US politics: 2 weeks notice

[Fury Resurrected]

4 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

But how do you know who is who?!?!?!?!?

Physically, there is a weight difference and Joaquin wears a beard. Outside of that Julían has more polish and is a better public speaker. You can definitely tell which one is shooting for the White House.

[Altherion]

1 hour ago, DMC said:

With two ideologically homogenized parties, it's difficult for anyone to come up with solutions that don't address the structural/institutional aspects that exacerbate the phenomenon.  Including but not isolated to encouraging more competitive elections, rectifying undemocratic features such as the EC and Senate malapportionment, and somehow revitalizing the role of political media to counteract selective exposure (good luck with that one!).  Generally though, I'd agree that these things wax and wane without any intentional effort (although I wouldn't describe it as "naturally").  Polarization is usually quelled upon realignment elections that usher in dominance of one party or another, resulting in the losing party to generally be accommodating to the ruling paradigm of the dominant party - a la the GOP from FDR to Reagan.

That would work, but the problem is that since neither party fully represents the majority of the population, neither can win such a semi-permanent victory. The Democrats won massively in 2008: 365 electoral votes, 257 seats in the House and initially 58 (eventually, as many as 60) in the Senate... but the united government resulting from this victory lasted only 2 years (until the next election). It's hard to imagine a larger victory in this day and age.

Similarly, the undemocratic features are hard to get rid of because they benefit the current politicians. The single most vulnerable of these (unlike the Senate and EC, it does not require an amendment) is probably gerrymandering, but both parties benefit from this so getting rid of it is difficult.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

18 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

Physically, there is a weight difference and Joaquin wears a beard. Outside of that Julían has more polish and is a better public speaker. You can definitely tell which one is shooting for the White House.

It was just a joke. Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like to have an identical twin, with all the pranks you could play on people?

[A True Kaniggit]

5 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It was just a joke. Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like to have an identical twin, with all the pranks you could play on people?

We’ve all seen The Prestige. 

[DMC]

5 minutes ago, Altherion said:

The single most vulnerable of these (unlike the Senate and EC, it does not require an amendment) is probably gerrymandering, but both parties benefit from this so getting rid of it is difficult.

Well, the EC doesn't necessarily require an amendment, although granted the current court would almost certainly strike down the National Vote Plan if it was ever activated.  Anyway, my point in listing those is they're all pretty much difficult to impossible to rectify currently (and not just because they benefit incumbents, although I agree that's a very important factor) - the EC would arguably be the easiest.  Encouraging competitiveness in House elections isn't just about "ending" gerrymandering.  It's also about prioritizing having districts reflect the partisan/ideological competition of the entire state when redistricting.  Even "nonpartisan" commissions still prioritize contiguous and compact districts, which makes directly contradicts such efforts due to geographic sorting.

Just now, A True Kaniggit said:

We’ve all seen The Prestige.

That long con went bad.

[JGP]

Unrelated, but I wonder how the youth vote is splitting between those old geezers. I'd think 3:1 for Biden, but I don't know, could be bias. 

Anyway.

 

[Fury Resurrected]

13 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

It was just a joke. Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like to have an identical twin, with all the pranks you could play on people?

I have not because for most of my childhood people thought my sister and I were identical twins (or that we were just one person). I played the pranks already. 

[IheartIheartTesla]

There will be a Siena poll out for Texas soon, which should be very interesting at this stage of the race (some people seem to think Biden's comment about transitioning from the oil industry would hurt him there, but I am not one of those people)

[JGP]

56 minutes ago, Fury Resurrected said:

I have not because for most of my childhood people thought my sister and I were identical twins (or that we were just one person). I played the pranks already. 

My brother and I still look a lot alike, yet that diverged when I prank-scared him badly during our later teenage years. 

As a consequence he's 5" shorter than I am.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

16 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

We’ve all seen The Prestige. 

I didn't like it. 

[A True Kaniggit]

6 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

My brother and I still look a lot alike, yet that diverged when I prank-scared him badly during our later teenage years. 

As a consequence he's 5" shorter than I am.

My older brother did something similar to me. He’s 18 months older, and 5-6” taller. 

[Fury Resurrected]

6 minutes ago, JEORDHl said:

My brother and I still look a lot alike, yet that diverged when I prank-scared him badly during our later teenage years. 

As a consequence he's 5" shorter than I am.

I am 5” taller than Amber as well, she was a year older than me and we were the same height until high school so we passed as each other until I got taller and started shaving my head into a mohawk. Then it was pretty easy to tell which was which

[DMC]

2 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I didn't like it. 

Philistine.

[JGP]

58 minutes ago, A True Kaniggit said:

My older brother did something similar to me. He’s 18 months older, and 5-6” taller. 

We could be cruel. 

I apologize for all big-brotherkind.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

1 minute ago, DMC said:

Philistine.

I was like 18 and drunk when I saw it in theaters. Found it kind of boring. Got dragged to it by some friends. 

[DMC]

My older brother and I often get the comment that we look alike or even "like twins," and we've been the same height since I stopped growing at about 11-12 (I think, my memory's not the greatest).  But we could never get away with such shenanigans because he's considerably more pale plus he's got dirty blonde hair (which was considerably lighter when young) and hazel eyes while I have brown hair and eyes.  Honestly dunno if it ever would've occurred to us anyway.

3 minutes ago, Tywin et al. said:

I was like 18 and drunk when I saw it in theaters. Found it kind of boring. Got dragged to it by some friends. 

I'd think then it warrants a second chance.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

10 minutes ago, DMC said:

I'd think then it warrants a second chance.

Yeah I've meant to get around to that. It's about to be Borat time, but afterwards, if I'm still wide awake, sure.

[mcbigski]

10 hours ago, argonak said:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-issues-that-divide-people-within-each-party/

This is a really interesting article that talks about the way the parties shake out on issues, and how much in agreement each side really is with each other. I find it hugely comforting to see how close the vast majority of Americans are on a lot of issues.  This reinforces my feelings that the biggest threat to America right now is the Right Wing propoganda machine that is driving a huge wedge between us when we're really not all that far apart.

As an example.  I would never have thought 52% of Republicans supported minimum income of any kind.  I must have really fallen into an us-them thinking style lately.  I need to work harder to evaluate my thinking, but this article really helped me see this plank in my eye.

Well I've been saying since Bush was President that you need to tack to the center to get things done and that Clinton and both Bushes were centrists with different wedge issues.  But is that shocking that half of the Republicans believe in some sort of safety net?  Probably you need to consider that people who aren't lock step with you might still have compassion, but I don't really know you well enough to say for sure.

10 hours ago, BigFatCoward said:

40% of Republicans saying they definitely would not get a vaccine could solve a lot of problems. 

Snarkily, which is why this election doesn't matter in the long run.  You'll win Florida next time after all the mask skeptics are dead.

8 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

You want to go down a real rabbit hole? Look at some of the policy opinions leading up to the 1972 presidential election. Makes you wonder how Nixon, who did nothing during WW2, made legit war hero bomber pilot McGovern look like a pansy hippie.  

Nixon went into the navy at age 29, if wikipedia is to be trusted, and according to his own admission (IIRC), spent most of his time fleecing other officers at poker.  Which is to not say in any way that he shirked his duty, to be clear.

7 hours ago, Killjoybear said:

It's literally what liberals are doing too, both here and elsewhere. This isn't anything specific to conservatives; this is specific to humans. And no, it's not about the 'religious mindset' - it's about human beings not being computers and not making choices on rational thought most of the time. 

Because tell me true - if a Republican campaigned on the above, would YOU vote for them? Pretty doubtful. 

Yay for finding some common ground.  We're all the same fundamentally.  All of us.

6 hours ago, Killjoybear said:

When we've not had major division between the parties has been when the US has had a major external threat. The least polarized time was between the great depression and the end of the cold war, at least as far as identifying with a party and agreeing on common truths and values. I'm pretty skeptical of us getting to that again without that external threat. Maybe in 20-30 years when we are fighting for scraps of the world's resources we'll align - though it probably won't be a liberal alignment. 

It's reasonable to say that the GOP is more involved in stoking this for a variety of reasons - conservatives tend to favor authoritarianism, tend to favor tribal identity and ingroup values, the GOP is more in line with one specific ethnic and religious group compared to the Democratic party which tends to be needing a number of groups to align to common causes. But the notion that this is something specific to conservatives only? Please. 

I dispute that the GOP is in favor of tribal identity though.  Like Trump said, possibly I'm paraphrasing, "my supporters are people that love America".  It's most certainly the Dems and their supporters in the media and academia that keep stressing racial conflict rather than the American ideal that of egalitarianism that we have moved closer and closer towards.

1 hour ago, A True Kaniggit said:

Yeah. This question is on the Louisiana ballot this year.

“Do you support an amendment declaring that, to protect human life, a right to abortion and the funding of abortion shall not be found in the Louisiana Constitution? “

 

They really are bastards.

 

 

I'm about 52% pro choice.  But why would the people of Louisiana be bastards if they made a clear choice here?  Are you anti democracy? 

Ideally, I'd say outlaw any public funding of abortion so that pro life people don't have their tax dollars spent there, but keep it legal, and allow private organizations that want to support abortion, support it.  (Though in practice it would probably be funded by Margaret Sanger approved eugenicists, which is distasteful to say the least.)

26 minutes ago, Altherion said:

That would work, but the problem is that since neither party fully represents the majority of the population, neither can win such a semi-permanent victory. The Democrats won massively in 2008: 365 electoral votes, 257 seats in the House and initially 58 (eventually, as many as 60) in the Senate... but the united government resulting from this victory lasted only 2 years (until the next election). It's hard to imagine a larger victory in this day and age.

Similarly, the undemocratic features are hard to get rid of because they benefit the current politicians. The single most vulnerable of these (unlike the Senate and EC, it does not require an amendment) is probably gerrymandering, but both parties benefit from this so getting rid of it is difficult.

I'm all for gimping the establishment, but I don't think looking for any sort of even semi-permanent victory is in the interest of the People.  We don't want to be on the Erdogan train here.  (In general, I'm sure there are plenty of anti-democratic a holes that want to snuff out dissenters.)

 

We're going to know in the next ten weeks or so how this all turns out, but if Trump gets re-elected, my advice for the Democrats would be to actually let the primaries pick a candidate who has enthusiasm behind him or her.  Obviously the party uppers put the fix in when Biden won one of the Carolinas and then everyone besides Bernie dropped out within 3 days or so.  He's a terribly flawed candidate, to be mild, though if the media carries him over the finish line, I suppose that doesn't matter.

[JGP]

We were having fun.

[DMC]

10 minutes ago, mcbigski said:

I'm all for gimping the establishment, but I don't think looking for any sort of even semi-permanent victory is in the interest of the People.  We don't want to be on the Erdogan train here.  (In general, I'm sure there are plenty of anti-democratic a holes that want to snuff out dissenters.)

Realignment elections provide a dominant paradigm for a certain era, but they hardly denote even a semi-permanent victory - even if as Altherion said the party generally represents a clear majority of the electorate.  Since Reagan there's been Clinton and Obama; after FDR there was Ike and Nixon; after the 1896 realignment there was Wilson; after Lincoln there was Cleveland...

I haven't really looked at this since my undergrad days because it's a throughly unscientific theory (more like something a historian would come up with), but Stephen Skowronek has developed his theory of "political time" for decades.  Here's a good blurb that succinctly explains it:

Quote

Stephen Skowronek has a theory about presidential elections. He looks at the sequence of ‘political time’, the historical pattern of the American presidency that has repeated itself over the last 200 years. The sequence goes from “reconstructive” presidents who transform politics in their own image (Roosevelt, Reagan), followed by their handpicked successors (Truman, Bush ‘41) ; in turn they are usually succeeded by presidents Skowronek calls “pre-emptive”, who adopt the reigning orthodoxy of their parties (Eisenhower, Bill Clinton) followed by a faithful servant of that orthodoxy (Kennedy/Johnson, Bush ‘43) followed by another pre-emptive opposition leader (Nixon, Obama). The final stage is the “disjunctive” leader, who is outside their party’s orthodoxy, and that’s where we are now with Trump.