Did we hand-wave the homelessness issue away in CA? Seems like there's an awful lot of hand-waving we did in the past 15 years growing the tech sector that left a shit-ton of people behind. I know a bunch of people are going to hand-wave this comment away too. The downvotes generated on hacker news will not translate at the voting booth.
I want to stress that I strongly support a just transition (policy should express compassion and empathy at scale), and if people can't be found other jobs, retiring them out early to bridge the gap to other social safety nets (medicare, social security, etc), but there is no path to success for conservative ideology on the issue of leaving fossil fuels behind (either through votes or economics).
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37052550 (citations)
I think this is a bit of a simplification that makes the effect sound much more drastic than it really is. While 2 million voters over the age of 55 may die every year, they are replaced by a similar number of voters who just became over 55 and who's politics, on average, are only marginally different. Of course this applies to every age group as well. Not that I'm assuming that you're meaning to suggest that the effect is drastic, but I often see the very same line of reasoning in the political media and I'm quite certain it is what they're suggesting---because clicks.
For example, Rep. Lauren Boebert won by only 546 votes last year in her district. You don't need much electorate change for that to not happen again.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/16/politics/demographic-changes-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152682 ("The renewable energy revolution is happening faster than you think.")
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37152803 ("The US climate law is fueling a factory frenzy. Here’s the latest tally.")
This is perhaps why there has been a big motivation for conservative politicians to use (or look the other way from) anti-democratic means to maintain power.
Even more than the claimed small-government ideology, there is such an incredibly strong allegiance with the fossil fuel extraction industries [1] that artificially propping those industries is worth the subversion of democracy. There are models of this elsewhere in the world, after all.
1. Liberals once had that too, but lost the fossil fuel geography after the 60s. Manchin is the last of his kind.
Liberals ("neolibs") fucked up bad by taking the working class for granted and letting globalization erode them [1] [2] [3], very similar to what is happening with conservative fossil fuel electorate today. Maybe things have gotten bad enough for that cohort to be catered to again [4], maybe things need to get worse first.
[1] https://kof.ethz.ch/en/news-and-events/kof-bulletin/kof-bull...
[2] https://www.npr.org/2017/07/05/535626109/the-end-of-loyalty-...
[3] https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/12/09/459087477...
From a small-c conservative point of view, renewables make imminent sense because of the low cost and the fact that they literally conserve resources. This fits very much with the conservative tendency to save and not spend frivolously.
Observing this contradiction really demonstrates to me how much big-C Conservatism in the US is really more about institutionally prolonging and cementing the long term viability of fossil fuels. Everything else seems in service to that goal.
I can't help but take note of the dichotomy that exists in current US politics. The implication seems to be that Liberals took on a policy stance that was electorally unfavorable and could jeopardize their ability to win elections. And yet:
“Maybe you do not care much about the future of the Democratic Party. You should. Liberals will always be with us. If liberals become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon liberalism. The will reject democracy." ― nobody
You are correct, but with the rise of nationalism as an appealing ideology, there are fewer white working class liberals (AKA blue collar) than there were in the past. These people were decisive in the 2016 election, and were a big reason that swing states had close elections in 2020.
Many of them have abandoned universalist progressive economic ideas because of the loss of economic security they experienced with globalization.
Also, unlike the capitalist and professional classes, the nationalists are often OK with strong safety nets, as long as these benefits are limited to their tribe. They are really neither conservative or liberal. There are other political dimensions involved.
This could be because of increased migration into the US and a billion other reasons that have nothing to do with nationalism.
>Also, unlike the capitalist and professional classes, the nationalists are often OK with strong safety nets, as long as these benefits are limited to their tribe. They are really neither conservative or liberal. There are other political dimensions involved.
Agreed
As voting numbers go, migration only comes into play if you interpret "fewer white working class liberals" proportionally, but I meant it in an absolute sense: that blue collar white Americans have shifted Conservative independently.
There is pretty good evidence of the nexus of race and occupational class in recent voting patterns [1][2]. This coupled with the fact that this population overwhelmingly supported economically liberal candidates in the past indicates a major shift, balanced partly in the other direction by the shift of the white professional class toward liberal voting tendencies.
If the argument is that migration into the US (which is mostly non-white [3]) is encouraging the white working class less liberal, then that is pretty well describing nationalism.
1. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-11-28/how-occup...
2. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2018/08/09/an-examinati...
3. https://www.pewresearch.org/hispanic/2020/08/20/facts-on-u-s...
At most, they might abandon pretending to support it as cover while working to chip away at the edges when that pretense stops working for them, but that’s not a loss for democracy.
Conservatism distilled to its essence can probably be summarized as Chesterton's fence: to not make rash moves changing the status quo without fully understanding both the reason the status quo is the way it is, and the nth-degree aftereffects of the change.
So I grant you, in the beginning of democracy, almost by definition conservatism was against it, when the status quo was a feudal monarchy or whatever; but there's been a few hundred intervening years, and I don't think it's fair to make the argument that "conservatism" is still, and will always be, opposed to "democracy".
I think they are talking about Conservatism in the US specifically, not in general. In the US, Conservatism has been quite active in limiting the voting power of several demographics [1][2], a distinctly anti democratic pattern of behavior. It's a unique situation reflecting our own troubled racial history and the large ideological gulf between the older and younger generations.
I wouldn't call that anti-democratic conduct small-c conservative at all, but it's very big-C Conservative in the US.
1. https://apnews.com/article/alabama-redistricting-voting-righ...
2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2023/04/20/cleta-mitch...
First, on the Allen v. Milligan case, it's illustrative to imagine instead what would be the appropriate number of majority-black districts? The state is 68.9% white and 26.8% black[0] and has seven congressional districts. 26.8% of seven is 1.876, so one (which is what it is currently) is too few and two is actually too many. If all districts reflected the state's demographics as a whole equally, none would be majority-black. Besides, I think it imprudent to assume that people vote on racial lines; as the majority opinion notes, "The Court’s opinion does not diminish or disregard the concern that [section 2 of the Voting Rights Act] may impermissibly elevate race in the allocation of political power within the States", and that "racial gerrymandering, even for remedial purposes, may balkanize us into competing racial factions; it threatens to carry us further from the goal of a political system in which race no longer matters". Both the majority and the dissents are worth reading, as usual.
On the second point of campus voting, I think there is reasonable room to argue on what the voting age should be. Prior to the 26th Amendment in 1971, the voting age was 21; which meant that for most of the country's history, young first-time voters already had many years of work experience under their belts and were further on their way to "adulthood". Nowadays, someone at the first-time voting age of 18 is less likely than ever to have worked[1].
Besides, if limiting suffrage is anti-democratic, then is expanding suffrage necessarily pro-democratic? There have been attempts at lowering the voting age to 16[2]; would it be considered anti-democratic to oppose such an action? And even states that are perennially unfriendly to big-C Conservatism based on voting record[3], like New York and New Jersey, were among states that made voting more difficult[4] recently.
All this to say: we should continue to have rational debates on the best way to ensure the ongoing health of the nation (that is, politics), and we would all be served better if one side was not depicted as acting against ("anti democratic pattern of behavior") that health, at least not without critical examination.
[0]: https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/AL
[1]: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300012
[2]: https://meng.house.gov/media-center/press-releases/meng-rein...
[3]: https://centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/ranking-t...
[4]: https://www.reuters.com/graphics/USA-ELECTION/VOTING-RESTRIC...
Since we are talking about an imperfect system with any solution, disenfranchising black voters by 88% of a seat is significantly worse than disenfranchising white voters by 12% of a seat. This is especially so considering that the Voting Rights Act was enacted to counteract the history of black voter suppression in states like Alabama. Even in majority white districts, suppression of black voting happens through enacting laws that make it harder to vote [1].
> Besides, I think it imprudent to assume that people vote on racial lines
At the individual level, it's true race is no strict predictor of voting preferences, but at the coarse/aggregate resolution of a congressional seat, that's a very reasonable assumption, especially in manifestly racially balkanized places like Alabama.
> Nowadays, someone at the first-time voting age of 18 is less likely than ever to have worked.
Plenty of people have a few years of work experience by 18. There are also many people 30+ who haven't worked a day in their lives (think trust fund kids) that vote. Same for lifelong stay at home parents . I don't think we should disenfranchise any of them either. But that's all still irrelevant. 18 year olds have the right to vote according to the law, and changing the law to make it harder for them to vote is at the very least wrong.
> Besides, if limiting suffrage is anti-democratic, then is expanding suffrage necessarily pro-democratic?
That's not really what we are discussing, and is an appeal to the theoretical. The subject is preventing the disenfranchisement of people who have the full constitutional right to vote today.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/politics/voting-rights...
That's not the political ideology called conservatism, though its how “conservatism” is used in other contexts (and it would be a fair use in a political context when discussing praxis [how you acheive the goals of your ideology] rather than ideology [the ends at which your praxis is directed], though “incrementalism” is more common there to avoid collision with the ideological label.)
Conservative ideology is often advocating for change, and often (when the status quo is farther from the goals of conservative ideology) more rapid and radical breaks from the established status quo than opposing ideologies, whereas the incrementalist praxis you describe can be found in ideologies that are very far from conservatism.
> the incrementalist praxis you describe can be found in ideologies that are very far from conservatism
If your argument is that conservative politics in practice aren't very conservative (in the incrementalist fashion, as you describe), then I'm not sure if any political ideology is really self-consistent in that way. As an example, some majority-progressive (perhaps "radicalist", as an opposite of "incrementalist"?) municipalities around the country behave in a frustratingly incrementalist manner when it comes to land use changes, such that high rents and increasing homelessness result due to the supply of housing not being able to keep up with demand.
This country being dominated by two parties -- which is a mathematical inevitability given a first-past-the-post voting system -- we necessarily end up with one big-tent "conservative" party and one big-tent "progressive" party, for many senses of those words. And because those tents are so big, there are people with many conflicting ideas under them. So it stands to reason that the conservative party does some non-conservative things, or things in a non-conservative manner, and vice versa for the progressive party.
No, it has nothing to do with self-consistency. “Conservative” as an ideological label refers to something other than than incrementalism, though in contexts other than ideology, it can refer to that. It is simply words having different meanings in different contexts.
Conservative ideology and incrementalist praxis have nothing to do with each other, though they can be mistaken for each other when the status quo is near the goals of ideological conservatism. (In the US, that apparent overlap with incrementalist praxis is currently more common with neoliberal ideology today than conservative ideology—it can be hard to tell an incrementalist who doesn't seek neoliberal ends from a neoliberal of any praxis, because the status quo is mostly neoliberal.)
I think we have to realize that for folks on the right it is a matter of Identity and not Policy. At this point their opinion or concerns should be just ignored because - 1) Addressing them will not get their votes (as it is a matter of Identity for them. A positive Policy for them will not impact their decision who to vote for) 2) Addressing their concerns just delays the inevitable (the inevitable could be either a significant move to renewables or climate disaster)