Or at least, an agreement in the value of good faith discussion in pursuit of truth and mutual progress.
From the left looking rightward at Fox News and many local stations (increasingly owned by and forced to run identical scripts from Sinclair Broadcasting) [0] at the response and the response to the response to coronavirus for example it's hard to ascribe that to just a different interpretation of facts.
It would be nice if people were a bit more skeptical of their preferred news outlets and opinion makers. What I see instead is the continuing existence of the same bubble that led to the shock and surprise at Trump's election. An absolute refusal or inability to consider other views, an inability to interpret events in historical context and with a healthy dose of common sense.
It's not even strictly about the news itself, the underlying philosophy that tilts the news and policy choices seems like it's missing or ignoring a piece of reality. [0] The further from my view the more alien the terrain seems and the less any of the logic makes sense because the priors are so different. Why do we keep swinging back and forth on banking regulations (or business regulation in general) when fundamentally the incentives haven't changed?
[0] Again I get that this is probably what a Conservative feels too but I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here. I went into CS because I can reasonably understand what twiddling a given knob will do and I can control the scope of problems. I have no idea how to even start twiddling societal knobs.
Everyone believes this. It becomes dangerous when we start assuming these are the correct beliefs.
> I don't know how to bridge the conceptual gap between the ideological poles here.
Just talk to conservatives, in my experience they're willing to listen.
"What laws, mechanisms and tools do we use to achieve those goals?" and "How do we pay for it?" -- that's where you run into differing opinions.
Conservative messaging is driven almost exclusively by fabricated outrage for which there is no non-conservative equivalent; non-conservative messaging is driven by outrage over actual conservative behavior.
Non-conservative media spreads outrage at factual abuses of power by conservative elites (such as the dismantling democratic norms, or police brutality) while conservative media creates outrage by giving voice to fabricated controversies created over trivialities, such as over tan suits and arugula, or by amplifying non-genuine controversies manufactured by astroturf groups.
There's no more of an equivalency between conservative and non-conservative media any more than there's an equivalency between actual public health experts and the kind of people who think injecting bleach cures COVID-19. There is such a thing as objective reality and the history of the past forty years of conservative politics is a history of conservatives abandoning objective reality in favor of delusions they find comforting.
Again, "the other side" has the exact same concerns about your tribe.
Take the conservative position on climate change, for instance, which over the past forty years has degenerated from 'there's not enough of a consensus to act' through 'it's happening but it's not human caused' to 'the science is a Chinese conspiracy theory to destroy America.'
Also note the increasing fondness of senior Republican figures, from Trump downwards, for Q-anon and it's associated conspiracy theories. Notably, there's no Democratic Q-anon equivalent of any statute.
Finally, while in office, Trump has told upwards of 20,000 lies regarding objective facts[0]. There's no equivalent lie count for Obama, Biden, or any other prominent non-conservative in very large part because they, unlike prominent conservatives, accept that objective reality exists and see their duty as finding a way to cope with it.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/07/13/president...
Then I realized that this is a stupid way to have a discussion, so here's my reply instead.
I would love to see a specific example of "conservative fabricated outrage". Not because I haven't seen any in my life, but to align our understandings of the fabricated outage.
The most recent one is probably that with a new supreme court judge nomination. Here's what I managed to find out:
- according to [1] rejecting a supreme court nominee from the opposite party is a relatively rare, but not completely outstanding event. Last time (ignoring current senate) it happened when Reagan nominated Bork in 1987.
- in "good olde times" senate minority could use filibuster to block the unacceptable nominee. This option has been eliminated by Harry Reid in 2013. All McConnell did was to keep the status quo.
- current situation is in no way unique: over the history of USA 29 times supreme court judges were nominated in election year. In case of aligned senate 17 nominations out of 19 were confirmed. In case of a misaligned senate 2 out of 10 nominations were confirmed.
- in 2016 dems have brought up some very good arguments to why having just 8 judges is problematic and why the president should nominate a judge as soon as possible (even in election year). I personally think these arguments were exceptionally reasonable and they still hold in 2020: the president should indeed nominate a judge as soon as possible
Your turn?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nominations_to_the_Sup...
Merrick Garland wasn't just not confirmed, his nomination was ignored for 9.5 months. As you point out, it's not uncommon for opposition party senates to turn down supreme court nominees, as is their due. It is, however, extremely rare for them not to hear those nominations at all, and Garland's nomination timeline stands out for its longevity.
Out of 163 nominations, only 11 have lapsed (from your wiki link, which lists an incorrect count in the summary). Reverse chronological order of the most recent 5:
- Garland (2016): 293 days. Opposition senate.
- John Marshall Harlan II (1954): 27 days in lapsed nomination + 49 days for confirmation. Ally senate, confirmed by opposition senate.
- Pierce Butler (1922): 14 days lapsed nomination + 16 days for confirmation. Ally senate.
- William Hornblower (1893): 45 days lapsed + 41 days to reject confirmation. Ally senate.
- Stanley Matthers (1881): 36 days lapsed + 59 days to confirm. Opposition senate, confirmed by split senate.
The point being that there is essentially no historical precedent for this behavior, to the point that we need to look 135 years in the past simply to find any example of an opposition senate delaying a candidate's nomination. Even then, Garland is the supreme court nominee with the most time under nomination in US congressional history by a factor of more than 2.
> over the history of USA 29 times supreme court judges were nominated in election year
This doesn't really do justice to the history here, 1/4 of those nominations happened in a single year due to conflict between President Tyler and the Whig party, and an overlapping 1/4 were withdrawals. The last ~170 years of supreme court nominees have been pretty uninteresting and undramatic.
- Garland (2016): lapsed. Ally senate.
- Fortas (1968): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Thornberry (1968) withdrawn because the seat was no longer available, due to some musical chairs replacing Chief Justice Earl Warren. Ally Senate.
- Murphy (1940): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Cardozo (1932): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Clarke (1916): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Brandeis (1916): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Pitney (1912): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Shiras (1892): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Fuller (1888): confimed. Opposition senate.
- Woods (1880): confirmed. Opposition senate.
- Hunt (1872): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Chase (1864): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Bradford (1852): lapsed. Opposition senate.
- 7 various nominations (1844): none confirmed. Opposition senate.
- Crittenden (1828): postponed i.e. rejected. Opposition senate.
- Johnson (1804): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Ellsworth (1796): confirmed. Washington was president and rejected party politics, but the Federalists were friendly with him, so ally senate.
- Chase (1796): confirmed. Ally senate.
- Cushing (1796): confirmed. Ally senate.
I think there's plenty of evidence that Garland's nomination fight radically rocked the boat in US national politics, and we're likely to see similar boat rocking over the next few years as Democrats are pushed harder to abuse the limits of their power in order to improve their leverage on Republicans.
More intense fights over control of the USSC will happen because the differential population growth between the states and the rigid allocation of Senate seats means that the USSC is being filled without benefit of the democratic consent of a majority of the American population.
The fact that the USSC is being filled with judges who are hostile to the social values and economic interests of the majority compounds the problem.
Political strife over USSC nominations is not a partisan problem but rather a function of the fact that the US constitution, by design, allows the reactionary minority to dominate the majority. The constitution gives the reactionary 40% the legal right to rule the majority, but this does not mean the majority is under any obligation to meekly accept this.
I am not sure the consent of majority or for the perceived benefit of majority is the right way to go.
What if the majority of the class votes that Jenny now must go to all school events wearing nothing but stockings and lingerie?
Excessive public representation can cause poor outcomes, (hard hat on) such as the governance problems in California caused by ballot initiatives. Letting the public write policy does not seem to lead to good outcomes in most circumstances.
However, representative democracy which combines the requirement that leaders secure consent of the governed with with normalized protections for individual rights seems to be the best system of governance humanity can come up with. Leaders, like employees, tend to do a better job if they can be fired for doing a bad job, and that is what the need for majority democratic consent provides. Protections for individual rights reduces the risk of individuals being harmed by mob rule, such as would be the case in the dress code problem in your post.
Indeed, most of the democratic world combines these principles to good effect. The US is an outlier among nominally democratic countries as it is governed without the consent of the majority.
Political systems that allow for governance without the consent of the majority allow rulers to act with impunity towards the majority and, as such have a very long history of abusing the majority. The kind of people who rise to the top of such systems tend not to be the kind of altruistic people who will govern in the interests of the public, and without any requirement for democratic consent they absolutely will not govern in the interests of the public. Indifference to majority needs, persecution, or even genocide, often follows.
Quite frankly, this is the situation the US has blundered into. Over the past few decades the US has gradually shifted from a polity where broad consent of the governed was essential into a situation where the constitutionally empowered minority (represented by the Republican party) has become increasingly abusive towards majority interests. Under Trump, the minority is now pursuing a platform specifically designed to antagonize--or even persecute--the majority. Fights over USSC nominations are just a part of this.
This isn't a good place for a country to be, especially as a large portion of the American ruling minority population is very pleased by the prospect of persecuting the majority.
Conservatives manufactured a moral panic over how Obama was unfit for office because he wore a tan suit in public and how he was out of touch with 'real Americans' because he ate arugula.
In contrast, most non-conservatives are disgusted at Trump because of his cruelty towards others, his failure to address COVID-19, the fact that violated democratic norms to put himself in office, and the fact that he is taking steps to rig the 2020 election in his favor.
The kind of scandals that conservatives created around Obama (such as tan suits and arugula) are not equivalent to the actual scandals that surround Trump.
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/09/911109247/trump-admitted-to-p...
But, when the discussion is actually in bad faith, you wont solve the issue by pretending to yourself that it was in good faith.
"replacing what works with what sounds good" --T.Sowell
offtopic rant, but on the subject of politics; to me it seems underhanded to pursue experimental federal programs eg for healthcare- why not demonstrate it works in a few test states.. wouldn't california love to pass something like that? if only there were a way to pass the buck to the federal government for the homeless...
not that the 'red team' political machine hasn't been pulling on the middle as well, claiming to be 'good guys' while corrupting for their own aims; what grinds my gears is either side claiming any kind of moral highground without referencing empirical positive impact
It's tough to do some things at the state level because there's less money at the state level vs the federal level. It's a lot easier for a business to move from a state to avoid taxes meant to pay for healthcare by rerouting fund from the private market to the public market than it is to leave the US entirely.
The federal government gets it's taxes first from income taxes then payroll taxes, I checked a couple states and most are income then sales/use tax which is a big difference. Not being able to reroute money from employer based systems into the single payer system is a huge hole in any state level attempt at single payer. Also just having more people means a federal level system will have more bargaining power than even the largest states.
> "I been sleeping all my life. And now that Mr. Garvey done woke me up, I'm gon' stay woke. And I'm gon help him wake up other black folk."
So if anything, it means to me that we need to work on increasing roles of individual states and decreasing federal powers.
Some states have scoped this out, and Vermont passed a law to pursue it. The problem has to do with financing (individual states can't print money) and the freerider problem, which isn't about the homeless, so much as more...libertarian states paying all of their diabetics to move to California to get treated.
Even without a Machiavellian "muahaha we'll ship all our sick people to X" good cheap healthcare will attract sick people to a state. It was a problem with the ACA where if enough healthy people weren't paying in [1] insurance companies could go belly up from having to cover sicker people they could previously refuse. That's why there was an individual mandate and a backstop for companies that lost too much money on plans.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2017/dec/...
[1] In the case of a single state doing a single payer system it's older or simply sicker people who may make less money because of chronic debilitating illness.
If you think that the debate over healthcare has anything to do with the substantive merits of one system over another, you're viewing it through the wrong lens. It is purely a power struggle between a class of potentates who have become obscenely wealthy from selling insurance, and the vast majority of the public in whose interest universal healthcare is.
Medicare for All being a success in one state would change little by just adding more evidence to the existing mountain because, again, it is not a struggle between differing points of view, but between monied interests and the masses. The colossal propaganda apparatus wielded by corporate interests would continue to wage relentless war against any expansion of such programs.
at least it would prove to work here- it's not like the US is in the exact same position as the EU
eg, I'm not sure how they're connected, but it's obvious that the majority of medical research is being done over here, and I never see that mentioned in the comparisons between our systems and overseas; if the overpayment we're doing over here is necessary waste for that goal, that should to be made explicit! health insurance is probably taking more than their honest share of the pie, but complaints that our health care is 'too expensive' never seem to take into account that our (expensive) health care is the best in the world
am I wrong?
The EU and Japan, South Korea, Hong Kong, Bahrain, Brunei, Australia, and New Zealand. It works all over the world. Research on the US system accords with the overwhelming evidence from all around: it would work.
> eg, I'm not sure how they're connected ... medical research
Let's clarify. The repugnant gouging in the cost of hospital care, doctor's visits etc redounds mostly to the profit of private insurance who provide no social value in return. The exorbitant cost of medicine does indeed flow to pharmaceutical companies, but the particulars of how they would be affected depend on the details of how universal health care was implemented.
> complaints that our health care is 'too expensive' never seem to take into account that our (expensive) health care is the best in the world
I have no idea where you got that notion; the US is generally not ranked in the top 20.
https://www.who.int/healthinfo/paper30.pdf
https://healthcarechannel.co/how-australian-healthcare-ranks...
The profit margins of a health insurance company are ~5% per the SEC filings of the largest insurance companies, which is not a large profit margin.
Not necessarily at the same price though. The US healthcare system is crazy expensive because US salaries for high-skill individuals are crazy high (because tuition is crazy high?....). To fund an expansion might be more expensive.
I'm sure it's possible, but if you need more funding, you need more taxes. I'm not at all sure Americans would be okay with that. Remember that you have very low taxes compared to Europe or Japan.
* A third of US healthcare cost is assumed to be administrative overhead just caused by the current system. "Cutting U.S. administrative costs to the $550 per capita (in 2017 U.S. dollars) level in Canada could save more than $600 billion, the researchers say." [0]
* Median wage level for healthcare workers (everyone directly care-related, i.e. including nurses, technicians and MDs) is $68k, about 5.5M people alltogether. [1]
* With the efficency gain of $600B one could double the headcount of medical practitioners and still be better off as a society.
[0] = https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-costs-administrati...
Cut new grad salaries in return for halfing their student loan, otherwise the outrageous cost of education is being subsidised by the sick and elderly.
One could stop all research for decades, and the US as a whole would still be better off if what was available now was distributed evenly.
https://data.oecd.org/healthstat/life-expectancy-at-birth.ht...
The healthcare industry does pour a lot of bribe money into preventing reform; see e.g. killing anti surprise billing legislation. However, the bulk of research into why the US doesn't have universal healthcare access points the blame at the blocking minority of Americans who'd prefer not have healthcare for themselves if the alternative is people lower on the social hierarchy (read: non-whites) having healthcare.
This is likely a far harder problem to fix than the already nearly insurmountable problem of excessive corporate influence over government policy.
Citation needed. This is quite an inflammatory statement to throw out there without a backing source.
My cynical short take is that the insurance/medical industry, sitting on a cash cow, will do anything to keep it being taken away. That seems to be a lot of the motivation for some people to support policies that only benefit corporations / status quo.
In absence of that, I would prefer to have public healthcare in one state, than not to have it at all.
That would be my guess too