Hacker News Reader

Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

> it's pandering to discontent and fear of some portion of the populace. The populist implies that he or she represents the interests of that populace and has solutions to their problems.

That’s just democracy! Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t. But the whole point of democracy is that it’s a mechanism for the people to resolve questions like that.

What you’re really drawing is the distinction between republicanism and democracy. You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews. That’s republicanism! That’s the system the founders created when we had states appoint electors and senators, and a limited franchise.

View on HN

> Your definition seems to have an unstated premise: you think certain kinds of “fear and discontent” are legitimate, and others aren’t.

I don't. Fear and discontent exist, and I'm not interested in the degree of their justification here. The unstated part is my disdain for the populist's overeagerness to leverage them, offering emotionally satisfying but often practically dubious or outrightly deleterious policies and actions.

> You want elites to decide what the important issues are and propose solutions, and voting to be limited to picking between those approved worldviews.

I'm not sure the OP said anything that implied they wanted this, but on the other hand it's unambiguously true that many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power. It's just that their justification for interfering with court cases or removing elected officials who disagree with them or banning opposition altogether is "they represent the elites/immigrants/Jews but I am on your side", which distinguishes them from people justifying similar actions on the basis of national identity or religion or divine right or technocracy...

> many politicians characterised as "populist" do want this upon getting into power

Your statement makes no sense. The elected politicians are the ones who are supposed to be deciding the political issues.

The problem is that, throughout the western world, judges and bureaucrats are not staying in their lane. The New York Times did a good podcast on how the immigration system we have is one that nobody ever campaigned on or voted for: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/29/podcasts/the-daily/electi.... The immigration system has been created through litigation and bureaucratic action--e.g,, taking an asylum system enacted in response to Jews fleeing genocide and applying the eligibility criteria so broadly that it covers general unrest in a country, or even just crime and gang violence.

Don’t forget, the judicial system is quite consciously an anti-democratic check. judges were put there to make sure that voters don’t vote themselves other people‘s property. That’s a legitimate function, but you have to keep an eye on it. The more and more issues you have decided by judges the less and less democratic your system becomes.

This is true for other areas as well. Our healthcare, education, and tax systems for example aren't what anyone proposed or ever would propose. They ended up that way for a variety of reasons and now we're stuck with them because the only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch.

> only real solution is to tear them down and start from scratch

The idea that tearing the political system down and starting from scratch will fix things is just as much of a fantasy as the idea that a greenfield rewrite of code will produce something with all of the desirable features of the original and twice as fast.

The Second System problem. Unfortunately even very (legitimately!) smart people fall into the trap.

Though it's true that they may know it's a trap. Ulterior motives aplenty.

People fall for it because sometimes it is objectively true.

It is often not clear when that is.

Not sure why you've chosen to go off on a tangent about immigration to the United States in response to my post about populists of all stripes typically trying to remove all sorts of checks on their power, including the democratic ones in the guise of "protecting" the people from the enemy du jour.

But since you've decided to make this about the current US administration then yes, it's a matter of fact that the current system is a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process. A situation in which a single individual holds all the power and permits bureaucrats like ICE to do what they wanted to any individual for any reason with noone else being able to intervene would also be a republic with limited democratic participation in the decision making process, though not one I would prefer, particularly not if I was a law-abiding citizen who understood how legal processes worked but had the sort of ancestry ICE and Trump seem a bit suspicious of...

No systems in the US look like what people campaigned on and voted for. What would policy look like in with true public votes on anything and everything? Well judging by approval ratings, Trump's decision to singlehandedly cause a recession with his tariff policy is something the public overall do not back, no matter how much Trump claims that he's acting for them and against globalist elites. Similarly, it seems that what Trump's newly created bureaucracy is doing to other government departments doesn't meet with wide approval, no matter how much the world's richest man appointed to head after giving him lots of money it claims to be tackling elites and corruption. Trump is a populist, but like many other populists he and many of his actions are not at all popular at the moment: it's a feature of the design of republics rather than the popular will that he remains in power nevertheless. Perhaps that's why the executive's power is supposed to be checked...

But yes, the one area in which his approval ratings stayed above water in some polls is in his handling of immigration. Whether this includes every decision the unelected bureaucracy that is ICE makes to select random non-citizens and citizens for detention or even deportation to to foreign concentration camps for wrongthink or wrong tattoos is another question; seems like public opinion sides with the courts rather than the admin on deporting a legal immigrant for no reason and then not bringing him back because that would mean admitting error. In a republic like the US it's actually not the job of the official elected in the belief he'd get the price of eggs down to overrule courts, and it seems hollow to claim it'd be more democratic to skip the process of legislative change in favour of executive fiat when the public doesn't agree with him on many of the details.

It would, of course, technically be more democratic to have people's right to remain in the country based not upon law but upon the prevailing fashionability of their skin colour and surname with a wider public that got to vote on mass deportations to third countries whenever they felt like it. Even as someone with reason to be completely confident this wouldn't jeopardise my right to remain in the country I was born in, I'd hesitate to say that supplanting citizenship law with a public popularity contest would be better though it would be more democratic. But this has nothing to do with what is going on in the US, which involves the president insisting his his yuge popular mandate places him so far above the law that bureaucrats whose actions he favours don't have to follow it, never mind other populists like Maduro or Mao or Mussolini who didn't even worry too much about the mandate bit.

I used that example because, across the developed world, immigration policy is the issue that reflects the disconnect between what the public wants and what anti-democratic checks on democracy have allowed.

We literally just had an election. Both candidates ran promising to close the border, and Trump additionally promised “mass deportations.” Immigration was literally the first two issues on his platform: https://www.donaldjtrump.com/platform. He won the popular vote. He’s got the mandate, and four years to implement it and see how the public feels then.

What we are seeing with the judicial and bureaucratic resistance to deportation is not the “rule of law.” In fact, the immigration laws are designed to facilitate deportations quickly and to punish those who facilitate or encourage illegal immigration. What you’re seeing is elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants.

This often gets forgotten but by all appearances, Alejandro Mayorkas, the DHS sec, facilitated mass migration illegally but avoided ever being called anti-democratic, authoritarian, or whatever else people are called for doing deportations. (So importations are more democratic than deportations I guess somehow??). No one gave him a mandate to do the CHNV program flying people in, to spend money building a highway in Panama, to grant parole to alleged asylum seekers, etc. It's surprisingly missing from all this passionate debate about authoritarians, populism, and the end of the rule of law.

Mayorkas had exactly the same thin mandate as Trump appointees, and was also unpopular, but he wasn't trying to claim his mandate was so strong that he could ignore courts and the constitution.

If Germany gave you a visa, would you consider it necessary to start a debate about whether such actions were authoritarian? How about if when you got there, they locked you up without trial?

But he did! The CBO calculates 8.7 million immigrants in excess of normal levels under his watch. It’s a plainly visible policy change in charts: https://images.app.goo.gl/9N5K5DQjcfcj542a8. Biden didn’t have the mandate to do that.

How did that happen? It was because Biden and Mayorkas did not “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He ignored laws that required him to keep immigrants out. He also interpreted the law in ways that were not “faithful” to Congressional intent. For example, he took a law that allows parole on a “case-by-case” basis, and gave blanket parole to hundreds of thousands. But then judges will say that these blanket protections must be revoked on a “case by case” basis.

People are prattling on about the Impoundment Act and whether Trump has statutory authority to reorganize executive departments. Meanwhile, Obama created an entire amnesty program (DACA) nowhere in the INA, after failing to get the same amnesty through Congress. All of this stuff about “the rule of law” is rank hypocrisy from people who don’t believe in rules or law.

> Biden didn’t have the mandate to do that.

Course he did, by your own arguments not only did he have precisely that mandate as the president that people voted for [on a manifesto of broadening pathways to citizenship], but nobody else should have had any right to try to stop him.

It's interesting that you regard Biden's administration pursuing a policy in their manifesto (but ceasing part of the parole-in-place programme as soon as the unelected judges of a state court ordered them to do so) to be a more egregious violation of the rule of law than Trump rocking up in El Salvador to sneer at the idea of abiding by a rare unanimous Supreme Court verdict. Much like your insistence that whereas Trump has a mandate to disregard court orders, Biden didn't even have a mandate to undo executive orders on border control he said he was going to undo, the "rank hypocrisy from people who don't believe in rules of law" displayed in this exchange is all yours...

> Course he did, by your own arguments not only did he have precisely that mandate as the president that people voted for [on a manifesto of broadening pathways to citizenship], but nobody else should have had any right to try to stop him.

Sorry, I was unclear. I was mirroring the language in the post to which I was replying, which assumed that the margin of Biden’s win meant he didn’t have a mandate. I think Biden had a mandate to do most of what he did. My only quibble would be that Biden didn’t campaign on opening the border, but Trump clearly campaigned on mass deportations.

And yes, I view the introduction of millions of illegal immigrants as being the more egregious violation of the law than what Trump is doing. The former reflects millions of instances of the administration violating american law and americans’ right to determine the kind of society in which they want to live. The latter applies to a small number of individuals, and reflects mostly administrative flubs involving people who are undisputedly non-citizens.

I think letting in millions of people illegally was extremely serious and Biden did not campaign on that. Although Mayorkas always played it down so no one ever accused the two of being authoritarian. I don't know if that's because the media favored the de facto open borders or if it's because Mayorkas was good at speaking in bureaucrat-ese so he was always incognito. I think there was an intentional plan to open the border and it wasn't a charitable cause. I think we both know the purpose was ultimately to change the voter base to be more favorable, among other reasons. If that isn't an authoritarian power move, I don't know what is.

Now regarding Kilmar, probably yes his rights were violated as happens routinely. I am not sure I am going to lose sleep over it because millions of people came here in one of the largest human migration events in history and we're still at this point where we can't talk about that but instead we debate about whether this clerical error was the event that turned us into a fascist dictatorship. I think it's all disingenuous. I don't know if there's a term for it in the law but our country created an extraordinary legal situation and there's bound to be mistakes made and I think significant political bias is present among judges and lawyers in what should be a neutral court. Do they really care about rights or is this more about keeping immigrants here at any cost?

Actually in 2018 Trump deported an elderly guy who may have had dementia who was accused of being a Nazi war criminal, his name was Jakiw Palij you can look it up. There wasn't strong evidence he was evading war crimes though and he wasn't accepted as a citizen anywhere in Europe because of border changes. I suspect his rights were violated in some way but no one cared for obvious reasons. None of the lawyers you see now jumped to defend this guy. So might there be political concerns ahead of rights? absolutely.

I point to issue polling because I'm pointing out the obvious fact that much of what he and his appointees actually done isn't the will of the public, no matter how much shouting about migration or egg prices during the election resonated with certain segments of it.

The fact that he has four years left to make appointments and executive orders and the public can't do anything about is an implementation detail of a republic, just as anti-democratic as similar quirks meaning that other presidents' appointees are around to thwart him in certain areas. Most of those decisions have absolutely nothing to do with issues that got Trump elected, but the rules let him get his way on many of them anyway. Contra populism: democracy /= the guy who got a plurality of the vote once getting his way on everything even when the rules and votes aren't in his favour.

I do think your sequence of posts is as good an indication of the difference between populism and popularity as we're ever likely to see though. Populism isn't about making political arguments that are popular, it's about making arguments of the form that if an ultraconservative Supreme Court of presidential appointees (three of them his) determines that part of Trump's bureaucracy sending legal migrants to foreign concentration camps without even deigning to provide a reason might not be constitutional, it's because "elites try to use the republic’s anti-democratic checks to impose their preferred immigration policies, according to their peculiar affinity for immigrants...." even when the best available evidence suggests the public widely supports the court in this instance. Trump won a vote so anyone not deferring to him is guilty of overreach.

> I point to issue polling because I'm pointing out the obvious fact that much of what he and his appointees actually done isn't the will of the public

The reason we have elections and not issue polls is because voters balance the totality of the circumstances in reaching their decisions. People may or may not like this or that incident in the moment, but that doesn’t mean they disapprove of the overall arc of the policy. So, for example, polls show that virtually no Trump voters regret their vote and he’d probably win a rematch: https://emersoncollegepolling.com/trump-100-days/ (Emerson is a good pollster, its final 2024 polls nailed Trump’s actual share, and overestimated Harris only by 2). Issue polls taken in the moment also suffer from response bias—e.g. people who approve of the overall arc of Trump’s immigration policy are less likely to respond to polling about a flub than people who are outraged by the policy itself. (The 2024 Harris bounce should be a good lesson in response bias!)

And a rule based on second guessing election results based on issue polling would never be applied even handedly—judges are definitionally elites and such a rule would be applied to favor their preferences. Issue polling showed the ACA under water for quite some time. Roberts had ample basis for finding the statute unconstitutional—far less of a stretch than the expansive interpretations of asylum laws—but he admirably saved it. And I’d argue that, contrary to the issue polls, Obamas’s reelection ultimately bore out that the ACA had a mandate.

> The reason we have elections and not issue polls is because voters balance the totality of the circumstances in reaching their decisions

No, the reason the United States places issues in the hands of a small elite of people elected for fixed terms and some of it in a single individual is a practical feature of the design of a republic which is obviously less democratic than alternatives, like having ballots on most issues or absolutely every implementation detail. It's also a feature designed for practical implementation and less disruptive governance, but so is the separation of powers and rule of law (the "anti-democratic" separation of powers and rule of law having much stronger and more enduring support than actions of any individual president suggests that wasn't a decision the Founding Fathers got wrong...). A rule based on letting the public decide exactly who got to stay in the country and who won each court case would obviously be more democratic than delegating that power to judges, but it would not function particularly well. A rule based on letting ICE elites rather than the judiciary rule on the rights and wrongs of particular immigration cases and giving the president the right to ignore people's constitutional right to due process if they found it inconvenient would not be more democratic and would, I suspect, also not function very well. And suffice to say migration policy is not the only area where Trump is or was arguing that rules shouldn't apply to him or that he should have more power.

Again, the difference between popular sovereignty and populism is quite well illustrated by your argument that if Trump's deportation policy is underwater even in the poll you picked showing him with neutral favourability overall, the "totality of the circumstances" means that deportation decisions he approves and laws he chooses not to follow must be him enacting the will of the people, cheerfully disregarding details like the people explicitly wanting him to do something else and overwhelmingly endorsing the right of institutions ordering him to do something else to make those orders. The belief that the people should have some say in the decision making process is quite different from the belief that the people's will is manifest in every action of some guy they elected on some issue that seemed salient.

The judicial resistance to deportation because they didn't follow the law on how to do deportation. That is, the judicial opposition is exactly the rule of law.

The courts are not saying that the administration can't deport illegal aliens. They are saying that, in order to deport illegal aliens, the administration has to follow the law.

Do you have a problem with that? If so, what and why?

What does “the law” require, though? A number of these judges are liberals who adhere to the notion that the law can be found in “emanations from penumbras” of the constitutional text. But I saw little effort to look at the “emanations from penumbras” of the INA, which is a decidedly pro-deportation document.

And some of the actions have been simply lawless. For example, after the Supreme Court ruled that Judge Boasberg lacked jurisdiction in the deportation flights case, the proper course would have been to dismiss. Instead, he initiated contempt proceedings based on failure to follow an order that was void ab initio, citing case law that applies to private litigants but makes no sense in a case where a district court exceeds its jurisdiction to compel a co-equal branch of government to act. Sanity prevailed and the DC Circuit administratively stayed those contempt proceedings. Judge Howell, in one of the law firm EO cases, asserted that firms had a first amendment right to pursue “progressive employment policies”—even though the first amendment obviously doesn’t apply to race-conscious employment policies. Other courts are insisting that Trump can’t revoke temporary authorizations by executive fiat that Biden granted by executive fiat.

More generally, courts are abusing their injunction powers. Read Marbury v. Madison again. The court goes out of its way to avoid enjoining the secretary of state even to perform the “ministerial” task of delivering a letter the president had already signed. Marbury makes clear that, while courts have the power to declare the law, and overturn Congress’s laws, its power to compel the executive branch to act is extremely limited.

The Supreme Court correctly ruled in the deportation flights case that the administration must allow detainees to file habeas petitions in the districts where they’re detained. That’s a proper exercise of district courts’ jurisdiction to adjudicate alleged deprivations of individual rights. It’s not proper for the courts to try and use that authority to enjoin entire executive policies that offend a judge’s sensibilities.

the important part of populism isn't the fear and discontent, it's the pandering. some fear and discontent is valid, some isn't, that's not relevant to whether something is populist or not.

populism is telling people that there's a nice easy clean solution to their fear and discontent, when in reality problems are complicated and difficult to solve without causing other equally valid problems.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com