Skibboleth
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User ID: 1226
Except that they're more than willing to defend the supposed bailey. This is more like referring to refugees and asylum seekers as 'illegals'.
I think you're severely overestimating the popularity of the Coatesian 'white supremacy' anti-racist paradigm versus normie lib 'don't be a dick' anti-racist paradigm.
(I suspect you also underestimate the prevalence of racism, which leads to further confusion)
I kept thinking to myself who are these white supremacists that they think run the country? If this country was run by white supremacists, they would be doing a terrible job.
Your confusion arises from semantic differences. When someone like Coates or Kendi talks about "white supremacy", they don't (just) mean mask-off segregationists or white nationalists. They don't even mean closeted white racists. They mean the whole accumulation of things which collectively acts to keep white people at the top of the socio-economic heap*. You can probably find a direct quote from one of the above that articulates this without my paraphrasing, but it's late and I'm on my phone, so I'm leaving that as an exercise for the reader.
Crucially, in this paradigm, it is entirely possible for society to be white supremacist despite the fact that everyone including racist white people profess to oppose racism and look at efforts to form explicitly white organizations with intense suspicion. Disparate impact and outcomes are the key indicators.
*though they'll also be quick to note that the US also has a pretty long history of explicitly giving preferential treatment to whites.
Skibboleth
10mo ago
it turns out you can just vote yourself other people's wealth
What stops the enfranchised elite from voting themselves other people's wealth (e.g. enclosure)?
Skibboleth
11mo ago
It would be far worse for maintaining trust in the institutions than the status quo, as bad as the status quo is.
Worse for Trump supporters, maybe, but they're not the only ones with low institutional trust.
We're not talking about process; we're talking about Congress voting that Trump's insurrection is no long disqualifying, i.e. short circuiting the matter.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
This is very different from "a major party is not allowed to contest X position, opponent wins by default".
That's not what is on the table. It perhaps feels that way to Trumpists, because Trumpism is populist movement and thus first and foremost a cult of personality.
Most of the time, even senior party figures are largely replaceable. If a couple of senior senators got disqualified from either party, people would care infinitely more about the replacement process than the people ejected (they're not even necessarily unpopular - as has often been noted, Congress has terrible approval but people like their guys - but their supporters just aren't attached enough to stand by them if they got into real hot water). In the case of Trump, his followers regard him as irreplaceable and are hostile to even considering alternatives. As such, the possibility that he performed some disqualifying act feels like total disenfranchisement even though the GOP still gets a nominee (who probably fares better) (plus the Supreme Court, ~half of Congress, half the state governments, etc...).
Skibboleth
11mo ago
the Right Thing To Do for the sake of America
Why?
The reason why a Trump supporter would favor it is obvious, but what is the case for forgiveness from someone who thinks Trump is guilty?
Skibboleth
11mo ago
It's also an outgrowth of the specific dynamics of southern politics.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Median is less important than marginal if you're trying to nudge elections. If there are 100k low propensity voters that theoretically would support my opponent, shifting the number who actually vote from 25k to 12.5k is still a win even though the median group member was staying home either way.
Whether or not this is decisive or who it actually favors in practice: v0v
Because those would be mutually disqualifying.
Harvard professor of law is not a position with governmental authority (or even an advisory position) and also [insert dig at law professors here]. You could call, e.g. Larry Summer a (retired) technocrat. Not because he's an econ professor at Harvard, but because he's held governmental positions (Treasury, CEA) and was at least notionally selected for his expertise.
edit: I'm not really trying to convince you to adopt this definition of 'technocrat', just trying to lay out what I mean.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
See, I think this is reversed. Warren likes to adopt a professorial persona (maybe calling it a persona is unfair, given she actually has been a professor), but she is really just a lawyer (like most Members of Congress) and dresses up eat-the-rich populism in wonky clothes for the benefit of pseudointellectual liberals. Somewhat famously, she got Saez and Zucman (a pair of noted left-wing economists) to write up policy proposals for her campaign and then proceeded to ignore them when their recommendations weren't spicy enough for the audience she was courting.
Maybe we're using the world technocrat differently; to me "wants to use government policy as a tool of social engineering" isn't a distinguishing element. That could refer to almost any politician. My understanding of the term technocrat implies that they hold their position by dint of at least notional subject matter expertise. Supreme Court Justices are pretty much inherently technocrats, as is the Fed Chair. Conversely, I'm almost tempted to say an elected official can't be a technocrat, but that might be a bit too far. Nevertheless, it's rare (and even more unlikely in the specific context of Congress). It's just not how politicians win elections.
Part of the Republican persecution complex is their inability to acknowledge their own transgressions.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
What good are a bunch of technocrats if they just implement populist policies?
Mostly technocrats just don't get to decide policy. Positions like the Fed Chair are a rare exception. Mostly they advise and execute on behalf of politicians, who frequently ignore them because their advise is probably unpopular or operates over a time horizon that makes it undesirable to elected officials (nobody wants to implement a policy that loses them the election and that their successor gets to take credit for). The usual failing of technocrats is either than they're operating outside their subject matter expertise (see: the Soviet Union, where it turned out that engineers don't make particularly good political/economic leadership) or they're prone to galaxy-brained schemes due to overconfidence in their understanding (half the thesis of Seeing Like a State).
Warren isn't a technocrat. I'd be hard pressed to name a single elected official in the US who could be characterized as such. The technocrats are proposing things like carbon taxes, land value taxes, zoning and permitting reform, etc... And mostly getting ignored because these are unpopular.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Of course, all of this is operating under the presumption that the Democrats' concern that the GOP has become increasingly illiberal and authoritarian is baseless hysteria. If it's not, then saying "if they're Republican, they're fascists" is not only predictable, it's fairly reasonable.
Like, say, if one of the more senior Republicans attempted a procedural coup and incited a mob to attack Congress. And then the entire party decided to go along with it and purged everyone who didn't follow suit.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I've been here the whole time. Until 2014 or so I was a Republican.
I'm going to need you to be more specific about "ratfuckery", because my experience over the past 23 years has been an ever-escalating right-wing persecution complex at the same time as they've become increasingly underhanded and unhinged.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I mean, you can believe what you like, but as I said, asking your opponents to not criticize your publicly acknowledged policy positions is a bit silly. Of course, the GOP doesn't call it voter suppression for the same reason Dems don't call it illegal immigration, but it doesn't change the fact the GOP is on record being in favor of making it harder to vote.
No matter who is selected, there is going to be "If they're Republican, they're fascists".
The analog here is the GOP talking about how Dems are socialists planning to destroy the American way of life, i.e. normal political marketing. It might be nice if people spoke in less hyperbolic terms, but the fact that they aren't isn't indicative of much.
Not sure what you mean by that. GOP politicians are on-record as being in favor of targeted discouragement while GOP legislatures have been slapped down for passing targeted voter ID laws and contriving to re-disenfranchise felons in Florida (mentioned in the link above). That's to say nothing of things like suspicious patterns in polling place closures.
What is true, as near as I can tell, is that there isn't solid evidence for voter suppression efforts having a decisive impact on any particular election (anyone cares about). Partly this is because voting suppression tends to provoke short-term backlash, partly because more egregious efforts have been struck down, and partly because they're most likely to be implemented in already solidly red areas where they don't matter that.
But that's not a very strong defense. Regardless of how effective their efforts have been, the GOP continues to be openly supportive of making it harder to vote.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
And nobody is arguing that this was disrupted.
I am. I'm arguing it. Obama nominated a candidate and McConnell sat on it for a year.
it was the usual escalation that can be traced back to Bork, at the very least
Bork always gets wheeled out as the excuse, but it's total bullshit. Bork was rejected (unusual but far from unprecedented) and replaced with... another Reagan nominee. Who was confirmed. In other words, what we'd expect to happen. If McConnell had specific issues with Garland as a nominee, he should have held a hearing and voiced them. Of course, he didn't, because he didn't have a problem with Merrick Garland. He openly declared he wasn't going to consider any nominee.
You still haven't answered the question. To whom does the stolen seat belong?
The seat doesn't 'belong' to anyone because it's not a piece of property, but by long-standing American political norms it was Obama's prerogative to fill the seat. Word games and playing dumb about idiomatic use of the word 'stole' can't duck the GOP's flagrant breach of trust.
Except it was the Republicans who finally Noticed, and truly defected rather than be played for chumps.
That would imply that the Republicans weren't defecting constantly, when in fact that was pretty the standard playbook since the end of the cold war.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
"Pick a different candidate if you want to win because your frontrunner is wildly unpopular" and "pick a different candidate if you want to win because your frontrunner is likely to be disqualified and/or imprisoned" are superficially similar but practically very different kinds of advice.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Neither the Dems nor the GOP did that. The Supreme Court has been supreme since 1803, and it's always been calvinball because it can't not be.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Stole from whom, exactly?
The president gets to nominate SC justices. Customarily (see @guesswho's remark about trust), the Senate almost always accepts them, even when the president is from an opposing party. It has rejected them on occasion (or nominees have been withdrawn when it was clear they were headed for rejection). Garland was neither rejected nor withdraw. McConnell simply refused to hold a hearing or consider the nomination.
Yes, in theory, the Senate can do whatever it wants. In reality, what McConnell did was extremely unusual, compounded by the handling of ACB's nomination making it clear that his arguments with respect to Garland were unambiguously in bad faith. If you keep mashing the defect button, don't be surprised when your opposition starts Noticing.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
Ah, so people won't protest Republican voters from voting for their preferred candidate, so long as those people approve of that candidate.
They won't protest Republican voters from voting for their preferred candidate, so long as that candidate doesn't have some very specific disqualifying infractions.
From the leader of the insurrection to a billionaire-turned-governor from North Dakota, the GOP’s large candidate field — down to seven candidates — features a wide array of figures, all of whom are antagonistic toward voting and democracy to varying degrees. No one skips out on suppressing the vote, all the way down to your average GOP voter suppression policies, like photo ID requirements.
Maybe the Republicans should stop supporting voter suppression if they don't want Dems to complain about it? Expecting the opposition party to like your candidates is a bridge too far (notably, we're not quoting anything the GOP says about Dem candidates), but nobody is trying to get Haley or DeSantis (or RFK Jr.) disqualified.
Skibboleth
11mo ago
I'm not sure what that means in this context - I assume you're not referring to literal LFPR or unemployment rates.
Poor communities often have poor access to law enforcement (i.e. the police are often absent, abusive, or unhelpful) for social/political reasons, which allows criminal behavior to flourish, which increases antagonism from law enforcement, which increases distrust of law enforcement, which allows criminal behaviors to flourish...
This is often compounded by weak law enforcement also encouraging anti-social behaviors which may be adaptive in that environment but not in others. E.g. in a community with weak law enforcement, being willing to fight may be important to not being victimized (even if that norm also leads to stupid fights over petty disagreements). In a community with robust law enforcement, being willing to fight gets you arrested for assault.
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