Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PaulHoule | Hacker News Reader

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My impression is that British politics are more resentful, but that you don't see it the way you do in the US because the structure of the system is different.

In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations you see in the US where usually the Democrats control some of (1) the Presidency, (2) the Senate, (3) the House of Representatives and the Republicans control others. Considering the veto power of the President and the filibuster rule in the Senate that can be a formula for gridlock.

Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan both represented a move to the right but when Thatcher was in power she had no effective opposition while any legislation that passed in the 1980s was a compromise between Reagan in the US and Tip O'Neill and I think between having a good conservative and a good liberal, we got a lot of good legislation in the 1980s (we got a new Clean Air Act in that time frame, for instance.)

As a result there was a lot of resentment towards Thatcher from Labor advocates who felt completely shut out, so some sang "Ding Dong the Wicked Witch is Dead" when Thatcher died

https://theconversation.com/burying-thatcher-why-celebrating...

> In Britain the PM is chosen by the party in power so you don't get the divided government situations

The UK government has been in utter turmoil for a long time now and it’s at its worst right now. This resignation marks a new low in self destructive politics and posturing.

I know you are referring to a different type of political impasse, but the chaos that is present in the UK is not a lot better than what the US system seems to see so regularly.

It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US.

I subscribe to The Economist which would like to support the Tories but has had nothing but contempt for Teresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss.

Some people say that the Democrats in the US are like the losers in professional wrestling but the complete incompetence and inability of Labor to get elected makes it possible for conservatives to get elected by pandering to a particular segment of the population. Voters have no interest in talk about redistribution if they think they think the people who talk about redistribution push policies that will leave people with nothing to redistribute. Jeremy Corbin did nothing to push back on the perception that he wanted to turn the UK into Cuba, and by not providing a viable alternative the Tories became useless. Corbin hoped that the fall of the Tories would lead to the rise of Labor but oddly it doesn't work that way.

> It's a different kind of turmoil than we have in the US.

100%.

The inability of Labour to make headway at this time is so depressing.

The common ground between the UK and the US is the inability to find and promote leaders with a combination of age, charisma and ability on their side.

If their best are those elected, the future is grim.

Labour has nobody to blame but themselves. They walked the exact same path that democrats did in the US—abandoning their working class base in favor of college educated liberals. The error in that approach became clearer more quickly for them because they don’t have (as much) the added overlay of racial sectarianism to keep working class minorities voting for them.

Agree 100%. IMO abandoning the working class is by far the stupidest thing the Democratic Party has done in recent memory. And even now, as it should be becoming crystal clear, they still don't seem to have the ability for introspection. They keep thinking they should be winning handily, and on the merits this is a plausible argument, but they really have a hard time with culture. I find it very frustrating, because I am pretty sympathetic to having the US become a modern social democracy like some Western European nations, but our politicians seem to focus on culture wars instead. When your party can have basically all of the ideas and the other party still succeeds dramatically by just saying they hate you, it's time to ask why.

The problem is, with what platform are you gone capture those working class people. You can't just win on the rural working class. You need to convince deserve urban working and upper class citizens.

In the US, if you want to go after the rural working class then you better be talking correct about abortion and guns otherwise you will get nowhere.

Its really not easy to do.

Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt. And continuing to pursue gun control is an unforced error on the part of the Democrats (though they eased off quite a bit on that starting with Obama, to be fair).

IMO the Democrats would have been better off focusing most of their effort on something like single payer health care, along with minimum wage and housing affordability, things like that. Those are issues that are ostensibly part of the party platform but are not high priorities.

> Making abortion an effective wedge issue was an excellent strategy by the GOP, no doubt.

Calling abortion a “wedge issue” leads you to thinking about it the wrong way. Sure, democrats say abortion is an unimportant distraction the GOP likes to trot out—but only insofar as everyone unilaterally accepts their position on it. They certainly didn’t treat it that way when Roe was repealed.

There’s no “wedge issues.” The electorate cares about what it cares about. Parties need to triangulation on positions that keep their coalition together, and avoid positions that allow the other party to divide their coalition. It’s just math.

> There’s no “wedge issues.” The electorate cares about what it cares about.

Aka, propaganda doesn't actually exist. At the very least, my team doesn't do it.

Thinking your political opponents are duped by propaganda just means you lack the ability to think outside your bubble and understand people who have different values and priorities. Certainly abortion views are not the result of GOP propaganda, seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the subject of careful compromises in all but a few liberal democracies. (Views on immigration, same sex marriage, multiculturalism, etc., aren’t the product of “propaganda” either. Most people in my home country of Bangladesh would agree with the GOP on all those issues—especially if the shoe were on the other foot and you were talking about e.g. hearing people speak foreign languages in Dhaka—but they certainly don’t have positive views of the GOP itself.)

This myopia is a great shortcoming of democrats (of the last 20 years—the party used to be savvier in the past), because it leads them to believe that politics is about lecturing and badgering, instead of building coalitions of people who agree more than they disagree.

Thanks for elaborating my point in detail. For reference, my post

"There are no wedge issues - propaganda doesn't actually exist. At the very least, my team doesn't do it."

https://commons.m.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abortion_Laws.svg

I don’t understand your response. Are you saying all those other people in other countries are duped by GOP propaganda as well?

> seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa

List of countries with same or more restrictive laws for abortion when compared with Texas abortion laws.

Europe - None

Asia - Afghanistan, iraq, syria, Yemen, Burma, Papua new Guinea, Bangladesh

Africa - Somalia, Mali, Malawi, south Sudan, Congo, Niger, Nigeria, Madagascar.

America - Venezuela, Haiti, Suriname, Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, tiny Caribbean islands.

Your use of the phrase "seeing as how it’s illegal in two dozen countries across Europe, Asia, and Africa" would have been a great example of propaganda, especially considering that no country in Europe is as restrictive as Texas. Especially, leading with "Europe,..." instead of leading with " barely 2 dozen non European countries across the 200+ countries in the world".

But as we all know wedge issues and propaganda don't exist. So, my previous paragraph can actually be deleted because it is a non-sequitur.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Abortion_Laws.svg

The GOP didn't so much make abortion a wedge issue as much as evangelicals captured a big chunk of the party's lame duck platform during the various positional realignments of the 60s-80s. The GOP, by almost sheer luck, managed to stumble in to an apathetic voter block, and came out with one of the strongest, most long lived cores of voters out there.

The real strategic leadership of that block mostly died off in the 2000's though, leaving evangelicals headless and politically adrift. These days most seem to have reverted back to being somewhat apathetic in the positive direction, and aside from abortion, are voting completely based on the products out outrage culture.

You’ve got it backward. You do it by not talking about abortion (and other things that divide your coalition of urban liberals and working class people). “Celebrate your abortion” isn’t helping democrats with my Bangladeshi immigrant family in Queens either.

The people you’ll lose doing that are the Rockefeller republicans—Silicon Valley and Westchester types. And that’s fine.

Abortion and guns are different. Many rural voters own guns and personally feel a loss from gun control. The average rural voter has a basically libertarian bent and would probably be pretty happy with a truce that they are left alone about guns and women are left alone about abortion.

Like it or not the electoral map favors rural voters, Democrats can recruit more urban voters and it will make no difference for winning seats. If Democrats gave up 5% of their urban votes in exchange for 3% of the rural votes the Republicans would find themselves in the wilderness.

Depends on how those votes are distributed, in both directions, but I doubt either would make a huge difference. One thing to remember is that rural areas are less red than cities are blue. A 75/35 split seems to be the most common rural distribution, whereas many city districts are 90% dem with the GOP struggling to outperform the greens or libertarians.

The GOP stands to gain nothing in the urban cores outside of a few southern cities and Texan cities, but they currently live for the suburban fight. The Dems biggest struggle out in the sticks is less that they can't field any candidate that isn't an 80 year old union man or a local youngin' fresh out of college who says all the wrong things (and is thus unelectable).

New York City was 80/20, with Trump making significant gains in heavily immigrant neighborhoods: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/12/20/us/politics/e.... Trump won 26% in LA County. He ran within 7% of Biden in Miami-Dade County. The GOP absolutely has room to grow among working class Hispanics and Asians in cities.

They were at a 33 point lead in the polls recently, the biggest lead of any party since the early 90s.

I think you need to read more into Thatcher and what happened under her to understand why some sections of society reacted like this.

I don't know a huge amount about Regan, but I doubt you can really compare them.

Britain in the late 70s and early 80s had huge issues which Thatcher addressed, but in hugely contentious ways, in some cases destroying entire industries and their communities.

The structural impact of some choices she made are still present in British society even now, decades later.

I've got three books about Thatcher I am reading right now.

To interpret Thatcher you need to know about the labor unrest in the UK in the 1970s. Back then there seemed to always be a strike in some chokepoint industry (Coal mining, trucking) that threw the rest of the economy into chaos, almost like a general strike. This gets talked about it in this song

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/(Wish_I_Could_Fly_Like)_Superm...

A lot of people saw the labor movement as a big problem, thus Thatcher was in position to make a big crackdown against it. I occasionally meet an Americans who is opposed to unions, but there never was a time when a reasonable person could say unions were bringing the US economy to its knees.

Reagan had an impact of moving the US to the right a lot like Thatcher did, but not so much.

The Democrats largely accepted Reagan's viewpoint because it was perceived to work. Clinton accepted Reaganism just as Blair accepted Thatcherism, in fact both politicians were able to outdo their predecessors because on the other side of the aisle they were able to neutralize any possible opposition and normalize the slogan "there is no alternative".

Although Barack Obama introduced almost universal healthcare but implemented the public-private partnership plan that Nixon offered in 1974... One that almost works as a policy, but does great damage to institutional legitimacy because it looks like another case of regulatory capture and ultimately contributes to the nation becoming ungovernable.

> Barack Obama introduced almost universal healthcare

Terms and conditions apply.

It's the American Way. Reduce the cost of social services, in the short term, by making them very difficult to apply for.

Once I heard Newt Gingrich talk vaguely that high deductible plans and health savings accounts (a core idea of Obamacare) would be a good "free market" solution but it strikes me as another one of those penny wise and pound foolish ideas.

If people don't buy the $200 a month Asthma inhaler which high deductible plans make them pay for themselves they might have 2 hospitalizations a year which cost $15,000 a piece... which high deductible plans will pay for. High deductible plans seem to be a way to maximize the costs of chronic disease like diabetes.

The originally introduced plan was nearly a mirror of what is currently law in Massachusetts which does cover everyone. As put in place by a Republican Governor, no less. It is only during long and bad faith negotiations that the Affordable Care Act became the extremely limited and optional alternative that we now live with.

I grew up under Thatcher in 80s Britain (also 70's but too young to see it).

Britain's problem with labour unrest was rooted in other problems. Ironically, one being a problem we are seeing again now - massive inflation.

Yes, you can definitely 'solve' the problem of industry strikes by completely destroying the industry involved.

That's one option.

Inflation always has an element of circularity in the explanations of it.

There's no doubt that workers would like to get a 10% raise in a year when there is 10% inflation. Since labor is a substantial input into the cost of services, it also seems like a plan to have at least 10% inflation next year.

The problem with many of those unions was just that they depended on industry that no rational country could have continued to run forever. Like are you seriously going to just continue to mine coal forever, in mines that have been active for 100s of years and were just losing money.

The leader of the coal miners union didn't even fight for coal minor wages, he was talking actually revolution.

Some privatizations were sensible, lets remember that Nordics, Switzerland and so on also did that and you can do it well depending on the situation. But they are complex issues that you need to consider rationally on what you want to do.

The British government rail was probably to big, doing to many things and selling part of that and splitting it up and opening it up to some competition is sensible.

In my opinion labor in the 1950/1960 just did poorly, overly focus on some of their socialist hangups rather then making smart policy. Like Britain had debt after the war for sure, but its not like it was bombed to the ground (the Blitz was minor compared what most countries experienced), you have a rebuilding Europe. Britain had a world class aircraft industry, advanced nuclear, building lots of cars, world leading and so and so. Its had a great good electronics sector as well. Being among the best in the world in almost every major technology.

And somehow that couldn't be leveraged into much economic success. You have terrible growth and massive inflation just 20 year later. Something did go wrong, and you can't blame the conservatives. Even when they were in power for period they only slightly slow down the agenda.

To be sure, good things were done in that period as well it certainty wasn't all bad but its hard to look at pre-Tracher Britain and be overly impressed.

Coal miners seem to have a sense of entitlement everywhere.

Coal was mostly crushed in the 1980s by the low capital cost of

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combined_cycle_power_plant

and the low cost of gas of Natural gas in the US and UK, the latter because of the discovery of petroleum in the North Sea. The same economic steamroller pushed "pause" on nuclear energy.

Today we see coal miners in the US who are empowered by the "one state, two votes" structure of the Senate to keep the industry alive despite it being basically uneconomic as well as environmentally unsound, the difference is this time the coal miners are supported by the right instead of the left.

Those who hate Thatcher today aren't so much pining away for the way things used to be but instead for the loss of their dreams for how they think things could have been.

Thatcher's most memorable slogan was "There is no alternative" and it's that sense that the realm of the possible in politics shrunk dramatically is why people have a sense of loss. (I'm amused that both Angela Merkel and Hillary Clinton liked that slogan too.)

It wasn't all coal mining.

We lost over 2 million manufacturing jobs at the beginning of the 80s.

The hate of Thatcher, imo, was less about "the country" and more directly about the impact on people's communities and direct personal relationships.

But looking back, Thatcher tactics were at times borderline fascist.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/03/miners...

It's hard to get a clear view on these things within your own country, my advice would be to compare Reagan, Thatcher and fascist military dictator Pinochet.

One of them killed lots of people, and still gets praised today as making their country richer, when the evidence suggests they didn't. Which wouldn't really justify the deaths even if true. Sorry, did I say one of them, all of them, I meant all of them. Seems easier to spot that when it's not your country though.

> The structural impact of some choices she made are still present in British society even now, decades later.

Financial impact too; oil company privatisations and tax cuts which offset the income from the oil fields deprived the UK of a sovereign wealth fund equivalent to Norway's (although likely not as large, due to variations in the price of oil).

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