I witnessed this up close in India where parties openly exist to benefit certain constituencies based on caste, language, religion and so on.
It is horrifying to see this attitude take root in my adopted land.
I think the end goal is domination. From https://mastodon.social/@JuliusGoat/109551955251655267 :
It’s best to understand that fascists see hypocrisy as a virtue. It’s how they signal that the things they are doing to people were never meant to be equally applied.
It’s not an inconsistency. It’s very consistent to the only true fascist value, which is domination.
It’s very important to understand, fascists don’t just see hypocrisy as a necessary evil or an unintended side-effect.
It’s the purpose. The ability to enjoy yourself the thing you’re able to deny others, because you dominate, is the whole point.
For fascists, hypocrisy is a great virtue — the greatest.
https://hac.bard.edu/amor-mundi/hypocrisy-and-fascism-2018-0...
For my friends - everything, for my enemies - the law.
When this theory is used in discourse, it is always a matter of suggesting that the left fringe and the right fringe are equally to be rejected. Stalin and Hitler, communism and fascism, class struggle and racial theory, Das Kapital and Hitler's Mein Kampf, dictatorship of the proletariat and Nazi dictatorship: the righteous liberal democrat must keep his distance from both extremes in equal measure. The golden path lies in the balanced middle. I am tired of criticizing this nonsense. It is an ideological lie.
The trident means that there is just as much ideology, corruption, political dysfunctionality and all kinds of drivers of suffering, misery and resentment in the supposed political center. But it is very well hidden because it wears a kind of ideological cloak: the horseshoe theory.
So to respond to your sentence I quoted above: the horseshoe theory IS the political compass that should be ridiculed.
An added benefit is you get to avoid annoying semantic battles such as whether Nazis or Fascists are Right wing or Left wing.
Plus you get to add other axes as needed. My favorite, perhaps relevant today, is principled vs. expedient: do we apply principles like this "Rights" stuff impartially, even to people with whom we disagree, or do we just git 'r done?
Ideally, maybe we would describe a person's politics with something like a tensor, where each value is the person's support of a specific policy.
It’s based on the flawed assumption that politics can or should be understood on a single axis. It can’t and shouldn’t be. That heuristic is wrong.
If viewed on a 2d axis, the “cohorts that appear similar” on the ends of the horseshoe are still on opposing ends of one of the axes, despite being near each other on another axis.
IMHO, political positioning should be described as a tensor, where each data point is the person's position on a specific policy.
only partisan blinders would cause one to equate trumps actions with anything from our past.
mark my words, maga is about dismantling the american system and establishing a totalitarian state. obey.
https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/obama-administration-cla...
Republicans can play all sorts of games because their mistresses will always be able to get an abortion on the DL without consequence, while "single black mom? 25 to life for murder!"
Also, frankly, you folks need to stop monopolizing these topics, based on highly polarized ideological filter, because even before Trump there was dissatisfaction about how Musk monopolized NASA contracts on the promise, that he would deliver more efficient and cheaper solution, while in reality the result is that NASA is currently paying more for Musks private solutions, than when it had to do it by itself. There are sure many other options to what Musk offers and if Trump is there to break up that monopoly and open up the market, then it is a win situation.
SLS, NASA's rocket, costs $2.5 billion, PER LAUNCH.
I don't know whether Trump can accurately be described as a fascist, but its been clear to me since his first term that domination is the only thing that matters to him. The obscene wealth and the swaggering deceitfulness and the gold-plated bathrooms are just the secondary outcomes of his need to dominate.
Domineering father-figure; raised as a sociopath; given a lot of money. Kind of inevitable.
In history textbooks, it's known as the spoils system.
The expansion of executive powers also played a role in this erosion, as both the judicial and legislative branch increasingly devolved their prerogative to the executive, leaving it much more open to political tampering and reducing the power of checks and balances.
There's a reason LKY in SG, Yoshida Shigeru and Sato Eisaku in Japan, and François Mitterrand in France tried to decentralize power to a semi-independent civil service.
Here the corruption is openly displayed as a kind of peacock-tail to the beneficiaries.
In addition, low level corruption is orthogonal to grand corruption as can be seen in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and the US.
Finally, Indian public discourse around corruption is non-targeted, and fails to contextualize significant institutional differences in how local, state, and federal governments operate in India compared to other states (be they democratic like the US or authoritarian like China).
[Feel free to add questions or points of contention, but I won't be able to reply quickly]
These two sentences, taken together, lead me to exactly the opposite conclusion—exploitation of identity politics allows one to gain power to enact corruption. You play into what people want by being the savior they think they need and then once in power do whatever the hell you wanted in the first place.
This includes ‘women’. A group that probably has a small majority.
But in the US, “minority” means “less poticial power”. By any reasonable measure straight white “Christian” men should be about 20% of the population, yet somehow they have 80% of political power.
And to reply to the comment above yours, there are material factors upstream of idpol. It's not a coincidence that sort of thing is in renaissance across the world.
No but when it comes to local government contracts, building permits and similar stuff its quite different. Also a lot of (what sane people would consider) corruption is legal and institutionalized.
i.e. bribing politicians running for office is perfectly legal and entirely expected by all sides (that Americans are so open about this is quite unique).
What's new to me is that the last couple decades might be a reversion to a pre-war mode of US governance.
(I know WW2 was unifying in some ways, as we'd expect, but I don't recall much from school about how US politics was played before then, other than punctuated events like the Civil War, civil rights movement, etc.)
This is high level rather than your direct experience, so it's not a contradiction. Just a different perspective.
The slide started in the 80's when Reagan killed off the 'fairness doctrine' which meant news outlets could present completely one-sided coverage of an issue.
Couple that with massive consolidation of newspapers and TV news stations where all the programming is heavily coordinated and groups like Sinclair started pushing identically worded "false news" narratives across all their stations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo
Edit: Forgot Pat Buchanan. He belongs in there somewhere.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...
It started before 2017. The right adopted identity politics as a response to the left doing so. Note that even NY Times word usage is a lagging indicator -- this is a case of prestige media picking up trends which originated on social media such as tumblr.
Vox even wrote a defense of the shift back in 2015, with an article called "All politics is identity politics":
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identi...
Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
The term "identity politics" is not being tracked. Rather, terminology used by modern left-wing idpol ideology is being tracked. See here: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage...
>the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
I'm not sure that's true. E.g. Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the "magnificent words" in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Modern activists would say: "Written by dead pale male slaveholders. We need more diversity! Where are the voices of women and POC?" For King, ideas took precedence over identities. For modern activists, it's the opposite.
The American Anti-Slavery Society was predominantly white. That's puzzling for a movement driven by identity politics. It does make sense for a movement driven by universal humanitarian ideals.
In any case, if you still think I'm wrong, and identity politics is an essential force behind trends such as the civil rights movement -- then I suppose you'll be happy that it's being adopted by the political right in the United States? Since it's got such a great historical track record, surely results will be good? ;-)
>Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
This is a bad analogy, because fake news itself doesn't use the term "fake news". If "fake news" was an ideology which was characterized by particular terminology, we could graph the use of that terminology to document the rise of the ideology. That's what's being done here.
In any case, I do believe that "fake news" (in the narrow sense of websites which write completely bogus news, with no effort at reporting, to drive clicks) is a phenomenon which has, in fact, become more widespread relatively recently (due to the ease of internet publishing etc.) So that's another way in which your analogy is invalid. Fake news did increase in popularity when Trump was the GOP candidate, relative to when Romney was the GOP candidate. And Google Trends helps illuminate that!
Agreed, and I was born here. I was taught we expressly want to reject those things, and now it's all the fashion. It feels like a temper tantrum from a third of the electorate, a rejection of adulthood and reason.
All of this is a long temper tantrum about Obama and then Mrs Clinton, emphasis on the Mrs.
If I had a time machine I would take documentation back and convince someone that we need a few more Old White Guys to let the GOP's base unrustle their jimmies for a bit.
I predicted something like this coming back in the late 90's, not that anyone should have listened to me about civics. I say 'like this', but... not like this. And if I had someone would have requested "wellness checks" (which is American for 'check to see if we can have him involuntarily committed to a mental facility) on my behalf.
My notion back then was that the vibe of the country was such that a black man would need to be elected before a white woman was a serious contender. But that there would have to be a delay. When you rush progress you can spin out. And fuck if we haven't spun out.
Maybe they'll go for a whip-smart gay man next term? Who knows.
So how could one design a political system so this behavior doesn't emerge / is not incentivized?
Big fat /s
https://ballotpedia.org/Results_for_ranked-choice_voting_(RC...
I think what you want is electoral rules which tend to select for consensus-makers. Approval voting would be an example.
In terms of strength of 3rd parties, I'd say they are generally quite weak in the US system, somewhat stronger in a proportional representation parliamentary system, and potentially overpowered in a FPTP parliament like in the UK.
Historically I believe the 2-party system in the US was pretty good at tamping down on extremism, but recently the 2 major parties have acquired too many extremists.
You're blaming both parties for where the US is now?
At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth: stupid people are easy for smart, ill-intentioned people to herd, which gives the latter a leg up in any democratic election.
This bug in democracy was there in the beginning. But it's only now, 2500 years later, that it can be exploited effectively enough to invalidate the whole concept.
To be fair, those are not things that are taught in school. If they come up at all it is in some historical context, a battle someone else fought--and won. There is no mention that maintaining a liberal democracy requires effort and vigilance. Modern, ie. post-WW2, "fighting democracies" have built-in safeguards to oppose internal enemies of democracy, but if they are effective remains to be seen. The USA mostly does not even have such mechanisms and it shows.
Eh, "internal enemies of democracy" is way too vague. E.g. Trump supporters claim that "unelected bureaucrats" in the "deep state" are enemies of democracy. Anyone can call anyone an "enemy of democracy".
The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (aka. Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz) completed a report a few weeks ago but is required by law to withhold it from the public due to due process. Of course it leaked, you can read the report here [1] (it's in German, obviously).
Now there is a discussion ongoing, if the Alternative für Deutschland has to been dissolved. That's a fighting democracy at work, following the rule of law.
[1] https://assets.cicero.de/2025-05/Geheimgutachten_Teil%20A.pd...
https://www.thefire.org/news/blogs/eternally-radical-idea/wo...
Of course, those safeguards were designed in the late 1940s, so it's interesting, to say the least, how they cope with modern demagoguery. In any case it is worth a try.
Tangentially, that's a great site! I hadn't heard of FIRE before, but I'm glad they exist. I hope they don't get suborned by one side or the other.
Sometimes the truth is even more uncomfortable than “lots of people are stupid.” A much more insidious scenario is when there’s two groups with no major differences in education or access to facts, but one has a cultural which is actively and explicitly hostile to truth. In such scenarios, ever-escalating hostilities between the two groups is inevitable.
Not sure where the 2500 number came from. The US is about 250 years old, and the founders were extremely wary of democracy based on its history prior to the US. The US constitution was designed to mitigate issues with democracy, e.g. that is the purpose of "checks and balances". By democracy standards, the US has been very successful; the average constitution only lasts 17 years: https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/lifespan-written-constitut...
This article estimates that the US is the #2 longest-lasting republic after the Roman Republic: https://www.broadstreet.blog/p/the-democratic-institutions-o...
Nonetheless, you would think that the "technology" for writing constitutions would've evolved more in the past 250 years. And in fact, in the Federalist Papers, it is predicted that political technology will evolve, just like any other field of technology. Yet results there have been quite disappointing, if you ask me. There aren't that many interesting and innovative ideas in this area. Most people, even programmers, tend to get lost in the object level us-vs-them conflict instead of going meta with their creative algorithmic brain.
Athens probably? From what I remember of school, this was the world's first democracy. (I've heard that Americans are taught something else!)
In fact, I understand that CamperBob2's critique of democracy is quite similar to that of Socrates. So I'm puzzled by the claim that it's "only now" that the critique is being proven correct, given that US democracy is notably more stable and long-lived than Athenian democracy.
In general, I think times of turmoil are always much more salient when you yourself are living through them. We lack the historical perspective to understand how bad turmoil has been in the past.
Think of it this way: you can't reach people who don't read much by starting a newspaper, but you can reach them with Fox News and Twitter. Mix in a bit of that old-time religion -- Billy Graham with a side of sauce Bernays -- and the left-hand side of the bell curve is yours to do with as you please.
Never trust internet comments!
A good political system is one which continues to work well even when education and the economy suck, so societal self-repair is possible. Ideally it would actually start working better when things suck, so society becomes antifragile.
"More college diplomas" is not a great solution when existing graduates are already working at Starbucks. This is the "elite overproduction" which creates instability.
Americans already have a relatively high standard of living by global standards, e.g. see median income adjusted for cost of living: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
Yet Americans are still dissatisfied. Part of the problem is that our political system incentivizes candidates and media outlets to stir up dissatisfaction so they can exploit it. There's also envy / the hedonic treadmill.
There were two guys: a Roma and a Jew in BiH who also wanted to take the president office. However according to Constitution they didn't have a chance. So they went to EU Human Rights Court to look for a justice. The court told the country it's kinda racist to have a rule like that and they should change it. This was like 15 years ago. Guess whether the rule has changed since then. (Sejdić and Finci v. Bosnia and Herzegovina for more details).
PS. If you find 3 presidents not fascinating enough, then google for High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina.
The executive is led by a First Minister and Deputy First Minister (despite the difference in title, they have exactly equal powers), who are selected from the largest party representing each of the two main communities.
Major decisions require cross-community support - at least 50% of all those voting AND 50% of the representatives of each of the two communities, OR 60% of all those voting AND 40% of the representatives of each of the two communities.
On paper, it seems slightly absurd... but in practice, it's a reasonable way to deal with deeply divided societies.
I assume if you need 70% to pass legislation then you get a grand coalition pretty much every time?
I guess it could incentivize brinkmanship among coalition partners though, since the leader of the coalition has less leverage if a small party threatens to quit?
When I put my programmer hat on, there's something inelegant about this approach, because it involves hardcoding the words "Bosnian", "Serb", and "Croatian" into the constitution.
It seems like with a sufficiently clever electoral rule, you could generate a small "national steering committee" with an odd number of members, where each major faction is guaranteed representation. But that also sounds a lot like a parliament where there's one party for each ethnic group, and then we're back where we started?
What happens when the 3 presidents disagree? Maybe the trick is to incentivize consensus-driven decisionmaking?
That's where High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina comes into play. This is external guy appointed by the EU (US also was participating in the appointment in the beginning, but they withdrew themselves from the process quite a few years ago). This guy has the power to fire any (like ANY) politician in the country. And the permission to overrule or enforce any law.
This guy is probably controlled by EU and can't turn into dictatorship mode, but you never know. At the very least two times presidents were fired due to political disagreement.
EU considered to discontinue this practice, but local people encouraged EU to leave things as is. Cause nobody trusts politicians and the systems is still pretty corrupt.
Anyway, whatever decision presidents have to make, all 3 must agree. That's why a lot of controversial topics are hanging for eternity (e.g. recognition of Kosovo).
When country was trying to choose a national flags, all the parts couldn't find the agreement for a long time. That's why High Representative just approved his own version nobody really liked. So today if you visit the country, you will find Serbian flag in the parts where Serbs live and Croatian flags in the part with Croats. Actual country flag normally is in the parts where majority is Bosnian.
The core issue is that news cannot compete with entertainment, and the firms that appeared after Murdoch on the right, insulate themselves and their politicians from the need to be accurate.
The cycle is essentially:
1) Fringe theory appears on the internet
2) Fringe theory is picked up by Notable Person (Someone who is able to come on Prime time Television)
3) Notable comes onto media network and repeats fringe theory
4) Reporting can now cover Fringe Theory as main stream
This economy of ideas shares little with the processes on the center and the left. People who come up with counter arguments don’t end up getting amplified.
This has demolished the exchange and debate of Ideas, and it has worked in all liberal democracies. Implacable Partisanship has been rewarded.
+1
As an Indian, classic definition of corruption here is something that other people do. When our own do it, its not really called corruption, its more intelligent work done to make our people win.
Similar term is appeasement. It kind of means if people I hate are winning, they must be doing bad things or cheating. It is impossible that people I hate should do well in life.
This is a very important rule stated by the War Nerd: 'Most people are not rational, they are TRIBAL: "my gang yay, your gang boo!" It really is that simple. The rest is cosmetics.'
A small human group is compatible with this tribal behavior because the bulk of actions (or at worst their effects) are quickly perceptible to everyone. The larger the group, the less each person understands what is happening, even the effects of what he does.
Stating it is useful because many neglect (or maybe even ignore) this fact.
The way the War Nerd puts it is IMHO the best.