Here's an interesting take on Trump as president. I disagree with the authors (and apparently given the last paragraph, they disagree with themselves). But nonetheless, it's worth reading, as a fully-developed version of an argument I've heard put forward a few times in recent weeks. To wit, Trump being a nuclear bomb that basically forces a re-set of the entire political system, which is (they'll say) more important at this moment in history than what policy positions he holds.
That article IMO fundamentally misunderstands why people are supporting Sanders and Trump.
To me, the article seems to say that both parties should abandon their radical sides and get back to middle-ground establishment politics. Problem is, people for a large part either hate the middle-ground establishment politics, or they don't care.
Abandoning the extremist views is not a cure to the cancer, because the extremists are not the cancer. Heck, they're more like the life-support. They give people some reason to get interested in politics.
The real cancer of American politics is that the middle-ground politicians are too afraid to look like they have significant ideological differences with their opponents. Everybody wants to be something for everybody.
I think the low point of that was Bush v. Gore election. Two guys trying to claim the middle-ground so hard that it was almost embarrassing. Heck, a lot of the time it WAS embarrassing.
Although really if you want to put the blame somewhere, I think it would be the New Democrats of the early nineties, lead by Bill Clinton.
That article IMO fundamentally misunderstands why people are supporting Sanders and Trump.
To me, the article seems to say that both parties should abandon their radical sides and get back to middle-ground establishment politics. Problem is, people for a large part either hate the middle-ground establishment politics, or they don't care.
Abandoning the extremist views is not a cure to the cancer, because the extremists are not the cancer. Heck, they're more like the life-support. They give people some reason to get interested in politics.
The real cancer of American politics is that the middle-ground politicians are too afraid to look like they have significant ideological differences with their opponents. Everybody wants to be something for everybody.
I think the low point of that was Bush v. Gore election. Two guys trying to claim the middle-ground so hard that it was almost embarrassing. Heck, a lot of the time it WAS embarrassing.
Although really if you want to put the blame somewhere, I think it would be the New Democrats of the early nineties, lead by Bill Clinton.
Yet, economically, his pragmatic economic policies were perhaps the most effective of any President.
Abandoning the extremist views is not a cure to the cancer, because the extremists are not the cancer. Heck, they're more like the life-support. They give people some reason to get interested in politics.
The real cancer of American politics is that the middle-ground politicians are too afraid to look like they have significant ideological differences with their opponents. Everybody wants to be something for everybody.
But maybe the centre really is where most Americans stand politically. Maybe most Americans aren't religious fundamentalists, but they also think students wailing about safe spaces and rape culture are a bunch of flakes. Maybe they distrust wall street, but they're still on-board with capitalism and free markets. Maybe they're sceptical that their tax dollars are well spent, but they still support old age security and Medicare. Maybe they're open to immigration, but they have concerns about immigrants from some parts of the world.
The biggest problem with the U.S. system is gerrymandering. Because so many districts are safe, the real contest is for the nominations. And the people who get involved at the nomination level tend to be the special interests and uncompromising ideologues. So that's who politicians cater to, leading to a polarized political climate.
If you're right, if compromise and middle-of-the-road policies fail to engage citizens, and voters really want representatives who will go to the barricades carrying the flag of stark ideology, where does that leave democracy? Modern democracies can't really function without compromise (as we see in the U.S. today). One side will never defeat the other. If push comes to shove, you'll have civil war if they try.
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Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
If you're right, if compromise and middle-of-the-road policies fail to engage citizens, and voters really want representatives who will go to the barricades carrying the flag of stark ideology, where does that leave democracy? Modern democracies can't really function without compromise (as we see in the U.S. today). One side will never defeat the other. If push comes to shove, you'll have civil war if they try.
I think this is the key. Itse's perspective is interesting, but I couldn't disagree with it more strongly. Convergence is crucial to the functioning of our society as it's structured. If your view is that the structure doesn't work, that's a whole separate conversation, but just on this item specifically it seems to me that continued divergence and ideological entrenchment in more and more extreme views means the end of western civilization as we know it. Basically would prove Plato right.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
But maybe the centre really is where most Americans stand politically.
That is I think true pretty much by definition. The center however is not a constant thing, it's forever in movement. Politics should be about offering people options about where they want to go next, ideologically speaking. If you don't offer people real choices in elections, the whole process becomes meaningless.
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If you're right, if compromise and middle-of-the-road policies fail to engage citizens, and voters really want representatives who will go to the barricades carrying the flag of stark ideology, where does that leave democracy? Modern democracies can't really function without compromise (as we see in the U.S. today). One side will never defeat the other. If push comes to shove, you'll have civil war if they try.
I think that's a misunderstanding of what ideology is. Ideology does not mean uncompromising. It means that the ideas you have form a whole that is a somewhat coherent vision of how things should and could be.
In practice, ideologies are not what makes compromises hard, they make compromises possible, because ideologies are not (usually) that focused on any one specific thing, and even less on a specific solution to a specific problem.
WARNING: WALL OF TEXT INCOMING.
For example, abortion. The main reason why in most Western countries liberals "won" this battle was not because they could ram it past conservative opposition. Typically they got a significant portion of the conservatives to agree with them that pro-choice abortion laws are better than the alternative. There was enough hard data to prove that anti-abortion laws did not actually result in less abortions, but did result in young mothers dying in backalley operating tables. (Obviously I'm simplifying for the sake of argument here, but that's a typical essence of that discussion back in the day.)
Now, let's imagine two politicians facing this situation.
Politician #1 is the ideological guy, against abortion because he's a firm believer in "traditional Christian and family values". Politician #2 is a pragmatist who is against abortion because it's popular in his area.
Politician #1 can look at the situation and notice that the best thing from his ideological view is to support pro-abortion laws, because ultimately it's not JUST about abortions. It's about the whole family, mothers as well as babies. Politician #1 can also explain this to the people who hate abortion, because he genuinely understands people who hate abortions. He can do what politicians are supposed to do: turn ideas into practical decisions. His voters might not like his decision, but many will at least respect it because he really is "one of them".
In comparison politician #2 will go to his advisors and ask how the voters would react. His advisors will tell him that for most voters it's minor question, but the people that really care are anti-abortion. As a result, the only way #2 will vote for pro-abortion laws is if he's offered something that an even larger part of his voters will like. In practise this is likely to be something completely unrelated to the abortion issue. This will simply infuriate or confuse the anti-abortion people. The rest will be more focused on the fact that this guy helped push through that other thing.
We can also imagine Politician #3, who is against abortion simply instinctively, without any clear ideology. This is a guy who will simply never give in to pro-abortion laws, because for him it's a simple binary question of saying yes or no to dead babies, an isolated issue, not part of a whole ideology. The dead mothers don't really enter into the equation.
So essentially, IMO the ideological guy is the one that's most likely to make a compromise that actually makes sense for the voters.
Let's play a little hypothetical with type 2 politicians and see where it goes.
WARNING: 2nd WALL OF TEXT INCOMING.
Spoiler!
In the short term politicians like #2 do well in elections because through their deal-making and opportunism they can say things and deliver things that many voters will like. They will however also regurarly turn their coats in issues that are really important to some people. Over time this will lead to more and more people feeling "betrayed" by politicians in The One Thing They Care About.
If politicians like #2 end up being the majority, it will end up eating away the ideological views of whole parties. After all, you can't have an ideology without ideological people. At this point it becomes very easy for the party to take money from not just likeminded people and companies, but from anyone. After all, if you don't have an ideology to compromise, it's essentially free money... and even if it's not really free money, you still need it to win elections.
From the POV of the party it even makes perfect sense. If you think that the job of a politician is to get elected and then do what their voters wanted, taking money to win elections pretty much always justified. This is true for every party if you look at them in isolation.
People who are not inside a party don't look at them in isolation however. Looking from the outside it starts to look like all parties are the same, because each party only has a minority of openly ideological people. From the outside the party will look corrupt for taking all that money from the wrong people, and the general view of politicians will start to be that a politician will sell out That One Thing You Care About in an instant if it gets them more votes.
What incentives does this create for the voters that have either been betrayed one time too many, or who just feel that the parties are all the same?
a) Stop voting. Pretty logical. If the parties are all the same, voting doesn't really matter.
But what if you really care about That One Thing? What do you do?
b) Vote for someone that's more likely to keep their word. Remember politician #3 from earlier? At this point he's starting to look like a real attractive candidate. Okay, he also hates gays and you don't, but that's secondary. He's anti-abortion, and he will stick to his guns, and that's your One Thing. Plus you want to support him because he keeps his word. You're at this point likely to think that politics would be better if it had more people who would just stick to their word.
This leads to politician #3 becoming even less willing to compromise, because declaring himself unwilling to compromise got him elected. He will probably even start be uncompromising in things that were not originally important to him, because his voters will be watching him, making sure he "can be trusted." The easiest way for this guy to keep his voters happy is never compromising about anything. These are for example your Tea-partiers.
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Originally Posted by Bunk
Yet, economically, his pragmatic economic policies were perhaps the most effective of any President.
At the time it did seem so. In retrospect there are many who blame his administration pretty directly making the housing bubble and the financial crisis possible in the scale that they happened.
Of course you could debate how much this is just Bill Clintons fault and how much of it was the combination of Clinton policies and Bush policies, but IMO that argument does hold a lot of water.
Last edited by Itse; 06-07-2016 at 03:52 PM.
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I'd note that your abortion example falls apart, because most pro-life people aren't pro-life because of nebulously defined "traditional Christian and family values". They think that abortion is the practice of murdering babies.
That's a pretty tough place to shift someone off of. You're not going to get someone to a point where they think, "well, looked at in this light, maybe murdering babies is okay". Politician #1 is really, really unlikely to change his position.
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
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I'd note that your abortion example falls apart, because most pro-life people aren't pro-life because of nebulously defined "traditional Christian and family values". They think that abortion is the practice of murdering babies.
That's a pretty tough place to shift someone off of. You're not going to get someone to a point where they think, "well, looked at in this light, maybe murdering babies is okay". Politician #1 is really, really unlikely to change his position.
Yes, I think it would be difficult to distinguish between Politician #1 and Politician #3, at least in the US context. Poli #1 as described by Itse might be a unicorn.
Edit: Good posts though. More than willing to read a wall of text, if thought is put into it!
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From HFBoard oiler fan, in analyzing MacT's management:
O.K. there has been a lot of talk on whether or not MacTavish has actually done a good job for us, most fans on this board are very basic in their analysis and I feel would change their opinion entirely if the team was successful.
But what if you really care about That One Thing? What do you do?
You should start by recognizing that our political system was never meant to cater to people like you. Our system presumes a citizenry who engage with politics as a civic duty to the varied, and often mundane machinery of the state.
Maybe fiscal policy and entitlement reform and infrastructure funding are too dull to engage the attention of citizens in an entertainment-glutted world. And maybe they require too much compromise to interest the zealots who see politics as a war of abstract ideals. But if that's the case, the system is beyond reform. We'll take our struggles to another platform. Maybe virtual-reality wars between legions of avatars headed by celebrity demi-gods.
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Originally Posted by fotze
If this day gets you riled up, you obviously aren't numb to the disappointment yet to be a real fan.
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One look into the moral valuations and psychology going on in the minds of Trump supporters that explains why things like "look at my African American" lead to no measurable loss of support. Detailed exploration of the phenomenon begins down under "the long story".
The political view from the Far Right Sea is a dismal one, then, largely bereft of hope and thoroughly haunted by carefully constructed specters and ghouls about immigrants, refugees, the Democrats, and especially Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton (not to mention Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and Harry Reid). Knowing little more in truth about those people except that they are evil, the GOP of the last decade has kept conservatives rowing ever further right without any heed to the consequences. Just a little farther right now. We'll shut down the government; then Obama will fall. That's when we'll see the promised land, you'll see. What? You can't see it? It's not there (now)? Thanks, Obama.
The result is that a considerable proportion of American conservatives, acting as a moral tribe, have in common nothing more powerfully than a well-groomed hatred of outsiders, whom they see as likely to destroy the fabric of America, and "liberal Democrats," whom they rarely can tell apart from "socialist-communist-Marxists" and "tyrants."
__________________ "The great promise of the Internet was that more information would automatically yield better decisions. The great disappointment is that more information actually yields more possibilities to confirm what you already believed anyway." - Brian Eno
Last edited by CorsiHockeyLeague; 06-07-2016 at 05:28 PM.
I'd note that your abortion example falls apart, because most pro-life people aren't pro-life because of nebulously defined "traditional Christian and family values". They think that abortion is the practice of murdering babies.
My example is not a hypothetical one, it's a vastly simplified version of history, so the people who were prone to change their minds already did that. What we have left is the ones who didn't. And as you point out, instead of an ideological question it's a simple binary issue about murdering babies. Which underlines my original point.
People who have an opinion that is not based on ideology are the ones that can't be talked out of their opinions. The modern "un-ideological" discussion where every issue is a singular one is one reason for the death of bi-partisan politics.
Of course there are numerous ideologies on all sides, but since nobody wants to admit they have one (at least in public), talking about where the middle ground might be becomes impossible.
There is no middle-ground for murdering babies anymore. But there used to be a lot of middle ground on the topic of abortion, when it was part of a larger discussion on family values.
Yes, I think it would be difficult to distinguish between Politician #1 and Politician #3, at least in the US context. Poli #1 as described by Itse might be a unicorn.
Edit: Good posts though. More than willing to read a wall of text, if thought is put into it!
Thanks.
Sanders is pretty typical Politician #1 IMO. McCain used to be pretty ideological before he started to be just a rambling old man. Notably, these are both old guys. It's an old school style.
If you go back and watch old presidential debates, Reagan for example clearly painted himself in a different ideological corner than Carter. He infamously wasn't very specific, but he does clearly talk in an ideological tone.
Compare that to Bush (and Gore) for example.
Bush talks about how US needs to be "credible" and a leader needs to be "patient". In other talks he talks about how you need "plain spoken Americans in the White House" and how you need to elect people who "have good common sense." Stuff that doesn't really mean anything.
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Looks like it's over for Bernie. I know the AP called it yesterday, but with New Jersey and the early returns from California it really appears to be completely over.
