US Politics: Choking our Democracy

[Jace, Extat]

Professor DMC, can I still get half-credit if I rephrase to America is unstable or the nation in which I live is unstable ? 

I would not want anyone to doubt their system of government unnecessarily, and I definitely wouldn't want anybody to get confused about what unstable could possibly mean in the context of a given statement. 

[DMC]

5 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

can I still get half-credit if I rephrase to America is unstable or the nation in which I live is unstable ? 

Sure.  You can even say the US system is vulnerable to exploitation that can lead to despotism.  Or, like I said, emphasizing the current threat to democracy is almost as grave as it's ever been in our history.  Or that polarization and the correspondent rise of extremism among the GOP has left American democracy on shaky ground.  What I take issue with is your assertion that means it's inevitable.  And, yeah, I had a very specific meaning when I referred to "stable democracies" that you were taking out of context.

[Altherion]

36 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

If the rules don't matter, what's stopping Trump from YOLOing here?

The fact that the rules and customs protect the losers of political conflicts. In the world before the rules and in quite a few countries today, people who are on the losing side are not merely removed from power, but also lose their property or are imprisoned or even executed and any of these can also extend to their families and supporters. As it stands, if Trump loses, he will still be very wealthy, he can continue doing whatever it was he was doing before he became President and his children and grandchildren will inherit that wealth and that lifestyle.

Early in his term, there was some murmuring that Trump would take the Jacksonian approach to the Supreme Court, but he didn't do it then and neither did he try to forge the militias into some sort of paramilitary force. Breaking the rules requires quite a bit of preparation to have any chance of success and none of that is there.

[Durckad]

"Early in his term," there were a number of adults still in the room who were seemingly able to blunt his nascent fascistic tendencies at times.

Who is left in the room now? Pompeo? Barr? They're fucking passing out whetstones with seeming glee. McConnell? McConnell only gives a shit about McConnell and that goes the same for many of the House and Senate GOPers. They've clung on this long, are they going to let go now?

Trump succeeding at a power grab only requires that those above do one thing: nothing. They don't even need to support him, just do what they do best, nothing. The inefficiencies of American democracy and Trump's rabid base will do the rest.

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Sure.  You can even say the US system is vulnerable to exploitation that can lead to despotism.  Or, like I said, emphasizing the current threat to democracy is almost as grave as it's ever been in our history.  Or that polarization and the correspondent rise of extremism among the GOP has left American democracy on shaky ground.  What I take issue with is your assertion that means it's inevitable.  And, yeah, I had a very specific meaning when I referred to "stable democracies" that you were taking out of context.

How does America not revert to despotism when hard choices need to be made? I'm talking about 10-15 years down the line when the rest of the world is finally starting to crunch against global warming, not in three months. What remedy is there for this government? This nation?

Dude, less than half of the population gets to hold everyone else hostage in perpetuity and their chief political aim seems to be making the enlightened folks around them suffer even at great personal cost. You can't design a platform that heals such things. You can't alter the system to be more functional. You can't count on the public to remain engaged towards reform. You can't count on your own allies not to sabotage you if their preferred messiah isn't the reformation's leader. You can't fix education systems. You can't protect voting rights. You can't even keep kids out of cages. You can't hold the president accountable for clearly trying to extort foreign powers to spread lies about his political opponents, and in fact in doing so opened the door for him to straight-up try and rig the system without a shred of deniability. You can't keep sycophants and thieves from slashing every crucial knot that Democrats attempt to tie around our flailing regulatory systems. You can't prosecute these people. You can't fix them. You can't kill them. You can't (X), you can't (Y), and you can't (Z).

So tell me, sir. How exactly I'm being chicken little. Because all that shit I just listed will kill whatever vestiges of 'democracy' you in your exigence see so fit to defend as surely as a severed head will kill a chicken, and yet not one of them are the focus of the Democrats' campaign. So forgive me if I find our democracy's death throes discouraging.

[Freshwater Spartan]

1 hour ago, Durckad said:

Is this going to be the Pussygate of 2020 then?

This was my exact thought. Happened about the same time (I think the access Hollywood tape was a little later), it makes some  republicans nervous but in the end won't matter by October. It's too bad there is no audio. It would have been nice to put in some ads.

[Durckad]

Just now, Freshwater Spartan said:

This was my exact thought. Happened about the same time (I think the access Hollywood tape was a little later), it makes some  republicans nervous but in the end won't matter by October.

Yep.

Quote

It's too bad there is no audio. It would have been nice to put in some ads.

Oh, I wouldn't be surprised if Donnie was dumb enough to speak the words directly into a camera or recorder somewhere at some time. But it wouldn't matter. Cults gotta cult.

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

I'm talking about 10-15 years down the line when the rest of the world is finally starting to crunch against global warming, not in three months.

I have no idea what the political landscape is going to look like in 10-15 years here or globally.  And neither does anybody else so I don't see much point in speculating about it right now.  Like I said to begin with, the longterm effects of climate change are not what I'm referring to - I'm talking about what happens in the next 3-4 months.

6 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

You can't design a platform that heals such things. You can't alter the system to be more functional. You can't count on the public to remain engaged towards reform. You can't count on your own allies not to sabotage you if their preferred messiah isn't the reformation's leader. You can't fix education systems. You can't protect voting rights. You can't even keep kids out of cages. You can't hold the president accountable for clearly trying to extort foreign powers to spread lies about his political opponents, and in fact in doing so opened the door for him to straight-up try and rig the system without a shred of deniability. You can't keep sycophants and thieves from slashing every crucial knot that Democrats attempt to tie around our flailing regulatory systems. You can't prosecute these people. You can't fix them. You can't kill them. You can't (X), you can't (Y), and you can't (Z).

This is all a bunch of bullshit.  You can do almost all of those things by winning elections.  In fact - getting back to most tipping point states having Dem SoS', winning those elections WILL help them protect voting rights.

12 minutes ago, Jace, Basilissa said:

Because all that shit I just listed will kill whatever vestiges of 'democracy' you in your exigence see so fit to defend as surely as a severed head will kill a chicken, and yet not one of them are the focus of the Democrats' campaign. So forgive me if I find our democracy's death throes discouraging.

Stop acting like I'm some Ivory Tower egghead just because I object to your fatalistic positioning.  It doesn't suit you.  And yeah, you can be discouraged!  But this "inevitable" rhetoric leads to disengagement and thus not even putting up a fight.

5 minutes ago, Freshwater Spartan said:

Happened about the same time (I think the access Hollywood tape was a little later)

The Access Hollywood tape was a little more than a month later actually.  I don't think the two are comparable.  Prominent republicans were openly considering calling for Trump to drop out of the race in the immediate aftermath.  It was much more significant than the Atlantic story - if that's all there is to it.  Still, I expected the story to be relatively ignored, and it certainly has not.

[Zorral]

Perhaps another consequence of shoggoth's contempt for the US military war dead and US POWs -- even to asking in bewilderment, "What was in it for them?" seeming then to even scoff at the idea that they volunteered to fight for their country and even for others -- is he's telling this country's army and its citizens the military is irrelevant because, 'what's in it for them.'

The thing is that plague / pandemic and protest and social unrest, frequently very violent social unrest are entirely entwined.  Nothing shows up the true inequality of a society like a pandemic / plague, except famine, perhaps, but famine is so much a part of plagues.  It's rubbed in the face of the population at large that their suffering and death is of a magnitude vastly greater, and, further, those who aren't suffering don't give a rat's ass that they are, and continue forcing them to serve in whatever the rich expect to be served, even when it kills you, the person providing the service.

Black Lives Matter emerged before the pandemic, but the pandemic brought in the white kids in vast numbers who weren't there before.  I've seen very large marches frequently in which nearly all the marchers were white, not black.

There has been a lot of historical research on this in the past -- here are a few resources that provide some information, perhaps previously not widely known, such as the real reason the London playhouses were shut down in Shakespeare's time of the Black Death is not to avoid crowds spreading infection, but because the productions and the playhouses were centers of protest and anger against the rich and the ruling class.

ENGLISH LIFE AND LAW IN THE TIME OF THE BLACK DEATH
By: Mark A. Senn
Real Property, Probate and Trust Journal, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Fall 2003), pp. 507-588
American Bar Association

Shutt Up: Bubonic Plague and Quarantine in Early Modern England
By: Kira L. S. Newman
Journal of Social History, Vol. 45, No. 3, The Hidden History of Crime, Corruption, and States (Spring 2012), pp. 809-834
Oxford University Press

The London Apprentice Riots of the 1590s and the Fiction of Thomas Deloney
By: MIHOKO SUZUKI
Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 2 (spring, 1996), pp. 181-217
Wayne State University Press

Elizabethan Protest, Plague, and Plays: Rereading the "Documents of Control"
By: BARBARA FREEDMAN
English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 26, No. 1, Culture, Documents, and the Drama (WINTER 1996), pp. 17-45
The University of Chicago Press

The City and Its Double: Plague Time in Early Modern London
By: IAN MUNRO
English Literary Renaissance, Vol. 30, No. 2, Re-contextualizing Shakespeare (SPRING 2000), pp. 241-261
The University of Chicago Press

[Freshwater Spartan]

7 minutes ago, DMC said:

I have no idea what the political landscape is going to look like in 10-15 years here or globally.  And neither does anybody else so I don't see much point in speculating about it right now.  Like I said to begin with, the longterm effects of climate change are not what I'm referring to - I'm talking about what happens in the next 3-4 months.

This is all a bunch of bullshit.  You can do almost all of those things by winning elections.  In fact - getting back to most tipping point states having Dem SoS', winning those elections WILL help them protect voting rights.

Stop acting like I'm some Ivory Tower egghead just because I object to your fatalistic positioning.  It doesn't suit you.  And yeah, you can be discouraged!  But this "inevitable" rhetoric leads to disengagement and thus not even putting up a fight.

The Access Hollywood tape was a little more than a month later actually.  I don't think the two are comparable.  Prominent republicans were openly considering calling for Trump to drop out of the race in the immediate aftermath.  It was much more significant than the Atlantic story - if that's all there is to it.  Still, I expected the story to be relatively ignored, and it certainly has not.

I think you are right. This story is a poor man's version of the access Hollywood scandal. To the extent that it seems to have more juice in some ways is that it goes against his core support. Usually the military is a much more important symbolic demographic for Republicans  than women. But you are right in the end I don't see it changing too many minds.  It is interesting that the military seems to be going with Biden this time but that switch started before this story.

[Fury Resurrected]

This is the same guy who talked shit about John McCain’s time as a POW and claimed he could kill someone on fifth avenue.  There is literally nothing he could say and possibly nothing he could do that would bother his base.

[Maithanet]

1 hour ago, Lollygag said:

Forbes has tracked Trump campaign money being moved into his private business. No doubt there's more.

The Trump campaign has raised like a billion dollars, right?  And yet they're making some inexplicable decisions about campaign spending.  They pulled out of Michigan for like three weeks in July.  They went almost totally dark across the country during the week of the RNC (as if every single person was watching the convention ).  And this week they just announced they're canceling their buys in Arizona for this week and possibly the whole month. 

Why would they be doing this, if they are the most well funded campaign in the history of presidential elections?  I suspect it's because a huge portion, possibly more than half, of that money is being funneled away into the pockets of Trump, his family and their friends. 

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

29 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

This is the same guy who talked shit about John McCain’s time as a POW and claimed he could kill someone on fifth avenue.  There is literally nothing he could say and possibly nothing he could do that would bother his base.

I believe the line is "The only way I can lose this election is if they catch me in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." 

[Durckad]

6 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I believe the line is "The only way I can lose this election is if they catch me in bed with a dead girl or a live boy." 

DEEP STATE! FAKE NEWS! NO COPULATION!

 

[Kalbear]

2 hours ago, DMC said:

Most "stable democracies" haven't had true universal suffrage for too much longer (and I don't know where you're getting the "30 years" from.  What is that - 1966-96?  76-2006?  Seems the period you're referring to is considerably longer).  The incumbency advantage is hardly limited to the US among stable democracies.  Twice in the last five contests is not a good look, sure, but 53 out of 58 looks a hell of a lot better.  The EC winner lost the popular vote twice from 1876-1888, and that didn't lead to a descent into despotism/whatever.  As for Trump consistently getting 40%, that's obviously more a reflection of the electorate - which isn't really a factor other than ensuring their rights when considering the facets that define democratic stability.

30 years is roughly from the time of the VRA to the time of consistent imprisonment of minorities that disenfranchised them. In addition to that, that's about the same amount of time that we had a government that did not shut down when there were different parties in power in the various branches; this marks both the historic imprisonment and the period where one party effectively decided to do fuck all in order to spite the other and was not punished for it. I think we ended being a stable democracy when one party could essentially hold the government hostage for 30 years aside from small parts where they were swept out of office entirely - all of two years time. 

And 2 out of 5 is bad, and since that's the period I'm talking about it doesn't really matter about the 53 out of 58. This notion of using the starting point to be 200 years ago ignores the actual facts on the ground. Historically the US had a pretty good run, but the stability has run out. 

Also, I'm not talking about incumbent advantage; I'm talking about that most districts are so partisan that they are never competitive except in the primaries. 

And no, 40% voting along party lines no matter what is not just a reflection of the electorate, because the reverse is also probably accurate - at least 30% will be voting for the Democrat no matter what, and probably even more. It is not a stable situation where there exists only two parties, and one of them is viewed entirely as the enemy by 80% of the population. That is pretty much a staple for instability - for massive swings in policy change, in values, in laws and norms, in lack of compromise and lack of being able to simply get anything done. Things like 'wear a mask' and 'use a vaccine' are now politicized - and that is instability. 

I also would caution you about your views of how democratic the USA is by those links before - at least two of them studied the US in 2014. I doubt even they would give the US as high of marks given the unrest, treatment of refugees, treatment of press, treatment of laws and norms, use of the DoJ to prosecute enemies of the states and free those who are for the state, etc. I mean, seriously - this year we literally had armed federal troops in cities (against the cities' wishes) fighting against the people. Does that sound like a 'stable' democracy to you? Does it sound stable when militia members are going to other cities to kill people? If we heard about this in other countries - where groups of armed paramilitary forces routinely had open violent confrontations that led to deaths with protesters - we would call that signs of either a civil war or  signs of state repression. 

 

[Jace, Extat]

1 minute ago, Durckad said:

DEEP STATE! FAKE NEWS! NO COPULATION!

 

He was just giving them a ride home. To his own bed.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

14 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I believe the line is "The only way I can lose this election is if they catch me in bed with my dead eyed daughter or a live boy." 

Fixed that for you.

Altho, I am not sure it would change much.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

12 minutes ago, A Horse Named Stranger said:

Fixed that for you.

Altho, I am not sure it would change much.

Could help lock up the undecided Southern voter. 

[DMC]

3 minutes ago, Kalibear said:

This notion of using the starting point to be 200 years ago ignores the actual facts on the ground. Historically the US had a pretty good run, but the stability has run out. 

Why?  Using all the available data points rather than cherrypicking the last five is usually preferable.  If you want to use another cutoff, like, say, when the primaries were nationalized, or FDR, or maybe even the beginning of polarization and the last realignment (so 1980), those at least have some justification.  Starting at 2000 and ending at 2016 is blatantly biased.  

As for partisan districts or safe seats, again, plenty of other democracies share that facet as well.  As for the cutoff from the VRA to the rapid rise in the prison population, that's..accurate in terms of time frame.  But the total prison population peaked at about 1.6 million in 2009.  That'd be a little over 1 percent of the 136 million voters in the 2016 election.  I think it's a travesty and have always made efforts that such an injustice gets more attention, but let's not overstate its impact.

15 minutes ago, Kalibear said:

one of them is viewed entirely as the enemy by 80% of the population. That is pretty much a staple for instability - for massive swings in policy change, in values, in laws and norms, in lack of compromise and lack of being able to simply get anything done.

See above.  I agree that extreme polarization and negative partisanship put American democracy on shaky ground.  My point, once again, is that's it's not a facet of "democratic stability," and it doesn't necessarily lead to the breakdown in democracy.  In fact, the last time we were this polarized - in the post civil-war era - that led to, along with the panic of 1893, the progressive era.

19 minutes ago, Kalibear said:

I also would caution you about your views of how democratic the USA is by those links before - at least two of them studied the US in 2014.

No, Freedom House and the EIU are from 2019.  I don't know about the third link - they got a lot of charts there so I don't know exactly which one you're referring to. 

[Kalbear]

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

Why?  Using all the available data points rather than cherrypicking the last five is usually preferable. 

Not if you're wanting to see a trend. Democracies can fall pretty quickly; saying that they were stable for 250 years as a way to justify a rough spot is kind of like saying that a person was cancer free for 59 years but that last year kind of sucked.

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

If you want to use another cutoff, like, say, when the primaries were nationalized, or FDR, or maybe even the beginning of polarization and the last realignment (so 1980), those at least have some justification.  Starting at 2000 and ending at 2016 is blatantly biased.  

If you like, I can do 1996 that goes along with my other hypothesis, in which case it's 2 out of 6 that were not decided by the person who got the most votes. But really, 2 out of 10 is very bad. 

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

As for partisan districts or safe seats, again, plenty of other democracies share that facet as well.  As for the cutoff from the VRA to the rapid rise in the prison population, that's..accurate in terms of time frame.  But the total prison population peaked at about 1.6 million in 2009.  That'd be a little over 1 percent of the 136 million voters in the 2016 election.  I think it's a travesty and have always made efforts that such an injustice gets more attention, but let's not overstate its impact. 

When 20% of the male population of the main ethnic minority is represented in that prison population, let's not understate the impact in repression of ethnic minorities. When the US literally has more people in prison per capita than any other country, let's not understate that - especially when even after they get out of prison, they still cannot vote.

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

See above.  I agree that extreme polarization and negative partisanship put American democracy on shaky ground.  My point, once again, is that's it's not a facet of "democratic stability," and it doesn't necessarily lead to the breakdown in democracy.  In fact, the last time we were this polarized - in the post civil-war era - that led to, along with the panic of 1893, the progressive era.

And the time before that, it led to an actual civil war.

And it's not just extreme polarization and negative partisanship. It's that, it's how laws in the government are being ignored, it's the human rights violations, the use of federal troops in repression, the judicial branch, the rise of corporatism in electioneering...I agree that if it was just that, it might be okay. But it's not.

11 minutes ago, DMC said:

No, Freedom House and the EIU are from 2019.  I don't know about the third link - they got a lot of charts there so I don't know exactly which one you're referring to. 

The study is from 2019, but their data is from 2014 per their conversation in the article. Regardless, none of them take into account 2020.