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.
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?
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
"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
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.
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.
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.
I think it is the bottom line--literally.
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.
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.
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
“Look I just need you to find me 11,000 votes.” isn't an actual quote from Trump.
Yes, it is. That's how everyone can easily know your quote isn't an actual quote. You could also try the transcript.
Come. Machine politics was a thing well into the 20th century. Consider the career of Harry Truman and the Pendergast machine.
You're bringing up blatantly trying to steal elections like it's 2001 instead of 2022.
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?
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 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 ..."
"No no really my side just is obviously right ..."
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.
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.
What does this have to do with the thread you're responding to?
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.
We don't know. But I would say a 600 year old trend is a good indication or what will come next.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
--------------------
[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.