It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.
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.
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.
>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.
For my friends - everything, for my enemies - the law.
I used to love this pithy quote but reflecting on it more recently this doesn't seem like something limited to fascists or fascism. Indeed, this kind of thinking is used by those of any political leaning when ideology becomes more important than principles. An obvious example is the USSR.
Authoritarianism is the umbrella term describing the behaviour of both fascist states and various others. AFAIK all fascist states have been authoritarian - but it’s a common outcome anytime the people running the government are replaced en masse.
Good point, and much harder to challenge. If the majority is against an authoritarian there's protests and sabotage of social structures. If the majority oppresses a fringe group, it's often socially encouraged
For these reasons, I personally believe authoritarianism cannot be opposed without a solid foundation of individualism. The problem becomes that explaining ideological nuance is rarely politically expedient or even rhetorically effective. Appeals to collectivism are more easily digested by the masses.
that's kind of what the USA is going through right now but it's more aptly described as "tyranny of the plurality" because Trump didn't win either majority of of registered voters or majority of the actual vote.
Regardless of tiresome partisan hyperbole, I don't regard the substance of this administration's actions as any more authoritarian the previous or the status quo. In the specific instances where state power has been expanded, I regard it as part of the general trend of expansion. The trend is more indicative of the overall incentives and structure of governance, rather than specific political actors. Similarly, partisan recriminations fit with the same pattern.
IMO, Obama claiming the power to assassinate US citizens on US soil (by declaring them "foreign combatants") was primarily different in that he only used it a little bit.
This is a great example of the horseshoe theory of politics [0], which I believe in very strongly. I made a separate post if anyone cares to discuss it. [1]
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.
Horseshoe theory has always read like a Pythagorean epicycle to me, an attempt to redeem a broken model. For a reductive political model, I prefer the 2 dimensional Collectivist-Individualist, Authoritarian-Libertarian axes. No need to literally contort the outdated Left-Right spectrum.
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?
To me, the horshoe theory is just a step in the right direction. It shows the limits of a straight 1D line to describe politics, and is a stepping-off point for deeper exploration.
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.
Hmm. I guess I feel that "The Horseshoe Theory" is worse than useless. It implies that as someone gets "too much" Right or Left, they inevitably become authoritarian, as if centrists cannot be authoritarian. It equates "weirdness" with "bad". I'd argue that we should skip straight to identifying "authoritarianism" as the problem, and the not having weird or even extreme leftist or rightist ideas.
> I see it as the gateway to people realizing that the left/right 1D line, and even the political compass, are ridiculous.
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.
Absolutely. See "the only moral abortion is my abortion".
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!"
You "think" the end goal is domination? This is someone who incited an violent insurrection to try and override a presidential election and has called king, posted illustrations of himself wearing a crown, and has (again) openly talked of not leaving office.
This is a shameful false equivalency. In the puppet president scenario you outline, the blast radius is, at worst, 4 years? In the case of an insurrection to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, there is a generation or more of democratic order lost.
That depends entirely on your context and frame of reference.
You're describing the blast radius of what was possible in the past assuming that one president was willing to usurp power but only for one term.
In reality, we did go 4 years with a president who wasn't in charge, at least for part of that term, specifically because the public was lied to about his health and some small number of people his the truth. We did not go through 4 years of a presidency after one very much seemed to attempt to take the office despite having lost the election.
In both cases I take huge issue with the intent and the potential outcome. In one case, though, the outcome was real and I lived, for a time, in a presumably democraric society ruled by someone(s) who weren't elected while the one who was elected decreased mentally and physically beyond the ability to rule.
They’re different orders of magnitude. Biden was elected legitimately. Parties can nominate whoever they want, so shenanigans with primaries, while distasteful, are completely legitimate. Likewise, keeping Biden’s mental state from the public is ugly but legitimate. Voters can, and did, punish these actions.
Trump tried to cheat his way to keeping power. Even if you don’t blame him for the violent attempt, it’s well established that he made major efforts before that to change the outcome by more peaceful means that were just as illegitimate.
Playing stupid games within the system means you lose elections and either reform or get replaced. Playing stupid games subverting the system means you don’t have to worry about elections anymore if you succeed. I’m about a million times more concerned about the latter.
Do you not believe Trump was elected legitimately? I totally understand and share many of the concerns over the insurrection and what happened around it, but Trump didn't take office in 2020 and wasn't reelected until 2024.
I must have misread you last comment. I read this as a comparison implying that Biden wasn't legitimately elected but you just meant it to set up the point.
If it’s not an insurrection what it is? What is the organization of thousands of individuals to invade the capital building in protest of election results?
Just because it failed, doesn’t mean it wasn’t an insurrection.
Words like "protest" or "riot" leap to mind. It is more comparable to something like CHAZ in 2020 which could technically be called an insurrection or rebellion, but realistically was more of an unruly protest.
An insurrection would traditionally involve a little planning and a little more seriousness in the attempt. Maybe a plan that could conceivably lead to a change in government.
Obviously. All riots are technically insurrections. They're synonyms. And they are usually protests too; it'd be unusual to have a riot while agreeing with the current direction of the government.
> A riot or mob violence is a form of civil disorder commonly characterized by a group lashing out in a violent public disturbance against authority, property, or people.
> Uprisings which revolt, resisting and taking direct action against an authority, law or policy
See? Riots are by definition rebellions. They're both words for resisting legitimate authority. How do you expect there to be a riot that isn't an insurrection? That's why the lefties aren't getting much pushback on calling it an insurrection. Its a riot. Everyone agrees. Insisting that it use a specific word instead of the usual one is playing a bit of a game to pretend that it is some sort of special riot which is where the pushback starts; but there isn't any question that it is technically an insurrection - all riots are small insurrections.
Try as I might, I really can't understand this mindset. What drives some very reasonable and intelligent people to keep trying to deny and deflect that J6 was not an attempt to prevent a peaceful transfer of power?
Please stop. This is a topic that people have been saying the same things about for over four years. It's not a good topic for HN as people only bring it up for the purpose of ideological battle, which is against the guidelines.
Please stop. This is a topic that people have been saying the same things about for over four years. It's not a good topic for HN as people only bring it up for the purpose of ideological battle, which is against the guidelines.
So you're saying giving a speech with war-like symbolism ("if you don't fight like hell", "we will never give up. We will never concede" "we will stop the steal", "we are going to the capitol") to a crowd which he knew contained people ready for violence, is escalation? Where is the proof that there were federal agents inciting violence (I thought it was Antifa agents? The story changes all the time...).
Does similar Democrat language around BLM at the time of CHAZ/CHOP mean Democrats encouraged insurrection?
Unlike Jan 6th, the CHAZ rioters brought rifles, organized a standing militia, and murdered someone to assert control of the area they seized — which seems distinctly more violent.
Why is the president of the US trolling his own citizens that he will ignore the constitution and act as king a desirable thing, exactly? What is the desired outcome of doing this?
Trump is the one who started it by refusing to acknowledge Biden won a fair election. He whipped his supporters into a frenzy believing the election had been stolen. The reason he didn't use the military is he didn't think they would obey him. It's different now as loyalists have been put in charge.
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.
The Democratic Governor of California denounced them publicly and stopped the effort.
Despite Musk raising millions and campaigning viciously against the Democrats the administration kept all of SpaceX contracts and Tesla ev subsidies. In fact the IRA benefited Tesla disproportionately.
Both sides are NOT the same. One is fascist and the other is not
Joseph M. Arpaio – Former Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona, Trump Supporter
Ray Smith III – Trump Attorney
Cathy Latham – Fake Elector, Coffee County GOP Leader
Robert Cheeley – Trump Attorney
David Shafer – Fake Elector, Former Georgia GOP Chair
Mike Roman – Trump Campaign Staffer
Shawn Still – Fake Elector, Then-Georgia State Senator
Scott Hall – Atlanta Bail Bondsman
Misty Hampton – Former Coffee County Elections Supervisor
Steve Lee – Pastor from Illinois
Harrison Floyd – Black Voices for Trump Leader
Trevian Kutti – Publicist from Chicago
I'm sure this was just Democrats following the law, with no bias, right?
This kind of narrative that you're forwarding now where the Republican Party are fascists and Trump is a threat to democracy is exactly the kind of mentality that was used to elicit this enormous persecution of Trump and officials near him.
Meanwhile, the real elephant in the room is always ignored:
The Democrats shovel hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayer money to large unions in order to secure their support and win elections. This is textbook corruption.
The recipients of USAID grants? All Democrats. Same story all across DC. That's why 92.4% of DC voted for Harris. DC, meanwhile, has a per capita GDP of $250,000.
Policy difference not partisan squables or payback for supporting his opponents. Most Democrats feel Unions are important to help workers (union and nonunion) earn more.
To base the decision on what companies to invite to an EV summit on whether they support the Democrats' favorite constituents is pure politics. The only policy difference here is one which helps the Democrats win elections.
It doesn’t matter what Democrats think about unions. This wasn’t a union summit or a summit on party values—it was about EVs. Tesla is the world leader in EVs and the top American EV manufacturer. Excluding them because they don’t support unionization — an issue tied to massive political support for Democrats through campaign contributions and institutional backing—is indefensible. It undermines the purpose of the summit through rank politicization and partisanship.
As for the claim that Tesla has racial discrimination issues—that’s a distortion. Nearly every major company gets hit with discrimination lawsuits because civil rights law has been weaponized to make that outcome nearly inevitable:
> The recipients of USAID grants? All Democrats. Same story all across DC. That's why 92.4% of DC voted for Harris. DC, meanwhile, has a per capita GDP of $250,000.
Why shouldn’t the recipients receive these grants other than that they are Democrats? What about their projects makes them not meritorious?
If you can't see the opportunity for corruption and bias here, then there's nothing I can do to convince you. This is always a story when people call Republicans corrupt or fascists and say the Democrats are not. They have absolutely no impartiality in the way they look at the world.
There are hundreds of thousands of regulations carrying criminal penalties. If a political party is determined to imprison an opponent, it will find a law they’ve technically violated. In Trump’s case, they used an obscure accounting rule — one so trivial that even prominent Democratic supporters acknowledged it was an inappropriate basis for prosecution.
Hillary Clinton used a private email server while serving as Secretary of State, and in 2014, her staff deleted 31,000 emails they labeled personal to prevent them from being scrutinized in an impending investigation. You don't think that if Hillary had been a Republican and if the Democrats were determined to prosecute her, they couldn't have found some law that she broke and prosecuted her on it?
Wait. What do you think about Hegseth's signal and atlantic reporter issue? That is wildly worse and where is the court case that absolutely should be happening?
we are not banana republic (just yet, getting there though) so anyone that breaks a law under a given statute you file charges, run an investigation and punish if law(s) are broken. if memory serves me well there was one :) can’t say the same for Hegseth et al but night is young so-to-speak…
The prosecution record, where Trump and dozens of his allies were prosecuted, is the record of a banana republic.
Like I said there's hundreds of thousands of regulations which hold the potential for criminal sanction. They could have found her guilty of something when she deleted those emails. The SDNY DAG found a way to charge the developers of Tornado Cash with running an illegal money transmission service when they didn't even hold it in custody of any funds, they simply published code. They stretched the law to incredible lengths to get someone they wanted. And they couldn't find something to pin on Hillary Clinton? Ridiculous.
They didn't for political reasons and you're naive or dishonest for believing otherwise.
Yes it was them following the law and being unbiased.
Many of the people involved in prosecuting them are Republicans. Trump is the most corrupt president we've ever had and many of his allies are similarly corrupt.
These days they know they just have to follow the maga line to get out of jail free. The Attorney General of Texas was so ridiculously corrupt he was about to be impeached by Texas Republicans but then he just claimed it was a witchhunt against maga got Trump on his side and suddenly impeachment was cancelled and he's polling a win in the next Senate primary.
Also Trump supported an attempted violent coup in addition to things like telling the Georgia Secretary of State to find him votes after the voting.
Trump has been described as a threat to democracy by many leading conservatives and Republicans. Many of them have had their careers ended and been slandered by former associates despite being conservative who had dedicated decades to the party while Trump doesn't care about ideology or party or outcomes only himself.
> in a series of interviews published Tuesday, saying the former president fits “into the general definition of fascist” and that he spoke of the loyalty of Hitler’s Nazi generals.
> He also confirmed to The Atlantic that Trump had said he wished his military personnel showed him the same deference Adolf Hitler’s Nazi generals showed the German dictator during World War II, and recounted the moment.
> Do you mean Bismarck’s generals?’” Kelly told The Atlantic he’d asked Trump. He added, “I mean, I knew he didn’t know who Bismarck was, or about the Franco-Prussian War. I said, ‘Do you mean the kaiser’s generals? Surely you can’t mean Hitler’s generals?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah, Hitler’s generals.’ I explained to him that Rommel had to commit suicide after taking part in a plot against Hitler
Copy-pasting my response to a similar partisan talking point:
--
There are hundreds of thousands of regulations carrying criminal penalties. If a political party is determined to imprison an opponent, it will find a law they’ve technically violated. In Trump’s case, they used an obscure accounting rule — one so trivial that even prominent Democratic supporters acknowledged it was an inappropriate basis for prosecution.
Hillary Clinton used a private email server while serving as Secretary of State, and in 2014, her staff deleted 31,000 emails they labeled personal to prevent them from being scrutinized in an impending investigation. You don't think that if Hillary had been a Republican and if the Democrats were determined to prosecute her, they couldn't have found some law that she broke and prosecuted her on it?
--
What you're claiming is absolutely absurd. This idea that Trump leads a criminal enterprise and everyone affiliated with him is corrupt and that's why so many were prosecuted and not that this is the same politicization of the justice system you see all over the world and Democrats, with the tacit support of establishment Republicans, trying to imprison their opponents.
I also want to make it absolutely clear that it is all about framing. From your beltway-manufactured frame, Trump instigated January 6th, and this amounted to insurrection. But a much more reasonable framing is that leading Democrats instigated over 500 riots in the summer of 2020, and are instigating the current riots too:
Kamala Harris even tweeted this out, to bail out rioters:
> “If you’re able to, chip in now to the @MNFreedomFund to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
Of course the mainstream news media journalists who are all unionized and thus economically aligned with the Democratic Party barely cover this or criticize it.
Yeah, only the issue here is that @realFascists are in opposition to Trump. And reading this text in that light - it check out and not really a news.
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.
>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
SLS, NASA's rocket, costs $2.5 billion, PER LAUNCH.
That’s all very nice but according to Trump this only suddenly became a problem only a few weeks ago due to some reason. So whatever you are saying has absolutely no relevance to this decision making. If Musk continued licking his boots he’d be doing fine..
I think double standards would be a better term than hypocricy. Hypocricy would imply the pretense to be bound by certain rules, but the whole point of fascism is that those in power are not bound by any rules. They only make rules to bind others. I don't see any hypocricy in the openly advertised corruption of the current administration, it's just plain evil of the “we do it because we can” sort.
> It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.
In history textbooks, it's known as the spoils system.
hopefully this time around it will go a little quicker, aka one term. project 2025 specifically pointed out all "disloyal" government employees should be kicked out and only those who bent a knee to trump should replace them, whatever their actual merit and ability to occupy the position
Vote banks and patronage politics has always been a thing in the US, especially at the local and state level. The main difference is a significant portion of governance was temporarily de-politicized in the 1960s-90s period as leadership on both sides of the aisle had formative unifying experiences during the World Wars and the Korean War, but has been re-politicized now that activism on both sides of the aisle has resurged and social polarization has taken root.
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.
Low-level corruption at the local/state level is related but its effects are different though. In fact even today low level corruption in the US is extremely low by global standards - you can't bribe your way to a drivers license openly, for example. I'm sure it happens but it's not common or openly boasted about (parts of CA or DC could be an exception).
Here the corruption is openly displayed as a kind of peacock-tail to the beneficiaries.
I'd rather not have a whole discussion over this atm (I'm out rn - maybe later), but I recommend reading Yuen Yuen Ang's paper on "Unbundling Corruption" - there are different typographies of what "corruption" is, and some nations have always had a similar type of corruption compared to others.
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]
Fine, I don't disagree with anything you point out. However where we differ is that I believe identity politics is the trigger factor here, all the other changes you mention (loss of balance of power etc) are downstream of this.
Your causal diagram is backwards. Identity politics isn't the path to corruption. Corrupt politicians like Trump use identity politics to gain power to practice their corruption. Nobody who wanted to bring back Christian hegemony and re-oppress minority groups is cheering that Trump is threatening to take away contracts from Musk because "their side is winning."
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.
> Identity politics isn't the path to corruption. Corrupt politicians like Trump use identity politics to gain power to practice their corruption.
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.
Idpol can exacerbate corruption. There are strong feedback dynamics.
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.
> you can't bribe your way to a drivers license openly
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).
The notion that this kind of politicization started in the 90s is fanciful revisionism. It wasn’t really a thing in the US until about 2017. The word it’s known by is Trumpism.
I'm familiar with the rise of talk radio, News Corp, Web propaganda, alt-right, etc., in politics and public sentiment.
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.)
its revisionism to say that the US has been free of politicization this bad. for most of its history, not counting the civil war very minor (and very major) issues sparked massacres, revolts, and even minor wars between states.
First off, Trump skyrocketed to political fame with his nonsense claims about Obama's citizenship.
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
9/11 was a big turning point in my experience. American conservatives that I considered online friends were simple impossible to reason with within days and completely alien beings after a few weeks.
Interesting. Things did change on 9/11 but it seemed incremental to me. Before that was the constant investigation of Clinton by Gingrich, the dog whistling of Reagan, Nixon's Southern Strategy, and before that to McCarthy and so on.
This is high level rather than your direct experience, so it's not a contradiction. Just a different perspective.
Yes. Almost everything about our current situation can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Things were much more civil and reasonable before that point.
I don’t know. Nixon had goons breaking into the DNC headquarters (and his whole southern strategy led to racially polarized politics up to this day), and there was that senator who got beaten by another senator just before the civil war. Eisenhower waited in the car rather than attend a meeting with Truman on his inauguration.
Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace to avoid impeachment when it came out. The dude in the White House now did much worse and he was rewarded with reelection.
It has actually been a gradual process for decades from the John Birch Society to Paul Harvey to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney to Citizens United to Donald Trump.
Edit: Forgot Pat Buchanan. He belongs in there somewhere.
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":
Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"? Because the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.
Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.
>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!
I think our definitions of "identity politics" differ too much to have a useful discussion about it. I'm going off the most common definitions I can find (eg dictionaries, wikipedia), but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place.
> It is horrifying to see this attitude take root in my adopted land.
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.
It's because we tried to take down the 'no girls or brown people' sign.
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.
>It turns out that when elections are fought on the basis of identity (race, religion) etc corruption is actually considered a benefit! This is because the loyalists interpret this as "we" are winning and "they" are losing.
So how could one design a political system so this behavior doesn't emerge / is not incentivized?
In no way this is a good example of such a system, but I still find Bosnia and Herzegovina political system absolutely hilarious. After Dayton peace agreement the literally put ethnicity requirement for presidents to Constitution as a hard rule. One Bosnian, one Serb and one Croatian. And yes, the country is ran by 3 presidents at the same time. So there is no longer a competition whether the main guy in the country will be theirs or ours.
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.
Northern Ireland has a similar system, with an executive built on a forced coalition.
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 like this term "forced coalition". How about a traditional parliamentary system where a supermajority is required to pass legislation?
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?
>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.
having three is interesting because it gives a way to break ties. how do they handle candidates with mixed ethnicity, though? or the Serbians and Croatians converging, while the Bosnians move farther apart from both?
This has not emerged due to the political system, this has emerged due to the issues in the information economy.
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.
Get rid of FPTP and the Electoral College that enables a two-party stranglehold. If a vote for a third party wasn't a wasted vote, we could see nuanced parties and politicians emerge that don't have to tow a party line.
FPTP is what makes Reform so dangerous though. They have a real chance of having a lot of power. In a proportional representation system where parties have to share power in coalitions these extreme parties actually have to be involved in government, at which point they’re exposed as completely incompetent. See the Netherlands right now for example. I would rather have these extreme positions represented, because they will be represented poorly. It takes wind out of the populist sails, where they can no longer simply promise everything until they’re in power and completely destroy the country.
I think FPTP ends up working out a lot different in the parliamentary context. The US only has 2 parties in Congress, despite FPTP.
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.
Does it? Could you explain which mechanism you suggest using? Because the main results from social choice theory about ranked choice voting that come to mind seem to be all about impossibility of fair elections (eg Arrow) or even paradoxical situations such as cyclic preferences (eg Condorcet).
How about not creating a precarious underclass with lack of (higher) education that is ready to vote for whatever solution promising to take down the system that made them so desperate for radical change?
If the functioning of your nation's political system depends on the functioning of your nation's education system or your nation's economy, you've created a circular dependency. The education system and the economy are themselves downstream of the political system. Dysfunction in one tends to create dysfunction in the others. See https://www.econlib.org/library/Columns/y2004/Caplanidea.htm...
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.
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.
I don't really buy the education argument. How do you "educate" somebody who lived through the first Trump administration and voted for more of the same? Let's get specific: what exactly did they miss in school that would have driven them towards a different decision?
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.
> At some point it's necessary to confront the uncomfortable truth
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.
>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.
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...
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.
My comment is too old to edit, but I would like to issue a correction. I should not have written "This article estimates that the US is the #2 longest-lasting republic after the Roman Republic", since the caption for the figure in the article states something different ("Duration of Long-Lived Democracies", i.e. the word "democracy" is used rather than "republic", and also there wasn't a claim to "longest-lived")
I didn't get the impression that Athenian democracy was particularly successful. So it seemed weird to say that the flaws in democracy are only now becoming apparent.
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.
The flaws in democracy were always apparent, and they've always been exploited by parties willing to do the dirty work. But they couldn't be exploited consistently and decisively. Now they can be.
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.
umm Switzerland disagrees with the assessment of the USA being the oldest democratic republic. If we are only speaking of republic, Portugal has been one since the 12th century, albeit there's been 10 or 11 iterations on the constitution, including Salazars so-called New State.
They missed that liberty and freedom is not a god-given right, but hard-earned privilege. They missed that liberty is not a personal property but a shared practice of pluralism. They missed that liberty is not absolute, but requires compromise and limitations so that we all can be free.
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.
>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.
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".
Those fighting democracies are very specific about what is and what is not irreconcilable. For example, in Germany you can murder the president--that's just homicide--but you cannot abolish the protection of minorities. That's a violation of the constitution. Germany's far-right party Alternative für Deutschland has been under suspicion of violating a few of those provisions for quite some time now.
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.
Me neither, but as the discussers point out, the Weimar Republic totally failed to apply serious consquences, e.g. Hitler's very short arrest after the Munich coup. Besides, the safeguards include more than limiting free speech.
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.
I see it as a continuation of the American Civil War in politics. There was always this attitude but now people are more redicalized, so it's more obvious.
Voila, we've ended up with a low trust society with "petty corruption", which is generally considered harmful as it establishes something about that society that cannot be easily corrected unlike "grand corruption."
>>I witnessed this up close in India where parties openly exist to benefit certain constituencies based on caste, language, religion and so on.
+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.
That's naive and you know it. A massive drive for him was electing the first black president. A less, but still not-insignificant drive was for Hillary as the first female president.
Thats your opinion, Obama could have been white, and he still would have been voted for by 99.9% of those who voted for him. Young Kennedy-like candidates are rare (eg Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) but are incredibly electable when they show up.
Towards the end of his presidency, most of us forgot he was even black. Just those white southerners and a certain old guy in New York who were fixated on his race from the beginning still thought he was a DEI elect.
There were hit songs about what a big moment it is that he was black. At least among minorities that was a massive deal. If you didn't see that, I think you're probably closer to those white southerners than you might think you are.
Can you imagine if mainstream entertainers made songs celebrating having a white president?
Given that all of them but one are white, what the point that would be? Songs are not because Obama is black, but because he was the first black on the role.
So you are opposed to fixating on people's race and yet there you are singling out white southerners. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.
Most people forgot Obama was black except them, they are also the ones constantly accusing Obama of being racially divisive, they should just own what they say. This is kind of like Trump calling people names but then being greatly offended when someone calls him a name, right?
I’d be shocked if Hilary had a net benefit being a female candidate. We’ve had 2 chances to elect a female president and they both lost the general election with not that great turnout.
John McCain’s VP was female during 08 and he lost by a huge margin.
In a way yes. Kamala lost because she was the ultimate DEI candidate (in how own words that the only reason he picked her to be VP). Regardless of her personal skills or qualities it’s very hard to move past that..
Had she had a chance to prove that she could win a primary things might have been different
In a way yes. Kamala lost because she was the ultimate DEI candidate (in how own words that the only reason he picked her to be VP). Regardless of her personal skills or qualities it’s very hard to move past that..
Biden fucked up in many ways, but he also got a lot of flack from bad timing and poor messaging. It’s easy to say COVID hurt Trump in 20 and Kamala in 24, but I think the details mattered.
The inflation rate fell significantly under his presidency, but during periods of high inflation prices soared. Coming back from that after generations of extremely low inflation would have been tough for someone without failing facilities. I think a great politician could have weathered that storm, Biden wasn’t up to the task and Kamala’s messaging didn’t help.
Republicans getting out ahead on that inflation messaging similarly did wonders for Trump and other Republicans. Planting the idea that America somehow didn’t do well when we did far better than the rest of the world was brilliantly executed IMO.
Kamala probably wins in 2016? I mean this in a very nice way but I think you may want research the politics and candidates in the US a little more before bold statements such as that. Kamala was unable to even register on a scale in the primary and what noise she did make was to play a false game on which she essentially accused Biden of being racist filth. I think it is not just that she had no qualifications for office, we could argue about what constitutes a qualification for a long time, but she had no reasoning or theory of why she would even be someone yo run for office. She tablet in such incomprehensible ways that one could not even discern a point from her utterances. You may say the current president rambles but she think the point is always present. Kamala on her best days just spoke in long winded tautologies: “we are always doing each day the things we do every day” or whenever nonsense she chose to present to the public. Further, he main qualification to place herself as one of the poor people was to constantly talk about being a “middle class kid.” The problem is in her generation, the middle class did quite well for themselves so it was such a false premise. Let’s not discuss the accents.
That was not at all the main reason Obama got elected. He was charismatic, likable and promised hope and change. Why is it that the people who don't want identity politics to be a focus make it a focus?
"To all those who supported our campaign, I'm humbled by the faith you've
placed in us. To all of those who did not support us, let me say this. Hear me
out as we move forward. Take a measure of me and my heart. If you still
disagree, so be it. That's democracy. That's America.
The right to dissent peaceably. Within the guardrails of our republic, it's
perhaps this nation's greatest strength. Yet hear me clearly: disagreement
must not lead to disunion. And I pledge this to you, I will be a president for all Americans, all Americans. And I promise you, I will fight as hard for those
who did not support me as for those who did."
Obama taught constitutional law and served in the state and US Senate before running for president. He was [not] some unqualified hack thrust into power because they needed a person of a different race in power.
Obama's campaign was far less about race than Trump's campaigns in 2016 and 2024. Unless you can't hear the dog whistles.
You can't claim that while claiming wanting to elect a black president wasn't a big driver in much of the turnout for Obama. There were multiple musicians literally making songs about finally being able to elect a black president.
Trump's initial popularity was due in no small part to the anger of American white supremacists and the alt-right, this was well documented even back in 2016[0,3]. That the President elected after Obama was the man who mainstreamed the birther conspiracies against Obama was not a coincidence. It wasn't entirely about Obama, but he was the straw that broke white America's back.
The social justice age wasn't a rejection of bigotry. It was a Mccarthy-esque movement of dividing everybody between sexual and racial lines into a hierarchy of who was and wasn't allowed to speak. Speaking against the party line meant exile.
The SJW/Wokeism movement had nothing to do with true equity and "rejection of bigotry". That's why there was such a revolt against it.
Of course, I didn't claim that the republicans aren't now doing everything they claimed to revolt against but worse. As it turns out "free speech" absolutism only applies to things that pwn the libz.
I call b*t. The reality is that the there is a outrage campaign in the right wing media trying to drive anger about some perceived victimhood in people who have largely been privaledged all their life. They would have found something else instead.
Obama was genuinely qualified to be president. Trump was clearly unfit in 2016 (having never held elected office and run nearly all his businesses into the ground), and constitutionally disqualified after Jan 6 2021.
Trump was also reluctant to denounce or criticize white nationalists. He repeated and reposted neo-Nazi content and phrases. He is the one ordering a zealous yet haphazard dismantling of anything that breathes the words racial equity, and without a hint of pushback from his voters.
So when Trump admitted on Howard Stern that he likes to walk in on naked teenage girls because his role of running the teen universe beauty pageant allows him to get away with that, that is ok because he wasn't running a campaign at the time?
>There are places in America that are among the most dangerous in the world. You go to places like Oakland. Or Ferguson. The crime numbers are worse. Seriously," and retweeted a false claim that 81% of white murder victims were killed by black people.
> "We've just seen many, many crimes getting worse all the time, and as Maine knows—a major destination for Somali refugees—right, am I right?"
Yeah I mean to be clear, I think Obama was a remarkable leader and it's hard to believe he once occupied the same seat DJT does today
He didn't explicitly use his race (the way Hillary often used her gender), but many who campaigned for him and large parts of his caucuses did. For better or for worse.
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.