Democratic regression in comparative perspective: scope, methods, and causes
tandfonline.com
tandfonline.com
I'm in the US (so this comment is US-centric). As with so much else over the past 6 months, the tension between federal powers and state powers is being thrown into relief. In particular, the popular idea that democracy is good/right has long been suspect: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fath... .
This is the effect of the Internet and of the "Long Tail": the monetization/politicization of the "long tail" is in segmenting and then aggregating bits of the long tail into larger and larger groups of marginalized members of the population. With poor communication, "the fringe" is only a fringe locally; with near-infinite communication, the fringe is everyone: FB and the various tailored news feeds drape a comfortable bubble over us and cause us to see our view as (manifestly) the only view (since it's our only view, it must be the only view).
As a "Republican", I point the finger at Republicans, a political group which has been a 10x political operation. Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. And Republicans have played the state/local-politics game very, very well.
As others have noted, democracy is a game best played locally but our pervasive communications systems are forcing it to be played globally and this is happening quickly enough that our political systems haven't come to grips with it yet.
The chickens are certainly coming home to roost.
If you're a large country and especially a superpower, everyone in the world has a stake in the outcome of your elections and political process. This means we should expect more and more foreign "meddling" in elections as well as direct meddling in the political process through foreign lobbying/bribery and covert methods.
Maybe what we're seeing is the beginning of the accretion process of a true global government. Eventually the people will realize that since politics is global political awareness must be as well. Campaigns could globalize. Then we're a few steps away from global political parties and then global government.
That's my main reference.
For most values of "we", sure. There are a few who are benefitting immensely from this at the expense of the rest of us, though. I'm not sure how to get your average voter interested in understanding things like intersectionality while conservative propaganda feeds into their basest predilections.
It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.
It should not surprise you that the people whose group self-interests are proclaimed illegitimate by a social theory (more than just illegitimate - the cause of the suffering of all the other groups!), would not agree with that theory.
> It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.
That is not a conclusion of intersectionality. That is, to the extent it is a component of the anti-racism movement, much older than intersectionality and operates on a level logically orthogonal to intersectionality. It's basically the discrimination + position of power view of racism combined with the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive but racism is strongly negative.
(I get that this is confusing because right-wing critics of the movement keep taking the names of individual elements of theory embraced by segments of the left and attaching everything they disagree with by everyone on the left [and then, every generally-seen-as-bad movement in history whether it relates to either the particular element or the left] and attaching it rhetorically to that element, and the mass media—including the center-right corporate media attacked by the right as leftist—covers the right-wing attacks more than the theory itself, so that those attacks shape the understanding of the terms by people outside of either strongly-interested camp.)
Could you explain more? Because it seems to me that's how it's used in practice. See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change [1,2,3], and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears [4].
> the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive
Again, depends on the group. For example, white privilege is seen as negative, but it's just white group solidarity.
[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/28/kashmir-muslims-fe...
[2] https://time.com/5877176/kashmir-special-status-india-domici...
[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/why-ho...
> Could you explain more?
Sure. Intersectionality is a comparatively recent concept that privilege and disadvantage experienced by individuals is not a simple additive or multiplicative combination of the privilege or disadvantage associated with isolated parts of their identities, but that the interaction of such group privilege and disadvantage is more complicated, and particularly that discourse and solutions centered on serving the needs of single-axis identity groups in isolation, even when aggregated, often do not well serve the interests and needs of individuals in overlapping disadvantaged groups; it specifically originated in the late-1980s/early-1990s black feminist movement with the argument that generalized race and gender dialogue missed the particularized issues faced by women of color.
The idea, on the other hand, that there are ethical differences between (in the US, particularly) white identity movements and black, etc., identity movements (and, more generally, in identity movements among locally advantaged classes and those of less advantaged ones), is many decades older than intersectionality theory, having a variety of different roots, the clearest theoretical one (that not the oldest or necessarily the most important) being the "prejudice plus institutional power" view of racism (first expressly articulated in the those terms in 1970), which was immediately applied to the idea of relative merit of group identity movements.
The two ideas can interact (as they do in, e.g., dialogue about "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism"), but are essentially orthogonal concepts. One can fully subscribe to either without subscribing to the other.
> See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change, and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears.
The difference there is about institutional power and single-axis identity movements. It has nothing to do with intersectionality, and everything to do with perceived alignment of group identity and preference with institutional power (Muslims being seen as disadvantaged with regard to the Hindu-dominated institutions in India, while no similar institutional disadvantage is perceived for the white ethnically-British in Britain.)
Doesn't that effectively mean only groups without the ability to stop immigration, can have legitimate reasons to stop it? As soon as you have institutional power (i.e. power to shape immigration law) your reasons for opposing immigration become illegitimate?
Probably the most absurd political divide I've ever heard in my life is between the slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter": on their surface meanings, not only are they logically compatible, but the latter actually eclipses and reinforces the former! But it's another case in point: the meanings of the phrases don't matter, let alone any ostensible outcomes. It's simply a way to wave a flag of team membership.
[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/07/beware-righttalkism.h...
This has been terrible for both parties, the GOP obviously because through its own gerrymandering it’s beholden to extremists. And for the Democrats who assume Black votes and haven’t been forced to implement meaningful change since the Civil Rights Movement.
So we’re stuck with a party that has only a minority of votes retaining power through anti-democratic means.
The answer to me is more democracy, not less. I hope for a Democratic blow out in November, want to see the Supreme Court expanded, and hope to see legislative change to expand voting rights, overturn Citizens United and pass campaign finance legislation, and start using non-partisan commissions to establish voting districts. I also want to see a national popular vote for presidents. And we have to reform the Supreme Court... term limits, a rotating bench, something.
The Democrats do not have all the answers, but the opposition party has to be interested in democracy and the good of America.
I believe what they wanted was to repeat the Southern Strategy by fanning the fuel of racism, xenophobia and right-wing hatred among their white base (an obvious tack to take with Obama) but the Republicans underestimated just how extreme that base had become since the Goldwater days and how unhinged the presence of a black "leftist" in the White House made them.
The Tea Party, being a Republican Party proxy movement, wasn't anywhere near as radical enough as its purpose was maintaining the Republican status quo, and for all the Tea Party's talk of "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" and such in their campaign ads, wasn't going to give the right the blood in the streets that they wanted.
Thus, we ended up with the reactionary movement against both the left and the mainstream right in Trumpist populism, the rise of the alt-right and embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and the start of open violence by right-wing militias against black and leftist "agitators."
Barring some effective, widespread counter-Conservative movement to return the party to sanity and core non-crazy-racist principles (which doesn't appear to exist) the Republicans have no alternative now but to ride the Trump train all the way to the end, or else split and form another party.
0 - https://www.ushistory.org/us/58e.asp
1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanawha_County_textbook_contro...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA
Coal miners have been getting screwed for generations.
I wonder how many Americans know about the Battle of Blair Mountain. I never learned about it in my history books.
I agree that a discussion over the merits of democracy is currently taking place. I _don't_ think merely questioning the electoral college counts as suspicion of democracy itself. I know many argue that the problem with the electoral college is in fact that it is _less_ democratic by some definition of the word.
The Senate is also undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw.
The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy. That difference is why we have the electoral college and the Senate.
I think the US founding fathers somehow thought the senate would be populated by people who could put some sort of "good of the nation" ahead of their own interests.
You can change the framing but not the core issue: why is this particular form of a Republic best?
I see this repeated so much in online discussions, and it makes no sense to me. Is it enough to not have a monarchy? There's no actual reason why democracy and republic need to be distinguished, because we're almost always talking about a system where people get a say in how they are governed, not whether there's a monarch.
Nobody doubts whether Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands or Spain are democracies.
Now to the point about the constitutional issues. Why is it that it's fair for a minority to decide who gets to be leader? To people who've grown up in democratic systems, it certainly seems to be a flaw that it's possible for someone get less support than the loser.
To put it another way, what is having a senate and electoral college that isn't proportional to votes supposed to save you from? Is there a good argument or example of a situation where that made sense?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_t...
The founding of the nation was built on compromise. The direction ever since has been to greater equality. To more representation. To form a more perfect union. Senators used to be appointed by state legislatures until 1913. Would you advocate for a return to that? Neither party used to have primaries as we know them today. Would you advocate for a return to that?
https://www.cop.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/brie...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pri...
A republic just means that we elect leaders who pass laws, instead of voting on those laws directly.
The EC was a compromise just as much as the 3/5ths compromise.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...
The last two presidents elected by a minority of the vote have been an unmitigated disaster for America. The EC has enabled that. The EC serves no useful purpose anymore. We should abolish it or work-around it with the National Vote Compact.
As far as the Senate, 53 Senators currently represent 15 million fewer Americans that the other 47. I think that's that's a problem. It tilts in favor of the GOP today, but tomorrow it may tilt in favor of Democrats. I would still think it's a problem.
The 26 smallest states make up only 18 percent of the population.
We can mitigate it by adding DC and Puerto Rico (should they so chose) as states. DC and PR residents are Americans. They should be represented in the Senate.
But I suppose, if I were around at the nation's founding, I would have been a Federalist.
Relevant piece on the Senate with some astute observations about why it used to work (TL;DR: compromise) but no longer does, and the danger of minoritarian rule:
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21450891/mitch-mccon...
The Dem Convention was filled with "Republicans." There were/are a fair number that tried pushing back against the Tea Party first, then Trump (remember "Never Trump" Republicans? Or "Log Cabin" Republicans?).
The issue is not that Republicans went crazy; it's that party dynamics shifted. So, consistent with your surprise, there's a word for, , as GP put it, "Republicans": "Democrats"
I don't think people are questioning the merits of democracy. I think people are questioning whether the US truly is a democracy.
I'd love to see a shift from voting on leaders to voting on laws and projects. The idea that one person could represent hundreds of millions seems impossible to me.
Participatory Budgeting [0] is truly democratic. Citizens get to vote on how their tax dollars are spent.
I hope that current backlash against our system of government leads to more democracy, not less.
[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/shari_davis_what_if_you_could_help...
We have enough complexity in our lives as is. We need a better structure to manage this, not less structure.
as a member of the (extra-)educated class, the failure to convince the ignorant masses of our superior ideas and policies lies squarely at our feet. we fail to realize that education and intelligence are differences we magnify in our egos and thrust upon others, without regard to circumstance nor environment. we know better, so why don't they listen to us, their betters?
wedging happens all around. it's most insidious when blinded by (self-)righteousness. clumsy terms like cancel culture and wokeness try to describe/mock this sort of tribalism, but the underlying impetuses those terms describe is a significant contributor to division as well.
I can't say I can prescribe any great solution here, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring manufacturing back.
in this way, the rural/urban shift can be understood as an extraction of esteem as much as wealth.
But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it. They can benefit from lax regulation and low taxes and political turbulence and simply leave when things get out of control. It’s fun watching elites squirm but they have an exit plan. Most Americans can’t. They don’t have the skills or the money to go anywhere else. Using your politics to troll the elites is very much an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wonder how long it’ll take for people to realize that.
I guess my question relates more to the idea that the US has a “business friendly” economic regime and any change to that status quo is going to cause the very rich to leave. I’m sure a few will move to Monaco (as suggested by the other poster) but I’m not super convinced there are a bunch of viable alternative places to live.
Monaco.
Modern populism is just a set of lies, where they harm poor people on less visible ways to make money available to distribute, most of it to the elites, and a small share back but on very visible ways.
It is not the elite that sustain governments nowadays, so it can't really be any different.
Spicy take: the nationalist branch of populist voters are very aware of this, and are actively exploiting it to make the internationally mobile professional class suffer.
It’s sad because they’re not getting those things through nationalism either. In fact they’ll lose international relevance and their homes, jobs, and communities because of the folks selling them nationalism.
Both parties are under the control of professional classes who don't actually need to care about the material outcomes for them. David Brooks type Republicans supported a "tax cut" which raised their taxes. Woke liberals want different TV characters represented while knifing Bernie Sanders in the back.
The professional classes have the privilege to engage in culture war, and it's what the parties respond to because that's the donor base. Actual policy and material outcomes are irrelevant to everyone across the spectrum.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24373042
> "Most enemy themes are beyond reach, especially those of inter-ideological warfare. The Nazis and Russians made the best propaganda against each other when they got down to the basic necessities of life, not when they were trying to weave finespun theories about each other's way of thinking or of life."
but on the other hand, Linebarger was aiming at a much wider[1] population than a donor base.
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/48612/48612-h/48612-h.htm#Pag...
> "The first thing to do with the hypothetical man is to make him fit the kind of person who does get propaganda. In dealing with China, for example, it would be no use to take a statistically true Chinese, who lived on a farm 1.3 acres in size, went to town 5.8 times a year, had 3.6 children, and never read newspapers. The man to be set up would be the reachable man, the city, town or village dweller who had an income 2.1 times greater than that of the average in his county, who owned 1.7 long coats, and who shared one newspaper with 6.8 neighbors. Take this lowest-common-denominator of a man who can be reached by enemy propaganda and by yours. Name him the Propaganda Man. (Realistically speaking, modal and not arithmetical classes should be set up.)"
That's a very interesting quote about the reachable person in an agricultural society. It's worth noting that after taking power, one of Mao's highest priorities was raising the literacy rate.
"Political Limitations of Psychological Warfare." and "Definition of the Enemy." are interesting sections.
He does mention that communication, even mid-20th century, was prone to retweeting: "German broadcasters who emphasized the anti-capitalist character of National Socialism in the programs beamed to Eastern Europe found that B.B.C. picked up the most tactless statements and repeated them to Western Europe, where the Germans posed as anti-Bolshevik champions of private property. American attacks on the Germans for associating with Japanese monkey-men were passed along by the Japanese to the Chinese, who did not like the slur either."
(Another anecdote he tells is about getting into a flame war that went around the world. In hindsight, he regrets getting mixed up in it, yet admits he'd had the dopamine hit at the time.)
====
interesting to view this para of "Political Limitations" in hindsight:
> "President Roosevelt, in his conduct of the political world role of the United States, promised Manchuria to the Chinese, Korea "in due course" to the Koreans, and the integrity of the French Colonial Empire to the French; outside of that he avoided specific promises. In another instance (to put a complicated matter baldly), the British promised Palestine to both the Arabs and to the Jews in World War I, and consequently got themselves into a political mess which, thirty years later, was still a mess."
It not only explains indochina/vietnam but also I think we could fairly update that "thirty years" to 100.
This one resonates with me in our current moment:
> From the very beginning the British had the lead. They nailed German propaganda as propaganda, while circulating their own as news, cultural relations, or literature.
One of the ideas he discusses is intentionally keeping your literacy low and your population itinerant.
"...under the French, administrators would complain that they could send delegations to arrange for labor to build a road near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the terms with apparently cooperative elders, and return with the equipment a week later only to discover the village entirely abandoned—every single inhabitant had moved in with some relative in another part of the country."
Graeber on the myth of the ignorant savage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvUzdJSK4x8
I'm not sure that itinerance or illiteracy are strategies I would recommend to anyone. :)
Dreher's Benedict Option seems like a Western perspective of a similar strategy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orangutan#Etymology
> 'Malays had informed him the ape could talk, but preferred not to "lest he be compelled to labour".'
For more literate sandbagging, in Oflag XVIIA (POW camps actively discourage itinerance): https://www.mat.univie.ac.at/~michor/leray.pdf
> "Recteur Leray lectured mostly on calculus and topology. He had succeeded in hiding from the Germans the fact that he was a leading expert in fluid dynamics and mechanics (a mécanicien, as he liked to say). He turned, instead, to algebraic topology, a field which he deemed unlikely to spawn war-like applications."
====
For a certain period (when the lifestyle was actually militarily superior) roaming worked well for steppe peoples.
I doubt there'd be much theological overlap, but do the BenOp people ever think to look at what the least english-dependent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_people already practice?
Bossmang! Mi du sensa. Milowda na sasa lang inya, keya?
[1] protestant, catholic, and orthodox, in that order. One is reminded of the person who is constantly looking for the New Shiny Library/Language instead of writing their app with the ecosystem they have at hand. (cue GKC quote on difficulties untried, Benedict on Sarabaites)
For more similarities to open source schisms, consider https://blog.ayjay.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BenOp-788x... and replace the christian references with geeky projects such as "building a modern operating system", "immanentising the crypto eschaton", "welcoming our new GPT-N overlords", etc.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0BpfwazhUA
[2] who are still around to ask. There's a non-benedictine abbey near me which celebrated its 1'500th birthday a while ago, and at least a handful of benedictine which are probably not many centuries younger.
TIL Benedictines are more Marxist than Marx.
From each according to their ability: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c...
To each according to their need: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/50040/50040-h/50040-h.html#c... (no private property, nor personal property, nor even personal volition)
[3] as I'm not charitable, I'll suggest that being afraid of Obergefell then writing phrases such as "L.G.B.T. activism is the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war" reminds me of Poe's law. Then again, I'm not sure if he fears swallowing "liquid modernity" as much as being swallowed by it. (a complaint which I believe Dreher shares with another movement I doubt he covered: the Taliban)
Point of pride for me if I can get downvoted for a thoroughly classy comment.
Knowing whether income inequality has some effect on the popularity of populism in a particular country cannot be "(dis)proven" one way or the other based on low-dimensional observations of (alleged) behavior and motivations of people in another country. Each individual person holds an incredibly complex set of beliefs in their heads that drive their actions. Some people go to school to learn some things about human behavior and cognition, and then get jobs hypothesizing about the causal underpinnings of human behavior, and then broadcast these hypotheses to the world from where they are picked up and stored in other minds, which then also proceed to hypothesize about other things based on the aggregate of information (of which this is only a small part) they have consumed in the past.
These hypotheses, the ideas the mind conjures from thin air, seem largely indistinguishable from reality, but this is a clever illusion that (allegedly) arose out of millions of years of evolution. Seeing speculative beliefs in other people is easy, seeing them in oneself is not so easy - or so psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy would have us believe.
this is a perfect microcosm of the confusion about inequality (you didnt say inequality but MASSIVE inequality, but the magnitude is not important). the inequality premise is non-causal to the actual problem, which you yourself immediately state: control. the issue is not inequality, but the loss of ability to transition from low to high income. inequality is a necessary, sufficient, and desired outcome of any system - by definition.
we should be fighting generational inequality, not inequality itself. the system needs to encourage mobility and allow for potential maximization. its ok that there are poor neighborhoods, but its not ok that poor neighborhoods have gang, drug, crime, and school quality problems. equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. chasing down outcome inequality is murder-suicide. marxists and communists have killed hundreds of millions of their own people in the last two centuries.
Also, I think many studies on inequality assume things like stocks are all worth face value, which is optimistic to say the least. Stock valuation has almost everything to do with faith in a bigger fool and almost nothing to do with tangible benefits. GOOG, for example, has a market cap of >$1T, now ask yourself, how did it come that there are even USD 1T in existence? Were they printed? Can you touch them? Did Eric Schmidt hold the poor up by their ankles and steal $1T one pocketful of quarters and dimes at a time? Or maybe, just maybe, these numbers are all just make-believe.
At least, I think it's not as simple as people who live in the suburbs must have wronged some particular voting block and should be punished.
Fear is most often the reason with added inexperience of people not knowing what a dictatorship entails.
Restore regulations on “news” mass media, and regulate their political advertising. Including social media.
Reform campaign financing. Apply the fixes recommended by SCOTUS in Citizens United.
State-level voting reform, including universal and automatic mail-in ballots, and ranked choice voting.
Passing and extending the Patriot Act was bipartisan.
I'm not so sure about that. Especially given that only ~42% of eligible voters cast votes in the 2016 US elections[0].
What's most troubling about that statistic is that more eligible voters did not vote than voted for any of the presidential candidates.
Without ascribing motives or intentions, it's not clear that your statement is supported by the facts.
I don't know what the motives/intentions of those non-voters might be. Given that I always vote in every election, because I see it as my duty and responsibility as a citizen, and because that's how we choose the path our government (and, more broadly our society) will take. Especially in local and state elections, where my vote (given the smaller size of electorates in such elections) is more consequential.
In any case, while voter suppression and disenfranchisement are all too common in the US, such activity doesn't explain why nearly half of eligible voters abdicated their responsibility and gave away their opportunity to create the government they want to have.
[0] https://guides.libraries.psu.edu/post-election-2016/voter-tu...
You have that backwards. 42% did not vote; 58% did.
Still way too low, though.
>You have that backwards. 42% did not vote; 58% did.
>Still way too low, though.
Yes, you're absolutely correct, and I got it backwards. I need to proofread better.
Thanks for calling me out on this.
There is reality, and then there is each individual's perception of reality. Each person believes with near-absolute certainty that their personal model (based on a tiny slice of actual events, the majority of which are first run through third parties for ~interpretation and adjustment) of reality is accurate, and often enjoy chuckling at other people's models, but the unfortunate fact is that no person has an accurate model - and perhaps more importantly: hardly anyone seems to realize this (in depth, and on a continuous basis).
I suspect you actually don't, due to the underlying complexity and ineffable, counterintuitive nature of the subject matter.
> but I will not be gaslit.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem.
There is gaslighting, and then there is psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy - and then there is each individual's knowledge (actual and perceived) in each field, all of which is implemented by the human mind, which is not well understood at all, but understood well enough that it is known to be very imperceptibly deceiving.
> Some sources are better in quality than others, considering multiple sources is better, critically considering the information in those sources and discussing it is the best.
I completely agree, and nothing I said suggested the contrary. Although, you may have the intuition that it implicitly communicated it, just as you seem to have the intuition that I am gaslighting you.
> It is entirely possible to still get at the truth.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not - it depends. And sometimes, that which is considered to be true, is not actually true.
> The propaganda is the USA is bordering absurdity in its believability.
100% agree - to me, it passed surreal levels years ago. Even more surreal is the percentage of intelligent people who seem to believe that they have a firm lock on "the truth" about a system this complex, despite often having extensive background knowledge in the complexity that lies within far simpler systems.
> The president says exactly what he means, and his words are interpreted by others like a horoscope to mean whatever they want.
Serious question: how is it that you came to know the beliefs of other people? Trace the lineage of that belief in your own mind, and see what you come up with.
This is not conspiracy theory or trolling, it is the result of scientific investigations performed over decades by specialists in various overlapping fields, who are doing their best to understand the mysteries of the human mind. And scientists aren't the only source of substantiation - not that long ago philosophy and literature were very seriously by a lot of serious people, and may have a thing or two worth learning.
https://thundergodblog.com/2015/07/26/a-brief-history-of-the...
https://www.azquotes.com/author/6592-Frank_Herbert
It's hard to resist picking a side and getting down into object level mudslinging in the information war currently playing out in the media (mainstream and social), I'm very often guilty of it myself. But I propose that there is another alternative available: that of a disinterested (as possible) 3rd person observer who engages his/her mind with the abstract perspective of the battle, observing with playful curiosity the rhetorical strategies, strange supernatural beliefs, and various other absurd behavior that until recently only the human mind was capable of producing. Not only is this perspective far more interesting, but once you do it for a while some interesting new thoughts might come to mind, like "Just what exactly is going on on this planet? These humans have the ability to have a realtime video conversation with someone half way around the world, or deliver a package there by the next day, yet at the same time millions of their offspring die every year due to a lack of the basic essentials required to sustain their lives, and all they seem to do is post short "tweets" to each other lamenting that "nothing can be done". What mysterious force underlies this madness?"
Agreed, which is why I believe we should take a more scientific approach to discussions. For example:
>>> Those adults watch a few conspiracy YouTube videos and Fox News and consider themselves educated and informed.
Is this statement True? At best, it has some truth. But this type of language and thinking is incredibly common right here on HN, a place we consider to be a place of quality discussion. For sure, things are better here than most other places, but it is still chock full of objectively incorrect statements and erroneous thinking, much of it being very nuanced and easily dismissed by "don't be pedantic", "you know what I meant", etc.
Science does not operate by ignoring details or requiring listeners to infer things from vague messages, and this is why it produces successful results. The way we manage and discuss affairs on planet earth however, is almost entirely operated in this non-scientific, error-riddled form.
To be clear, this is my personal opinion (an estimate) about reality. What matters is what the true state of reality is, and almost no one seems to care about that, at least based on discussion and voting patterns here.
I wonder if some sort of a browser addon that added a metadata layer to forums would be helpful in surfacing these things, such that patterns could be recognized over time, which might bring to mind ideas of how we could improve our thinking and discourse.
My money and politics teacher @ CMU - John Delano said something that has always stuck with me when in doubt about motivations - “in politics, follow the money”.
I'm gonna challenge this assertion. I would actually assert the opposite: that trust is one of the worst poisons.
Why? Because trust breeds weak restrictions (checks/balances), and weak restrictions are easy for dictators to exploit, thus undermining democracy.
Rather, I say you want those in a democracy to assume everyone (including everyone within their own party) is a potential tyrant and to structure (and enforce) the restrictions accordingly.
Where the US in particular has really fallen down, in my opinion, has been the enforcement of those rules upon those in office because of partisan favoritism. Perhaps those showing favoritism haven't realized that in the bigger picture, although favoritism is convenient, it undermines the whole system in the long run.
I am not located in the US and there is no law that declares it mandatory in my country, but there is a political culture that a successor administration doesn't reverse the policies the predecessor has enacted in the previous term. That is to give it a chance to have an effect. There can be exceptions of course but there is a general understanding and it is regarded as good conduct to adhere to it. Honor amongst thieves perhaps, but it doesn't have to always end in nepotism.
Xenophobia, racism, and war are deeply routed in the culture, and date far before 9/11. We're simply witnessing the culmination of the slow erosion of checks and balances over centuries, which has exposed the raw flaws that have existed since the beginning.
Spending hours per day following and discussing politics for emotional and intellectual reasons, instead of power-seeking organized action destroys democracy.
>"For most people who are political junkies, their news consumption is not really geared toward information that is going to help them be active citizens in the community. And even if it is, they’re not being active in the community. Most people who are daily news consumers belong to zero organizations and have worked zero times in the past year with other people on a community problem. So, most people are not doing anything."
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/11/21172064/politics-is-for-power...
I suspect social conservatives have so much power in the US because they attend church and that forms a nexus of political organization.
I think it's more that it's easier to agree on things as a conservative. "I don't want rapid social changes" is pretty much the defining trait of someone being conservative, and since it's based on the past or present, there isn't much room for interpretation or different viewpoints. For progressive voters, they want things to change, but there are a ton of different ideas for how they want things to change, so you see a lot of "snake eating it's own tail" as groups don't agree on how things should change. Conservative politicians can just sit back and go "look at the crazy libs tearing themselves apart" and get people to vote for them.
1) Agree on a set of problems are valid problems faced by everybody- say high cost of housing, expensive healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, police violence, children being raised in single-parent households, a completely worthless education system, non-compete agreements, war on drugs, prison reform, etc. Maybe someone thinks one problem is more important than others, but it doesn't matter- pretty much everybody can agree that these are problems. You don't need to trivialize things that other people think are important.
2) Discuss the causes of the problems. Again, there might be disagreement, but you can get some facts. If you approach it as a problem to be solved, people can agree.
3) Discuss possible solutions to the problems. Doesn't need to be 100%, and think about how hard these solutions are to implement. For example, with police serving warrants- maybe you limit it to waking hours, except for hostage situations or some immediate emergency. That's low hanging fruit. If you can fix a bunch of small things, it can still make a big difference.
Whenever I discuss politics with people, that's how I approach it. You can't take an all or nothing approach, it's just not feasible. But if we break down big problems into small problems that people can understand, we can slowly make progress.
I actually see this is a really important factor, and the people who are doing it are kind of like Bruce Willis in the sixth sense. It's so easy to rationalize as "being informed". This combined with the massive amounts of information, misinformation, and disinformation at your fingertips is just too much stuff, all the time.
I expect them to have more in the future as they are outbreeding (republicans VS democrats) pretty handily. [1]
Although not every kid votes for the same party as their parents, most do. And generally this swap trades places both ways, evenly.
[1] https://www.fatherly.com/health-science/republicans-have-mor...
What that portends for the future is difficult to say, as this could all swing the other way very rapidly. However, it's hard not to see data like what's presented in this paper, combined with things like inequality and the global displaced persons crisis, and not conclude that something significant is coming worldwide.
I can have a measurement, equally plausible to many, that democracy has gone up. These are also left-leaning organizations and there facts almost always target countries with governments of the opposite ideological bent -
"And then are the states that remain democratic but have been deteriorating in quality, including the world’s four largest democracies – the United States, India, Indonesia, and Brazil – and the largest democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland. 12 In 2019, India suffered one of the steepest declines on the 100-point Freedom House scale (4 points). Since 2012, India has declined by 5 points, Indonesia by 7, Brazil by 6, Poland 9, and the U.S. 7 points."
There is no scientific basis to assert that Freedom has actually gone down in these countries. Just like more coverage of murders and crime on the evening news makes us think that crime has gone up, greater coverage of so-called illiberal events makes us think that democracy is in danger.
Lacking data, I would go with the earlier in the graph of Democracy trending up and not down (null hypothesis).
Personally, I agree with the Freedom House and the Economist hallmarks of democracy. Therefore, the conclusion is significant to me.
> In fact, 2006 was the high water mark for democracy in the world, with the percentage of democracies peaking that year at 57% among states over one million population (Figure 1), and 61% of all states. 9 Since then the proportion of democracies in the world has gradually declined, to 55% of all states and 48% of states above one million population.
So you are in opposition to even the simplest provable fact provided in the article. And you wish to replace a statistic you don't approve of with... made up measurement? You then bring up that somehow, measurement of liberties would have a scientific basis? Liberties are not a physical quantities. They choose indicators and measured them. You chose to no indicators and simply stated your political bias.
I will choose to appreciate the more rigorous of the two.
1. Do we have defined policies for clean Politics? I mean ethical/fair.
2. I believe, we teach democracy in college. Do we teach rules of politics (1)?
3. When a political party takes the office (white house in US), aren't they expected to represent people instead of their political party?
4. When people take oath in office wouldn't (3) come into play?
5. Shouldn't white house employees (Federal) work for ruling party - but they are govt officials instead of party workers?
6. When ruling party/govt breaks above rules what is the penalty/punishment?
Sorry, if this is out of context for the main topic, but these keep bugging me.
Pointing the bots to a higher "moral standard" will not work unless they are programmed to follow it. But you can't refactor humans, sadly
Take for example all the technological progress of the modern era. Little of that would be possible if we didn't have massive, stable, cooperative societies. Any rational, selfish agent should recognize this and not resort to hunger games. This is also the reason capitalism seems generally more productive than communism. Instead of trying to fight or rewrite human nature, its more productive align incentives such that we can harness it.
The country narratives are not available for 2019 or 2020. I can assure you that if you dig into the raw data you will most certainly find it rife with ad-hoc assumptions to justify their conclusions.
The fact that they have a magical threshold of 1 million for a country and that country get a weight of 1 and India with a population of 1.4 billion gets a a weight of 1 which leads to this gem:
"From 2006 to 2020, the number of democracies contracted to 108 and the percentage of democracies to 55%. Among states over one million population, the decline in the number of democracies was more dramatic, from 86 to 75, a drop from 57% to 48% (Table 4)."
I can tell from a fairly informed perspective that the quality of the process of voting in elections in India over the past decade has gone up significantly due to tamper-proof EVMs and the fact that India's voting commission is an independent constitutional body. Just that gain alone should make India's ranking move up in the Democracy index. India has added ~100 million people over that time. So the sheer number of people being able to exercise that vote freely and have it be counted dwarfs the population of countries who have become undemocratic.
To quote Charlie Munger, incentives matter and to quote Taleb - always always ask what they are selling. Freedom house is selling their rankings to Donors. Press like this gives them the ability to show donors the PR and raise more dollars. Freedom House rankings are optimized to raise the $30,000,000 they need every year from Donors. They are incentivized to say - Democracy is in Danger - for it raises more dollars. Dem are there incentives. Even better when you can demonize the countries whose governments are of the opposite ideological strain than that of the donors. India's rating has cratered since 2014 since Modi got elected.
Incentives matter and always always ask what they are selling and why.
Posts prior to yours have stated other causes (lack of leadership, economic issues).
But a strong and widely shared/held understanding of civics would have provided a framework for discussing these issues and potential resolutions.
civics to include both the what (how government works) and the why (power arising from the people, leviation so life is worth living, government to secure rights (which includes economic provisions such as a social safety net to ensure delivery of those rights), ...), leading to the responsibility/expectations on all of society, from the individual on up.
We today (as a culture) are so advanced in terms of STEM that we think we know it all, and are completely blind to how much we don't know. The founding fathers had much greater wisdom/understanding on how politics and society work and how to make them work, we've lost that.
Finally, ALL of the above is completely neutral to "conservative" or "progressive" politics. The founding fathers debated these just as strongly as we do today, on all aspects of every point I raised above.
Our experience has been that anything that results from our work will be compromised, and we want to aim high so that we can compromise somewhere in the middle.
It seems like you're implying that people who argue for "x" are ignorant of the fact that they'll get a fraction of x. Anecdotally, people who argue for "x" are aware of the fact that they'll get a fraction... so they ask for very high values of x.
Even worse I'd say is the lack of psychology and neuroscience education. If one doesn't understand the fundamentals of how the human mind works, it's very easy to fall victim to lies from any source, including their own mind.
> A lot of citizens are not capable of separating fact from fiction.
Including people that perceive that they do have the ability. Everyone suffers from it to varying degrees (the specifics of which are not known, despite the patterns that appear to be there), but it is near impossible to perceive in oneself for many interesting reasons, including some possibly significant ones which have been observed but have not yet gotten much attention in the scientific community (who does not know what it does not know, something which may only be perceivable in certain states of mind).
My conspiracy theory is that it is not accidental that we don't teach these things in school outside of specialized programs, because it is a vector that can be used to distort beliefs across all demographics, including self-perceived informed rationalists, and the effects of this can be observed on a daily basis.
Democratic regression started when the majority of people in countries like the USA started to feel as if they had no viable choice that actually represented their own interests or ideas. This is why most people don't vote. They see it as a choice between "the puppet on the left" and "the puppet on the right."
I mean take 2012. Obama had clearly demonstrated himself to be Bush's third term, at least when it comes to quite a few issues such as banking reform and remaining entangled in Iraq. For all his "change" rhetoric Obama didn't change much. His opposition was Mitt Romney, a literal member of the financial elite who signaled nothing beyond an intention to represent that elite.
Nobody signaled an intent to represent the actual interests of the middle or working class in the US. Nobody talked about pushing back on unfair trade policies or taking any other steps to return good jobs (a.k.a. not service jobs) to the US. Nobody even really acknowledged that there was a problem.
Then in 2016 you had Hillary Clinton who clearly would continue Obama's policies and seemed to be working on trade pacts to further accelerate outsourcing to China, and you had a wildcard self-styled populist upstart. I can't stand Trump, consider him dangerous, and did not vote for him, but I can totally understand people who did. He was the first candidate in at least a generation to even acknowledge the economic collapse of the American center.
The Democratic Party and the left continue to think Trump's victory was about race, and I still think they are wrong. Yes there are racists and yes they like Trump, but those people were never going to vote for Hillary Clinton anyway. Maybe a few of them voted when they otherwise would have stayed home, but I don't buy the idea that some tide of closet neo-Nazis and 4chan incels swept him into office. Do they ever ask people in these polls if they actually voted or intend to vote?
Trump won because historically blue "rust belt" states tipped, and that was because of his economic rhetoric... which was ironically liberal in some ways. He ran as a social conservative but as an economic liberal, and that overlaps quite well with working class America. He may be lying and just saying what he needs to say to get elected, but that's what he said and that's what people voted for.
Another major ingredient was the collapse of trust. The Bush administration lied us into a war, and then in 2008 we bailed out the banking interests that created the crisis while leaving the actual economy to rot. Those two events did more to undermine American democracy than a thousand Russian troll farms could ever achieve. People no longer believe in our system.
We've been a very dysfunctional democracy for decades. What we are seeing is the final collapse of the facade revealing the rotten structure underneath.
https://taibbi.substack.com/p/kansas-should-go-f-itself
taibbi and thomas frank's writings on this subject have been very good. racism is an easy scapegoat because it is more or less a purely effervescent moral failing that can be broadly applied without asking uncomfortable questions about the institutional failings of establishment neoliberalism, clintonism, "nudge theory" and the rest.
The things people talk about and get emotional about are the things that sway elections, and therefore these are the topics politicians focus on. I don't think you have to imagine some sophisticated conspiracy to sideline economic issues... politicians just don't pay much attention to them because their constituents aren't bringing them up. Meanwhile their donors have a clear position in favor of the status quo, so that ends up being their economic agenda by default.
Look at how charged the Supreme Court battle is, which is mostly about abortion, and compare that to the complete lack of interest shown by politicians on either side regarding our record unemployment numbers or the COVID driven collapse of small businesses across the USA. We are in the midst of a small local business holocaust in the USA and a profound consolidation of corporate "big chain" control over local economies, and not a word... we are too busy screaming about Ginsburg's replacement.
I am not saying those "culture war" issues don't matter. Clearly they matter a lot to some people in very real ways. I'm just pointing out how they dominate the political discourse and prevent other issues from being debated. The economic and operational issues I listed above arguably affect more people than most of the culture war issues, and the Venn diagrams overlap quite a bit too. Gay rights mostly affects gay people, but wage stagnation affects everyone including gay people.
It’s weird how no one talks about this most fundamental issue. You’re literally the first person I have seen to bring this up.
Clinton almost won with an absolutely horrible campaign that failed to excite anyone. She even through in that awful 'deporables' comment. I know what she meant, but it sounded like she was insulting the entire US working class.
Donald Trump is one of the most consistently unpopular and widely disliked presidents in history. He has his fanatical base, but that base is no more than 30% of the population at best. Most other people can't stand him and the only reason they'd vote for him is if they feel there is no better choice. The fact that there is any question at all about the outcome of this election shows just how pathetic the Democrats are at connecting with the electorate.
The slope is slippery. It begun with Nazism and pedophilia advocacy but already includes Corona "misinformation", r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, Hamas' Twitter account, WikiLeaks, Mila Yanniopolis, and a whole host of stuff I just don't know about because some powerful fucks decided it was too dangerous for me (please don't read so much into my examples - these are the ones I know about. I think both the left and the right is guilty of trying to censor the other side). If you don't believe this creeping censorship will eventually reach you, you either have very vanilla opinions or are very naive.
Furthermore, more and more power over expression online is concentrated in a handful of American mega corporations, making it practically impossible to escape it. You can't "just start your own site" if Google blacklists it and refuses to index it because no one will find it. They effectively control the online discourse.
Just yesterday, Leila Khaled was supposed to participate in an discussion panel online sponsored by an American university. Zionist lobby groups got her booted from Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook, preventing the meeting from taking place. Reportedly, the university had a backup if one platform would boot her, but not all three! To the best of my knowledge, there are no alternative to these platforms. If they won't allow you to stream to an international audience, you just can't do it. At least not if you are not a techie who knows how to setup your own video streaming server.
I think there is a huge need for software for censorship resistant online platforms. Something that is distributed so that it can't be taken down, but not so complicated that only a few can use it.
Hypothesis: it's the opposite. The era of bidirectional mass communication is allowing geographically-dispersed fringe interests to consolidate into political blocs. Interest groups that previously would have been censored implicitly (by being a small, isolated group in a larger community) or explicitly (by the authority-controlled media, such as cable, television, and radio, having standards and practices that excluded giving pedophiles a half hour to plead the pro-side of their case on the air) now have the tools to communicate with each other and the public outside of gatekeepers.
I agree that individuals should have the right to believe what they wish, however heinous their opinions may be. But it's clear that social media platforms are very powerful credibility launderers that give nefarious actors an incredible amount of power in shaping public discourse, and we can't ignore that either. We have to take disingenuous efforts to pollute discourse by malicious actors as seriously as we take protecting genuine speech.
I am from Brazil, and media (both local and international) loves to portray him as some sort of conservative dictator.
Except he been trying to do the opposite for a while now, for example people called him "genocidal" because he opposed cities issuing lockdown orders.
Thing is, in our constitution only the president can issue lockdown, and only after being reviewed by three different oversight groups, because we had a nasty dicatorship during cold war, our new constituion was written deliberately to make really hard to create a new dictatorship, yet our supreme court is happily ignoring a lot of parts of our constitution to give the government dicatorship powers, and the president is opposing it, but every time he does so, people say he, is the dictator.
Another case: population voted against arms control in a country-wide vote around 2003, government back then issued arms control anyway (they made it legal to have weapons if you had a license, and then stopped giving licenses, thus effectively banning weapons against the wishes of the population), Bolsonaro more than once talked about it, and tried to undo the ban and follow what was voted for, again people kept saying that this was him being a dictator.
Our supreme court been under heavy criticism lately for various reasons, and they reacted badly (for example one judge called police on a guy that criticized him in person on an airplane and got him arrested), the media is portraying this as the president trying to get rid of the supreme court and have more power for himself, and the supreme court as democratic heroes, but that is obviously not what is going on, the supreme court for example breached a fundamental principle of democracy recently when they started a case themselves, becoming court+pŕosecutors at same time, something that is NOT supposed to ever happen, they also are trying to institute a "Fake News" law, something that obviously goes against our constitution that guarantees free speech.
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has long been notorious for his homophobic comments, once declaring: “Yes, I’m homophobic – and very proud of it.”
Bolsonaro claimed “homosexual fundamentalists” were brainwashing heterosexual children to “become gays and lesbians to satisfy them sexually in the future”.
He doesn't sound very democratic to me.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/apr/26/bolsonaro-accu...
I'm sorry, but I think you're confusing liberalism with democracy. In a liberal democracy, we usually balance the two, by placing some realm of basic human and constitutional rights outside the realm of democratic political contestation. To say that submitting certain questions to the voters is undemocratic is a contradiction in terms.