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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   23862 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 10, 2024

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I'm seeing a consistent stream of content from people these days decrying Biden and saying that they're not going to vote for the Democratic party in the election. This is one example:

Voting for Biden is letting the Democratic Party know you are okay with them not raising the min wage to a living wage. It's letting them know you are okay with record military budgets while homelessness spiked 12% in one year and that you are OK with sending billions of dollars in US bombs and bullets to Israel to blow the heads and limbs off little children and babies while leveling 70% of Gaza. Sometimes in a democracy, the strongest word you can say is NO.

Here's another:

You don't have to choose between genocide and a felon.

And here's a tweet indicating that voting for the Green Party is not the same as voting Republican:

If I cast my vote for the Green Party ... my vote does not go to the Republican. We'll go over this again tomorrow

This sort of thing seemed to start around the time the Israel-Palistine culture war heated up and I haven't really seen it stop. I've even seen one that says that our choices for November are basically Voldemort and Palpatine.

This may just be coming from social-media acquaintances of mine and just the sources they follow (I have a lot of really leftist acquaintances), and may not be representative of the general populace. I really don't know.

I find this interesting for a few reasons.

  1. I somehow find this sort of thing even more annoying than pure Trump bashing, because it's showing me that absolutely nothing will be enough for these people. They seem to think they're entitled to a purely leftist president who agrees with them on everything, and anything right of that makes him evil.
  2. This is the exact opposite of the rhetoric I remember from 4 years ago. Everyone was rallying around the ideas that "we need to stop fascism (read: Trump)" and "it's okay to choose the lesser of two evils, as long as we depose Trump" and "a vote for a third party is akin to voting for Trump". Make no mistake, the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people I saw making these "lesser of two evils" statements last time around.
  3. I think the group fervor and group commitment to all voting for Biden no matter what because they believed it was the only right thing to do, was a lot of the reason why Trump lost in 2020. I wonder if this severe disillusionment with Biden to the point of public denouncement really will hurt his chances in November. Maybe the people I see making these statements are just virtue signaling "look I'm so progressive, even the Democratic president isn't progressive enough for me". Or maybe not. But even if they are virtue signaling and they don't really mean it, they could easily influence others, and the break in the group fervor could have huge consequences.

They seem to think they're entitled to a purely leftist president who agrees with them on everything, and anything right of that makes him evil.

Same dynamic as on the right and folks that insist they won't vote for a RINO, even if it means running candidates that lose the general. Heck, the D majority of the Senate today rests on a few poorly chosen GOPe candidates.

I expect that what they are really saying is that they have enough of a bloc to sink a Dem Presidential candidate and that should disincentivize any such politician from crossing them.

My baseline assumption for pseudonymous tweets is that it's all Russian troll farms. None of it means anything.

This is a common sentiment, and it's just not true, and I wish I could bet my entire net worth against it. There are a billion english speakers, a majority of them use the internet. Half of them are below average IQ, 10% of them are in various senses mentally ill, and very few of them have political beliefs that are by our standards reasonable or sane. Russian troll farms exist, but every example we know of only produced terrible tweets across small accounts, it's a crazy leap to assume that a significant fraction of pseudonymous discourse are troll farms.

It's also easy to find people IRL who believe things like what's in the OP. For instance, how do you think the anti-israel protests at universities will post on this topic?

Is Russian just a placeholder for "foreign" or do you have reasons to think the majority of foreign troll farms on social media are Russians? My read is that going back to 2016 Russia has become a bit of a partisan fixation without much evidence its online presence is impactful in any way.

This kinds of concern-trolling to attempt to reduce voter participation among the Democratic voters is what Russia, specifically, has attempted in the past. I have no idea how successful it is.

Right but that is kind of question begging, because its the kind of "concern-trolling to attempt to reduce voter participation among Democratic voters" is what partisans in the intelligence community have claimed Russia did, with little evidence, and none convincing, in the past.

Yes, I had the same thought, this is very much just exactly the divisive stuff you'd expect Russia and Iran to push as much as possible. There are of course people who lap up the narrative and horrific images, the propaganda wing isn't so incompetent not to get some organic opposition with access to dead children and an organization happy to putting their children in the kind of danger that produces fresh horrific images.

organization happy to putting their children in the kind of danger that produces fresh horrific images.

Are you claiming that Palestinians moved to Palestine just to make sure their children could die in order to win propaganda victories? The Palestinians didn't actually migrate to Palestine or Gaza just recently in order to make Israel look bad - they've been in the region for quite a while.

No, I'm saying hamas purposefully colocates military targets with civilians knowing that this will inevitably end up with dead Palestinian civilians which they record and use in propaganda.

Do they actually have any kind of choice? I don't believe that Israel would be terribly accepting of an official Hamas Military outpost showing up anywhere in Gaza.

Do they actually have any kind of choice? I don't believe that Israel would be terribly accepting of an official Hamas Military outpost showing up anywhere in Gaza.

Yes, they obviously have a choice. They've got an extremely extensive underground network, there's very little reason they couldn't have most of their military hardware there. While they're at it, they could open up their tunnels for civilians to shelter in rather than say it's not their responsibility to look after them.

It's not like the possibilities end there. They could choose to keep kids away from "schools" jam-packed with weapons and firing facilities. The hit to the kids' education is probably compensated for by their subsequently increased life-expectancy. They could store military hardware in apartment blocks that actual civilians are forbidden from living in. And so on.

They could unconditionally surrender. That's what I'd do if I found myself having started a war with a superior power despite having no actual army. Their other choices are set up shop where civilians aren't and get immediately destroyed or keep up what they're doing and getting their people killed. They've taken that option and are responsible for the obvious consequences.

Well then they have two moral options:

  1. Get good.

  2. Stop setting up military outposts until you get good.

Our military budgets are the lowest they’ve been in almost 40 years. About half of what we budget for federal spending on social security programs. While it’s obvious that the left hates Biden, mostly because he’s an old, doddering fool and not one of the cool, handsome presidents they’re accustomed to voting for, this seems like a strange angle of attack. Especially when Biden’s signature foreign affairs achievement is withdrawing from Afghanistan.

mostly because he’s an old, doddering fool and not one of the cool, handsome presidents they’re accustomed to voting for,

Actually, as someone who can understand leftist thinking and beliefs, this isn't the case. What they're objecting to is support for ethnic cleansing in Palestine. They say this extremely loudly and vehemently, and I don't see any reason not to take them at their word. You can blame Tiktok for letting Chinese mind-control algorithms turn them against Israel or whatever, but this is actually the principal objection - not that Biden isn't as sexy as Bill Clinton.

It's hardly clear that Trump would be materially better on this front.

At beast, the claim is that they need to torch Biden to prove, in general, that no D candidate can win without their support and hence no D candidate can have the policies to which they object.

It's hardly clear that Trump would be materially better on this front.

He probably wouldn't, but that's actually an argument supporting the second claim - which I agree with. Voting for Biden because he would be indistinguishable from Trump in every way that they care about would just be a way to guarantee that the issues they care about are never addressed.

This is supposing that there are no other issues that they care about at all.

If two candidates are indistinguishable on some set of issues, the only way to decide for whom to vote would be to look at other issues.

This is the exact opposite of the rhetoric I remember from 4 years ago. Everyone was rallying around the ideas that "we need to stop fascism (read: Trump)" and "it's okay to choose the lesser of two evils, as long as we depose Trump" and "a vote for a third party is akin to voting for Trump". Make no mistake, the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people I saw making these "lesser of two evils" statements last time around.

There is a good case to be made that this is deliberate tactic to drag the democrats as far to the left as they can. Just make the democrats panic so that they think they need to align their policies with them, hoping they'll throw them some candy like student debt forgiveness, and then closer to the election switch to the "choose the lesser of two evils" narrative regardless of how may of their asks were covered because ultimately that still drags the country closer to their preferences than voting R, third-party or not voting.

I think this is what the game theory bears out for the partisans, but IMO taking it seriously is hurting the party with moderate voters who don't like the the associations with the crazies. I think the administration, and indeed the country, would have been better off, for example, cutting the more extreme college protesters loose and daring them to vote for the other guy.

It feels to me like they're hemorrhaging swing voters because the one I know best (me!) has basically decided that the blue platform is largely unprincipled, and falls well short of its promises of egalitarianism and competent governance. Someone like Bill Clinton could have had my vote in this red state.

Yes, that's a good way of putting it. That's basically what I think is happening

You are probably correct. But I had a potential opposite reaction. Maybe a bunch of them deep in their mind feel that Trump wasn’t that bad. So telling people to stay home helps Trump and doesn’t force them to flip psychologically and actually say they were wrong and support Trump.

Some of them are clearly in your camp. I can’t see the Hamas wing of the left supporting Trump at all. (Ok maybe their ideology implies whoever owned the land at 1900 is the true owner and any immigrants after then are illegal? But doubt that’s the rationalization).

I think we’d have been much better off with a parliamentarian system with multiple parties because of this exact issue— by default you only get two candidates for any position in government and as such you don’t get to vote “yes” very often. More often than not you’re choosing what you dislike the least so do you hate Trump for his policies enough to hold your nose for Biden? Or hate Biden enough to hold your nose for Trump? I’m not opposed to third parties, and in fact I think having more viable options would moderate the government and get them about the business of government rather than simply trying to thwart whatever the other guys want to do.

But I think long term, most of the “not Biden” talk is going to fade. Because the same people who don’t want to vote for Biden are convinced that Trump wants to be a dictator and are on about Project 2025. If you think democracy ends if Biden loses, you’ll vote Biden, and most democrats think that Trump wants to end democracy.

Voting for Biden is letting the Democratic Party know you are okay with them not raising the min wage to a living wage. It's letting them know you are okay with record military budgets while homelessness spiked 12% in one year and that you are OK with sending billions of dollars in US bombs and bullets to Israel to blow the heads and limbs off little children and babies while leveling 70% of Gaza. Sometimes in a democracy, the strongest word you can say is NO.

As if Republicans didn't balloon our military budget and get us into "endless wars" in the 00's. SMH

You don't have to choose between genocide and a felon.

You're right. I choose no one. The Internet hates this one simple trick.

I somehow find this sort of thing even more annoying than pure Trump bashing, because it's showing me that absolutely nothing will be enough for these people. They seem to think they're entitled to a purely leftist president who agrees with them on everything, and anything right of that makes him evil.

IMO people are entitled to their right to vote for someone they agree with, the main reason they cant is the 2 party system which is only shared by America, Australia, and 30 or so 3rd world countries.

What if you were to look at a chinese person calling people annoying for thinking they are entitled to a president from outside the one party. You might think its sad that the chronic lack of democracy has become so normalised they think you're annoying for caring about it, so don't normalise the 2 party system either. Someday you might end up disagreeing with both parties and have no choice but to join the crowd you are so dismissive of today.

the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people

"these are the exact same people that said x" has never been spoken truthfully in my experience, if you want to prove there exists one specific person who is a hypocrite go after them, compile tweets proving hypocrisy and repost it whenever they make a post.

If you go after a group of people made up of roughly half the entire population of america you will obviously see statements that contradict each other.

Imagine being told "you are all the same, you are all hypocrites" from someone outside the group, maybe some people here are hypocrites, but you don't want to be painted with the same brush.

Maybe the people I see making these statements are just virtue signaling "look I'm so progressive, even the Democratic president isn't progressive enough for me". Or maybe not.

Or maybe they are allowed to change their mind, new things happen, they gather more information, they use the bayesian algorithm to generate new opinions. Up until the Israel/Palestine situation the lesser of the 2 evils was an argument about how Biden might be senile and have wishy washy convictions, but at least he is not killing people, now people believe he is killing people, so he is no longer a 'lesser' evil.

You seem to be a bit argumentative. I think you may be nitpicking some details in my post, and misinterpreting some others.

IMO people are entitled to their right to vote for someone they agree with, the main reason they cant is the 2 party system which is only shared by America, Australia, and 30 or so 3rd world countries.

I never said anyone wasn't entitled to vote for whomever they want. Write-in ballots are doable, I think.

But people are not entitled for any given person to win just because they want it. They're subject to the votes of the rest of the country. And these people are not entitled to be free of consequences of their actions. The candidate they prefer less, the one that they previously claimed was trying to take over the country and send people to concentration camps, may end up winning in part because of their actions.

Someday you might end up disagreeing with both parties and have no choice but to join the crowd you are so dismissive of today.

I'm already there and have been there for a decade. I just don't make outrageous claims that my disillusionment is because of the unique failings of the candidates. I understand that the system itself sucks (despite being one of the best ones there is), because the world sucks, because it is filled with ridiculously difficult tradeoffs to make at absolutely every turn, such that being a politician is an impossible job on just about every front. And I have no expectations about how anything is going to ever get any better, because, once again, the world is filled with ridiculously impossible tradeoffs.

"these are the exact same people that said x" has never been spoken truthfully in my experience.

Are you the best person to be telling me that my social media acquaintances were not posting non-stop about hating Trump 4 years ago?

Or maybe they are allowed to change their mind, new things happen, they gather more information, they use the bayesian algorithm to generate new opinions. Up until the Israel/Palestine situation the lesser of the 2 evils was an argument about how Biden might be senile and have wishy washy convictions, but at least he is not killing people, now people believe he is killing people, so he is no longer a 'lesser' evil.

See my response here.

If these people have decided that Trump is not literally Hitler, then I have a new gripe, which is that they never called this out and admitted they were wrong about him by orders of magnitude. If these people decided Biden is literally Hitler to match their previous statements about Trump, then I think they really are just looking to label anyone at all right of them as evil, and I dislike that behavior.

IMO people are entitled to their right to vote for someone they agree with, the main reason they cant is the 2 party system which is only shared by America, Australia, and 30 or so 3rd world countries.

Nobody is entitled to vote for someone who agrees with them, they seize the right to do so. The portion of the coalition that will back away if they aren't satisfied is the portion of the coalition that gets to vote for someone they agree with. The portion of the coalition that always votes the same way, will get what they get.

It's funny that on the hard right, the sentiment is massively if not overwhelmingly pro-Trump. People go around saying stuff like 'countersignalling Trump this close to the election? We're going to do things to you that have never been done before.'

And it's not like Trump has great credentials on that front! He delivered tax cuts, a deficit reliant economic boom and half a wall. He's a devout Israel-lover, which is presumably popular in certain circles of the right though unpopular with others. He stood by while his supporters were swept off major forums, 'monitoring the situation'. He constantly begs for money in these emotionally manipulative ways with his campaign sending messages like 'Donald Trump thought you were a close ally but you betrayed his trust... give us some money'. His foreign policy was full of swamp creatures and Bolton types. He wasn't exactly strong on social issues, letting LGBT and pronouns run rampant. He delivered justices who reversed Roe but that's about it.

Maybe having a de jure enemy in the White House makes it easier to rally around the leader. Leftists were like that too.

I somehow find this sort of thing even more annoying than pure Trump bashing, because it's showing me that absolutely nothing will be enough for these people. They seem to think they're entitled to a purely leftist president who agrees with them on everything, and anything right of that makes him evil.

This is how it is supposed to be. the founders knew that many people would not and should not participate. The system was set up , if anything, to discourage participation. Good, let them sit it out. It will only make Trump's win more decisive even in the event of tampering.

This is the exact opposite of the rhetoric I remember from 4 years ago. Everyone was rallying around the ideas that "we need to stop fascism (read: Trump)" and "it's okay to choose the lesser of two evils, as long as we depose Trump" and "a vote for a third party is akin to voting for Trump". Make no mistake, the people saying they're not voting for Biden in 2024 were the exact same people I saw making these "lesser of two evils" statements last time around.

Youth turnout spiked in 2020 because Trump was president, compared to in 2016 when Obama was still president, or now. So memories are stale, compared to being fresh in 2020.

Youth turnout spiked in 2020 because Trump was president, compared to in 2016 when Obama was still president, or now. So memories are stale, compared to being fresh in 2020.

Indeed. It’s hard to put into words how deeply unpopular Donald Trump is with young 20-something college students and recent graduates. Biden was just about the worst democratic candidate for president in my lifetime, and he still won because he was against the left’s Antichrist.

I wonder if restricting the franchise is the core right wing belief that is outside the Overton window? I say this as someone who would heavily reduce the franchise.

I think the idea that inequality is both fine and inevitable is probably the most fundamental one. Restricting the franchise is just downhill from there.

Yes, probably franchise restrictions, ending no fault divorce, and large expansions of the death penalty are the three outside-Overton policies most common among red tribe normies.

Imagine how annoying they are if you'd prefer Biden to win.

One underrated thing about living in Australia with compulsory, ranked choice voting, is that our political discourse is blessedly free of this kind of self-indulgent signalling. We obviously have our own domestic foibles (per Walter Cronkite: too many journalists, not enough news) but more generally: structuralist comparative analyses of political discourses strikes me as something both rich and relatively understudied -- especially in wider conversations about polarisation, epistemic closure, radicalisation, new-media landscapes and so on. There's been some research on how the US primary system exerts a centrifugal force on candidates (e.g. adams/merrill), how polarisation necessarily sustains marginal turnout (e.g.), and so on but I haven't seen a holistic structuralist take on all the factors together in those conversations.

There's clearly some lensing/closure effects that makes these kind of sentiments in the US particularly annoying when mediated through social media and the Algorithm, but the actual underlying cause seems much more rooted in the inability of the political system to a) co-opt and recuperate extremists (or more broadly, those whose views aren't represented by mainstream parties) and b) handle and mitigate swathes of society whose potential votes are rendered statistically meaningless (both in reducing this alienation in absolute terms, and alleviating how it feels on the ground).

Australia has a few structural advantages in this regard that makes the political discourse significantly less annoying than America. RCV lets minor parties absorb fringe or special-interest positions, while necessarily funnelling their preferences inward to more major parties (effectively defuses the 'no one represents me' line and complaints about picking the lesser of two evils). Compulsory voting makes political expenditures targeted not at maintaining turnout in single-issue, activism-bound constituencies (abortion, guns, most obviously in the US) which allows these factions to be more effectively clientalised by major parties: ideological activism groups must be catered to in the US to avoid demoralising them as turnout engines. In Australia where they can't deliver turnout, these special-interest activism groups can be much more easily captured -- someone particularly interested in abortion might get upset when the libnats loosen access, but they're hardly going to preference labor over it.

But is Australia better? To my eyes, it is more authoritarian. Sometimes enshrining the blob has the effect that change is quite difficult.

Better in what sense? The political discourse is absolutely better, and I would say our political institutions are much more stable and effective at the general business of government: running elections, writing and enforcing laws, handling the myriad edge cases and emergent problems that crop up constantly in complex systems.

Australians are more culturally authoritarian than Americans in one sense, but there is less perceived distance between citizenry and government. Where in the US the government is seen as oppositional to the citizenry in many respects (independent of party affiliation, e.g. with cops) and must be constrained via various 'checks and balances', an armed citizenry and so on, authoritarian stances taken by Australian government are parsed domestically as Australian society exerting its will over itself. This difference in perspective is why you had many people in the US (including some on this forum) convinced that the Australian government would never end Covid restrictions or freely give up Covid-era powers, and that our politicians who implemented lockdowns would pay a steep political price for it.

I really can't comprehend to this day why potentially the most covid-hysterical state gave up the powers. I think your politicians are stupid.

Yeah, I think failure to model differences in culture and the political incentives at play led to a lot of bad external predictions. In reality the lockdowns were stop-start in response to new infections being detected. It wasn't surprising domestically to see covid powers dialled back because it had essentially already happened a few times by that point (and the publicly accepted rationale was buying time for vaccines)

I don't think it's culture, I think it's timidness. The whole developed world could turn into 1984 literally tomorrow with zero problems, if only the upper class wished so. I should be playing coy at this point, saying how this is not something to be mentioned openly, but who the fuck among them reads this forgotten corner of the internet, 2rafa is the closest here.

I disagree entirely, I think American politicians are far more timid than Australian ones. Our political culture is utterly ruthless.

Yes, but part of that is the tools they have available. Trumps cabinet had the option of being obsequious or resigning, and without any real mechanism for removing him that didn't involve cosigning with the dems, they spent their energies on ever more creative legal theories on his criminal immunity as if he's Louis XVI. Australian politics proves if you give a politician a knife, they'll happily stick it someone's back, and while they can obviously get a bit stab-happy it's a genuine boon to have the privileges of leadership be conditional on the continual, sustained confidence of the led.

American journos are certainly more timid and status/access-conscious than Australians, which is why Jonathan Swan's interview stood out so much, and I'd definitely put that down to cultural over structural factors, so I'm sure there's a bit of both at play.

Reminds me of a presser I went to with Madeleine Albright and Julia Gillard in Sydney ages back. Questions addressed to Madeleine Albright, per her aide, should be prefaced only with 'Madam Secretary'. Questions directed to the prime minister, of course, were addressed to 'Julia'. It's hardly as simple as one country being more deferent to authority than the other.

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yeah, Australia also lacks the paranoid style, but that's always been idiosyncratically american in the anglosphere, going back to Hofstadter's 1964 essay and probably beyond

Australia is certainly more authoritarian (for good or ill), but I think that's primarily due to cultural difference rather than institutional design. If anything I would say the type of highly-engaged Australian who would still be a reliable voter if voting were optional is more authoritarian again than the random person who doesn't care about politics.

As far as I can tell, most of the multiparty parliamentary democracies end up being functionally one-party states; there's one party (with many names) whose various factions rise and fall, and a big chunk which is simply kept out of power entirely. The UK seems to be something of an exception.

Yes, I am profoundly grateful for the way that living in Australia makes so many of these arguments moot.

Turnout is irrelevant. All elections have 90+% turnout. It is impossible to win by turning out the base.

All votes must be full-preferential. It is therefore impossible to harm your own side by voting third party. All votes will ultimately flow to either the first-ranked or the second-ranked party.

The Australian system isn't perfect and it's possible to contrive weird edge cases where you get unintuitive results, but in the main it is just so much better than, well, almost any other country in the world (and especially messes like the US or the UK) that I have to feel grateful for it.

I still marvel occasionally at the fact that a solid third or more of the political discourse around the 2019 election revolved around minutiae regarding the refundability of tax credits attached to retiree superannuation accounts. Just weeks on weeks of it, probably lost Shorten the election. Australia may not be a particularly intellectual country imo, but the proverbial 'pub test' here presumes a baseline level of Tocquevillian political literacy/sophistication far beyond what most countries could hope for. I don't think that's necessarily because we're particularly special as a people (perhaps a little bit), but we have some very well-constructed institutions that curb some of our worse impulses.

I'm kind of excited that we're going to get a serious debate over nuclear power this election.

Political discourse is annoying in America because the stakes are perceived as so high and it's like a spectator sport, but that never really ends. Politics is also very personal in America. The 'us vs. them' mentality makes politics in the US more divisive or polarizing than elsewhere in the world, although it's not like this isn't seen elsewhere too...but it's amplified by social media and a 24-7 news cycle.

Yes, though if you model political discourse across parties, politicians, media and voters as the emergent aggregation of various goal-oriented strategic activities to win elections and sway policy, then that discourse is constrained by political structures. These political structures mediate how different kinds of moves in the discursive space actually achieve political ends and which are more useful than others. My larger point above is that the US has political structures which incentivises various rhetorical moves which result in a political discourse that is particularly annoying.

e.g. the sentiment that this election is of truly existential, catastrophic import makes strategic sense when a party's marginal voter is someone who already agrees/aligns with the party but needs to hit a certain activation threshold to actually cast a vote. Propagating this sentiment does not make sense if a party's marginal voter is going to vote regardless but whose alignment between parties can be competed for. The structural factor of compulsory voting impacts what political messaging is more viable (and this calculus applies not only to politicians and the media, but activists on twitter as well).

Leaving aside for now whether either approach is more generative of good policy outcomes and a functioning government, the latter is certainly less annoying.

The Electoral College for example as such a structure...if as few as 100k voters can decide the outcome of the election ,it means a lot of campaigning to reach them. under a mandatory popular voting system, there would be no need for campaigning or politics for that matter , as democratic win would be foregone conclusion .

100,000 voters cannot decide the outcome of US presidential elections. Given certain assumptions about which states are and are not in play, sure, but those assumptions are predicated on the votes of tens of millions of other voters; these 100,000 voters cannot elect Zombie Hitler over the objections of the rest of the country.

100,000 voters voting the other way would flip most Australian elections to the other major party, too (although admittedly we have a much-smaller voter base), at least if you got to pick exactly which ones to flip lots of marginal seats to 50%+1 the other way.

It should be noted that we just flat-out do not have any direct equivalent to the US President with a nationwide election for one position - the Australian Prime Minister is not directly elected but rather elected by the House of Representatives, and can have lost the two-party-preferred vote if the voters for that party are better distributed among seats (this happened in 1998; the two-party-preferred vote narrowly favoured Labour over the Liberal/National Coalition but the latter won more seats and thus government). And our Senate favours less-populous states over more-populous ones in precisely the same way as yours does - Tasmania gets 12 Senators just like New South Wales, despite NSW having over 14x Tasmania's population (though the territories, which are even less populated, do at least get fewer, and Tasmania's an outlier among the state populations).

It may be preferable to have the democratic legitimation of the government to be a foregone conclusion, but as political actors have interests that extend beyond simple legitimacy I think we'd still be stuck with political campaigners for the time being.

While there are various obvious ways you can reduce the number of people who are statistically disenfranchised, for want of a better term, I think less examined is the way this can be compensated for to reduce alienation. It's not like parliamentary systems don't have safe seats.

I think that they have a point. Voters are not obliged to hold their nose and vote for a candidate that they find reprehensible. I myself rarely vote. And I also think that refusing to vote can send it's own message. If the Greens got 10% of the popular vote they wouldn't win,but it would definitely shift the political window and demonstrate that there are lots of dissatisfied voters out there for the taking. Similarly if turnout was to decline precipitously, it would also be read as a political signal.

I say this but I also think that to tie your vote to the affairs of Israel and Palestine is very wacky.

Voters are not obliged to hold their nose and vote for a candidate that they find reprehensible. I myself rarely vote. And I also think that refusing to vote can send it's own message.

I don't personally disagree with you. But I'm not one of these people who thought Trump was literally Hitler 4 years ago. These people I'm posting about definitely are those people. Unless they actually think that Biden is literally Hitler this time around, then it doesn't make sense for them to vote Green.

And I really don't buy that they actually think Biden is as bad as they thought Trump was from 2016 to 2020. If they do, that points to another crazy phenomenon, the fact that they are so disconnected with their past, and with the people who they supposedly felt were most harmed by Trump from 2016 through 2020, as to be willing to throw them under the bus this time.

I don't think this is that crazy. My impression, which might be wrong, is that a lot of the Trump/Hitler crowd is actually from the mainstream left, and The hard left voices that are withholding their votes from Biden took the position that sure, Trump was horrible, but he was just saying openly what Republicans always believed.

The hard left voices that are withholding their votes from Biden took the position that sure, Trump was horrible, but he was just saying openly what Republicans always believed.

That sentiment does not match up with anyone I know personally. Even if they felt Trump was saying things many Republicans believed, they still all thought Trump was a megomaniac who would seize power for himself, ruin our institutions, and start an apartheid state, and that's something I never heard anyone worry about from Mitt Romney.

You might have heard it, but it was certainly being said. No less than Joe Biden stumped that a Romney Administration would see African-Americans in chains in what was a pretty obvious slavery allusion to a mostly black audience.

Mainstream Democratic-aligned narratives in the period was that a Romney victory would be dystopian disaster. The nature of the dystopia varied by the message and audience- it could be a corporatist, religious extremist, but bigotry was an expected component, to the point that 'binders full of women' became a proof of sexism he would bring into government.

I mean, I think one of the relevant differences between Hiden Biden in 2020 and genocide Joe today is that in 2020 he was, not quite a black box, but a candidate who didn’t run on his record. Like, literally, he ran on, ‘Trump bad, look at the state of the world today for evidence’. Today he has no choice.

I also want to point to, well, the state of the world today. Inflation is higher than the government admits, there’s wars and rumors of wars, crime is at generational highs, housing costs through the roof, etc, etc. It’s hard to be an incumbent in the early-mid 2020s; the tories and Canadian liberals and French government coalition and PiS in Poland can all attest to that.

But let’s circle back to Trump/Biden. From a far left perspective, Biden has mostly failed at being better than a Republican, and quite a bit of the Trump hate is getting transferred to other major Republican figures, like Greg Abbott or justice Alito. Nevermind that a second Trump administration entails Greg Abbott getting much more of what he wants, or at least his policies being extended over a larger chunk of the border. Nevermind that Gaza is not a genocide. Nevermind that it was Trump appointees who overturned Roe. Biden failing to stop them undermines the ‘last chance to stop fascism’ narrative something fierce. Instead what the far left twitterati seems to be settling on is doomerism.

I would add beyond inflation even the Fed chairmen is now suggesting the job numbers are “overstated”

I also want to point to, well, the state of the world today. Inflation is higher than the government admits, there’s wars and rumors of wars, crime is at generational highs, housing costs through the roof, etc, etc. It’s hard to be an incumbent in the early-mid 2020s; the tories and Canadian liberals and French government coalition and PiS in Poland can all attest to that.

War tends to be good for the incumbent, historically speaking. The economy and stock market doing great , as much as I may hold my nose at joe. And inflation is coming down. The CPI came in great today, although as many note, it does possibly omit hidden forms of inflation. if you look at 538, Biden's approval nosedived around mid-2021 fror reasons that are not clear and never budged, this was despite all these developments you listed. A LOT has happened since mid-2021, yet similar to trump from 2017-2020, Biden has been stuck in the same low 40s approval.

War tends to be good for the incumbent, historically speaking.

Is this true? WWI is tricky because the Democrats winning 1910-12 was out of the norm for that era, but the Democrats did nothing but lose in subsequent elections and by 1920 the GOP had the Presidency and a massive Congressional majority thanks to running against Wilson's internationalism. WWII also gets tricky because the FDR coalition was so insanely dominant, but winning the war didn't save the Democrats from getting crushed in 1946. The Korean War likewise resurrected the GOP from the dead, with them winning a trifecta in 1952 (They wouldn't win the House again until 1994.). The Vietnam War arguably scuttled LBJ's Presidency and even winning the Gulf War in spectacular fashion didn't save H.W. Bush in '92. The W. era GOP performed unusually well in '02 and '04, but were dead in the water by '06. IIRC Biden's approval nosediving had to do with the ugly optics of the withdraw from Afghanistan.

The economy is as the 4chan guys say fake and gay. The Fed chairmen is openly saying the job numbers are overstated. There is a historically unprecedented massive difference between the establishment and the household survey. If you believe the household survey there has been basically no job growth overall AND an actual job loss for non immigrants. The establishment survey owes almost 60% of job growth to the birth/death calculation which is a big fudge factor. For that reason you have people like the chief economist at Bloomberg suggesting the household survey is more reliable.

Similarly you have fudge factors in inflation that can bring it way down. Summers showed using historic cpi calculation inflation was about 2x the historic rate. And inflation is still high compared to the 2010s and this is off an elevated base).

Finally, a lot of the soft data (eg manufacturing, service data) has been ugly or turning ugly suggesting a slow down in GDP. This despite the fact the government is borrowing a trillion dollars every hundred days so GDP growth (which counts government spending) should be stabilized. The problem with that is the government is probably crowding out beneficial private spending.

The stock market looks good but that’s basically been (when adjusted for inflation) higher P/E ratios and growth at the very top (AI tech boom — if there is no is there the market will tank). Like most things, when you look under the surface the market doesn’t actually look great.

When you add all of this up it doesn’t paint a rosy picture. Under Biden, household net worth on real terms hasn’t budged and that’s using official data. It has almost certainly gotten worse.

Every year people make these arguments about the inevitable debt collapse, yet things keep humming along. The last two major crisis-Covid and 2008 crisis-were not because of the national debt. As the economy keeps growing ,each trillion of extra debt is smaller relatively speaking. It only becomes a problem if somehow the economy has negative real growth combined with high borrowing costs. But economic slowdown is almost always correlated with lower interest rates and falling bond yields, reducing the debt burden. Emerging markets and small economies, in general, have the opposite problem in which falling growth and crisis leads to surging borrowing costs and falling local currency due to the 'flight to safety' trade. In this case, you are right.

if you look at 538, Biden's approval nosedived around mid-2021 fror reasons that are not clear and never budged,

Afghanistan. My recollection is this shattered a consensus support, and he never recovered.

Not Afghanistan. US voters aren't that affected by foreign policy unless US bodies are involved. Inflation. Prices went up fast, gas prices went WAY up, and all the reports from the Federal Reserve saying everything's fine can't offset that.

"Transitory"

I'd normally ignore or warn low-effort one-liners, but you don't appear to have taken the hint from the last four.

I suppose I'll move on to a one day ban.

The Afghanistan withdrawal was a debacle and I think even "normal" people were put off by how it ended. Afghanistan was a going concern for twenty years, then we pull out, American efforts are immediately undone, the Taliban starts waving around American weapons.

I don't think the average voter "cares" in the sense that Afghanistan will decide their votes. But the whole incident shattered Biden's image in a way that broke some necessary myths. After Afghanistan lots of people started criticizing Biden regularly over other shortcomings. Hence, his approval dropped, and never recovered.

Yeah I think that is right. Biden campaigned on “the adults are back in charge.” He then had a Saigon moment shattering the idea the adults are in charge.

If it was just Afghanistan, he’d be fine. But it opened him to criticism and he has continued to step into it.

The economy and stock market doing great , as much as I may hold my nose at joe.

The stock market is doing great, but how much of those gains does the inflation nullify? I looked up an inflation calculator, and our dollar today is only worth 82 cents compared to what it was worth in 2020.
Also, interest rates are starting to decline, but still remain really high.

And inflation is coming down

Inflation is slowing down, but we're not gonna have deflation. We're stuck with these inflated prices, and I'm not certain, but I don't think wages have risen to match, at least not in all industries. So many people basically just lost 18% of their purchasing power for both their previous assets and future as well.

Is the market as a whole actually doing great though? It seems to be mainly the 7 tech giants dragging the sp500 up.

I looked up an inflation calculator, and our dollar today is only worth 82 cents compared to what it was worth in 2020.

Okay, but the stock market is up 70% since January 2020.

We're stuck with these inflated prices, and I'm not certain, but I don't think wages have risen to match, at least not in all industries.

We're stuck with inflated nominal prices but we're not necessarily stuck with inflated real prices. Median weekly real wages are down significantly from pandemic exuberance but really not bad.

The housing market is of course fucked, but boomers are sitting pretty and that's who Pokemon goes to the polls.

Yes if you pick a time when the market crashed due to covid it is up a lot. If you pick from when Joe Biden took over (2021) and adjust for inflation…not that much. Net worth is up for families less than 1%.

I literally picked the first day of the first month of 2020, which is the year we were discussing. If I was picking the time the market crashed I'd have picked April 1, since when the market has gained 117%.

But sure, we can cherry pick another date if you prefer. The market is up 46% since January 20, 2021, still way more than inflation.

Which well isn’t really all that great for 3.5 years! It isn’t terrible but not great either.

You're quibbling over like 11.5% annualized vs 12.5% annualized if you start measuring in 2020 or 2021. The market has grown by a lot over the past few years no matter how you slice it.

We're stuck with inflated nominal prices but we're not necessarily stuck with inflated real prices

Are you saying that you think prices are going to go down? Or wages are going to catch up? I don't know enough about economics at all to necessarily know how these things tend to go.

I think wages are going to increase in real terms (i.e. faster than prices). That's the usual long term trend according to the graph I posted.

I hope you're right. But where I am, in tech, promised salaries increased for like a year, then dropped right back down once the companies started laying people off. They knew they could get away with it.

You got a pay cut?

More comments

The stock market is doing great, but how much of those gains does the inflation nullify? I looked up an inflation calculator, and our dollar today is only worth 82 cents compared to what it was worth in 2020.

the market is also up a lot in real terms too. But as far as politics is concerned, a strong stock market plus high inflation is worse than flat market and low inflation. People see the headline. It's hard to explain to voters real vs. nominal. Also the media voter may be more negatively affected by inflation than benefit from rising stock market.

The other poster also picked a random time during Trump’s presidency where the stock market was low.

From a far left perspective, Biden has mostly failed at being better than a Republican

Do they really think that? They must have short memories, because when Trump was in charge, they really thought the end was nigh. I cannot overstate how much these people really thought Trump was, well, just the worst in about every possible way. Like they really thought that any day he was gonna overturn democracy, start sending jews to concentration camps, all of that stuff. And Trump is who Biden is up against this time.

They still think the end is nigh.

I think there was a large cohort of sheltered well-meaning liberals who genuinely thought that all the chaos breaking out in America and the world was the result of Orange Man Bad. It seemed a reasonable assumption, because a) that’s what every major media outlet told them and b) the chaos really did happen to start right around the time Trump took office. They thought that as soon as Trump walked out of the White House, that reality would magically reset to brunch and reruns of Parks and Rec and everyone would live happily ever after. Now, they’re starting to realize that the world is just falling apart for a variety of reasons that have nothing to do with Trump, and Biden isn’t doing anything to effectively handle it. That cohort is starting to get angry because they feel like they were fooled.

I have to wonder how much of this is confusion between the hard leftists who wanted Bernie and the center-left who much preferred to have Biden leading the fight.

That's an optimistic way of looking at it, in that these people might not just be moving further and further left really fast, or swinging with whatever is trendy right now. I hope you're right!

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