Congress' push to regulate Big Tech is fizzling out

Arguments about “GOP racism” might be justified if they were the ones constantly talking about people’s race, but they’re not. In my 33 years in America a Republican has never dared to call me “brown” or “a person of color” or lumped me in with a grab bag of other minorities based solely on skin color. They’re not the ones fighting to legalize discrimination against my kids.[4]

My family immigrated to Reagan’s America, where my brother and I could compete on objective standards. My kids will grow up in an America where they’ll have to compete by telling some story about their grandfather growing up in a village in Bangladesh, hoping to appeal to the subjective aesthetics of some white administrator.[5] It’s not the GOP doing that.

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

[2] https://www.insidehighered.com/admissions/article/2022/05/02...

[3] https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-h...

[4] https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2021/12/09/biden-adm...

[5] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/thomas-jeffer...

Look who funds universities with large endowments and specifically which departments and buildings they fund. Money means priority and importance and is upstream of culture.

It’s no coincidence that what were fringe ideas that were mainly academic (for decades) and an extension of theoretical post modern philosophy departments very quickly became the truth according to the same power structures that own mainstream cultural energy sources. Judith Butler and Kimberlé Crenshaw probably can’t even believe it.

The latest NYT/Siena poll suggests exactly otherwise for the coming midterms. Dems carry the white college-educated vote by a substantial margin and lose all working-class groups (non-college-degree, lower income) to Reps.

The message is that the Democratic Party as of now caters to those who are financially well enough off that social ("woke") issues matter more than economic issues.

This is a perfect example of why I cannot call myself a democrat anymore. Can you not see how an unemployed white person in the rust belt who lost his job because the factory he worked at was moved to China because of NAFTA may interpret this as extremely dismissive? Why should he vote for someone who claims that he isn't a "real" working class person?

The recovery from the 2008 recession was very slow, and the unemployment rate for most of 2012 was over 8%. George H.W. Bush lost reelection with an unemployment rate that was less than that.

> Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong.

White non-college graduates made up 43% of the electorate in 2018. Non-whites made up only 24%.

Restructuring the Democratic Party around graduate-school level race theory was an excellent way to destroy its ability to advocate for the working class. At best, working class white people don't get the rhetoric. At worst, they correctly perceive that it's not in their interest to support Democratic policies that redistribute opportunities along racial lines: https://www.forbes.com/sites/evangerstmann/2021/06/12/yet-an.... Such policies deliberately avoid redistribution across class lines. I.e. if you spend political capital fighting to redistribute funds amongst small businesses based on race, you have less political capital to spend redistributing from big businesses to small businesses.

Democrats have already lost working class people. They're 11 points behind among non-college graduates overall according to recent New York Times polling: https://theliberalpatriot.substack.com/p/working-class-and-h.... Currently, what's keeping them afloat is a supermajority among minorities. But that's eroding as well, as working class Hispanics start trending the same way as other working class people. Biden won just 55% of non-college Hispanics in 2020. In the latest NYT poll, the parties are tied among non-college Hispanics in terms of which party they want to control Congress in 2022. Democrats' long-term hope long term is that Hispanics vote the way Black people do, rather than the way Italians and Irish did. (The latter were key Democratic constituencies until they went for the GOP under Reagan.) The math on that isn't looking good.

Democrats cannot be the party of racial gerrymandering and critical race theory and also the party of the working class. That's not mathematically possible.

In 2008, he railed against big banks and elites. He called for bailing out GM. Here talked about the need to stop illegal immigration: https://www.c-span.org/video/?c4656370/user-clip-sen-barack-....

On social issues, he signaled that he was solidly within the Midwestern mainstream. He emphasized his Kansas roots. He opposed same-sex but supported civil unions. He distanced himself from the radicalism of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright. He was not out at the forefront of anything, and didn’t attack the social values of the Midwesterners he was courting.

While that may have been retroactively applied to it, I got the sense that it was a movement for college kids to cut class and get high all day, commingling with their female peers. Funnily enough, my economics professor at the time asked one of the protestors what their views on the macroeconomy were, and the dude was so stoned he launched into a tirade about aliens or something equally nonsensical. It was certainly a cultural movement, but let's not make it seem like it was some large grassroots movement that united Americans all across the country to take down government and corporate corruption.

Yes, we need to do that. From here to there however, is a long and winding road with many obstacles.

Here's the thing though: I lived through the era as a young adult. So while you have links, I have lived experience. I know what I saw and who said what.

I never said Democrats started the culture war. The "Gingrich revolution" and his Contract on America was a full throated reaction to Democrats winning the White House. It reshuffled the political parties along ideological lines and eliminated most Blue Dog Democrats.

Maybe learn some history before coming at people with whatever you learned last week.

If everything were going great I'd agree with you, but "a lot of huge sweeping changes" is what we need and it's exactly what the American people have been asking for. Where's the federal law America wants to end prohibition on marijuana? Campaign finance reform? Internet privacy? Gerrymandering? Immigration? Consumer protections? Healthcare? Domestic Surveillance? Mass incarceration? Climate change? Education?

Congress isn't doing just fine, it isn't "not moving fast enough", it's broken. It's failing to serve the interests of the American people year after year after year. There is so much that needs done and so many people being hurt because none of it is getting addressed.

This is a dishonest summary. The person you replied to dismissed "relatively minor infrastructure bills," they did not dismiss all infrastructure bills as minor.

Some of these bills do indeed matter, in the sense that someone has to deal with them at some point, and I expect many bills in most sessions to appear somewhat similiar.

But they are hardly real attempts to tackle the problems we're facing, and I'd argue we're not even treading water on serious, serious issues we're facing as a country.

It's like watering your house plants while the house burns down. Technically - someone should be watering the plants. Is it really the right priority at the moment?

Seems you missed the point.

I'm not sure we read the same comment then.

Your own comment even circles back around to agreeing with the basic premise, so I'm confused as to why you're even disputing something that you're in fundamental agreement with.

The parties are in disputably different, and electoral outcomes lead to massive differences in policy choices which are clear to anyone who's willing to bother to do the research. It takes a lot of finessing and hedging and caveats and broad meandering musings on political grand strategy to start to attempt to equate the political parties. The reason it requires that much work is because the parties are indeed different.

The result you are talking about is not the result of Democratic strategy, but of Manchin’s (and to a lesser extent, Sinema’s) blocking of anything meaningful and impactful.

The last example I recall was when republicans passed an over-ride of Obama's veto on the bill to allow victims of 9/11 to sue Saudi Arabia then once it passed were worried about the actual consequences.

I also get information from corporate media but I always keep in mind the purpose of the angle of their reporting and always ignore all opinion pieces. Opinion pieces are always trash

You are trying to gish gallop the argument with a completely unfounded quip about “magic”.

I mean, Trump won with several million fewer votes than Clinton. The common narrative around Hillary Clinton and the Democrats is, as you mention, the failure to tap into an anti-establishment zeitgeist that Trump did more successfully. But the numbers alone (apart from electoral votes, obviously) show the Democrats were at least as successful, if not technically more successful, than Trump at messaging. The Democrats' failure was one of tactics, not strategy.

Case in point: not too long ago they used to control the entire congressional delegations of deep-red North Dakota and South Dakota. Now they're all red. That's two reps and four senators, which I'm sure the Democrats theoretically wish they had right now.

IIRC, the last Democratic senator from those states lost because she was boxed into to unelectable social policy positions by out-of-state donors.

If I could vote in the US I’d vote democrat (and likely join them) because I don’t want Christian fundamentalists to be in power, not because I believe in their policies and especially not in their abilities.

There may be a coalition of people who believe in what you think, but I’d wager the vast majority of support comes from those who simply think they’re less bad than the alternative.

Which party is the majority in the Senate? I thought it was the dems.

If your political party can't pass a law when it controls Congress, that's a legitimate reason for people to be disappointed with your political party, is it not?

As you may or may not know, legislative bodies have a whip. The current Democratic Senate whip is Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL). The job of a whip is quite literally to whip votes. It is to get legislation passed. Betwen the whip and the Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer (D-NY), they could:

1. Remove Manchin and Sinema from committee chairs;

2. Remove them from committees completely (eg Dianne Feinstein was effectively removed because she's basically a billion years old and senile);

3. Investigate the links between Manchin, his actions on the Energy Committee and his brother's coal company in West Virginia from which he personally profits.

The counterargument is that they'll switch sides and either join the Republicans or simply caucus with them to retake the majority (eg like Tom Daschle did with Jim Jeffords). Let them. You cannot allow people to hold you hostage like that. They probably won't either because currently they enjoy a disproportionate amount of power. As soon as the GOP doesn't need them, they'll just be relegated to being junior Senators with little to no power.

The Republicans unlike the Democrats know how to whip votes. Take the fascinating case of Madison Cawthorn who found himself the subject of an organized hit campaign after making off-the-cuff remarks about Republican sex parties (seriously). He got dragged into Kevin McCarthy's office and came out looking like he'd been physically beaten. The GOP primaried him and he lost. That's how you get your caucus to toe the line.

So Manchin and Sinema could (and should) be primaried.

Biden could create executive orders to advance his agenda. He's too much of an institutionalist to worry about separation of powers and doing anything "too divisive". You know who doesn't worry about that? Republicans. Republicans care about winning. Democrats care about fundraising off how terrible Republicans are.

Even if such executive orders are struck down by the Supreme Court as overreach then at least you tried.

Example: The Senate could raised the minimum wage to $15 as a budget reconciliation process. They didn't. Why? Respect for some outdated notion of norms, rules and procedures. You know what the Republicans did when faced with pushback from the Senate parliamentarian on passing Bush's tax cuts? They fired him and found someone else [1].

Remember that keeping Roe v. Wade enjoyed wide public support (eg 64% according to [2]; I've seen other figures as high as 70-75%). Even if legislation cannot pass you force politicians to put their vote on the record. Votes on the record matter. Hilary's support for the Iraq War came back to haunt her (in 2008, mostly).

[1]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/2001/05/08/k...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2022/05/19/1099844097/abortion-polling-r...

Meanwhile, just 29% of folks who primarily speak Spanish at home, and 41% of first generation Hispanic immigrants, think abortion should be legal. If Democrats want to be the party of telling working class Hispanics that their views are “regressive” and the most important problem is that they can’t or won’t abort enough of their babies, that’s a dream come true for the GOP.

Bonus points for “[a]bortion rights have strong support among the wealthy.” The attack ads write themselves. “Wall Street bankers and Silicon Valley engineers think that their maids and gardeners are having too many kids and should abort more of them.”

It being the left-most of the two major political parties has been the case since it was clear how the emerging alignment from the long 20th century realignment was shaking out, by, say, the late 1960s.

> In 2006, 32% of Democrats identified as liberal. 23% were conservative (the rest identified as moderate). In 2018 it’s 46% liberal/35% moderate/17% conservative.

So…what? Unless you have some kind of calibration of where the people with these self-identifications place the liberal/moderate/conservative divides, this doesn’t tell you anything, since it can just as easily be interpreted as shift in what Democratic voters consider liberal vs. moderate.

You can’t measure how liberal the Democratic Party is by how liberal Democrats see themselves.

> That means that even today, a minority of Democrats are liberals. An even smaller minority are progressives. The Democrats are not and have never been a majority liberal party, although that is rapidly changing.

You seem to be using Pew data [0] for self-identification. But–while it lacks the kind of over-time comparison one might like (they’ve done it several time since the 1980s, but the methodology has changed), Pew also has a present (well, 2021) political typology derived by bucketing actual views into descriptive buckets: 51% of Democrats are in left/liberal buckets, 28% in a distinctly-Democratic group that tends to self-identify as moderate, 13% in a moderate group that is about evenly split between the two parties, and the remaining 8% in more typically Republican buckets (all of which are Right/Conservative.) [1]

> The reason democrats like Manchin and Sinema block liberal policies is that they are conservatives.

Neither seems to be a conservative (in any of the senses usually used within the American political spectrum.) Manchin might be in the equally-split “Stressed sideliners” bucket, maybe.

Sinema has maybe made the most rapid transition from a far-left critic of the Democratic Party for being too friendly to the Right to the the very right edge of the Democratic coalition over her career as a political activist and politician…or she is just an ideology-free opportunist.

[0] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/01/17/liberals-ma...

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2021/11/09/the-democrat...

Both sides-ism has a low social cost. Everyone is bad to some extent, this can always be true in a vacuous sense, nobody is offended. You are not partisan nor biased if everyone is bad. If someone questions you you can infinitely motte-bailey backwards into an agreeable position, just by saying you are actually taking no position.

While untrammeled corporate power and untrammeled government power are both scary, the effective fusion of the two via state capture is the real nightmare. I think that sort of halfway environment, where there's enough state to be worth capturing but not enough to be an effective counterweight, is the default in a lot of the particularly cursed post-colonial nations - Angola and Burma spring to mind - where traditional means of social organization were sublimated into the colonial state, leaving a vacuum when the colonial state itself began to molder.

This was a great thing for consumers and banking competition. There is no reason a small bank with $50B in assets should have the same regulatory requirements as JP Morgan.

Can't get creative, couldn't solve the Chinatown murder of May 12, 2012, "no we don't have funds, you have to get back on task, detective. Detective! We've been defunded, get back to your part of the deal."

When made by the US president (to Latin America [1]), that probably needs to be taken seriously.

[1]: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-the-first-...

Market cap doesn't mean people are making money or shows the economy it creates. Musk sends funny troll tweet or says something that will result in a fine few month down the road and instantly billions of dollars of market cap is destroyed or created. This doesn't exist in Europe or anywhere else, at least not at that scale. The amount of money in the USA is just on another level.

Secondly, that crazy ecosystem in the US sucks all the high potential companies. It's very common for an EU startup to incorporate in the US to tap into that consumer market and that VC ecosystem. The work is done in NL, FR, RO, BG etc but it is a US company. As a result, you have a situation where the EU part of the operations doesn't make any money because it doesn't have to but does all the salary processing and the Silicon Valley HQ makes ridiculous trades and the EU part looks like a loss center. Lots of lots of games are Europe-made, like European talent created the concept, the graphics, the code but if the publisher is American on the books you'll see it as American success.

Europe has this investment culture where investors invest into stuff that make profit, in US companies don't have to make a profit as long as the owners of the stocks can trade them and make profit.

It's just different, I don't think it's fair to say that Europe does oil and textile and not much more. That wouldn't explain the living standards that are on par with the USA.

That's because you've redefined technology to mean 'software company'. Oil & gas, automotive, industrial machinery, pharmaceuticals, chemical industry, transportation, aviation, construction, telecoms is technology. They're high productivity, high complexity and highly automated sectors. In Ludwigshafen were I grew up there's BASF's chemical complex, literally the largest one in the world. Is that not tech because it doesn't have a smoothie bar and hip people with macbooks in the lobby?

the productivity in wealthy European countries is roughly as high as in the US, and the only way that is possible is due to tech. Otherwise you'd be an agrarian society and much poorer.

Automobiles, video games off the top of my head. In any case, why does it matter? There are other things outside of consumer tech that are innovative and bring money.

Are you sure? I distinctly remember them boasting in a keynote about how many Android users were using their app to switch to iOS. I could definitely believe that it's not a high strategic priority though.

> It is far more profitable now than it would be in a race to the bottom as a commodity hardware maker.

Agreed, but I don't think it would have to turn into a race to the bottom. Apple is a luxury brand now, and I expect they would continue to maintain that. The Apple logo is very much a status symbol (particularly for the young. My teenagers are literally made fun of at school for having "Androids" instead of iPhones), and I wouldn't expect that to change much. In fact I think as more people adopt it, being an Android user would become more of an aberration from cultural expectations than it already is.

It probably will hurt app store revenues, but Apple makes such a premium on hardware that it may make up or even exceed the losses from software competition.

or maybe they just drop usbc altogether?

between the representatives, not between the people. Couple that with gerrymandering, vestiges of election laws back from the times when the red coats were still a threat and corporate money, it's no surprise that the people are disenfranchised when it comes to these issues.

I would go and say this is all intentional, btw. The government is doing a great job at promoting the interests of the entities they're actually representing.

They aren’t, though.

(Support in the least representative house of the federal legislature may be split almost exactly 50-50, but that’s not the same as opinions on the substantive issues being split that way.)

Lol, you should look up mining towns and how corporations treated their miners in the 1800s.

A corporation without a government to beat it into submission will treat you as a machine, to be used up and discarded and replaced. Come on! We've seen the bad side of unregulated business here in America, and it was extremely dark.

And that's because government zoning at the time prioritised suburban single-family house zoning, which in turn created the car-dependent culture. It didn't have to be this way, Rotterdam isn't built this way for example.

See anti-bike lane movements, lack of over and underpasses for pedestrians, sidewalks that quite literally connect nothing and go nowhere, local laws that prohibit walking on roads where there is no other access between locations, no crossings, signage, or road markings for pedestrians in commercial areas, etc.

Go to a modern local shopping strip, park near the road, and walk the sidewalks. See if there's ramp or stair access between all parking lots and appropriate crossings between them. See if there are indicators before all curbs and paths for a blind person or someone in a wheel chair or with a stroller to travel.

Being designed for cars only would imply useless designs wouldn't exist. They do, so we know that something is governing these things, just poorly and not in the favor of not-cars.