How Stable Are Democracies? ‘Warning Signs Are Flashing Red’
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
These are truly concerning times; in America at least, no one in political power is discussing serious policy proposals to reduce the influence of money in politics and hence address the accelerating transition of wealth from the lower and middle class to a tiny fraction at the very top. This is not a stable course. Even the current president elect despite his populist slogans is going to increase the regressive tax rate based on debunked trickle down economics (what actually helped lead to the current inequality in the 1980s), and wants to eliminate the estate tax all together. Both of these will merely accelerate the current course. No light is visible at the end of the tunnel.
The irony in your statement is that it's pretty much impossible to tell which candidate those voters you're referring to supported.
Can you elaborate on that? I'm unaware of how it was demonstrated.
According to OpenSecrets, Trump spent 56 million on his own campaign. [2]
In historical US election terms, that is quite the underdog story, even if it's still a lot of money.
[1] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/ [2] http://www.opensecrets.org/pres16/candidate?id=N00023864
I don't think that's an accurate way of describing his campaign. The campaign funding includes donations to the campaign in those figures. Only 22% of Trump's campaign funding was from himself, while 27% was from small individual contributors and 15% from large individual contributors. Clinton obviously had much less self-financing (0.27%), while 18% was small individual contributions and 53% was large individual contributions.
The 'someone else' in my post is money spent outside the campaign altogether from superpacs. SuperPACs are associated with 'big money' but to my knowledge there's nothing stopping normal people from donating to them.
Unfortunately, your underdog story is just not viable in a democracy of three hundred million. A common citizen, as you put it, simply has no means of getting the attention of enough people, and standing out from the crowd, without money, or to raise that much money. Even wealthy, well-known non-politicians have trouble with that - you see them pop up sometimes in the primaries. There's a reason most American Presidents were already politicians.
If you add your email to your profile, maybe we can talk about it offline? I'm interested but I have a hard time seeing how we can have national politics without money playing a big role.
He actually did get obscene amounts of free media though.
If you look past all of the fake news, twitter faux pas, etc., I think that FBI Director Comey's manipulation in the last week really did do a number on the voter base, and it's disappointing that nobody is enforcing the Hatch act.
It's so odd to me that Silicon Valley simply can't comprehend that their values aren't shared by the rest of the country. Literally the only explanation they can produce to explain Trump votes is that everyone must have been brainwashed by Facebook news (despite the fact that millions of voters probably don't even have social media).
There was a time when democrats represented the blue collar working class -- who have watched helplessly as their jobs and security has been outsourced to china and Mexico. Now it's Trump who represents their values and clearly they're not alone.
I'm also not sure what "silicon valley sentiment" has to do with wanting enforcement of the Hatch act either. The idea that rural white america is a victim and needs protecting is one of those being spread by the alt-right, and it's wrong to think it justifies manipulating the election.
>Have you tried to start a business before? Are you familiar with the debilitating beauracracy and taxes associated with running a small business (15-50 people) that doesn't take venture capital funding? Nope. I'm a computer engineer and everyone should care about what I care about or they're brainwashed.
Yes. Yes. And that last remark is uncalled for, since I'm not a computer engineer or think that.
We don't know how much damage Comey's actions in particular did to Hillary's candidacy but there is no doubt that the email scandal damaged her prospects tremendously.
> There was a time when democrats represented the blue collar working class -- who have watched helplessly as their jobs and security has been outsourced to china and Mexico. Now it's Trump who represents their values and clearly they're not alone.
Trump clearly tapped into that sentiment, particularly on trade deals. However, the Republican party has largely pushed policies that increase income inequality and hurt blue collar workers for some time now. Republicans have consistently attempted to weaken unions that tended to benefit blue collar workers.
Republican voters don't tend to hold them to account for that because the GOP campaigns successfully on wedge social issues, conservative media still largely supports trickle down economics and said social issues. Fake media only reinforces the echo chamber there.
Unfortunately there isn't much honest discourse on what to do about the effects of globalization and automation on the blue collar workforce now and into the future. I suspect that the job-reducing effects will continue to be used as a weapon for grievance politics but effective policy solutions will be hard to come by.
I think a lot of Democrats were put off and disillusioned. Hillary wasn't a candidate to be excited about, she was the candidate waiting in line whom you were told you had to vote for.
And so people stayed home.
For me, one of the biggest WTFs this election season was when I noticed that Hillary was literally selling "woman cards" on her website. The article below mentions at was meant as a joke, though I'm not sure most people took it that way...
I don't understand what logic there is in blaming Comey for actions Clinton made. Her and her staff decided to run the server. The FBI did not fabricate something here that needed to be investigated.
He outright disobeyed the Attorney General's (his bosses) orders and released the information before he even had a warrant approved by a judge to investigate, just days before the election.
This appears to happen every so often. After all, who do you know who votes for the Whig party?
Are we forgetting that small states and small districts generally get an unjust magnitude of political power? That the gerrymandering game of the last 30 years have favored these small states with small districts? Are all American lives equal or do those who live in cities matter less? The answer is yes. American lives are equal, and those who live in cities are worth less.
Trump did not win the populist victory. Hillary Clinton did. This is twice in recent memory that the majority of the United States was overruled by the minority.
As people criticize Hillary Clinton for arrogantly not visiting states and cities she thought were victories, do people in those states not realize that they get an unjust magnitude of power and influence every time election season rolls around? And that big cities and states basically get zero attention?
And why? Is it because big states like California or Texas are unworthy? Yes, thanks to the structure of American politics and districting. The Texan economy is doing great by the way.
Or did you think that Trump is a populist candidate? So popular that he didn't win the popular vote? Do you believe that Trump will ever win the popular vote?
How long should American voters remember that they were twice denied by minority voices? For how many years ought they bear this stain in their trust in government legitimacy?
Which means nothing because they were not playing a popular vote contest. We will never know who would have won, on that day, in a pure popular vote contest.
Winning the popular vote and losing the contest means you miscalculated, and misprovisioned your campaign resources, focusing too heavily on areas you already won.
Plus, the number of representatives has been capped since the early 1900s. That serves to take things further away from even.
which maybe they should have.
>representatives has been capped
which should be fixed.
The electoral college exists for a reason: precisely to protect the interests of the minority of people who don't live in cities from the whims of those who do. I live in Maine and we recently passed a citizen referendum for a large minimum wage increase in the state. This is almost entirely because of the people in a few population centers. These places will be able to absorb that hike moderately well, but the rural parts of the state are going to get crushed by it, and they're already the poorest parts of the state. It should have been a city ordinance, but was not.
>Trump did not win the populist victory. Hillary Clinton did.
Both campaigns were strategized around the existence of the electoral college. Winning the popular vote is merely an artifact of the system in place, but holds no real meaning. There's little reason to assume that were the popular vote what actually decided the election that the result of the election would have been different, as the strategies employed by both campaigns would have been different.
This idea that there is impact from republicans not voting isn't true, and what happened actually exasperates the popular vote difference.
Which is supported by what evidence?
There are tons of people that don't vote in any given election. Everyone has their reasons, and I'm sure apathy is the leading one, but it's crazy to suggest some portion of them don't vote because they live in a state that won't flip anyway. If you a Republican in California or a Democrat in Kansas, you don't really expect your vote to count.
You mean that it's not crazy to suggest this, right?
Was voting republican in california in 2012 any less of a waste?
I mean, think about it. In California, 33% of residents voted for Trump this year - and those votes didn't count in any sensible way. In Texas, 43% of residents voted for Clinton this year - and those votes didn't count, either!
This is a straw man that is commonly made by advocates of the EC. The top 50 cities in the U.S. only account for 15% of the total population, so it's a nonexistent problem.
This is not the reason the EC exists: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13038525
Judging by the way blue-collar communities turned out for Bernie Sanders, I don't think "their values" are the fascist tripe being pushed by the Trump campaign and transition stuff. No, blue-collar people are not automatically violent rubes who want to throw Jews, Muslims, and Hispanics from the country while reinstituting slavery and criminalizing abortion -- while telling people wages are too high.
The problem is, whether through 'natural' forces, the destruction of union power, etc, most of the "we fight for the poor" is about implementing social programs, and, at best, the minimum wage.
But most people don't want handouts. Most people want to be proud and find value from their work.
The Republican party doesn't show more interest in this than they have in the past, but neither does the Democratic party.
Trump can appeal because he can tell them they can have THEIR jobs back. THEIR past glory. Something they were proud of. This is very different from telling a 50 year old "don't worry, we'll send you to 6 months of 'retraining' and you can start your career over in a minimum wage job -- but don't worry, it'll be the NEW minimum wage, $1 higher than the old one!"
Now, obviously Trump can't deliver on his promise. But then again, neither has anyone else, and at least his promise is appealing to them.
Is it possible the former status quo, while far from optimal, was at least being stewarded by adults who knew how to keep it from going off the rails? A given Democrat or Republican has to at least preserve their party's ongoing reputation. Donald is a nihilist who doesn't even have that constraint.
It may be that a canny candidate with a good but small PR department can do just as well. Certainly Twitter, YouTube and Facebook seem to be having outsized impact and they're relatively inexpensive.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevenbertoni/2016/11/22/exclusi...
"This wasn’t a completely raw startup. Kushner’s crew was able to tap into the Republican National Committee’s data machine, and it hired targeting partners like Cambridge Analytica to map voter universes and identify which parts of the Trump platform mattered most: trade, immigration or change. Tools like Deep Root drove the scaled-back TV ad spending by identifying shows popular with specific voter blocks in specific regions–say, NCIS for anti-ObamaCare voters or The Walking Dead for people worried about immigration. Kushner built a custom geo-location tool that plotted the location density of about 20 voter types over a live Google Maps interface.
Soon the data operation dictated every campaign decision: travel, fundraising, advertising, rally locations–even the topics of the speeches. “He put all the different pieces together,” Parscale says. “And what’s funny is the outside world was so obsessed about this little piece or that, they didn’t pick up that it was all being orchestrated so well.”
For fundraising they turned to machine learning, installing digital marketing companies on a trading floor to make them compete for business. Ineffective ads were killed in minutes, while successful ones scaled. The campaign was sending more than 100,000 uniquely tweaked ads to targeted voters each day. In the end, the richest person ever elected president, whose fundraising effort was rightly ridiculed at the beginning of the year, raised more than $250 million in four months–mostly from small donors."
Any sense for how Clinton's campaign compared on a tech front? I get the sense that similar to the article's description of Trump, she's...uh...not too tech savvy. Was her campaign similarly data driven as his?
I think this election has been a good demonstration of how rapidly tech is changing the world and how asymmetric the adaptation has been. The ground is shifting so fast that it's much harder to predict and imagine the myriad of implications and the way they will feedback into systems.
I think people overlook how effectively Trump uses Twitter. To this day. He drove a ton of outreach and messaging even when he couldn't get it framed the way he wanted in the news, and twice in the last couple weeks he's done some pretty interesting stuff where he represents a position his opponents hold, then watches as the press attacks him for it. He relies on the fact that the internet will get the truth out.
It's difficult to be enthusiastic about the propagation of outrageous lies as a communication revolution. Say what you will about effectiveness, he's said things he can't back up and it's hard to laud that.
Given that people rarely change their view once it is well-established (rejecting new I formation which conflicts with it), even if there was quantitative balance, the fawning early coverage would be more significant in effect.
Which isn't exactly an indication that money is weak.
This was the very platform Sanders ran on. Overturning citizens united was probably his #1 political priority.
Trump too was nakedly pandering. He was just better at it and had a more receptive base for it. He was better at keeping his agenda secret as well. Does anybody have a clear idea about what his administration policies will really be?
If that was true, wouldn't more people have voted for him?
Their policy direction is pretty strongly hinted at by the chosen transition team, no?
And even with all that, the FPTP system makes it virtually impossible for a third party candidate to win, unless one of the existing major parties collapses outright.
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic...
'Over the three decades following US entry into World War I, as working-class and socialist parties burgeoned throughout the industrialized world, American elites chose to deal with the problem by radically restricting access to the ballot. In state after state, petition requirements and filing deadlines were tightened and various forms of routine legal harassment, unknown in the rest of the democratic world, became the norm.
The new restrictions came in waves, usually following the entry of left-wing parties into the electoral process. According to data gathered by Richard Winger of Ballot Access News, in 1931 Illinois raised the petition requirement for third-party statewide candidates from one thousand signatures to twenty-five thousand. In California, the requirement was raised from 1 percent of the last total gubernatorial vote to 10 percent. In 1939, Pennsylvania suddenly decided it was important that the thousands of required signatures be gathered solely within a three-week period. In New York, according to one account, “minor-party petitions began to be challenged for hyper-technical defects.
"Although these statutes have been assailed on all sides,” a 1937 Columbia Law Review article reported, “their severity is constantly being increased, probably because the interests oppressed seldom have representation in the legislatures.” Indeed, when the Florida legislature found socialists and communists advancing at the polls, it responded in 1931 by banning any party from the ballot unless it had won 30 percent of the vote in two consecutive elections; naturally, when the Republican Party failed to meet that test, the state immediately lowered the threshold.
By comparison, in Britain getting on the ballot was never a major concern'
Right now, for example, it is very hard for party leaders in the House and Senate to wrangle their followers, in part because they've lost the carrot and stick that earmarks used to represent (by the way, I used to be against earmarks and have changed my mind and realized that the "solution" is much worse than the problem). Consequently, we have much greater ideological coherence at the expense of actual government functioning.
How about a more representative democracy, celebrating pluralism, and as a result, requiring parties to engage in coalitions as nobody ever has the majority.
I found this out after the election. It wouldn't have changed my vote had I known about it before the election (way too many other issues with Trump) but, at the very least, it is a hope that maybe something good will come out of this presidential cycle.
All of the most influential people in his transition team are family members, career politicians, or industry lobbyists/partisans.
Trump's plan doesn't decrease the power of money in politics; it concentrates the power of money by neutering other forms of influence.
Trump has no interest in reducing the influence of money in politics.
If you wanted to fix it, do you vote for the person who said he wants to change it or the person who profited from that system for decades? Both parties need to end if you want change on this.
Regardless: The whole idea of campaign finance reform is that it's too powerful: Most politicians can't do the right thing because it would hobble them too much in elections.
We didn't have corruption prior to Citizens United? Here's my purposed rule, if you take a nickel from a company you don't get to vote on anything that would effect them. No way in hell the neo-cons or the neo-liberals in Washington pass that.
>Regardless: The whole idea of campaign finance reform is that it's too powerful: Most politicians can't do the right thing because it would hobble them too much in elections.
That might be changing. People are pissed at the establishment. This is the first time since the 50's that the person who spent the most money lost.
Maybe! But now there's going to be even more monied interests spending hard to make sure it doesn't.
> This is the first time since the 50's that the person who spent the most money lost.
This is neither here nor there. Simply spending money isn't the issue.
To me, it seems you have to pull from the first two groups and hope you can use the people you know and trust and your own influence to get the necessary change from the people who have been thus far malignant, but know important things like how to get votes, how to draft legislation, etc.
This is where every presidential candidate succeeds or fails, and most of them end up failing. I feel like it would be hard to argue that Obama wasn't completely co-opted by monied interests as he took office. The finance sector got their claws into him from the beginning.
Not everyone who works in government is part of the problem. Many of them are working very hard to solve real problems. No one's perfect -- that's for sure -- but I'm worried we're throwing out very talented and well-intentioned babies with our bathwater.
And the Trump administration, such as it is, has already proven that the government doesn't have a monopoly on corruption. The man's been "part of the problem" since the 70s and people seem to give him a pass. Weird.
I would argue that the election results show that most people don't give him a pass, it just happens that those that do have a favorable geographic distribution.
>The man's been "part of the problem" since the 70s
Yes! The public doesn't have anybody from group A to choose from, and essentially always gets to choose from group B or C. The hope is that we might get lucky one day and get someone for the group you brought up. We want the D.
Which is why I really dig guys like Obama who have academic credentials and seem to understand the problems they will face. Then, at least, if they do something I don't want I can look at that decision and ask why they felt it was the best one.
Hillary wasn't perfect. So we screamed about it as a nation and, well, now look at the mess we've gotten ourselves into.
To quote a certain orange individual: "Sad!"
I forget where I heard it, but there was a comment about Trump that was something to the effect of: The office of the President is so powerful that in essence the position itself controls whoever is in it. To that end, results can't really vary as much as people think. There is also out there, somewhere on the internet, an essay written by a European leader who garnered the mantle of power despite deep reservations and wrote about the effect holding the position had on him. I wish I could remember who he was / where he governed. It is a really amazing piece. Maybe someone else on here knows what I'm talking about?
>Which is why I really dig guys like Obama who have academic credentials
An immoral act is an immoral act. You just get fancier rationalizations. I don't see the advantage. I actually think it's a disadvantage. To some extent Obama's charisma has kept people from being overly critical of a lot of the terrible things that can be laid at his feet, whereas, if it was still G.W. Bush he'd have been excoriated.
>now look at the mess we've gotten ourselves into
It seems to me to be an error to treat this being bad as a foregone conclusion. Maybe yes, maybe no. Time will reveal.
Are you referring to Václav Havel?
> "With your permission, I would like to take advantage of my unusual experience and try to cast a critical eye of an intellectual on the phenomenon of power as I have been able to observe it so far from the inside, and especially on the nature of the temptation that power represents." - Václav Havel on the temptations of political power[1]
and
> "Someone who forgets how to drive a car, do the shopping, make himself coffee, and place a telephone call is not the same person who had known how to do those things all his life. A person who had never before had to look into the lens of a television camera and now has to submit his every movement to its watchful eye is not the same person he once was.
He becomes a captive of his position, his perks, his office. What apparently confirms his identity and thus his existence in fact subtly takes that identity and existence away from him. He is no longer in control of himself, because he is controlled by something else: by his position and its exigencies, its consequences, its aspects, and its privileges."
His 100 day plan says a lot of things, like 'cut taxes for the middle class', but if you look at his actual tax plan most of the benefits go to the top 1% and many middle class earners (especially single parents) will see their taxes increase: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/personalfinance/2016/11/...
I wouldn't trust his 100 day plan further than I can throw it.
Isn't money in media more of serious concern. What about billionaires co-opting media as their mouthpieces.
nytimes - carlos slim
slate/wapo.. - jeff bezos
salon - John Warnock
twitter - price al waleed
Ironically nytimes, for all their moral outrage, itself is funded by the money acquired through subversion of democracy in mexico , cheating mexicans out of billions of dollars every year. [1]
Or to put it another way, I think politics has lurched right rather than the Post moving left. Do you have any particular stories in mind, though?
Just read that article, it does portray the version from the other party, but always allowing for a proper justification for Slim's position so that one might find it reasonable.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/10/world/americas/mexicos-car...
Bloomberg - Michael Bloomberg
The history of American media is a history of very rich people growing, owning and acquiring media. They've always had this influence.
And yes it may be sub-optimal, but it is not new and therefore difficult to directly attribute recent changes to. In fact, it's somewhat arguable that the current predicament we find ourselves in is the result of making media less expensive to disseminate, not the opposite.
Our society and biology are poorly trained to reject incorrect information. So when small unethical actors begin to proliferate doing quick profit cycles on sympathetic populations, we see a lot of uptake for those ideas.
Want a great example that won't pick a big 2016 political fight? PETA. Despite being a rather ineffective activist group with a large incoherent message, they can inexpensively produce tons of populist media that helps keep them in people's minds and associate them (however wrongly) with helping animals.
'tell the press' emails are not crippling enough?
http://www.salon.com/2016/11/09/the-hillary-clinton-campaign...
Poll after poll, taken after Sanders quit, showed Clinton beating Trump by wide margins.
The Hearst family is one I'm familiar with and referring to above.
Even "educated" people here debate climate science with absolutely ridiculous claims. This is as good as it gets. That's the painful truth I've been trying to swallow.
People use information to make an educated vote? I missed that memo
How would that make things better? Not all sides deserve equal time, nor is there any requirement to present the 'other' side in a fair and accurate light. Having clearly stated up front biases is far better than biases hidden behind a veneer of faked impartiality and careful stage managed 'fairness'.
If by "funded" you mean a rich dude in Mexico owns just 16% of the stock.
You are going to need to provide more than Trump Campaign taking points if you are going to accuse NYT of being Slim's mouthpiece.
Governments have, and will, always be corrupt. Politicians don't decide to become corrupt, it's part of the job. It's how power has always worked. If you want to reduce this corruption, the best thing you can do is to limit the power and money the government has. And the best way to do that is by passing solid constitutional laws.
Surely not an easy task, but a real first step in the direction of a stable democracy.
I have no idea how it will happen, but I hope we won't need a bloody revolution to reduce the influence of finance and economic markets on modern life.
I'm merely arguing that corruption isn't inherently tied to capitalism or any other economic system. That Governments will always be corrupt. Meaning that blaming capitalism for being "corrupt" is about as productive as blaming people for being selfish.
But the current version of capitalism dominant in the world is corrupt, and desperately needs radical change. Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many well-thought out alternatives with good leaders - so we end up with Trump and Farage peddling demagoguery.
Capitalism is inherently and fundamentally the corruption of government to organize society and basic law (especially property relations) to favor the narrow, capitalist class, which is the fact for which critics of capitalism coined the term "capitalism" to refer to the system corrupted in that way.
It seems to me that once societies are big enough to need government, they first reach for something like feudalism, then capitalism. That's a simplified version of Marx. I don't see capitalism as inherently corrupt, but I can see how it has a tendency to become corrupt without tight regulation. It does favour the ruling class, but that's the inherent nature of government - those who put it in place put something that suits their interests.
No, I'm saying "capitalism" is a name for a particular manner of corruption of government.
Or, more fully, a particular-but-still-quite-corrupt stage in the evolution of government away from the perfectly corrupt state of public power unified with the personal interest of the ruler or members of the ruling class with no distinction, wherein the structure of property rights established by government creates and maintains a ruling class which still has disproportionate and dominant power over the formal public power, but in which nevertheless (unlike preceding stages) there exists a formal, if often misleading, distinction between the formal institutions of public power and the members of the ruling class.
I'm a bit of a lefty, but don't see any particular innovation - the fight is between those who prioritise 'being electable' (Clinton, Blair) because you can't change anything if you're not in power, and those who focus on emphasising the genuine problems (Sanders, Corbyn) but are unlikely to gain power. Neither seem to have any real solutions, it's just a matter how much they tap into the anger and frustration of the non-elites. Trump, Farage, Le Pen mine that frustration much deeper but don't seem to have any wide-ranging agenda beyond protecting the elites while pretending to do the opposite.
I look forward to the day we take the next step in human organization, but surely it can be seen that, to this point, capitalism is the high water mark.
http://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2015/10/04/wo...
The dominant system of the developed west in the 19th Century for which the term "capitalism" was coined was certainly an improvement in most respects over its predecessors, as was recognized by its critics who named it.
The modern mixed economy, which has generally displaced that system in the developed west (and much of the rest of the world), which incorporates significant elements of the program of the socialist critics who named "capitalism" without, as those critics would generally have preferred, replacing entirely it's fundamental structure of property, is, while certainly far from ideal, I would say much better than capitalism, though it constantly seems to want to slide back into capitalism (or, rather, powerful interests want to force it back to that state).
OTOH, I think it's a mistake to see the particular shape of the modern mixed economy (even recognizing it as a broad umbrella) as the ultimate stage in economic progress, just as it would be to see capitalism or feudalism as the ultimate stage.
Yes, it's just that many people believe the current mix too heavily favors the government, which creates a massive consolidation of power & resources as well as a weak point susceptible to being co-opted or corrupted. This is what people who want the 'slide back into capitalism' are concerned about. Moving more towards state intervention moves us more towards the horrors of systems that are worse than wild west capitalism.
>I think it's a mistake to see the particular shape of the modern mixed economy (even recognizing it as a broad umbrella) as the ultimate stage in economic progress
I wasn't accusing you of claiming that.
My main point is that by most trends as the power of the US federal govt has grown it has correlated with wealth inequality and stagnation for most of the people in the country. Basically, the greater the mix, the worse things have gotten. As we look towards the ultimate outcome of too much mix, it would seem that if we're not going to move towards something better, then we shouldn't be too quick to write off moving towards a more pure capitalism.
There were some pretty deep recessions in the 50's and 70's. With the very important exception of the great recession, this doesn't really hold up against inspection.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_recessions_in_the_Unit...
That's it, right there. The US is on a declining path regarding this most central issue, and I don't see any signs of change or social/political will for change.
From that POV how could we get back to a state where influence is in the hands of polticians (public servants) again?
What if neo-liberalism really is a super contagious virus to economies/societies?
Correlating, Žižek likes to emphasize how important global decision-making bodies are - now more than ever (e.g. in undermining tax-havens trans-nationally, setting up binding climate-change policies, etc) so damn if we get rid of them (lack of directed global power towards global problems) and damn if we don't (coporate shills)?
Maybe we do need something new this time?
I don't know, I don't see it - I'm solution blind myself. I just have got this feeling looking back into our huge catalog of isms - that we can't (and for many should not/must not) rely on those anymore.
IMHO we definitely need to become more creative again..
Clinton talked about attempting to get in a more liberal justice who could have helped reverse course on the citizens united ruling.
Consider: Trump's campaign relying so heavily on social media; social media as a recruiting and organizational tools for extremist organizations; the issue of fake news sites; the role tech plays in enabling/accelerating globalization; tech as integral to global surveillance apparatuses.
> We are just as ignorant and naive as the next set of folks down the line.
Sure, averaged out over the variety of ways a person can be ignorant and naive (emotionally, financially, politically, etc). But nonetheless I think it would behoove us to stay engaged and reflective about our role in the world beyond tech, rather than saying "Nope, nothing for us to discuss, just keep laying the bricks".
> Trump's campaign relying so heavily on social media; social media as a recruiting and organizational tools for extremist organizations; the issue of fake news sites; the role tech plays in enabling/accelerating globalization; tech as integral to global surveillance apparatuses.
These are all interesting points, but I don't think they explain Trump's win. Trump's win was about a voting demographic that felt Washington, and to a lesser extent, cities generally – were out of touch with their problems and they were willing to overlook flaws that are core values for us to get there.
It was also about another voting demographic that may have been appalled at Trump on a personal level but not in a way that translated to 2008 turnout.
It was also about a political system that turned out two very disliked candidates and produced one of the most extraordinarily negative campaigns in history.
Technology played a small hand in greasing each of those, but it did not create any of them. Nor can it fix them. It is human nature, perhaps, to focus on things we can control in dire situations. As technologists, we can control technology.
But creating a webapp to combat fake news is not going to make Washington feel in touch, motivate voter turnout, or fix the primaries. It won't do anything actually, because Politifact already exists. If we want to do something, we need to do something that strikes at a real problem. Perhaps that requires technology, but what it requires more is empathy. Too many technologists and not enough empathists.
Don't get me wrong, build a webapp if that helps you. I build antisurveillance tech, it helps me. But I also know that being reactionary and clique-ey got us into this mess. It won't get us out.
And of course, demographics who had their right to vote restricted starting in 2013.
After Trump's election I came to the conclusion that I had let myself get sucked into a left-leaning filter bubble, which was why I was so surprised when Clinton lost. I realized I had no clue what really mattered to "the other half" of the country, and that terrified me. Equally terrifying was that there are (at least) two bubbles, neither of which comprehends the other, and very few central mediating platforms that connect these two worlds.
On Twitter I decided to follow Breitbart. Yes, Breitbart, the much-reviled bogey-man of the left. And yes, I find some of it objectionable. But really the surprise has been how not-totally-insane it is. It presents an alternate worldview which is in its own way coherent and (dare I say it?) legitimate. Maybe it's right, maybe it's wrong, it doesn't matter---the point is that without bringing these separate worlds into meaningful communication, America is in for some real turmoil. And HN is part of this. It's rare for me to see things here that really challenge the mainstream narrative. It basically all confirms what I already believe. That's what drew me here in the first place, and though many of us probably like to think of ourselves as free-thinking and willing to confront contrary evidence, I'd imagine that's why many of you are here, too.
As a side note, I'm sure fora like that exist already... anyone care to recommend some?
Rightly or wrongly, many people are not pleased with this. Especially as other players have either joined in or spoken out.
On the one hand, I get it: these are terribly subjective, more so than some Go hack, or release of a new version of Python major release.
On the other hand, a lot of the people are smart, sometimes domain experts. It's fascinating and rewarding to read a back-and-forth between two calm, but fully disagreeing individuals.
My secret wish is some sort of "HN Politics" or "HN Social" or something. The .js frameworks discussions and the weekly 'tech interview' complaints get tiring.
Part of that game is being in the news as little as possible.
You don't see economists deciding and dictating you how software should be built and what technological stack to use, presumably because they have the foresight to assume you are an expert in your field and can do so better than them.
My point is thus: leave it to the experts in their own field. The hubris required to believe that software engineers can somehow "take responsibility" overnight to create a "fair, just, open, and economically robust society" and do so better than experts, is astonishing.
This isn't directed in particular at anyone and isn't mean as an insult, but the amount of economic illiteracy here on HN is staggering, but that's not the annoying part.
The annoying part is that there is at the very least a vocal minority of software engineers who believe they have the solutions to hard problems in other fields, typically negligent of the problems and of the nuances of that field and most frequently of limitations of human nature itself.
The problems are systemic. It's not Hillary or Trump.
We haven't figured out how to make mass organization work effectively.
It has been fairly well documented that societies undergo four distinct phases which repeat:
1. Anarchy 2. Democracy 3. Aristocracy 4. Monarchy
This also matches up with the Strauss-Howe generational theory:
1. High 2. Awakening 3. Unraveling 4. Crisis
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyklos
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strauss%E2%80%93Howe_generatio...
Has it? Citing some ancient Greek philosophy hardly counts as good documentation.
You also have the cycle mostly reversed.
Cycles don't have a start/end...but I'd consider anarchy the starting point for humanity.
You're also conflating two different theories that don't mesh meaningfully. The Strauss-Howe theory is predicated on complete cycles of ~90 years. I'm utterly confident that the US has not cycled through anarchy, monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy twice.
Note that the Anarchic period is usually very short and often accompanied by war because people can't figure out how to live without a ruler apparently.
The idea is, there are seven stages of governance for people. 1. Monarchy, 2. Kingship, 3. Tyranny, 4. Aristocracy, 5. Oligarchy, 6. Democracy, and 7. Ochlocracy
The cycle just endlessly repeats itself through time.
I don't know if there is a way, or if it's even desirable to stop them.
I think the US is at the last stage right now. Which very oddly means, North Korea is now closer to democracy than the US is.
Hear me out, I think the US is going to have to go back through all the cycles before going back to democracy. Whereas a country like North Korea is further along the cycles.
The Strauss-Howe cycle has a very different mechanism; in particular, the time scales are much shorter (80 years vs. several generations), and the mechanism proposed is each generation's individual childhood/formative experiences rather than interactions & social cohesion between individuals.
"According to Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the cycle, it rotates through the three basic forms of government, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy"
The version you describe is the Anacyclosis, which is equally valid IMO but not what I linked.
"According to Polybius, who has the most fully developed version of the cycle, it rotates through the three basic forms of government, democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy and the three degenerate forms of each of these governments ochlocracy, oligarchy, and tyranny. Originally society is in anarchy but the strongest figure emerges and sets up a monarchy. The monarch's descendants, who because of their family's power lack virtue, become despots and the monarchy degenerates into a tyranny. Because of the excesses of the ruler the tyranny is overthrown by the leading citizens of the state who set up an aristocracy. They too quickly forget about virtue and the state becomes an oligarchy. These oligarchs are overthrown by the people who set up a democracy. Democracy soon becomes corrupt and degenerates into mob rule, beginning the cycle anew."
Current trends are inherently unstable. You can't have a workable political system when nearly all the economic gains accrue to a small group at the top.
This has been the fundamental tension in political systems since we've had political systems. Some have been screaming their heads off about it for years, but with minor exceptions there haven't been genuine working and middle class focused political movements in the west with actual power in at least a generation. This is what happens when you do that.
I don't think that's necessarily true (unfortunately). There's probably a threshold where inequality becomes unsustainable, but it could be very high.
See Axelrod's The Evolution of Cooperation. It's most famous for the iterated Prisoner's Dilemma contest, where the simple "tit for tat" strategy beat all the others, but there's a lot more great material in there. "Tit for tat" is just one stable solution, but there are others.
Another stable solution is an unpleasant-sounding caste system, where everybody is nice to people of higher rank and nasty to people of lower rank. That system is self-sustaining and resistant to interlopers as long as it's self-policing, i.e. the insiders punish people who buck the system. Even people at the bottom of the pecking order are incentivized to play along and keep their heads down.
Similarly, I think extreme inequality could be stable and self-sustaining. I think it would require people to actively reject "government handouts", which is exactly what we see in a lot of political rhetoric these days.
Almost all large corporations have extreme salary inequality, but they're still relatively stable and successful entities. Why wouldn't the low-level workers demand more pay? Because it's a "meritocracy" -- we need high executive salaries to attract the best people, and if you just work a bit harder maybe you'll get promotion and earn the big bucks for yourself.
Yes, to some extent. I suppose there is an argument you can make that there's another Nash equilibrium at the point of extreme inequality, where a couple people are rich and everyone else is essentially starving. But that sort of seems besides the point, given how complex and interconnected our current economic and political structures are.
> Almost all large corporations have extreme salary inequality, but they're still relatively stable and successful entities.
On what time scale? I would argue that if governments were even 1/10 as likely to fail as large corporations the world would be quickly reduced to rubble.
I meant more an equilibrium where there's a pyramid and everyone knows their place. (Maybe the lowest class needs to be small rather than large, I'm not sure.)
But that sort of seems besides the point, given how complex and interconnected our current economic and political structures are.
I don't understand this, can you elaborate?
On what time scale? I would argue that if governments were even 1/10 as likely to fail as large corporations the world would be quickly reduced to rubble.
You're right, corporations are definitely shorter-lived on average (although there are some very long-lived ones).
I guess there are some important differences between companies and countries, notably that countries are tied to a particular land area and population. And they're far less numerous than companies.
I still think my point is relevant and worth exploring, though. If democracy (or any other system) is so great, why don't companies tend to use it? Even companies that are worker-owned tend to be run in fairly traditional ways (see e.g. John Lewis in the UK).
I'm fairly ignorant about this, so please correct me if my perceptions ar wrong, but Turkey seems to have devolved to autocracy after being democratic for a while. I've heard scary things about Poland. Venezuela, as mentioned in the article, fell apart. Obviously there's Putin's Russia, though I'm not sure Russia was ever really democratic.
I can't think offhand of any new, functioning, democracies.
Poland is fine, don't listen to the bullshit in mass media. That was just some noise of little importance to anything whatsoever, perpetuated because the party that lost last elections wasn't too happy about that fact.
That seems eerily similar to what happened in the US.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/oct/05/polish-governm...
What about the story that Poland is one of the few European countries that want access to encrypted communications?
https://www.euractiv.com/section/social-europe-jobs/news/fiv...
"Democracy" doesn't mean "they do what you agree with" nor even "they do what's best for their citizen", it means the citizens elects the one they want, even if it's the guy whose policies are so bad he's going to send them backward 20 years.
Basically if people elect candidates that want to kill democracy then the democratic thing would be to let it die?
See, this is why the US is supposed to be ruled by a constitution, rather than just be a democracy. The constitution says that there are things you can't do, even if you have a majority (unless you have enough of a majority to amend the constitution).
Now, granted, that's been eroded under the last few presidents, with (probably) worse to come under Trump. But this is why it matters that we have a constitution that limits what a president can do.
Yes. I.e. not the proposal itself, but the stories about it being likely to be implemented - yes. The "Black Protest" thing was a media-inspired panic.
> What about the story that Poland is one of the few European countries that want access to encrypted communications?
That is indeed worrying, but I don't see anything different here than happens in many other western countries.
A Similar, but perhaps further evolved situation is in Hungary, where right-wing populists have held the power for quite a long. But even in Hungrary the rulings party's power is not absolute, at the moment, and you don't get thrown into jail for having wrong opinions.
The government’s attempts to undermine the country’s constitutional tribunal, for instance, set off an investigation by the European Union. The resulting report warned that the government’s actions “endanger not only the rule of law, but also the functioning of the democratic system.”
Turkey is still democratic. Yes, the rule of law is taking massive hits, and yes, Erdogan really wants to be sultan and makes his way there, but so far he has always won in the election in the same way and rules people won with 15 years ago there. He didn't have a 50+% majority of votes to be PM but neither did the torries in the UK. It might go wrong if there are more actions against legislative political opponent.
Venezuela went from a pretend democracy where everyone massively voted for the popular charismatic dictator to a pretend democracy where everyone massively dislike the unpopular dictator, nothing fell apart because there was nothing to break there.
Russia is a valid case.
This morning Tump tweeted:
>Nobody should be allowed to burn the American flag - if they do, there must be consequences - perhaps loss of citizenship or year in jail!
The fact that the democrats and republicans produced such like minded candidates is the more worrying aspect.
While one can certainly argue that there is little merit in specially punishing that particular mechanism of achieving those unlawful ends, that clearly is not the same thing (or even a similar thing) to a general ban on flag burning.
Titles of laws are rarely accurate indications of their substance.
Does a white college educated young person burn the flag with no consequences, and everyone else gets hit with intimidation ?
Can these actors be unfair and express biases not in the text of the law? Sure. But that's more an argument for policies to address that problem than it is an argument against additional criminalization of a subset of a category of generally already-criminal acts. (And against which, I should add, there are plenty of other arguments.)
Anyone on the left who disagrees with this argument? Re-evaluate your own principles then, in a way that doesn't assume "my values are right and yours are wrong" in the context of a democratic republic.
Then again, why is burning the flag necessarily "hate speech". I would dare say that it's perfectly legitimate way to protest any abuses that are carried out presumably in the name of that flag - like, say, Gitmo or Patriot Act.
Except they absolutely didn't.
But under Trump there's no need to be a dissident, just burning the flag is enough. How lame is that?
So he's, essentially, ignorant about American civics. It's a shame that he's ignorant, and more of a shame that a person ignorant on that topic got elected. That said, the courts are supposed to limit the effect of such ignorance about how the system works, and about what our rights are.
If the courts start failing in that role, that will be cause for very serious concern.
Courts are mostly able to act after-the-fact of alleged violations; by the time they fail to do their job, it will be way too late to start being concerned.
If the person gets arrested, do they get prosecuted, or does the prosecutor know and follow the relevant court rulings?
If the person gets prosecuted, does it come to trial, or does the judge throw it out?
If it comes to trial, does the person get convicted, or does the judge or jury rule that this behavior is protected by the First Amendment?
At every step, the flag burner should be home free. If they wind up facing a year in jail or losing their citizenship, that is not just time to start being concerned - it's time to start thinking seriously about leaving the country. But I'm more optimistic than that. I think, however, that it will be interesting to see how far it goes before it's thrown out, to see exactly how broken things currently are...
dismantling the constitutional tribunal is hardly "a bit" on the extreme. there are two law systems in the country right now - one where rulings of this tribunal hold (in the judiciary branch) and one where they don't (the legislative branch). please tell me how this is democratic again?
There's a lot of latent causes that move these indices (e.g., the collapse of the Soviet Union) so theoretical frameworks are useful for understanding the raw data, e.g. Samuel Huntington's 'waves' characterization of democracy [2]. Not saying that this is right, but sometimes it helps to think about the underlying currents.
Finally, democracy and liberal institutions are not concomitant... in fact it's sort of a bug in democracy that you can totally democratically dismantle institutions like court systems, press freedoms, and even voting [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_Wave_Democracy [3] http://media.library.ku.edu.tr/reserve/resfall15_16/Sosc116_...
Actually, I believe that to avoid those Russell-style paradoxes, it should be a rule that the vote must be potentially reversible in the future with the same process. So the decisions like
- strip democratic rights to a minority
- kill a specific person
cannot be democratic. On the other hand, creating a democracy then cannot be democratic decision either.
Dismantling press freedoms and courts would still be democratic (in fact, many democratic countries do not have full freedom of speech), as long as people could vote again on the issue (I don't see why they would vote to dismantle it, so it's not a big deal).
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/22/world/europe/e...
>Viktor Orban and his right-wing Fidesz party, running on a joint list with the K.D.N.P., a Christian Democratic party, have won the last two parliamentary elections in Hungary, worrying many Western leaders about his increasingly authoritarian rule. The party also decisively won in voting for the European Parliament in May 2014.
Jobbik, a far-right, anti-immigration, populist and economic protectionist party, won 20 percent of the vote in parliamentary elections in 2014, making it Hungary’s third-largest party.
Its policy platform includes holding a referendum on membership in the European Union and a call to “stop hushing up such taboo issues” as “the Zionist Israel’s efforts to dominate Hungary and the world.”
Jobbik wants to increase government spending on ethnic Hungarians living abroad and to form a new ministry dedicated to supporting them. In a 2012 bill targeting homosexuals, the party proposed criminalizing the promotion of “sexual deviancy” with prison terms of up to eight years.
Freedom and democracy is nice, but having the means to buy bread, and not being robbed and killed by desperate people is even nicer.
Edit: I presume the downvotes aren't coming from people who lived in Russia through the 90s.
It's a complex issue, and like others have pointed out, being democratic isn't a binary switch. Take Turkey, for example - in a country prone to military coups, the most recent military coup failed. Erdogan has autocratic tendencies, but people really do support him and he seems to be in power because of mostly democratic elections.
I think there have been multiple backlashes to this in recent times. The socialist revolutions of central and south america, the arab spring, the rise of Putin's influence in the ex-soviet sphere of influence, and now the rise of nationalist anti-globalization leaders like Trump. A lot of people world-wide are deciding that America's place in world affairs is no longer tenable or desirable.
I'm totally mixed on this and consider myself fairly neutral. I appreciate the relative peace and stability that we've had, but I also think it's been untenable. A better world will likely come, eventually, from more distributed decision making that doesn't involve just a small % of the world's population.
But we have extreme anti-American sentiment that has been brooding for quite some time in some of these countries, which we are now seeing actualized in the form of terrorist attacks.
I think we will have to live with those for a while after our meddling in other countries' affairs ceases--if it ever does.
While that is certainly the rhetoric, that isn't actually true. We have propped up secular democracies in Western Europe, but in the Middle East, Asia, Africa, and South America we often propped up dictators as long as they allowed American businesses to do business there. In some cases the CIA orchestrated a coup of democratically elected leaders such as in Iran in 1953 [1] which eventually lead to the Iranian revolution in 1979 [2].
When taking the full, real US history and foreign policy since WWII into account, it actually makes sense why some parts of the world are revolting. That does not excuse terrorism, but I do think it is important to understand the motivations so that we can solve the problem(s).
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d'%C3%A9tat
Unelected bureaucrats become nonviolent totalitarians.
The Demon in Democracy: Totalitarian Temptations in Free Societies
I for once am grateful to the faceless bureaucrat at the FDA who demanded that Theranos submit their device to FDA for appproval. This unnamed fellow is the Stanislav Petrov of medicine.
Which is to say, regulation can be good sometimes, and it can be bad sometimes, even when it's the same exact regulation. The trick is to find a balance that is beneficial to all of us overall.
For example, is there any European country in which a generic alternative to Daraprim hasn't been certified yet? If there isn't one, then why is US special in that regard?
Centralized buying is only a partial solution to drug prices. Access to cheap generics is also a part of that puzzle. If FDA procedures get in the way of that, it may very well be that the net balance for us is negative.
Democracy involves meeting each-other half-way without exception and clearly the likes of Merkel and Clinton have shown no interest in budging on wedge issues, which only accelerates their fall from leadership. Clutching onto power through underhanded further ensures our dangerous position on the edge of a precipice.
I also find this statement laughable when you consider that the republicans have made up excuses and refused to vote for a year on the Garland nomination. That nomination would also be considered reaching accross the aisle, given the Obama picked a candidate that he thought the republicans could live with.
The republicans have thrived on obstructionism and blaming the other side.
The countries chosen in the study, Poland and Venezuela are particularly poor examples as they were both countries that were under long periods or autocratic rule and then briefly attempted a transition to democracy which failed. To hold these up as examples of a general trend of failing democracy seems misleading.
What this really seems to me is people with a particular political bias sounding the bell of doom because a candidate they dislike won the election. Really they even mention Trump in the article and mention his election as a sign of failing democracy - you can't get much more biased than that.
Which democracies have been hurt by this?
For all the current furore right now about whether we're "normalizing" fascism, note that communism (as practised in China) is already pretty well normalized. Other countries are judged on how friendly they are, not their political systems, so China and Saudi Arabia are okay.
It would be great to see some real willingness to repair democracy in the US. Ditching the electoral college would be a small but significant step. Almost nobody likes it, after all! If we can just keep the discussion clear and calm, and separate the proposal to improve the system from the result of this election, maybe we could make progress. I'm not holding my breath, though...
I would also love to see experimentation with really radical forms of democracy. For example, Arthur C Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth has a fun aside about random selection of leaders. The Venetian Republic apparently used multiple rounds of lotteries and nominations; incredible to think that such a complex system was used successfully for centuries. (Excellent writeup in the New Yorker: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/07/26/win-or-lose)
Take this, and remove all references to "workers" and "proletariat", and it sounds like it could be a very workable system, more stable than direct democracy, but with a much faster feedback loop than any modern representative democracy (since any council can recall its delegate to the higher-level council at any point).
Lenin […] issued a "temporary" ban on factions in the Russian Communist Party. This ban remained until the revolutions of 1989 and according to critics made the democratic procedures within the party an empty formality.
The last time we've seen something like this was during the heyday of the Black Panthers. Now, what does this say about trust in public institutions?
A foreign reporter -- preferably American -- was much more valuable to us at that time (1957) than any military victory. Much more valuable than rural recruits for our guerrilla force, were American media recruits to export our propaganda.
They didn't seem to like Hugo Chavez(mentioned in the article, and a socialist) at the time, which is evidence against it being a general trend. I'd need to look at other leaders to see if it is systematic from the NYT. Maybe Hugo just wasn't as good at dealing with the media: http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/venezuela/chavez2.htm
There could be bias from this specific author, though. If this author was going to write any article at all, it was going to be about Trump destroying Democracy. The same author used to work at Vox and there are many other articles comparing him to a dictator: http://www.vox.com/authors/amanda-taub
How much independence are NYT writers given? Does the company take a stance on certain issues? Is there selection bias for certain employees, even if there's no explicit company policy on politics? This could be measured to some extent by checking political donations from employees associated with the NYT. I think that data is public.
None of these necessarily oppose their argument, but good evidence and arguments subjected to enough selection bias can say any story you want it to. http://lesswrong.com/lw/js/the_bottom_line/
Does the difference correlate well with immigration patterns? A lot of the European countries are admitting many refugees and migrants from countries with a lot of corruption. The US might have many migrants from Mexico or other Central or South American countries with a higher corruption index. It could be that the migrants don't care about democracies, because they weren't raised in a culture that cares about democracies.
I'm 27 and prefer a Republic to a Democracy, since it keeps more power closer to the people governed. I haven't looked at their study to see if I would count as a younger person opposed to Democracy.
Sanders is a socialist and he seems to be pretty popular. It could be that people are warming up to socialism or communism. That's different from the system of government, but depending on how they did the study they could've said that socialists are not in favor of democracies.
Russia is a republic. China is a republic. Canada is not a republic. Japan is not a republic.
Describing a form of government as a republic is almost entirely meaningless. It's a split-hair thought-stopper that adds nothing to the conversation.
It is also a republic.
To be very specific, it is a constitutional federal democratic representative republic.
Now, back when the Declaration of Independence was written, your statement was true - for the simple reason that the word "democracy" was very exotic then, as was the form of government itself. The people who used it then, used it more in a sense of Aristotelian dichotomy between demokratia and politeia (the latter word was later somewhat incorrectly translated to Latin as "res publica"), and generally implying direct democracy.
Since then, numerous new democratic states appeared, with various differences in their specific arrangements - and so there was a need for a word that would describe the things that are common to all of them, and distinguish them from states with other forms of government. "Democracy" happened to be the one that was already in use, but also rare enough that its evolution wouldn't be bothersome, and its etymology made it the perfect candidate; and so, here we are.
So, what you were really trying to say - assuming that you meant the original 18th century meanings of the words - translates to modern English as, "USA is a representative democracy, not a direct democracy".
Well, duh.