political asylum and are automatically legal for the time it takes to process your claim. You may not work while in this process and are supported by the state. If the court decides you are not eligible for asylum, they deport you or keep you in a legal limbo for a while if you deporting would probably kill you. If you go undercover during this you become illegal. It is very hard to find employment without legal status in Europe, you are most likely forced to be supported by relatives or earn money by committing crimes.
This creates a strong incentive for the state to deport you.
In the US it seems that most illegals are able to find work in farming or hospitality (official data says 7 million illegal immigrants in the US are part of the workforce) - that creates an incentive for a right wing party to take it slow. You might hurt businesses in your electorate if you deport immigrants that are gainfully employed. After all, illegals keep the wages down for everyone.
So, while the incentive of the USA to protect their borders is as high as everywhere else, but the incentive to really enact deportations is somewhat less, probably?
Why do you pick those as "comparable countries" as opposed to say, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, etc?
Canada, USA, the Eurozone share a place near the top of the development index, the countries you mentioned are far off.
Many of the systemic problems the USA face are different from those that Brazil has to deal with. To name just one set: The NA / Eurozone has an aging population + an influx of immigrants; Brazil has a young, largely unemployed workforce + some educated people moving away.
I actually think that in many ways the US is closer to "Latin" America than it is to Western Europe...certainly in demographics, but also in political attitudes...though it's still closer to Canada, at least the "blue states"...but Western Europe IMO is the real outlier, it is the most WEIRD place in the Word and further away from the "global average" in its values I'd argue...
I disagree here...I think you have to accept the different political realities between nation-states. The US is built on individualism, and thus cannot be compared to Western EU countries...maybe to Canada, but even that's stretching it a bit. This is why I think it's stupid to declare that the "Democrats would be right-wingers in Western Europe" because they have to adapt their policies to the US context, just as the FDP cannot be as libertarian in Germany as they could in the US, Canada or Czech Republic because Germany is among the most left-wing nations on earth...
This is not true. The political theories are the same, regardless of which country you look at. Conversative policies, liberal policies, socialist policies can be (within reason) properly defined.
What you're saying is essentially "I want to misslabel German politics as left-wing or "Democrats as socialist" because in the US right-wing is the middle and Americans tend to define everything from the American normal. You can do that, it's not unsimilar to what Musk does, but isn't is exactly what you think my mistake is?
No, I don't think that's correct. Like I wrote, policies do not happen in a vacuum. They (politicians proposing the policies) have to take into account of what the population affected thinks. And as long as the nation-state remains the major organizing entity for political expression, then one has to take into account the different political cultures between different nations (or other entities in which politics take place). For Example, where do you place the Chinese Communist Party in terms of their "policies"? I don't think it's obvious from a US or European perspective...so, no, (unfortunately) the nation-state sets the parameters which control political expression...
> the Republicans have a structural advantage: small, rural states get just as many Senators as bigger states, so Republican votes are worth more, at least in the Senate.
I don't see how this follows. Surely that just means small, rural states have a structural advantage. They can give that advantage to whichever party they want, it's not inherently a Republican advantage.
Thank you, Scott. Your work here mainly makes me feel like caring so much about this stuff is all just a waste of time because I can’t control it. Here is a silly short story to illustrate the point.
Suppose we found out there really WAS a galactic federation and earth was a test case but there was a split in the galactic federal bureaucracy and they were running this A/B test on earth and we were in a holdout group for some new policy that ….
Would you _want_ to know more? Would you benefit from finding out that yes almost all global elites really are working under groups of space lizards but it turns out true are multiple groups of space lizards all intently focused on what happens to earth? Suppose they have their OWN squabbles between them which are vaguely mirrors to our own, but it gets really weird because they guided our cultural evolution to resolve their own squabble, and it’s not working out as either group expected. Do you really want to know the details?
Meanwhile I’m still not the dad and parent I want to be. So why focus time and energy into this insanely complex system that I can’t control? The only answer seems to be “because system claims to want my input.” When I tell it “neither of these choices make sense to me,” it responds, “no no the stakes are infinite, you must choose.”
And so I conclude, the only reasonable move is not to play.
I find this analysis to be well done and ambiguous, as the nature of the beast truly is. I do have a question... people were asking what happened with polarization, you used these questions to look at how polarization has happened, but in this blog we don't discuss WHY it is or isn't important.
Personally, I find these conversations moot and that they perpetuate the negative aspects of polarization. I think we need to stop labeling people on a political spectrum that can't possibly capture the nuance and complexity of humans and society....
e.g. you can't take a few hundred million people, line them up left to right and cluster them because your clustering analysis will depend on those arbitrary categories. The only reason WHY I see this question as important, is because we live in a two party society... but like I said I prefer the meta conversations that seek to undo this two party stranglehold through initiatives like ranked choice voting.
A couple of years ago Democrats had the chance to collectively choose one person to represent them. They went with Joe Biden, who is largely a traditional establishment incrementalist politician.
When Republicans made a similar choice, they went with Donald Trump, who mostly stood for smashing up the establishment and winning at all costs. This was exemplified by his (and much of his party's) willingness to go to any lengths to hold on to the presidency after the 2020 election, regardless of the actual votes cast - recall e.g. their take that Pence could choose the next president by unilaterally choosing not to count certain states' votes, which would have been a pretty terrible precedent for future presidential elections.
This is strong evidence that the Republican Party has become more extreme faster.
I think the correct way to evaluate is to see how extreme the parties seem to historians in the future, obviously that is impossible.
But I think looking back in history you can look back and sense the things that are weird dead ends, that were popular among one side in politics but never could be the mainstream view and you can see what view today are similar.
"Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?"
It feels like the fact that there's Republican congresspeople who support QAnon is hard evidence on this? Is there anyone on the left in Congress who is equally extreme? Genuine question. (Or maybe you're thinking about the median Republican in Congress instead of the mean, and a few crazies doesn't pull the median much?)
"When the other party seizes power in an undemocratic coup" Also, given the fact that a bunch of Republican Congresspeople support Jan 6, that Trump asked Georgia to change the vote outcome, etc., do you actually believe the possibility of this is symmetric between the parties? Implying that other people are saying one party is "infinitely worse" on this axis is a cop-out; one party can clearly be worse on this axis right now without being infinitely worse.
Put differently: If you had to bet on which party would seize (or try to seize) power in an undemocratic coup in the next 20 years, which would you bet on? With what odds? If you think it's actually 50-50, I'd take that bet with you.
Yet another way:
• Which party has gotten more extreme faster from the perspective of other Western Liberal Democracies?
An outsider view from a Nordic country:
Democrats are traditionally moderate center-right to center. Typically in sync with Europe in social issues, sometimes behind. Right on the economy and more religious. Classical liberals with moderate social democrats at the edge. People like Bernie Sanders push policies that have already been implemented in Europe.
Republicans _were_ conservative right and Christian right up to 2010. Economically Republicans are instinctively business capitalists, not market capitalists. Very traditional Christian values.
Changes after 2010:
Democrats still have a centrist policy and but performative and reactionary rhetoric defines them from the left. The real fight inside the party is between the young and the old. Democrats don't act radical in practice.
The republican core support is not conservative anymore. GOP has adopted radical-right agenda and rhetoric that points towards illiberal democracy. Victor Orban's Hungary is an example of similar ideas in Europe. Degrading norms concerning the rule of law in Poland is an another example. Republican party is doing radically actions and even extremist actions.
----
Definitions for words I use. They are right/left axis neutral in a strict political science sense.
"conservative" - wants to keep the current values and policies mostly intact. Left or right conservatives exist.
"radical", "radical-right", "radical-left" - opposite of conservative. Works within the current democratic and legal framework for fundamental changes in the system. Non-revolutionary civil disobedience where you break the laws to change the current system is as far as radical goes. You can be left/right/religious/or centrist radical. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_centrism
"extremism", "extreme-right","extreme-left" - extreme measures needed to change the system completely. Revolutionary, violent overthrow possible.
Well, I am from (ok maybe not quite) Northern Europe too...but I think that analyzing politics outside of Northern Europe with a Northern European lens will lead to highly distorted results...I don't think many people from Northern Europe (or for that matter, from most other countries) realize this, but Northern Europe is I would argue the only place where altruism won over individualism (on a society-wide level, that is), and of course the reason for that is WW 2...but other place are much more on the "survive" spectrum than on the "thrive" spectrum (even the US, despite being wealthier than Western Europe, but I guess it's because they didn't live through WW 2 and didn't take the lessons from that war...). Thus, Northern Europe really is an outlier in terms of politics Worldwide... the only comparable places, outside of Western Europe, are the other Anglo Settler-societies (minus the US if including the "red states"). Thus, while I agree with you from a Western EU perspective, that's a perspective that is very particular and thus is interesting to hear from, but isn't applicable to the US or basically the vast majority of nations worldwide...
I think you’re too quick to poo-poo “extreme relative to the average voter”. Clearly it’s a hard metric to assess. But on issues like gay marriage the public has shifted a lot; being pro Gay marriage went from a fringe belief to the overwhelming majority in a decade. Maybe two? When you measure from matters a lot, which presumably drives the generational divides on such issues.
But also, after losing an election Republican leaders tried to cheat and overturn votes, and when that failed they committed violent sedition against the US. They also cheated to stack the judiciary. Those acts are extreme but not captured by any metric you can find because they each only have one precedent in American history. The Tea Party/Q wing of the GOP is unhinged, but there was explicit neo-Nazi symbolism at CPAC so you can’t sweep the crazies under the rug; they are influencing the GOP mainstream.
Balanced against that, Progressives have historically-extreme positions on the environment, the economy, gender and sexuality, and pronouns.
With so many dimensions, you have to ask “extreme at what?” Existential issues at the top of your priority stack like the livability of our planet or the continued existence of America as a democracy seem like they matter more than pronouns, no matter how far you are from historical positions or modern voters on pronouns. I guess if you listen to Tucker Carlson enough, maybe you’d disagree.
Wow, yeah this is a loaded topic. From my experience it seemed like progressives were moving farther left while Republicans were fairly static, maybe moving left on a few issues. For instance most Republicans now support gay marriage. What I find interesting though is this obsession of showing the world you aren't the one who has changed. Progressives may have gone farther left over time, but does that mean the policies they support are therefore extreme or bad? They are still winning elections, people are voting for them.
Yes. Because progress has been the norm in the Western World, at least, since the enlightenment...of course, there are various ways to define "progress", but if people haven't changed their position since the Paleolithic, homo sapiens still would be living in caves...
A more interesting question to me - is this Congress historically partisan (feels like the grand total of swing votes is like 2 Dem Senators)? And can we blame earmark reform for eliminating the lubricant that let bipartisanship function?
Wow Scott. It's amazing that when you take out all the stuff the Republicans have won and moved right on (guns, abortion, taxes, unions), *and* start the clock the year of a major rightwards alignment (the Republican Revolution and the Contract with America), it looks like Democrats are moving left. You don't have a finger on the scale here, you're standing on it. This is a disappointing post.
not an American. I’m pretty sure that conservatives moved right on unions and on the State, for sure. Attitudes to abortion were hardly more liberal.
However there was a clear sea change in the US from Trump on, on the left. If you can find any democrats espousing ending white supremacy, or self identification, or defunding the police in 1995, I’m all ears. The democrats were even opposed to gay marriage back then.
It does amaze that intelligent American adults with a concept of an outside view seem to frequently have the view:
My sides racism, riots and falsely saying an election was fraudulent is not worth talking about, but the other side doing it is evil and a threat to democracy.
As a European centre leftist, more left on economics than culture, there’s a spectre haunting these debates and it’s the spectre of trans - particularly self identification.
The social issues like tolerance for drugs and homosexuality are now the norm. The conversations I had about gay marriage in law school in 2008 in an open lecture would now be sufficient to get dozens of students and a handful of teachers expelled today for being intolerant bigots or what have you. As we all know, even Obama came out against gay marriage in 2008. Look how far we've come on that issue.
There used to be a bunch of people that identified with democrats because they despised the absurd fundamentalist religious beliefs pushed from the right all the way up through the Bush years. These types of Republicans seemed laughably stupid and it was impossible to vote for them.
Unfortunately now that's how I feel about the left and the drawing speaks to that. I just can't get on board with the parts of wokeness that seem illogical, regressive, and lead to absurd consequences. I'm also sick of being forced to implicitly accept a woke political opinion in a professional or social setting or risk losing status. The Musk drawing was a pretty good example of how many people feel in this area.
Just smile and repeat the lies. It will be painless. You get to keep your job that way.
I don't have the emotional strength to do that. I'm a terrible liar.
I know brother. Me too. The courage to just say things that are not popular must be weighed by my obligations to care for my family as the primary bread winner (by a long shot). It sucks.
And for a brief shining moment ACX became Facebook.
Another important part is the generational aspect to this. You touch on it a little but for something over decades it should be addressed explicitly. When Colin looks at his “fellow liberals” 20 years ago he is thinking about other young people like himself. When he thinks about “fellow liberals” today those are new young people, not people from 20 years ago who changed their mind. Similarly, the right didn’t change its mind about prison for sodomy, rather, people who held that position got old and died. So everyone looks around themselves saying “I haven’t changed my views since I was 16, but the world around me is moving all over the place” and can all be accurately describing their view, while getting the generational differences all wrong.
I can't speak for Colin, but when I first saw the meme and agreed with it, I meant the "fellow liberals" of my own early-Millennial generation. I don't have much interaction with 20-year-olds.
Fair enough. I guess that’s why I was thinking a data-based analysis by cohort would be useful to figure out if it is changes within a cohort or cohorts changing.
"Among Republicans, 79% said they would press a magic button that replaced current policies/institutions/norms with those of 1990; among Democrats, only 33% would."
What? One third of Tumblr Democrats wanted to go back to the 90's? When gay marriage was illegal? ...Did they understand the question? This throws the survey results into serious doubt for me, unless someone has an explanation.
As a foreign observer I think both major parties in the US have changed a lot, have moved very far from ordinary citizens, have become "ideologically pure" (which is a bad thing), and have embraced entirely crazy worldviews and tactics.
I apologize because I'm not a US citizen and so this isn't my business, but I think both main parties in the US should split in a moderate half and a radical half. I guess the two moderate parties would be able to work together.
OK, this is a good point, but why do you assume that a combination of moderate left and moderate right working together would not care about the American people and not work in their best interests? Perhaps it has been often so, but I don't think it is necessarily so.
All combinations of [moderate / radical], [right / left], and [care / don't care (about the people)] exist. Just choose moderates that care about the people and are strong/smart enough to resist the inevitable pressures to betray the people.
Wow thanks for this train of thought! I’m about to logoff ((I am on European time) but I’ll certainly read and comment tomorrow.
Your point is that moderates are intellectually lazy because they don't care enough, and only partisan extremists care enough to understand and change things.
But I disagree.
I see myself as a radical centrist who dislike extremists of both sides *precisely because* they are intellectually lazy and consume partisan propaganda without making any effort to understand. They are just happy to belong to one or the other camp, and are more interested in virtue signaling than in actual political outcomes.
One can be a moderate centrist in the sense of disliking both extremes, and still be an engaged citizen who strives for a better world. Not a perfect world, which is impossible, but a better world, which is possible if enough people work hard and smart enough.
Sorry for misunderstanding your point, and thanks for making it clearer. I still disagree. Question: what do you propose instead of “a positive attitude and elbow grease?”
Two immediate thoughts:
- My impression of extremism in the GOP has a lot more to do with what they are willing to do to get their way than with their actual goals. I grew up with very conservative parents and was a registered Republican for many years; the goals are not surprising. Things like prosecuting abortion as murder were things I heard about all the time as a kid in the 90s.
The "Green Bay Sweep," however, was shocking. So many Congresscritters obviously holding their vomit down to go along with Trump's worst excesses was shocking.
- I wonder how much of this sentiment (not fact - sentiment) that the left has moved too far left comes down explicitly to gender politics.
I'll throw this out there and then people can tear me to shreds:
Democrats have gotten more extreme, Republicans have gotten more insane. Republican policies haven't changed all that much, but their paranoia, hostility, and willingness to believe the worst about everyone who isn't on the right have gone up gone up; meanwhile, their ability to think rationally....way down, of course. On the left, a different kind of paranoia (as well as an obsession with egalitarianism) has pushed them in the direction of adopting ever more extreme policy positions: the 1st Amendment is now deemed a terrible constitutional flaw, the equal protection clause needs to go so we can ensure equality of outcome, national borders are racist, we need wealth redistribution to alleviate the problem of billionaires having more stuff than everyone else, shrink the economy on purpose to save the planet. Believe all women, even when they lie, etc.
So I would say Scott's Both Sides-ism is not wrong, but needs some clarification.
I don't see why we need to carve out the 'on paper policy' from the 'tactics / norm violations'. The other arguably has just as much an impact on society and the future than any policy, and iirc they actually passed an empty platform at the last convention.
I think this results in democrats being more detrimental (but fixable) in the short-term, with republicans being more detrimental in the long-term, but permanent.
I think you answered your own question. The two have somewhat different implications, so it's worth distinguishing between them.
"On the other hand, the Median Voter Theorem just says where you have to be in order to win. If you are dumb and bad and want to fail, you can be anywhere! "
Fairly accurate description of the Biden administration's legislative strategy thus far.
I appreciated this analysis, but I think it tended to focus on a limited number of variables that (to overly generalize) tend to 'cosplay' more how politics is conducted. This is commensurate with what has happened inside some of the work I've done with rationalist-community folks on a few political initiatives, where the first day usually starts with me spending a lot of time reiterating variations of, "It doesn't really work like that".
(Source: I am one of those much-reviled behind-the-scenes DC-insider-types)
Perhaps by virtue of that orientation - which, to be clear, is also my own potential source of bias - the most operative metric of 'extremism' is far more straightforward and less hypothetical. If we want to look at whether 'the 90s policy equilibrium' holds sway in one political party or the other, I think we can very easily simply look at the people who were shaping it in the '90s (or whatever our preferred time period is) and see what kind of influence they hold today.
By that metric, the answer is unambiguously, "The Republicans have become far more extreme." I work with high-profile Ds and Rs on a number of different issues. The Clinton-era Ds occupy many of the most powerful positions in the White House. The Bush-era Rs are uniformly excluded from official positions and harbor very little discursive public relevance (indeed, it usually backfires in this very "#RINO" way).
You can also look at large-scale dollars supporting political causes. Many of the most stalwart last-three-decade supporters of D initiatives are still channeling colossal amounts of money towards mainstream Ds. By contrast, look how assertively folks like e.g. the Koch network and its affiliates have run away from the baseline right.
I can walk through a more thorough analysis than I have the time (or discretion) to do in this post, but I think the main takeaway is that the variables you're focusing on - while not bad - tend to be the kind of things that feed narrativist rather than causalist understandings of politics.
(My only other issue IMO is that the caveat you acknowledge - "who is proceeding at what rate and in what direction" vs. "who has diverged from point X" - is I think pretty clearly both the factual and experiential thing people tend to be referring to, and is the 'main thing' rather than an aside. But that's simply a preference assertion on my part and not really an actual argument).
Thanks as always for stuff like this.
Another way of phrasing this is that anyone interested in having a serious conversation about politics needs to know and understand who e.g. Mike Donilon is.
Another possibility to explain that observation is that the Democrat machine rewards playing the game and changing policy stances as it is convenient, while the Republican machine tends to reward consistent support for particular issues and punishes playing the game (becoming an insider). One could test that by looking at official positions and statements of the Clinton Ds then and now and comparing them, likewise with the remaining Rs. Likewise you could compare the positions and voting behavior of current Rs with those they replace to see if the voting behavior stayed with the seat, as it were.
*nodnod*. I think the policy positions of Obama --> H. Clinton --> Biden are extremely heavily-clustered relative to McCain --> Romney --> Trump (which was broadly speaking a libertarianism --> protectionism shift within four years) but I'm admittedly biased towards the tax/economics dimension of things and this is hardly a robust analysis.
Agreed when it comes to trade and some economics; Republicans seemed to swap positions with Democrats when it comes to freer trade. Although how much of that is only in relation to China (on both sides) I don't know. Much of the "white working class" moving towards the Republicans might also account for some of that, or perhaps was caused by it?
I expect that on social issues and immigration there has probably been a pretty sharp swing for the D's, Obama notably being anti-gay marriage at the time, and Biden... well Biden has been all over the place since the 90's. Bit of a weathervane that one. I haven't seen as much of that in the R's; I think in the 90's I would have correctly predicted the later Republican stance on gay marriage based on current trends (and remember having early discussions about "why not just make it a civil contract?").
Although describing any of McCain's positions as even broadly speaking "libertarianism" is a little strange to this libertarian type :) It's been a long time since he was believably for smaller government, lower taxes or free trade, but then most Republicans can be described that way. From a "Republican adjacent" position there always seems to be a lot of frustration within the party regarding politicians that promise smaller government, lower taxes, etc. but then keep producing the normal ever growing government. I think that explains a fair bit of Republican politician turn over compared to Dems, as "more government programs" is usually a popular promise with the D electorate, and what politicians usually want to do anyway.
I think what you've established here is that Clintonistas make good apparatchiks. But we already knew that.
We also already knew Bush is out of favor generally among Republicans, but I think this has very little to do with culture war issues, or even right-left-center issues in general, and much more to do with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars he left behind.
>Among Democrats, about 60% thought the Republicans had gotten more extreme faster, 10% thought they’d gotten more extreme faster, and 30% weren’t sure.
>Among Republicans, the numbers were the exact same, only in the opposite direction.
That doesn't mean what you imply it means. Among evolutionists, most will say that creationists are believing non-scientific things because of bias. Among creationists, most will say exactly the same thing about evolutionists. But one is correct and one isn't. I could say the same thing about homeopaths and allopaths.
The meme isn't about formal politics, it's about the overton window of political commentary / discourse.
Excellent comment
I don't know how you can look at that Pew data and say that it's clear conservatives have held pat while progressives have shifted left. I was an infant in 1994. That's not my - and likely not for the majority of other readers here - frame of reference. There's pretty clearly an inflection point in the early 2000s where conservatives dramatically shifted right compared to progressives largely maintaining the same - or slower - rate of movement left.
That's not clear to me. I worry tho, that if I ask for any examples, you're going to have to violate Scott's comment policy for this post.
Not sure what examples you're asking me to provide - I'm just referring to the graphs in the Pew data Scott shows above.
Ahhh – I didn't realize the second part of your comment was only referring to the Pew data. I thought you were claiming that there was a "pretty clearly an inflection point" based on some other evidence/info and I wasn't sure what that might be.
The Democratic party in 1880 didn't have opinions on most modern issues... and Pew in 1994 wasn't necessarily asking about many modern issues.
I think part of the problem with this question is that people aren't really thinking of Dems/Republicans but Blue/Red Tribe.
You'd need a whole extra layer of analysis to say how much of the crazy that comes out of blue tribe highbrow media (E.G. The 1619 Project), that comes out of lowbrow media (gestures vaguely at twitter mobs), is endorsed by the Democratic party. And the equivalent for the red tribe. Not to mention which tribe's fringes are crazier.
i'd be more concerned about which tribes medians are crazier
A lot of Twitter mobs involve highbrow people...
I'm always surprised when users can't resist indulging their recreational outrage over data posts that don't get on a pulpit to give them their 2 minutes of hate. Even though I shouldn't be. Real "I tried getting David Shor fired" energy.
Good content. Social media has opened a pandora's box qua mob behavior (or extremism if you prefer), but I wonder if broad temperament will grow immune to its effects or the exacerbation will only get worse.
Perhaps the lizard point is a better way to measure to extremism.
Election fraud or racial discrimination claims might have no evidence, but it is a normal thing that happens involving mortal humans.
What percentage of people and officials in each party believe things that require suspending any form of link to reality like cannibals building tunnels or nearby racist statues making people worse at maths.
P.S excluding religion because that is obviously a different thing.
It seems to me that the DW-NOMINATE data support the first conclusion that liberal policy is more constantly changing. It's easier to hit a stationary target than a moving one, so we would expect a party whose policies are in flux will have more difficulty reaching consensus. After all, it takes time to build consensus.
Perhaps a better way to read the DW-NOMINATE data would be to see it as a barometer for which party's policies are more consistent (and therefore easier to reach consensus on) over time. Are there obvious periods of change in the data that can be correlated to significant policy/directional changes in the party platforms?
The right and left may have similarly tight clustering in terms of their demonstrated and asserted views.
BUT the left is much less tolerant of those who do not tightly cluster.
This is important and your measurement of ideological purity does not touch on this.
The far right and far left are both highly ideologically intolerant. Hence DINOs and RINOs.
The problem with this whole line of analysis is that it assumes a stable left-right spectrum of political views, when in fact the definitions of "left" and "right" change considerably over time. Specifically, both terms represent large, diverse coalitions, and the constituencies in these coalitions shift, both gradually and suddenly. For example, the upheaval of the 1960s that created the "new left" moved a portion of the "working-class" constituency from the "left" coalition to the "right" one, and much of the "white-collar-professional" constituency, as well as the "Southern Black" constituency, from the "right" coalition to the "left" one. This shift gradually expanded over the subsequent few decades, until the recent upheaval of the 2010s, in which a portion of the "business/corporate" constituency moved from the "right" coalition to the "left" one, while a portion of the "minority" constituency moved from the "left" coalition to the "right" one.
With each of these tectonic shifts, the definitions of "left" and "right" change to conform to the new coalitions' constituents, largely mooting questions about how the parties have moved along a left-right spectrum that is itself in flux. For example, while Wright and Musk are probably correct that the "left" and "right" coalitions have shifted under their feet, moving them from their perceived "center" position closer to that of the "right", there are at the same time many people--so-called "never-Trumpers", many of whom are demographically very similar to Wright and Musk--who would argue that the "right" has scooted off in an extreme direction, moving them from the center closer to the "left" coalition's position. And of course they're both correct--the coalitions have actually shifted along multiple dimensions, and which dimensions matter more to them determines which coalition they perceive as having traveled furthest from them.
This is an excellent point. Depending on what basket of issues/values are important to you, you could make the argument that the Republicans have become more left-wing (abandoning support for free trade, adopting anti-corporate/pro-working-class rhetoric) over recent years at the same time the Democrats have become more right-wing (abandoning support for broad free expression, toning down anti-corporate/pro-working-class rhetoric). As a libertarian, I've noticed both parties becoming more authoritarian, but not necessarily any more extremely "left" or "right." Economically speaking, it often seems like the parties are more similar now than they've ever been in my lifetime.
Well, that's mostly a US-centric POV though. It's I think an artifact of the two-party system that this is seen this way...there are of course areas where it changes what it means to be "right-wing" or "left-wing", but if you agree that being for egalitarian communitarianism is left-wing, and hierarchical individualism right-wing, then the definitions cannot change simply on what population groups support which parties that consider themselves to be "left" or "right".
You compare parties to voters. Comparing parties to voters makes perfect sense in regards to mean voter theory. But what about comparing parties to the total population?
The ratio of voters to non-voters is not symmetrical between parties.
Voters skew significantly older relative to the total population. They skew non-hispanic relative to the general population. They skew educated. They skew towards being middle class or more affluent. They skew slightly churchgoing. They skew slightly Republican aligned and conservative aligned.
https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2006/10/18/who-votes-who-doesnt-and-why/
From the perspective of “what is the Wright-Musk meme about?”, I think it’s about what’s going on in their social circles/on Twitter, which are surely dominated by people with high levels of education. This group has been shifting left, with Trump causing the trend accelerate, and that is what I think they’re responding to.
This is such a strange way to quantify things, borders on lying with data. If you start with the premise that civilization is not static and that it, I don't know, it *civilizes* over time, you would set up the roles of Democrats and Republicans differently. Democrats change things, Republicans conserve. Conservation of what works in a system is important (see: Jonathan Haidt). But if we assume that change is necessary, a moral force, than suggesting that "hey, conservatives have wanted slaves and submissive women consistently since pre-America, and therefore they are more consistent and reasonable," you're being disingenuous. You need some way to say in a modern world of potential abundance, we have more room for humane moral policies and equitable divisions, and trying to roll back the clock on rights, environment and mass violence is definitely more extreme. We might even find a way to measure it - both parties say one thing, do another, but which one is embracing more institution-breaking norms? I submit the one normalizing the resistance of free and fair elections is definitely not a "business-as-usual" party.
+1000
Yep. +1000 from me too (Why are there no upvotes on this Substack btw?).
The center is the US administrative state, the executive branch bureaucracies. After D-FDR won 1932 running against the spendy busybody R-Hoover, he fired 100k R federal employees. Then he changed to a big government tax and tax, spend and spend, elect and elect. By 1933 he hired 500k D federal employees and the Democrats went from a small-government, states-rights party to the party of big government. D-LBJ and D-JFK changed civil service law to formalize D party organizations as public service unions.
Why bother with ancient history? Because ever since the Democrats have monopolized the US administrative state. Therefore, the Democrats are the part of the center. And, the center has expanded wildly. The tail now wags the dog. Elected D now obey bureaucrat orders. Making them even more centrist.
Democrats have captured the "US administrative state" by drawing in the sort of people who work in the bureaucracies. They did this by creating huge numbers of jobs for "knowledge workers" to staff the big programs (Medicare, Social Security, Civil Rights, welfare, and so on). Then we entered into a deadlock on legislation, which led to the bureaucracies "filling in" the laws already passed by Congress. Fortunately for them, the legislature hates passing bills (other than spending bills), which gives the bureaucrats full reign. (Not to mention recently the President ruling by "executive action" instead of executing actual laws.) Once some of those pesky Trump judges are gone, there will be a unified bureaucratic regime that will never be voted out of office. Voting will became a vestigial, fruitless act.
Yes, Bagehot on the ceremonial and serious side of government, only democracy instead of monarchy.
Working in the DOD for 20 years I saw this every day. When push comes to shove, everyone who works in one of the countless monolithic government buildings is a democrat.
Wow, another conspiracy...no, I think it's simply that people who are drawn to administrative jobs, especially in the public service, will be left-leaning...after all, why should they vote for a party that disparages them and wants to lay them off? (Similarly to farmers or oil engineers voting for Conservative parties...).
Okay, I have to admit I just read Scott’s essay.
There were a lot of comments already and I had a peek and saw the “You are a poopie head” “No *you* are the poopie head!” stuff going on and got caught up in midstream. Oops. I would have phrased some of my statements below differently or not commented at all if I had read the essay in full.
Democrats have become more extreme in rhetoric, no question. Their party line no longer allows biological distinctions between men and women.
Republicans have become more extreme in tactics. Noticing that Democrats have successfully captured every institution, they support less democratic methods of restoring balance.
My opinions on stuff would be pretty standard in 1990, but increasingly I think the only way to reverse course is for a new Caesar to emerge.
"the only way to reverse course is for a new Caesar to emerge"
Jesus Haploid Christ. Wow. Okay. It's not every day I see someone openly saying that dictatorship/tyranny is the best option, but here we are.
Leaving aside the fact that said "new Caesar" would presumably have to shed a lot of innocent blood in order to seize power, I have a question for you: Why do you assume that life for you and people like you would be better under this "new Caesar"? Would this dictator have the exact true correct beliefs on trans women and immigration and guns and the environment and taxes and everything else? Why? Why would you expect this to be the case?
Life would be better for me because I rank higher in a competence hierarchy than I do in the inverted (leftist) one. The exact true correct beliefs on those topics are the ones that are a) obvious and b) the ones that just about everyone held prior to 1960 or 2014, depending on how close one is to academia.
Leftists have to invert reality because it grants them patronage of the low-status. Rightists don't do this and so can make decisions based on actual ROI.
IDK...I think you are betraying your partisan bias here...You believe in hierarchies, so you a are a right-winger...lefties don't believe in hierarchies though...so, no, this won't solve the problem, at least not for any non-conservatives...
It's important to realize that the categories "liberal" and "conservative", "left" and "right" and "Republican" and "Democrat" all change over time, and also change in relation to each other. Thus if you go far enough back, comparisons really are meaningless. (When I was teaching US history, I used to tell my students that if they mapped any antebellum political party onto either of the current ones, they weren't capturing the historical thought at work). As a very rough analogy, it's similar to the way that baseball statisticians often disregard 19th century stats, simply because the game was too different to really compare.
Two other things are important to note: first, there was a long process—one of the well-known phenomena to American historians—whereby, over the course of the 20th century the Republicans and Democrats more-or-less switched constituencies: where the south used to be reliably Democratic, it became reliably Republican, and where New England used to be reliably Republican, it has become reliably Democratic. (There are lots of caveats here I am skipping.) If you look at turn of the century maps from circa 1900 and circa 2000, they are close to mirror images of each other. This process was not entirely complete by 1965—it is usually argued that the passing of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in 1964 & 1965 respectively are what caused the final push—but it was well on its way. (This is complicated by the fact that some long-time conservatives Southern Democrats never changed parties (some did, not all), but were then replaced with Republicans who voted very similarly if not identically to them and who were their clear political heirs. This process took a while.) In some ways it only finalized in 1994 with Gingrich's takeover of Congress. But the heart of it was 1932-1965, I think.
The other important thing to note is that in the 20th century American politics changed dimensionality. In the 1950s you needed two variables to chart the political positions of congressmen; by 2000 you needed only one. (To oversimplify, in addition to liberal/conservative there was an axis about racial views.) This too makes such calculations tricky.
Oh, and while "right" and "left" were regularly used in Europe since the French Revolution, they were a later import to the U.S. The telling anecdote here is that Irving Berlin wrote "God Bless America" in 1918 and then stuck it in a drawer for 20 years before releasing it in 1938. But when he did, he had to make a few changes. In particular, the line "Through the night with the light from above" in 1938 had been "Through the night to the right [something]" in 1918. But, he said in a letter, he couldn't use that in 1938, because "to the right" would read as political at that point (as opposed to meaning just "to the moral"). A good sign of culture change.
So when can we go back to? That's a tough question. I think we can go back at least to 1965: at that point the parties were *fairly* recognizable. And you might say that even as far back as the 1920s the parties were recognizable enough to compare. Any further than that, however, you get a muddle: throughout the progressive era both the Republicans and Democrats variously aimed for and fought the progressive mantle (see the mess that is the 1912 election).
All of which is to say, I strongly suggest not trying to extend these calculations back that far. It's not true that in 1900 conservatives wanted prison for sodomy and liberals wanted a monetary fine, because it *just wasn't a political issue*. It's like asking the parties' view on the gold standard today. Yes, there are a few fringe people who have views on it... most people don't think about it and probably don't know what it is or what they would think about it. It's the wrong way to judge the parties. So please, leave off the 1880 and 1900 analogies; they'll be more confusing than anything else.
A few years ago I would have agreed with the conclusions of this post. A couple of years ago I might have still landed there though with significant misgivings.
But today? Sorry, no. Only one of our political parties has actually literally tried to overturn a national election.
And still to this moment insists that it was in the right to do so.
And is right now, openly and without apology, preparing itself to try again and "finish the job" the next time they lose an election.
A dozen U.S. senators of one party, and only one, traveled to sit and talk behind closed doors with Vladimir Putin literally on the 4th of July. Only one party's core activists just held their annual national convention in Hungary and gave a standing ovation to Victor Orban.
Only one party's Vice President of the United States has had to reject the demand by its POTUS to illegally intervene in the constitutional process of counting electoral ballots, and had his political standing within that party trashed for having done so.
Etc, etc. Anyone paying any attention can now add a dozen more entries to this list.
That change in the GOP renders this whole discussion, at best, quaint.
(a) This false meme, which is a lie in multiple ways, needs to be retired.
(b) Even If it was true, that response would be the ultimate false equivalency.
Suppose it was true that the Democratic Party and/or its national senior leadership had "cheered on" the 2020 race riots. On that alternate-Earth I hope that party has been punished at the ballot box and its national leaders driven from office.
That sequence of events would still be a dramatically-lesser threat to our republic than is a national party which conspired and attempted to overturn the results of a national election; is openly preparing to try it again and "finish the job" the next time they lose a national election; and now openly consorts with and seeks to emulate authoritarians like Orban and Putin.
None of which you provide any backup for, because none of it is true. So you've demonstrated only that it is a more detailed false meme and that you can repeat lies using larger number of syllables.
One rookie city mayor, who was driven out of politics altogether a few months after the interview that you link to, represents the leadership of a national party? Yea okay sure....sorry but the ravings of just another online rando aren't worth wasting any further time on, so, bye.
This was excellent bait to get people to reveal whether or not they need banned. Also an interesting analysis that conforms pretty closely to my perceptions, so of course I like it!
Thinking about this piece more, I think my biggest issue with it is that I'm not sure it's asking the most useful question: it doesn't engage much with the question of objective truth, which I would think should matter for a rationalist analysis.
I'll start my explanation with a fake/constructed example: imagine you had an Orange Party and a Purple Party, and the Orange Party believed the moon was made of cheese, and the Purple Party thought it was made of rock. In the past, almost everyone believed the moon was made of cheese, but now 20% of the Orange Party and 90% of the Purple Party have concluded that it's actually rock. The public is roughly split down the middle on the question. We can also imagine for the sake of this hypothetical that the Orange Party are well-mannered policy wonks whose messaging of their moon-cheese beliefs mostly takes the form of politely suggesting that the country should allocate lots of money into sending cheese-mining machines into space to solve the hunger crisis, while the many members of the Purple Party will loudly insist that they think anyone who believes the moon is made of cheese is a moron who shouldn't be in office.
At least three of your metrics suggest the Purple Party is more extreme - their beliefs have changed more over time, there are fewer dissidents to the party orthodoxy, and their messaging is more "extreme". But I would argue that it's highly relevant, to the extent this is all just a proxy for deciding which party is "better", that THE MOON IS NOT MADE OF CHEESE. Does it matter if the Purple Party is voting in lockstep if they're *right*? Is it some kind of problem that their beliefs have changed, when their past beliefs were wrong and their current beliefs are correct?
So to move back to the real world, let's consider two examples for which I believe there are factual answers: evolution (and whether it should be taught in school) and the existence of human-driven climate change. Several of your metrics would suggest Democrats are more "extreme" on these issues than Republicans. I would argue that that's evidence that the questions you're asking are not very useful.
Now, I'm obviously coming at this from a liberal perspective. I'm sure the conservative commenters on here could come up with examples in the opposite direction. And most policy questions don't have as obvious of a factual answer as "is evolution real?" does. I certainly don't expect you to try to evaluate all the existing evidence on every point of American political contention. But I would think a rationalist analysis would want to at least acknowledge "to what extent does this party create policies based on real-world evidence" as an important question, even if it's not one that you feel you can answer in a blog post.
And finally: I do feel that there's an ethical/moral dimension that you're leaving out, which many people on both sides are keeping in mind when they talk about the other party's extremism. You gesture to this with your "conservatives want a jail sentence for gay people" example. Of course, even most conservatives don't actually want jail sentences for gay people, but I would argue that there is an ethical difference between, say, "people should be able to fire their employees just for being gay" and "people should not be able to fire their employees just for being gay" - that is, that regardless of any of the metrics you suggest, the former is inherently a more extreme position.
In terms of "is evolution real?"...do Democrats agree that evolution may lead to different distributions of mental traits - such as the Big 5, time preference, differnt pathologies, and intelligence - among different groups of people? Or is that not the kind of evolution that is 'real' for the left?
As for whether or not an employer can fire someone for being gay, how about the not-radical-at-all position that regardless of the morality of one firing or another, the government has no business getting involved in private business hiring and firing?
Yes, it would be a massive change...like forcing normalization of homosexuality, transgender, and same-sex marriage. Or legalizing abortion until birth. Or pushing for voting rights for noncitizen illegal aliens.
Lots of things are extreme.
Hi Katie, yes!! Thank you so much for saying this! I'm kind of stunned by Scott's complete avoidance of the "which party's policies more closely correspond to reality?" aspect of this issue.
A priori one would find it an exceedingly unlikely hypothesis that an entire major political party, commanding the allegiance of 40-60% of Americans nationwide, and completely dominant in at least a dozen states (which describes both of them) would have come unmoored from reality, while the other one stays firmly rational. You're basically arguing that Americans can be split into the Rational Sensible People (who join one party, and for some reason concentrate in a few states) and Delusional Freaks (who join the other, and also oddly enough congregate in certain other states).
This is (1) exceedingly unlikely, just on the grounds that most human beings have to be reasonably in touch with reality just to survive their daily life, and the Delusional Freek states seem able to function at the economic and state/local level as well as the other set, and (2) it sounds like the sort of partisan cheerleading that's as common as crabgrass. ("We're not only right, They are irrational!") In light of both the reasonable person can be expected to set a pretty high standard of proof for the proposition.
A much more reasonable starting assumption is to assume that both parties have (1) positions and beliefs that are sensible and almost universally approved, (2) other positions and beliefs where reasonable men can and do disagree, and (3) a rather small set of both that are more or less either bones thrown to their loony fringe, or hazing rituals, to which a nonloony might subscribe only to prove he's so loyal he can swallow a few impossible things before breakfast if the party asks him to.
"You're basically arguing that Americans can be split into the Rational Sensible People (who join one party, and for some reason concentrate in a few states) and Delusional Freaks (who join the other, and also oddly enough congregate in certain other states)."
No, I'm arguing that there's a spectrum of rationality to delusion. I don't think either party is exactly at the endpoints of that spectrum, but determining exactly where the parties lie along that spectrum should be key to a rationalist analysis. I gave the Purple/Orange Party thing as an extreme example to illustrate my point: that if a party's belief on any particular issue is based in delusion, then Scott's metrics for measuring extremism will fail for that particular issue.
Basically, if there are, say, two provably factually incorrect things believed by a majority of one party which the party's leaders use as justification for making important policies, and seven provably factually incorrect things believed by a majority of the other party used by *that* party's leaders to drive policy, I think that's a worthwhile point of analysis.
Or to put it in your terms: yes, both parties have a combination of the three types of beliefs you mention (sensible/up for debate/loony). But if the percentage breakdown of that is, say, 50/30/20 for one party, and 60/35/5 for the other, then I think that's an interesting metric to consider (among the other possible metrics for extremism).
That's especially true if we start narrowing it down from "beliefs" to "beliefs being used to justify major changes to policy or which make up a large portion of that party's messaging." The problem, to me, is when the loony fringe of a party stops being on the fringes.
Imho major problem with the question "Which Party’s Policy Positions Have Changed More In Their Preferred Direction Since Some Starting Year?" is that it is very sensitive to the choice of a baseline year.
Pew, in the data featured in the post, has chosen 1994, which pretty unabimguously makes Democrats more extreme in that sense. But this this might be (I have not done my own research, so I ought to hedge a lot) just because an era between the Fall of Communism and the Great Recession happened to be in many respects high tide of the Right in the Western World.
Perhaps if 2010, or 1980, or even 1970 were chosen as a baseline, then answer to this question would be different.
But it is true that this uncertainty pertains only to post WW2 era - Western World before that was clearly far more rightwing in our sense, since it started being a recognizable thing.
The people who scare me the most are those who have an immediate answer to this question, I think.
I think a frustration many feel is in the past a 51% Republican victory meant a moderate gov't. Today a 51% Democratic victory means a moderate gov't. But a 51% Republican victory means the GOP gets everything they want, might as well make it 100%. Sure there are occassional exceptions (McCain killing the attempt to kill Obamacare), but those are certainly getting fewer in the future.
By % here, I mean seats won. Of course it isn't helping that Republican governments more and more are won with a majority of voters rejecting them.
What exactly did they want? (BTW, 'maybe'? )
Childish performance art there. Bad form too since Buffalo where people actually died isn't that long ago.
I also get that you hate the First Amendment, but then the SC did rule that it is legal to protest at people's homes so, well here we are.
More importantly the GOP got quite a bit given how consistently is fails to win the popular vote. The impression is the GOP gets what they want with 45% of the vote what the Dems would need 60% to get. While you can for a while say 'thems the rules', that only will work so far before the system breaks....esp. since the GOP has discovered they can just ignore most of the informal rules that kept the system going when it fits their needs.
"Lol, sorry, you don't get to wave around random atrocities to justify the ones your side is committing." - I've committed no atrocities. Nor have I advocated or encouraged anyone to do so. If you want to play the "all liberals are responsible for anything a person I think is liberal has done despite being promptly arrested and charged by a liberal administration" game, well the sword can cut both ways quite well.
"I must have missed it when the Supreme Court overturned Title 18, Section 1507, of the U.S. Code, which very clearly makes protests for the purpose of intimidating judges into changing their rulings illegal."
1. The Congress cannot overturn the first amendment.
2. The SC cannot legitimately hear a case on protests at their homes because of the obvious conflict of interest.
3. The law applies equally to the home and courthouse which means if you read it as banning all protest, then for the last 75+ years there's been felonies committed almost daily outside the SC in Washington DC yet no one noticed.
4. The court did rule that bans of protests outside the homes of abortionists violated the First. These are the rules. Deal with them.
"Anyway, I don't want to hear peacocking about the First Amendment from the sort of person who enthusiastically supports censorship as long as it's a monopolistic corporation..."
Yawn, another nitwit who pretends Twitter has a monopoly on speech.....as he complains on substack, or Facebook, or Tik Tok, or YouTube, or Truth, or Redit, or wordpress, or a zillion uncountable URLs. Tsk tsk.
We'll leave aside the fact that the Court has clearly pointed out corporations enjoy first amendment rights. I mean really, why do I know more about your side than you do? How have your masters done right by you when they've left you so impotent and unable to handle yourself in discussion?
OK except we had a President who lost the popular vote and a thin majority in congress for 4 years after 8 years of Obama. And Roe is about to go down because of the after impact of that limited victory for the GOP.
Who gets more of what they want if they get a slim majority these days? Sure each side perceives they aren't getting what they should but I think the reality is the GOP gets more. Now libertarians may feel unhappy but libertarians have *never* won an election in the US. The degree they should feel cheated is only the degree that you consider the GOP to be a proxy for a libertarian proxy. As they say your mileage will vary with that idea.
> Is there even one issue like this on the Dem side?
Yes. The equivalent issue for the Democratic base is... abortion.
It wasn't dumb luck that RBG died when she was 87. It was a dumb move on her part not to resign when Obama could have picked her replacement.
>There are way, way fewer one issue pro-abortion voters than anti-abortion voters.
I think we are about to see that change. I am a single issue pro-abortion voter on state races now and doubt I'm the only one.
And the lesson of Jan 6 to liberals was that no, not even winning an election is enough anymore. It's a power grab and one side will not play ethically anymore.
No and one candidate was opposed to anything other than peaceful protest while the other candidate embraced people fighting it out in the street (provided 'his people' won). Fortunately the former won despite the efforts on Jan 6.
As someone who has (unfortunately) spent quite a bit of time in and among activist circles on both Left and Right, it blows my mind how literally everyone gives their supporters the exact same peptalk: "[outgroup] is better organized, better funded, and more willing to get their hands dirty; that's why we keep losing. You think those [outgroups] are sitting around complaining about things being unfair? Hell no, they're out there right now stealing our lunch, laughing at how ineffectual we are. We need to stop prattling on about "principles" and start bashing in kneecaps, or we'll be living [1984/the Handmaid's Tale/insert your chosen dystopia here] after next year's election." Every political gathering, of any ideological group, that I've ever attended involved somebody giving some version of this speech. And they're all 100% earnestly convinced that they're describing reality.
Well put. It reminds me vaguely of Barbara Tuchman's pop history book "The Guns of August" where she describes both sides of the coming World War confidently telling their citizens that the war would be over by Christmas, because their long-restrained but finally released righteous fury would overwhelm the untermenschen in a jiffy.
I think there is a frame-loaded nature to the question as well; at a mechanical level, if you stick to your beliefs without updating them while everyone around you is changing theirs, you will eventually, inexorably, be at the extreme end of the distribution (in the non-normative / statistical sense of the word). But the normative conclusions from this observation depend on your ethical frame of reference; if you're a deontologist operating from a fixed interpretation of a set of rules like the Bible, then that set of rules is your frame of reference, and everyone else is moving relative to it; it's a morally bad thing that your long-held and immutable beliefs are now in the minority, and it's the others who are getting more extreme/bad (also, because the mean is moving relative to you, any increase in variance means that the position on the opposite side of the mean from you is moving twice as fast, vs. an observer considering things from a frame fixed at the mean).
And on the other hand, if you believe in moral progress and don't have immutable "laws", and update your beliefs along with the shifting mean (i.e. the (I think) standard progressive/liberal world-view), then social consensus is your frame to make observations from, and by the moderate liberal reference frame it's the conservatives (and the woke progressives) that are increasingly extreme.
As in Physics, the frame of reference determines who is moving and who is stationary, and I suspect this makes part of the discussion essentially unresolvable.
A few questions, BLUF:
1. Is the left/right dichotomy still valid?
2. Is it worth considering another definition of "extreme", something like "preserving vs. abandoning norms"?
3. Is the "width of the spectrum" increasing actually a separate phenomenon than the mean shifting; increased polarization vs. change in beliefs in the population?
In more detail:
Is it even valid to use the one-dimensional "left/right" spectrum to cluster politicians any more? My takeaway from 2016 was that a new "populist/establishment" axis became more salient, Sanders and Trump being the respective parties' incarnations of that new axis of rhetoric.
I suppose it might be reasonable to question that on the grounds of it just being rhetoric, since Trump's major policy achievement was the pro-establishment / anti-populist corporate tax cut that anti-Trumpists like Romney thoroughly approved of. But the China trade-war and resulting tariffs/protectionism seemed quite anti-establishment-Republican to me.
I'll try to comply with your pre-moderation request by simply suggesting that it's worth considering an axis of "conserving institutions/norms vs. tearing them down", on which the general Trump playbook of declining to nominate appointees to seats (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2018/mar/16/donald-trump/why-trump-appointments-have-lagged-behind-other-pr/) seems to be at least a break from the norm of Republican presidents, and "Find me the votes" is the more concerning break from established norms that underlies many Democrats' claims that the Republican party is the increasingly-extreme one. I think you could make the case that Sanders would have engaged in more "tear down the institutions" behaviors so this is not a purely one-sided claim, but it is (to me?) clear that the Trumpists have taken over the Republican party, while the Sanders/progressive wing has not decisively defeated the Biden/establishment wing of the Democrats (nor has it been completely squashed). And so I think there is an axis here that would be interesting to investigate and try to quantify.
I also think it's worth noting measures of political polarization (increasing in the US over the last few decades, though apparently now approaching "normal levels" of polarization from a historically-abnormally low baseline), which supports the increased "width of the spectrum" in the diagram above, potentially independently from the shift in the mean. Relatedly, it's worth considering the axes along which polarization occurs (IIRC with 2016 being an important and rare "pole flip" from Republican party being wealth-polarized vs. Democrat party being education-polarized, to Republican party being negatively-wealth-polarized vs. Democrat party being both wealth- and education-polarized.) This is tackled in Ezra Klein's book "Why we're polarized", discussed in http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/260-why-were-polarized-ezra-klein/ and also http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/248-are-democrats-being-irrational-david-shor/.
Re 2: how is that different from the Republicans keeping to norms and Dems intent on creating 'better' norms?
To clarify (in case it wasn't clear), I was specifically thinking of political/governmental norms, such as "honor the results of elections" where any examples of Democrats attempting to create new norms would definitely be worth considering too. (I suppose creating a new norm doesn't always imply abandoning some old countervailing norm, though I suspect in many cases you can frame it as such?)
I think cultural norms such as "permit/deny gay marriage" are fully-covered by the existing conversation on social conservativism vs. liberalism, i.e. the contents of the original blog post, so I don't have anything to add there.
...are you not aware of the widespread "selected not elected" memes re Bush, the case of Stacy Abrams (widely celebrated on the Democrat side) and the *deep* opposition and TDS following the 2016 election? I mean, it's not exactly new news, contesting an election.
Do you think these cases led to as much change in the Democratic Party post 2000 as has occurred in the Republican Party between 2020-2022? It seems to still be a big deal for Red Tribe, part of purity tests, campaign platforms, and active pushes to select new judges/election officials, even after the legal challenges were made and rejected.
To me the difference seems to be what happens after the courts consider and reject the contested claims, not the fact that the claims were made in the first place.
Is there anything similar for Democrats post-2000? I’m less familiar with that time period so would love to hear more contrasting examples.
I think it's funny that you essentially just get the obvious out of the way first and then bounce around some. Yes, we know from first principles that leftists are driving overton's window and thus are constantly 'more extreme' and have been since forever (Fascist revolutions withstanding. And no, you're not in one). Cthulhu swims left and everyone should know this by now. That is the ONLY thing we know, because the following question is impossible to parse in this context:
What is the 'objective' domain of viable policy? Because if there is a hard wall we're coming up against, that makes all the difference in the world. It is the difference between living in the precursor to the glorious gay luxury space communism utopia or the inexorably falling Babylon, and figuring that out requires being good at the very things humans will never be good at.
Predicting the future.
All politics suffers from the Kulashav effect. It's eschatological. And you can take that to the bank.
This is subjective and fuzzy and all those bad things, but...
I generally try to summon up my idea of an ur-Democrat/Republican from 10, 20, whatever years ago, compare it against the modern equivalent.
And then I try to summon up the mind-state of Belisarius from 10, 20, whatever years ago, and imagine how I would have reacted to modern Democrat versus modern Republican.
In both instances, I think the Democrats come off as more 'extreme'. They've moved significantly leftward on pretty much all social issues, and moderately leftward on many economic ones. (With maybe an exception for free trade support)
In the latter instance, I think that 10-20 years ago Belisarius would recognize most Republican positions as being the same, or having moved leftward. The worst thing that pops up is embarrassment at them voting for the guy from The Apprentice.
The problem with DW-NOMINATE is that it treats each legislative session separately and there is no valid way to compare the scores of legislators from different legislative sessions. See https://themonkeycage.org/2012/05/polarization-is-real-and-asymmetric/
See also https://nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/the-mismeasurement-of-polarization, which points out that, for example, “Senator George Pendleton of Ohio, who served during the late 19th century, scored a -0.42, and was therefore one of the more liberal members of Congress in American history. He was significantly more liberal than, say, today's Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, who scores a -0.37. Yet Pendleton voted against many pension bills and public-works projects — virtually the only types of government spending at the time. He was also a noted opponent of the 13th Amendment, which put an end to slavery. Menendez is a standard-issue 21st-century Democrat: He supports a host of measures — from massive expansions of federal spending to family-planning funding under Medicaid — that would have made Pendleton blanch. And presumably, Menendez is a fan of the 13th Amendment.”
So DW-NOMINATE scores are not valid to compare legislators from different legislative sessions.
So Musk's meme is correct, Democrats have "gotten more extreme", because they no longer think homosexuality is a bad thing, whereas Republicans aren't so sure.
DW nominate doesn't prove what is claimed here. Imagine the only political issue was the number of buttons on the space force uniforms. Debate rages back and forth, with the hardcore half of democrats wanting 4, moderate halves of both parties wanting 6, and the hardcore half of republicans wanting 8. That gives the republican party an average nominate score of 7.5 and the democrats 2.5, because the range of debate is 8-4
Now, over time, there are some elections and a new crop of super liberal 2 buttoners are elected and make up 1/3 of the democratic members while the republicans remain evenly split between 8 and 6 buttons. how do the scores change? well, now the range of debate isn't 8-4, it's 8-2, the democratic score goes UP to just under 5, while the republican party goes up to 8.75. And if the republicans give up on 8 buttons entirely and go over to 6 buttons, their score shoots up to 10, while the democratic score shoots up to 6.6. In other words, because of the way nominate works, by getting more liberal and trying to be less polarizing, the republicans look more extreme and democrats more moderate, the exact opposite of what actually happened in our toy model, because the terms of debate shifted.
Nominate has some uses, but despite claims made for it, it cannot measure partisan drift over time unless goalposts remain fixed, which they never do.
Making a divide R and D, seems to miss a whole section of the population, that hates both parties. ~equally. The only congressmen I liked are those that have been driven away from the system. Because it's party first, self second and maybe constituents or country third.
This blog post is a stress test Scott is running on the local commentariat to illustrate some completely different point, and I claim my five pounds.
Well if we put aside the whole alternate reality of the Trump presidency - which is pretty difficult - I’d say the progressives at the edge of the Democratic Party have become more extreme. ‘Birthing person’? Really? Defund the police? A ridiculous slogan, a worse idea.
I think it was Bill Maher that said when your ideas start to look like headlines in The Onion, it’s time to reevaluate what the hell you are thinking.
Possibly relevant:
Our Violent Era: How Social Media Algorithms are Kickstarting a Civil War
https://questioner.substack.com/p/our-violent-era
I think it's fairly safe to say that the party that runs against Motherhood, Apple Pie, and America's historical heroes is pretty darned extreme.
The Republican Party has changed as well. It has become much more blue collar. In some respects Trump has moved the party leftward. Trump was trying to enforce a national picket line in order to raise blue collar wages. Reminds me of Dick Gephardt. And then there was Trump's foreign policy of talking to Evil Dictators and gaining independence from the Middle East through tapping into our immense reserves of dirty energy. Those were Jimmy Carter's policies.
This country has had a not-quite-viable third party that pops up to the surface once in a while. This party is suspicious of both big government and wealthy elites. This party has also been anti-immigration. It surfaced as the American Party back in the early days of our republic. It resurfaced as the Populist Party in the late 1800s. It came back as the Reform Party in the latter part of the 20th Century. It came to actual power just recently as Trump led them in a hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Whether the takeover will hold remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Democratic Party has turned into that mix of elitism and socialism foretold in Gary Allen's "None Dare Call it Conspiracy" -- with a healthy helping of active anti patriotism and anti Christianity thrown in for good measure.
Great framing of the question(s), but I’d like to point out some data nuance that can help you home in on answers. First, I think we don’t have to go back to 1880 as a possible party divergence point, we can simply ask when the percentage of party-line votes in Congress began to significantly escalate. And what we know is that party-line voting went from around 60% in the early 1970’s to around 90% on average today (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/1065912917722233).
Some might be tempted to say that even 60% is large, but we have to keep in mind the countervailing tradeoff, which is that citizens want parties to embody some kind of “brand,” otherwise a politician’s party ID offers no prediction of how she will vote. We also want disagreements between the parties, else we may drift into a united front of elites, with no genuine choices for voters. So we can stipulate that some party-line voting is good, but given that our political institutions (federalism, balance of powers, bicameral legislatures, etc) push us toward compromise in the exercise of government power, party-line voting as a near-constant feature of the system signals democratic breakdown.
Next, it's critical to differentiate between party shifting—meaning that some significant core of a political party has moved its policy preferences (the analysis that follows doesn’t overly depend on how you conceptualize how that core is comprised, e.g., loyal voters, donors, bosses in smoke rooms, etc)—and party sorting, which is when people who think alike gather into a single party.
The latter is a significant driver of the apparent gap that Pew pollsters get the vapors over—Democrats who were pro-gun became Republican, Republicans who were pro-environment became Democrats, and so on. Widening gaps between parties, then, is not evidence of a shift in the preferences of American voters so much as a grouping of conservatives in one party, and liberals in the other. You can peruse the very reliable American National Election Studies data (https://electionstudies.org/resources/anes-guide/) to see that American opinions about most issues, be they welfare, crime, taxes, the military, etc, haven’t deviated significantly over the past 50 years.
This matters because the implication of our question is that the parties are moving not just away from each other, but from the voters. Another way of looking at this is that neither party is necessarily moving away from what Americans want. Each party is just specializing its appeal to only a subset of the American populace. And in doing so, each party alienates a significant portion of Americans.
Now, your reference to the Median Voter Theorem might get us past this impasse, insofar as each party has an incentive to “soften” its positions to win 50% + 1 of the electorate, in confidence that even if its most ardent supporters are unhappy with this squishiness, they have no viable alternative. The only problem with invoking the MVT is that it was upended by Ken Arrow in 1950 (https://web.archive.org/web/20110720090207/http://gatton.uky.edu/Faculty/hoytw/751/articles/arrow.pdf). In a nutshell, because American (indeed, human) political preferences are not distributed on a single left-right continuum, there is no satisfying the Median Voter, because who the Median Voter is depends on what issue we’re talking about.
The beautiful reality about American voters is that most of them don’t fall onto the liberal-conservative scale in a way that suits political scientists. This voter wants more welfare spending AND the death penalty, that one wants lower taxes AND gun control. In a multi-dimensional policy space, the Median Voter Theorem runs into real trouble.
Little wonder, then, that the political class has focused so intensely on trying to instill hatred in voters for the Other Party. If you come to the ballot box with your particular, uniquely ordered concerns about abortion, crime, inflation, and so on, you can’t be counted on to toe the party line. But if the chief notion in your mind, come vote time, is how the Other Party is destroying America, then you’re willing to eat whatever line of horseshit your party leaders are selling.
Viewed in that light, the question kind of falls apart, because which party became more extreme, faster doesn’t matter nearly so much as the present reality that both parties are invested in destroying civil society, and increasingly exercising power undemocratically via judges and unelected executive agency officials. In that light they are both extreme, and dangerous.
DW Nominate is a shitty site. They come up with insane lists of who is more liberal than who because they only track adherence to party leadership policy rather than actual ideology.
The whole Democrat v Republican scenario is a false dichotomy. There are more independents in my state than Democrats, and it was independents who elected both O'Bummer and The Orange Menace.
One party supported a literal coup instead of peacefully ceding power in the last Presidential election. One party is about to turn women into birthing vessels by confusing insemination with consent to motherhood. But let’s worry about too many pronouns or genders or “birthing people” being a phrase instead because thinking is hard and red party make strong ooga ooga noises.
This post is somewhat disappointing. You opened up with a meme asserting that while 2008 liberals became 2020 woke progressives, conservatives didn't budge. And then you spent the rest of the article mostly talking about Democrats and Republicans. These are two very different dichotomies and for someone like you, it's disingenuous to conflate them.
Any honest discussion of liberalism, progressivism, and conservatism necessarily needs to at least try to define them. During the 2020 protests, there were "liberal" protestors marching with banners saying "Death To Liberals!". If you treat "leftist" and "liberal" as if they were simply synonyms, that just doesn't make sense. If you actually define "liberal", then it makes sense.
"Conservative" is a boring term, since it typically just stands as an antonym to progressive, indicates a desire to return to a bygone era, or represents alignment with some repressive faction. By that last meaning, to me and from a 90s progressive's perspective, the woke people can certainly *feel* conservative, but nobody would ever call them that.
As to whether the Republicans have gotten more "extreme", I think that's a very hard case to make. The Bush administration had millions of Americans chanting "USA!" in jingoistic fervor, manufactured a casus belli to invade a country, got a million people killed, passed the patriot act...And we're somehow asserting that Trump-era Republicans are more extreme than that?
And to the question of whether the Democrats have gotten more "extreme", typically people would point to the actions of the woke progressives. Except that woke progressives are a minority of Democrats(that one article said 8% of the general population. With 60% voter turnout, that would mean they're something like 25% of voting Democrats?) Certainly the woke crowd is trying to their damnedest to give the appearance of being extreme, but the identity politics battlefront is the culture war which is happening mostly external to party politics. The woke folk may be political extremists in the politics of the academy, in hollywood/entertainment, in the professions, and in corporations, but that doesn't map directly to the Democratic party.
How about 240 "parties" instead of 2?
Rodes.pub/RealElectors
That *might* work, but why use so convoluted a system to accomplish what could be achieved by approval voting and proportional representation?
I would appreciate it if you took the time to spell out your idea and how the US system would change.
Roughly, I think, in a similar way to your proposal. Both options break the two party duopoly. They give voters the opportunity to vote their consciences, rather than voting strategically. And the multiple parties do roughly what your interest groups do, except more dynamically (there's no set number) and more simply.
Did you think my proposal has a set number of groups? What number would that be?
I'm trying to understand your proposal in detail. Which country has something close to what you are proposing?
I see. It did look at first glance like 240 was a set number, but I see that it isn’t. That’s not important though; it’s the complication that concerns me.
According to Wikipedia, 85 countries use party-list proportional representation, which would be my first choice (though other options are certainly possible if that one turns out to be less than ideal for some reason): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proportional_representation.
As for approval voting, it’s only just starting to be implemented. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Approval_voting
For much more information on approval voting (and a little on PR), see https://electionscience.org.
Thank you for the link to ElectionScience. I will study it:
From my proposal:
>>VOTING FOR ELECTORS
Elector candidates must belong to the group they are campaigning to represent. Candidates for each group would be shown on the online ballot in random order identified by full name and email ID. Every online ballot would be randomized independently.
Voters vote for up to 10 Elector candidates who belong to their group: maximum of 10 choices even if the group has more than 10 Electors. A voter can vote for only one Elector if desired.
A voter would mark their desired choices on the screen, and when finished, indicate: DISPLAY. The terminal would display the voter's choices in the order selected. (This is not a ranking.)<<
What I describe is APPROVAL VOTING.
Certainly most first-world countries have a better voting system then the US. However none of them use REAL ELECTORS. As you might guess, that it is a key feature of my proposal: Rodes.pub/RealElectors.
Another point is that the proposal does not change the basic structure of the US government: Congress, President, Supreme Court.
I'm sure someone could make a persuasive case that the US should adopt Parliamentary Democracy. But not me.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_system
Would you be interested to learn that from over here (Germany) many people (including me) have the strong impression that USA has one party with two right wings?
I'm Australian and I get the same impression as well. No public healthcare, at-will employment, and a complete inability to sensbility regulate firearms stick out to me.
Honestly I find it kind of insane that the Democracts can be described as left-wing in any meaningful sense when they continually falter on material issues regarding labour and social welfare. The biggest tell is Americans using 'liberal' to describe a left-winger when many other developed nations use it to describe committed centrists and conservatives.
To me part of the problem is that we can't easily untangle the function from its derivatives
Like, you can be called conservative because you want the political situation to stay exactly as it is (to the extent that this means anything in changing material conditions)
But you can also be considered conservative if you want a constant rate of change, as is allowed by current political institutions
Or maybe you want the political institutions to change to adapt to the way the public opinion evolves, but no faster
Or maybe you want the institutions to push public opinion, but not necessarily in the direction that it would spontaneously evolve
So in the end, are you "progressive" only of you want an exponential rate of change along all political spectra?
I don't think anyone thinks that, even the most leftists (although I suspect it's a common mechanism by which liberals are depicted as 'not really on the left')
So yeah, in my eyes any conservative/progressive spectrum will result in an unclear mess.
Nice to see all that data though!
Since there has been so much disagreement here and doesn’t seem to be a shared observable reality at times I’ll mention my news sources so you can adjust for my biases. NYT, WaPo, PBS, Saint Paul Pioneer Press, Politico. I avoid cable news and social media.
I’d welcome any recommendations to round this out
The Handmaid's Tale analogy really does not work at all because, as you've amply demonstrated within the post, Democrats have moved at least approximately proportionally to the average voter, leaving each party about as far away from centre.
I know you say you don't care about divergence from the average voter, but your hypothetical doesn't hit the right intuition levers at all if you don't also stipulate that the average position of the populace is equidistant from Handmaid's Tale theocracy and current boring Democrat policy.
"Which party has become crazier in terms of worldview and messaging, in a way orthogonal to specific policy proposals?"
This is vague enough to be virtually unanswerable. I think a better framing of this question would be "Which party is more willing to challenge the legitimacy and authority of the government as a whole, and support tactics that break precedent and undermine long-term stability?" I think that gets to the heart of the issue here, and it's the sort of thing that can at least roughly be measured objectively. (Most likely, the answer is "whichever party isn't currently in control of Congress," but maybe one party is more guilty of it than the other once you account for that?)
from what i see republicans were relatively unchanged (if not they outright moved to the left) from the 90s to 00s, but got more extreme in the 10s. the democrats have been moving to the left the whole time. imo this validates musk's picture, though if you wanted to be pixel perfect the republican would be walking slightly rightwards starting in the 3rd panel.
"slightly"
One party tried to overthrow the government and blocj the result of free elections to install a de facto dictator, the other ove thinks you should be kind to all people.
Yes, that definitly warrants a balanced look at funny Elon Musk memes.
I read your blog and the one before for about ten years now. I am afraid this is where we part.
Holy God, is this a *deliberate* attempt to violate Scott's rule? "(Please don’t post comments with “How is this not obvious when [outgroup] has done [worst and craziest thing the outgroup has done], and [ingroup] is just doing [most moderate thing ingroup has done, framed to sound extra innocuous]!”, or I’ll delete them.)"
This is interesting but there's some conversation missing here that could be more interesting. And here's the topic that would illuminate more the the preceding topic:
Why does it matter to progressives if they have gotten more progressive? Are you opposed to the idea you're more distant and polarized from others?
The same question could be asked to those who consider themselves more extreme/polarized on the right. Why does it matter if liberals think you're more extreme?
Is it important we label ourselves the "normal" ones and our adversaries the extreme ones? What if your party or ideology is winning more hearts and minds? Must you insist that you're NOT extreme?
It seems obvious but I don't recall being explicit but extreme ideology is merely relative. I guess what matters is either should we all be closer in believing the same thing? If not, then how should we live with those who believe severely different things?
I'd imagine answers would be something like
- fight a common enemy
- convince the other side you're correct
- censor the other side to gather more support for your side
- divorce/secession
I'm late to the party but I'm throwing my hat into the ring anyway.
I think Howard Zinn partially anticipated this argument a long time ago when he said "You can't be neutral on a moving train." It's interesting to see that Democrats have moved from their policy positions more recently than conservatives, and I can't say that I anticipated this to be true. But It also fits the ethos of both parties. Traditionalism is a foundational aspect of conservatism. Progressivism and liberalism go hand in hand. In retrospect it feels predictable that policy positions would change quicker for the Democrats. I can't be certain this is historically true, but it seems likely, or at least coherent, that this is true historically and mostly unrelated to extremism.
I wrote a whole post on my blog about this if you think it's an interesting line of thought.
If the more progressive party always got more progressive faster, then parties would always diverge with time. This is not observed in history; depolarisation happens.
That's a good point. In support of my view a lot to some of this depolarization may be when when conservatives catch up to progressives, for example, I think conservatives track progressives (with a lag) on positions like decriminalization of homosexuality, climate change, and historically civil rights, women's rights and welfare. For example, on women's rights of civil rights the left may have gotten "more extreme faster" but with historical hindsight the extremeness of the positions has flattened. The key takeaway here being that over decades the majority of the political spectrum shifted greatly on these issues, and the depolarization is not necessarily a return to an original policy position.
I think my perspective then involves questions like "should women be allowed to vote" and the answers eventually bottoming out for both parties. The continued progressification of the party would come from novel questions, like "is gender reliant biology" or similar.
To be clear, I'm only talking about a certain subset of special cases. And certainly there's questions which could/should likely track in opposite directions, such as "should America adopt communism."
I think there's a third set of cases where my model doesn't hold at all, and might be more what you were initially thinking about. Questions like "what is the ideal sales tax rate" should presumably fluctuate around some middle value and not allow for continued divergence with time.
The foundational problem of most analysis of this meme is that "left" and "right" are not synonymous with "Democrats" and "Republicans."
In the original meme, when the lefty screams "bigot!" it's reflecting cultural shifts, not policy shifts.
PS - the meme was developed by a college professor who felt the PC/woke avalanche in his workplace over the past 10 years, which is a pure cultural reflection.
That's a superb point. How would one measure this?
I am not sure if there can be any objective measurement of what is considered socially tolerant and intolerant.
What is considered to be tolerant attitudes evolves over time with the culture. Historically, the lefties have been out in front and setting the table for expanding tolerance in the culture.
Currently, however, the lefties appear to have flipped towards orienting their movement toward expanding what intolerant speech is. I think this meme is all about this shift from expanding tolerance to expanding intolerance on the left.
The misconstrual of culture with politics is, in my view, a savvy technique the Right has deployed to directly link Democratic policy with the Woke Cultural Revolution.
Objectively, these are only tenuously linked to-date.
A compliment and two criticisms:
First, it simply had not occurred to me that, by nature, a progressive party will move more than a conservative one. It's an obvious point, but one that I had missed, so kudos.
The minor criticism is that you can't really call the Democratic Party before Woodrow Wilson "Progressive." It was liberal, sure, but liberal in the sense of "classical liberal," broadly speaking, which was the status quo, more-or-less, so they didn't necessarily advocate for change. I'm just saying that you've got to be careful in drawing conclusions using data that far back.
The major criticism is that I really think you missed the issue in "Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?". For that issue, you really need to determine what median *positions* are, and see how the positions of the parties have moved relative to them. I suspect the results would be interesting.
(However, there's another way to frame the distinction between parties: That one party has fixed goals, and the other has unfixed, unlimited ones. This is not the same slice, but will result in similar outcomes, and I think is more (but not entirely) accurate. Conservatives don't want to go back to the past because it's the past, but because it represents a more-ideal state. Progressives don't have an ideal state in mind; they just want to keep moving "forward," whatever that means, so that their agenda is, in principle, unlimitedly radical.)
Surprised you didn't mentioned this analysis of party manifestos (one could say official party positions).
It shows that Reps stayed roughly the same from 2000 to 2016 but Democrats sharply turned left after 2008. Dovetails with Zach Goldbergs documentation of the great-awokening around 2010.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/06/26/opinion/sunday/republican-platform-far-right.html
> Which Party Has Diverged Further From Ordinary Americans?
> I think this is a dumb question. A corollary of the Median Voter Theorem says that both parties should be the same distance from the average voter.
What the f*ck? This is not what the "Median Voter Theorem" says, and it's not a corollary either. And then (presumably because you already rejected the idea) you don't find any historical data that might measure any movement that might exist. And then you call a six-point difference (54-49) "tiny" for some reason.
I don't think Joe Sixpack votes D or R simply based on how "far" they are from him, partly because I don't think Joe Sixpack actually knows how far each of them are from him. I think it's more like this: Joe Sixpack is hearing what Tucker Carlson and a variety of negative ads are saying about Democrats, and/or they're hearing what CNN or MSNBC commentators and a variety of negative ads are saying about Republicans, making a decision somehow about who's worse, and voting against the seemingly worse one.
Even when I judge candidates (mostly by going to their websites and looking at their platforms) it's not a simple "distance" measurement. I'm also looking at, for instance, what they might realistically accomplish or (more likely) veto if elected, versus opinions that aren't likely to influence actual legislation. Also it's sensitive to *who else is running in the same district*. It doesn't matter that in the next city over there's a Republican who seems moderate vs a crazy Democrat who wants to shut down the nuclear plant and whose solution to the housing crisis is rent controls... it only matters that in *this* district the Republican is a dirtbag I'm eager to defeat.
And I remember there's a regular commenter here at ACX who vowed he would stop voting for any Democrats from now on, seemingly not because of distance between him and Democrats vs the distance between him and Republicans, but because "Scientific American" went full woke. How does the "mean voter theorem" account for all this? (it doesn't?) How does it account for gerrymandering? (it doesn't.)
Some districts are "safe". In a safe district the same candidate always wins. Maybe one year the candidate wins with 55% of the vote, and in another year, 75%. The makeup of Congress stays the same even though we can see that (i) the opinions of voters are changing or (ii) the opponent is changing or (iii) perceptions of the winning candidate are changing. Clearly then, it is possible for one or both parties to move in relation to to the average voter, without this having any effect on the makeup of Congress.
I think there's a few issues here.
One is visibility of leadership.
Trump is way more extreme than Biden is, and in ways that presidents usually aren't. This makes it seem like the Republicans are way more extreme.
However, Trump was something of an outlier compared to historical Republican candidates.
If you go back to, say, 2012, when Mitt Romney ran against Barack Obama, the difference simply isn't nearly as large. Same went for McCain in 2008. This makes it look like the Republicans are far more moderate and less extreme than they appear today. The old prototypical Republican candidatate is very different from Trump.
This could mean that the difference is mostly just because Trump was a particularly extremist president.
Comparing Trump to Eisenhower versus, say, Hillary Clinton to JFK, I think it's pretty easy to see where things diverged more - but that's not necessarily reflective of the party as a whole.
Moreover, prior to JFK, there was a socialist who ran for president on the side of the Democrats. So the Democrats actually came closer to the center from there.
Which ties into another issue: your dataset may just be looking at the wrong time period.
The 1990s is kind of a bad time to look at this. There was a major realignment that started in the 1960s, and in 2000, we had a very different set of coalitions. We have also seen a very significant change in the Republican party since 2016.
As such, I think your dataset is probably looking at the wrong years. If you compare 1960 to today, you're going to get very different answers, and I think if you compared 1990 to today, you'd get different answers.
Moreover, I think that dataset doesn't capture some of the more extreme views of things that have changed on the Republican side very well - for example, there's not a question about religion. That would be especially true relative to the pre-Moral Majority Republicans.
And thirdly, that data set feels like the sort of thing that a Democrat might write. If you took a Trump Republican, and had them ask ten questions, you might get a different response as well, because the questions that were asked there are the sort of thing that a Democrat would largely use to show how they are better morally than a Republican.
If you were to instead ask about, say, vaccinations, it's pretty obvious that the Republican party view on that has gone highly divergent to where it was even just a decade ago.
As such, I'm not sure you can really draw useful conclusions in this regard as if you ask about the right data set, you can probably get whatever answer you want.
I think both parties have taken a hard jerk towards extremism since 2016, but the Democrats have done a better job of containing it from the party leadership, while the Republicans have failed at that. Extremists in both parties are far more visible and vocal than they were in the 1990s.
I'd love to see your last point expanded a bit further. Progressives feel that Conservatives have radicalised if, for example, instead of advocating for 2010 morality and policies in 2020, they propose we go back to the 90s or 80s. Is there a dataset to check this hypothesis?
It appears the two parties play politics at the most meta of levels in opposing strategies. When Republicans get radically desperate with messaging. Democrats let them, and play it calm to appear normal. When Democrats get radical with messaging, Republicans play the calm normal game. Democrats use to be the radical in messaging, but Trump changed that. Now the Democrats appear to be the rational calm party; which I believe they are embracing.