It is strange that this analysis goes into so much detail and yet skips over so much. The spread of democracy has caused a great deal of chaos as well documented by Amy Chua in her book World on Fire. If we are counting on democracy as a foundation for progress and it causes instability then this concept of world order is bound to destroy itself. The more interesting problem is why democracy not only fails to contribute to stabilization but in fact destabilizes nation states.
It's also strange that the author discards everything prior to 1989 with "Well, that was just the West." To the extent that small-l liberalism is crumbling, it's largely from the inside in Western democracies; foreign policy doesn't just spring into being from empty space.
I’m not sure why you wouldn’t expect democracy to destabilize non-democratic nation states. You’re moving from an authoritarian system that can squash legitimate grievances and desires (e.g. Yugoslavia) that would otherwise need to be addressed under a democracy.
If you look at history, a jump from authoritarian systems to stable democratic systems seems to happen in either countries had some quasi-democratic system prior (e.g. Poland) or a strong national identity to unite the population (e.g. Japan).
Most other democracies transitioned through decades of instability and non-democratic government when given independence (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan).
Japan, Germany, Italy, and South Koreas transition to modern democracy required US military occupation (indeed United States occupying forces wrote Japan's constitution)
This is a strange conclusion considering non-democratic political changes cause plenty of chaos. Russian Revolution, the Chinese Civil War, the Protestant Reformation and accompanying violence, the Boxer Rebellion, all come to mind. Of course changing political systems will cause violence. Look at Kazakhstan. The current protests have very little to do with democracy in their cause. People would have been protesting high gas prices without the goal of having democracy. But autocrats will blame the political side of things when the cause is purely economic.
The real question is what happens once democracy has taken hold.
An election is like flipping a coin that lands on a side with relatively substantial weight of public support (quirks of electoral systems mean it's not guaranteed to be the most popular or least unpopular side, but unless it's blatantly rigged, substantial public support will be there). A revolution is flipping a coin that lands on the side most effectively able to concentrate violence. Sometimes that's achieved by overwhelming public support, but if your "revolution" is a military coup, it doesn't need many people to be on side at all.
Mao won the Civil War only after getting US backing during WW2, and allowing the nationalists to do the bulk of the fight againsg the Japanese while gathering his strength.
Chaos and violence are not the sea thing in your definition. I would much rather have political chaos and no violence than violence and political stability.
I disagree, man is a social animal that has survived throughout the eons by living in packs. Sociology is clear on this: leaders arise, villages are built, work is distributed.
> The spread of democracy has caused a great deal of chaos as well documented by Amy Chua in her book World on Fire.
No surprise there actually. Sensible people have always been aware that liberal/bourgeois values and Constitutional protection of fundamental rights are basic prerequisites for meaningful democracy, as practiced throughout the West. Elections alone are practically irrelevant if these more basic things are missing.
Indeed. And yet it seems sensible people are quite impotent whenever there's such trouble, real or imagined, in some far-away land that a US Administration feels an uncontrollable urge to send in the Marines first, and try to "nation-build" afterward. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq -- we just never learn.
George Orwell: "Not much is learned from the lessons of history. And that is the greatest of the lessons of history."
This hasn't happened, though. True nation-building has not been seriously attempted since post-WWII Germany and Japan. Cargo-cult efforts to "export" the figments of electoral democracy (as seen in Afghanistan and 2000s Iraq) do not matter. They were always doomed to failure.
Among the countries that today maintain the same constitutional order as they have for centuries are democracies. Switzerland, the United States, the UK come to mind. All autocracies that existed 100 years ago have been overthrown—multiple times in many cases.
In what way is democracy to be considered destabilizing?
Looking at history and at the present moment, one could say that instability is an inherent feature of human society, but that democracy substantially reduces that instability.
> autocracies are constantly prone to being overthrown from within, and from without
And this is quite fundamental to the autocratic model. Coming in #2 in a democratic contest for power means you don’t get to be President. Coming in #2 in an autocratic contest for power means losing your property, liberty and likely life. The former encourages reconciliation. The latter, challenging the outcome at all costs.
To build on that, coming in at #2 in a democratic contest for power means you don't get to be President yet. A properly functioning democracy affords you or your faction a second chance usually enhanced by accepting the result. A properly functioning autocracy doesn't.
>In what way is democracy to be considered destabilizing?
I think it's interesting to think of the receiving side of this as well: how stable are democratic allies when their foreign policy can change election cycle to election cycle?
The foreign policy choices of liberal democracies tend to be far more stable, consensus-driven and cooperation-oriented actually. This is what the whole notion of a "liberal international order" ultimately boils down to. And it was hardly a failure - even the most recent and salient seeming "successes" of various more-or-less authoritarian polities are ultimately reliant on the "liberal" order working as well as it does.
> why democracy not only fails to contribute to stabilization but in fact destabilizes nation states
This has been known since antiquity, and is why the Founding Fathers designed not a democracy but a republic that combines elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. (The three branches of government.) That we’ve forgotten this lesson is a likely contributor to the current instability.
The almighty Founding Farme^H^H^Hthers were upper class slave owners, not some omniscient illuminati. In the century after the constitution was ratified there were financial crises, domestic terrorism, skirmishes, ethnic cleansing, lynching, and civil war. The idea that the US republic is the ideal institution is propaganda drummed into the head of US school children. The US is where it is in the world order because of _resources_, access to a large amount of slaves at the time of colonization, geographical isolation, and many other fortunate circumstances.
Regarding the first half of your comment about instability and planning in the founding of the US, I've been reading a book that totally agrees and goes into more detail. Folks (like myself) whose only exposure to US history is public school classes and modern talking points might like it.
It's called Empire of Liberty. It's about the first 3 decades of the US and definitely shows how much was not planned at the time and how much of the constitution was intended as just a starting point to be edited soon after. Very much not the perfect document people treat it (knowingly or unknowingly) today.
> idea that the US republic is the ideal institution
This is a straw man. Nobody, including the Founding Fathers, claimed the original Republic was ideal. The Constitution's vagueness and incompleteness were widely admitted at its signing.
Pure democracies don't work. They devolve into populist, majoritarian nightmares that tear themselves apart. This has been a consistent failure mode across over three millennia. We have minority-protecting, stabilizing features built into our system that have been systematically dismantled and attacked over the past decades, all in the name of more democracy. That more democracy isn't always a good thing has been absent from the discussion, in part due to Cold War and ensuing dynamics, in part due to ad hominem rejections like the one you made.
My counter to that is that the common act of holding the framers (and constitution) in reverence, which you did in the comment upthread, stultifies the ability of the country to react to changing mores and needs. There's a lot of absurdity in US law and politics that simply doesn't exist in countries with more modern and/or fluid constitutions.
Suppose that the US were to create a constitution today, based on today's needs and the anticipated needs of the next 50 years. How different do you think it would look from what was written in the 18th century? (Put aside the impossibility of doing this in today's political climate, as that's not the point of the question.)
I've gone back and forth on this. On one hand, the reverence is stifling and often mis-used. But it's also stabilizing. The fact that we've forgotten the balanced nature of our republic, and that the easiest way to remind us of that fact--which still holds merit today--is by appealing to the authority of the Founding Fathers, would be my Exhibit A to this argument.
It starts to sound demi-religious. You shall not disobey the word of a larger power/figure.
And then society starts to rift over time, through the interpretation by different sects about what the words meant.
Over centuries you get a pretty twisted view of the original values, interpreted by a few different sects, and an ever growing wedge between those interpretations that gets harder and harder to reconcile.
They kind of did think they were building the ideal government, though. One of the major, under-emphasized influences on the framers (especially Jefferson) was Destutt de Tracey, who developed the term “ideology.” For Destutt de Tracey, ideology meant the formal study of ideas as scientific objects. Large parts of his writings deal with determining the scientifically optimal form of government (cf. Marx). In his correspondences with Jefferson, you can read how much the new government took from Destutt de Tracey, both in form and outlook, to the point that Jefferson felt compelled to explain deviations from the Count’s prescriptions.
That "republic" is effectively the same as the "liberal democracy" mentioned in the article. Which, in turn, is the default meaning of "democracy" in contemporary discussion. Democracy doesn't mean mob rule by the majority anymore. It's about elected representatives, constitutional protections, civil liberties, rule of law, separation of powers, checks and balances, and so on.
European constitutional monarchies are effectively republics with some state-sponsored celebrities. North Korea is a republic that is effectively a hereditary monarchy. Official labels don't always match reality.
Anyway, my point was that "republic" effectively means "liberal democracy" in this specific context, where someone invokes the Founding Fathers and contrasts it with direct democracy. And when someone talks about present-day democracy, they usually refer to the entire Western system rather than to simple majority rule.
The constitution calls for a "republican form of government," however the conventional understanding at the time was that such a government is one in which the people choose their rulers. We could use the term "democratic republic" if that term hadn't been co-opted by states that are the exact opposite.
In contrast, states in which the rulers are elected from among a limited set of candidates chosen by the government, do not qualify. For instance, some states curate the selection of candidates by jailing or murdering opposition candidates. Others vet their candidates through a separate body of religious leaders.
In the US, gerrymandering probably does not pass a basic constitutional sniff test, but getting governments to relinquish powers that they enjoy is no small feat.
Democracy does contribute to stabilization, but the people have to want it. In the same way that the liberal order requires all nations to sacrifice some self-interest to enable that stability, factions within a country must do the same. We’re now reaching a point where some nations, as well as some factions, no longer see this as a worthwhile sacrifice. They prefer to take power where they can get it and manage the chaos that ensues.
Any post that tries to link Trump and geopolitics is suspect. He was in for 4 years and that isn't very long. The only thing Trump is good for in that context is a reminder that there is a big gap between what paid talking heads believe and many voters accept as true.
Also - everything collapses, every world order and every regional power either has collapsed or will collapse. The Roman Empire collapsed with a thousand-year gap between the last breath of the east and west wings. The fact that something is currently collapsing doesn't tell us much except that it hasn't collapsed yet.
> Does it? Seems to me that most people don't, and never have trusted each other
Most people don't need to trust each other. The elites certainly do, at the very least, to respect the peaceful transfer of power. Democracies have, by design, lots of elites, so the coördination problem becomes (intentionally) more difficult.
A society does need trust. The US is losing that trust which is worrying. The almost-majority who doubt election integrity is a symptom of that, not the cause.
When it's 60% who have doubts, is it still a "blindingly obvious lie"? What about 80%?
Today is January 7th. One year ago today, they were still at the Capitol grounds picking up Confederate flags, cleaning up Swastikas, and sweeping up truckloads of Trump 2020 paraphernalia. For the last year, hundreds of Trump’s foot soldiers have been flowing through the criminal justice system, one after another pleading that they were only there that day fighting for the former President at his direction.
Today, one year later, the evidence is clear about what the plot was. Actually it was all admitted to on live TV and even had a name: “The Green Bay Sweep”
- pretend there was fraud, and lie about it profusely.
- GOP Reps and Senators challenge specific states, baselessly.
- Pence rejects the certification, assuming powers he doesn’t have (but who would stop him?)
- states baselessly reject election results and choose Trump instead
- Contested election is thrown to House
- Majority Republican delegations install Trump as President, thereby officially ending American democracy.
Of course at the last moment, Pence refused to be part of this plan, because he knew what they wanted him to do was unconstitutional. Hence the Capitol insurrection. Hence "Hang Mike Pence".
Whether that equates to societal collapse, I don’t know, but it does amount to tearing up and burning the Constitution.
Mearsheimer likes Putin, hates China, and thinks the future is nationalism. He structures his analysis around that narrative. He opposes arming Ukraine. He can't stand that the revolution in Kazakhstan could thwart Putin rebuilding a rump Soviet empire. He seems to be aiming to become a Great Thinker of Trumpism 2.0.
I reckon it's more that he thinks that nationalism and economic self-interest are more stable than liberal democracies pursuing policies with enlightened self-interest (e.g. supporting immigration and free trade). He appears to view the world along a stable / chaotic axis, where stability requires an umbrella of hegemony structured in opposition to another hegemony.
It's certainly a hypothesis, but I think it's more descriptive than prescriptive, but he risks turning a bit circular: arguing that a certain model of the world is the only stable model, while simultaneously arguing that other models should be torn down because they're not stable - adding to the instability.
I think it's obvious that the policies you highlight as being 'enlightened' are not universally popular, and also create instability.
Off shoring and massive immigration are never popular with the working and lower classes, these are popular with the higher classes who desire cheap labor for their rent seeking operations. This behavior is neither liberal nor democratic and is rarely the product of a broad base democratic effort; its not as though the immigration politics of the modern west emerged after popular outcry- they are entirely top down efforts. In this regard we can say that they might be enlightened from a certain perspective but are they really democratic?
The author presents nationalism as an ideology that is ever-present; but that is amplified by hyperglobalisation. I think he's right about that. In fact I think nationalism is a reasonable response to damaging interference from foreign powers and international institutions.
What else can people do, when they lose their jobs to offshoring and trade agreements, and find that everyone in their neighbourhood is now talking in foreign and competing with them for housing? All they can do is demand that foreign interference and immigration be brought to a halt.
I'm not advocating nationalism; that way lies war. But hyperglobalisation has failed, and needs to be reversed.
> Off shoring and massive immigration are never popular with the working and lower classes, these are popular with the higher classes who desire cheap labor for their rent seeking
You simultaneously mischaracterize what I wrote and assume that you speak for multiple classes of people, universally, world wide. You're wrong about what I wrote and you're wrong in your assumption of the universality of your opinion.
I didn't say anything about off shoring or massive immigration. There's majority support for lots of qualified categories of immigration, and it's not based on rent-seeking higher classes. Sometimes it's mutuality (e.g. EU free movement), sometimes it's competitive (e.g. football players), sometimes it's self-interested (e.g. doctors), sometimes it's ethnocentric, etc.
Please don't pattern-fit what you read to your pet trigger phrases.
We must be talking past each other ; I spoke of immigration to replace or replenish the working class labour pools - then you point to other sorts of migration entirely.
I am afraid that severe climate change might lead to a future with fewer or no borders. Not having borders isn't necessarily going to be great. Nationalism will not go away as long as there are humans. We may have different labels for it but the effect will be the same.
I see a lot of people predicting the decline of democracy. The US is the pole that is crucial to the world order as I cannot imagine how the world will be if China is the sole power. The last few years as shown how flimsy our systems and safeguards are and that most of them work on honor system rather and someone can definitely do a lot of damage if they wanted to. It feels like the next 2-3 yrs are going to be very critical. I don’t have a very good feeling about the 2024 elections and that might bring by about chaos. What do people think here?
I certainly think that model of democracy - as it was applied (or attempted to) to Libya and Syria, is not going to win a lot of support in a lot of countries which don't have the democracy "yet".
The precedent has been set in the U.S. If you can whip up an army of fanatics to assault the Capitol then you may do so with impunity. The system set up 230 years ago has too many imbalances. We don’t have proportional representation in either chamber of Congress and the way things are set up a minority of the electorate can prevent even the fiscal policies of the majority. Eventually such an imbalance will need to change. It can not last for long.
There is also great social change. Women are a large majority of incoming college students and are a majority in graduating with college degrees right now. Demographic changes are occurring. There are severe inefficiencies in the basic functioning of our society. For instance we spend far more on healthcare and education than other countries with worse outcomes.
Defeat in Afghanistan, divided population at home, crumbling infrastructure, etc. all point to a state of long term imperial decline.
>The precedent has been set in the U.S. If you can whip up an army of fanatics to assault the Capitol then you may do so with impunity.
No it has not. The people involved are being prosecuted and criminal punishments are being handed down.
Trump is not being prosecuted, because disagreeing with the official election results are not a crime, nor is it illegal to hold campaigns arguing your case. If Trump had actually done something illegal, he would be prosecuted.
The advantage of democracy is that it usually obviates the need violent political civil wars as the people are able to express their will as to who is the leader.
This is an inherent disadvantage of dictatorships, as political factions can back different leaders and cause prolonged and recurrent civil wars. Looking at the history of empires, these dynastic conflicts are incredibly common.
The disadvantage of democracies is that frequent elections prevent leadership from executing multi-decade long objectives. Democratic leadership changes often countermand the direction of prior administrations. Further, these decisions are subject to popular fashions and often represent the interests of vast swaths of the population who are uneducated and/or young. Democracies are often slaves to circumstance and societal evolution - and this is exacerbated with social media.
The advantage of dictatorships is their ability to create generational goals and execute methodical plans that can show value to the nation decades later. Dictatorships have the ability to shape societal evolution (for better or worse).
Oversimplifying this, you could say that a democracy acts according the average intelligence of the society, whereas a dictatorship acts according to the intelligence of the leader (and thus the process to select a dictator makes it far more critical to be meritocratic).
> Oversimplifying this, you could say that a democracy acts according the average intelligence of the society, whereas a dictatorship acts according to the intelligence of the leader
The problem with dictatorships is the dictator. Dictators are typically Cluster B personalities: narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. Dictatorships don’t revolve around the intelligence of the dictator, but around their ego. Dictators aren’t interested in doing what’s right for society, they are interested in doing what’s right for themselves. This is why they are so dangerous, because those two goals are often at odds.
For this reason, the dictator surrounds himself with toadies, lickspittles, sycophants, and generally other cluster B personalities who want to be a proxy for the dictator. This results in rampant government corruption and incompetence, as people end up in jobs for which they are not qualified, but which they earned through loyalty to the dictator.
So if you want to map a dictatorship’s intelligence I would say they converge to the intelligence of the worst, most power-hungry, morally and ethically bankrupt people in society.
You could also probably argue that the power structure set up in a dictatorship exacerbates these tendencies. Absolute power would naturally push you toward a narcissistic view on the world, because, well, you always would be the most important person in the room, and everyone else's job is literally to do what you want.
Oh for sure. The primary directive of a narcissist is to feed off of narcissistic supply. It's what they live for. When a narcissist gets into power, it's like overdosing on a drug for them. Every word they say is recorded, every move they make is watched. They gain the ability to speak and have it broadcast to every corner of their nation. It's addictive to them.
This is why you see dictators crack down on journalists; while the narcissist loves praise, he hates criticism no matter how deserved. Well, it's part of the reason. One other reason is that dictatorships are based on mythologies that put the dictator at the center of the universe. Typically a dictator establishes legitimacy by painting "others" as the source of all societal problems, and the dictator will solve those problems by subjugating the "other". Of course that's not true, and journalists will unhelpfully point that out, so usually the first thing to go under a dictatorship is the free press.
And it goes on from there. As you start persecuting the "others" they will use the judicial system for redress and they will receive it. So then they have to stack the courts.
People will see this and attempt to elect new leaders. So then they have to kill elections, or at least rig them.
The political opposition will thwart your agenda, so they have to get rid of them as well. That's when political purges start happening.
Their own institutions like the Department of Health, Labor, Economy, War or what have you will issue reports that show the problems are not improving, despite the fact that the "others" have been persecuted into the ground. That's when they start installing unqualified quislings into these bureaucracies who will push their agenda.
Of course, now that they've gutted the government of all competency things will begin getting worse and people will start to get upset with you. That's not good for narcissistic supply. So they find a new "other" to persecute.
The cycle repeats as more and more groups are isolated, persecuted, and driven from society. But the problems are never fixed because there's no attempt to even fix them. It's all a game of shifting shells that never ends. But one thing is true through all of this: their ego is happy, so that's all that matters to the dictator.
This is why dictators usually face a bloody end. They build the pressure up to a point where it is explosive, and then they find themselves hiding in a hole in the ground, cowering in a bunker with a loaded gun, or hanging from a gas station.
> Dictatorships don’t revolve around the intelligence of the dictator, but around their ego.
This is a problem with all hierarchically-driven organizations in the absence of adequate checks and balances, not just dictatorships. It affects all sorts of privately-run hierarchies as much as the various sorts of internal hierarchies which operate within governments (including, to a varying extent, nominally democratic ones).
Of course, it's not always clear that these problems can be even mitigated, let alone resolved. We still use large organizational hierarchies to do all sorts of things 'at scale', while acknowledging their drawbacks.
Dictators and corruption are indeed inseparable. But the present UK government is also being shaken by revelations of extensive corruption.
Corruption is insidious; it starts with buddies of the glorious leader, leading to businesses that are founded on corruption, ending up with almost every official in every capacity becoming corrupt, including policemen and army officers. In the process the people are impoverished, markets are kneecapped, and the currency becomes debauched. Honesty and honour become a liability.
I'm much more scared of corruption than ideology X or ideology Y. If you're lucky enough to live in a country where the rule of law still sort-of works, you'd better hope that corruption is stamped out as soon as it's head pops up.
I don't know of a better replacement for democracy but perhaps a Proportional Representation voting system would help by encouraging the creation of other parties with more power than an independent. Of course, how do you get that implemented?
I'm an American expat who's been living in Germany for the better part of a decade. I've often confronted an unfairly pessimistic, doom and gloom attitude from German people regarding the US, and I've always pushed back on this, as I did not feel it represented the reality that the US was as prosperous, mostly well functioning country with a few loud eccentricities which are not always understood from the outside.
However my perception was shook a bit in my most recent trip back to the states over this past holidays. Cream cheese was unavailable as an ingredient for the Christmas meal due to supply chain issues. People complained about inflation and high gas prices. Flights were totally unreliable, and COVID tests were almost impossible to come by.
On top of all those real-world issues, it was surprising to see how compliance has become a political issue in the US. My liberal family members treated mask wearing as an issue of character, and seemed to treat catching covid as almost a moral failing, while my conservative family members viewed it almost as a scam.
I have seen the politicization of every issue before. I've been aware that the US government has been in a state for a long time where it seems to be structurally unable of getting things done. But this is the first time I have seen material conditions degraded to such an extent in my home country that it is impacting the day to day lives of even middle class and upper middle class people. This was especially surprising since the same issues have not presented themselves in Germany.
I hope what I witnessed was just the short-term effect of an unprecedented wave of the virus, but it was enough to give me doubts.
The problem in America isn't a lack of cream cheese, I'm sorry. The problem is that there was a free and fair election last year that one party's leader refers to as a coup, which then lead to an actual coup attempt. They refer to that as a patriotic uprising. This happens because people are being lied to on purpose. Republican leadership wants this to happen. They are doing it on purpose. This does not happen because there's no cream cheese at the store. This is something that takes decades to foster.
I'm sorry but you are missing the point. You could argue we haven't had a proper transition of power in several administrations. In Bush v. Gore we had (perhaps reasonable) concerns about the validity of the result thanks to the supreme court stepping in. When Obama took office, a significant portion of the opposition refused to believe he was even an American citizen. Trump's validity was questioned on the grounds that he was a Russian plant - a claim which was pursued with a years-long very public official investigation which yielded smoke and no fire.
My point is, this is the first time I have seen America's issues actually manifest in material ways. Political alienation is concerning, but it's not all that powerful on its own. Political alienation plus the degradation of material conditions is absolutely how wars are started.
> Trump's validity was questioned on the grounds that he was a Russian plant - a claim which was pursued with a years-long very public official investigation which yielded smoke and no fire.
The craziest voices claimed he was a Russian plant, but the mainstream claim was always collusion, which was proven by the Senate Republicans in volume 5 of their report on Russian Active Measures. The report established that the Trump campaign, through its chairman, was funneling internal campaign data to a Russian Intelligence Officer, as Russian Intelligence was running a psyops campaign against American citizens [0]. So yes, there was smoke and it was coming from a fire. There was collusion, and there was obstruction. It's been proven and documented.
When we look at the transition of power, yes it's true that there have been issues in past elections and that's what I mean when I say this has been going on for a while. There was actual violence in the 2000 election (the Brooks Brothers Riot). But at the same time we are someplace new when an actual coup plot is formed and executed by the sitting President of the United States.
And I hear you about material conditions, but at the same time the people who stormed the Capitol flew there in planes. They stayed in expensive hotels. They captured their crimes live on their expensive cell phones. They included doctors, lawyers, and business executives, and politicians. This isn't about economic anxiety. That's a narrative that's been going on since 2016, and it's just hard to find real evidence of that. It's true that there have been some temporary shortages of specific items, but in general I can go out and buy cream cheese today, and really anything else I would like. Material conditions are fine in America.
> Political alienation plus the degradation of material conditions is absolutely how wars are started.
Wars also start when leaders deliberately lie to masses of people, claiming their votes are being stolen when they aren't. Sometimes wars just happen because of conditions, and sometimes powerful people and groups take a situation and tip it over because they would like to see a war happen, because it's preferable to the alternative. That's where we are in America.
> So yes, there was smoke and it was coming from a fire. There was collusion, and there was obstruction. It's been proven and documented.
There may have been some Russian involvement in the 2016 election, but the effort has always been to blame Russia for Trump's election. In my opinion this has been very damaging to American politics. It gave liberals and democrats an out to ignore the very real reasons for which Trump attracted a very real base of support leading up to that election. If you remove Trump's nationalistic rhetoric and racial dog-whistling, his populist messaging was not all that different form Obama's.
If you ask me, a lot more good would have been done by actually reckoning with the fact that something like 30-40% of the voting population genuinely wanted him to be president rather than trying to live with the fantasy that Putin is so all-powerful that a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ad-buys were able to overthrow American democracy.
> But at the same time we are someplace new when an actual coup plot is formed and executed by the sitting President of the United States.
I agree that the events of Jan 6th were unprecedented, and uniquely disturbing. I think the leaders of the movement should have been brought up on treason charges.
> Wars also start when leaders deliberately lie to masses of people, claiming their votes are being stolen when they aren't.
Hasn't this been the exact claim of the Clinton campaign post 2016? That the election results are illegitimate?
> It's true that there have been some temporary shortages of specific items, but in general I can go out and buy cream cheese today, and really anything else I would like. Material conditions are fine in America.
I hope you are right, and that I was just particularly unlucky to encounter a series of market failures in a single 3-week period due to extraordinary circumstances.
I'm not really here to relitigate the 2016 campaign. I have a lot of thoughts on it but I'll spare you them here. If you're genuinely interested let me know and I'll shoot you an e-mail.
But I will say this much because it relates to my previous post directly:
> trying to live with the fantasy that Putin is so all-powerful that a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ad-buys were able to overthrow American democracy.
I will note that the Russian GRU was able to hyper-target Facebook advertisements in large part because they were receiving updates on who to target from the Trump campaign. I think it's a fantasy to suggest that Putin can overthrow democracy this way, but that's not really what happened. Trump and Putin coordinated through public channels and behind closed doors through intermediaries (let's not forget that Trump's son, son-in-law, and aforementioned campaign manager turned GRU liaison, met with a Russian spy at Trump's residence to discuss an explicit cooperation deal). Putin couldn't have done what he did alone -- he needed a willing, like-minded, yet distant partner in one of the two major political parties in America, and he found one in Trump.
> Hasn't this been the exact claim of the Clinton campaign post 2016? That the election results are illegitimate?
It's was entirely warranted to question the results of our electoral system, and honestly it was Trump's right to do so after the 2020 election as well. I think it is important to probe weaknesses in our system and to fix them where appropriate. But after that probing is done and the vote is certified legitimate, the questioning needs to cease.
However, when a candidate has exhausted all legal remedies, they can't continue to call into question the results of the vote. That's where this all fell apart. Trump lost his claims in 62/63 cases and that should have been the end of it. But it wasn't, and look where that got us.
I think no one should listen to Clinton anymore, and I never wanted her to be President, but she has a point about Trump's legitimacy. The legitimacy of a leader in the US is usually established by the results of an election, but what if material crimes are committed to win the election? And once a leader is elected, are the legitimate for their term or can they lose that legitimacy through abuse of their power?
Trump aided and abetted the hacking of his opponent and then lied about his campaign's direct involvement with the organization that did the hacking, both to the American people and the FBI. He lied about the fact that at the time, he was in talks with Putin about building a Trump Tower Moscow, with a penthouse gift dedicated to Putin. After he was sword into office, he swiftly used the authority granted by the American people to quash the investigation into that very malfeasance. He also obstructed the subsequent Special Counsel investigation by destroying evidence, lying to investigators, and attempting to quash it as well. This behavior is not the legitimate exercise of trust placed on our leaders, it's a pattern that more closely resembles a prolific serial criminal covering his tracks.
The question I always ask myself when this topic comes up is, Trump and Russia colluded to do what?
I want to be clear that, if Trump's campaign in any way worked with a foreign power for the purpose of furthering it's electoral interests, that is something which is quite shocking, and anyone involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
However,
I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that if 1) Trump worked with Russia for the purpose of winning the election, and 2) that Trump in the end did win the election, that 3) working with Russia caused Trump to win the election.
This last part is where we run into a bit of trouble.
Returning to the original question: Trump and Russia colluded to do what?
Let's take it for granted that Trump's campaign met with Russian government agents, talked strategy, and funneled information which could be used for targeted advertising and other purposes.
In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do? The answer is not very much. It's not like Russia hacked into the voting system and changed votes. Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population to take the electoral college, to vote for him. In other words, Trump is the primary reason Trump got elected. Russia at best put a finger on the scale, or added a little bit more fuel to a fire which was already burning.
To make an analogy: let's say that I made my house out of matchsticks, and you came along and set it on fire with a magnifying glass and sunlight. Yes you might have committed an act which triggered this event, but who is primarily responsible for my house being burned down?
If any of this is shocking to you, please I implore you to read in full the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel report I linked earlier. These reports are nonpartisan and bipartisan respectively, and were directed by Republicans who were appointed and/or elected by Republicans. Read the raw text without any media filter or paraphrasing, especially the Mueller Report Vol I and the Senate Intel Report on Russian Active Measures Vol. V.
> I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that ... working with Russia caused Trump to win the election.
I can assure you I'm not under any delusion that this is the cause of Trump winning. I'm not even sure it helped that much. I believe the proximal cause of Hillary's loss was actually the Comey announcement that happened mere days before the election. If you look at the polls, you can see her favorability dropped significantly after that announcement but then started to bounce back (but not quite to the level it was at before the announcement). Given how tight the contest was, and how that announcement visibly affected polling, there's a big question in my mind that had Comey not done that, she might have won.
> Trump and Russia colluded to do what?
Here's what the Mueller report says:
[T]he investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency and worked to secure that outcome, and that the Campaign expected it would benefit electorally from information stolen and released through Russian efforts.
It goes on to say:
[T]he investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities.
So we know why they were engaged in this relationship; Russia didn't want a Clinton presidency, and Trump wanted to be President. While the Mueller report "did not establish" that the Trump campaign "conspired" with Russia to do this, it's important to note that:
1. Conspiracy is a technical legal term, this was always an unlikely scenario and not at all what the mainstream and serious jurists were alleging. It's worth noting that the directive to focus the investigation on "conspiracy" came from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who also intoned to Trump privately that he would "land this plane", referring to concluding the Mueller investigation in a light favorable to Trump. When the report was released, it was AG Bill Barr who released the second quote above and withheld the first one from the public, a move that a federal judge wrote lacked "candor".
2. "The investigation did not establish members..." is not the same as "The investigation established members did not...". Most of the media and all of the GOP read the former and pretended it was the latter. This is especially disturbing because the reason the Muller report says it could not establish these facts was in part because witnesses lied, destroyed evidence, and obstructed the investigation, hence the entire second volume of the report (this is why obstruction is a crime on its own, because if you are allowed to obstruct an investigation with impunity, you can get away with almost anything). This is where the Senate report picks up and fills in more details about actual coordination between Trump and Russia via Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort.
> In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do?
They hacked the Democratic National Committee and handed the hacked materials over to Wikileaks for distribution. PACS can't do that. Also unlike PACS, the Russian GRU isn't subject to any American campaign finance laws which are in place to provide transparency to the electoral process.
> Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the...
Again I just don't think any of this is particularly relevant. Trump didn't get elected by colluding with Russia. Trump got elected because he articulated a salient message which resonated with many Americans.
If you think Hillary Clinton's emails had more to do with the result of the election than NAFTA's effect on the rust belt, the opioid epidemic, the skyrocketing costs of healthcare and education, and the handling of the 2008 financial crisis then I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning.
I just don't think it's productive at all to fixate on Trump as some sort of bogeyman. He's merely a symptom of our dysfunctional government.
The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate and January 6 is not particularly interesting to me. If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people.
I don't think it's relevant either, not at the moment anyway, not after 1/6. But the collusion happened and we need to stop pretending it didn't.
> If you think Hillary Clinton's emails ... I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning.
I would say all of those things you listed would be my personal list of grievances against Hillary Clinton. I think it put her toe-to-toe with someone fundamentally unfit for office. But when I talk to Trump voters, their grievances include almost none of the points you listed. In order they are almost invariably: 1. E-mails, 2. Benghazi, 3. her proximity to Bill Clinton. That's just my experience anyway, maybe it's not generalizable. But it's not surprising, as this is roughly the proportion of time spent on each topic in the media, particularly on Fox News. They didn't focus on the cost of education or the opioid crisis. They did focus on NAFTA a bit, but more so than anything it was e-mails they focused on. Just look at the peak here of search terms that drop off after the election: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202...
> The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate
If you think the reaction to the events laid out in the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel report amount to "pearl clutching", then you admit it's above-board to work in lock-step with a foreign government to hack your electoral opponents, and that it's fine to then leverage your privileged position to cover it up. If that's your stance, say so. That's fine. What's not fine is to minimize what happened as "pearl clutching". A thing happened and it has serious implications that drive directly at the dysfunction of our government. We have to be lucid about those implications. Just don't be surprised when a Democrat does it in the future, I wouldn't put it past them. That's what normalization of this stuff does.
> If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people.
I know you said you've been out of the country for almost a decade, so maybe you have not followed how dysfunctional things are now. None of what you suggest will be signed into law. Maybe some election reforms will squeak through, but even then they might just patch a 19th century old electoral count act, and even that is going to be a massive ask.
Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures are removing all of the barriers that caused their "Green Bay Sweep" plan to fail on 1/6, giving themselves full partisan control of state election boards, which used to be nonpartisan. Again, you can call that uninteresting pearl clutching, but at the same time I will note that you are living in a functioning democracy, whereas we here in the homeland are currently classified as a backsliding democracy due to the GOP agenda. It's very interesting to those of us who are still here.
I'd be very interested to hear the take of older Germans you know about 1/6, as to whether they also think the consternation is pearl clutching.
> None of what you suggest will be signed into law.
> Republican state legislatures are removing all of the barriers that caused their "Green Bay Sweep" plan to fail on 1/6, giving themselves full partisan control of state election boards, which used to be nonpartisan.
These are real problems. If you ask me, you homelanders should avoid spending one minute longer clutching your pearls over a tin-pot dictator who was only a symptom of the problem, and focus 100% on trying to find solutions for real problems.
> Hasn't this been the exact claim of the Clinton campaign post 2016? That the election results are illegitimate?
...no, I don't believe the Clinton campaign has ever claimed that.
They do believe that Russia put its thumb on the scale, at that the Trump administration—even as beneficiaries, yes—should have punished Russia diplomatically for their behavior.
> If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president
In reference to WikiLeaks making her private emails available.
I will grant you this is not exactly the same as claiming the results of the election were not legitimate. But it does seem to directly blame foreign interference for her loss.
To me the question of foreign interference is way less important than the question of why this election was even close, or indeed why Trump even made it as far as the nomination.
> I will grant you this is not exactly the same as claiming the results of the election were not legitimate. But it does seem to directly blame foreign interference for her loss.
But I think that's a very important distinction! If a foreign power attempts to influence our elections through underhanded means, the US should retaliate diplomatically, regardless of who won. Note, that doesn't mean the winner should be called into question.
> To me the question of foreign interference is way less important than the question of why this election was even close, or indeed why Trump even made it as far as the nomination.
I think they're both important. I also think that foreign interference is one part (key word) of the answer.
A robust democracy would not be so vulnerable that one of the candidates' actual private emails being made public would not swing the election.
We live in an adversarial world, and America will always have enemies. If we are so fragile that a 3rd rate hack can get a tin-pot dictator elected, the fragility is the problem, not the attack itself.
> In reference to WikiLeaks making her private emails available.
Oct 28 was the day FBI Director James Comey made his announcement that the FBI had reopened its probe into the Clinton campaign based on a laptop it received. It quickly determined all of the e-mails were duplicates of ones they had already seen, and reversed course, but the damage was done. I think she's really saying that was the proximal cause, and I agree with that assessment.
DNC hacked e-mails were released on Oct 7, the same day that the Washington Post published the Trump Access Hollywood tape.
She blames both, but I think everyone pretty much realizes that the FBI director tanked her chances hard with that move.
Collusion "is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law". So you're effectively saying that the "mainstream claim" is a big nothingburger. Bait and switch.
Russia and the Trump campaign worked together to win an election. That doesn’t alarm you? You sound like liberals do when I bring up the Clintons making millions of dollars for speeches at Goldman Sachs and Citigroup after them and Rubin gutted Glass-Steagall and other regulations that benefited investment banks.
We couldn't prove any form of conspiracy largely due to the fact that the participants didn't think they were doing anything wrong, which is the kind of crazy laws that apply to the powerful that don't apply to the governed (I certainly can't use that kind of logic if the cops show up at my door about something or I get pulled over while driving).
And collusion with a foreign nation doesn't exist as a specific crime, but in a more sane time it would have been easy to see it was what was intended by "high crimes and misdemeanors".
> However my perception was shook a bit in my most recent trip back to the states over this past holidays. Cream cheese was unavailable as an ingredient for the Christmas meal due to supply chain issues. People complained about inflation and high gas prices. Flights were totally unreliable, and COVID tests were almost impossible to come by.
This is what worries you? That we're having some supply chain problems with cream cheese, largely as a result of a once-in-a-century pandemic?
The price of gas is far too cheap anyway given it's environmental cost, Americans should consider buying smaller freaking cars. While it is hard to find COVID tests, it's very easy to find vaccines (and has been for eight months), and between the two I'd say we prioritized the right thing. Flights are clearly a result of employees catching Omicron.
I'm much more worried about the insurrection, and voter suppression, and the large percentage of Americans who think Biden won illegitimately. Or, if you want to focus on material issues, I'm worried that we're the only advanced country without universal healthcare, income inequality has been skyrocketing for decades, and we can't seem to build major new infrastructure projects. (The recent infrastructure bill is encouraging, but e.g. Amtrak says it will mostly be used for maintenance on existing lines, WTF?!)
Oh, and I'm worried about climate change, but at least most of those problems are in the future. You know, after it's too late to do anything about it.
Funny you should lead with that as your main concern, because it has the same problem as the fabrications about Russian collusion (which I note has fallen way out of fashion now that election security has happily returned to being a iron-clad given [0]) - at some point the narrative collapses due to a lack of any and all evidence. It has been 12 months, the transfer of power turned out to be mostly peaceful - as usual. And then people quite rightly ask "why was the focus on fabrications rather than real, tangible problems - like supply chain instability and lack of disaster preparedness?".
[0] Possibly the Trump administration did good work securing them?
> because it has the same problem as the fabrications about Russian collusion
I'm still worried about Russia interfering in our elections. I can't speak for others.
> And then people quite rightly ask "why was the focus on fabrications rather than real, tangible problems."
Because it almost worked. If one police officer had run a different way, the insurrectionists probably would have found where the congresspeople were. Say a bunch of them are killed—what do you do now? If they came from states that had opposite party governors, and the balance of power in congress changes... what does that mean for democratic legitimacy?
That day came very, very close to being very bad, and there's no reason to think it won't repeat itself in a few years if we don't take the problem seriously.
Surely a global shortage of a certain very specific good is different than a local shortage of everyday consumer goods.
I hope you are right that this is not a serious issue. I can only say that I ran into this, as well as being unable to reliably get on a flight, as well as being unable to easily aquire a PCR test required for international travel all within the same 3 week period.
And none of these problems seem to exist in Germany.
If you want to pretend that Russian collusion was a fabrication, you have to explain why Senate Republicans found that Paul Manafort was exchanging internal campaign data with a Russian Intelligence Officer. So far, no one who I have encountered who believes that collusion was a hoax is able to explain this uncomfortable fact.
Here's what the Senate Intel. Committee concluded:
[B]ased on the facts detailed in the Committee's Report, that the Russian intelligence services' assault on the integrity of the 2016 U.S. electoral process[,] and Trump and his associates' participation in and enabling of this Russian activity, represents one of the single most grave counterintelligence threats to American national security in the modem era.
Again, that was the conclusion of the Republican majority Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Republican Richard Burr. What about this is a fabrication?
What happened in 2020 is not that the election was more secure per se (although there was some foreign interference reported at the time, it was not as bad as in 2016), it was that Paul Manafort was not Trump's campaign manager. He was the main vector between the Trump campaign and Russia. And honestly at that point, Russia didn't have to do any work to get their propaganda on American airwaves, because Fox New was literally doing their job for them -- e.g. broadcasting the position that Ukraine was responsible for the 2016 DNC hacking, not Russia.
> the transfer of power turned out to be mostly peaceful - as usual.
Mostly peaceful? A violent insurrection at the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, sent there by the defeated President, with the explicit intention of preventing the transfer of power through force is not "mostly peaceful", I'm sorry. It actually marked the ignominious end of a 200+ year streak of peaceful transfers of power. Even during the Civil war something like 1/6 didn't happen.
> we can't seem to build major new infrastructure projects.
No worries, you are in good company - we can’t build anything big in Germany, too. Between NIMBY lawsuits and over regulation everything takes literally decades and cost billions. Somewhere is 60s-70s people have build whole metro networks in a decade. Now a single stub metro line takes 10 years (Cologne, Berlin) and is often followed by all kind of problems due to incompetence.
Europe had its own issues too (natural gas shortages). I guess you still haven't gotten your energy bill. As some other commentators said, US problems are not Cream cheese or unreliable flights (though that's a hassle).
I don't see any signs of democracy 'crumbling'. That's a political talking point.
When I get out and talk to people (not interact with strangers online) I find that people feel the political pendulum swings back and forth, gradually bringing better conditions for all. The right wasn't really treated badly under Obama, the nation wasn't too badly off under Trump, and things aren't really all that bad under Biden.
Let me know if you really know of any threats to democracy. (No political hyperbole, please.) I know of none that are real.
The 'liberal order' was very happy to open up China and then enriched themselves selling off industry and manufacturing to China and elsewhere. They seem to have thought that this would liberalize China, and that failed miserably . I don't know if they were sincere, since this belief has little historical support - I think they just wanted to make some money and came up with some justifications to sweeten the bitter medicine.
That generation is passing away, and their ability to control global geopolitics is passing away too. It remains to be seen if the whole world will ever be 'liberal' or 'democratic' and it sure seems like much of the world would rather opt out.
Just because someone's wrong, doesn't mean they're evil. The USSR had literally just liberalized after similar policies. You telling me that wouldn't have been compelling evidence 30 years ago?
I never called anyone evil, but if you think we liberalized the USSR by making them a major trading partner and moving our industrial base to the communist block... well, all I can say is I don't believe that's what happened, but you can if you'd like to.
I'm not even sure it's fair to say the fall of the USSR was entirely due to external influence, I do think the pressure the west put was a factor but I think internal events like chernoybyl and the quirks of the leadership sucession in the 80s had as much to do with it.
> seem to have thought that this would liberalize China, and that failed miserably
Most evidence suggest it was sincere. That it was one of the most major policy failings of the West is now admitted, even by its architects. That sort of remorse isn't common with conspiracies.
> They seem to have thought that this would liberalize China, and that failed miserably.
It really hasn't. China is still far wealthier and more economically developed today than it was under Mao-era policies, and for a vast majority of average Chinese this is ultimately what matters most. They have little reason to care about abstract ideals like elections or individual rights when other things are so much more relevant to them.
It's interesting to hear you say this, as I hear similar sentiments from friends on the opposite end of the political spectrum from you - though directed at their own leaders (including Trump). It seems everyone is getting rather annoyed at the ineffectiveness of the federal government - I imagine we'll see more political flashpoints at the state level going forward.
Here’s a question, if you have certain goals for a government like defense, education, etc. and you create a bureaucracy to recommend the best researched policies for these goals, what is the role of democracy? Just checking for errors from the bureaucracy?
Not much to criticize in this thesis. Contains nothing new or original. Just a rehash presented as insightful.
Author claims Liberalism lasted until 2019. Although hyperglobalization is mentioned, author does not acknowledge Neoliberalism (aka Thatcherism & Reaganomics, roughly coinciding with "capitalism" defeat of "communism").
Modern Liberalism (post WWII) was the West's response to nationalism; an effort to curtail the endless wars.
Today we have new challenges. Of course we need new arrangements.
What could that look like?
Like this OC, I have zero idea what's coming next. As in no clue.
Unlike this OC, I do have hope and optimism.
That said, I keep chewing on two ideas.
Of all the dystopian novels I've read, too many to list, I most believe the social arrangements imagined in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. A cautionary tale. Basically how corporations pivot to become the new feudal lords, no different than the robber baron's company towns. How taking a job is choosing serfdom. What it may be like to opt out, to create something new, like Butler's protagonist does. What we might call "mutual aid society".
Of all the notions for a successor to representative democracy, the most exciting to me is "phyles" from Neal Stepheson's The Diamond Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles How each social movement is decoupled from geography, strives to be self consistent, and has to negotiate intra-social arrangements.
I haven't yet read Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. It might have some notions worth considering.
I don't recall ever reading sci-fi treatments of possible left-libertarian (aka anarchist) social arrangements. It recently occurred to me to seek out stories about pirates (from their own point of view) and the Iroquois (and adjacent) from before contact with Europe.
124 comments
[ 28.1 ms ] story [ 2793 ms ] threadIf you look at history, a jump from authoritarian systems to stable democratic systems seems to happen in either countries had some quasi-democratic system prior (e.g. Poland) or a strong national identity to unite the population (e.g. Japan).
Most other democracies transitioned through decades of instability and non-democratic government when given independence (e.g. South Korea, Taiwan).
The real question is what happens once democracy has taken hold.
Democracy is not inherently stable, in fact I would argue they are the opposite. An election is like flipping a coin.
I think The Patrician is probably the wisest ruler the world has never known.
No surprise there actually. Sensible people have always been aware that liberal/bourgeois values and Constitutional protection of fundamental rights are basic prerequisites for meaningful democracy, as practiced throughout the West. Elections alone are practically irrelevant if these more basic things are missing.
Indeed. And yet it seems sensible people are quite impotent whenever there's such trouble, real or imagined, in some far-away land that a US Administration feels an uncontrollable urge to send in the Marines first, and try to "nation-build" afterward. Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq -- we just never learn.
George Orwell: "Not much is learned from the lessons of history. And that is the greatest of the lessons of history."
This hasn't happened, though. True nation-building has not been seriously attempted since post-WWII Germany and Japan. Cargo-cult efforts to "export" the figments of electoral democracy (as seen in Afghanistan and 2000s Iraq) do not matter. They were always doomed to failure.
In what way is democracy to be considered destabilizing?
Looking at history and at the present moment, one could say that instability is an inherent feature of human society, but that democracy substantially reduces that instability.
This is a feature of the autocracy being overthown, and not necessarily a feature of the system of government that replaces it.
And this is quite fundamental to the autocratic model. Coming in #2 in a democratic contest for power means you don’t get to be President. Coming in #2 in an autocratic contest for power means losing your property, liberty and likely life. The former encourages reconciliation. The latter, challenging the outcome at all costs.
I think it's interesting to think of the receiving side of this as well: how stable are democratic allies when their foreign policy can change election cycle to election cycle?
This has been known since antiquity, and is why the Founding Fathers designed not a democracy but a republic that combines elements of monarchy, oligarchy and democracy. (The three branches of government.) That we’ve forgotten this lesson is a likely contributor to the current instability.
It's called Empire of Liberty. It's about the first 3 decades of the US and definitely shows how much was not planned at the time and how much of the constitution was intended as just a starting point to be edited soon after. Very much not the perfect document people treat it (knowingly or unknowingly) today.
This is a straw man. Nobody, including the Founding Fathers, claimed the original Republic was ideal. The Constitution's vagueness and incompleteness were widely admitted at its signing.
Pure democracies don't work. They devolve into populist, majoritarian nightmares that tear themselves apart. This has been a consistent failure mode across over three millennia. We have minority-protecting, stabilizing features built into our system that have been systematically dismantled and attacked over the past decades, all in the name of more democracy. That more democracy isn't always a good thing has been absent from the discussion, in part due to Cold War and ensuing dynamics, in part due to ad hominem rejections like the one you made.
Suppose that the US were to create a constitution today, based on today's needs and the anticipated needs of the next 50 years. How different do you think it would look from what was written in the 18th century? (Put aside the impossibility of doing this in today's political climate, as that's not the point of the question.)
It starts to sound demi-religious. You shall not disobey the word of a larger power/figure.
And then society starts to rift over time, through the interpretation by different sects about what the words meant.
Over centuries you get a pretty twisted view of the original values, interpreted by a few different sects, and an ever growing wedge between those interpretations that gets harder and harder to reconcile.
Just like most major religions.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom
Anyway, my point was that "republic" effectively means "liberal democracy" in this specific context, where someone invokes the Founding Fathers and contrasts it with direct democracy. And when someone talks about present-day democracy, they usually refer to the entire Western system rather than to simple majority rule.
In contrast, states in which the rulers are elected from among a limited set of candidates chosen by the government, do not qualify. For instance, some states curate the selection of candidates by jailing or murdering opposition candidates. Others vet their candidates through a separate body of religious leaders.
In the US, gerrymandering probably does not pass a basic constitutional sniff test, but getting governments to relinquish powers that they enjoy is no small feat.
Also - everything collapses, every world order and every regional power either has collapsed or will collapse. The Roman Empire collapsed with a thousand-year gap between the last breath of the east and west wings. The fact that something is currently collapsing doesn't tell us much except that it hasn't collapsed yet.
The thinking is societal collapse = bad; Orange Man = bad; so Orange Man = societal collapse.
Honestly, it's exhausting at this point no matter what you think of Trump.
Does it? Seems to me that most people don't, and never have trusted each other.
Most people don't need to trust each other. The elites certainly do, at the very least, to respect the peaceful transfer of power. Democracies have, by design, lots of elites, so the coördination problem becomes (intentionally) more difficult.
When it's 60% who have doubts, is it still a "blindingly obvious lie"? What about 80%?
Today, one year later, the evidence is clear about what the plot was. Actually it was all admitted to on live TV and even had a name: “The Green Bay Sweep”
- pretend there was fraud, and lie about it profusely.
- GOP Reps and Senators challenge specific states, baselessly.
- Pence rejects the certification, assuming powers he doesn’t have (but who would stop him?)
- states baselessly reject election results and choose Trump instead
- Contested election is thrown to House
- Majority Republican delegations install Trump as President, thereby officially ending American democracy.
Of course at the last moment, Pence refused to be part of this plan, because he knew what they wanted him to do was unconstitutional. Hence the Capitol insurrection. Hence "Hang Mike Pence".
Whether that equates to societal collapse, I don’t know, but it does amount to tearing up and burning the Constitution.
*[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_kingdoms_and_royal_dyn...]
It's certainly a hypothesis, but I think it's more descriptive than prescriptive, but he risks turning a bit circular: arguing that a certain model of the world is the only stable model, while simultaneously arguing that other models should be torn down because they're not stable - adding to the instability.
Off shoring and massive immigration are never popular with the working and lower classes, these are popular with the higher classes who desire cheap labor for their rent seeking operations. This behavior is neither liberal nor democratic and is rarely the product of a broad base democratic effort; its not as though the immigration politics of the modern west emerged after popular outcry- they are entirely top down efforts. In this regard we can say that they might be enlightened from a certain perspective but are they really democratic?
I would point to China as an example of nationalism paying dividends.
What else can people do, when they lose their jobs to offshoring and trade agreements, and find that everyone in their neighbourhood is now talking in foreign and competing with them for housing? All they can do is demand that foreign interference and immigration be brought to a halt.
I'm not advocating nationalism; that way lies war. But hyperglobalisation has failed, and needs to be reversed.
You simultaneously mischaracterize what I wrote and assume that you speak for multiple classes of people, universally, world wide. You're wrong about what I wrote and you're wrong in your assumption of the universality of your opinion.
I didn't say anything about off shoring or massive immigration. There's majority support for lots of qualified categories of immigration, and it's not based on rent-seeking higher classes. Sometimes it's mutuality (e.g. EU free movement), sometimes it's competitive (e.g. football players), sometimes it's self-interested (e.g. doctors), sometimes it's ethnocentric, etc.
Please don't pattern-fit what you read to your pet trigger phrases.
It's funny. A few years ago, when the Arab Spring, the sentiment was the opposite.
There is also great social change. Women are a large majority of incoming college students and are a majority in graduating with college degrees right now. Demographic changes are occurring. There are severe inefficiencies in the basic functioning of our society. For instance we spend far more on healthcare and education than other countries with worse outcomes.
Defeat in Afghanistan, divided population at home, crumbling infrastructure, etc. all point to a state of long term imperial decline.
No it has not. The people involved are being prosecuted and criminal punishments are being handed down.
Trump is not being prosecuted, because disagreeing with the official election results are not a crime, nor is it illegal to hold campaigns arguing your case. If Trump had actually done something illegal, he would be prosecuted.
This is an inherent disadvantage of dictatorships, as political factions can back different leaders and cause prolonged and recurrent civil wars. Looking at the history of empires, these dynastic conflicts are incredibly common.
The disadvantage of democracies is that frequent elections prevent leadership from executing multi-decade long objectives. Democratic leadership changes often countermand the direction of prior administrations. Further, these decisions are subject to popular fashions and often represent the interests of vast swaths of the population who are uneducated and/or young. Democracies are often slaves to circumstance and societal evolution - and this is exacerbated with social media.
The advantage of dictatorships is their ability to create generational goals and execute methodical plans that can show value to the nation decades later. Dictatorships have the ability to shape societal evolution (for better or worse).
Oversimplifying this, you could say that a democracy acts according the average intelligence of the society, whereas a dictatorship acts according to the intelligence of the leader (and thus the process to select a dictator makes it far more critical to be meritocratic).
I honestly wonder if there's a better way.
The problem with dictatorships is the dictator. Dictators are typically Cluster B personalities: narcissists, sociopaths, and psychopaths. Dictatorships don’t revolve around the intelligence of the dictator, but around their ego. Dictators aren’t interested in doing what’s right for society, they are interested in doing what’s right for themselves. This is why they are so dangerous, because those two goals are often at odds.
For this reason, the dictator surrounds himself with toadies, lickspittles, sycophants, and generally other cluster B personalities who want to be a proxy for the dictator. This results in rampant government corruption and incompetence, as people end up in jobs for which they are not qualified, but which they earned through loyalty to the dictator.
So if you want to map a dictatorship’s intelligence I would say they converge to the intelligence of the worst, most power-hungry, morally and ethically bankrupt people in society.
This is why you see dictators crack down on journalists; while the narcissist loves praise, he hates criticism no matter how deserved. Well, it's part of the reason. One other reason is that dictatorships are based on mythologies that put the dictator at the center of the universe. Typically a dictator establishes legitimacy by painting "others" as the source of all societal problems, and the dictator will solve those problems by subjugating the "other". Of course that's not true, and journalists will unhelpfully point that out, so usually the first thing to go under a dictatorship is the free press.
And it goes on from there. As you start persecuting the "others" they will use the judicial system for redress and they will receive it. So then they have to stack the courts.
People will see this and attempt to elect new leaders. So then they have to kill elections, or at least rig them.
The political opposition will thwart your agenda, so they have to get rid of them as well. That's when political purges start happening.
Their own institutions like the Department of Health, Labor, Economy, War or what have you will issue reports that show the problems are not improving, despite the fact that the "others" have been persecuted into the ground. That's when they start installing unqualified quislings into these bureaucracies who will push their agenda.
Of course, now that they've gutted the government of all competency things will begin getting worse and people will start to get upset with you. That's not good for narcissistic supply. So they find a new "other" to persecute.
The cycle repeats as more and more groups are isolated, persecuted, and driven from society. But the problems are never fixed because there's no attempt to even fix them. It's all a game of shifting shells that never ends. But one thing is true through all of this: their ego is happy, so that's all that matters to the dictator.
This is why dictators usually face a bloody end. They build the pressure up to a point where it is explosive, and then they find themselves hiding in a hole in the ground, cowering in a bunker with a loaded gun, or hanging from a gas station.
This is a problem with all hierarchically-driven organizations in the absence of adequate checks and balances, not just dictatorships. It affects all sorts of privately-run hierarchies as much as the various sorts of internal hierarchies which operate within governments (including, to a varying extent, nominally democratic ones).
Of course, it's not always clear that these problems can be even mitigated, let alone resolved. We still use large organizational hierarchies to do all sorts of things 'at scale', while acknowledging their drawbacks.
Dictators and corruption are indeed inseparable. But the present UK government is also being shaken by revelations of extensive corruption.
Corruption is insidious; it starts with buddies of the glorious leader, leading to businesses that are founded on corruption, ending up with almost every official in every capacity becoming corrupt, including policemen and army officers. In the process the people are impoverished, markets are kneecapped, and the currency becomes debauched. Honesty and honour become a liability.
I'm much more scared of corruption than ideology X or ideology Y. If you're lucky enough to live in a country where the rule of law still sort-of works, you'd better hope that corruption is stamped out as soon as it's head pops up.
However my perception was shook a bit in my most recent trip back to the states over this past holidays. Cream cheese was unavailable as an ingredient for the Christmas meal due to supply chain issues. People complained about inflation and high gas prices. Flights were totally unreliable, and COVID tests were almost impossible to come by.
On top of all those real-world issues, it was surprising to see how compliance has become a political issue in the US. My liberal family members treated mask wearing as an issue of character, and seemed to treat catching covid as almost a moral failing, while my conservative family members viewed it almost as a scam.
I have seen the politicization of every issue before. I've been aware that the US government has been in a state for a long time where it seems to be structurally unable of getting things done. But this is the first time I have seen material conditions degraded to such an extent in my home country that it is impacting the day to day lives of even middle class and upper middle class people. This was especially surprising since the same issues have not presented themselves in Germany.
I hope what I witnessed was just the short-term effect of an unprecedented wave of the virus, but it was enough to give me doubts.
My point is, this is the first time I have seen America's issues actually manifest in material ways. Political alienation is concerning, but it's not all that powerful on its own. Political alienation plus the degradation of material conditions is absolutely how wars are started.
The craziest voices claimed he was a Russian plant, but the mainstream claim was always collusion, which was proven by the Senate Republicans in volume 5 of their report on Russian Active Measures. The report established that the Trump campaign, through its chairman, was funneling internal campaign data to a Russian Intelligence Officer, as Russian Intelligence was running a psyops campaign against American citizens [0]. So yes, there was smoke and it was coming from a fire. There was collusion, and there was obstruction. It's been proven and documented.
When we look at the transition of power, yes it's true that there have been issues in past elections and that's what I mean when I say this has been going on for a while. There was actual violence in the 2000 election (the Brooks Brothers Riot). But at the same time we are someplace new when an actual coup plot is formed and executed by the sitting President of the United States.
And I hear you about material conditions, but at the same time the people who stormed the Capitol flew there in planes. They stayed in expensive hotels. They captured their crimes live on their expensive cell phones. They included doctors, lawyers, and business executives, and politicians. This isn't about economic anxiety. That's a narrative that's been going on since 2016, and it's just hard to find real evidence of that. It's true that there have been some temporary shortages of specific items, but in general I can go out and buy cream cheese today, and really anything else I would like. Material conditions are fine in America.
> Political alienation plus the degradation of material conditions is absolutely how wars are started.
Wars also start when leaders deliberately lie to masses of people, claiming their votes are being stolen when they aren't. Sometimes wars just happen because of conditions, and sometimes powerful people and groups take a situation and tip it over because they would like to see a war happen, because it's preferable to the alternative. That's where we are in America.
[0] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/docu...
There may have been some Russian involvement in the 2016 election, but the effort has always been to blame Russia for Trump's election. In my opinion this has been very damaging to American politics. It gave liberals and democrats an out to ignore the very real reasons for which Trump attracted a very real base of support leading up to that election. If you remove Trump's nationalistic rhetoric and racial dog-whistling, his populist messaging was not all that different form Obama's.
If you ask me, a lot more good would have been done by actually reckoning with the fact that something like 30-40% of the voting population genuinely wanted him to be president rather than trying to live with the fantasy that Putin is so all-powerful that a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ad-buys were able to overthrow American democracy.
> But at the same time we are someplace new when an actual coup plot is formed and executed by the sitting President of the United States.
I agree that the events of Jan 6th were unprecedented, and uniquely disturbing. I think the leaders of the movement should have been brought up on treason charges.
> Wars also start when leaders deliberately lie to masses of people, claiming their votes are being stolen when they aren't.
Hasn't this been the exact claim of the Clinton campaign post 2016? That the election results are illegitimate?
> It's true that there have been some temporary shortages of specific items, but in general I can go out and buy cream cheese today, and really anything else I would like. Material conditions are fine in America.
I hope you are right, and that I was just particularly unlucky to encounter a series of market failures in a single 3-week period due to extraordinary circumstances.
But I will say this much because it relates to my previous post directly:
> trying to live with the fantasy that Putin is so all-powerful that a few hundred thousand dollars worth of Facebook ad-buys were able to overthrow American democracy.
I will note that the Russian GRU was able to hyper-target Facebook advertisements in large part because they were receiving updates on who to target from the Trump campaign. I think it's a fantasy to suggest that Putin can overthrow democracy this way, but that's not really what happened. Trump and Putin coordinated through public channels and behind closed doors through intermediaries (let's not forget that Trump's son, son-in-law, and aforementioned campaign manager turned GRU liaison, met with a Russian spy at Trump's residence to discuss an explicit cooperation deal). Putin couldn't have done what he did alone -- he needed a willing, like-minded, yet distant partner in one of the two major political parties in America, and he found one in Trump.
> Hasn't this been the exact claim of the Clinton campaign post 2016? That the election results are illegitimate?
It's was entirely warranted to question the results of our electoral system, and honestly it was Trump's right to do so after the 2020 election as well. I think it is important to probe weaknesses in our system and to fix them where appropriate. But after that probing is done and the vote is certified legitimate, the questioning needs to cease.
However, when a candidate has exhausted all legal remedies, they can't continue to call into question the results of the vote. That's where this all fell apart. Trump lost his claims in 62/63 cases and that should have been the end of it. But it wasn't, and look where that got us.
I think no one should listen to Clinton anymore, and I never wanted her to be President, but she has a point about Trump's legitimacy. The legitimacy of a leader in the US is usually established by the results of an election, but what if material crimes are committed to win the election? And once a leader is elected, are the legitimate for their term or can they lose that legitimacy through abuse of their power?
Trump aided and abetted the hacking of his opponent and then lied about his campaign's direct involvement with the organization that did the hacking, both to the American people and the FBI. He lied about the fact that at the time, he was in talks with Putin about building a Trump Tower Moscow, with a penthouse gift dedicated to Putin. After he was sword into office, he swiftly used the authority granted by the American people to quash the investigation into that very malfeasance. He also obstructed the subsequent Special Counsel investigation by destroying evidence, lying to investigators, and attempting to quash it as well. This behavior is not the legitimate exercise of trust placed on our leaders, it's a pattern that more closely resembles a prolific serial criminal covering his tracks.
I want to be clear that, if Trump's campaign in any way worked with a foreign power for the purpose of furthering it's electoral interests, that is something which is quite shocking, and anyone involved should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law.
However,
I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that if 1) Trump worked with Russia for the purpose of winning the election, and 2) that Trump in the end did win the election, that 3) working with Russia caused Trump to win the election.
This last part is where we run into a bit of trouble.
Returning to the original question: Trump and Russia colluded to do what?
Let's take it for granted that Trump's campaign met with Russian government agents, talked strategy, and funneled information which could be used for targeted advertising and other purposes.
In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do? The answer is not very much. It's not like Russia hacked into the voting system and changed votes. Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the population to take the electoral college, to vote for him. In other words, Trump is the primary reason Trump got elected. Russia at best put a finger on the scale, or added a little bit more fuel to a fire which was already burning.
To make an analogy: let's say that I made my house out of matchsticks, and you came along and set it on fire with a magnifying glass and sunlight. Yes you might have committed an act which triggered this event, but who is primarily responsible for my house being burned down?
> I think a logical leap which is often made, and which it appears that you may me making, is that ... working with Russia caused Trump to win the election.
I can assure you I'm not under any delusion that this is the cause of Trump winning. I'm not even sure it helped that much. I believe the proximal cause of Hillary's loss was actually the Comey announcement that happened mere days before the election. If you look at the polls, you can see her favorability dropped significantly after that announcement but then started to bounce back (but not quite to the level it was at before the announcement). Given how tight the contest was, and how that announcement visibly affected polling, there's a big question in my mind that had Comey not done that, she might have won.
> Trump and Russia colluded to do what?
Here's what the Mueller report says:
It goes on to say: So we know why they were engaged in this relationship; Russia didn't want a Clinton presidency, and Trump wanted to be President. While the Mueller report "did not establish" that the Trump campaign "conspired" with Russia to do this, it's important to note that:1. Conspiracy is a technical legal term, this was always an unlikely scenario and not at all what the mainstream and serious jurists were alleging. It's worth noting that the directive to focus the investigation on "conspiracy" came from Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who also intoned to Trump privately that he would "land this plane", referring to concluding the Mueller investigation in a light favorable to Trump. When the report was released, it was AG Bill Barr who released the second quote above and withheld the first one from the public, a move that a federal judge wrote lacked "candor".
2. "The investigation did not establish members..." is not the same as "The investigation established members did not...". Most of the media and all of the GOP read the former and pretended it was the latter. This is especially disturbing because the reason the Muller report says it could not establish these facts was in part because witnesses lied, destroyed evidence, and obstructed the investigation, hence the entire second volume of the report (this is why obstruction is a crime on its own, because if you are allowed to obstruct an investigation with impunity, you can get away with almost anything). This is where the Senate report picks up and fills in more details about actual coordination between Trump and Russia via Trump's campaign manager Paul Manafort.
> In this scenario, what exactly is Russia doing which is aiding the Trump campaign which any Super PAC would not be able to do?
They hacked the Democratic National Committee and handed the hacked materials over to Wikileaks for distribution. PACS can't do that. Also unlike PACS, the Russian GRU isn't subject to any American campaign finance laws which are in place to provide transparency to the electoral process.
> Trump was, with his message, able to convince a large enough share of the...
If you think Hillary Clinton's emails had more to do with the result of the election than NAFTA's effect on the rust belt, the opioid epidemic, the skyrocketing costs of healthcare and education, and the handling of the 2008 financial crisis then I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning.
I just don't think it's productive at all to fixate on Trump as some sort of bogeyman. He's merely a symptom of our dysfunctional government.
The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate and January 6 is not particularly interesting to me. If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people.
> If you think Hillary Clinton's emails ... I would have a lot of trouble understanding your reasoning.
I would say all of those things you listed would be my personal list of grievances against Hillary Clinton. I think it put her toe-to-toe with someone fundamentally unfit for office. But when I talk to Trump voters, their grievances include almost none of the points you listed. In order they are almost invariably: 1. E-mails, 2. Benghazi, 3. her proximity to Bill Clinton. That's just my experience anyway, maybe it's not generalizable. But it's not surprising, as this is roughly the proportion of time spent on each topic in the media, particularly on Fox News. They didn't focus on the cost of education or the opioid crisis. They did focus on NAFTA a bit, but more so than anything it was e-mails they focused on. Just look at the peak here of search terms that drop off after the election: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=2016-01-01%202...
> The endless pearl-clutching and regurgitation of Russia-gate
If you think the reaction to the events laid out in the Mueller Report and the Senate Intel report amount to "pearl clutching", then you admit it's above-board to work in lock-step with a foreign government to hack your electoral opponents, and that it's fine to then leverage your privileged position to cover it up. If that's your stance, say so. That's fine. What's not fine is to minimize what happened as "pearl clutching". A thing happened and it has serious implications that drive directly at the dysfunction of our government. We have to be lucid about those implications. Just don't be surprised when a Democrat does it in the future, I wouldn't put it past them. That's what normalization of this stuff does.
> If we don't want another trump, the best thing we could do is reform elections to combat minoritarian rule, reform the legislature so it can actually function, and pass some simple, obvious reforms to improve the material conditions of working people.
I know you said you've been out of the country for almost a decade, so maybe you have not followed how dysfunctional things are now. None of what you suggest will be signed into law. Maybe some election reforms will squeak through, but even then they might just patch a 19th century old electoral count act, and even that is going to be a massive ask.
Meanwhile, Republican state legislatures are removing all of the barriers that caused their "Green Bay Sweep" plan to fail on 1/6, giving themselves full partisan control of state election boards, which used to be nonpartisan. Again, you can call that uninteresting pearl clutching, but at the same time I will note that you are living in a functioning democracy, whereas we here in the homeland are currently classified as a backsliding democracy due to the GOP agenda. It's very interesting to those of us who are still here.
I'd be very interested to hear the take of older Germans you know about 1/6, as to whether they also think the consternation is pearl clutching.
> None of what you suggest will be signed into law.
> Republican state legislatures are removing all of the barriers that caused their "Green Bay Sweep" plan to fail on 1/6, giving themselves full partisan control of state election boards, which used to be nonpartisan.
These are real problems. If you ask me, you homelanders should avoid spending one minute longer clutching your pearls over a tin-pot dictator who was only a symptom of the problem, and focus 100% on trying to find solutions for real problems.
...no, I don't believe the Clinton campaign has ever claimed that.
They do believe that Russia put its thumb on the scale, at that the Trump administration—even as beneficiaries, yes—should have punished Russia diplomatically for their behavior.
> If the election had been on October 27, I would be your president
In reference to WikiLeaks making her private emails available.
I will grant you this is not exactly the same as claiming the results of the election were not legitimate. But it does seem to directly blame foreign interference for her loss.
To me the question of foreign interference is way less important than the question of why this election was even close, or indeed why Trump even made it as far as the nomination.
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/hillary-clinton-blam...
But I think that's a very important distinction! If a foreign power attempts to influence our elections through underhanded means, the US should retaliate diplomatically, regardless of who won. Note, that doesn't mean the winner should be called into question.
> To me the question of foreign interference is way less important than the question of why this election was even close, or indeed why Trump even made it as far as the nomination.
I think they're both important. I also think that foreign interference is one part (key word) of the answer.
We live in an adversarial world, and America will always have enemies. If we are so fragile that a 3rd rate hack can get a tin-pot dictator elected, the fragility is the problem, not the attack itself.
Oct 28 was the day FBI Director James Comey made his announcement that the FBI had reopened its probe into the Clinton campaign based on a laptop it received. It quickly determined all of the e-mails were duplicates of ones they had already seen, and reversed course, but the damage was done. I think she's really saying that was the proximal cause, and I agree with that assessment.
DNC hacked e-mails were released on Oct 7, the same day that the Washington Post published the Trump Access Hollywood tape.
She blames both, but I think everyone pretty much realizes that the FBI director tanked her chances hard with that move.
Try to look at it objectively.
And collusion with a foreign nation doesn't exist as a specific crime, but in a more sane time it would have been easy to see it was what was intended by "high crimes and misdemeanors".
This is what worries you? That we're having some supply chain problems with cream cheese, largely as a result of a once-in-a-century pandemic?
The price of gas is far too cheap anyway given it's environmental cost, Americans should consider buying smaller freaking cars. While it is hard to find COVID tests, it's very easy to find vaccines (and has been for eight months), and between the two I'd say we prioritized the right thing. Flights are clearly a result of employees catching Omicron.
I'm much more worried about the insurrection, and voter suppression, and the large percentage of Americans who think Biden won illegitimately. Or, if you want to focus on material issues, I'm worried that we're the only advanced country without universal healthcare, income inequality has been skyrocketing for decades, and we can't seem to build major new infrastructure projects. (The recent infrastructure bill is encouraging, but e.g. Amtrak says it will mostly be used for maintenance on existing lines, WTF?!)
Oh, and I'm worried about climate change, but at least most of those problems are in the future. You know, after it's too late to do anything about it.
Funny you should lead with that as your main concern, because it has the same problem as the fabrications about Russian collusion (which I note has fallen way out of fashion now that election security has happily returned to being a iron-clad given [0]) - at some point the narrative collapses due to a lack of any and all evidence. It has been 12 months, the transfer of power turned out to be mostly peaceful - as usual. And then people quite rightly ask "why was the focus on fabrications rather than real, tangible problems - like supply chain instability and lack of disaster preparedness?".
[0] Possibly the Trump administration did good work securing them?
I'm still worried about Russia interfering in our elections. I can't speak for others.
> And then people quite rightly ask "why was the focus on fabrications rather than real, tangible problems."
Because it almost worked. If one police officer had run a different way, the insurrectionists probably would have found where the congresspeople were. Say a bunch of them are killed—what do you do now? If they came from states that had opposite party governors, and the balance of power in congress changes... what does that mean for democratic legitimacy?
That day came very, very close to being very bad, and there's no reason to think it won't repeat itself in a few years if we don't take the problem seriously.
For stuff like cream cheese, I really think the news stories are overblown. It's around, there was plenty in the grocery store yesterday.
I hope you are right that this is not a serious issue. I can only say that I ran into this, as well as being unable to reliably get on a flight, as well as being unable to easily aquire a PCR test required for international travel all within the same 3 week period.
And none of these problems seem to exist in Germany.
Here's what the Senate Intel. Committee concluded:
Again, that was the conclusion of the Republican majority Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, chaired by Republican Richard Burr. What about this is a fabrication?What happened in 2020 is not that the election was more secure per se (although there was some foreign interference reported at the time, it was not as bad as in 2016), it was that Paul Manafort was not Trump's campaign manager. He was the main vector between the Trump campaign and Russia. And honestly at that point, Russia didn't have to do any work to get their propaganda on American airwaves, because Fox New was literally doing their job for them -- e.g. broadcasting the position that Ukraine was responsible for the 2016 DNC hacking, not Russia.
> the transfer of power turned out to be mostly peaceful - as usual.
Mostly peaceful? A violent insurrection at the Capitol during a joint session of Congress, sent there by the defeated President, with the explicit intention of preventing the transfer of power through force is not "mostly peaceful", I'm sorry. It actually marked the ignominious end of a 200+ year streak of peaceful transfers of power. Even during the Civil war something like 1/6 didn't happen.
No worries, you are in good company - we can’t build anything big in Germany, too. Between NIMBY lawsuits and over regulation everything takes literally decades and cost billions. Somewhere is 60s-70s people have build whole metro networks in a decade. Now a single stub metro line takes 10 years (Cologne, Berlin) and is often followed by all kind of problems due to incompetence.
Democracy is the best of a set of troubled types of social order.
Elected politicians, for better or for worse, are indeed a representation of the people.
Democracy is as flimsy as the citizenry's understanding of and commitment to education, civic duty, and justice.
When I get out and talk to people (not interact with strangers online) I find that people feel the political pendulum swings back and forth, gradually bringing better conditions for all. The right wasn't really treated badly under Obama, the nation wasn't too badly off under Trump, and things aren't really all that bad under Biden.
Let me know if you really know of any threats to democracy. (No political hyperbole, please.) I know of none that are real.
That generation is passing away, and their ability to control global geopolitics is passing away too. It remains to be seen if the whole world will ever be 'liberal' or 'democratic' and it sure seems like much of the world would rather opt out.
Just because someone's wrong, doesn't mean they're evil. The USSR had literally just liberalized after similar policies. You telling me that wouldn't have been compelling evidence 30 years ago?
I'm not even sure it's fair to say the fall of the USSR was entirely due to external influence, I do think the pressure the west put was a factor but I think internal events like chernoybyl and the quirks of the leadership sucession in the 80s had as much to do with it.
Most evidence suggest it was sincere. That it was one of the most major policy failings of the West is now admitted, even by its architects. That sort of remorse isn't common with conspiracies.
It really hasn't. China is still far wealthier and more economically developed today than it was under Mao-era policies, and for a vast majority of average Chinese this is ultimately what matters most. They have little reason to care about abstract ideals like elections or individual rights when other things are so much more relevant to them.
Author claims Liberalism lasted until 2019. Although hyperglobalization is mentioned, author does not acknowledge Neoliberalism (aka Thatcherism & Reaganomics, roughly coinciding with "capitalism" defeat of "communism").
Modern Liberalism (post WWII) was the West's response to nationalism; an effort to curtail the endless wars.
Today we have new challenges. Of course we need new arrangements.
What could that look like?
Like this OC, I have zero idea what's coming next. As in no clue.
Unlike this OC, I do have hope and optimism.
That said, I keep chewing on two ideas.
Of all the dystopian novels I've read, too many to list, I most believe the social arrangements imagined in Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. A cautionary tale. Basically how corporations pivot to become the new feudal lords, no different than the robber baron's company towns. How taking a job is choosing serfdom. What it may be like to opt out, to create something new, like Butler's protagonist does. What we might call "mutual aid society".
Of all the notions for a successor to representative democracy, the most exciting to me is "phyles" from Neal Stepheson's The Diamond Age. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Diamond_Age#Phyles How each social movement is decoupled from geography, strives to be self consistent, and has to negotiate intra-social arrangements.
I haven't yet read Robinson's The Ministry for the Future. It might have some notions worth considering.
I don't recall ever reading sci-fi treatments of possible left-libertarian (aka anarchist) social arrangements. It recently occurred to me to seek out stories about pirates (from their own point of view) and the Iroquois (and adjacent) from before contact with Europe.