Welcome to the "neomedieval era": are states becoming obsolete?
vox.com
vox.com
If history teaches us lessons, one of them is surely that the masses sometimes prefer war. Americans may be doves or isolationists today (with Iraq and Afghanistan recent in memory) but if US adversaries push too hard, if there's some large scale terrorist attack (or even just a viral incident), the US public will become hawks overnight.
It's exactly at moments when we start asking questions like "are states becoming obsolete?" that we should start to worry.
Sounds like shock doctrine at play
Not just that. Also gullible and manipulable. Putting tremendous power in the hands of those who would abuse it.
What does seem neomedieval is the resemblance of intra-Oceanian politics to Guelphs and Ghibellines, but we could equally well say Byzantine...
(It may help to realise that the geopolitics of 1984 was informed both by Orwell's own You and the Atom Bomb [but how do drones affect this conclusion?] and a book by a 1920s? author whose name I've currently forgotten)
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
What an absurd, meaningless way to frame the current moment.
In a more controversial phrasing I'd call it "the return of the big penis".
He also normalized relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors. An accord that has withstood the current Israel/HAMAS conflict and remains intact.
Now that the guy who loves power is out of office? Putin has invaded Ukraine, HAMAS has attacked Israel, Iran proxies have committed over 150+ attacks on our troops and China continues to threaten Biden with an invasion of Taiwan.
But he was sending out mean tweets, so that makes him "detestable" in your book amiright?
> included the guy who you said loves power but somehow never started any new wars
Not sure those are correlated anyway
Well yeah. The alternatives we tried didn't exactly go so great did they.
Yeah, there's a nice book about it: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/technopopulism-97801...
Doesn't help with the actual problem you're talking about, which I agree sucks.
An effective, just and trustworthy leader is likely the most efficient form of human governance. The men you listed are examples of corrupt, weak leaders - a good ruler makes history.
In contrast, fully representative democracy is only treated with a religious reverence in the west because it benefits those in power. It’s effective at balkanizing the populace and allowing elites to abuse the populace with little repercussion. After all, we voted for them. We’ve only ourselves to blame.
The killer app for democracy is not efficient governance, it is peaceful transfer of power.
With any sort of autocracy, no matter how honest or just "efficient" the autocrat is, inevitably you end up with an autocrat who is far worse than least functional democracy. Autocrats make history by making lots of corpses. History makes this absolutely clear.
Exactly. There's a long tradition in this country of not prosecuting former Presidents, even those who were obviously guilty of crimes (a lot of them, TBH, a lot more than the ones that come immediately to mind).
The proximate cause of the end of the Roman Republic was the Senate's determination to prosecute Julius Caesar after he left office (many Roman officials had immunity while they were in office).
They were basically running around chortling "Oh, we are really going to prosecute the living shit out of Caesar! He's in big trouble now! Hah HAH!"
Caesar had other ideas. He marched his troops on Rome, his enemies ran away like a pack of scared rabbits, and he made himself dictator. The Roman Republic was never restored.
Not many people today study this part of history, but the Founders certainly had.
No one marched on Rome, dude. It was a protest almost exactly like the one when Trump took office. Hillary Clinton wasn't accused of "insurrection", even though she, too, denied the validity of an election.
Remember this?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-trum...
Also, when people march on Rome they generally bring their weapons with them.
Because it is easier. Most people don't want to put in the hard work that democracy requires. They want to go to their job, play with their children, see their friends, exercise at the gym, go on dates, etc. They quite like that there is a "great leader" ready to take the load of community off their backs so that they can focus on the personal things they deem more important.
A terribly unsettling event can cause people to change priorities pretty quickly, but when things are comfortable and everything appears to be running smoothly enough, it's hard to see why, when someone has happily stepped up to do the work, there is any reason to put in the time and effort too.
It’s a reaction to top-down liberalization by elites. Immigration, globalization, and social liberalization were imposed by elites (economic and cultural) on the masses.
Modi is a good example. Socialism and secularism were brought to India from Oxford by western-educated elites. Modi is a populist reaction to that: https://unherd.com/2021/04/the-culture-wars-of-post-colonial....
The authoritarian aspect arises because only an authoritarian can control the control the cultural and economic institutions where elites exercise soft power. Modi is aligned with your average Indian on the issue of secularism, against your average Indian college professor. Likewise, Trump is aligned with your average American over racial preferences, against your average American college professor.
Considering he lost the popular* vote in 2016, that's a strong claim.
If he manages the popular vote this time, I'll grant you it.
> No one in this world, so far as I know — and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me — has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby. — HLM
* which distinguishes itself from the electoral results by clearly including the opinion of the median voter.
Immigration was his defining issue in 2016, and he has won with the public that issue. He won on the rioting and law and order issue. He has won against affirmative action, both with the public and with SFFA. He sides with the majority view on the Iraq war and using the American military to underpin the world order. The GOP’s biggest liability has been abortion, which is an area where Trump has gone against the party and pushed for a 15-week middle ground that commands majority support (once you extricate the policy from voters’ worries about total bans).
My mom—who is a steadfast Democrat—was commenting the other day that Trump could’ve been a great president. She hates how he talks, what he did on January 6, etc. She won’t vote for anyone with an (R) because of the Iraq War, but she (and my dad) basically agree with Trump on all of his signature policies.
He didn't win it in either 2020 or 2016.
Issue polling, however, shows that Trump is winning on all those issues. For example, 74% of Americans oppose affirmative action in hiring: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/06/16/americans.... The median American thinks abortion should be banned after 15 weeks: https://apnorc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/chart2-1536x15.... It’s the rest of Trump that keeps his support under 50%.
People who go off on the "popular vote" are generally those who are unwilling to accept that they have lost the election. In other words, sour grapes.
Oh, they might argue that they'd be in favor of using the "popular vote" even if that worked against them, but you know what? I don't believe them.
If it worked against them, they'd be arguing for a "return to the original system as conceived by the Founders" or some such.
> Trump is aligned with your average American ... against your average American college professor.
and the popular vote is evidence that in fact the other candidate in both 2016 and 2020 was aligned with your average American.
(as to college professors, although there are only <600k American college professors, which would make them "elite", in recent generations over half of Americans have had at least some college education, which means that the average American knows at least one college professor, which is not so elite.
On the other hand, although I've had after-work beers with billionaires, and I'm sure you have too, I'm willing to bet that the average [modal or median, maybe even mean] American has not shared beers with any billionaires.
Therefore I would find it more statistically defensible to claim:
Trump's opponents in 2016 and 2020 were aligned with your average American ... against your average American billionaire.)
see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professors_in_the_United_State...
Your ellipses edits-out the very point I was making, the specific issue of affirmative action. Your average American is indeed aligned with Trump on affirmative action against the average college professor. And on immigration and a host of other issues.
> and the popular vote is evidence that in fact the other candidate in both 2016 and 2020 was aligned with your average American.
The popular vote is evidence that Trump is a crass, unstable, unlikable person, who lost the election to someone who people perceived to be a decent guy.
And “billionaires” aren’t the only elites. For all of history we have recognized the people purporting to answer questions about the nature of the universe and humanity as clerical elites. University professors serve that exact same function in our society and are, in anthropological terms, properly classified as elites.
OK, that's a very defensible claim. Let's see how he does (on both metrics) in November?
You can coherently say elections don't mean anything, but you can't coherently say that the popular vote is meaningless but the electoral college isn't. Your argument has to at least make some kind of logical sense, right?
For Iceland the purpose of degressive proportionality is to make sure the capital do not have a majority decision of the rest of the country. In Sweden, the purpose of degressive proportionality is to make sure that the small island of Gotland have a minimum 3 seats in parliament (a purpose which would require a larger explanation). For the European Parliament the reason of degressive proportionality is there to basically not give Germany too much power.
The most common argument for the degressive proportionality of electoral college in the united states of America seem to be that it encourage the states to remain part of the union, rather than split the continent into multiple independent countries. Whatever that is still true 200 years is worth having a discussion on, especially now with the low voter participation and low respect for the outcome.
In any competition, the rules affect the contestants’ behaviors. You can’t judge a competition outcome under different metrics post hoc. If you’re running a 400 meter, it’s irrelevant who was winning in the first 100 meters—nobody was trying to win that milestone. If they were, they would have run the race differently. Because the Electoral College is the only thing that counts, politicians have every incentive to optimize their campaigns for winning the EC, not the popular vote.
Indeed, whichever party has greater support from small rural states (currently the GOP, but for a long time it was democrats) has every incentive to run further to one direction until they lose the popular vote while still winning the EC. Winning the popular vote is actually sub-optimal for the GOP. That means they could’ve run on a more right wing platform while still winning the election.
If you want evidence of the fact that the majority of people dislike Trump personally, you can just rely on opinion polls for that. Trump has never been above 50% on those polls.
But that’s not the point I’m making above, which is that—putting aside his flaws as a candidate—he is on the popular side of many of his signature issues. For example, he has been vindicated on immigration, with Democrats rushing to the right on immigration recently in response to public opinion.
Hardly. They're "rushing to the right" to try to get the intransigent House GOP to approve more military- and humanitarian aid to Ukraine. (And that didn't work because The Leader — which sounds better in the original Italian or German — said "no, don't fix the problem because I want to campaign on it," and Republican legislators, terrified of being primaried by MAGA types, caved in.)
But the popular vote here was brought up as a rebuttal to your claim that Trump's electoral success, which was a pure product of electoral gamesmanship (I mean that here in a value-neutral, descriptive way), was an indicator of a cultural shift. If the popular vote isn't an indicator of the public consciousness, the Electoral College can't be either; it is strictly less representative.
I don't think the Democratic party has ever been as unified on immigration as you're implying it is here, but that's neither here nor there.
> A human they call Donald Trump was what they call President of USA for basically all of “2017”, and that sucked. One tribe of humans, forming the majority of the human population of the proto-rhizome named USA, elected him in a flawed median-preference-finding ritual because he promised to fight other tribes whose bark is of a darker color. Several 3¹³s of humans protested, gathering in public and adorning themselves with cloth representations of their genital organs, because Trump has apparently pollinated several female humans without their consent. Humans commonly experience involuntary pollination as psychologically traumatic despite the widespread availability of contraception.
though apparently the plant who wrote that didn't understand quite how flawed the ritual was
It isn't.
The system is designed to prevent populous states from running roughshod over the smaller ones (and no, it didn't have anything to do with "slavery"... Virginia, a slave state, was also by far the most populous state. Under your proposed alternative system, it's likely that a) slaves would be counted fully[1] and b) the 1808 cutoff for importation of slaves would have been rescinded, or never enacted in the first place.
Under such a system, we likely would have had 4 or 5 civil wars by now, rather than just one.
[1] This point is also often misunderstood. It was the slave states who wanted the slaves counted fully, as that would have given them more representation in Congress. The free states didn't want the slaves counted at all. Phrasing it as "counting them as 3/5 of a person", as you often see, is simply ignorant. "So... you wanted them counted as a "full person"? You do understand that makes you pro-slavery, right?"
The 1830s are calling and want you back; South Carolina's John C. Calhoun wants to enlist you in his nullification campaign.
In any case, the exact same rationale for the Electoral College still exists: small states don't want to be bullied by large ones.
Since getting rid of the Electoral College would require a constitutional amendment, and there's no way one of those is going to pass without the support of the smaller states, it is Never. Going. To. Happen.
John C. Calhoun be damned.
Theoretically, after everything washes, the electoral vote is what the people want, because it reflects which of the two candidates, both of whom are optimizing intensely for the electoral vote, is able to get it.
The whole book engages in the same "projecting trends into the future", on the same topic. But in a more detailed way.
In fact, one of the early points it makes is that the Roman Empire, when the last emperor gave way to a tribe lord that invaded Rome, officially when the empire fell, everyone pretended it didn't.
Like the emperor is out, he's living somewhere else, but yeah the empire keeps going, nothing to see here.
Only years later, decades if I recall correctly, did the implications of the fall of the empire truly reached culture.
The shell was untouched, but the insides were rot already.
For all the talk of the "deep state" it generally feels like the career bureaucrats are the only ones doing any actual governing anymore. Eventually the whole thing's just going to get too brittle to hang together.
Anyway I know this is almost totally fact-free, but that's just where I'm at now. Who the hell cares who's president?
The main European powers neutered themselves through what looked a lot like a big civil war. This also dealt a serious blow to Russia, who then finished the job by spending decades trying to make Communism work. Japan trashed China, then China neutered itself through a big civil war, then finished the job with decades of trying to make Communism work.
India was left in an odd spot after British colonialism, but they seem to have tried socialism as their major strategy and that didn't bring them up to a high living standard.
Africa never got themselves organised (the Europeans may have been involved in that). The Middle East was in disarray after the Europeans had dismantled them in WWI and never got organised.
So by virtue of being democratic enough that they didn't melt down, the US was left standing ascendant with a horrified expression as they tried to figure out why everyone else kept destroying their own infrastructure. "Won't someone please think of the buildings??", asked wealthy US capitalists. Really they were a bit proactive through all this, but lunatic foreign ideologies were much more of a driver than US policies.
It is hard to convince large groups of humans to do sane things.
Also, don't underestimate the value of being a highly populous country on a prosperous landmass largely isolated from the rest of the world by a lot of ocean.
https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-k...
https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/techno-feudalis...
Imagine a field called CR (corporate relations) where people try to understand the relationship between Apple and Google by looking at the relationship between the dutch and the british east india company. Absurd.
Lots of “old Western” ideas are Islamic, and plenty of new ideas are very Western.
Barthes, Chompsky, T.S. Eliot and Foucault are as Western as you get.
Are you taking about “Mediterranean Civilization?”
Rather than more modern theorists.
If that’s what the poster meant, I strongly agree.
If I could push a button requiring all students to take four years of Plato, I’d smash that button again and again.
At the end of the day... people act the same. When you read 1000-year-old stories and realize people then behaved the same way now, you start to understand the things that make people tick. It's not going to be any different tomorrow than it is today. People do not change. Yes their circumstances do, and if you look only at the response you might conclude they actually changed, but the way in which people respond rarely change substantially.
> people try to understand the relationship between Apple and Google by looking at the relationship between the dutch and the british east india company. Absurd.
Of course, we shouldn't look at apple and google and think the dutch and british east india company would be the same. They're different. But what doesn't change is people and yes, you can look at the people behind the companies and they will probably all act the same. Corporations are not people; people are people.
> δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν — Θουκυδίδης
It seems to me that we could almost certainly gain insight into Apple and Google's relationship by looking at the relationship between historical megacorporations.
Also, I don't have a subscription.
Ashli Babbit, the Trump supporter shot by Capitol police.
Kevin Greeson, the Trump supporter that died of a heart attack due to natural causes during Jan 6.
Rosanne Boyland, the Trump supporter that "appeared to have been crushed in a stampede of fellow rioters" (more accurately, was claimed to have been crushed, by prosecutors), actually died due to an amphetamine overdose. No crushing/trampling injuries are mentioned.
Benjamin Philips, the founder of a pro-Trump website called Trumparoo, died of a stroke.
Officer Brian D. Sicknick died of "multiple strokes that occurred hours after [his] confrontation with the mob. The medical examiner added, however, that “all that transpired played a role in his condition." What the NYTimes omits from this article, but is found in the NYTimes article they cite, is: "an autopsy found no evidence that Officer Sicknick had an allergic reaction to chemicals or any internal or external injuries, the medical examiner, Dr. Francisco J. Diaz, told The Washington Post"
Officer Jeffrey Smith of the Metropolitan Police Department killed himself after the attack.
Officer Howard S. Liebengood of the Capitol Police also died by suicide four days afterward.
So precisely zero deaths caused by the Jan 6 rioters. Keep this in mind when you see the riot called "deadly". https://www.city-journal.org/insurrections-and-double-standa... covers the hypocrisy in greater detail.
What I was responding to is the frequent, deceitful, and hypocritical characterization of the riot as "deadly".
Correcting willful lies about something, correcting its severity downwards, is not equivalent to saying it was good or peaceful. But it's a common tactic of people trying to demonize something - any claim of "it wasn't that bad" is met with "oh so you think it was good??" It's a basic false binary.
To answer your question, no, it's not fun. But when minimizing stuff brings it closer to the truth, it is necessary.
Fundamentally you & yours don't want to say 'deadly' because it sounds bad. Guess what, it is! You own that.
Of course this wordplay is not applied evenly to all movements.
Thank God the USG was able to hang on by a thread in that brutal Civil War between obese off duty-cops VS obese on-duty cops.
She should not have been doing that, but… it sure is interesting how some people celebrate an unarmed person being shot by police because she supported “the other side”.
I'm just wondering if maybe making an example of someone had a great effect. Or did not.
And wow, you cannot honestly call what Ashli Babbitt did "climbing through broken window". She was warned, and she tried to break through a barricaded door to where members of Congress were sheltered. She was shot in the front. We literally have the footage this [2].
[1] https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/04/politics/january-6-prosecutio...
Just want to calibrate your definition.
No one was shot or skilled, despite a window being smashed (!!!). They were slowly evicted in 10 hours by riot police.
Fries Rebellion actually involved a trained militia, seems like a different category of event.
No one was shot or killed in Fries rebellion. Yet members were convicted and sentenced to hanging (though presidential pardon prevented that from happening).
Despite all that American school children learn about Fries as a foundational rebellion and an example of the difference between a strong federal government and the articles based weak one.
That is to say, every one can decide their own definitions but by historical standards Jan 6 was at least in the same league as other historical insurrections.
No political support except coordination between the Trump administration and the convicted leaders, dozens of these them, charged with seditious conspiracy of both the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, key planners behind the January 6th insurrection.
No political support except the march on the capitol beginning with Trump saying ""We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore," before telling his supporters to march to the capitol. The same crowd not standing down until Trump told them to "Go home, we love you".
No political support except some Republican members of Congress leading riot participants through the capitol in the days before the event.
An event that was literally designed in adanvce to pressure Congress and the Vice President with the threat of violence (gallows and a crowd chanting "Hang Mike Pence") into rejecting legitimate election results and accepting slates of false electors. A crowd running through the Capitol chanting "where are you Nancy?" - echoed in an attack on her husband Paul Pelosi not long after.
An event that was proceeded by pipe bombs planted at the GOP and Democratic headquarters.
An event that involved the beating of Capitol police officers to force their way into the inner chambers of Congress.
And you're lying about insurrectionist Ashlii Babbit. She was not shot in the back, she was forcing herself into a shattered window, into a hallway where Congress was evacuating, along with other rioters.
Tell me, what was the end game of the rioters there? What do you think would have happened had they managed to get into the chamber while Congress was still present?
Was it only an insurrection if they succeeded?
"When I arrived in Washington this morning, I fully intended to object to the certification of the electoral votes. However, the events that have transpired today have forced me to reconsider, and I cannot in good conscience object to the certification of these electors. The violence, and lawlessness, and siege of the halls of Congress are abhorrent and stand as a direct attack on the very institution my objection was intended to protect, the sanctity of the American democratic process."
What's sad is this hypocrite is still campaigning for a Trump presidency in 2024...
As for the so called leaders in the building that day, I have zero respect for anyone who has to cower from their own citizens. Any leader worth his salt would have stood on a soap box and addressed the crowd. But the western world no longer has leaders. It has teleprompt readers, and lobbyist controlled puppets.