The ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns, if your views are by definition enlightened | Hacker News Reader

The ‘Smart’ Party Never Learns, if your views are by definition enlightened

wsj.com

6 pointsisaacfrond22 comments

How about this in rebuttal:

If your views are by definition morally correct, those of your critics must be evil. Who needs self-reflection?

I don't think i see much from the other side about understanding the 'smart' parties side of things either, so whatever.

Thus if I were in a position of power I would think - if my issues are never going to be bargained on, why bargain on my opponent's issues?

But I'm a fight to the death kind of guy.

I don't know if it's just cultural, the influence of Moneyball, or cheap compute crunch having made it possible to Monte Carlo elections while targeting campaign spend, but apparently while in the XX there was still a significant overlap between the left of the R caucus and the right of the D caucus, now they have no overlap, leading to slim chances of rapproachement.

Having diagnosed, however, triage suggests treatment is not worthwhile.

Maybe time will fix this situation.

https://archive.ph/M9EM1

But, the Democratic Party does adapt. Biden's economic policy is notably different from Obama's. It's in some ways like Trump's. TPP is dead, there are significant export restrictions, and domestic manufacturing is getting subsidies. That's all different. Will this lead to good outcomes or just to inflation? I don't know! But it's absolutely a reaction to the political events of recent years.

I now don't think the writer had hoped we would argue the article's flawed premises (analysis of an argument would be an "coastal elite" activity), but rather consider what "the base" might possibly be attempting to convey with their "real American" tantrums[0]. As best as I have been able to suss out, it is: "Fine, alright already, some White males do have their thumbs on the scale. But {I'm/my town is} obviously not among them"

    [American Chopper Meme Blank]

    You're helping Black people!         They need our help!
    
    We need to help poor Whites too!     So let's help everyone?

    No! That's Socialism

[0] eg https://indyweek.com/news/Letters-to-the-Editor/op-ed-oath-k...

> I didn't really see Trump as a savior, I saw him as the Bigly-est brick the American people could pick up and throw through the White House windows.

TPP was a trade agreement that was meant to align Pacific trading partners with the US instead of China. Four years were lost where China gained ground on trading agreements with the other TPP countries, but the idea is still the same.

The text of the treaty was kept secret even from congress [0], and to read it, they had to request the exact (single) chapter ahead of time, and were not allowed to bring any means of copying into the room where they read it in solitude. If they even got the text itself, and not a 'summary' [1].

Meanwhile, "industry representatives" had free access to it, and were largely the ones writing it.

The TPP (and other similar trade agreements) are nothing but backdoor means of subverting national legislations in favor of corporations. If four years were lost to China, the corporate authors of the TPP have only themselves to blame, as it was so hideous and anti-consumer, it was one of the few things Trump and Bernie Sanders agreed was bad.

[0] But, obviously, not from the other governments negotiating it, showing that the secrecy was not to gain an advantage over the other parties, but over ones own voters and politicians.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Pacific_Partnership#Secr...

That is the standard procedure by which all treaties are written according to the US Constitution. The executive branch writes and negotiates treaties, taking input from who they think will be affected, with only the Senate having oversight. The reason for this was explained in The Federalist Papers, and this setup is so successful that every developed country in the world does essentially the same thing and has since before the Constitution was written.

The US constitution requires that treaties be kept secret, even from congress, during negotiations? I'd like a citation on that, and an explanation on why wikipedia implies the secrecy around TPP as unusual - if such secrecy were so standard and great, one would not expect it to be criticized this way.

> the GOP had, in their eyes, defenestrated what was left of its legitimacy.

This would have been a stronger point if the principled conservatives (those people with whom, in the 1988 US, I never would have thought I'd ever agree) within the GOP had not been decrying exactly the same defenestration.

(my fantasy at this point is that those people, the Lincoln Project, and the right wing of the democratic party could all coördinate and form a viable Centre Party. There is some slight precedent by Earl Warren in California: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earl_Warren#Election but otherwise I would never hold my breath.

The Old Country has long-standing structural tech^Wpolitical debt baked-in, and so I am content to watch it with concern from this side of the Atlantic.)

Edit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33957537 links the story of Beth Moore, an economic and social conservative, and how she was cancelled after she also saw the defenestration.

> The latter still plump mostly for Democrats, although the party’s social radicalism is pushing them toward the GOP.

"social radicalism" - what is that? Communism, UBI, one baby policy ..? Probably not.

I'll take "social radicalism" for one thousand, Alex.

What is... saying hating "others" is bad?

It can be nothing more than a stigmatizing invitation to hatred leveled for no reason other than political convenience.

True, a theme explored in Stefan Zweig's Schachnovelle ("The Royal Game")

(a more literary exploration of the "playing chess with a pigeon" joke)

> The most obvious change in American politics this century is the sorting of voters along educational lines. [..] Voters with impressive educational credentials tend to be Democrats, and those without them lean strongly Republican.

This is overstating it. Among white voters, college graduates preferred not just Republicans, but Trump, by a 4% margin (and by 14% in 2012) [1]. The sorting along racial lines seems the more obvious one.

Given things such as the (attempted) explicitly racially discriminatory prioritizing of funding by the Biden administration [2], can we really be surprised?

[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trum...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/23/us/politics/biden-debt-re...

The fact that, 150+ years after 1868, a reputable source can bin by {Black, Hispanic, White} and get a distinct signal is mind-boggling. Does anyone ever bothering segmenting voters by {Blonde, Brunette, Ginger}? Or talk about how it's only natural that the left-hander vote skews for a given candidate?

(I was always offended, as a child, by all the forms with an entry for "race"; I've been away for long enough that I had forgotten all about it before this thread)

> the fact that, 150+ years after 1868, a reputable source is can bin by {Black, Hispanic, White} and get a distinct signal is mind-boggling

Is it really? Compared to how long people have been competing along tribal lines, 150 years is less than negligible.

For roughly 6'000 years before the 1800s, people didn't travel faster than ~80 km/h, but now we routinely[0] do so.

(yes, there is tribalism here too —Sneetches will be Sneetches— but the tribalism is at least along slightly more subtle lines than melanin content)

[0] on occasion a very few of us manage 40'000 km/h. Past Performance Is Not Indicative Of Future Results

What happened in 1868?

https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/amendment-14/

Among other changes, the Original Constitutional 3/5 of a person language got deprecated.

It starts by talking about "persons", but the right to vote was still reserved for "male inhabitants". Women's suffrage (19A) was a half century in the future, and at the point I emigrated from the Old Country, the ERA still had not been ratified. Haven't checked to see if you all have ratified it since.

Edit: I suspect the reason the Civil Rights Movement was such a big deal in the 1960s is that folks looked around and said to themselves "100 years of Reconstruction, and we're still lynching?"

It's easy to say "I don't see race", but when everyone else does you're just sticking your head in the sand. People have never been discriminated by hair color in this country.

As european citizen, you americans are obsessed with race thing. I struggle to imagine european policy research that segregates people by skin colour or whatever else.

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