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Comment by asddubs | Hacker News Reader

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A simplistic framing my uncle gave me decades ago of party management that still holds water: “Democrats are stupid, and Republicans are mean”.

I don't think that it's accurate anymore. Democrats don't seem to be stupid, overly trusting, or disunited anymore. I mean, in a 50-50 senate, they've constantly had 49 votes for bills, usually with Manchin and all Republicans dissenting. That's a far cry from the Obama era, where the Democrats had a supermajority but didn't have the votes to pass basic parts of Obama's proposed bills, because the party was disunited.

For a very long time, the Democrats were several different parties loosely united under one. As AOC put it "In any other country Biden and I would be in different parties". They were the "Big Tent Party".

Now it's the Republicans whose divisions are becoming visible.

Isn't that a variant of "Evil will win, because good is dumb" (https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/GoodIsDumb)?

Roe v. Wade is an emotional sticking point for people on both sides of the issue, but Congress had decades to codify it into law. Instead, lawmakers chose not to do that so they could campaign on the other side wanting to take away 'rights.' SCOTUS overstepped its authority and robbed the people of the typical process that issues take to gain support in the public's mind. Had they not ruled on such a hot-button issue at the time, I believe we'd have laws in support of abortion by now. I also believe it will trend that way in the future.

Anyone else tired of this Machiavellian approach that gives up on trying to persuade through rational and informed discussion?

Yeah, I also miss the mid-80s. But they're not coming back. We haven't had anything even faintly resembling "rational and informed discussion" in decades.

The thing with Machiavellianism is that it works. The anti-Machiavellians are welcome to discourse with each other all day. But they'll take orders from those who manipulated the rules to get more rules passed. It has never been about who's right; it's about who wins.

Public trust in government has been declining since the 1960s[1].

There's a book called Congress and the Decline of Public Trust, published in 1999, which talks about this trend[2]. You can borrow it hourly on archive.org.

There's a paper from 1983 called The Decline of Confidence in American Institutions which discusses this as well[3]. People already knew about it during the mid 80s.

[1]: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2015/11/23/1-trust-in-g...

[2]: https://archive.org/details/congressdeclineo0000unse/page/n5...

[3]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2150494?seq=1

Difficult to have "rational and informed discussion" when one side's guy says he'll be "dictator for a day" and gets a pass. Hard to imagine that there's a middle ground waiting to be uncovered by open-minded investigation.

I'm reminded of that quote by Satre.

> Anyone else tired of this Machiavellian approach that gives up on trying to persuade through rational and informed discussion?

I'm tired of a system which structurally rewards a party if they are the party most willing to do this, and I'm also tired of the party with the worst policy positions also disproportionately setting policy because it is the most willing to do this.

You can't structurally reform your way out of the broken incentives without effectively using power within the system as it is, or replacing it from outside (the latter of which means violent overthrow, in practice). As inelegant as power politics within the system is, its a whole lot better than either rolling over and giving up, or than getting to structural reform by any other available means.

Late-stage democracy

I'll bite. Explain why you think Machiavellian tendencies is something that is particularly associated with "democracy" as opposed to other systems of government. (I'm ignoring the fact that the US is a constitutional republic and not a democracy.)

They're saying it's a symptom of a dying democracy, not that democracy is associated with Machiavellianism.

Edit: Also, a republic is a type of democracy.

The same can be said of any system. Look at the Internet itself, marriage, every online game, every company.

Once people stop respecting something they coexist with, they start looking for ways to exploit it.

I agree, but the BS was poured out of the bottle and onto the floor during the previous two administrations. It's hard/impossible to put it back in now.

Blame McConnell's "power for power's sake" approach to the Senate.

It is definitely impossible if we all give up on that principle. I'm not willing to give up.

Where in 2024 are you expecting to find an agora?

Okay, so you stack the court. And then when the other team gets in there, they restack the court, and the restacked court overturns all the things that your stacked Court did. Repeat ad nauseam

Yes, but it will make the other team so angry for a couple years! And I will feel better until then...

I mean the republicans can hold up any nomination under a democrat president because they have a bunch of senators representing half the population of just that Bay Area, and then pass anyone under a republican president.

They block replacing a republican justice for a year while saying he needed to be replaced by a conservative, then replaced Ginsberg in weeks with a justice that explicitly said the Bible is more important than the constitution.

Then for some reason the constitution makes bribing the justices legal.

Short of the Republican Party demonstrating any respect for the rule of or the democrat states splitting up like Dakota did for the sole purpose of getting increased senate representation nothing is going to change.

Seriously CA should just split into 10 substates, all of which would be bigger than a bunch of the BS states.

You don't have to go that silly. The main reason that DC and Puerto Rico aren't states is because they lean Democrat. Which is a particularly stupid reason for denying them statehood. The US was built on a protest over "taxation without representation", but have no qualms denying it to >3M Puerto Ricans.

They had no problems denying it to slaves, either. And much of the holdup for adding new states to the US in the first half of the 19th century was the political question "will it tip the balance in favor of slave states or free states?" It was easiest to admit two at a time, one slave state, one free state, so that states could be admitted without political controversy.

Funny how people don’t like mechanisms explicitly designed to combat the tyranny of the simple majority and to protect minority interests when it doesn’t suit them.

Yeah, instead we have a system where we get tyranny of the minority, which is clearly superior.

There are multiple states that combined have lower populations than individual cities in numerous successful states. Identical senator counts only (loosely) make sense when there's at least some similarity in state populations. Once you have multiple states which even combined have lower population than single cities in multiple other states it breaks down. Currently ~60% of the senate is determined by 25% of the population. This is ignoring the abuse of prisons to get even more over-representation (The inability of prisoners to vote actively encourage criminalization of groups that vote against you by targeting their activities, and the fact that representation in the house of representative is based on population of an area regardless of voting population means you can both stop a group from voting at all, and then simultaneously use that group to bolster your own representation is immoral, but so is voter suppression, so it's not remotely surprising)

I think it would be reasonable, and in the spirit of the founder's demand for "no taxation without representation" that states owe federal taxes proportional to their federal representation. That way CA residents aren't having to pay more taxes per vote than those of Wyoming.

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