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Comment by jmyeet | Hacker News Reader

Of course it is. Why? Because both parties operate at the behest of the capital-owning class. The only bills that pass are performative, extend police power domestically (eg [1]) or extend military power internationally (which typically means a massive giveaway to the military-industrial complex anyway).

Nothing curtails corporate power. It's also why the focus of politics is on being divisive on social issues. This is to distract the voters and prevent class solidarity of the working class.

[1]: https://edition.cnn.com/2022/06/14/politics/house-vote-supre...

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Occupy Wall St had a huge impact on the culture war and it’s no coincidence that todays intense culture war began after it. Occupy failed for many reasons but primarily it failed because it couldn’t get funded. Donor class and corporate sponsorship are required for progressives to attain the power they want. Class warfare - the traditional progressive cause - died and gave birth to a new identity politics (we call it Woke today) that could get funded.

Donors and businesses (the same thing) can get behind a movement that centers group identity so long as it isn’t class because it’s useful. It’s why you didn’t see any corporations updating their logo for Occupy or speaking out in favor and why mainstream media did its best to paint it as a rudderless, leaderless collective that didn’t have clear messaging or requests.

People ask how wokeness became such a big thing so fast and it’s because it has been extremely useful in crushing class solidarity after the collapse of the financial system.

I feel like I'm reading the plot of a Metal Gear Solid game. What will the Patriots do next? So intriguing!

Occupy failed because it didn’t have clearly defined goals.

Ending capitalism isn’t really a readily achievable goal; Occupy would have had more success if they broke down their broad sweeping goals into smaller more attainable goals.

It did have clear goals - “we are the 99%”. It addressed wealth and income inequality and money in politics and it didn’t have a leadership head for the same reason Antifa doesn’t - they are collectives against hierarchal societies. They operated on loose consensus and because of these principals I agree it was weak. But their message was clear.

But they couldn’t get donor class support because, well that is the 1%. The media painted it as a well meaning (they’re progressives after all) thing that has no concrete goal. That was a lie.

However, radical gender ideology doesn’t address the 1%. If anything it’s an attack on the working classes that tend to have traditional values. So here we are.

Reducing wealth and income inequality is an outcome, not a tangible goal. It's the same as ending police violence against black people. That is actually a more tangible goal because that can be directly controlled by the government. It also had no shortage of support for the "donor class." Yet BLM was still ineffective because it still lacked focus.

To the kind of left-wing populist involved in things like Occupy Wall Street, reducing wealth and income inequality is the tangible goal that they believe achieves the outcomes they want. Their thinking seems to be roughly like this: there is a fixed amount of wealth in the economy that is sufficient for all ordinary people to live a good life, but the super-wealthy have siphoned off much of that wealth due to their greed and that's why ordinary people are suffering, and the only solution to that is to forcibly redistribute that stolen wealth back to the people. Any attempts to make things more complicated than this, any talk about rising tides lifting all boats or suggestion it won't work, is just a propaganda trick from the super-rich.

The "rising tide" meme never made much sense to me. The economy is not like the ocean. A rising ocean affects all boats equally, but a rising economy does not affect all participants equally. The gains from rising economies tend to be disproportionately captured by the already-wealthy, and the losses from falling economies tend to be disproportionately borne by the poor.

The wealthy in a free market get that way by creating wealth, not transferring it from poor people.

To be fair. "Fix wealth and income inequality" as a goal is a bit like Michael Scott's 45 day-45 point plan to save Dunder Mifflin. "Ok, day 45 company saved. Day 44. Go."

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

> It did have clear goals - “we are the 99%”. It addressed wealth and income inequality and money in politics and it didn’t have a leadership head for the same reason Antifa doesn’t - they are collectives against hierarchal societies. They operated on loose consensus and because of these principals I agree it was weak. But their message was clear.

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.

> I got the sense that it was a movement for college kids to cut class and get high all day,

Were you there? When the system collapsed and millions of people lost their homes and their jobs? These were the people that were there. Your revisionist account is precisely what the ruling class would like to perceive it to be. And now cast them off as populist weirdo losers. Is it a coincidence we have since entered an opium epidemic, reduced lifespan, and elected Trump?

Honestly I think they were there to see a head roll and no head did. But to cast them as stoned idiots is completely wrong. I’m happy your professor who uncritically slurp on made you feel good though, as you wiped your mouth.

Famously, "What is our one demand?"

I don't think it's a conspiracy theory, but it reads like one. Obama ran as a populist and won Iowa by almost 10 points in 2008, Wisconsin by 14 points, Michigan by almost 17 points, etc. With nearly 60 Senate votes, he was able to permanently expand the social safety net through Obamacare. And how did Wall Street respond? They rebranded themselves as the good guys for their George W. Bush views on immigration, and helped pain Democrats' blue wall voters in the midwest as "deplorables" for not having progressive views on immigration, sexuality, etc. The Democratic Party happily joined them in blowing off one of its own legs, and the resulting party is one that owes its slim electoral majority to Arizona, the home of Barry Goldwater and Regan suburbs in Atlanta and can't do anything.

This doesn't hold up given that in 2012, Wisconsin was only +7.5, Iowa was +6, and Michigan was +10, an across the board drop of 5-8 points in those states over 4 years for the same guy when, by all accounts as in incumbent, he should have done better.

This line of conspiracy only works if you pretend that Democrats are the only people with agency, and that there wasn't active and successful work in the Republican arena to appeal to voters "racial anxieties". The party was actively being racist, but apparently saying that is unacceptable.

> Regan suburbs in Atlanta

Cobb county is majority minority as of the 2020 census. It was 75% white in 2000, probably like 80 or 85 for Reagan. Dems appeal among actual working class people (read: usually minorities who don't own quarter million dollar trucks) remains extremely strong.

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

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.

the poll you're referencing (https://int.nyt.com/data/documenttools/us0722-crosstabs-nyt0...) doesn't check income anywhere.

Dems fail to win the non-college white vote, but carry the non-college educated vote for other ethnic groups, which is the same way its always been.

College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income. The guy who redid my bathroom probably makes more than some of my lawyer friends doing government work. But he still removes and replaces toilets for a living and they don't and that's a form of privilege in and of itself.

And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points.

They've replaced those folks with a coalition of Silicon Valley engineers and Wall Streets bankers who used to vote Republican, and racial minorities. Good for fund raising, but results in a party that cannot effectively advocate for the working class.

> And the current poll does not reflect the "way it's always been." Democrats were competitive for white voters with just a college degree as recently as 2008: https://www.npr.org/2016/09/13/493763493/charts-see-how-quic.... In 2016 they lost that group by almost 30 points.

In a parallel thread about Obama's performance in 2012, you said

> 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.

Can you explain to me how it is that the economic recovery anxiety affected precisely one group of people, white voters without a college degree, and why their support continued bottoming out in Obama's second term even post-recovery?

Like my thesis here is "The Republicans, as early as 2009, adopted a strategy to appeal to the racial anxieties of less-educated white voters, which pulled support from those groups to republicans".

Yours appears to be "Until around 2013, support among only less-educated white voters dropped due to economic recovery concerns, but all other groups were unconcerned with the economy, and, just as the economy began to improve, the dem party decided to switch strategies specifically to not appeal to those voters".

Like for all the weird bad pundit takes that exist, I don't even think this take exists on the spectrum. Pretty much everyone agrees that there was concerted effort by Republicans to stoke racial anxiety and appeal to white voters. Like, that was the entire way Trump got his initial boost onto the scene (Obama's birth certificate nonsense). Why are you pretending that's not the case?

> College education is not only a strong proxy for income, but an even better proxy for working class status than income.

What does "working class" mean here? Like, if you're going to say that working class isn't income-driven but perception driven, ok sure, but then the existence of concepts like "driving while black" suggest that the US's class system also includes race, which means that policies that help minorities are class based! You can't have it both ways.

And keep in mind that the whole income v. education thing is highly impacted by race (https://nces.ed.gov/programs/raceindicators/indicator_rfd.as...). A white voter who didn't complete high school has the same income, on average, as a black voter who has completed some college, and for all races except whites, the difference between no high school and a BA is more than 2x, but for white people it's only around 1.86x. That is, correlation between income and education is significantly weaker for white people than for any other race.

> Pretty much everyone agrees that there was concerted effort by Republicans to stoke racial anxiety and appeal to white voters.

Everyone does not agree on that. The period leading to Obama's second term coincides with a period during which white Democrats got significantly more liberal, to the point where they had moved to the left of Black Democrats on race issues: https://www.vox.com/2019/3/22/18259865/great-awokening-white.... Part of that was redefining "racism" to mean things other than personal prejudice. Positions that working class Democrats had previously embraced, such as Bernie Sanders' opposition to immigration, became "racist" under the new definitions.

But minorities themselves largely do not accept these theories, and most do not hear the "dog whistles" that white liberals claim to hear: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote... ("We began by asking eligible voters how 'convincing' they found a dog-whistle message lifted from Republican talking points. Among other elements, the message condemned 'illegal immigration from places overrun with drugs and criminal gangs' and called for 'fully funding the police, so our communities are not threatened by people who refuse to follow our laws.' Almost three out of five white respondents judged the message convincing. More surprising, exactly the same percentage of African-Americans agreed, as did an even higher percentage of Latinos.").

Democrats during that period also rediscovered policies regarding racial preferences in education and hiring that remain wildly unpopular among minorities themselves, not to mention working class white people: https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/05/08/america...

> Why are you pretending that's not the case?

Because it's self-serving nonsense. Your theory is that folks in Iowa soured on Obama because Republicans pointed out that he was Black, and not because he appointed a former Goldman Sachs executive to Treasury and doubled down on globalization after having run as a populist.

It's also an attitude that is terribly counterproductive for Democrats (but great for Republicans). America is far less "racist" than my native Bangladesh. But some degree of "racism" is inevitable in any society. It's inevitable that working class people are going to have less racially progressive views than elites who learned elaborate social-science theories in college. If it becomes politically acceptable to hold that against them, then that becomes a powerful club for elites to use against the working class. Which is what's happened.

> A white voter who didn't complete high school has the same income, on average, as a black voter who has completed some college

That's an interesting social science fact, but you can't build a politics for a working class party around that. The 90% white county where my wife's family is from has a median household income lower than the median for Black households nationally. Folks in that county do not care if you tell them that 2/3s of white people are richer than them, but only 1/2 of Black people. And they correctly perceive that policies that focus on redistributing opportunities based on race--policies that accord more preferences to affluent immigrants from Africa than first generation college students from the Oregon coast--are contrary to their personal interests.

> Everyone does not agree on that. The period leading to Obama's second term coincides with a period during which white Democrats got significantly more liberal, to the point where they had moved to the left of Black Democrats on race issues:

This is based on a single question, and shows that most of the shift happened post 2012. Which would make this a perfect example of Simpson's paradox: the right-most democrats left the party, making the average (white) democrat move left.

> Your theory is that folks in Iowa soured on Obama because Republicans pointed out that he was Black, and not because he appointed a former Goldman Sachs executive to Treasury and doubled down on globalization after having run as a populist.

Yes, because it makes sense that less educated white voters who in many cases supported the ACA but didn't support Obamacare, and who support abortion pre-viability but not in the second trimester, have well defined, cogent opinons about a member of the cabinet who I, someone who cares enough to argue about this stuff, can't even name.

> That's an interesting social science fact, but you can't build a politics for a working class party around that.

This begs the question.

> This doesn't hold up given that in 2012, Wisconsin was only +7.5, Iowa was +6, and Michigan was +10, an across the board drop of 5-8 points in those states over 4 years for the same guy when, by all accounts as in incumbent, he should have done better.

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.

> 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

This is only a correct perception if they decide to make it a fight. There is nothing that implicitly prevents a big tent dem party from both advocating for working class and minority beneficial policies. It's only zero sum because people like you claim it's zero sum and create the perception that it is so. Don't do that, and push back against others that do that, and the problem goes away.

>Such policies deliberately avoid redistribution across class lines.

No they don't (I mean even ignoring the extent that redistribution along racial lines usually correlates with class lines pretty well), there isn't anything that prevents you from doing both. It only costs political capital when you make it a fight. If everyone in the dem party were like me, doing both wouldn't cost any political capital!

If you believe that such policies are bad, say that. If you think such policies are good, support them! Don't do this half-hearted thing where you just claim the policies are electorally untenable. That's self-fulfilling because saying it's zero sum drives the perception that it is so.

> It's only zero sum because people like you claim it's zero sum and create the perception that it is so

It is by definition zero sum. There are a fixed number of college acceptance spots at prestigious colleges each year and by the nature of prestige it must stay so for the colleges to continue being prestigious. There are (roughly) a fixed number of jobs in prestigious fields. There are a fixed number of C level positions in Fortune 500 companies. When you deliberately reallocate these spots on the basis of skin color instead of merit, you doom the nation to eventual failure as it's outcompeted by nations like China. Science does not care about your skin color, it only cares that you're right.

You might notice that current Democratic policies only advocate for raising income taxes, and not substantially raising LT capital gains taxes. Not only that, but you can still deduct huge amounts for real estate ownership and business ownership.

No one was talking about allocating headcount.

> Science does not care about your skin color, it only cares that you're right.

This begs the question.

> You might notice that current Democratic policies only advocate for raising income taxes.

Sanders and Warren both advocate for wealth taxes, and have higher support among the college educated cadre of the dem party!

You brought up "minority beneficial policies" in the context of the current left wing segment of the Democratic party. That means DEI programs and affirmative action to favor minorities, because that's what's being pushed by the left right now. Those policies do affect headcount and college admissions and are zero sum.

I'm sure as an engineer at Google you would know that recruiters at your company will regularly favor racial minorities by prioritizing their resumes and promotions. Unsurprisingly, it was found that they were systemically underpaying men [1] and discriminating against Asian applicants [2].

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/03/05/700288695/google-pay-study-fi...

[2] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/daily-labor-report/google-sett...

> You brought up "minority beneficial policies" in the context of the current left wing segment of the Democratic party.

Correct.

> That means DEI programs

Let me know where in the democratic party platform it says that colleges should use race based affirmative action policies. We were discussing a particular minority aware funding program. You decided to bring up headcount, something no one else was discussing.

> I'm sure as an engineer at Google you would know that recruiters at your company will regularly favor racial minorities by prioritizing their resumes

Sure, yes, this is fine.

> and promotions.

Interesting bit of made up nonsense there though.

> Unsurprisingly, it was found that they were systemically underpaying men [1] and discriminating against Asian applicants [2].

You should really read those links better. Your first showed that a particular crosstab of engineers (that I belonged to, in fact!) were being systemically underpaid (by, if I recall, something like .25%). Your second link notes that Google settled both against Asian applicants, and against female applicants and employees. So, Google was, per your own source, systematically underpaying women (by a larger margin over a larger period) and their internal study failed to recognize that, and instead gave me a small bonus.

> Sure, yes, this is fine.

Most minorities themselves don't think it's fine: https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe.... Hispanics oppose the practice 69-27, and Black people oppose it 54-37.

To put that into context, Hispanics are more unified in opposing taking race into account in hiring than they are in supporting Joe Biden. White liberals are imposing this practice upon them.

Your link and what I said I support aren't the same thing. I'm going to ask you to ensure that you're responding to the strongest interpretation of what I'm saying (and maybe reconsider your priors if "DEI" to you means "explicitly favor applicants based on race"). I really don't like having to deal with motte and bailey, even if it's unintentional.

Google doesn't consider race or ethnicity (or gender or..) during the hiring or promotion process. Prioritizing someone's resume (e.g. giving them an interview first) because they're underrepresented is vastly different than hiring or promoting someone less qualified.

> where in the democratic party platform it says that colleges should use race based affirmative action policies

Well, the CA Democratic Party's official position is that you should have supported Prop 16, which would have unbanned race based affirmative action (racism) [1].

> Sure, yes, this is fine.

It is not fine. Myself and many others reject this sort of practice. California voters rejected Prop 16 by a 15 pt margin. It is illegal under federal discrimination laws to discriminate on the basis of race or sex. It is racism, plain and simple. Just because you are (I presume) white and liberal and you aren't affected by such policies does not make them legal or moral. Pretending you are morally superior by discriminating against minorities through affirmative action is just as bad as white supremacy.

This sort of "it's fine" attitude is why Trump got elected. And before you accuse me of being a white cis-male, I'm not white.

> You should really read those links better

> Interesting bit of made up nonsense there though.

I quote from the article: "Managers had dipped into the discretionary funds more often for women engineers, creating a pay gap for men in the same job category". This is literally the sort of DEI affirmative action sexism I was mentioning. You also coincidentally ignore the fact that Asians were discriminated against because women being underpaid fits your political narrative better. One of these things is a direct result of Google's internal policy to discriminate against "overrepresented" minorities like Asians and one of these things is not.

[1] https://cadem.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/State-Propositi...

> "Managers had dipped into the discretionary funds more often for women engineers, creating a pay gap for men in the same job category".

Right, so you lied when you said that they were prioritizing promoting women, which is false, and is completely unrelated to what you quoted in the article.

>You also coincidentally ignore the fact that Asians were discriminated against

No I didn't. I literally mentioned them. Me pointing out that you did entirely ignore the discrimination against women (because it does in fact completely invalidate the point you were going for) isn't ignoring Asians. Like I keep saying, its not zero sum. I am capable of believing that it is possible to dsciriminate against multiple groups.

> Just because you are (I presume) white and liberal and you aren't affected by such policies does not make them legal or moral.

I'm confused, so please explain it to me:

If I'm white, and these policies favor nonwhite people over white ones, how could I be unaffected?

> Right, so you lied when you said that they were prioritizing promoting women, which is false, and is completely unrelated to what you quoted in the article.

Promotion or bonus, do the details really matter? In either case, Google's internal DEI initiatives caused managers either directly or indirectly to favor women. You can't just set diversity KPIs and expect managers to respect anti-discrimination law. Incentives matter.

> completely invalidate the point you were going for

That Asians are systemically discriminated against by affirmative action? That affirmative action is wrong and racist/sexist? That Google systemically discriminates against Asians through its DEI initiatives?

> I am capable of believing that it is possible to dsciriminate against multiple groups

Correct, it is possible for women to have been discriminated against by sexist managers and for another set of managers to have discriminated against men and Asians through DEI programs. One of these things is a program promoted by Google and one is not.

> its not zero sum

So why don't you give up your job to a female person of color then? Headcount is zero sum. If you favor specific minorities, other people get less spots. That's zero sum by definition.

> these policies favor nonwhite people over white ones

That's where you've got it wrong. Affirmative action doesn't favor nonwhites over whites, it favors specific nonwhites (mainly blacks and latinos) over Asians. If you look at the stats before and after the University of California system banned affirmative action, the proportion of whites stayed about the same [1]. That's what I mean by "you aren't affected by such policies". When you implement affirmative action, it's Asians taking the hit for your moral grandstanding. As a white person, you have no right to come and lecture us minorities about "diversity" and "equity" and "inclusion" when your own policies are racist.

[1] https://www.dailycal.org/2018/02/02/prop-209-affirmative-act...

For most of my life, I didn't live in the bay area. I lived in a place where Asians are less than 5% of the population, which is like most of the US. Disfavoring Asians in such a place is ineffective, as there aren't enough to have an appreciable effect. Are you claiming affirmative action doesn't exist in such areas?

There's a bunch of other nonsense in your post (like suggesting $400 and $30,000 are equivalent, or the completely made up claim that managers were being encouraged to pay women more), but like this feels extra egregious.

> Disfavoring Asians in such a place is ineffective, as there aren't enough to have an appreciable effect. Are you claiming affirmative action doesn't exist in such areas?

Please read my comment again and try to comment in good faith. I never mentioned anything about affirmative action not existing. You'll notice also that California is aggressively trying to implement affirmative action to disadvantage Asians despite Asians being only 15% of the population in CA.

Are you claiming that affirmative action doesn't disadvantage Asians? Because that is demonstrably false, as evidenced by SFFA vs Harvard, the data out of the UC system before and after Prop 209, and comparing the racial makeup schools of similar caliber that do and do not utilize affirmative action.

> like suggesting $400 and $30,000 are equivalent

I never mentioned any numbers in my post. Please don't lie.

> the completely made up claim that managers were being encouraged to pay women more

It is a fact that Google managers used internal discretionary funds to pay women more. It is also a fact that Google managers have diversity KPIs they are encouraged to meet as part of their performance: "At Google, we measure the progress against these [DEI] goals with various metrics across hiring, progression, retention, and inclusion" [1]. I will let you come to your own conclusion as to how the latter could lead to the former.

[1] https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/intl/en-gb/future-of-marketi...

> I will let you come to your own conclusion as to how the latter could lead to the former.

Given that I know the size of these discretionary funds, I can practically guarantee it didn't. For context, my manager recently stretched his discretion to the limit for a coworker, and was able to bend their salary by around half a percent. A few hundred dollars isn't going to retain anyone at a FAANG.

> Please read my comment again and try to comment in good faith. I never mentioned anything about affirmative action not existing.

No, but you did say it doesn't disfavor whites, it disfavors Asians. I'm asking who it disfavors when there aren't any Asians.

> I can practically guarantee it didn't

If that was the case, then Google would not have been sued by the Department of Labor. Don't presume to understand what a manager is capable of doing when you are a mere engineer IC. The fact that you believe the discretionary limit is a few hundred dollars indicates you don't know what you're talking about. Top performers routinely get discretionary refreshers of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of RSUs (on top of their regular annual refreshers). A few hundred dollars is probably less than your team gets for a single social event. If retaining a woman would boost the manager's diversity KPIs, it's easy to see how the diversity KPIs would cause discriminatory retention bonuses.

> I'm asking who it disfavors when there aren't any Asians.

Do you not realize that the <5% of Asians in your city are still applying to jobs and colleges across the country? Even if locally there are few Asians, they are still discriminated against by affirmative action. If I'm an Asian in bumfuck nowhere Kentucky and I apply to Harvard, I still get screwed by affirmative action equally as much as the Asian applying from California.

The situation you're talking about where there are no Asians competing for a spot doesn't exist for jobs and schools with any level of selectivity.

> If that was the case, then Google would not have been sued by the Department of Labor.

Correct, Google was not sued by the DoL for overpaying women.

> Top performers routinely get discretionary refreshers of hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of RSUs (on top of their regular annual refreshers).

Well aware ;)

> The fact that you believe the discretionary limit is a few hundred dollars indicates you don't know what you're talking about.

So what you don't appear to realize is that in the situation where Google found themselves to be overpaying women, this applied specifically to L4 SWEs, and only in regards to base salary. The difference was found to be around $400.

Just to be really, really clear here: your average L4's manager is probably an L6. There's significant restrictions on what such a manager can do with their discretionary comp, and 500-1000$ in base salary really is the upper limit for what they can do. Anything larger would require escalation to a director or a VP, and even there, the amount you can move a base salary is relatively limited.

I realize this makes the entire narrative you're pushing here fall apart, but that's the reason I think it's so important to make this clear to you. From someone who actually has knowlege of the circumstances, you're pushing a sexist conspiracy theory. Don't do that.

> Do you not realize that the <5% of Asians in your city are still applying to jobs and colleges across the country?

You're missing my point. You've claimed that white people are unaffected by AA. There's a university in Bumfuck. It has practically no Asian applicants, because the population is low. Are you claiming, categorically that every school like Bumfuck U is unable to engage in affirmative action because the don't have an Asian population to discriminate against? And if not, what group does their policy harm?

> around $400

Wrong, because they paid out 9.7 million to 10k employees [1] which is more than $400. And it was not base salary, but discretionary funds. That information is straight from Google's public statement. And it was not only L4s; Google only cited L4s as being a particularly large contributor. Google also has an incentive to understate what the real damages were, since it has to pay out for discrepancies. Don't forget, Google was sued for pay fixing in a cartel with other tech companies. Please get your facts right instead of lying.

> Correct, Google was not sued by the DoL

They were sued by the DoL for underpaying women and for hiring bias against Asians. I mixed up the two cases there - but that doesn't change the conclusion.

Look, there are two groups in the DoL lawsuit: women and Asians. Women being underpaid/underhired is explained by sexism by managers. That's obviously illegal. Asians being underhired, on the other hand, is easily explained by Google's internal policy towards DEI and their DEI KPIs. That lines up with men being underpaid due to DEI policies. I might've mixed up the male underpayment survey and the lawsuit, but it doesn't change the conclusion that diversity KPIs can lead to managers illegally biasing decisions to boost their KPIs.

You literally stated yourself that it's possible for multiple instances of bias to occur at the same time. This is an obvious example of that happening.

> I realize this makes the entire narrative you're pushing here fall apart

The facts are: Google was sued for underhiring Asians. Google also found that men were underpaid due to use of discretionary funds. Google also sets diversity KPIs for their managers to meet, which affect managers' compensation. As you have stated in your comments, Google prioritizes resumes of "underrepresented" minorities. Do you really not see how these practices cause discrimination against Asians in hiring?

> every school like Bumfuck U is unable to engage in affirmative action

In these schools, affirmative action is generally not used because the school is not sufficiently selective for its use to have any impact on student demographics. My local community college accepts everyone. So yes, in practice, Bumfuck U does not use affirmative action.

I don't get why you feel the need to bring up Bumfuck U when whether a white person is affected by affirmative action for some school no one cares about doesn't matter at all. The largest damage done by affirmative action is being done at the most prestigious firms and schools. That is where it matters, and that's where white people are not disadvantaged by affirmative action's use but Asians are. Do you care if you're rejected from McDonald's because of your race? Probably not. But you do care if you're rejected from Google (as the DoL stated Asians were) or Harvard because of your race.

Do you disagree with the statement that 1) Asians competing for spots at prestigious firms and colleges are discriminated against by affirmative action and 2) white people competing for spots at prestigious firms and colleges are NOT discriminated against by affirmative action? Because that's what the statistics (SFFA v Harvard, UC system before/after Prop 209, etc.) show. And if you don't disagree with that, then you must come to the natural conclusion that affirmative action is racist against Asians and as a white person you are advocating for a policy that does not materially affect you but severely affects Asians.

As a side note, your patronizing tone and attitude towards this are not conducive towards reasonable conversation. Acting morally superior because you can advocate for a policy that doesn't harm you but gives you nice optics is textbook white privilege. Please check your privilege.

[1] https://www.blog.google/inside-google/company-announcements/...

> Wrong, because they paid out 9.7 million to 10k employees [1] which is more than $400.

And 49% of those funds were paid out to a much smaller group of unrelated people, if you read to the next line.

> And it was not base salary, but discretionary funds. That information is straight from Google's public statement.

Yes, discretionary funds to adjust base salary.

> And it was not only L4s; Google only cited L4s as being a particularly large contributor. Google also has an incentive to understate what the real damages were, since it has to pay out for discrepancies.

Which has absolutely nothing to do with your claim that Google's DEI policies were causing managers to pay women to prevent them from leaving. I'm not the one getting confused here. Get your argument straight and stop bringing up unrelated distractions. I'll reiterate: as someone who was employed by Google in 2018 and affected by this policy, I was given a $400 raise, as were other affected swes I discussed with. It was $400. You're denial of this isn't factual. It's driven by a narrative that simply isn't there.

> Do you really not see how these practices cause discrimination against Asians in hiring?

No, I have absolutely no clue how Google underpaying men has anything to do with discriminating against Asians.

> Asians being underhired, on the other hand, is easily explained by Google's internal policy towards DEI and their DEI KPIs.

Ok so now you've changed your argument yet again.

> That lines up with men being underpaid due to DEI policies.

But contradicts women being underhired, and of course if you know anything about Google's hiring you'd know that (especially back in 2017) hiring decisions were made before a manager even knew anything about an applicant, so individual managers diversity KPI's couldn't affect the underhiring of applicants.

> You literally stated yourself that it's possible for multiple instances of bias to occur at the same time. This is an obvious example of that happening.

Sure, but the the whole conspiracy part is how this is related to diversity KPIs. In one instance you're saying that the diversity KPIs somehow resulted in women being paid more en masse (even though they were being paid less!) and in the other case they resulted in Asian men getting hired less even though it also led to women being hired less. You'd expect the impact to be like, somewhat similar in both cases, but you're arguing it had opposite effects.

> I don't get why you feel the need to bring up Bumfuck U when whether a white person is affected by affirmative action for some school no one cares about doesn't matter at all. The largest damage done by affirmative action is being done at the most prestigious firms and schools. That is where it matters, and that's where white people are not disadvantaged by affirmative action's use but Asians are. Do you care if you're rejected from McDonald's because of your race? Probably not. But you do care if you're rejected from Google (as the DoL stated Asians were) or Harvard because of your race.

It's pretty privileged (and weird!) to categorically reject the idea that people "in the middle" can lose out to even worse people from AA. Isn't that the entire way AA causes harm: by replacing some middling people from one group with ostensibly worse people from another group?

Like, do you think that someone who doesn't get into their stretch school is unaffected just because they're stretch is a state university and not Harvard? But here you're saying that actually harm only matters when it affects Asians. Maybe that's not what you mean, but it makes me question your motives.

> And if you don't disagree with that, then you must come to the natural conclusion that affirmative action is racist against Asians and as a white person you are advocating for a policy that does not materially affect you but severely affects Asians.

There are lots of policies that I advocate for against or that don't materially affect me (or even are directly adverse for me, including the one we're discussing!). We live in a society, and I try to support policies that will be good for society, not just ones that will be directly beneficial to me.

> Ok so now you've changed your argument yet again.

Like I said, you are arguing in bad faith and quibbling over an honest mistake when I explained to you exactly why you're wrong. I've presented the evidence and you refuse to acknowledge it, so there's no more to discuss.

> Like, do you think that someone who doesn't get into their stretch school is unaffected just because they're stretch is a state university and not Harvard

Even if the scenario you're proposing existed (the acceptance rate at these state schools is well over 50%), affirmative action still wouldn't affect white people. Whites, for example, are admitted to Harvard at around the same rate that they are to the University of Washington Tacoma [1] [2] or to SUNY Stony Brook [3]. So regardless of whether you're talking about some random state school or Harvard, and regardless of whether affirmative action is allowed (as it is at Harvard and Stony Brook) or not allowed (UW), white people are admitted at around the same rate. In fact, in some state schools in the deep South, whites make up over 60% of admitted students, despite affirmative action being allowed there. That is by definition, unaffected by affirmative action.

> We live in a society, and I try to support policies that will be good for society, not just ones that will be directly beneficial to me

Affirmative action is bad for society. It is racist and reduces the competitiveness of the nation as a whole. It violates the Civil Rights Act and will hopefully be illegal come the next SCOTUS session. It makes some white liberals such as yourself feel better about yourselves, that's it.

The fact that you believe you know what's "good for society" and no one else (especially not minorities! [4]) is exactly the sort of white supremacy that progressives nowadays embody.

[1] https://studentdata.washington.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/...

[2] https://blog.collegevine.com/harvard-university-diversity-st...

[3] https://www.stonybrook.edu/commcms/irpe/fact_book/data_and_r...

[4] https://www.vox.com/2019/5/9/18538216/diversity-workplace-pe...

> Even if the scenario you're proposing existed (the acceptance rate at these state schools is well over 50%), affirmative action still wouldn't affect white people. Whites, for example, are admitted to Harvard at around the same rate that they are to the University of Washington Tacoma [1] [2] or to SUNY Stony Brook [3].

You've cherrypicked examples. Look at UNC Chapel Hill or Georgia Tech or Duke or Tulane or Emory (granted not all are State schools). These schools have acceptance rates of less than 25%, and some lower than 10% and, and relatively small Asian populations, with white populations as high as 65% and in some cases more Black than Asian students. You're claiming that none of them engage in race-aware, holistic admissions processes, despite contrary statements on all of their undergraduate admissions websites?

> In fact, in some state schools in the deep South, whites make up over 60% of admitted students, despite affirmative action being allowed there. That is by definition, unaffected by affirmative action.

Wait what? Are you claiming that being overrepresented compared to the baseline population is evidence that a group is unaffected by affirmative action? If so than Asian students, who are overrepresented compared to population percentages at every school you've mentioned, are unaffected by affirmative action.

> The fact that you believe you know what's "good for society"

I'm confused, are you saying I should support policies I think are bad for society, or are you saying that it is white supremacy for me to have opinions that differ from yours?

> You've cherrypicked examples. Look at UNC Chapel Hill or Georgia Tech or Duke (acceptance rates of 25% or less, small Asian populations.

I see higher white populations at those schools than the ones I cited, which would support my point that affirmative action does not disadvantage whites, since all 3 schools you mentioned use affirmative action yet they have higher white populations than schools which do not use affirmative action.

> You're claiming that none of them engage in race-aware, holistic admissions processes, despite contrary statements on all of their undergraduate admissions websites?

I made no such claim. In fact, the stats you've shown would further prove my point that whites are not disadvantaged by affirmative action, and that Asians are.

> Are you claiming that being overrepresented compared to the baseline population is evidence that a group is unaffected by affirmative action

When did I say overrepresented? I merely said the percentage of whites is the same between schools which do and do not use affirmative action, in both schools which are prestigious and those which are not. You cannot say the same is true for Asians.

> are unaffected by affirmative action

Except the evidence is overwhelming that Asians have to have higher SAT scores, stronger extracurriculars, and stronger profiles to be admitted compared to both whites and other minorities. Not only that, but Asians who received identical personality scores as whites/blacks from alumni interviewers were rated lower by Harvard admissions staff, in order to disadvantage Asians. See: SFFA vs. Harvard. Try to read from a source that isn't liberal this time around.

Your claim that all races must have equal representation to their proportion of the population ignores the impact of culture on outcomes. Why do black people dominate athletics? Maybe ask yourself if the NBA should have affirmative action.

> You literally just claimed to know what's good for society

No, I claimed affirmative action was illegal under the Civil Rights Act and racist. The difference here is that you are a white person, who is not affected by affirmative action, mandating that minorities, who are negatively affected by affirmative action, adhere to it. And you dismiss minorities' opinions as invalid and dismiss the fact that a majority of minorities say they don't want race to be taken into account in the workplace (see the Vox link in my previous comment). THAT is white supremacy: believing your own opinions about minorities, as a white person, while ignoring those same minorities telling you they don't want what you're preaching.

> I merely said the percentage of whites is the same between schools which do and do not use affirmative action, in both schools which are prestigious and those which are not.

But this isn't true. Berkley is 25% white, Harvard is ~40% white, Tulane is 61% white. If what you said were true, all three would have similar white populations.

Let me try and clarify this for you one last time. Not all schools get them same population of applicants, so you would not expect all schools to get the same population of attendees. National target schools, and schools in areas with large Asian populations, may have relatively large Asian populations. But other schools, including relatively selective ones, in areas with smaller Asian populations, will not have many Asian applicants.

If such a school wants to engage in Affirmative action programs, it cannot do so by discriminating against Asian applicants, because it does not have an excess number of Asian applicants to discriminate against.

You have claimed previously that such a thing cannot happen, and that even if it did that it "doesn't matter at all". What I have shown are highly selective schools with applicant pools that have a relatively small number of Asians, and I previously demonstrated that such schools engage in affirmative action programs. This demonstrates that such schools disfavor white students when favoring minority applicants.

> Except the evidence is overwhelming that Asians have to have higher SAT scores, stronger extracurriculars, and stronger profiles to be admitted compared to both whites and other minorities.

Right, now apply the exact same argument to white applicants in comparison to other minorities in regard to the schools I mentioned like Tulane, Emory, Chapel Hill, etc. You would expect white students to be overrepresented compared to the baseline population (much as Asian students are in schools that they target), but they aren't, while Hispanic and Black students often are overrepresented.

So can you explain to me how precisely the same behavior is harmful racism against Asians when done by Berkeley or Harvard, but somehow doesn't happen, or if it does it "doesn't matter" when it's at Tulane or Emory and impacts white students?

I'll also mention that twice now you've accused me of white supremacy based solely on your assumption that I am white, and your further belief that a white person, I cannot be harmed by affirmative action policies. In reality, it appears that your actual belief is that affirmative action that harms white people "doesn't matter", and that because it "doesn't matter" a White person cannot be harmed by it.

> Your claim that all races must have equal representation to their proportion of the population ignores the impact of culture on outcomes.

I, uhh, I didn't make this claim.

> No, I claimed affirmative action was illegal under the Civil Rights Act and racist.

So when you said "Affirmative action is bad for society.", you didn't mean that ending affirmative action would be good for society? What's the option I'm missing?

> And you dismiss minorities' opinions as invalid and dismiss the fact that a majority of minorities say they don't want race to be taken into account in the workplace (see the Vox link in my previous comment).

I remain confused, I side with the majority on responses to the vox link. While I didn't explicitly state it here[0], my response there should make it clear that I also don't believe that companies should consider race when making hiring or promotion decisions. Like, I'm already on record saying the opposite of wat you think I'm saying. I've never said anything that implies otherwise, so I don't know why you're claiming that I disagree with minorities about this thing when I don't.

Like, it's also not a good idea to treat minorities as a monolith. While you clearly oppose Affirmative Action, 80% of Hispanic adults and 70% of Black adults do support them[1], so claiming that I am ignoring minorities simply because I disagree with you is to disregard, well, quite literally the majority of nonwhite Americans, who also disagree with you.

And that's fine! Minorities aren't monolithic and you're perfectly free to disagree with anyone you like, but please refrain from accusing me of white supremacy simply because I disagree with you, it's rude.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32186694

[1]: https://news.gallup.com/poll/352832/americans-confidence-rac...

> because it does not have an excess number of Asian applicants to discriminate against

Wrong, because Asians overindex relative to their proportion of the population in higher education institutions which don't use affirmative action. That's a statistical fact. Even if you have only 5% Asian applicants, Asians could still represent a plurality of the qualified applicant pool that should be admitted.

> This demonstrates that such schools disfavor white students when favoring minority applicants

You cannot show that whites are disfavored when the percentage of whites at these schools is equal to or higher than schools which do not use affirmative action. That is basic science 101: you cannot show an effect exists when your stats show the opposite.

> while Hispanic and Black students often are overrepresented

Easily explained by the fact that those schools use affirmative action. Show me a school that doesn't use it with blacks overrepresented.

> done by Berkeley

Berkeley is banned from using affirmative action or considering race in admissions in any way. Please get your facts straight instead of lying.

> at Tulane or Emory and impacts white students

Your own stats show it doesn't impact white students at those schools.

> [1]

California, the most liberal state in the nation, rejected affirmative action by a 15 point margin at the ballot box. I have to question the legitimacy of your polling data here if it claims 62% support AA.

> please refrain from accusing me of white supremacy simply because I disagree with you

I accuse you of white supremacy because you are a white supremacist. You enforce views which discriminate against Asians and which do not discriminate against whites, and you do so with a tone of moral superiority. That is white supremacy.

> Wrong, because Asians overindex relative to their proportion of the population in higher education institutions which don't use affirmative action.

Asian applicants also overindex relative to their portion of the population at higher institutions that do use affirmative action. This doesn't tell you anything!

And Asian applicants overindex more significantly at Chapel Hill than at Berkeley, relative to the state and local population, which is important, because both schools are mandated to accept around 80-90% in state students.

(And of course it's actually not clear that Asians overindex at UC Berkeley. The bay area is ~30% Asian, which is similar to Berkeley's demographics)

> You cannot show that whites are disfavored when the percentage of whites at these schools is equal to or higher than schools which do not use affirmative action. That is basic science 101: you cannot show an effect exists when your stats show the opposite.

Yes, you can, because as you yourself just said, the important thing is the acceptances relative to the candidate pool, and the candidate pool at these schools doesn't have a large number of Asians. You're (wrongly) relying on the base rate fallacy, which leads to an unsound and invalid conclusion.

And this makes sense, in areas where Asian students make up the plurality of qualified applicants, the schools will discriminate against them. But in areas where white students make up not just the plurality, but the majority of qualified applicants, schools will instead discriminate against white students. In all cases the goal is to reduce the most populous group and increase the least populous ones.

> Your own stats show it doesn't impact white students at those schools.

Only if you continue to commit the base rate fallacy.

> Berkeley is banned from using affirmative action or considering race in admissions in any way. Please get your facts straight instead of lying.

Yes, now, but you keep complaining about how it used to!

> California, the most liberal state in the nation, rejected affirmative action by a 15 point margin at the ballot box. I have to question the legitimacy of your polling data here if it claims 62% support AA.

Compare to recent measures in Colorado and Washington, which were basically 50/50. Politics is more complicated

> You enforce views which discriminate against Asians and which do not discriminate against whites

Again, this is simply untrue. White students are affected by such policies. As I've now demonstrated three or four times.

> and you do so with a tone of moral superiority.

Moral superiority meaning, what, exactly? That I disagree with you about a particular ethical question?

> There are a fixed number of college acceptance spots at prestigious colleges each year and by the nature of prestige it must stay so for the colleges to continue being prestigious.

This is exactly why affirmative action will be overturned in the next Supreme Court session later this year.

The argument that Justice Ginsburg and others made in support of it is that you aren’t taking anything away from other people by making a special exception for an arbitrary group of people.

But you are. Seats are limited and coveted by all. It’s literally against the civil rights act and should be abolished.

"My strategy would work if voters all adopted my values and worldview" isn't a sensible political strategy. It's utopianism. Politics is about putting together a coalition with the voters you have, not daydreaming about what you could do if you had the voters you want.

And the utopianism harms the very minorities you claim to advocate for. My parents, immigrants from Bangladesh, don't vote straight-ticket Democrat because they think you can achieve racial harmony. They do it because they think Obamacare is a good idea. You're not going to convince them that Bangladeshis have common cause with other minorities, or that police are bad, or that same-sex marriage is great, or that anyone should ever "celebrate their abortion." They will go along with those things, but they're voting for a political party to achieve tangible results, not bring about the Rapture.

It would be interesting to ask your parents if their experience with the personality cult of Mujib led them to vote that way here.

My mom is from a wealthy family and mainly votes democrat because she views Republicans as the party of religious “common people” and democrats as the party of the educated elite. She agrees with Trump about a lot of things, but hates him because “he talks like an uneducated person.”

My dad dad is more of a traditional Carter Democrat. He likes big government and Obamacare and rule by law expert administrators. He dislikes Republicans for their Nixon/Reagan/Bush era foreign policy (especially Nixon’s support of Pakistan against Bangladesh). He’s slowly coming to terms with the fact that although he hates Trump, he agrees with Trump on a bunch of things (pro-Russia, anti-accepting Afghan refugees, etc.)

This is one of the best socio-political analyses I've seen on Hacker News. Thank you for writing it.

Your analysis leaves one big question mark: the Republican Party offers them even less. Why would they vote for them..?

On economic issues, republicans support industries like oil production that undergirds good working class jobs. Republicans also tend to support small businesses, which is a realistic aspiration for working class people who might hope to own their own contracting or catering business some day. Republicans also have opposed Democratic efforts to implement racial preferences, which working class people correctly understand place them at the bottom of the hierarchy.

Working class people also tend to align with republicans in terms of values. Part of that is ideology (the Bible versus Judith Butler). But part of it is more pragmatic. For example, less than half of people without a college degree think that “changing gender roles has made it easier for women to lead satisfying lives.” https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2017/10/18/wide-pa.... Is that because these folks haven’t read Judith Butler? Or because Leave it to Beaver sounds pretty great in comparison to the jobs (not careers) available to them? For most people, raising a family is going to be the most fulfilling thing they ever do. Is it surprising that those folks gravitate to a party that dignifies that, instead of the one that exalts careerism and a diversity of lifestyles?

This is an interesting take. If it’s correct, the GOP is making no attempt to capitalize on it because they’re idiots when it comes to tapping in to how Americans feel (Trump was a rare exception). The GOP don't get it, haven’t gotten it, and I suspect never will get it. So I’m doubtful this will translate into enough votes by itself to turn elections.

Cobb county is not becoming blue because of demographics. As another poster pointed out it’s likely the college educated younger people like myself.

It can be both.

(If you overlay the precinct-level results from https://s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/cobbcounty.org.if-us-west... on a demographic map, it becomes apparent that the more educated parts of Cobb are redder than the less educated parts. This correlates basically perfectly with the less white vs. whiter parts).

I'm from Smyrna originally and lived there for the majority of my life. East Cobb (although it is purpleish, not just red, and that is due to college education) is redder than Smyrna/Marietta, despite being much more educated.

I’m from East Cobb and live here currently. There’s been a big change from 2000, starting in 2016. 2020 highlighted the shift.[1] I don’t think it’s race related if I look at the demographic changes in the past few censuses.

East Cobb has always been more conservative and they have a senior population who’s not changing views.

[1] https://www.11alive.com/amp/article/news/politics/elections/...

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

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?

I'm confused, are you saying this jobless rust belt person owns a quarter million dollar 18-wheeler?

I'm certainly not saying that white people can't be working class. That'd be silly. What I am saying is that often, we pretend that very affluent rural whites are "working class" to the deficit of urban (and often minority) working class people.

Edit:

I'm really having a hard time understanding how you've turned my statement which was functionally "nonwhite people can also be working class" into "white people cannot be working class". So I'm going to disengage.

> I'm confused, are you saying this jobless rust belt person owns a quarter million dollar 18-wheeler?

No, I'm not, and I think you know that I'm not. I grew up around people like this - rich kids who would put exhaust stacks on their lifted F350s - so I know what you mean. My point is that the dem response to the hollowing out of the american working class (obligatory bill clinton approved NAFTA mention) seems to be "should've gone to college lol". Like it or not, white people are the majority in america, so it seems extremely counterproductive to only consider the needs of the "real" (read: not white) working class people instead of the entire group.

No, you said “actual working class people” are “usually minorities.” That’s both wildly inaccurate and dismissive of working class white people.

> Obama ran as a populist

Not from the US and I like Obama and wouldn't have minded a third term. He had his flaws, some of them severe and stupid, but it at least had a solid direction and successes despite a lot of sabotage towards his reform attempts.

But when I suggested that his "change"-campaign is basically the definition of populist massaging some otherwise quite smart people were shocked. Perhaps insecurity about my support, but it cannot get much more populist than that to be honest.

The scary part is that the word got redefined for political purposes lately. Also, populism isn't always negative. Most "corrected" definitions today say it is authoritarian but it is also often the exact opposite.

People are remembering Obama for the way he governed, as a polished socially liberal globalist—the guy who sued Catholic nuns to force them to pay for contraception, when there was a government program that would have paid for it—instead of the populist campaign he ran.

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.

Sounds like Embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy in relation to a social movement.

Corporations embraced identity politics, extended it to absurdity (peak wokeness), and are now extinguishing any hope of meaningful change, placating the plebes with meaningless virtue signaling and short-lived rage-machines like BLM.

There is an old documentary out there that basically sums this strategy as:

"Your movement dies in Target. Yes, Target. Corporate America will defang your movement, put it on a t-shirt, acid wash it and sell it to mindless, edgy teenagers who want to feel like they're doing something with their lives "by supporting" it."

What's the documentary?

That’s essentially the premise of the novel “Gravity’s Rainbow”. Anything and everything will be co-opted for corporate profit. The only way to truly be free is to fly under the radar.

> Occupy failed for many reasons but primarily it failed because it couldn’t get funded. Donor class and corporate sponsorship are required for progressives to attain the power they want. Class warfare - the traditional progressive cause - died and gave birth to a new identity politics (we call it Woke today) that could get funded.

Yup, my interpretation was the corporations / government funded the woke politics to divide. If you review the old Soviet era plans to bring down America it was effectively to focus on inflaming racial tension. That’s effectively what critical race theory is, instead of class dynamics you have racial dynamics; the end goal is the same. Gain power through a divide and conquer strategy to bring in an era where all are “equal”, some are just more equal than others.

This displays a fundamental misunderstanding of CRT.

I’ve read a few books on the subject. They explain that as the objective in the early work. So no don’t really think so, I think most people don’t take the time to understand / read context.

Can you say which books you're talking about, and by which authors? I've also read my fair share of CRT, but mostly papers from the last 10 years rather than books, so I'm curious who you're referencing.

are the results different? i cant believe in usa the divide between black and white are bigger than being poor or middle class. certantly there are certain big picture "identity" dinamics (or the remaints) at plays, but to solve social issues the solution are simple and proven across countries and time. lift the poor out of poverty with economic and social chances (effective education is a simple solution) and control the problems originated by poverty in those communities by law and by "social" investments. the CRT discourse looks, behave? and talks like a divide et impera

I think you're underestimating the effect of racism in the US. The economic and social chances you're using as a remedy for poverty are absent for many minorities, and the CRT discourse is all about why. There's a huge contingent in the US that believes that any attempt to address "the problems originated by poverty in those communities by law and by "social" investments" is socialism, or reverse racism or giving preferential treatment to minorities.

Is CRT specifically actionable? Does it suggest anything we can do for racial disparities (besides awareness) that we don't need to do for poverty anyway?

And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa (i.e. poor American blacks vs. rich African blacks)? I hear that despite Harvard students being 15% black, the number of undergrads actually descended from slaves can be counted on one's hands.

(I'm not sure that you need this additional context, but benefit from it)

> Is CRT specifically actionable?

Setting aside for a moment what is CRT, there are debates about problems related to actionability in different accounts of racism on the left. One critique of some accounts is that they are too pessimistic, too mysterious, and too inactionable. You might find this read interesting as an example: https://auth.jacobinmag.com/2017/05/ta-nehisi-coates-racism-...

> And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa

Some black activists, especially among those demanding reparations for slavery, have sought to form a movement around this question. It's called 'The American Descendants of Slaves' movement. If you Google 'ADOS' you can find movement websites and both sides in various debates

Thank you for the article. That was up my alley.

> Does it suggest anything we can do for racial disparities (besides awareness) that we don't need to do for poverty anyway?

Why not do both?

> And while we're at it, why do US-based affirmative action programs not distinguish between descendants of slaves and recent immigrants from Africa

Slavery impacted affected West Africa as well. The trade eventually destroyed communities leaving them vulnerable to colonization and exploitation.

Some African countries have former slaves e.g. Liberia. Individual slaves were traded multiple times across different countries. Do you include slaves when America was a British colony or only after the revolutionary war.

I assume Affirmative action policies pertain to current racism not just past racism.

Thank you for the coherent defense of a pan-African-American broad affirmative action. I haven't seen that argument made clearly before.

I believe CRT underlines and fortifies issues facing minorities. It cements them as minorities not having a stake in culture.

No, any reaction to “woke” happened later and unfortunately comes from the worst possible places. Woke fits in way more with the general culture than racism and sexism on the GOP spectrum does. Am I going to jump to a conclusion that corporate America deliberately boosted racist perspectives to divide us? No, because that’s not rational and you’re driven by an agenda.

American culture, and most minorities themselves, still embraces color blindness,[1][2] which wokeness rejects. And it embraces being proud of America and it’s history, which wokeness rejects.[3]

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...

[2] is interesting, saying "For gender, 82 percent think it shouldn’t be considered" in admissions decisions.

However, many universities seem to be opposed to having an imbalance, a situation that would presumably be expected given the gap in high school graduation rates.

The modern GOP isn't the party of Reagan. It's no mystery why the party of Paul Gosar and Steve King is perceived as racist.

The modern GOP has some racists in it, but at least apologizes for it. The modern Democratic Party has mainlined racism and institutionalized racism in routine interactions business and education. I would 100% rather deal with a Steve King who worries about white replacement, than with all the ways white progressives find to center race, use them as clubs against other white people, and disrespect the autonomy of minority groups.

This argument would be more persuasive if you could name one of the racists in the Democratic party, and that racism was something ordinary people would recognize as such; by way of example, I just named two Holocaust deniers.

If you define “racism” as “treating people differently based on race”—a pretty typical definition—Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren and most other Democratic politicians would count. It’s a different, more patronizing and paternalistic racism, but it’s racism nonetheless.

Indeed, this sort of racism is pervasive among at least progressive democrats. See: https://insights.som.yale.edu/insights/white-liberals-presen.... It’s been wild to me to realize how many progressives I know would hate Bangladeshis if they were white. But as far as I can tell they don’t think non-whites have moral agency.

Rayiner, I have the conventional, non-Twitter non-message-board definition of racism, the same definition I'd get from a random person I stopped on the street. There's no interesting conversation to be had if we're going to just say "racism means whatever I can persuasively argue it means". You can "persuade" anybody of anything on a message board just by exhausting them, which is how a lot of really stupid lefty thought happens.

So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

You made an observation that implied it was somehow risible to think the GOP is a racist party. I don't think it's especially useful to designate one party or another as "racist". But what I said is true: it is not a mystery why people think the GOP is racist: there are out-and-proud racists in high elected office in the GOP, and there aren't in the Democratic party.

You make some great and insightful commentary on many issues here, but I wonder if your fealty to the US Democrat party is putting some ideological blinders on. Racism meaning "treating people different on the basis of race/skin colour" is a pretty normal understanding of the term, and certainly it's not jargon from "Twiter or a message board". The random person on the street would likely agree that "treating people differently on the basis of race" is racism, plain and simple.

And as such, Rayiner's point about elected reps in the Democrat party, including but not limited to the President and high-ranking members of the Senate and House, making race the lens through which everything is discussed and planned for, is racism plain and simple. And it's frustrating for minorities to be disrespected and have their agency taken away by mainly caucasian liberals pretending to represent us. The sad part is that people like Biden and Warren know better, but they're just pandering with to a specific demographic that also views race as the primary driver of everything, but that in turn makes the middle ground also shrink, as people naturally look to mimic their leaders.

This tiresome focus on race-for-everything is making society much more racist, not less, and yes, I would agree it's mainly the Democrat party and it's current policies and rhetoric that is worsening it.

Both 'Democrat party' and a definition of racism that strips it of any notion of prejudice or animus (compare that to, say, one you might find in a dictionary) are very much politically-inflected jargon.

I don't know about other people, but being treated differently based on your race doesn't actually make me feel better just because the other person thinks they're helping.

Sure and I (a white Eastern European immigrant) might place a different weight on those thoughts and feelings in part because you are a brown South Asian immigrant, without it being racism. It's a shoddy redefinition better abandoned in poorly ventilated dorm rooms and talk radio studios. You touch on the problems with the whole 'who are the real racists' millstone yourself when you mention agency. If Democrats are the real racists, what sort of rubes are the majorities of Black Americans who vote for them? It just doesn't go anywhere but a circle of nothing or worse.

> Rayiner, I have the conventional, non-Twitter non-message-board definition of racism, the same definition I'd get from a random person I stopped on the street.

I'm not using a novel definition of racism here. Promoting racialization (categorizing people into different races), and treating people differently based on their race--both under the law, through racial preferences, and socially, through DEI--is racism. And Democrats do it much more than Republicans.

> So, no, I'd ask you to try again to square the Republican party of Paul Gosar and Steve King against a Democratic party that has none of those figures.

The Republican Party has some racists. In the case of Steve King, the party stripped him of his committee assignments and he lost his seat.

The Democratic Party is engaged in a fundamentally racist project of co-opting minority identities to advance the ideology of white liberals. It starts with promoting racial identity in schools, focused on an oppression narratives. "Asian studies" curricula, for example, focus on discrimination against Chinese Americans in the 1800s (people few Asian Americans trace their ancestry to), instead of for example the rapid upward mobility of Vietnamese, Koreans, and Indians in the 1960s and 1970s (which many Asian Americans today do trace their ancestry to). It continues to Democrat-dominated educational and professional institutions that center people's race and expressly treat them differently based on it.

The fact that it's a paternalistic sort of racism--Democrats think they're helping--doesn't change the fact that it's racism. At the end of the day, all of this is to advance the agenda of white Democrats. That's quite apparent when any non-white Democratic group diverges from white Democrats either out of cultural differences or divergent interests (e.g. Asian Americans when it comes to color-blind metrics or Black Americans when it comes to religion).

My feeling is that there only two kinds of people who would find this argument persuasive: (1) people who already strongly believe it, and (2) people who don't read it carefully. The argument relies on its audience assuming that any noxious behavior involving race is "racism", and that simply isn't the case. There is no equivalence to be drawn between Paul Gosar denying the Holocaust and overeducated, cliquish busybodies at nonprofits "co-opting" minority identities.

The minorities can speak for themselves on this issue (and are, by voting out the co-opters and switching parties). At least, they can as long as Paul Gosar doesn't have his say.

I didn't say that the Republican party was going to lose all minority support, or that every Republican is racist. As I said, I don't think it's productive to describe any party as "racist" (though apparently you disagree). But if I asked you to guess which party has the big-state governor candidate who paid $5000 to be featured prominently on the openly white-supremacist site that featured the Tree of Life shooter, you would not honestly have to think carefully about the question. It is, as I said, not a mystery why people say that the GOP is a racist party; it is many things, and one of them is the party for racists.

Arguments about “GOP racism” might be justified if they were the ones constantly talking about people’s race, but they’re not.

They'd be justified if the party endorses racist views, elects racist candidates, puts racist policies in place. "Talking about race" is a very narrow and selective definition of "racism".

The side that promotes racial identity and classification, wants to teach it to elementary school students, and supports treating people differently based on skin color is the “racist” party. Supporting race-neutral policies regarding law enforcement or immigration, by contrast, is not “racist.”

Democrats are engaged in a sweeping effort to redefine “racism” to serve the purposes of white liberals: https://contexts.org/blog/who-gets-to-define-whats-racist/ (“White elites —who play an outsized role in defining racism in academia, the media, and the broader culture — instead seem to define ‘racism’ in ways that are congenial to their own preferences and priorities…. Charges of “racism,” for instance, are primarily deployed against the political opponents of upwardly-mobile, highly-educated progressive white people.”)

I don't think that link makes or really directly supports the vastly broader claim you're making. And of course 'Democrats' includes a Black political elite influential enough to play kingmaker for the democratic party presidential nominee just this last election. The republican party just doesn't have a Black political elite, never mind an influential one. It's weird to claim whatever Democrats are engaged in has the sole purpose of serving the interests of white liberals.

But let's try 'race neutral policies regarding immigration'. In the previous administration, was VDARE fan Stephen Miller, in your view, advocating for and working to implement race neutral immigration policies?

It feels like America became MORE racist in the past 2 years, not less. I am starting to think all this talk about diversity and inclusion is having the opposite effect than intended.

Any action gets a reaction. The bigger the action the bigger the reaction. I wouldn't be surprised to see a very far right Trump as the next president. Let's hope that people will start "seeing" each other again and meet in the middle instead of the current "F*ck you, you are wrong!"

It's the amount of in-your-face this stuff has become. White guilt is getting kinda ridiculous.

I think the "woke" term is loosing its meaning. Are you "anti-woke" if you don't want to watch gay movies?

I think you drank the Kool Aid. This might sober you up. I am looking at the Pew Research poll you posted [1] and Republicans seem to lag on polls where they ask about the value of racial, ethnic, and language diversity.

You really have to ignore a lot of Trump’s rhetoric about Muslims (Bangladesh is 90% Muslim), Mexicans, etc. Closing your eyes to the tiki torch carrying Neo Nazis, the racist congressmen, the Jan 6th confederates, the list goes on and on. Perhaps you did not hear when Reagan called black people monkeys (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/ronald-rea...) or when Trump called Haiti, etc Sh*t hole countries (https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/white-house/trump-referred-...) They don’t see race at all.

I am not sure in what universe that Pew poll looks positive for Republicans. Republicans don’t need to talk about race much according to the poll because they don’t live in diverse communities.

I get that you don’t like affirmative action. It has been a great wedge issue to factionalize minorities against Blacks in particular. The Supreme Court will ban it in due time. You probably did not know that the Civil Rights Act (passed after decades of blood, sweat, and tears of Blacks to protect people like you) and Immigration Act 1965 (repealing anti Asian ban) of that allowed your grandad to immigrate here was introduced and signed into law by Democrats. A lot of pain went into getting you here. You should read about it. (Before they ban those books too)

> Am I going to jump to a conclusion that corporate America deliberately boosted racist perspectives to divide us?

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.

> to bring in an era where all are “equal”, some are just more equal than others.

But that's the era where you are now. Consider the humble speeding ticket. Same flat fee for everyone. Well that means rich people can afford to break the rules.

In a "more equal" nation like Finland, speeding tickets are income proportional. A billionaire speeding is gonna pay a huge fine, and that's what makes it fair.

But this is fundamentally different. It is the same percentage of income for everyone and is based on the individual. It isn't based of some caste or group membership, which is a key component of woke policies. Ironically the same fault as people with prejudices towards groups extrapolating to individuals..

Huh, that also explains how the trans movement grew so quickly out of nowhere.

Regardless of whether you agree with it or not, pushing such a big change onto an entire country is a huge endeavor!

Claims of trans pharma companies doing all the pushing seemed far fetched to me since it didn't seem like that would be enough to account for all the support it's gotten.

But if this allows the culture warfare to continue while keeping the working class distracted away from the elite, suddenly you have many more donors who'd be happy to support your cause.

Occupy certainly brought wealth inequality to more of a forefront of the conversation, but I wouldn't say it began the culture war. I'm old enough to remember the early 90s and the start of the permanent campaign and professional outrage of media. But the culture war has been going on since at least the mid 50s with desegregation.

Even in 1954, comedians were complaining about not being able to make a joke anymore.[0]

[0] https://www.truthorfiction.com/june-1954-jack-albertson-lame...

I didn’t say it began it at all. Just that it clearly intensified since.

More intense than saying the first family is running cocaine up from Columbia, and has a personal murder squad, they’d use on everyone from some rando at a stoplight, to the Secretary of Transportation?

This is an interesting opinion. My opinion is that Occupy Wall St is a tiny footnote to a culture war that goes back to Rush Limbaugh in the 90's and then Glen Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Alex Jones, and Tucker Carlson today.

Occupy was a right wing thing?

I don’t get what you’re saying here.

Occupy Wall St failed because it had no agenda in my opinion.

The agenda for LGBT rights movement? Marriage equality in law. You’ve got a clear goal.

Civil rights movement? Equal suffrage, repeal of discriminatory laws.

You can’t take action when no one is asking for a specific action.

> The agenda for LGBT rights movement? Marriage equality in law. You’ve got a clear goal.

I think a lot of people wish it was that simple. Instead, the progressive trans movement has crept into sports, prisons, spas, toy aisles, etc. which far fewer people agree on a straightforward answer to. It's unlikely the LGBT agenda will ever focus on something as simple as marriage equality and then be "done", since far too many people are making money on finding new issues to push for.

There was never one singular push for gay marriage over all other things. If anything the aids crisis was the most unifying phenomenon in the lgbtq community, because it perfectly encapsulated that society at large can and will unequivocally kill lgbtq people via the intentional withholding of basic consideration for life. And even that had multiple fractures in the community of what to do about it (such as whether or not to protest in churches).

The existence of trans people is not an "issue", or a question to be decided. The fact of that existence is certainly very inconvenient to a great many people who are used to ignoring it.

Sort of agree, at least I did at the time, but in retrospect and looking at what has happened since, and especially who has pushed for it, endorsed it, and continues to be instrumental in expanding the scope and reach, I don't think that's the full story.

In what way are the goals of identity politics any more clear? Most of the time the only obvious objective is "winning on Twitter".

Occupy didn't have clear goal, but it was dangerous in theory. Letting it simmer could have lead to something more dangerous, a popular movement demanding significant reforms, for example, setting capital gains tax to match income tax. Identity politics in contrast is not dangerous and has no potential to become so.

The left is big tent. Being on the left I don’t agree with any of the trans or any of the runaway feminism nonsense, but what choice do I have. Vote for the racist, sexist republicans instead?

Today's intense culture war began with Bill Clinton taking the White House in 1992 (which shocked Republicans to their cores) and was exacerbated by the removal of earmarks from legislation. These caused a wholesale demographic shift that turned political parties into polar monoliths. The only thing that kept Republicans from radicalizing even further this time around is that Trump was basically voted out of office for being obnoxiously antagonistic.

> Bill Clinton taking the White House in 1992

You mean the Bill Clinton who was so cucked by conservatism that he passed the "Law and Order" Bill of 1994 that made him the architect of mass incarceration? That Bill Clinton?

Clinton pretty much only won because Ross Perot was a conservative spoiler in 1992.

The modern Republican Party is a project spanning 50+ years that really began with racial desegregation. The so-called "originalist" interpretation of the Constitution that now dominates the Supreme Court is a modern invention of the Nixon era. The Federalist Society began is a project in the 1980s to create a pipeline to push this completely made up "philosophy".

Prior to the mid-to-late 1970s, abortion wasn't a controversial topic. Catholics had been opposed. No one else really cared (or, rather, they viewed it as a personal choice where the Bible was silent on the issue).

We are now in an era where Supreme Court just openly lie to justify a political agenda. Two prime examples:

1. The coach who Gorsuch claimed was quietly praying despite photographic evidence to the contrary [1]; and

2. Alito claiming abortion was never part of our tradition despite Ben Franklin publishing instructions on how to do an abortion at home [2].

Hopefully you're just an unwitting victim of this very effective propaganda that makes you believe the Democrats somehow started the culture war. I hope for your sake you wake up to the fact that you've been systematically lied to.

[1]: https://www.vox.com/2022/6/27/23184848/supreme-court-kennedy...

[2]:https://www.npr.org/2022/05/18/1099542962/abortion-ben-frank...

Yes, that Bill Clinton. The one whose wife tried to architect a form of universal healthcare and was hounded for over thirty years for her transgressions. I am fully aware of the history of abortion-opposition and have posted about it multiple times on this site.

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.

Letting Leon Panetta curb stomp her in front of her reports over drones in AfPak does not make for presidential timber.

Dude, all philosophies are made up. That’s sort of the point.

> Occupy Wall St had a huge impact on the culture war and it’s no coincidence that todays intense culture war began after it.

It's true. Thing-that-didn’t-happen was not a coincidence.

I think it is the reason why the movement died to be honest. Pushing "woke" talking points is also a great indicator of government influence on a corporation. Perhaps the state has stakes or maybe the company was rescued by tax payers.

For corporations the usefulness is actually in dividing people along arbitrary lines. Race, sex or whatever you like I guess. The is textbook behavior for toxic middle management. Treat people differently and they fight among themselves instead of you. Age old trick.

Trying to engage with this comment in good faith is very difficult. The best case I can come up with is you are engaging in significant hyperbole to push forward some point you are passionate about. Congress has passed nearly a hundred bills in the last year alone. We don’t hear about them because Congress agrees and does it job is not interesting or newsworthy. We do hear nonstop about the divisive issues that the parties are split on and can’t find common ground. There is no half abortion or half gun seizure. I quickly glanced at those hundred bills and didn’t see much in the way of expanding police power or military conquest of Europe and Asia.

Have you heard of think tanks? There are groups like ALECS that literally write legislation at the behest of corporations, it's been a problem for a long time.

The reason you think it isn't in good faith is likely due to corporate owned media pushing specific narratives to keep workers placated

With minor exceptions like grandstanding bills that are never meant to make it to a vote let alone pass, no federal legislation is written by legislators or even their staffs.

I can’t find it, but there was a case not so long ago when the senate accidentally voted for one of those grandstanding bills. Maybe somebody else recalls the particulars.

In any event it’s clear to any intelligent observer that the actual dynamics of governance put a lie to the fiction that our system functions as a representative republic.

>I can’t find it, but there was a case not so long ago when the senate accidentally voted for one of those grandstanding bills. Maybe somebody else recalls the particulars.

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.

What media do you get your information from?

While it is American-centric, PBS news hour is one decently solid option

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

Right. This is boring, and therefore not fun to talk about. But it's extremely clear that there are substantial differences between the parties to the point that I don't know how to have a conversation with someone who wants to deny this, and talking about the No Surprises Act (for instance) won't lead to a flamewar, so you won't hear about it.

I don’t think OP is denying that there are differences between the parties. But the first two years of Biden’s administration was a win for the McConnell wing of the Republican Party. The only significant economic measure that was passed was covid relief, which republicans were for (because Trump did it) before they were against it. There were no tax hikes and no expanded social programs (apart from temporary expansion of the child tax credit).

It’s hard to deny that the result of the current democratic strategy is not meaningfully different from what Mitch McConnell wants, whether it’s deliberate or not.

And I do think it’s deliberate to a significant extent. The current Democratic coalition has a lot of people, especially in the donor base, that are basically socially liberal Republicans. If forced to choose between issues, they care more about legalized abortion than labor unions. Of course these folks avoid any acknowledgement that these goals are in conflict, but that’s obviously wrong. Politics is about assembling a coalition that can command a voting majority. Political capital is a finite resource. Obviously spending significant political capital on an issue like abortion—where about 1 out of 5 democrats disagrees with the rest of the party—will mean less political capital available for making the child tax credit permanent. It’s math.

The current composition of the senate, 50-50, and the antiquated filibuster process, mean that the senate cannot do anything without bipartisan consensus. Not sure why you are railing about democrats that are secretly republicans when that is clearly not the issue.

The current composition of the Senate is the product of a deliberate choice by socially liberal pro-business democrats (i.e. Rockefeller republicans) to prioritize social issues such as abortion and immigration over economic ones.

There is no constitutional basis for the filibuster. It's just a rule the Senate invented. And they can un-invent it. Whenever the new Congress forms, the Senate Majority Leader sets the rules for that Congress. This includes the number of seats on committees and so forth.

What you have is Democrats who hide behind "institutions" as an excuse to do nothing and Republicans who quite literally will change the rules whenever it suits them. Examples include:

1. Firing the Senate parliamentarian when he blocked the Senate from advancing Bush tax cuts;

2. Deciding completely without basis that with 11 months left of Obama's term, it somehow wasn't proper to hold a hearing or a vote on Garland's nomination to the Supreme Court; and

3. Deciding that any nomination (not just judicial) couldn't be filibustered (Harry Reid had previously changed the rules to make Supreme Court nominations filibuster-proof).

But what is the filibuster? Up until I believe the 1970s it was a process where a Senator who had the floor could refuse to yield and keep talking to block a vlote as long as they could keep standing. This is real "Mr Smith Goes to Washington" type stuff [1].

This Senate refused to change the rules on this so here we are. Two proposals have been made:

1. Eliminate the filibuster entirely. It's pretty much only ever used to block progress (eg by blocking civil rights legislation in the 1960s); or

2. Require a Senator to actually filibuster by going back to the old system of holding the floor and refusing to yield.

Both of course failed. Why? Because the corporate interests that own Manchin and Sinema don't want that because that might allow some form of progress, all under the guise of institutionalism. But this is a post-facto justification. I guarantee you the second the next Republican president holds office and the Republicans hold a majority in the Senate, the filibuster is gone.

The current rotating villains of the Democratic Party couldn't even bring themselves to bypass the filibuster to pass legislation to protect voting rights, which shouldn't even be controversial. But of course it is controversial because voting rights might endanger the red wave of voter suppression.

None of this has to be the case. Schumer won't go nuclear on this either because Schumer represents the interests of Wall Street.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zPv0S1-ETdI

"Firing the Senate parliamentarian when he blocked the Senate from advancing Bush tax cuts"

Not a great example. Democrats and Republicans have both switched up the parliamentarian when they've taken control of the Senate.

Democrats fired Alan Frumin in 1987 when they won a majority and appointed Robert Dove.

In 2001 (your example), four years after winning the majority back, Republicans fired Dove and reappointed Alan Frumin. Frumin went on to be a key figure in helping Obama with passage of elements of the ACA, so not exactly a hardcore partisan.

The parliamentarian has hardly been a nexus of cutthroat politics, just the normal ebb and flow of power and control in the Senate.

To be clear, my argument isn't firing him was right or wrong. My argument was that Republicans are willing to bend, change or just completely ignore rules when it suits them. Republicans talk about institutions when it suits them and don't when it doesn't. Democrats largely are LARPing in a world that doesn't exist of civilized debate.

My argument more simply is that Democrats should be more like Republicans. Not in policy issues but in terms of effectiveness: whipping votes, advancing an agenda and punishing dissent.

If you talk to a Republican supporter they will say the same thing about their side, that the useless Republican politicians in Congress won’t stand up to the Democrats and actually accomplish anything, and the Democrats are full of dirty tricks that the Republicans just roll over for, and so on.

For both parties it’s partially right and partially wrong, but what it’s not is anything unique or inherent to one side.

Eh I mean some of them are though. Manchin and Sinema get the biggest hate, but there are others who agree with him who are just not as obvious or loud about it.

I mean abortion rights which were settled for 50 years just got completely destroyed, and if the entire Democratic party actually cared about this issue, they'd enshrine it as a right in law with 51 votes, but they won't because a handful secretly agree that abortion should be illegal.

> they'd enshrine it as a right in law with 51 votes

That enshrinement will last ~6 months. A supreme court decision on the subject of body autonomy was a far stronger form of protection than legislature ever could have been.

I'm not sure why people keep repeating the falsehood that claims the contrary (other than to repeat the both-sides meme).

> The current composition of the senate, 50-50, and the antiquated filibuster process, mean that the senate cannot do anything without bipartisan consensus. Not sure why you are railing about democrats that are secretly republicans when that is clearly not the issue.

When Trump wanted to kill the remaining bits of Obama era banking reform, he didn't have 60 votes in the Senate, which didn't matter because the Centrist Democrats voted with him.

>The “Crapo bill,” a bank deregulation measure co-authored by Senate Banking Committee chair Mike Crapo, R-Idaho, and several centrist Democrats, passed Congress this spring with the help of 17 members of the Senate Democratic Caucus and 33 House Democrats.

https://theintercept.com/2018/11/10/dodd-frank-deregulation-...

In the same manner, the Centrist Democrats saved the Bush era tax cuts for the rich from automatically expiring during the Obama years despite the fact that the party had control of the House, Senate, and White House at the time.

The Bush era Republicans had passed those tax cuts under Senate reconciliation rules requiring only 50 votes in the Senate which placed a time limit after which they would automatically expire with no action needed.

The Centrist Democrats voted, repeatedly, with the Republicans to make sure they wouldn't expire.

Then, of course, history repeated itself with the Trump tax cuts, which ALL the Democrats claimed to find abhorrent (yes, even Manchin), until it became possible to do something about them.

https://prospect.org/economy/the-impossible-inevitable-survi...

I really just think the issue is the senate. Look at all the bills that passed the house. They passed a bill that try’s to solve gerrymandering. They passed abortion legislation. They passed all the economic stuff Biden wanted, including his signature legislation universal pre k. But the senate needs 60 votes to pass anything other than a budget, which no one will ever have. I’m inclined to agree that the filibuster is mostly an excuse to not vote for things manchin and sinema wouldn’t vote for either way, but at that point it’s hard to say democrats have a majority in the senate.

> But the senate needs 60 votes to pass anything other than a budget

Incorrect.

One of the other things it can do with a simple majority is alter or eliminate the 60 vote requirement.

Right but it’s pretty clear that there isn’t a majority willing to do that.

Being able to pass a budget with a bare majority is a lot of power! They could raise taxes and increase funding for existing programs with that power. You know, the stuff people vote in Democrats to do.

I mean they sort of did increase funding. They passed a 2 trillion dollar stimulus bill.

>> It’s hard to deny that the result of the current democratic strategy is not meaningfully different from what Mitch McConnell wants, whether it’s deliberate or not.

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.

This is unknowable. There could be 5 other Democrats that agree with Manchin but why voice it when Manchin can take the heat with no political consequences.

>I don’t think OP is denying that there are differences between the parties.

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.

Responding to this comment in good faith is easy: just examine legislation that was split along party lines and show that there are substantial differences between the parties on non-social issues. That would be a very convincing argument grounded in fact rather than impressions.

> Congress has passed nearly a hundred bills in the last year alone.

A patent troll can create hundreds of patents per year and never release a single product. The quantitative aspect is meaningless without the qualitative.

> I quickly glanced at those hundred bills and didn’t see much in the way of expanding police power or military conquest of Europe and Asia.

Bills regularly get stuffed with unrelated compromises. I can't totally refute the idea that there are police power expansions on this bills or not, HOWEVER nor can you with your rudimentary analysis.

>We don’t hear about them because Congress agrees and does it job is not interesting or newsworthy.

Well, yes, that's the point - given that both parties represent the capital-owning class, no wonder they mostly agree.

Parties literally never do anything: they must be owned by the capital-owning class

Parties always agree: they must be owned by the capital-owning class

My pizza is late: they must be owned by the capital owning class

If your explanation works to explain everything, you've just found a very long synonym for "magic" and you don't actually have an explanation.

I don’t see how your 3rd point tracks; it doesn’t work for why the pizza is late. Why would the pizza being late be caused by the pizza being owned by the capital class? What motivation does the capital class have in my pizza being late?

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

That's not a gish gallop, I only made one argument. A gish gallop is when you throw out a bunch of arguments at once, hope your opponent misses one in their reply and then call out their failure to respond.

If you're going to call a fallacy, please do so correctly.

It makes exactly as much sense for all three cases. "Capital Owners" have no desire for price transparency (2019), Covid stimulus (2020) or most other things congress does. Certainly not supporting sanctions that torch the oil and fuel needing industries in Europe.

If being beholden to the capital owners can be used as an excuse for anything congress does that you don't like, I can also use it as an excuse for my pizza being late.

>It makes exactly as much sense for all three cases. "Capital Owners" have no desire for price transparency (2019), Covid stimulus (2020) or most other things congress does

You are still assigning unfounded assertions to the capital class? The capital class has no desire for COVID stimulus? Why? Did you not see the stock market completely shit itself in September - and every economist saying the only way out was a stimulus? Likewise price transparency? I assume you are talking about healthcare; but corporations also have an interest in reducing healthcare costs as for most of the Forbes 500, health insurance is a massive HR cost. “Price transparency” is the same neoliberal concession for a country who’s working class desperately needs public healthcare. It doesn’t meaningfully change the situation for working class individuals

What you are doing is treating the capital class like some evil boogeyman instead of a motivated class of individuals looking to protect their wealth from institutional redistribution. I’m talking about corporate regulation, protections for unions, and most well funded social programs. Reducing a well researched phenomenon to “blaming capital owners that my pizza is late” is profoundly myopic

> a motivated class of individuals looking to protect their wealth from institutional redistribution

You are giving way too much credit. They're not on the defensive of protecting their wealth from "redistribution", but rather on the offensive of extracting ever more wealth away from those in the productive economy. Economically, this is done via printing new money and financializing the lives of the plebs.

"A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury."

This quote is usually levied at voters personally, as a condemnation of social programs - the same induced "culture war" to distract from the grownups' looting. The quote is actually much more applicable to politicians (of both costumes) promoting the policies paid for by big capital, which has consistently succeeded at getting itself ever more corporate welfare - stock market bubble, housing bubble, healthcare trainwreck, defense spending, covid giveaways, etc.

> What motivation does the capital class have in my pizza being late?

You're asking what motivation do businesses have for taking your money and not investing enough to provide the service that customers want in return?

> Congress has passed nearly a hundred bills in the last year alone.

Honest question - Have you read most of the descriptions? Because I have (literally every single one) and with exception for a few aimed at Russia, the vast majority of them are the equivalent of legislative bookkeeping. They are nothing of substance.

The most common are simple names changes of federal properties, or grants of federal properties to cities nearby so they can assume management.

Then come the "award" bills, that grant a medal to someone, or put a statue somewhere.

Then we have a few relatively minor infrastructure funding bills, and a couple changes to how the federal military programs handle training. A couple of these are simple extensions of existing programs (ex: SB4119/SB2102)

Then a few "planning" bills - which basically outline that "something bad" is happening and we should probably attempt to figure out why (ex: SB66). Or the "something bad happened, we know why, it's mostly been addressed, but congress will pass a bill anyway to look good" (ex: HB3182)

-----

Basically, I take away from your comment that you're actually agreeing with the top poster, and you simply don't know it.

> We don’t hear about them because Congress agrees and does it job is not interesting or newsworthy.

Yes - they passed a bunch of bills that are not interesting because there is nothing substantial in them - they mostly just don't matter. They are COMPLETELY business as usual. No attempt to address the more critical issues that we face.

Conspicuously absent? Climate action, Tech regulation, Energy funding and independence (again - outside of the context of russia). Basically - few of these bills have ANY impact on 99% of us.

They definitely did pass SB4160 though - have to make sure the supreme court is protected in case their decisions blow up in their face.

Yeah, who would want to protect government officials? /s

They already have it in copious forms from other laws. So basically - it's another showboat law, which is the point of the whole comment.

Seems you missed the point.

The point seemed clear to me that Supreme Court deserved what it had coming to it if they did stuff that "blew up in their faces."

I remember the hearings around MLB steroid use and discussions on whether new federal laws should be written to “prevent” drugs that were already illegal (or in breach of contract) from being used by an entertainment industry. If the executive branch wasn’t investigating existing laws That already applied, what effect would new laws that were more narrowly defined provide?

It seemed so stupid until considered from the perspective that MLB superstars were getting a lot of media time and politicians weren’t. Now they had a chance to butt in and spend the majority of the time in front of the camera on a subject they were likely briefed on moments before any “hearings”.

After participating (very briefly) in a local precinct political process within a single party a few years later, I’ve effectively lost hope in the political process. There are self-serving, narcissistic sociopaths who will do anything for perceived power and well funded entities who will prevent anything truly populist from gaining traction. I feel like the disillusionment it breeds is intentional.

>I feel like the disillusionment it breeds is intentional.

Absolutely. Demoralization of the proletariat is priority number one for the bourgeoisie. You don't have to spend huge amounts of resources fighting them if there is no one to fight in the first place.

> Basically - few of these bills have ANY impact on 99% of us.

That does not mean they are a waste of time, however. There are a lot of impactful bills. Just because they don't personally affect or benefit you does not mean that they're not doing anything.

It's not even really much of congress' fault. The power in both houses (especially the House of Representatives) has become very top heavy. That is not an indication that representatives aren't trying to do things, just that they are getting stonewalled by leaders like Nancy Pelosi.

You could have stopped at the first half and had a mostly coherent point that I would agree with.

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?

> You could have stopped at the first half and had a mostly coherent point that I would agree with.

You could have also just stated that the legislature has been ineffective at passing legislation that is important to you, and you'd have had a mostly coherent point. Instead you went out of your way to diminish what did pass as unimportant.

Juneteenth maybe isn't important to you but it certainly is important to a lot of people and naming it a national public holiday is seen as a significant gesture by many. Naming a memorial site for the victims of the Pulse nightclub shooting is important. Increasing access to mental health services for veterans in rural areas is important. Banning crib bumpers is important to... anyone that may have a child or already has a baby?

There's plenty of examples like this that you deemed unimportant.

> But [there] 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.

There are actually a lot of real attempts, but, as I already mentioned, legislators get stonewalled by the leaders in their respective houses. It's very hard to introduce legislation and have it go anywhere because the power resides mostly within the leadership. Individual congresspeople have very little power. If you don't understand how the legislative process actually works of course it'll seem like they're simply not doing anything.

> 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?

It's more like eating or taking a shit; they're necessary and important even if they're mundane and there are "more important" matters to attend to. They take up time but they don't prevent you from accomplishing other things in your day.

While I can appreciate that you characterize your agenda as super important stuff that absolutely needs to be addressed yesterday, you're not the only one that feels that way and what's super important to you is probably not the same as someone else.

It seems kind of disingenuous to dismiss useful bills like infrastructure ones as "minor" and "few". A single bill can contain many changes and carry huge amounts of funding, like HR3684 or perhaps better known as the "Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act". Seems like a pretty major omission from your bill summary.

I'm not sure what you're expecting, The US Congress doesn't and shouldn't be passing a lot of huge sweeping changes every single year. When it's not passing huge sweeping economic changes, legislative bookkeeping is another critical job. It's not "nothing substantial". Planning bills, department/agency confirmations, and grant renewals are all important duties that keep the country running which does impact 99% of us.

The OP's comment did not say "Congress doesn't move fast enough", it said Congress doesn't do anything beyond expand police/military and social issues. That's evidently not true.

> The US Congress doesn't and shouldn't be passing a lot of huge sweeping changes every single year.

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.

The American people ask for conflicting things. Marijuana is a partisan issue, campaign finance reform, gerrymandering, immigration, healthcare, education, climate change, mass incarceration etc are intensely partisan issues. Polarization rightfully makes change slow in a representative democracy. No matter how you as an individual feels about the urgency or necessity of your favorite causes, there are people who feel just as strongly about doing something different or not doing things at all.

> Marijuana is a partisan issue

Every topic will have people on both (or many) sides, but the majority of both democrats and republicans want legalization with only 1 in 10 of all Americans opposing legalizing it for both medical and recreational use. Polarization isn't the problem. There is common ground and wide agreement on various aspects of these issues which are actionable even if it doesn't solve the entirety of the problem.

While of course there will be people who want to argue over specifics that's congresses entire job. To represent our disagreeing perspectives on how a problem should be addressed, work out solutions collectively, and put those solutions in place. No party is going to get everything done in the exact manner they want it, but as long as the issues do get addressed (one way, the other, or by some compromise) the system works. If nothing substantive can be done about the issues that the vast majority of the country agree we need to act on because of partisan bickering then the system is broken and broken systems should be replaced with something that is capable of actually working for Americans.

"people disagree so nothing can be done!" is not acceptable.

It's pretty obvious these people simply aren't voting or aren't voting for appropriate representatives. The US is an optional democracy. It doesn't really matter what you answer in these no-stakes surveys if you can't be bothered to show up for them when electing your representatives. If you sent out a survey asking if people wanted free money, you'll probably get a similarly high approval rate.

Your revealed preference when you don't vote accordingly is not "deep down I think Congress should legalize marijuana", it's "I don't care".

And let's not get carried away, not legalizing marijuana or establishing your preferred healthcare system does not mean the system is "broken". There are ways for people to express that they think the system is broken, but it usually takes more effort than voting accordingly if you're actually right that there is such a strong consensus.

The problem I see now is that neither party in our two party system have any interest in candidates who are willing to represent the American people. It's nice that in theory we can vote for anyone we want, but the impracticality of that makes it irrelevant. In practice we vote for who they tell us we can vote for. We are essentially not allowed to vote for appropriate representatives. We usually see the frustration with that reality expressed as some form of "Nobody votes for who they want in office, we all just vote against the person we oppose". The problem is widely acknowledged and there have been a number of suggestions like ranked voting systems which would make it more likely for people to be allowed to vote for the candidates they actually want in office, but as you'd expect those elected by our current system have no interest in implementing them.

The system may not be entirely broken (it has allowed for things to get accomplished in the past), but because today it consistently fails to represent our interests or meet our needs even over several election cycles there are clearly bugs to be worked out and I think the problems go beyond which particular asses are filling seats in the capitol building.

If we had the ability to simply vote our way out of this mess we'd have done it decades ago. That said, I'll agree that far too many people aren't participating in the process, and the longer this goes on the more I think that will change and in fact it has been improving (in presidential elections voter turn out hasn't been this high since the early 90s and for the 18-24 group it hasn't been this high since the early 70s), but that's also why we're seeing an increase in voter suppression.

Both parties in the two party system have primaries to choose party candidates. If people don't participate in primaries, they shouldn't be surprised when neither party pays attention to who they want. Anyone can run in primaries and they don't even have to win. The whole primary process is designed to signal to the party and the winning candidate what voters are willing to show up for.

"Nobody votes for who they want in office" is a natural result of high political polarization and the inherent polarization in any democracy, when that many voters hold competing and conflicting priorities then of course practically no one gets what they want. Spinning this as some kind of evidence that American democracy is broken makes no sense when this is said about practically every democracy, including democracies that use ranked choice. Ranked choice or any other voting system is not going to change this dynamic where the will of millions of disagreeable voters are condensed into a relatively small committee. Alternative voting systems are a trade-off like any other and at best will just move the needle a bit on a handful of issues. Voter suppression is yet another exaggerated bogeyman, it's largely a fight between two equally well-funded factions and the votes it accounts for pales in comparison to voluntary abstinence.

Of course the problems go beyond which particular asses sit in Capitol Hill, it goes right up to the asses that sit in the United States, including the people who promote the distracting fable that the system citizens repeatedly voted for (directly or not) is the fault of other people.

> Anyone can run in primaries and they don't even have to win.

Nope. You need to meet requirements which vary by state. Most require some mix of signatures (often thousands) and fees (can range from hundreds to tens of thousands). The high barrier to entry is another long acknowledged problem (example: https://www.cnn.com/2012/01/22/politics/newcomers-campaign-c...) which has only gotten worse. If you want to stand a chance to win (and you'd be a fool to spend the time and money to enter if you didn't) expect to spend many millions. (see https://mcfn.org/node/7427/2020-us-house-races-cost-868-mill...). Go ahead and count the number of people in congress who were living paycheck to paycheck before running for office. Most of them are not millionaires by chance.

It's also worth mentioning that primaries are not required to be fair, as we saw when the DNC colluded with Hillary's campaign to undermine her opponent and install their preferred candidate ahead of the 2016 primary election.

> Ranked choice or any other voting system is not going to change this dynamic

experts disagree with you, and for good reason. There's zero incentive to not vote for the candidate you want in office when your vote will go to your next choice if your preferred choice cannot win. The problem we have now is that we're forced to vote for who is most likely to win no matter how we feel about them. There is research showing it would increase voter turnout and it would also open the door for more than just two parties expanding our options. There are issues that come with ranked choice voting, but the biggest problem is that it confuses voters and that problem can be solved by education and acclimation.

> Voter suppression is yet another exaggerated bogeyman

Once again, experts disagree with you. I can provide sources if you like.

Gerrymandering and other forms of voter suppression have a significant impact on the outcomes of elections in opposition of the will of American voters. In short, people who would not have been elected into office are being elected because voters are silenced. Any scheme intended to prevent eligible American voters from having their votes cast or counted should be abhorrent to anyone who cares about democracy and research shows that the practice hurts voter turnout as well (people whose votes are being rendered meaningless unsurprisingly don't vote as often). For someone who seems so concerned about voter turnout you're awfully dismissive of things which would change that for the better.

I don't claim that the American people don't have a role in the decline of our democracy. We certainty have been complacent and we have allowed ourselves to become discouraged and conditioned to accept things as they are, but I can't pretend that the system hasn't been systematically refined over hundreds of years to limit the power of the average citizen to effect change or influence policy and anyone can see that what we have has not been working for us. You vastly overestimate the ability for the average citizen to enact change (see for example: https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...) but the fact that we, that you, haven't been able to do it so far says it all. We all share a responsibility for how things got to where they are, and a responsibility to reform the system which is failing us, but if it's still possible to enact change with the system we have today it's going to be a very difficult fight.

Again, it's not just about winning. Any primary candidate that gets a share of votes shifts the platform, it's the campaign that matters, like Bernie Sanders who wasn't even part of the DNC yet shifted the party/presidential platform after the primary.

Sure, there are some minimum requirements for running, it doesn't fundamentally change any dynamics here, it just raises the bar. It's always convenient for primary losers to blame their loss on party favor like Hillary's case, even though it simply amounts to increased marketing and exposure which, as was evident in the 2016 elections, does not win elections. As with all marketing, it only works by increasing the reach of an already good product, it does not mind control voters. I'm going to assume you personally did not vote for Hillary in any primary, you had no trouble resisting this diabolical collusion yet I suppose the implication here is that everyone else is just too weak minded to self-determine their own votes in the face of increased campaign financing. The simple reason you need to be a millionaire is that any serious party always has one or more massively popular candidates that already represent the majority of issues that voters care about, there are rarely any major gaps in representation, the easiest way most candidates can distinguish themselves when the main issues are already represented is by increasing exposure. But if voters care about a major gap in representation, they will find you. If you completely solve this problem by lowering minimum requirements to zero, it will simply change the minimum size of these relatively small gaps which also lets increasingly small & fringe extremists into the party.

> The problem we have now is that we're forced to vote for who is most likely to win no matter how we feel about them. There is research showing it would increase voter turnout and it would also open the door for more than just two parties expanding our options.

You are not forced to vote for who is most likely to win, every candidate knows that if they don't represent certain issues it will depress turnout and lose them votes. That's because people are not forced to vote for who is most likely to win, in fact they don't have to vote at all. In the next sentence you even point out that it will just increase voter turnout. Again, I don't doubt that, but the votes it accounts for are insignificant compared to voluntary abstinence, it's a minor distraction. Like I said before, it will at best equilibrium on the most borderline issues but parties will quickly realign. The same is true for gerrymandering, it has a suppressive effect but it does not defend against a serious consensus among actual voters, it simply raises the bar for one by a certain amount. You simply don't have a serious consensus on issues like marijuana and healthcare. A serious consensus is formed by voters prioritizing it in the voting booth, not answering "yes I care" on any of these academic studies.

For someone who seems so concerned that the system is largely broken you're awfully focused on only fixing the tiniest of cracks in the face of voluntary abstinence. This is the equivalent of fussing over expensive & fancy gym equipment to fix your workout when your biggest problem is that you don't workout often. Americans have never needed the most theoretically optimal voting systems or the best anti-gerrymandering policies at the cutting edge of democracy. They have democracy at home, if they have any problems they just have to use it.

> It's always convenient for primary losers to blame their loss on party favor like Hillary's case, even though it simply amounts to increased marketing and exposure which, as was evident in the 2016 elections

For the record, it went far beyond "marketing". In this case it was the DNC prepping Hillary's campaign by leaking questions in advance of debates, denying the Sanders campaign access to critical voter data (which they only restored after he filed a lawsuit against them), strategizing with her campaign on ways to turn democratic voters against him (including the suggestion that they attack on the basis of his religion), changed party rules to increase the number of Hillary's delegates, and established a joint fundraising committee to secretly launder money into her campaign.

That's not to say "marketing" wasn't a part of it too. The DNC pressured the media (including MSNBC) to be favorable to Hillary's campaign and leaked information to reporters they hoped with hurt Sander's campaign. The DNC also leaked info they had on Sanders to Clinton's campaign staff and they paid people to attack his supporters online.

They didn't even deny they rigged the whole thing. In a lawsuit filed against the DNC over their actions the lawyers for the DNC stated that they had no legal obligation to follow their own charter and had every right to "go into back rooms like they used to and smoke cigars and pick the candidate that way.”

Sure, and once again it is up to voters to hold their party accountable. The DNC chair has already resigned. The political fallout depressed turnout and Hillary Clinton ultimately lost. Primary favoritism, whatever form that takes, is not a legal matter, it is a democratic one. At a certain level legal protection doesn't make sense, you said yourself that the closest thing to legality in the DNC, which are party rules, were changed by the party anyway.

Senator Murkowski of Alaska lost her party's primary but ended up winning from write-in votes.

San Francisco's "mainstream media" could fill their front pages with as much praise and justification for the District Attorney as they want, it didn't stop him from being recalled with historic turnout. Getting the media to favor you doesn't mean squat if voters disagree.

The voters are always the biggest factor. Party leaders can pick bad candidates as much as their bosses - the voters - allow them to.

The issues you call partisan aren't really partisan but they are made partisan by politicians and those with power.

A large majority of the country is for making marijuana legal at the federal level. Most people don't like corporations and billionaires funding our elections. Most people are against gerrymandering. Most people are for legal immigration. Most people agree that out healthcare system is broken and way too expensive. Most people want education to be affordable and effective. Most people care about the environment. Most people don't want people to be jailed for petty things or people wrongly convicted.

The things people disagree on are the way these issues are framed by politicians and the powerful and the proposed solutions. However it's easy to agree that all of these things are a problem. I'm not saying everyone agrees but a lot more people agree on things then you are lead to believe by those who benefit from keeping the country divided.

> The issues you call partisan aren't really partisan but they are made partisan by politicians

Literally what does an issue being “really partisan” mean besides there being a sharp distinction between (in a two party system) the major parties or (more generally) between some group of parties and some other group of parties on the issue?

“Not really partisan but made partisan by politicians” is a nonsense description.

A more simple way to put it is that the politicians are hyper focused on the minor things we disagree on and complete ignore the things we mostly agree on. This division helps keep people hating each other and not focusing on important issues while also keeping their donors happy since they love the status quo.

Here's another simple way to put it: if politicians only focused on what you call "minor things we disagree on", voters can simply and easily vote them out. But voters don't think those are minor issues, it's just that you don't personally value them. Abortion, for example, is hardly a "minor" issue, for many it's a matter of life and death. You may think marijuana is a "minor" issue, but for others it's a critical crossroads that will determine the future of their community and country.

Politicians don't have mind control powers, there is no mechanism to make voters "hyper focus" on issues that voters themselves consider minor. If voters focus on something, it's not minor to them. All you're saying when you dismiss these politicians' focus as "minor things" is that you either don't know or don't respect the decisions of the voters they represent.

It's a perfectly appropriate description. To take abortion as an example, most people are in the middle ground where abortion up to a certain point (~12 weeks iirc) is ok with abortion until birth allowed in extreme cases. This is also how things are in a lot of other countries. Yet the rhetoric is dominated by the extreme positions of either no abortions or abortions until birth because not properly addressing the issue is convenient for politicians (after all, they had 50 years to codify Roe v Wade rather than leaving it to legal precedent).

These extremists are the only people that show up and care enough to make sure the representatives they vote for actually represent them on this issue. If you don't care enough to do that, I don't know why you expect politicians to care either. It doesn't really matter what "most people" say in these no-stake questionnaires. If "most people" care about getting this middle ground passed, then there'll be enough of them to vote out anyone who sticks to an extremist position. So where are these "most people"? Because I can't find them anywhere in the electoral surveys that matter.

> It seems kind of disingenuous to dismiss useful bills like infrastructure ones as "minor" and "few".

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

They said "Then we have a few relatively minor infrastructure funding bills" after summarising categories of bills in the past year as if there weren't other non-minor infrastructure bills like the whopper of HR3684. There's no mention of any non-minor infrastructure bills. The clear implication is that after reading the 100+ bills in the past year, the only infrastructure bills worth mentioning/summarising are relatively minor ones.

>Congress has passed nearly a hundred bills in the last year alone.

What does that mean though? Where is the anti trust legislation?

Stuck in the senate where it needs 60 votes

Can you cite the actual bill?

The state-venue anti-trust bill passed the Senate and is stuck in the House. There a multiple anti-trust bills.

you went from accusing the parent of "you are engaging in significant hyperbole" to making the statement "There is no half gun seizure". There's lots and lots of gun control legislation people would like to enact, can you show the ones that indicate the "seizure" of any existing weapons at all? The nature of gun control legislation, whether one is in favor or not, is extremely incremental, and all of the legislation that aims to restrict certain kinds of weapons always applies to the manufacture and sale, never existing legal ownership. Not sure where you got the term "gun seizure" from but that is beyond "hyperbole" because it's not even true in any sense.

Then why has Pelosi stalled passing a bill to restrict members of Congress from trading stock using insider information? Democrats are barely any better than republicans and comparably corrupt--they just offer better lip service.

Yeah man, everything is going great in the US. Extremely functional government.

>Congress has passed nearly a hundred bills in the last year alone

They could pass a thousand bills and it wouldn't mean much. The question is if the bills actually do anything. Take a look at the top post from the discussion here yesterday[1] on the European markets act. When is any of this coming to the US? We don't hear anything about the legislation that is being passed because it's not worth the paper its being printed on.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32163704

Yup. I bring this up all the time. Turn on Cspan nearly any time congress is in session and you'll see bills passing just fine.

> Nothing curtails corporate power. It's also why the focus of politics is on being divisive on social issues. This is to distract the voters and prevent class solidarity of the working class.

I think you’re misdiagnosing the cause. Nearly everyone I know—my circle skews highly educated and well compensated—cares more about social issues than economic ones. It’s telling that, in this crowd, Clarence Thomas gets exponentially more hate for the ways in which he’s a typical older Black man from a working class background (his views on social issues) than for the ways in which he starkly departs from that background (his economic libertarianism).

While these folks would deny they’re acting in their class interest, the effect is identical. Working class people, being less educated and less cosmopolitan, are naturally going to be more socially conservative. By making politics more about “rights” and “justice” than “wages” and “government services” you’re naturally going to divide the working class and have a powerful club to use against them.

The more well compensated you are, the more disconnected you are from the perils of working class poverty. Most people I know who are well compensated don't see an issue with the system simply because it has worked for them

I should note that these people are well compensated workers, and they are not capital owners even if they aspire to be one some day which helps solidify the ideals of capitalism working for them

> The more well compensated you are, the more disconnected you are from the perils of working class poverty.

For sure, but there's a type of blindness that comes from our culture and class expectations too.

I know many service workers who make more than white collar workers. But -- critically -- the white collar workers are unaware of it. You could say the white collar workers are banking on social clout for why they feel better than the service workers they utilize, but I don't think so. It looks like straight up ignorance and willful projection.

The service workers are happy to let the white-collar-fools carry on with the delusions --> it leads to big tips when the white collars need to show off and there's a payoff for workers who can put on a show of subservience while ultimately enjoying more freedom.

I learned the word for this recently is called Embourgeoisement. It’s at least a very similar phenomenon.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embourgeoisement

> I think you’re misdiagnosing the cause. Nearly everyone I know—my circle skews highly educated and well compensated—cares more about social issues than economic ones.

That's because they're liberals (or, worse, neoliberals) and liberalism is about aesthetics. It's about appearing to do something without actually doing anything. I don't mean this is any kind of perjorative sense by the way. I know many people like this too.

Take the Democratic Party. In response to the Dobbs leak the Demorats did... nothing. When the decision was handed down they sent a bunch of fundraising emails and texts and did... nothing. Well, other than "vote harder" messaging. The leadership has decided an issue with 75% public support is "too controversial" to tackle.

Why is the Democratic Party in this situation? Because there is always a rotating villain that blocks any action. Currently that's Senators Manchin and Sinema. In past years it was Joe Lieberman. This is by design. Everyone else gets to point at the rotating villain and say they tried but they got blocked and then fundraise off [insert blocked issue here].

Now look at an issue like homelessness. The most important factor that leads to homelessness is cost of housing. The one thing that would help above anything else is a housing-first policy, meaning giving homeless people somewhere to live. But rampant NIMBYism, even in heavily blue states like California, means that's a nonstarter. This is why you'll see people fund raise for homelessness without tackling the root causes.

This is what I mean by aesthetics.

You can’t overlook the deliberate prioritization of certain issues over other issues.

The Democratic Party is a coalition of people who agree on “bigger government offering more services” and little else. Obama as a populist and social moderate in 2008 and got Obamacare with several Senate votes in socially conservative Midwestern states. Since then Democrats tacked left on social issues and kicked the “deplorables” out of the coalition. They’re mad at Sinema and Manchin, who are holding onto seats deep in GOP territory, but should be mad at the party that lost labor and agriculture voters in South Dakota, Iowa, etc.

Folks I know were talking about kicking Joe Manchin out of the coalition for being pro life before the 2020 election. About 1/4 of the Democratic Party identified as “pro life.” 1/6 (mostly Black and Hispanic people) oppose same sex marriage. 1/10 want to restrict immigrant (and that’s after Trump converted a bunch of those voters in 2016). Kick all those people out of the party and give capital owners exactly what they want.

> coalition of people who agree on “bigger government offering more services” and little else.

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.

> I don’t want Christian fundamentalists to be in power

America is as religious, in terms of percentage of people praying daily, as Bangladesh: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/01/with-high-l.... That includes core Democrat constituencies, like Black people. 76% of Black Protestants, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, think the Bible should have at least some influence on US laws: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/13/half-of-ame....

Most atheists and agnostics are Democrats, but they're a pretty niche constituency within the party.

I don't care - I still don't want them in power any more than I would want to live in Afghanistan with the Taliban in power as a non-Muslim, and consequently would vote to keep them out, almost regardless of other policy.

Furthermore, those who think the Bible should have influence on US laws fundamentally fail to understand the very basics of the first amendment of the constitution: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof."

Allowing influence of a particular religious sect over laws is exactly akin to a state religion, which is expressly unconstitutional.

You are aware that Christian morals and ethics explicitly were sources of inspiration, energy, and direction for the country's founding--both as an event and its documents--right? You are aware that those principles are largely responsible for you being able to freely type your message on Hacker News, right?

Do you have any sources for that claim? Because I've heard the argument that it was actually the Enlightenment, and the removal of religion from government (e.g. separation of church and state, reason and science in place of dogmatism), that was the primary source of inspiration for the country's founding. A search for "Declaration of Independence" with "Enlightenment" provides many references for this.

> I don't care - I still don't want them in power

That’s fine but it’s not what we’re talking about, which is what keeps the democratic coalition together. Opposition to Christianity having a public role isn’t it.

> Allowing influence of a particular religious sect over laws is exactly akin to a state religion, which is expressly unconstitutional.

But doesn't this argument also mean "Allowing influence of religious people over laws (e.g. allowing them to vote) is unconstitutional"?

You might think that you're being completely neutral when you apply your atheist worldview to political questions, and that it is only those weird out-groups that are biased with their desire for laws that your in-group opposes, but from their perspective you are being just as biased by your religious beliefs (i.e. your beliefs about religions).

If you really think that the First Amendment was written with the intent to invalidate any policy which can be supported by some interpretation of the Bible, then you haven't thought through the consequences of that.

> 76% of Black Protestants, who overwhelmingly vote Democrat, think the Bible should have at least some influence on US laws

This is kind of a vague opinion. The Bible says many things, many of them contradictory and some of them just outright ridiculous. Let's just pick one gem, Exodus 21:7-11 [1]:

> When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as the men are. If she does not satisfy her owner, he must allow her to be bought back again. But he is not allowed to sell her to foreigners, since he is the one who broke the contract with her. But if the slave’s owner arranges for her to marry his son, he may no longer treat her as a slave but as a daughter.

> If a man who has married a slave wife takes another wife for himself, he must not neglect the rights of the first wife to food, clothing, and sexual intimacy. If he fails in any of these three obligations, she may leave as a free woman without making any payment.

Here we have slavery, selling your daughter into slavery and polygamy all in one. Should this influence the law?

If the answer is "yes", well you're crazy. If the answer is "no" then you've conceded the Bible isn't an authority and you can freely choose to ignore what pats of it you want.

There are others such as putting people to death who work on the Sabbath.

The issue of the Bible is most brought up when it comes to abortion (and gay marriage). The Bible is in fact silent on the issue. Up until the 1970s, white evangelicals didn't actually care about abortion [2]. Catholics had some opposition but it wasn't front and center.

What mobilized evangelicals against abortion was actually a deliberate political movement to opposed racial desegregation, as sparked by whites-only schools in Mississippi and Bob Jones University.

So my point is that I don't put a lot of stock on statements like "the Bible should have at least some influence" on US laws because it doesn't mean anything. The question itself is a form of manipulation. I mean the Bible says "Thou shalt not kill" and murder is a crime. Does that meet the standard of "some influence?"

[1]: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Exodus%2021%3A7...

[2]: https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-h...

>Does that meet the standard of "some influence?"

I would argue that all of western culture and civilization has been influenced heavily, almost exclusively by Christianity (including the Hebrew Bible), at least since Constantine.

If the answer is "no" then you've conceded the Bible isn't an authority and you can freely choose to ignore what pats of it you want.

That is not how the Bible works. It is a book of history, stories, laws, information, and other things. No Christian denomination on the planet, not even the most straw fundamentalist fringe sect you can imagine, takes this reductive view that because it is in the text it is automatically a command to be followed by the modern day reader.

Failure to make that distinction when interpreting a volume of such history absent its context does not mean that distinction is nonexistent or arbitrary.

To be fair, when people answer yes to "should the Bible have some influence on US laws" what they mean is "the Bible, as interpreted by my particular sect". Fortunately the number of members of the Republican party who belong to sects that approve of selling your own daughter into slavery is approximately zero, so it is possible to support Biblical influence without being "crazy" or "freely choos[ing] to ignore what pa[r]ts of it you want".

Actually a more neutrally phrased question to ask people would be "Does your opinion of the Bible have at least some influence on how you vote?", although there would be no point running that poll as the only possible answer to that question is "Yes". Either you think the Bible is a valid source of moral wisdom, in which case you are more likely to vote for policies which support that morality; or you think it isn't a valid source, in which case you vote for policies which (in at least some cases) oppose that morality. In both cases, the person is voting consistently with their opinion of the Bible, which means believers and non-believers aren't so different after all.

> Since then Democrats tacked left on social issues and kicked the “deplorables” out of the coalition. They’re mad at Sinema and Manchin, who are holding onto seats deep in GOP territory, but should be mad at the party that lost labor and agriculture voters in South Dakota, Iowa, etc.

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 Democrats were serious, they would give McConnell a Hobson’s choice - either accede to court packing or split Oklahoma into two states, rump Oklahoma and Tulsa and environs (“Indian Territory”, “Lafferty Land”, what have you), get more senators, and tell him PR and DC are the next chambered rounds if he interferes with abortion rights on Indian lands.

The Democratic Party becoming liberal is a recent development.

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.

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.

The reason democrats like Manchin and Sinema block liberal policies is that they are conservatives. Both parties have traditionally had sizable liberal and conservative wings, but they are rapidly polarizing and Democrats are pushing out the conservatives. In the 90s there would be about 20 Democratic senators like Manchin, now we only have a couple.

>In response to the Dobbs leak the Democrats did... nothing.

Everyone who follows politics knew that when Hillary lost in 2016, Roe v. Wade would inevitably be overturned. There's nothing we can do about this in the short term, especially when we don't have liberal majorities.

I'm going to disagree on your main point- social issues are the main problem in the US and they cannot be distinguished from economic ones.

Abortion, for example, is an economic issue. Allowing women to control their reproduction is, by far, the most effective way to combat poverty. A child costs over $250,000 to raise on average, and that's the type of burden that keeps people in poverty. Abortion rights have strong support among the wealthy; this is not a case of the "elites" dividing the working class, it's the working class that supports regressive policies.

Also, wealthy countries that are ethnically and culturally homogenous generally have much stronger social support systems than the US. This is, again, a social issue. Americans don't want their taxpayer money helping people who they see as "different" so they vote against welfare programs. And again, the wealthier and better educated someone is the more progressive they are in this regard, this is another example of working class people shooting themselves in the foot.

> Abortion, for example, is an economic issue. Allowing women to control their reproduction is, by far, the most effective way to combat poverty. A child costs over $250,000 to raise on average, and that's the type of burden that keeps people in poverty. Abortion rights have strong support among the wealthy; this is not a case of the "elites" dividing the working class, it's the working class that supports regressive policies.

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.”

We got Obamacare passed, but not a law codifing Row vs Wade. Its almost like its about money and power, and not personal freedom

> We got Obamacare passed, but not a law codifing Row vs Wade.

Codifying Roe v. Wade only makes sense as a symbolic act of protest against a court ruling against it when you lack the votes to do anything meaningful. Preemptively, it makes no sense, since a court that would reject the right held to exist in Roe as a 14th Amendment right is also sure to rule that no power granted to Congress allows it to curtail the powers reserved to states by codifying Roe.

> The Democratic Party becoming liberal is a recent development.

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...

I have no idea what people expect dems to do about abortion. They cannot pass a national law without the senate. Most blue states already put in protections.

It's not like they can just trot down to the court house and change the judges mind.

That's a great question ("What can they do?") and the answer is a lot.

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...

> 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.

When Tom Daschle was Senate majority leader, Democrats held both Senate seats in South Dakota. Virtually all of Democrats' economic achievements of the 20th century were built with a coalition including socially conservative midwestern and southern voters. Obamacare was passed with the support of voters that went over to Trump in 2016 over social issues. If you kick those people out of the coalition, as Democrats have been doing, you're left with a party that can't actually muster the votes to deliver on their economic promises to working class voters.

> 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%).

The majority of Americans don't understand the actual legal effect of Roe. They also support a 15-week ban on elective abortions--like the Mississippi law in Dobbs--which was prohibited under Roe. https://www.wsj.com/articles/support-for-15-week-abortion-ba....

More importantly to this conversation, a big chunk of the people who support legalized abortion are Republicans. https://news.gallup.com/poll/246278/abortion-trends-party.as.... The 2010 Democratic coalition that enacted Obamacare included about 30% folks who identify as "pro life." Continuing to kick those folks out of the coalition is a great way to do exactly what Mitch McConnell wants.

>> They cannot pass a national law without the senate

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?

Many educated and well compensated people have adopted "luxury beliefs" as a form of virtue signaling, even though putting those beliefs into policy tends to harm the working class.

https://nypost.com/2019/08/17/luxury-beliefs-are-the-latest-...

These are often called "champagne liberals" or even "champagne socialists" and is very much true.

I saw this in the 2016 election. What Demorats failed to understand was the groundswell against the status quo. This is why Trump won and Hilary lost. Hilary was very much a vote for the status quo and an increasingly large number of people are angry about the status quo. To be clear, Trump didn't deliver on any of his promises (other than on judges) but it explained a lot of his support, particularly in the Rust Belt. It's also why Bernie Sanders nearly clinched the nomination.

Hilary apologists like to blame her loss on any number of things (eg Bernie spoilers, Russia) but ignore the compltely obvious and actual reason: she was a terrible candidate. No one made her choose an anti-choice running mate. No one made her no campaign in Wisconsin.

I remember having a conversation with someone who is liberal about the estate tax. He opposed Bernie because Bernie wanted to lower the estate tax from $10 million. Huh? Clearly that affected him and this is of course an encdote but I found in illuminating as an example of how much momentum for Hilary was about protecting the status quo.

> What Demorats failed to understand was the groundswell against the status quo. This is why Trump won and Hilary lost. Hilary was very much a vote for the status quo and an increasingly large number of people are angry about the status quo.

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.

It's kind of meaningless to look at popular vote numbers because presidential campaigns are explicitly planned to maximize electoral college votes. Hypothetically, if we picked presidents by popular vote then campaigns would look completely different. For example, there would be a much greater effort to get out the vote in states like Oklahoma and Maryland, which are currently non-competitive.

In the 2016 race, the Clinton campaign spent about twice as much per popular vote received than the Trump campaign. So by that metric, Democrat messaging wasn't successful.

> presidential campaigns are explicitly planned to maximize electoral college votes.

Well, no, they have numerous objectives, many of which are in tension. In rough order of priority for a typical Presidential general election campaign, though there is considerable variation from campaign to campaign:

(1) Maximizing the probability of at least 270 EC votes (this can be quite different, and conflict with, maximizing the expected total number of EC votes), because that’s how you win,

(2) Maximizing downballot coattails, because that’s how you get people in position to pass your agenda into place, and get the people that are in that position to see you as important to their position,

(3) Maximizing EC and Popular vote totals, both of which are important to the perception of a mandate, which helps your agenda.

Having more votes does not make Hillary's run successful. Getting millions of extra votes in California but losing in other parts of the country was a poor tradeoff and the opposite of a good campaign. She gerrymandered her own voter base.

Poor strategy killed her campaign. Poor tactics doubled down her poor strategy. Poor decisions (remember when she decided to self host email), poor judgement when in power followed her entire public life. Look for a demoralizing 2024 run if Biden doesn't run or crown someone.

> I think you’re misdiagnosing the cause. Nearly everyone I know—my circle skews highly educated and well compensated—cares more about social issues than economic ones.

Of course they would. They are very well educated and very well compensated. Their needs are taken care of, economics isn't at the top of their political concerns list. However, they do not represent the majority of the US, they only represent a tiny minority.

https://www.legalreader.com/low-wage-jobs-are-the-new-americ...

Look, speaking as a trans person, I would love to ignore social issues and focus on economic ones, but I can't exactly do that when there's a growing movement to simply have me banned from society, and a smaller but also-growing movement to declare me a pedophile and have me executed. Class solidarity doesn't help me if I'm dead.

As a femme gay myself I am feeling the heat, although not as much as my trans compatriots.

I think GP is point stands though. The right is being told that a very important thing that they should be worried about is the existence of trans people. Which is ridiculous. But the reason the issue was brought up is because it’s very emotional and very personal and has nothing at all to do with curtailing corporate power.

Yeah. It's really frustrating to deal with. When anti-queer hate becomes a focal issue, many people treat the hate as half the problem and our existence as the other half of the problem. And it thus becomes untenable to simply move on to bigger issues, because the middle ground that this implies is very dangerous to us.

It sounds like you live in a dictatorship or theocracy in which case the best approach would be to apply for asylum in the US, Canada, the UK or the EU.

If your life is in danger (as it seems it is), it should be reasonably straightforward to be accepted.

> It sounds like you live in a dictatorship or theocracy in which case the best approach would be to apply for asylum in the US, Canada, the UK or the EU.

They are describing the status quo in the US (and, though not having had the kind of success in actually writing preferences into law yet, the UK.)

I just want to clarify that trans issues are important and we have had some progress here. I don't mean to diminish in any way the very real issues you and other trans people face. This is an example where the aesthetics of the Democrats actually achieves some good.

Conservatives are using trans issues to create division for their own benefit. Red states are rushing to pass legislation on trans issues. Take, for example, Utah's ban on trans athletes. This is apparently an issue so important that it demands legislation even though it affects literally one person [1].

You see closet (well not so much anymore) conservatives like Elon Musk tweeting dumb things about the "far left" [2]. When people complain about the "far left" what they really mean is they don't like trans people and they want them to go away. That's it.

There is no "far left" in American politics and the fact that so many have bought into the idea there is shows you just how normative and effective right-wing propaganda has been and continues to be.

[1]: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/25/1088908741/utah-transgender-a...

[2]: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1519735033950470144?s=20...

Thank you. I really do wish we could move on and focus on economics and corporatism and the like. It's nice to see people treating this as a coordinated attack rather than an issue with two sides, where me being allowed to exist in society is one of the sides.

I'm incredibly disappointed a Both Side's fallacy would appear at the top of a Hacker News post after all of the evidence we have all over the globe about both side's fallacies.

This week the far left got arrested for protesting abortion rights, while the far right tried to block countries from joining NATO and it's the usual pro-Russian agenda GOP politicans.

Also this week, the House voted to move forward with codifying marriage rights, and only Republicans voted no.

We could go on all day. Both sides are not the same and even remotely implying otherwise is very ignorant and damaging. Didn't you learn anything after 2016? Even Hacker News is no longer safe for reasonable discourse?

Their donor base is the same. So they stick together on the issues that are about value and money instead of values.

We need a good examination on when and how so many people got tricked into thinking cynicism is the same thing as critical thinking. The conservatives dismantled your public education, not the liberals and progressives and social democrats. The conservatives are also organizing on discords and 4chans to upvote shitty Both Sides Fallacies on social media, such as yours.

Feel free to provide voting records that show your theory. You will quickly move goalposts and start more clearing citing conspiracy theories, because Both Sides Are Nowhere Near The Fucking Same.

Taking a position has a high social cost. Try defending any candidate and you'll get a 10 comment chain where you have to defend your position against multiple internet commenters who are arguing mutually exclusive positions against you but not against each other. These kind of comment chains generally devolve into the every issue and often touches on the history of mankind and the nature of government.

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.

dismantling public eduation? Have you been to a college? conservatives aren't allowed in the building. If it sucks conservatives had nothing to do with that.

You're very useful

Expanding NATO isn't a progressive stance. It's pro-imperialism.

And those "arrests" weren't even real. They faked being in handcuffs. A publicist even announced on Twitter the "arrests" were going to happen beforehand.

> Didn't you learn anything after 2016?

I learned that the Democrats rig primaries. What did you learn?

Both parties are the same. Their donors are the same people. They just target their theater to different groups. These politicians are all phonies and until everyone sees that we're going to get the same crappy results.

>> This week the far left got arrested for protesting abortion rights

Are they in jail? Did someone come bail them out? Are there mug shots?

They got cited and fined 50 bucks, they pretended to be handcuffed by magical invisible handcuffs that disappeared when they felt the need to throw a fist salute to the crowd. Does that about sum it up?

Seriously, "pretend to be handcuffed" is about the lowest you can go as far as getting me to care about your cause.

Don't care.

I would much rather curtail government power than corporate power. I can much easier get away from a corporation than a government. Government has a "monopoly on violence". They can take away my rights much easier than corporations.

You just want to trade a monopoly on violence for a market of violence, and for some reason you believe that would make you safer. But you're making the common mistake of assuming that corporations won't simply fill the power vacuum themselves in the absence of a government capable of stopping them.

Government power is the only thing stopping corporations from exercising violence against you or take away your rights. Look at the way corporations operated in the 19th and early 20th centuries, when they had company towns and private armies coercing votes and killing strikers, or corporations' support for coups and cartels in foreign markets, or just the East India Trading Company, which was a de facto superpower of its time.

100% this.

I heard it said that the only things Americans know about is World war Two and they don't know that much about that. It's a sobering thought.

To your point, if anyone wants to see the effects of unchecked corporate power, just look at the 19th century and the robber barons. most notably, look at the history of the Pinkerton Detective Agency [1].

"Detective agency" is an inocuous sounding name but at its peak the Pinkertons outnumbered the US Army. Pinkertons were frequently used as striker breakers and to quash any form of labor movement. They did so with the blessing of the US government.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinkerton_(detective_agency)

While you and the parent are totally correct about the dynamics of power vacuums, I think it's also relevant to note that the robber-baron stuff wasn't exactly happening in some kind of Hobbesian state of nature - it's right there at the end of your quote: "They did so with the blessing of the US government". This was an environment where centralized authority was weakened to the point that private armies were worthwhile, yet still strong enough to engage in selective enforcement on behalf of corporate powers. Hence, the dynamic where you'd get beaten up by the Pinkertons and then arrested for fighting back. This sort of halfway environment is the worst possible case: in a more total vacuum, opposing corporate power via collective action is more viable; in a society with a stronger grip on a monopoly on violence, corporate abuses are (theoretically) restrained.

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.

The government is the only entity that can use violence legally, but it's also the only entity that cares about whether something is legal. Any idiot with a baseball bat can break your kneecaps for doing something they don't want. If you have a strong government, the threat that they will use force deters the vast majority of would-be kneecap breakers, and gives you some recourse against the few that remain.

The idea that corporations are escapable is merely a product of living your whole life in a society where governments are strong and reliable. If google started sending out henchmen to break peoples kneecaps, it wouldn't take long for them to be shut down and any of their leadership involved to be arrested, and the idea that kneecapping me is worth that risk to Google is laughable. But realistically google knows no borders, they have direct access to an ungodly amount of information, and the cost of hiring an armed thug would be infinitesimally small compared to their operating budget - if hurting me ever does become a priority for them where could I possibly escape to?

You go to some third world countries with sufficiently weak governments, you'll see plenty of corporations who have no difficulty taking people's rights away.

Large corporations are enabled by big government, not limited by government. Monopolies do not withstand competitive forces for the long run, unless propped up by government privilege. This symbiotic relationship creates cronyism

Exactly. The government will declare certain companies as too big to fail then bail them out. We need to let failure happen otherwise we are rewarding corruption.

It's not like if a company fails all their capital just disappears. Another company can emerge or another successful company can grow. If an airline fails, the places and infrastructure don't magically disappear.

The government gave the airlines a ton of money during covid so they could keep their staff and be ready to go when people start flying again. Instead the companies took that money, bought back stocks, gave executives bonuses, and encouraged early retirement. So now of course airlines have a staff shortage. But, hey, at least they made a ton of money, right?

I'm not saying the government should have done nothing when they forced businesses to lose revenue. But just giving the money directly to those at the top is the worst possible idea. We shouldn't just be giving out the people's money to the rich and get nothing in return.

I have a simpler explanation: boredom. Public opinion was probably getting bored of the big tech trials, which means they might not be fired up about voting for those politicians. So now politicians are pivoting to a different, more attractive cause. Votes are all that matter to politicians. It's unfortunate that the great unwashed still haven't realized this.

The UK has managed to keep people engaged over Brexit for seven years now. In the US abortion is an ancient topic, but has been a big topic since the supreme court nomination of 2016 and seems to keep people more engaged than ever.

I don't really buy that the nation can't keep interest in big tech regulation for more than two years, if congress and the media wants them to.

Big tech regulation: abstract thing.

Abortion: talks about freedoms. close to peoples hearts.

Brexit: talks about freedoms. close to peoples hearts.

Is a 3 week old baby considered sacred … vs … someone sold some data or something.

We need a separation of money and state. Desperately. The fact that you can do the bidding of the donor class for years then leave office and immediately get placed in a cushy job is gross.

There's a lot of evidence that regulations actually benefit the capital-owning class. Look at heavily regulated industries (insurance, pharma, banking, etc.) and how little competition the incumbents face. What most worries a big business is not whether they are allowed to do something or not, it is whether someone else will be able to do it better and hence, compete. It also doesn't help that large companies are the ones doing all the lobbying and practically end up writing the regulations[0].

[0] https://reason.com/2021/07/07/how-big-business-uses-big-gove...

^ This person gets it. The "overton window" in American politics is narrow enough that we essentially have a de facto uniparty, that agrees on everything except what matters. About 40% of the country is Independent but we pretend that either of these parties represent us. Then we fight about which party is worse. I can't see any other way that this could have happened after the introduction of fiat currency and endless war budgets financed by fiat. Eisenhower was right about the Military Industrial Complex.

Too many apologists keep totting the line that capitalism as practiced in the US is A-OK and then deflect with "what's the alternative?"

The alternative is to fix rampant abuses we see with highly concentrated capital accumulation that results in a proxy of many unchecked powers in private and increasingly public spaces. There's lots of paths being pursued to curb this.

Antitrust legislation and most business regulation exists because of abuses that naturally arise, I don't know why the narrative of continued deregulation solves these problems--regulation is pretty much the only way to leverage the benefits of capitalism without allowing it to become yet another oppressive system over the majority of society where the oppressors just become a class of the ultrawealthy. My opinion is that were well on our way down that path as we see increasingly less value add back to society and a lot more value capture strategies instead.

> Too many apologists keep totting the line that capitalism as practiced in the US is A-OK and then deflect with "what's the alternative?"

I don't think as many people say that as you think.

I think most people want better regulation and control, but perhaps done incrementally (with haste) and with a feedback circuit.

Most alternatives that have been "hard-stop" switched to lead to a lot more destruction and problems than we currently have now

I would like to see some evidence for this "continued deregulation" I always hear about. Seems like everywhere I look regulation either has stayed the same or been tightened.

The hobbling of Dodd-Frank by Obama and its gutting by Trump, in each case at the behest of Wall Street, is an obvious example.

Cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass%E2%80%93Steagall_in_post...

Your linked source does not support the claim, but rather talks about efforts to restore Glass-Steagall in some form and their failure, which is not a loosening of regulations, but a continuation of the status quo. I do acknowledge that the repeal of Glass-Steagall itself was a loosening of regulation, but that was 25 years ago.

The link was 'Cf', meaning it gives background on the part of financial regulation I talk about, rather than being a direct source. It talks about the rationale for not adopting Glass-Steagall-strength measures during the Obama years. During the Trump years, most US banks were exempted from Dodd-Frank in 2018 via the Economic Growth, Regulatory Relief and Consumer Protection Act.

Anyone in finance would tell you that Dodd Frank drastically changed how banks are run. Glass–Steagall was never reinstated because it had very little to do with the financial crisis. Many of the bigger players of the mortgage crisis never did anything related to commercial banking (e.g. Lehman Brothers, AIG).

Dodd Frank was not gutted by Trump. They lifted the asset cap so that the onerous regulatory requirements only applied to banks with $250B+ in assets, rather than banks with $50B+ in assets, as it was previously.

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.

There's an article with examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deregulation#United_States It doesn't seem like a comprehensive list. For example, I scanned the page for "Fairness Doctrine" and found nothing.

Check out Uber/Lyft/AirBnB. All of them ignored regulations for long enough that the regulations eventually got removed.

I'm not aware of many regulations that were tightened in the past 5 years. Changed sure, but usually aiming for fixing regulations that no longer properly applied.

The regulations that "tightened" would be: FOSTA/SESTA

It's possible I missed a lot, but please enlighten me.

Right, and the most frustrating thing is that antitrust laws have been on the books since 1890. We as a country and a people know how to stop unchecked corporate power, and we already have laws to do so. Unfortunately, lawlessness is much more of a problem than any one ideological position.

Blaming the ineffectiveness of Congress on the "capital-owning class" is a convenient, but lazy way to defect the blame to a place where you can pretend you don't have any control. Did you forget our that the government gave trillions of dollars in stimulus/unemployment during the pandemic?

The problem is that politicians act in ways that are more likely to be elected and voters are shallow. Throwing money at a problem is easy and creates good publicity, so that still gets done. Actual effective regulation is boring, so it's just as effective for politicians to simply grandstand against big tech companies.

Corporations are powerful enough to convince politicians that a proposed bill will cost them votes in the long term, but not much else. For example, Facebook, despite being one of the most heavy lobbying spenders, has spent even more money establishing their content Oversight Board. If they could actually buy politicians, we'd have more regulation that happens to benefit big tech. Both the Republican solution of not allowing social media companies to censor content and the Democratic solution of creating more rules for moderate disinformation are beneficial to Facebook because they can offload some of the responsibility of moderation to the government.

In the US, there is basically one party - the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies.

I'd go further and call it the neoliberal party. Business isn't necessarily evil. But selling out the people to huge multinational corporations is evil. Giving away our resources and institutions to corporations while screwing over small businesses is a problem. These are the same corporations that are their donors, that they buy stocks in and get cushy jobs when they retire.

> Because both parties operate at the behest of the capital-owning class.

The push to regulate big tech has come from within the capital owning class (and particularly from the traditional media.)

Correct. The legacy institutions and old money fear becoming even more irrelevant than they already are. But I suspect that most people want to trust bust companies like Facebook, spinning out business units into separate entities to pave the way for fairer competition. I know I want that, as both an investor and entrepreneur.

> This is to distract the voters and prevent class solidarity of the working class.

You are very cynical. Note: I did not say you are wrong.

Not really. They only support the capital-owning class when the capital-owning class supports them in return.

And that’s how this will turn out. If Big Tech decides to back the current politicians? They’ll go easy on them.

Big Tech already backs current politicians.

https://www.politico.com/newsletters/morning-tech/2022/01/24...

Disagree.

I think we haven’t curtailed big tech because we haven’t figured out what that involves (without dire consequences). What does it exactly involve anyway?

I wish. Extending police powers? Meaning refund the police?

No, they are still defunding in extreme left areas:

https://lasd.org/effects-of-defunding-the-lasd-on-public-saf...

The chart in that article shows LASD budged increased from $3.4b to $3.5b since last year, hardly defunding.

That's well under inflation.

No it isn't. That's the change from FY 2020 to FY 2021, which was ratified in April 2021. Inflation for the prior year was well under 2%, and even a live chart would have given you less than 5%.

Yes it is under inflation. Inflation is what, what it says on the news? Dude narcos what do they charge for their product, how many police do they murder, what's the budget for a dead cop? $100 million is...dude you realize I voluntarily pay taxes specifically so there can be a Medi-Cal and police, first and foremost?

"I love the cops and want them to have more money" is not a measure of inflation.

But it's a measure of something. An exact dollar value (I paid $80 dollars I had no reason to pay, at all, half to California half to America) that measures gratitude.

Very defunding. Very very defunding.

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."

Okay, so why is the EU seemingly able to regulate big tech? It's a capitalist continent.

Less lobbying focus (though probably still a lot)?

Protectionism (big tech is USA born)?

Elites are old money not new?

No tax income (probably this)?

> Elites are old money not new

This is the big one right here. Europe has pretty much missed the boat on tech so its elites are from older industries that tech is starting to compete with. You can see this same dynamic here in the US as the legacy media has declared war on the tech industry for threatening its power.

Because big tech is mainly foreign (American) companies to them.

Because it’s politically expedient for them?

Notice how China has no trouble regulating US tech either?

The primary purpose of the EU is administering a common market that consists of a large number of sovereign states. Each state naturally wants to be protectionist and give domestic businesses advantages over those from other member states. The EU can't allow that, as it would destroy the common market.

As a consequence, the EU has a lot of experience in pushing against powerful interests. It's doing that all the time, and it's also moderately successful at that. While many attempts at regulating giant businesses or forcing member states to do something they don't want ultimately fail, sometimes the EU manages to get things done.

There are several reasons.

1. Many parts of Europe still have a strong labor movement. This is the only effective counterbalance to corporate power in politics. The US has what may be the lowest rate of union coverage in the OECD (~10%) and most of that is police and teacher unions;

2. Europe by and large is not hypercapitalist like the US is. The normal is social democracy, which is still fundamentally capitalist but way less extreme;

3. Religion. Different European countries have more or less mostly Christian influence but that influence is way less militant. White evangelicalism and its effect ofn politics is more akin to wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. It's also hyper-capitalist;

4. The election process itself in European countries isn't generally political. US states often have the Secretary of State in charge of elections and that's a political office. Redistricting is inherently political. Other countries don't do this. Electoral boundaries are more often drawn by an independent organization;

5. Europe doesn't suffer from the "money = speech" falsehood; and

6. Europe still has the recent memory of two World Wars and the HOlocaust that favors cooperation over division.

#5 here should be #1, by a mile. Here in Texas, Google is carpet-bombing local TV with ads blasting the bipartisan AIAOC as an attack on American technology by "tha lib'rals," cynically exploiting the political division to scare off Republican votes. They're laundering their money through the Koch brothers' Taxpayer's Protection Alliance. The ads might be a little less effective if they ended with a big "paid for by Google" banner and voice-over.

For #1 an additional stumbling block for the labor movement is that it's rather difficult to create a limited-liability labor cooperative in the US. For-profit LLCs have legal advantages over other non-profit corporate forms. I suspect if someone tried to make something equivalent to Mondragon in the US, they'd have problems just maintaining the corporate veil and their workers would get crushed under the maddening hellscape that is consumer product liability.

#3 doesn't pass the sniff test to me: Europe has it's Christian Wahhabists, too. Hungary and Poland broke the backs of their democracies even faster than the US is, in the name of banning gay people, and they've cooperated to break the EU sanctions mechanism that was supposed to keep them from doing this.

Also #5 is wrong - or, at least, not properly root-caused. "Money-equals-speech" is itself a result of free-speech extremism. If we say the government can't regulate speech, then a way around that is to regulate money spent to speak. Let's say Ron DeSantis wants to ban gay advocacy - but the 1st Amendment says "hell no". Instead he gets a bill passed that bans spending money to purchase pride flags, buying paper to print books with gay characters in them, buying billboards with pro-LGBT messaging, or TV ad spots with the same. It's very difficult to not read this as a speech-restricting bill.

The argument in Citizens' United - the money-equals-speech case - was that even a content-neutral funding cap was an infringement of free speech. The government can't mandate that all politicians whisper, after all. Except now we have a fundraising war because every politician needs to shout as loudly as possible. And to do that you need lots of money. The US Supreme Court didn't invent "money-equals-speech", it's just a fact of how political speech works.

Europe does not have this problem because Europe is willing to entertain restrictions on political speech that the US considers unconscionable. Several EU member states have constitutional bans on fascism and hate speech[0], for example. You could never get away with that in the US for any reason. Freedom of speech is not entirely unprotected in the EU, of course - the protections are just more reasoned and considered than the blunt instrument of "Congress shall make no law".

I'm not sure about #6 either. Did America not get involved in WWII? I mean, we did try to cover up the Holocaust[1] early on and we got involved later than Europe, but it's just as culturally engrained here as it presumably is over there.

[0] Which, BTW, should be considered as censorious in and of themselves. Any political ideology which calls for the killing of specific groups of people is engaging in censorship.

[1] Specifically: FDR knew about it early on; and the New York Times buried it many pages deep because they were shy about being a "Jewish newspaper".

Because they are US companies. Which is the main reason the US won't regulate them. EU is all about being anti-competitive, look at Airbus, InBev or LVMH. As long as it's their own companies being anti-competitive. Apple isn't even the market leader in EU, and EU is going to regulate them. That is anti-competitive. Let's go regulate the 2nd place company.

When I read comments like this on HN, I honestly wonder if the commenter believes this to be true, or if it's rhetoric or maybe trolling.

It's blatantly true. Just compare the fines of VW who explicitly systematically cheated emissions tests on diesel vehicles to EU fines on Google... for recommending google products on google websites. Services are the one piece of trade between the US and EU which the US is a net exporter. Considering the number of fines and taxes which explicitly target those it's pretty clear what's going on.

Do you believe the EU is more protectionist than the US? If so, you are too biased to have a meaningful conversation with.

Wait what? The US runs a massive trade deficit with the world because it's extremely open about giving other countries access to its markets. The EU doesn't, in some years it actually runs a surplus. They're not ultra protectionist like China but I was certainly under the impression that they were more so than the US.

See "Free Trade Rankings, 2019" here: https://www.investopedia.com/ask/answers/040115/which-countr...

A trade surplus is not evidence of protectionism. The most common metric to measure protectionism (in as far as it can be measured statistically) is the Weighted Mean Tariff Rate. Compare the EU at 1.48% to the US at 1.52% - the EU is slightly lower and both are among the lowest in the world, certainly of the large economies.

It's literal misinformation to say that the EU is more protectionist than the US. It was a Trump talking point, and never based in fact.

EU: https://tradingeconomics.com/european-union/tariff-rate-appl...

US: https://tradingeconomics.com/united-states/tariff-rate-appli...

If Weighted Mean Tariff rates are the only measurement for trade that could be true. But it is not. You have subsidies and you have policy and regulations which can cause non market barriers to entry. Case & point: China doesn't have any tariff on American social media companies but simply bans American companies. Per your chosen measurement, that is simply not considered.

What causes you to perceive the EU to be less protectionist?

The EU precovid had a net positive trade balance with the rest of the world. [1].

The US precovid had a net negative trade balance of nearly $50 Bn a month. [2].

The balance of trade between the US and EU is quite remarkably in the favor of the EU for trade with a "protectionist state ". How do you explain this discrepancy? If the US is so protectionist why are exports as a percentage of its GDP 1.58 times smaller than that of the EU [3][4]?

[1]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/-/d... [2]: https://www.bea.gov/news/2020/us-international-trade-goods-a... [3]: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... [4]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/B020RE1Q156NBEA

As I replied to safety1st, a trade surplus is not evidence of protectionism. The EU has a comparable (slightly better) Weighted Mean Tariff Rate to the US, and both are the most open large economies in world.

It's unsupportable nonsense to claim otherwise.

Tariffs are only *one* means of trade policy. Pretending that they are the end all be all is nonsense. One quick example: France passed a Tax bill which targets only companies with revenues of more than 25 million euros there and 750 million globally. The catch? There's 30 companies which it applies to, but only one which is French[1]. Thus it is officially classified as merely local tax and not a tariff but in effect is a tariff on large foreign companies to give pricing advantages to local French ones. But per your measurement is a zero percentage tariff.

There are plenty of other subsidies and policy making ways to be protectionist.

And if it really were such nonsense to suggest other wise, why can you not explain the discrepancy of the US - EU trade balance. It should be simple.

[1]: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-48947922

I live in the EU (well, some of the time), and I honestly believe that what the above commenter says is at least partially true. The EU are being protectionist, and usually only pass these types of regulations in sectors they have little to offer in the way of competition. I eagerly await the moment they target Airbus or car manufacturers.

The EU is categorically less protectionist than the US, and is one of the most open economies in the world.

If you honestly believe otherwise, you are intentionally misinformed.

Sample size of one.

We hosted a German foreign exchange student.

He was very aware of famous Youtubers, utilize Google for searches, watched Tiktok constantly. He owned the latest iPhone. His English was amazing.

In certain respects, I wasn't sure if we ever offered him a radically different experience than when he experienced living in Hannover.

Big (U.S.) Tech was very embedded in his life.

ah yes "anti-competitive" and not "pro consumer"

nice choice of words

They are different things. Product dumping to get rid of your competition is anti-competitive even though lower priced is pro-consumer.

> Apple isn't even the market leader in EU, and EU is going to regulate them.

They have a monopoly on iphones.

By this logic every company is a monopoly, as they have a monopoly on their own product.

Most other products cannot run apps. There is no alternative supplier of iOS devices so that people can run the apps that they bought from other companies via the Appstore.

> Courts do not require a literal monopoly before applying rules for single firm conduct; that term is used as shorthand for a firm with significant and durable market power — that is, the long term ability to raise price or exclude competitors. That is how that term is used here: a "monopolist" is a firm with significant and durable market power. Courts look at the firm's market share, but typically do not find monopoly power if the firm (or a group of firms acting in concert) has less than 50 percent of the sales of a particular product or service within a certain geographic area. Some courts have required much higher percentages. In addition, that leading position must be sustainable over time: if competitive forces or the entry of new firms could discipline the conduct of the leading firm, courts are unlikely to find that the firm has lasting market power.

> Obtaining a monopoly by superior products, innovation, or business acumen is legal; however, the same result achieved by exclusionary or predatory acts may raise antitrust concerns.

https://www.ftc.gov/advice-guidance/competition-guidance/gui...

What difference does them being a US company make? They're listed on the NASDAQ? The CEO lives in the US? Seriously, what does it mean to be a US company?

> look at Airbus, InBev or LVMH.

I did. Google's EU division had more revenue than any of those companies worldwide. It seems like Google's EU division (which is an EU company owned entirely by Google) is a bigger EU company than any of those three.

> what does it mean to be a US company?

Easy enough question to answer by looking at the beneficial owners of a company's stock. I'd wager every "US company" as commonly understood is, in addition to being listed on US stock exchanges, headquartered in the US, and having significant operations in the US, is also majority-owned by American citizens.

Interesting distinction. I'm not sure it's possible to confirm this, but I would be interested in the different firms that were listed.

Specifically, I don't know about AirBus and LVMH, but InBev seems to be primarily owned by American based mutual funds.

How does Tesla fit in this, building a factory in Brandenburg against "some" public resistance? This case did not seem anti-competitive at all.

Generally because the EU Parliament is far less corrupt than the US Congress.

The US is more of a "corporatocracy" than a real democracy these days.

Congress is even incapable of impeaching a president that tried to overturn an election by force. That's a pretty embarassing state of affairs for American democracy.

What's the corporate interest in impeaching Trump or not? I think that has less to do with corporations and more to do with Republican politicians (correctly) concluding that their Republican voters don't want Trump impeached.

That is also a form of corruption though. Voter sentiment shouldn't be prioritised over protecting democracy and the constitution.

I'm always confused when I see people say (to paraphrase) "We need to protect democracy so the hell with what the voters think!".

How exactly does that logic work?

In the same way when you sit down to play a boardgame with someone and they draw extra cards, fudge die rolls, and flip over the table when a turn goes against them: they're no longer playing the agreed-on game at that point, and you and the other players don't have to accept their behavior as part of the play.

There is a baseline set of rules (in the USA we have the Constitution) for how the game works. Like a person's freedom to swing their arm, a voter's freedom on what to vote for must stop at the limit of the other voters' rights. The "Tyranny of the Majority" is a related concept as well.

Well, yes that is why the US is a constitutional republic.

It's just that phrasing seems hilariously and ironically out of wack.

It's as if some people think they know better then unwashed masses so they should be in charge regardless of sentiment. Ok, fine, maybe they do, but that isn't called "democracy".

It's called representative democracy. The job of representatives is to know what they're doing on the behalf of voters, not to cater to their every whim.

The EU is more corrupt. All China needed to stop EU statements on Human rights was some investments into Greece and making a few calls[1].

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-eu-un-rights/greece-block...

The EU is not a monolith. Its constituent countries are both more and less corrupt than the US, but the EU requires unanimity for foreign policy decisions, unlike the US enchi isn't beholden to reach State.

https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2021

Because big tech is overwhelmingly not European, thus there's little blow back to trade actions. Suggest a policy that may harm the balance sheet of the German Automotive sector and you'll see it killed on the spot.

That's demonstrably wrong: https://www.motor1.com/news/595006/european-union-agrees-com...

To the parent’s point, VW was saying for recent years they were going fully electric. This EU bill doesn’t harm them. In fact, it likely helps them against slower-moving competitors.

It might not hurt VW, but the EUs automotive industry is more than just VW. A lot of it is very specialized suppliers to bigger companies that do stuff like the best gear box etc. Those will be hurt for sure.

Does banning new combustion engines after 2035 really harm the manufacturers? To me it looks like they are all moving to electric.

A lot of the industry is suppliers to manufacturers, not just manufacturers themselves. Those will be hurt for sure as their whole business model is being the best at some specialized part of a combustion car.

Well, I think it's more about the fact that the tech industry is the us's lifeline to long-term viability and that other country's tech industries (like china, russia) are far worse in terms of human rights. Why would congress attack the golden goose for class solidarity? That would help send the US to historical irrelevance.

if you look at the quantitative reports on trade, you will quickly see that high tech is massive, but not the only category to have that title. You are arguing a perceived difference without quantitative grounding. In other words, the mind-share of tech is massive, and that certainly is part of the political gridlock here.

Yes, we also make money via agriculture although often times it's really just contaminating our environment for short-term profits (almond growers in california). We also have a vibrant manufacturing sector, although most of it is in high-end costly items because we can't compete on price for the cheapest items. We also have a huge health sector which is based mainly around rent-seeking rather than quality of care, and its main contribution seems to be causing medical bankruptcies.

Nor did I ever imply these other industries didn't exist. It's just that they aren't our lifeline to viability long-term because many countries could produce the food and physical products we can, but don't have the infrastructure to support high tech companies.

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