The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.
Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey.
Someone made a silly mistake in the booking, but either nobody noticed, or couldn't be bothered to correct it, or dared not be the one to tell Trump the mistake had been made. So the President (staff? apparently not him) gives a final press conference in the parking lot of a suburban store. It would be like watching the Emperor of Japan surrender in a dinghy because somebody brought the wrong Missouri.
Unforced error. Abandonment of dignity. Refusal to acknowledge the situation. Hallmarks of the administration.
(News accuracy notice: while it appears to have been an official press conference only Guiliani was actually there and not Trump himself)
The point is that when negotiations are at stake, you want an actual diplomat at the table, not an insult comic. If Joe Sixpack can keep his shit together enough to avert a war, feel free to elect him.
I would be very interested to know your life history.
Politics is about persuasion. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
https://www.cop.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/minute/Duel...
https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1851-1900/Th...
I personally cannot tell if it was intentional. Trump has held a lot of events at businesses that I wouldn't traditionally expect to hold the event. The name overlap is very interesting, though.
Hanlon's razor tells that it was a stupid mistake
Good new ideas: Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.
Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
Just to be clear I’m not on one side or the other because I’m relatively ignorant on the topic. Just looking for evidence
I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.
Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks).
These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills.
This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors.
However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3].
All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local).
[1] https://www.freelancer.com/jobs/ [2] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_united_states.htm... [3] https://www.company-list.org/capacitors_in_china.html
To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit.
I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy
I do think it's benefited other nations, but -- getting more into personal opinion -- I also think the "help other nations" argument is mostly used to justify cheapening wages. If companies were paying foreign workers the same rates that they would have paid US workers I'd be more empathetic to the argument. But something about the fact that the top 90th percentile of Americans has seen huge gains in the last 40 years, while the middle to bottom percentile has seen neutral or losses [1] raises flags to me that the push towards globalization was selfishly motivated. I know it's a huge inference to say the stagnating wages are caused by globalization, but realistically I would say it's the combination of outsourced labor/manufacturing, immigration, rise of women in the workforce, rise of minorities in the workforce, and automation. Most of these are positive changes, but I still think the average blue collar worker suffered a cost that the hyper-wealthy elite did not, so at the moment I don't see the push for globalization as a very selfless initiative.
Is it right, or wise in the long term, to use our position of power to stop the growth of wealth in non-developed countries? On the other hand, do we have any sort of obligation to elevate the standards of living of people in non-developed countries, especially when it may impact the standards of people living in our borders?
There is a moral question to be answered, especially given our purported system of values and the way in which the wealthy and wealthy countries came to be as such.
I'm not staking out a position or trying to shame anyone. I'm just saying I think it is the underlying question we should be thinking about to decide how we judge globalization and its effects.
> The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état (Portuguese: Golpe de estado no Brasil em 1964 or, more colloquially, golpe de 64) was a series of events in Brazil from March 31 to April 1 that led to the overthrow of President João Goulart by members of the Brazilian Armed Forces, supported by the United States government.The coup put an end to the government of Goulart (also known as 'Jango'), a member of the Brazilian Labour Party [...] although a moderate nationalist, Goulart was accused of being a communist by right-wing militants, he was unable to take office [...] The coup brought to Brazil a military regime politically aligned to the interests of the United States government. This regime lasted until 1985, when Neves was indirectly elected the first civilian president of Brazil since the 1960 elections.
The usual same old story.
It's the same thing they did to Lula.
But you're right, bombed was an exaggeration on my part, they usually invade or send weapons and cavalry
Colonization through military power is not hegemony, is tyranny
If advancing the interests of people outside the US to the detriment of US citizens accomplishes that, it's well within their purpose.
https://chicago.suntimes.com/news/2019/5/8/18619206/under-do...
Lower than the UK and Spain, a bit higher than Italy and France.
US deaths minus NY: 200,248 NY population: 310,674,858 Death rate per million: 644
You'd have to remove NJ and Connecticut (the top three states) to make much of a difference.
The US has numbers comparable to high density countries with extensive use of public transport. That is just terrible outcomes for a country where everybody drives and live far apart.
Nor is is really fair to even judge the Federal response to it at all, as under our system of government health care is largely a State matter not a federal one.
Remember the United States is a Republic of 50 States, joined together under a common Defense and Monetary system.
I don't for see large scale changes in policy under a Biden Presidency, you may get stronger messaging but power of the President is largely limited outside of dispersing money, and maybe requiring manufacturers to make certain things if there is a national shortage
Masks Mandates, Lock Downs, etc will still fall under the purview of State Governors as this how our constitution divides the powers of the government
If you mean full on authoritarian rules where by the government arbitrarily decides by executive fiat who is allowed to work, leave their home, engage in commerce, or other wise gather in any way for months.
I would say no that is not a proper role of a government in a free society that has any respect for civil or human rights...
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1104709/coronavirus-deat...
I have no idea where the worldometers.info data is coming from.
Regardless of small differences, painting Covid-19 as a uniquely American problem stemming from American politics is silly. No countries have performed particularly well, despite trying everything from strict lockdowns to no response at all. East and South East Asia is outperforming, but that likely has more to do with past exposures and disease resistance than it is due to policy difference.
South Korea, Vietnam, Australia, Taiwan and New Zealand would seem to be examples countries that have minimises deaths.
Some of these would never work in the US due to gov't structure and just the culture of people (privacy rights), but to discount American politics is a stretch. The entire debacle has been a war on misinformation from the top down.
Which, considering the wealth and expertise of the United States, makes a sort of sense.
At least those other nations are actually making an effort, and not denying science and spreading false, destructive information.
What specifically did Trump fail to do that you feel he should have done with regard to Covid? Keeping in mind that the US is a constitutional republic and does not have a lot of the same legal tools to compel people to do things en masse that other nations do.
I don't think Trump was tested in this area, and I don't think most wars were trivially the fault of the presidencies they were started in (sure, some exceptions like the most recent iraq may jump to mind). I mean, "just don't participate" is also equivalent to ceding influence to whoever feels like a bit of shelling would do them good, so that's not always a good choice - under the assumption that the US (and world) was well served by some measure of imposed order.
Course, maybe I'm misinterpreting who had agency in those situations - do you think it's largely presidents' at fault for for the post-WWII military engagements?
See the War Powers Act to get an idea of the modern framework for governing war in the US: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution
He didn't, but he did abandon the Kurds:
* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/trum...
* https://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/yes-donald-trum...
Helping his Turkish buddy to be able to go after them.
I think you can make a strong case US hegemony may be in decline, but it’s harder to claim it’s gone
I agree that US hegemony isn't gone yet, but we've lost so much of our manufacturing and materials sourcing that we'll soon need them more than they need us.
Why do you assume it was/will be replaced?
It could go back to the laissez-faire system that was present when all the European powers were running around basically doing anything they wanted. (It should be noted that the US wasn't as isolationist as the propaganda would have you believe: how else did they get pre-revolution Cuba, PR, Guam, Hawaii, etc.?)
I don’t think the US has been isolationist since before the Spanish American war.
That same adversary wouldn't sink a second [15 carriers in the next hour . . . 'cos they'll all be sunk]
> Back in reality, it's true [China] could ... sink 15 aircraft carriers [in an hour].
That is unlikely. The Chinese military relies on a combination of overwhelming manpower and tactical positioning, not aircraft superiority and tactical missile deployment (although they are equipping with more and more ballistic missiles). This puts the US at a distinct advantage in almost every conflict with the Chinese military. This includes the South Seas.
The presence of the 5 US carriers* off Singapore has deterred the staged Chinese invasion force for the last few months
https://www.stripes.com/news/pacific/china-sends-two-aircraf... - 3 carriers sent.
2 More were sent by Trump in September (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvgKgLVPckA). .
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_submarine_classes_in_s...
Having a nice battleship group does little for the average american public.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron." Eisenhower
Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class?
As you alluded to in the previous paragraph, it's good for people because it means we're not participating in the kind of horrific wars that ravaged the world in the century before. And the US has been far less extractive than previous global hegemons. (So in that sense it's worse for US citizens, but better for the rest of the world)
Now, everything is a tradeoff, and perhaps this particular tradeoff hasn't been worth it. But there are most certainly good things that US hegemony has given the world.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/how-trump-brou...
Trump brought war on US soil, Americans VS other Americans, is it better?
If you mean to say that BLM in the US is comparable to the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, I'd say that you're off by a factor of a million in deaths.
And it was about time.
Also: US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II
https://www.globalresearch.ca/us-has-killed-more-than-20-mil...
"But what about BLM and domestic conflict, US hegemony is dead, and the US has killed a lot of people overseas"
I still don't see the connection.
Did the impoverishment of the middle class happen before, after, or during the US hegemony?
Did the large scale wars of the past 30 years happen before, after or during US hegemony?
Did the international terrorism escalation happen bwfore, after or during the US hegemony?
The west especially is poorer and less safe.
Trump was simply the final nail in the coffin.
I think people are just connecting dots here.
I really hope Biden will realise it.
"The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation."
"Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people. So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge."
"Some people estimate that the number of Cuban forces killed range from 2,000, to 4,000. Another estimate is that 1,800 Cuban forces were killed on an open highway by napalm. This appears to have been a precursor of the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991 when U.S. forces mercilessly annihilated large numbers of Iraqis on a highway."
"Between 8,000 and 12,000 Nepalese have died since a civil war broke out in 1996. The death rate, according to Foreign Policy in Focus, sharply increased with the arrival of almost 8,400 American M-16 submachine guns (950 rpm) and U.S. advisers. Nepal is 85 percent rural and badly in need of land reform. Not surprisingly 42 % of its people live below the poverty level."
"Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of several republics. Since it refused to be closely tied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it gained some suport from the U.S. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, Yugoslavia’s usefulness to the U.S. ended, and the U.S and Germany worked to convert its socialist economy to a capitalist one by a process primarily of dividing and conquering. There were ethnic and religious differences between various parts of Yugoslavia which were manipulated by the U.S. to cause several wars which resulted in the dissolution of that country. From the early 1990s until now Yugoslavia split into several independent nations whose lowered income, along with CIA connivance, has made it a pawn in the hands of capitalist countries. (1) The dissolution of Yugoslavia was caused primarily by the U.S."
"Let us put this in historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18)." [But see the 1917-1919 flu pandemic, which may have started in the United States, making the US directly responsible for the deaths of 50 million people.]
But we all know that "behind a joke there's always the truth"
I still hope USA will understand what kind of criminal state they have been and still are.
No hard feelings, just hope for them to learn and be better in the future
Even if that article was remotely accurate (it isn't, see mcguire's comment), the kinds of wars that we fought before the US's new world order could produce that number of casualties in a single year (1942, 1945), so U.S. hegemony would still be a massive improvement. It's a massive improvement even over the two-pole world, as a quick glance at the battle deaths over time graph [1] shows.
[1] https://www.vox.com/2015/6/23/8832311/war-casualties-600-yea...
Just WOW
OK, let's make it easy for you
---
VIETNAMESE AND INDOCHINA WAR: A TOTAL OF 5.5 MILLION DEAD
THE VIETNAM WAR - 3.8 MILLION DEAD
1.7 MILLION MORE DEAD IN THE CAMBODIAN, KHMER ROUGE GENOCIDE
Source for death toll: Necrometrics and British Medical Journal, 2008
---
TOTAL IRAQI'S KILLED IN AMERIAN WARS (1990-PRESENT) - 3 MILLION IRAQI SANCTIONS: 1.7 MILLION TOTAL DEAD [1]
500,000 CHILDREN DEAD [2][3]
Source:
[1] Behind the War on Terror. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. 2003.
[2] Food and Agricultural Organization Study (1995)
[3] Iraq Sanctions Kill Children, U.N Reports (New York Times, 1995
---
Just these major events account to more than 10 million deaths
And they stop at the first gulf war
There are many more years to cover
Good luck denying that
> 1942, 1945
The massive improvement from 80 years ago happened even in third World countries run by warlord (financed by the US)
So what?
Can we not have another 80 years of US hegemony and compare the results?
Is it asking too much?
It's how science works: the US hegemony experiment is done and the results are meh, we ended up with Trump, now let's try something else and let's try not to bet on the wrong horse this time, ok guys?
Well, it that's true it means that wars started by US have only caused less than fifty deaths...
Given that the war in Afghanistan alone caused between 500.0000 and 800.000 deaths (depending on the source), the factor is more probably around 2 to 1
> Over 111,000 Afghans, including civilians, soldiers and militants, are estimated to have been killed in the conflict. The Cost of War project estimated that the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may be as high as 360,000 additional people based on a ratio of indirect to direct deaths in contemporary conflicts. These numbers do not include those who have died in Pakistan
Nietzsche said, “in times of peace a warlike nation turns on itself”.
Being economic hegemon (again likely to be challenged by China) is obviously good for the US but the rest of the world might not share this view for the large part.
To paraphrase Churchill: "The US hegemony is the worst hegemony for the world, except for all the other hegemonies."
The US retreating into isolationism would likely open up a vacuum eagerly filled in by less, well, liberal-minded states. The globalization you describe was pushed by the US-EU-(Japan/India/etc.) alliance, with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object. At least this is my current understanding.
I’m interested to see how the shifting demographics affect this conversation. The three biggest things that shaped history are demographics, geography, and information flow. Two of these three are going to be significantly different since the last time the US moved towards isolationism.
Yup having big stick lets one tell the rest of the world to shut up and do what the're told to do. Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.
Is that supposed to be a back-handed way of making a point? I don't understand what those things have to do with global stability.
Someone will be the de facto world police by force, now that the technology to utilize energy is so efficient. This situation has nothing to do with some sort of (USA-centered) Politically Correct philosophy. This situation is the eventuality of our time.
>"...This situation is the eventuality of our time."
This it what you say. I disagree.
This is how peace is kept, regardless of how you feel about it. More importantly, power fills a vacuum, and the choices in the absence of the USA are not exactly better for the world.
And the sky is blue. Everyone including my cat knows it. Of course one with the biggest club gets to write the laws and to ignore those when it suits. Just stop pretending to be a knight in a shining armor. And being not as shitty as some others is not a reason to claim high moral ground.
You're free to believe something else of course, but then again most people have no perspective or experience of the suffering and violence in the world while they throw out these casual statements about how terrible America is.
> Globalization has lifted billions from poverty.
There, I reordered things for you to answer your own question. :)
If you review history, large wars broke out between the major powers vying for dominance on a regular basis in the 19th and early 20th century, culminating in the First and Second World Wars. For all the negatives of what the US has done with its military since then, they're not a hundredth as bad as what went on before by any objective measure.
The Pax Americana has been good for stability and with stability comes prosperity. If the United States truly gave up its hegemony and turned isolationist, you'd see a resurgence of rearmament and jockeying for power among nations, inevitably followed by a new era of war after war.
Not to mention the Cold War, which only stayed cold because of the nukes holding both sides back.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...
Pax Americana usually means the same thing, though the borders of the empire are a little less clear.
Then I thought about it a bit more, and realised (and the last four years have shown) that if America withdraw, the Russians and the Chinese will move right in, and while I'm not a major fan of American imperialism, I'm even less of a fan of the Russian or Chinese flavours.
And the US built the UN and all the other multilateral organisations post WW2, so yeah they work for the US, but they're also pretty good for everyone else.
I owe that to hundreds of years of human progression and development, not to the US.
You yourself just wrote a the answer: it prevents wars.
US hegemony is to set be the US, not to serve the world.
The end result is ordinary people get caught up in less wars because politically war is much more rarely the right answer (either you're too politically weak to start one, or if you are the hegemon you just give people the evil eye and they usually shutup)
That doesn't make it a utopia, just a world with less war dead.
Korea was different, and also backed by the UN. But even there things aren't as clear cut as you imply. North Korea had yet to turn into the Kim-led hard core Stalinist regime.
Don’t you see the problem here?
Globalisation allowed it to grow, but i don't think isolation fixes any problem if every country starts doing that.
But you have to understand, the shift of manufacturing from the US has just devastated the economies of entire regions. You have children fleeing where their families have lived for generations. I'm convinced a factor in opiates getting a toehold in these areas was due to people going on disability to try to stay economically afloat, and getting prescribed painkillers as cover for faked injuries or in recovery for real but unneccessary surgeries (I have no proof, just anecdata).
US hegemony was good for them. It helped payed their mortgages and their kids' tuitions. It's easy to magnanimous when you aren't the one losing your house or kids aren't ODing from fentanyl. And the resentment is real when you see new grads at Google or Facebook making 10 times what you make, or CEOs making 1000 times what you make.
edit: the president did little, if anything to help their situation and channeled that resentment for his own benefit. It is a matter of national security that we all fix this and I hope the new administration will prioritize it.
IME it's less about disability fraud and more about treatment of the physical injuries sustained from blue-collar work. Those faking it are the ones with enough foresight to sell their pills to others.
But you are otherwise right from what I've seen; the opiates are addictive, the demands of the job do not lessen (they only increase) and the rest writes itself.
Almost everyone just wants to be safe, happy, economically secure, and the same for their kids. That transcends nationality, religion, or party. I think trying to frame it around economic policy reversed the way the mindset was bootstrapped.
As someone not steeped in it, I think the charitable interpretation is that these people like working a job for the dignity of supporting themselves. The jobs went away, but the desire for that dignity hasn't. So social welfare policies remain uninteresting. In fact any top-down analysis sets off their "government handout" detectors, so they're left pining for the age before the need for labor dried up.
IMO a lot could have been done (and perhaps could still be) by decreasing the definition of full time work. With technological progress, offshoring, and women entering the workforce, full time employment should be around 10-15 hours per week. It's a radical departure from the status quo, but that's due to progress being held back so long. Instead we're stuck between a rock and a hard place with an economy tuned to force people into working 40+ hours a week, but little actual work to do.
(BTW the work in cities is more about communication, so the same trend manifests itself as the creation of non-producing bullshit jobs. There is less financial pain, but similar existential pain)
False claim
I think Obama's strategy of a trading block with Asia was much smarter/efficient.
I’m from Bangladesh. The US backed world order has been amazing for the country. The World Bank and IMF have helped countries like Bangladesh modernize their economies, and they’re US-led institutions.
As the US pulls out, China displaces it. In Bangladesh, Chinese investment is flowing in, along with middle eastern culture. Neither of those things are good in my opinion.
I don’t think the US needs to continue footing the bill alone. But the other western powers don’t seem interested in helping. When I think about what I want the future of Bangladesh to look like in 50 years, I want it to be basically like the US or Canada, only with different food and religious holidays and movies and literature. And that seemed like the future in the 1990s, but it’s getting cloudy today.
Does it only end when the US population is in the state that the poor Chinese, et al. farmers were in before we accepted this globalism?
At some point we have to stop and say, "OK, we gave you a leg up now let's spend a few decades and rebuild our own country". This is not what is proposed by Democrat politicians, they propose we continue to transfer wealth (in many forms) to other countries and fill the income gap that is produced with social welfare programs.
Maybe if you live in US you can afford to not care, but I live in a weak, poor, corrupted country. For us it's either US, Russia (now) or China (in the long run) and I prefer US after all.
Would you prefer China or Russia instead?
I think the main difference is that trump decided to take tactical action on these positions without regards for the strategic long term consequences, which other presidents have been unwilling to do (except the globalisation point, i think most previous really liked globalisation and werent just worried about the consequences)
The quest to keep NK from going nuclear started decades ago and spanned administrations from both parties, and finally failed miserably and objectively before Trump got into office. This, despite all best efforts from the best minds. The status quo was hardly a defensible glide path.
Similarly, we’ve been after real change in the Mideast for decades across multiple admins from both parties. We’ve never had movement. I’m not saying that the Abraham Accords fix everything, but getting four nations to finally recognize the right of Israel to exist and engage in trade and cultural exchange is certainly visible change. Energy independence also helps lessen our conflict of interest there. That’s visible change that was seemingly unobtainium for decades. Circumstance and technology have their role in this, but there are also specific policy and regulatory frameworks that will make or break this new path over coming years.
China.. I think there’s consensus that Kissinger’s laissez faire approach to opening China has not produced the intended outcome. Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.
So point being that the status quo - the unmovable track our foreign policy was on for decades regardless of president - was due for a shake up. It will be interesting to see what Biden does - revert to old paths, or take advantage of the new paths?
Have to go back a little further than that, the romans also wanted change in the middle east and didn't have much luck.
> Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.
I'd say under trump we have taken a rich toltalitarian and reppressive state and turned them into a rich toltalitarian/reppressive state with new friends in high places.
Just because something is a change does not make it a change for the better. Maybe the previous policy was trying to hold back the tide and failing. Opening the floodgates is a change, but i'm not sure its a good change, even if holding back the tide was a failure on slow motion.
By “we” I mean the United States, and by real change by last several admins, I’m of course referring to attempts to break the stalemate between Israel and the other ME nations after the wars (six years, etc), not world wars. Necessarily time-bound. Not sure what Romans have to do with this unless you’re making a point about futility? The Romans certainly impacted the near East for hundreds of years, right?
Not saying it will, but that during the unrivaled US egemony after the end of the cold war things have been worse for the middle/poor segment of society, especially in the west.
Could be a coincidence, could be bad luck, could be a correlation.
For reference, see the movie Vice (2018) which is basically a third party account on Dick Cheney's biography. Scooter Libby, who got sentenced due to Plamegate due to leaking Plame's name while she was an active CIA asset on foreign ground (a retaliation move), as well. He got his sentence commuted by Bush and got fully pardoned by Trump. Why? I don't believe there's a valid justification. Nepotism 101.
Btw, while Obama did a fair amount of drone strikes, was vigilant on leaks, and probably knew all about NSA's ops before Snowden leaked, he did inherit a mess from Bush. After Obama, Trump did an ample amount of drone strikes (tho we need to put both into context as drone strikes are a new technology), and while Trump did not start a war in the traditional sense he escalated enough foreign relations including NATO and other treaties like WTO, Middle East (ISIS being partly a mess USA made with Iraq invasion), China (trade conflict), Iran (killing of Suleimani). Trump was a nationalist, and an egocentric one at that, who did not follow conventional scientific consensus on e.g. climate change. I'm all for freedom and opinion, but denying an important truth which is going to affect all of humanity if we don't act Soon (tm), is dangerous. Especially for people like me who live under the sea level (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). I'm so utterly relieved that Trump is gone. Senate isn't decided yet AFAIK, but I am not anti Republican by definition, and I believe dialogue is the way forward. Dialogue based on rationalization, facts, and science though; ie. not lies, denial, deception.
Dividing was his creed. Trump had a lot of hot air about helping Joe Sixpack, ie. rhetoric and short-term gains. On the long-term, climate change affects us all. Including the working class. We've seen some appetizers in the form of drought and massive fires. Reaction? Denial, cause he can't figure a way to profit from it.
There's ways to profit from climate change. Its a lack of willpower and lack of inventive thinking to not opt for it, and unfortunately the world can't afford to ignore it any longer.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2017/04/24/middle-class-f...
Energy independence helps us avoid relying on chinese solar panels and middle eastern oil.
Building carbon capture infrastructure in the US means the jobs would be here. Delaying means eventually pumping unprecedented amounts of money into whatever other country gets there first (probably China).
Phrasing it that way is unfair. Trump held China accountable for its mercantilist trade practices.
This seems overly simplistic. Globalization has led to a drop in the cost of many goods as well as multiple new markets for US industries.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that the spoils of globalization have not been shared as fairly as they should of, but imo that's way more linked to other policies (like tax rates & spending)
I think this is the biggest place where he said one thing, then immediately did another. We are involved in the Middle East as we ever were, and much much more so with more disastrous effects in places like Yemen. The US' involvement in Yemen should be enough to laugh Trump offstage any time he talks about "getting out of the middle east".
Please please please don't let him off the hook for this by saying he had "good ideas" here when he was talking out of one side of his mouth while civilian families are being slaughtered.
The military branch of the PYD party was crucial during the fight against ISIS. Leaving them to die in Erdogan's hands is tragic.
Energy independence from the ME is a reliable quality by which the US (and others) will care less about the region. But this also means leaving the regional developed powers to manage the area with greater and greater autonomy (e.g. Israel and SA).
To that end, we are arguably less “involved” today. Our dependence on that oil and our direct action involvement there are directly related.
By the numbers, we are less involved than in, say, 2005 if the US body count is the metric. If civilian deaths are the metric, Iraq’s numbers have fallen off a cliff since 2017 [0]. I would guess the same for Syria but don’t have data at hand.
It’s tough to want it both ways - asking the US to intervene for peace but not spill any blood. If the ME tells us anything, it’s that peace does not come from doing nothing - it is not the region’s default state given the cultural animosities. Stability seems the best chance for civilian peace there. The US is increasingly delegating or abdicating that role to the most friendly options available.
How would you prefer that the trajectory change? More direct “peacekeeping” involvement? Total abandonment while watching a regional death match play out?
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/269729/documented-civili...
This is also how I feel about China and Hong Kong, NK, how I would have felt under WW2/Germany, and how I would feel basically every other foreign policy incident.
If you mean our borders, you know that’s untenable, and so not a serious conversation.
This was already being done. That was the whole point of the end of the Obama admins shift to Asia strategy.
> Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.
Troop levels are the same today as they were in 2020. And I also don't think this is a novel idea, everyone wants out, but you have to do it in a way that doesn't leave us in a worst situation than just staying, and that is ridiculously hard. Nature abhors a vacuum.
> Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
This is a mixed bag. Look around and tell me that the general middle class American is worst off than they were in any other decade of modern America. We live safer, cleaner lives. What we don't feel is security, which is a consequence of 40 years of treating the government as an entity that is the problem, and not an entity that can be the solution.
Funny, my whole generation has basically given up on basics like owning a house completely. But we got cool tech gadgets so it all evens out?
With that said, there are plenty of affordable places to move to, they just aren't super sexy and cool. But even San Francisco and Brooklyn were completely uncool not that long ago.
Exactly. You can do this the smart way, by gathering partners and encircling China with something like the TPP, or you can do it the dumb way, by picking stupid playground fights.
One is effective and the other is just for show.
They're not even close to being as well off as they were up until the ~80's - 90's.
I do think that a lot of people had these things on their agenda already. We didn't need Trump to come to these conclusions. Because he might have gotten the issues right, but didn't really understand them nor did he care about solutions.
Also, he didn't get out of the Middle East, he just picked a side. Not sure what that means for the region.
American politics has brief focus windows, direct action has more impact than vague "pivots" or "focuses" which last about as long as the next crisis.
I would be inclined to agree, if Trump had any strategy behind that. His policies, or rather lack thereof, don't support that. I'd say he just stumbled around and got lucky once. And even that has to be seen.
And focusing on China as the new red scare would (is already?) simply result in a new Cold War, to nobody's benefit.
I personally don't think the US has any business being hegemon (feel free to check my post history), but if your primary interest is maintaining the position of the US from ~1992-2016, then your best bet is to maintain the foreign and economic policy of those times, which is basically what Biden is promising to do.
What concerns me is that just as Trump's election encouraged the proliferation of racism, Biden's election will encourage the proliferation of cancel/woke culture, which will lead to even more division than we have under Trump.
Globalization and isolation have two sides, neither of which is all pro or con.
Ineffectual? I’d argue he’s one of the most consequential Presidents of the past 100 years.
He reshaped the federal bench, confirmed a 6-3 majority on the SCOTUS, overhauled the tax code, negotiated multiple Middle East peace deals, repealed and replaced NAFTA, and didn’t start a single foreign war.
His impact on the US political system will be felt for generations. Compare that to 8 years of Obama that can’t point to any meaningful accomplishment.
I want to live in a country where we accept the results of a democratic process instead of spreading conspiracy theories, and yes, that goes for the Russia collusion conspiracy theories and the general "we're going to burn this mf-er to the ground if the election doesn't go our way" sentiments as well.
This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me this is a very sad moment and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.
https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-2020-elect...
I think this is probably one of the most secure elections ever executed.
By creating division you mean sending in troops to end riots that were burning down businesses, beating people, and spreading the virus all in the name of dubious claims of police brutality?
The rioters caused real violence that really happened. What did Trump’s supporters do that is violent on that level?
Is it any different?
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that's not entirely right.
Authoritarians aim to centralize power to themselves. By removing other sources of power, their power grows. An authoritarian's ultimate goal in the US is to remove all checks and balances they can.
In comparison a libertarian aims to remove non-centeral government, like laws that effect small towns, schools and police forces in small towns, and so on, though each libertarian voter aims to remove different things, so not to mislead: Not all libertarians want to remove police, or schools, or roads, or whatever else. What you will not hear is a libertarian wanting to remove congress or another form of checks and balance.
Unfortunately, Trump did not go around removing centralized laws, or any I know of at least. Everything he did has more to do with a power grab as best I can tell.
There's also been a focus on personal loyalty in high office that is also unseemly in a democracy, and has caused problems for the USA in the past too.
In response instead of addressing this growing anti-american anti-democratic minority, the term anti-fascist or antifa was created. The idea is if anti-fascism can be associated with riots, protestors, and other scary negative fear based topics, the second anyone raises a concern about fascism, supporters will unconsciously turn a blind eye, because antifa has a negative anti-american sting in their unconscious now. I'm surprised such word smithing like that works, and frankly I'm scared it does work. I'm terrified that not only Trump but Fox and other groups would rally behind not only supporting fascist movements, but invent a boogyman as a way to make the topic of fascism partisan and questionable. If that's not unamerican I don't know what is.
In response instead of addressing this growing anti-american anti-democratic minority, instead the news decided to associate anti-fascism with riots, protestors, and other scary negative fear based topics. Now the second anyone raises a concern about fascism, supporters will unconsciously turn a blind eye. I'm surprised such word smithing like that works, and frankly I'm scared it does work. I'm terrified that different conservative groups rallied behind not only fascist movements, but invented a boogyman term for it like antifa as a way to make the topic of fascism partisan and questionable. If that's not anti-democratic and unamerican I don't know what is.
America is extremely divided, and I'm not sure that it's going to recover from this (which I personally, as a foreigner, find very very sad).
Sadly without re-regulating the news it isn't, or some large trauma that brings the entire country temporarily together.
In the US we historically had similar problems, so something called the fairness doctrine was created. It was a law that required news give equal airtime for opposing views. This way no matter where you got your news you'd get the full truth, not half truths as the current American populous is getting.
Do you have a source for this question?
Bush vs. Gore in Florida 2000 comes to mind.
It's really not clear who should have won. There are different outcomes from different groups with different, but reasonable, interpretations of what the voter intended.
It's hard too see through all of the partisanship at the time.
The reason why it was never realistic to believe he wouldn't step aside is simply that he does not have the support to pull that off; it's essentially a kind of civil war but one he (and any other president) would likely lose almost instantly - as long as it's clear he lost the election.
And that's why it's so insidious to undermine the election, because that will eventually pave the way to actually ignore election outcomes. Even today, I suspect in all the partisan posturing some voters may have come away with the honest impression that there really was a stolen election. Since democracy hinges on the losing side accepting that loss, action that undermine that are quite problematic.
President Trump's action so far, both before the election and after, are entirely in line with the accusations against him; in essence: he's willing to undermine democracy to try and hold on to power.
Had the election been closer, it's conceivable he might really have engineered some legal shenanigans to try and steal the election. And if he had been backed in that (which isn't entirely impossible, because some of the toss-up states have republican-appointed courts, republican legislatures, and republican governors, and of course the heavily tilted supreme court now), then things would have gotten dicey. In that situation, just like in other strong-man democracies, the outcome of the election would have been rigged. Would democrats have backed down? Or would they have disputed the elections, even though formally they lost them? That's the kind of thing that breaks a democracy; because both backing down and confrontation are terrible outcomes.
To their credit - because that's how it's supposed to work in a democracy - those toss-up states did not seriously try to steal votes (although the vote-segregation thing is pretty close). And of course we don't know Trump would really have stolen the election, given the opportunity, since it never arose. But we can see that he took all possible steps in that direction at least; and that's something the US needs to deal with in the future for the sake of stability. It ended well this time; it might not every time.
A lot of checks and balances are baked into a multi-party system. One inherent advantage is less polarization, as there are more parties to represent the various views of the people. However, there are of course a lot of improvements that could be made to the Canadian governance system (ditching first past the post for example), but I do believe this style of government is more resilient than the US system.
At the same time, our government has not, and will likely not, be put to the test by someone like Trump. It is commendable that the US system has withstood what many feared could be the start of the downfall of democracy in the US.
I mean, it's never going to happen due to constitutional constraints, but really the very existence of the senate is rather problematic, because it's elections are so very different from those of the house+presidency; the votes are very much non-proportional.
And while non-proportionality is not in and of itself really all that bad - I mean, it's bad in that it's so visibly unfair that it slightly undermines the point of democracy (it makes it look a little hypocritical), but the actual impact of said unfairness (as opposed to perception thereof) isn't really all that problematic; many things in the world aren't 100% fair.
No, the real problem isn't the non-proportionality, it's the gridlock that arises from having so very different electoral systems. That gridlock exacerbates issues with partisanship, because it makes it attractive to play brinkmanship games; and of course gridlock isn't harmless anyhow. The system would be more stable if house, senate and presidency had similar elector biases; regardless of fairness.
Really though, parliamentary systems are in this regard simply better. Having the equivalent of the president serve at the mercy of parliament doesn't make the job at all irrelevant (just look at other democracies), but it does put to bed nonsense like failed impeachments - because it's not about crimes, even in the US; it's simply about political support - and it should be clear whether the president has it, or not - and the current system is almost designed to turn it into a nasty political battle that's simply divisive.
The only situation in which impeachment in the current system is not divisive is when house, senate and president are in the same parties hands - and hey, that's basically a parliamentary system right there!
I don't think reelection should be forced, impeachments are not done often and I feel there is no need to protect against it (it wasn't a big deal this time around).
US is in a strange situation where a sitting president is almost impossible to unseat, but that may be seen as a positive characteristic. It allows US to be much more focused and stable in its foreign policy.
The reason to favor the senate over the president is clear: if they truly believe the president still should retain political support, the president isn't the you should force into a new election.
The reason to favor the senate over the house (if forced to pick just one by this hypothetical) is that the senate is the odd one out here in electoral support, and to make it harder for them to play political games with this choice; i.e. it's in their interest to pick a stance that is supported by voters, because if they don't they'll answer to them. It's also the most impactful reelection to force, because those elections are otherwise spaced the furthest apart. Essentially: by giving the house more power and the senate less, you're inching closer towards the greater stability of a parliamentary system, and additionally it has the most impact because the senate is the least frequently reelected normally. The house really should have supremacy over both senate and president; and it's OK to check that supremacy with voters to make an unleashed house suffer the consequences (because a house that really did abuse this power is still up for reelection quite quickly, and results from the senate election would be very publicly visible).
To be clear; it's just a hypothetical. It'd be better if the senate were simply dissolved, or relegated to a more advisory role as it is elsewhere, or merged into the house, and better if presidents were elected by congress, not directly - but given the hypothetical of just one releection to force, I think there is an argument to be made that a senate relection would have the most impact on the impeachment process.
To be clear: I don't think the US president being hard to unseat is a feature; that's a design flaw. Other democracies have stable foreign policies to, even when just a simple majority in the equivalent of the house is enough to immediately unseat the equivalent of the president, with no recourse to the senate at all. In fact, other democracies seem to have a more stable foreign and domestic policy, because there's less infighting and less need for hyper-speed policy making in the rare moments without gridlock; none of that "but we can't approve that deal because currently the house or the senate aren't in the hands of the same party as the president". The decision-making capability of a parliamentary government isn't perfect, but it's less likely to gridlock for long periods of time.
It also means there's no hope of any party of trying to blockade the other should they lose, so there's more incentive to seek consensus beforehand because they simply won't be able to force anything should an election ever go the other way. And there's more potential cost for reversing previous governments policies, because what's to stop a future government from playing that same game? As it is currently, a party can risk being quite confrontational, knowing that a trifecta isn't all that likely in general. There's a good chance any controversial policy made will stick around simply because there's a good chance future governments will be gridlocked for a good while; worth risking that gamble. If governments knew that a future government could reliably overturn any policy they made, they'd be more careful choosing partisan pet projects, especially those without clear popular support.
Wouldn't forcing senate reelection in case of failed impeachment allow the party that controls the house to force that reelection?
Let's say Party A controls the house while Party B controls the Senate and the Presidency. If Party A wants, they would be able to send impeachment to trial without real reason and then by the fact that Senate didn't convict you would get a reelection of Senate.
Way I see it, this would allow manipulation of the election process. In my mind, it would be much more logical that the House has to be reelected as they pushed forward an impeachment that was not convicted upon. This would make it so that House would not bring forward frivolous impeachments as they would have their own positions on the line.
About unseating a president, I understand your point. I agree to a degree. A sitting president can be limited in power by the fact he doesn't control the legislative branch. This may seem less optimal but it has a couple of advantages. Executive branch can keep on working within the confines allowed to them, without having to juggle for political support in the parliament. This allows the President to keep working with little regard to losing his position. This is especially good for military or foreign affairs as they can work on this with little to no political support.
Framing this as if any of the legal constructs (house, senate, presidency) is reasonable, and thus needs to perhaps be punished for abuse of power is I believe pointless. Impeachment is not about right or wrong, it's about political support (I mean, just look at those almost completely party-line votes in house and senate recently!)
For American democracy to start working again - which has nothing to do with fairness, mind you - the power hierarchy needs to clearly weed out obstructionism; and where obstructionism is possible or even valuable as a kind of common sense sanity-check, either side involved needs to be elected or appointed on the same electoral basis (because the other option is political powerplay, rendering the whole point of things like impeachment moot, as it is today).
Pick two: A government that can govern, or elections with differing structures (essentially ensuring various branches will fight simply as a form of party politics, not based on merit), or equal branches of government, where one (plain majority) cannot remove the other.
You can't have all three.
Aside, the idea that the presidency is stable because it's decoupled from congressional support is not born out by simple comparison to other countries. Quite the opposite: by splitting powers like that, foreign actors need to consider internal US politics to a large degree. Stability would be greater if a simple majority in the house had the ability to appoint a new president at a whim - not because whims are stable, but because that shapes the back and forth of political powerplay, and thus renders the house responsible for the presidencies errors, which is how it works in other countries. Countries don't tend to reappoint prime ministers all that often, especially if a coalition is involved, because not only is that likely to be punished by voters, it's quite hard to form coalitions if you break support like that. That's not to say that a coalition of microscopic parties would be a great idea for the US by the way; just that small steps in that direction would increase stability.
(Un- [or loosely] related, I also think there are benefits from gridlock, forcing a certain level of consensus for those things that have to happen federally but leaving most federal things relatively stable over time.)
If at least senate "districts" were equivalent to house "districts" (i.e. all state-based or all more regional, and both equivalently proportional), then it would be very unlikely to have long-term gridlock; instead a senate would simply serve as braking mechanism during electoral upheaval, and that's perhaps a valuable feature.
On the other hand, Biden has come out backing Ireland. Which is good for sanity and bad for Johnson.
People need to remember that, no matter who is in power.
The problem is both republicans and democrats "forget" this when they are in power so they attempt to consolidate it, and believe that consolidation grand the virtuous
Then when they are out of power, the "other side" using that power become "corrupt and immoral"
Just like the irony that in 2016 the US electron system was so fragile that Russia stole it, at least that is what he heard for the last 4 years, but now that democrats have won the US Election system is as strong as Plymouth Rock and unwavering in face of people trying to steal it...
//for the record I do not think the election was stolen in either 2016 or 2020.....
I'm still in shock over how Trump actually managed to get into power. To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him (it woke me up as to how a large percentage of the American electorate actually thinks, and for me that's a worry).
You're right, the chaos Trump's created has seen a paradigm shift in the way politics is carried out everywhere, and that's likely not a bad thing. Often things need to get worse before a wake-up call turns them around for the better. We'll wait and see.
Trump's initial success, the lemming-like addiction to smartphones/Facebook mania, and the swathes and swathes of crazy, mad and irresponsible behaviour I've seen over the last seven or eight months in response to COVID-19 has truly shaken my view of humanity. I used to think we humans were smarter than we actually are.
Voting in the US, especially in general elections, is mostly about tribal identity, which explains a lot of that part of Trump's election, and he was largely a political unknown who's campaign was ambiguous enough that people could read what they want into it (By 2020, that last part was no longer true, obviously.) In the 2016 primary, he had the ambiguity factor, celebrity, the Republican establishment having trouble figuring out what he was doing, and a Republican Primary system designed to turn early pluralities into commanding delegate leads to avoid long primary fights which backfired spectacularly for the establishment.
That I can understand but it's the relative closeness of the vote in this election that surprised me.
Earlier I was looking at a live online polling update with maps of both state and popular vote figures. The popular vote map was detailed enough for me to drill down to county level and finer. In states like Ohio, N Dakota and Nebraska with sparce populations and high overall Republican vote one would occasionally (but not infrequently) come across small settlements of 500/1000 or so only 20/50 miles apart where the vote in one was say D-70%, R-28%, Lib-2% and the other almost exactly the opposite with Lib remaining the same at about 2%.
This seems to backup your tribal identity point very well. Given that these settlements likely have only trees or farmland between them the figures are actually quite startling. I took into account that some may have been Native American reservations (which I've not yet ruled out), so I resampled in other states with low populations such as Vermont and New Hampshire and found similar instances (of course, with these latter instances the overall state figures had the Democrats in the majority).
These demographics are fascinating to say the least and I'm going to revisit them again shortly.
People bought into it, because he's probably the most exposed businessman in America - through his brand name, and media appearances.
Furthermore, he was "hard" on certain populist topics like immigration, as well as conservative on more mainstream topics, like taxes, foreign affairs, etc.
And on the very top of that, the fringes of democratic voters didn't bond with Hilary Clinton getting ushered in as the presidential candidate.
Even Trump didn't believe he'd win in 2016.
In the taxi, on the way to the citizenship hearing, Gödel excitedly told his friend Albert Einstein that he intended to talk at the hearing of a flaw he had discovered in the US Constitution that could allow a dictatorship to take over.
Einstein managed to convince Gödel not to talk about that at the citizenship hearing, and just answer to questions.
But perhaps Gödel wasn't so wrong.
https://www.quora.com/Does-the-American-Constitution-allow-f...
It hinges on the fact that Electors in the Electoral College don't have to follow the popular vote.
" the legislators can change the state law to require Electors to vote for the President regardless of the popular vote."
Given rule changes (around punishing electors if they vote against who they are supposed to), and the recent way that electors did and didn't vote during the last few elections, it's clear that the system has no value now.
Populism?
You mean democracy?
"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief...
Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States."
Federalist 68
I don't think the US will have the time for a "post-mortem", this is not a bug that just disappeared/was solved because Trump is no longer president. More people voted for him in 2020 than they did in 2016, the racist things that he has said and done have not come out of no-where, he had (and still has) a strong support behind him, and that support won't disappear over night.
Have they deterred business with China in favor of moving that business back to America? Or have they just passed the price along to the American consumer?
It would of course be ideal if EU and all democratic countries got together, but they (just like Biden) unfortunately have no interest in doing so. Biden believe that it’s USA’s self-interest to see China prosper.
You can also see that China’s GDP growth (in 2019) was the lowest it’s been since 1990 (2020 will no doubt be much lower), and their reputation around the world is at an all-time low.
It’s also worth noting that the administration did a lot more to stand up to China besides tariffs (but tariffs that force companies to leave will of course hurt them the most).
You're not wrong, but:
> But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
* James Madison, 20 June 1788, Papers 11:163
* https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/H._L._Mencken#Notes_on_Democra...
Could you explain what you actually mean?
Our justice system is a sovereign power and doesn't depend on executive power, but is completely independent from it.
These are unavoidable aspects of being a supreme court judge, since you are also deciding what the law means and entails.
Consider that sanders made it a litmus test for his supreme court nominees to overrule an unpopular court decision. Most judges would avoid at a politician demanding this, as it defeats the purpose of a judiciary.
They may have very strong views on what framework a judge should use to interpret the law, but they usually will not push their own political agenda.
I can't point you to specific cases - I can only say that what has really stood out to me is that the justices do mostly seem to have well-defined interpretive frameworks, and that they work from those.
I can think of an exception, but my experience has generally been that it's the case.
Remember that Mitch McConnell, once he had the majority, stopped processing federal judge nominees from Obama for two years.
* https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-mcconnell-and...
* https://www.politico.com/story/2016/07/mitch-mcconnell-judge...
This also assume that McConnell wouldn't have just done the same. Remember that this is the same fellow that said both "no appointments in an election year" to "we're appointing with less that 30 days until the election".
McConnell is a political nihilist:
> It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections.”
* https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/mitc...
> “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”
* https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/04/20/how-mitch-mcco...
Remember McConnell (and the GOP) were also all about austerity during Obama's terms (when economy could have used economic stimulus). Then, when Trump got in, it was all about tax cuts which caused all sorts of deficit/debt issues—when the economy did not need any help (2017).
And yet, the United States does not preach this model when helping to propagate democracy abroad. Tellingly, they don't include:
- first past the post elections,
- bicameral legislative branches, or
- electoral colleges.
We're operating on a model that our own State Department discourages other countries from adopting.
Do you have a source for that?
Especially the point about bicameralism? I think in a federal system, having something like the US or Australian Senate's is useful in it prevents the smaller states from being dominated by the bigger ones. Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.
https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/template/oa...
Edit: here's a reprint in case that first link (from an NYT email newsletter) doesn't work:
http://www.barcelonaradical.net/info/12380/the-democracy-ref...
Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.
Do you have a source for that? Proportional representation does seem to solve for it. See also: far right parties gaining seats in Germany.
Their views get heard (if not enacted), no one secedes, and the system remains stable.
For the benefits of federal bicameralism, consider the UK – England has almost 85% of the population, and so in a purely one-person-one-vote system will always outvote the other three constituent countries. The UK does have bicameralism, but non-federal – the House of Lords does not directly represent the constituent countries, and does not provide a mechanism to block an English majority – the majority of the House of Lords is English too. And I think this is one of the major factors driving the Scottish independence movement. If the UK had a system more like Australia – with an upper house providing equal representation to each part of the country, regardless of population, and with constitutional referendums requiring a double majority to pass (both a majority of the national population, and also a majority of the population in a majority of the states) – then I don't think the Scottish independence movement would have anywhere near as much steam as it has.
Nationalizing elections would basically cement first past the post as our permanent voting system forever since it's extremely unlikely you could convince everyone in the U.S. to change to a new one at once.
It's interesting that you see it that way. From my perspective, it's something that was originally designed with fairly good intentions, that is now being abused by the minority to impose their will upon everyone.
Let's not forget that Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election this century. And that the Senate's structure has allowed the party representing a minority of Americans to reshape the federal judiciary for years to come. (And unless a rabbit gets pulled out of a hat somewhere, they'll still have outsized control over judicial confirmations for at least the next 2 years.)
I'm all for preventing the tyranny of the majority, but these features of US government haven't resulted in moderation, they've resulted in tyranny of the minority.
* https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/the-ori...
* https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/24/opinion/second-amendment-...
You're also misreading it: my comment was about the Senate, not the electoral college. And I left out the part about how the Senate was explicitly anti-democratic, not just anti-majoritarian, in that it was originally elected by legislators and not the people.
The alternative is effectively disenfranchising rural areas. Remember that whole "no taxation without representation" thing a couple of centuries ago and how badly that turned out? Rural areas are where all the food, agricultural and mineral resources of the United States are produced, not to mention the source of the majority of its armed forces, so trying to disenfranchise them isn't going to end well.
And the minority isn't small either: the last time I checked, even in archetypically left-leaning California, about 1/3 of the vote went to Trump; for the other two west coast states, the tally was closer to 40%.
The answer, of course, is to focus on uniting the nation, not division, even if it means not all the changes people want happen as quickly as they would prefer. "Politics is the art of the possible" after all.
Both for the urban areas in "red" states and the rural areas in "blue" states.
Therefore it's "just" for a house, senate, and president representing a minority of Americans to raise taxes on urban Americans (70% of the economy), refuse to fund our infrastructure (HSR and the gateway project), and impose their religious beliefs on us.
These self serving arguments aren't convincing anyone. What urban America has actually heard over the last four years is that "when you have the voted, you do what you want," a lesson we have taken to heart.
We have entirely different goals now. We should be aiming for fair elections in which one person's vote is equal to any other's regardless of the state they reside. The electoral college is downright repulsive once you realize how unfairly it treats citizens in more populated states compared to those in less populated states.
The electoral college now has the potential of pulling the union apart. If California and New York see a few more elections in which their citizens' votes are discounted, resulting in popular vote winners losing the presidency, then it would be logical for them to secede. They can take their massive economies and accompanying tax dollars and leave this system behind, as it should've been a long time ago.
The reality is that different locations have different ways of life and culture and politics, and therefore self determination must be supported through some mechanisms (like the electoral college) for a federal union to make sense and for those peoples to feel represented. If we are undoing that we need to also give states the option to secede and go their own way, since this union would simply mean the end of their way of life.
On a straight popular vote basis, the large urban centers in a handful of states would select the president. Their interests and motivations will necessarily be different from rural areas.
The electoral college gives populous states proportionally more influence, as they have more congressional representatives and thus more electoral votes. But it serves to balance that against the interests of less populated states, which are also part of the country and should not be considered completely irrelevant in the process.
Hell it's the same way in parliamentary systems.
This is a feature of any indirect vote.
I always feel that we are highly inclined to promote a voting system which would help the side we support.
What's interesting, and in defense of the electoral college, these three actually pick the winner in very different ways, making it harder for a single party to take control, and requiring some amount of compromise. If we just used popular vote for choosing the president, they're more likely to be the same party as the one controlling the House.
E.g., South Korea has a presidential election every 5 years, congressional election every 4 years, and gubernatorial(?) election every 4 years (staggered in the middle between congressional elections). In this way, a government losing popular support quickly finds itself surrounded by elected officers from opposing parties.
Maybe that's an argument for staggering elections even more regularly, or maybe it's just one of those coincidences pundits love to talk about, I don't know. :)
Well, this did not go _well_.
I wish a lot of luck to the Biden administration, there is a lot to rebuild. I might disagree on tons of policy topics with him but at the very least I can completely agree that he lives up to what should be the bare minimum for any president : respect the rule of law, be the president of all americans, not just the ones who voted for you, etc
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
We should require a fuller disclosure of a candidate's finances before we allow them to serve. Trump may be deeply in debt to foreign powers. He may not be. We do not know. That is a problem, and it should not be a partisan issue. It is mind-blowing that anybody is okay with not knowing. Let's not let that happen again. That should be the easiest law/amendment to pass, ever. (Of course it won't be)
We obviously have legal machinery in place to remove a president if the need arises, but it is necessarily slow and ineffective.
His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster.
The old 2/3 majority generally ensured that people who were competent centrists got onto the court. Both parties were equally happy with the candidates... or at least equally unhappy!
Senate Republicans were the ones who lowered the requirement for Supreme Court confirmations to a simple majority, not the Democrats[0]. Senate Democrats had reduced the threshold for presidential appointments excluding the Supreme Court as a result of chronic filibustering by the Republican congress during Obama’s term[1].
I agree with you that something needs to be done about SCOTUS nominations. It’s clear to me that the stakes are currently way too high. Turning the court into a political football has created an incredibly dangerous situation that risks undermining its authority and the rule of law.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/us/politics/neil-gorsuch-...
[1] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/10/01/fac...
Chief among which was allowing the election of someone like Trump to begin with.
Someone like Trump shouldn't have been a viable option regardless of who the Democrats put up.
She wanted to strengthen Obamacare, but was against a single-payer option. I'm sure people will quibble, but I'm confident health premiums would have gone up faster under Hillary.
Hillary Clinton was in bed with Wall St firms. A Clinton presidency would have risked undoing a lot of the regulatory protections that have been put in place after the dot-com and 2007 financial collapses.
Compared with Trump, Hillary Clinton is tremendously China-friendly. She would not have countered Xi's expansionist policies.
On more niche (but IMHO important) issues like space policy, Trump-Pence has actually been extremely good, better than any president in living memory. Hillary, on the other hand, considered expenditures on space to be a waste of money.
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There are plenty of arguments a reasonable person can come up with for not wanting a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, with or without the advantage of hindsight. Only through a deeply blue-tinted partisan lens could you say a Hillary term would have been objectively better on all accounts.
As I said way up thread, the DNC is as much at fault as anyone else for continuing to field deeply unpopular and uninspiring candidates, while simultaneously ignoring working class concerns.
Sure. But voting for a "chaos monkey" isn't reasonable. It's not as if Republicans would have been happy with another Democratic candidate, and they had an entire field of their own to choose from, and they chose to vote in Nero to watch Rome burn.
I don’t know if you noticed, but out democratic institutions have remained intact.
I don’t appreciate my country being held hostage to extortive tactics: “vote for my candidate—the other guy is a literal Nazi!”
It is not game-theoretic optimal to give into extortion, because things will gradually trend in worse and worse directions. Sometimes a protest vote to the system itself is required to reduce the long term damage.
As opposed to "vote for my candidate - Hillary is a literal blood drinking serial killing baby raping illuminati whore who will start World War 3!"
or "vote for my candidate - Joe Biden is a pedophile with extreme dementia, and we don't know exactly what his son is into but it's probably pretty awful?"
I mean, at least the people calling Trump racist can point to a large pile of circumstantial evidence to back it up. It's hard to believe that is "extortionate" and "holding the country hostage" but not Pizzagate, QAnon, and Stop the Steal vigilantes.
He was completely incompetent in everything he tried to do. Imagine how bad it would be, if he was actually competent. There is a good chance someone exactly like him can come along in the future, except more competent - that is scary to think about
Hopefully this four years will encourage us not to put our guards down again.
There is a lot of work left to do
His actions were aggressive: just not against covid. He sought to shift blame onto local governments and claim glory for himself.
This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.
I’m not so sure about that. There aren’t a hell of a lot of politicians who have handled it well in my view. There are a few and they are lauded for their efforts, but it’s not common. Have you any examples?
Covid probably looked like just another thing to him in the early days.
I think Trump was very aware of that fact, whether or not he responded in the right way.
Just my confidence he was fully aware that the pandemic-affected economy would be an enormous issue (in fact I believe he was hyper-aware...perhaps overly so).
It still seems strange to me to claim that "X isn't the danger, Y is", if X is a possible cause of Y. That's like people claiming "heart attacks are not what kills people, it's stopped oxygen supply to the brain that does". Sure, it's in a way factually correct, but what's the point in ignore the cause if you know about it?
You might disagree with that action, but there's no question he knew (and was motivated by) the threat to his campaign.
OTOOH someone in that circle, who did have a 9-11 moment and didn’t screw it up, waited until years later to piss away their credibility. So perhaps the president got some really bad advice.
Approving a more substantial aid to people and businesses would go along the lines of "entitlements".
Both of such choices would also align Trump's administration, and by extension the Republicans, with the opposition - something made unthinkable in the current climate.
If anything, COVID-19 underscored more the perhaps cliche saying that "Divided we fall". The strategies that play into devisiveness can only provide a situational advantage; for lasting changes there needs to be unity.
It's a herculean task to unite a nation in the current state of polarisation.
Perhaps people could stand back for a moment and ask themselves what or who is it there that makes people so intolerably polarised; is there a vision that could move the nation forward, define challenges that call for such a united power to overcome them?
Even during the peak, his team was still trying to play political games (by denying "blue states" federal resources to show it was democratic mismanagement). I think, if he truly made a strong showing (or was at least consistent in his message) he would have blown out Biden.
It was the perfect missed opportunity
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/08/06/heres-how-much-you-could-get...
That seems to fit just as well with his playbook, he just went for the wrong pill.
The thing about doing something is you can always claim what you did was necessary. It's asymmetric. Do nothing, and if the problem doesn't go away you're an idiot. Do something, and if the same thing happens you can claim it would have been worse if you hadn't. There's always some example somewhere you can abuse to say whatever you want.
Whether someone did badly depends on expectations about how it would have gone if they had done otherwise. Like in sports, you judged less harshly if you lose to the favourite. If you let the "otherwise" happen, people complain that you let it happen.
"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done."
Note I'm saying nothing at all about what ought to be done about the virus, just how to handle the PR.
The economy, or by Trump's barometer, the stock market, would have been fine. The Fed juiced the economy and then some, SPY is currently trading at pre-COVID all time highs.
Secondly, it's much harder to pin the blame on ~230,000 Americans dead to negligence if Trump actually took some action. Even if COVID came back in full force, you could then say that we have successfully flattened the curve and are now much better at treating the virus.
Instead, 237k Americans died and 1,500+ die every from COVID, and many Americans are following his lead by not wearing masks.
He wanted to use the pandemic as a way to boost nationalism. The evil virus from China vs America's freedom. Turned out, China handled the situation pretty well and blaming them for everything turned out more difficult than expected. And America didn't deliver, the drug industry couldn't find a treatment, and worse, one of the most effective mitigations, masks, rely on imports from China.
Had an American lab found an effective treatment, had a convincing argument been found against China, the situation would have been different for the elections. But how could one know? Trump just lost his bet.
it's still uncertain what biden will be doing, other than occupying the white house, of any substance for the next 4 years. he talks a lot about unity, but isn't reputed to be a unifying force, so that seems an unlikely pillar of his presidency. he recites a litany of standard democratic policy positions, but without any real conviction (even "bidencare" is clichéd already).
does he do anything to moderate political and economic consolidations that have been so detrimental to prosperity and unity over (at least) the last 40 years? doubtful, unfortunately.
> The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.
In many cases a thoughtful analysis will reveal that the "flaw" that was exposed was that a particular function of government required good people being elected and good people being appointed. In those cases it might be a mistake to attempt to update the design or structure of government, when the solution is a lot simpler.
E.g. imagine after using Chaos Monkey to demonstrate the flaws in structure, instead you just fire the people that made it in the first place.
I'm not holding my breath for that one. Lot of Dems campaign sponsors don't want to fix those issues.
Chaos monkey is intentionally outside the system, poking at it. Trump isn't this.
I believe it genuinely was touch and go a few times there.
What a cold and callus interpretation of a man that did real damage to thousands of people.
Put more simply, Trump managed to find a position strong enough that he lost the support of even John Yoo, who felt that the President had authority to order torture.
https://www.npr.org/2017/02/08/514049685/former-defender-of-...
I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that.
Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.
Nixon was potentially going to be bipartisan, which is why he resigned first — so we’ll never know for sure.
As I said (I thought clearly), I'm not talking about the final vote. I'm talking about the trial stuff that happens before it.
For example, whether any witnesses are called. In Trump's impeachment trial they decided witnesses weren't necessary (https://www.npr.org/2020/01/31/801589634/sen-alexander-expla...).
Also, when Clinton was impeached, it was a Republican-majority Senate impeaching a Democratic president. So not really comparable to when it's the same party for both as with Trump. Of course they went through all the steps in the trial for Clinton because that Senate wanted to impeach (and probably wanted as much damaging evidence to come to light as possible).