US Politics: The Transition Continues

[Lord Lannister]

5 hours ago, Yukle said:

Popular vote update: Clinton is now more than a million ahead. It's quite a gap, out to about 1.7% on current estimates.

I find it really confusing that any Americans still defend the Electoral College. It undermines the principle of one person: one vote. The whole, "Protect the small states" or "Protect the rural areas" thing is also weird due to the fact it implies people in smaller states or rural areas must receive preferential treatment, which is also unfair.

The whole argument in its favour is rendered invalid with a single easy piece of evidence you can use to prove that the Electoral College is stupid:

None of the States within the United States uses the Electoral College within state elections for any offices.

 

5 hours ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Yukle,

Look Rural areas are strategicly important.  Rural and urban cultures are very different.  Allowing the President to be elected by purely urban votes such that Rural intetests are no longer of interest to the one person who's job is to represent everyone is a poor idea.  

The electoral college is not perfect and should be made more representative but I do not believe it should be eliminated.

Yeah, I got to agree with Ser Scot here. You'd have the urban interests dominating the country to the exclusion of the all others. The New Yorks, Texas' and California's would decide the country's direction more than the Alaska's, Montana's or Rhode Island's. I understand where you're coming from Yukle, living in a state that's going to go one way no matter how I vote, but it does represent the majority of the people in my state and the system does allow every state to have an input in the outcome of the election.

Furthermore, it's not just the Electoral College. If you start tampering with this system, you start tampering with basically the entire notion the country was founded upon. Each state gets two Senators no matter their size and only two. If you pull the thread of the Electoral College, this one will be jostled loose as well. The whole notion of the Senate vs the House of Representatives was to keep a check on the larger states.

You can't even entirely say if the election was chosen by popular vote it would've changed the outcome. Both candidates would've ran entirely different campaigns focusing less on the "swing states" and more on their high population areas of support. Not to mention if you go by popular vote, it makes it even harder for the two party system which has dominated this country for so long to be broken. With the EC, in theory, a 3rd party could force the election to go to the House/Senate if they have local support. With popular vote it would always be the big parties to the exclusion of the small ones. I happen to think we're going to see a repeat of 1824 in our lifetime, and maybe even in effect become more of a parliamentary system with the House deciding the president more often than not. Disgust with both parties is just too high and I don't think Trump is going to change that in his term, when his own party is having a hard time accepting him and four years from now the Democrats are just going to run on a platform of not being Trump.

 

[Yukle]

30 minutes ago, Lord Lannister said:

Furthermore, it's not just the Electoral College. If you start tampering with this system, you start tampering with basically the entire notion the country was founded upon.

America could do with just that.

They were founded upon the idea that only men could vote, black people counted as 3/5 of a person for the purposes of the census and they didn't include any human rights in their constitution.

You know what America's greatest amendment is? One that I reckon I'm among the 0.00001% of non-Americans to have heard of it because it's never boasted as it should: The Ninth Amendment.

It says that you still have certain rights even if the constitution doesn't spell them out.

But it wasn't an idea that anyone thought of when the country was first made, rather, it was added much later. Just as slavery was overturned, women's right to vote was recognised, segregation ended - there are lots of times America has tampered with their systems specifically to tamper with the notion their country was founded upon.

As for the idea that the people of New York and Texas will decide the fate of the country without the electoral college more than Alaska and Wyoming will, well that's a GOOD thing! More people live in those areas, and democracies and republics function as majority-rules. At the moment, it's the case that minority-rules. Which disenfranchises more people.

The Electoral College wasn't made to represent rural areas, it was made so that the Electoral College could override the will of the people. For more than 100 years there was no penalty for being a faithless elector in any state. It's purpose was NOT to enshrine democracy, quite the reverse. Senators must be 35 because that was a venerable age at the time the rule was written and the Electoral College could dishonour the vote of their states not because the USA was founded to use the Electoral College to protect smaller states, but because the Electoral College was a failsafe AGAINST popular opinion. It was a way of ensuring, just as the Senator's age restrictions were, that old senior men remained in charge.

EDITED TO ADD: And nobody has a counter to the most obvious argument of all: How come nobody else, even the massive states like California and Texas, uses the Electoral College? How come no other country does? If it's such a good idea, how come Americans don't use it except for when their Constitution mandates that they have to?

Especially since, by way of comparison, both California and Texas are larger than the whole USA was at the time of its founding and neither of them uses the Electoral College to elect its governor or, indeed, any office.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

Why would they? What wouldbe the point of using it for let's say a State Senate election?

[Yukle]

1 minute ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

Why would they? What wouldbe the point of using it for let's say a State Senate election?

What about Governor? That's the office equivalent to President at state level.

[Shryke]

11 hours ago, OldGimletEye said:

I agree with this. Just like Democrats need to think seriously about what it's going to do about people that have lost their jobs through free trade.

Part of the problem here, I think, is that labor markets may not be able to adjust easily. Perhaps, one of the biggest problems will be educational barriers to entry. It's one reason that I think something like Bernie's or Hillary's college plan could make sense.

Of course, it helps if you keep high pressure labor markets. Which why it was good that the goal of full employment came back into the Democratic Party platform. It should have never went away.

The problem is, they likely didn't. More likely they lost their job to automation and advances in industrial manufacturing in most of the places people have been going on about since the election.

It's the same kind of thing you see where all these "thur takin' er jerbs" people come from areas without immigrants.

That articles Ormond posted above does nail one thing clearly which is that these people vote for the guy with the better story, even if that story isn't accurate.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

47 minutes ago, Yukle said:

What about Governor? That's the office equivalent to President at state level.

 I don't know if I have a great answer. In the days of Tammany Hall I could picture a guy like Boss Tweed buying electors and essentially owning the governor. 

And how would a state be broken down in order to decide the amount of Electoral votes? 

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, Commodore said:

You invite paying customers to view your art, then give them a lecture when they show up? Nothing respectful about that (no matter who it is).

Also, if you have to supplement your art with explicit scolding, you're compensating for deficiency in the art itself.

Indeed, what they did was simply unprofessional. It's one thing to criticize the government through art (as, say, the various comedy shows do it) and quite another to harangue an audience member.

Incidentally, I read a bunch of different propaganda sites to get people's views on topics like this. For example, various flavors of liberal (The Huffington Post, Slate, Salon), libertarian (Reason) and conservative (The Federalist). After the election, I realized that I was missing a fairly significant point of view so I added Breitbart to this list. It's pretty well done:

1) They're fast about publishing the news. Most American media tends to be slow -- if something happens near midnight Eastern time, it's quite likely that Russian and/or British media will publish it first even if it concerns the US. The opinion sites are even slower than the mainstream news networks. Breitbart has offices in London and Israel so I guess they're never quite asleep.

2) They sometimes come up with insights that I have not seen anywhere else. For example, regarding Pence being lectured by the Hamilton crew: they found this CBS New York article from last March which points out that the casting call for Hamilton specifically requested "non-white" performers (which would seem to be a violation of some New York law). This is a propaganda double play. Most obviously, it illustrates the rank hypocrisy of the Hamilton crew's appeal for diversity (to paraphrase, “diversity” does not appear to include white people). Less obviously (the article does not point this out, but it is common knowledge), since the Founding Fathers were exclusively white men, Hamilton is doing precisely what performances routinely get severe reprimands for -- but with white people replaced by minorities rather than the other way around. Obviously, this type of propaganda will not be very effective with people who believe that discrimination against white people and "cultural appropriation" of their history is OK, but that's not Breitbart's audience.

3) Speaking of which, the audience is a great deal more lively than on any of the other sites. Huffington Post or Slate may get a few thousand comments for a particularly popular article; on Breitbart, popular ones can easily reach ten thousand or significantly more. The quality of the comments is about the same as it is elsewhere (which is to say, very low).

4) They break up their analysis of large stories (like the Bannon interview) into multiple articles. I would guess that this helps them get clicks as they can write more controversial headlines. Some of the other sites do this too, but not as effectively.

In general, I would say that this is pretty clearly the best of the propaganda sites. The others (especially Salon) will occasionally post a more thoughtful article than I've seen on Breitbart so far, but in terms of excitement and riling up the base, the latter is just better.

[OldGimletEye]

1 hour ago, Shryke said:

The problem is, they likely didn't. More likely they lost their job to automation and advances in industrial manufacturing in most of the places people have been going on about since the election.I

Maybe. I think this under some dispute. And I've seen evidence on both sides. I'm not sure where exactly I stand on this issue. Plus there is evidence that free trade itself may have hastened the automation.

Even if automation is the culprit that sill presents a problem of labor market displacements.

If these guys did lose their jobs to due to free trade, I believe there are better ways to handle the issue than Trump's tariff scheme. This is a point I've been making for a while.

Even before Trump, the fact that free trade would create some winners and some losers, ie redistribute income, shouldn't have been a surprise to anyone. That's pretty much what standard free trade models say. Unfortunately, neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party dealt with this issue very well. Perhaps that was because they had some pie in the sky beliefs about labor market adjustments, which didn't quite pan out. That was the major point of Autor's paper, I think.

That doesn't mean though that I think Trump's trade plans are wise. For one, it would lower long term growth. And the re-adjustment process under Trumps plans would likely create havoc and confusion. 

1 hour ago, Shryke said:

That articles Ormond posted above does nail one thing clearly which is that these people vote for the guy with the better story, even if that story isn't accurate.

And of course, I hope you know, I am not defending Trumps economic ideas. It's not like I haven't been ranting about Trumps economic policies or anything for a while now.

For one, it turns out that free trade wasn't the only thing that created greater income inequality. In fact, it's probably not even the most significant thing. Reagan's tax cuts were likely more significant. Accordingly, Trump's proposed tax cuts are not helpful here.

Also after 2008, I'd say our most immediate concern wasn't free trade but getting back to full employment with aggressive fiscal and monetary policy, which the Republicans were against, even turning their backs on former conservative hero Milton Friedman. On that point, they fucked everybody.

[felice]

47 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

And how would a state be broken down in order to decide the amount of Electoral votes? 

How about one Elector per county? That would let the rural votes dominate within every state.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

2 minutes ago, felice said:

How about one Elector per county? That would let the rural votes dominate within every state.

 Each state doesn't get just one for president, larger states have more already, shouldn't larger counties? that wouldn't change anything from now anyway. politicians here always complain how we send more money to Albany than we get. 

[Yukle]

18 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

 Each state doesn't get just one for president, larger states have more already, shouldn't larger counties? that wouldn't change anything from now anyway. politicians here always complain how we send more money to Albany than we get. 

Larger states have fewer, not more. The bigger a state's population, the more it is penalised by the Electoral College.

I can't help but notice that my two gripes haven't yet been countered: If the Electoral College is so great, then how come nobody else uses it, even states within the USA for positions like Governor, and how come it is so rigorously defended when its intention was NOT to protect state interests, but was actually a failsafe against popular opinion by allowing the Electoral College members to override the votes within their states... ?

Like, that was its intention. It's not about protecting smaller minorities or states or anything like that, it was a means of having a second election of only the elite of the elite, who used the public will as advice, but were not bound by it. It's the most "Establishment" system in world politics outside of flat-out dictatorship.

[Arch-MaesterPhilip]

28 minutes ago, Yukle said:

Larger states have fewer, not more. The bigger a state's population, the more it is penalised by the Electoral College.

I can't help but notice that my two gripes haven't yet been countered: If the Electoral College is so great, then how come nobody else uses it, even states within the USA for positions like Governor, and how come it is so rigorously defended when its intention was NOT to protect state interests, but was actually a failsafe against popular opinion by allowing the Electoral College members to override the votes within their states... ?

Like, that was its intention. It's not about protecting smaller minorities or states or anything like that, it was a means of having a second election of only the elite of the elite, who used the public will as advice, but were not bound by it. It's the most "Establishment" system in world politics outside of flat-out dictatorship.

The Electoral college is determined by population.  California has 55 electoral votes and Alaska has 3. How is Alaska rewarded? States have never used it and it was never intended for use in State elections. 

Most people can't answer it because people spend no time thinking about it.

The closest thing I can come up with is that on the State level it opens the door to buying electors.   

Why is it so important for you to know ? 

[Yukle]

3 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

The Electoral college is determined by population.  California has 55 electoral votes and Alaska has 3. How is Alaska rewarded? States have never used it and it was never intended for use in State elections. 

Most people can't answer it because people spend no time thinking about it.

The closest thing I can come up with is that on the State level it opens the door to buying electors.   

Why is it so important for you to know ? 

California should have 65 electors if it was done as a proportion of its population. It is under represented.

When you say it was never intended intended for state elections - that's because it was never intended for any elections. It was used to prevent elections concluding with a result that the political establishment could override if they didn't like it.

How come it can't work in a state election? If it's such a great idea, then use it for state governors. Alternatively, if it's a terrible idea, which it is, get rid of it.

The electoral college is an affront to America's republican model. Their system of government is pretty good, save for a few flaws such as first-past-the-post voting, voting on a Tuesday and so on. But the Electoral College is the only flaw that is specifically designed to override the will of the people. It doesn't belong, it's just a legacy of the USA's history of, once upon a time, disenfranchising voters.

[felice]

4 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

The Electoral college is determined by population.  California has 55 electoral votes and Alaska has 3. How is Alaska rewarded?

Alaska should only have one electoral vote based on population relative to California. Getting triple the per-capita voting power is a pretty major reward.

4 minutes ago, Arch-MaesterPhilip said:

The closest thing I can come up with is that on the State level it opens the door to buying electors.

Why would that be more of a problem than on the Federal level?

[The Anti-Targ]

from the previous thread

Quote

when it comes to seeing how further up the moral mountain Trump was compared with Hillary. He was scaling the summit as she laboured in the foothills, burdened as she was with a blood-stained backpack loaded with corruption. 

I don't understand how sane, thinking people can believe this. If we grant that Hillary is very corrupt, it does not change the fact that Trump is a charlatan, a liar and also has personally admitted to being involved in political corruption on the payer side. And is or was probably a sexual predator. Yet some people seem to think he's an upstanding, moral guy basically above reproach. The mind boggles.

[The Anti-Targ]

1 hour ago, Yukle said:

California should have 65 electors if it was done as a proportion of its population. It is under represented.

When you say it was never intended intended for state elections - that's because it was never intended for any elections. It was used to prevent elections concluding with a result that the political establishment could override if they didn't like it.

How come it can't work in a state election? If it's such a great idea, then use it for state governors. Alternatively, if it's a terrible idea, which it is, get rid of it.

The electoral college is an affront to America's republican model. Their system of government is pretty good, save for a few flaws such as first-past-the-post voting, voting on a Tuesday and so on. But the Electoral College is the only flaw that is specifically designed to override the will of the people. It doesn't belong, it's just a legacy of the USA's history of, once upon a time, disenfranchising voters.

Part of the reason for an electoral college is at least somewhat reasonably motivated. The thinking was that if you have an electoral college then the president will try to appeal to the interests of more tstat5es than just the most populous ones. However what we have is that the candidates still end up not bothering with 40 states, because they are in the bag for one or other candidate, and concentrate their efforts in just 10, or sometimes fewer.

So the electoral college is not serving the one noble purpose it was meant to serve. Which amounts to the same conclusion that it should be scrapped.

[Datepalm]

If I'm not mistaken, Norway actually has a system where votes are weighed slightly by their distance from Oslo, assuming that people without easy access to the capital have less political influence in some ways - they can't conveniently go protest parliament, for example - so they're compensated with a slightly higher vote share. Norway also has a pretty explicit anti-agglomeration, or at least rural support, policy. The US system merely penalizes living in a populous state though, regardless of some measure of 'connectedness'. You'd need to make an argument that city or big-state dwellers have a disproportionate political influence one by one due to their location in big states, rather than because they're the, you know, majority.

[butterbumps!]

6 hours ago, Altherion said:

You can build your way out of congestion, you just need to overpower the induced demand and not even Moses could round up the resources for construction on this scale. That said, this is indeed a tangent -- in a place like NYC (where this demand may be prohibitively large), one can just as easily modernize the mass transit.

I think at the level of theory this might be true, but not in any realistically applicable way that wouldn't also devalue the city and drive down demand (which it looks like we might agree on anyway).   But it's definitely not important to the discussion.  It just happens to be a little interest of mine, and I think policy solutions are the way to go.  

Quote

 

It is possible to play with marginal rates and the like, but ultimately, yes, there is no getting around the fact that we're deliberately introducing an inefficiency into the system. Clearly, even with shipping, it is more expensive to pay an American worker $50K per year than it is to pay a Chinese worker $5K (they currently make less than that). Neoliberalism is reasonably efficient... up until it catastrophically fails. The rich are going to have to share.

Yes, this will diminish the job creation (although it will partly counteract the above point regarding inefficiency). Still, as long as either companies or the government are willing to train people, the overall effect should not be too significant.

 

Yea, I don't believe that reintroducing the particular inefficiencies that Trump has promised are practical or beneficial, even for the people who believe those solutions would be favorable to them.   

I'm generally pro-trade, but I'm aware that while that's favorable to the overall economic system, it creates dramatic winners and losers.   I'm in favor of compensating those who are directly harmed by globalization by redistributing and reinvesting some of the egregiously high profits at the top that globalization enables.   I think we might agree here too.

Something, though, that rubs me the wrong way is that a lot of these people calling for jobs aren't merely looking for jobs, but some very specific ones, and sometimes for not very good reasons.   There are a lot of jobs available for the taking, but many of them happen to be in fields historically associated with "women's work," such as nursing, which many men categorically reject.   Harvard Business Review came out with an interesting analysis of the situation, identifying, well, essentially, toxic ideas about gender roles that's partially at root in the call for the president to bring back some very specific jobs they deem properly masculine and the like.   

[Rorshach]

1 hour ago, Datepalm said:

If I'm not mistaken, Norway actually has a system where votes are weighed slightly by their distance from Oslo, assuming that people without easy access to the capital have less political influence in some ways - they can't conveniently go protest parliament, for example - so they're compensated with a slightly higher vote share. Norway also has a pretty explicit anti-agglomeration, or at least rural support, policy. The US system merely penalizes living in a populous state though, regardless of some measure of 'connectedness'. You'd need to make an argument that city or big-state dwellers have a disproportionate political influence one by one due to their location in big states, rather than because they're the, you know, majority.

What we do is we divide votes according to population + (square kilometers*1,8). This favours our three northern areas, which are sparsely populated but relatively large. Then we use Saint-Lague to award mandates (dividing first by 1, then 3, 5, etc...)

[butterbumps!]

4 hours ago, Altherion said:

2) They sometimes come up with insights that I have not seen anywhere else. For example, regarding Pence being lectured by the Hamilton crew: they found this CBS New York article from last March which points out that the casting call for Hamilton specifically requested "non-white" performers (which would seem to be a violation of some New York law). This is a propaganda double play. Most obviously, it illustrates the rank hypocrisy of the Hamilton crew's appeal for diversity (to paraphrase, “diversity” does not appear to include white people). Less obviously (the article does not point this out, but it is common knowledge), since the Founding Fathers were exclusively white men, Hamilton is doing precisely what performances routinely get severe reprimands for -- but with white people replaced by minorities rather than the other way around. Obviously, this type of propaganda will not be very effective with people who believe that discrimination against white people and "cultural appropriation" of their history is OK, but that's not Breitbart's audience.

I'm not sure how much of this is your own opinion versus Brietbart's take.   The choice to cast exclusively PoC for all of the roles other than King George (so there is still a role for a white guy here; did Brietbart bother to mention that?), and then appealing to a notoriously diversity-adverse Vice President to value diversity, is not hypocrisy.   Hamilton's decision to employ almost exclusively people of color only comes across as problematic only to people who are either blissfully unaware of how incredibly hostile to PoC the entertainment industry has been (there's some pretty interesting videos/ articles documenting the various blackface white actors adopted to play certain roles across theatre and film), or those who refuse to believe we do not live in a "post-race" world.  Hamilton's color-conscious reversal of the historic marginalization of PoC is a critique, and cries of "reverse racism" are just absurd.