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Eh, I dunno about that. There's a long history of back and forth about which party is the "defender of the Constitution" and such. They both have held that mantle at different times pretty strongly in the last even 20 years only. Sure, Democrats are playing their hand pretty strong, probably too strong, recently (junk like "democracy dies in darkness" and all that, great on paper, even true on paper, horribly mangled job in practice). Democrats cry wolf about a lot of things. But not Trump. This dude actually jokes around about suspending the Constitution which is not cool and not-so-jokingly asks about deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots. The dude doesn't even pay lip service to checks and balances and admires dictators.
This is not true. On active duty I worked a number of years doing DSCA. I was one of the "troops" (Title 10, as opposed to Title 32) that Trump would hypothetically deploy, and we went all over the country, all the time, careful to not do "law enforcement" but still working very actively in providing security, supplies, support, coordination, and all sorts of other stuff. There is a clear and legal way for the US Military to "deploy troops domestically" for emergencies, and a reasonable interpretation of Trump's remarks would be that he considers the current situation an emergency that would allow that type of legal mobilization.
When you hear States or cities declaring a "state of emergency", that's (generally) the magic phrase to unlock Federal support. Talk to the long term employees at USNORTHCOM and they're still pissed that Louisiana took so long to declare a state of emergency after Katrina, which prevented USNORTHCOM from providing support for the first few critical days.
Ah, I should have been more clear. Great comment and I agree for border stuff. I meant to refer more to e.g. local police departments aren't doing enough against crime so let's send the military. The military just fundamentally doesn't make a great police force. Not permanently. And Trump has a bit of an ego-attitude when it comes to using them for small stuff. Like, clear the protesters near my photo op. Worth noting as well that martial law was discussed in connection to the election. I worry there was a gut instinct to do coup-type things instead of wait for the political and potentially judicial process to play out. That's a little less small stuff. What if the SecDef was even more of a yes-man? Trump has specifically said that he will be selecting more for loyalty this time around than before. Sorta understandable, but also potentially very bad. We often rely on the good judgements of these subordinates to make the democratic and institutional stuff work.
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Except Trump is a Blue tribe defector and still sees the world through that lens, so when he jokes about suspending the Constitution hes doing so to do things totally contemplated by its original form, such as firing all the bad government workers or mass deportation or declaring the southern border crisis an invasion (he's not even really threatening ICE to have a loose ammo policy, which George Washington surely would have.
Haha, can't begrudge a great historical comparison post too much. GW was quite a guy, overall I think we're pretty lucky he was the first president because despite strong anti-monarchy feelings, people sure as hell wanted to keep him for more terms and he left on a good note with a great speech. Could have ended the US experiment right then and there. Well, unless you were one of the rebellious farmers. Then, maybe you weren't so much a fan.
Side bar please for fuck's sake liberals, can we not say this is the most divided the country has ever been? We literally fought a whole-ass civil war.
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...is a piece of paper written by dead men. Adjectives to taste.
...is the legal framework for the world's oldest democracy, possibly most stable democracy by virtue of the first point, strongest global power, strongest global economy, and one that is modifiable by living people at any time? You can make some decent coincidence arguments, but the simple fact remains: the Constitution is actually a big deal.
Fun fact, the only parts of the Constitution that cannot be modified by amendment are Senate representation (can still happen if they give up the representation themselves), maybe core changes like "dissolve the whole Executive branch" or "no more democracy, we are a dictatorship" (this is debated since it is merely implicit), and that's it! That's actually it. Well, okay, way back when there were limits about what you could do for certain slave and tax things, but those expired in 1808. OK, fine, the Supreme Court maybe probably can say no to an Amendment, but they'd have to have a darn good reason, and even then it might not stick (constitution crisis again anyone?). But most people gauge this to be mostly hot air or more of a hypothetical. I feel pretty safe in saying that practically, we can modify anything. You just need a lot of people to agree. As is proper!
Another fun fact is if the federal government is being stubborn, if enough of the state legislatures want to, they can call a convention, suggest some amendments, and then send them directly back to the states to bypass Congress entirely! I always thought that little method was neat, and a nice super-emergency check against Congress.
That was an observation, not a statement of opinion. Politically irrelevant weirdos are not a constituency.
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We had four years of Trump. Not one little suspension of the Constitution. I remember when Bill Clinton called for the suspension of the Fourth Amendment in public housing. As for deploying troops domestically during periods of public unrest such as the Floyd riots... that's what the Insurrection Act is FOR.
Let me put it this way. Trump has, let's say, a 90% chance of not harming the Constitution or the rule of law at all. Maybe higher, because I place a high confidence in general US systemic resilience? I think I'm still allowed to be worried about that 5-10%, because to me, that's well beyond my comfortable threshold for electing a president.
Does this sound crazy? Consider this: how many presidents have suspended parts of the constitution, acted unconstitutionally in a big or blatant way, or triggered a significant constitutional crisis? Madison (war of 1812 militia and war stuff, debated), Jackson(nullification crisis AND outright defiance of SC on Indian removal), Lincoln (habeus corpus in civil war), Wilson (WW1 free speech stuff), FDR (court packing AND Japanese-American citizen internment), Nixon (Watergate and related obstruction); as well as recent examples Bush (wiretapping AND detainment stuff, debated) and Trump (possible bribery AND Jan6, heavily debated) that are worth mentioning. A few other possible violators, depending. I think a few arguments were made for Jefferson for various things, and Truman for some Korean War stuff, and some even say Reagan for Iran-Contra (defying congress outright). I left off Johnson, although he WAS impeached, because the core issue felt like it hinged on technicalities of Cabinet appointments and personality clashes. Of course, the list goes way up if you're talking about ANY unconstitutional action, judged after the fact.
So that's 6-8 presidents out of 46. 10 if you are expansive. Those that threaten the core fundamentals of the nation, that's probably just Jackson for his SC defiance and FDR for court packing (and maybe the four terms if we are being honest, though totally legal it was worrying), because although some wartime stuff is in theory worrying we can probably give a bit of a pass to that, even if it involves some core free speech stuff, due to theoretically all wars having an end date. Trump is definitely not (currently) on that core fundamental list.
So historically only a 4% rate of bigtime, core fundamental danger, though that's a really, really crude calculation where I don't yet know how I feel about it. I'm mildly afraid that Biden will consider a court-packing plan, but this probability I place at more like 3-5%. Trump gets weighted higher at 6-10%. This is subjective, thus I don't expect people to agree. However, I don't consider "not suspending the constitution" as a fair predictor of future behavior just because it's literally the default expectation. We have to look elsewhere. Could we have predicted FDR and Jackson's transgressions? FDR had a lot of sweeping changes, and a lot of them undone by the SC, with big economic pressure. I don't know how useful this is. Major planks of major plans have been knocked out for a lot of presidents, including several recent ones from both parties, no connection with major crises yet. Jackson was highly pugilistic and the classic original populist. However, this is tricky and subjective. I kind of feel like this is a good Trump comparison? It's gotta be, right? But I also think you could come up with other parallels for other presidents with Jackson, so I'm not sure. Maybe the standard is actually talking bad about the SC ahead of time instead? A lot of presidents also grouse about this. I don't think Biden himself does this as much as other Democrats. But he does sometimes.
Got distracted, we return to the original question. Why am I rating Trump higher than Biden in existential risk?
How much of that is due to rhetoric? I've actually rewritten the second half of this comment eight times (I counted), with many, many deleted sentences talking about evidence. Let no one say I can't at least try to be fair, or at least consistent. I think I've decided after this long reflection that it's actually all due to rhetoric and language. If someone makes noises about doing highly dangerous constitutional/existential stuff, am I really supposed to ignore it if most evidence points to it being bluster, though rooted in strong and (I think) genuine feeling? Biden makes noise about court packing. I actually rate this as concerning, I do try to be fair. Trump makes noise about election stuff. Both of these concern core interests. However, court packing would likely fail, whereas election denialism stuff... might succeed? IS that fair? I could possibly be nudged in either direction on Biden court packing. Is my feeling on Trump a sign of TDS? Or is it simply a case of listening to what he literally talks about all the time and treating it at face value on the off-chance it's not superficial but real?
I'm going to make that an actual question. Broadly: does the recent adage "if someone tells you who they are, believe them" hold water when it comes to presidents and what they say?
You're obviously allowed to think that, but it's a ludicrously low number. Trump had 4 years in which he did not harm the Constitution or the rule of law at all. He had policies which were adjudicated unconstitutional, and he modified them to satisfy the courts, but that's about it.
No. Even if someone were to have shown "bribery" (which they simply have not), that would not constitute "[acting] unconstitutionally in a big or blatant way", it would merely be unlawful. Nor is one's supporters rioting at the Capitol that either.
Biden, on the other hand, has his administration actually prosecuting his opposition, and there is evidence of co-ordination between his administration and New York's prosecution of his opposition. That's a threat to our system right there.
To be clear, unlike apparently many Democrats, I'm actually relatively unafraid of so-called "lawfare". Even if it turns "against" Biden. I trust the courts, at least broadly speaking, to deal in facts and weigh evidence. Still, I'm a realist. I know not all the decisions will be perfect, and not all judges are either. See for example Judge Cannon in the Florida case, which seems to me to be a very, very open-and-shut, slam dunk case, tricky procedural classified stuff notwithstanding. I don't like how she has been treating the case. I won't lose sleep over it, just be a little disappointed. This legal aspect is not something I consider to be an existential threat from Trump, even in the Democrat's worst case on this issue.
Parts of the system you can see working even now. The House investigated Biden a million times, as is their right, even if the left complained about it loudly. Guess what? They really didn't find anything at all. The best they could do was an attempted ouster of Garland, which was pretty flimsy, and the vote margins demonstrated that. Even Trump not being removed from office after impeachment I begrudgingly think is the system working. The two party system is pretty flawed but still delivers roughly expected results. I still agree with Mitt Romney's vote and speech on the issue, but if Trump had tried an even more blatant or flagrant bribery scheme than he did, he would have been removed, GOP reluctance or not. I don't love the threshold we've established, but one exists.
Still, a single term is still relative weak evidence. I already agreed about how Trump's first term is evidence for his constitution-abidingness, even though it's weak. We're talking about an inherently rare event, which is tricky from a statistics perspective. My whole thing is, the best we can do is watch the rhetoric. I don't see Biden making inflammatory claims, other than a brief flirtation with court packing, which he ended up sidestepping and burying. I do see Trump making inflammatory claims and ones that seem to violate several constitutional principles. Grains of salt are needed of course. We're not in wartime, so that helps. And I think most attempts to totally defy the Constitution would fail. I'm just explaining one aspect of my vote that I think other people share, even if they haven't thought about it in the same detail. They don't like gambling with existential risk! Saying "oh the risk is low" is not an effective counter-argument and misses the whole point of the objection.
I'm also unafraid of lawfare, because the vast, vast, vast majority of Democrat's have not committed anything close to Trump, and even the most wacky Trump +80 rural county in the middle of Texas or Oklahoma actually will have issues finding 12 jurors (that any Biden/Hillary/Obama/etc. defense team will basically six of) to convict random Democratic officials of whatever crimes people want to charge them with.
Like, there are actual laws about classifield documents or falsifying business records, regardless of your belief of Trump's guilt or innocence. There's not the laws on the books for the random stuff the Right is upset over - and hey, as with good ole' Gold Bars Menendez, if there are actually corrupt Democrat's so be it - as a left-wing social democrat, the more corrupt ones are usually more moderate. Menendez is being replaced with a much more progressive nice Asian-American 41 year old who will be in that seat for the next 30 years.
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Thatt's not just subjective, it's so subjective that your conclusion entirely depends on the subjective part. I mean, I could say "Biden has a 5-10% chance of cutting off aid to Sarael" or "Biden has a 5-10% chance of nationalizing Twitter" based on nothing whatsoever, and the percentage is small enough that it would be hard to argue exact numbers.
It's harder and we have to be very honest and transparent about our assumptions, but not impossible. There are a still some obvious guardrails to rare claims. For example, I flat out do not think anyone could make even a half-compelling case for Biden nationalizing Twitter. Few things happen to our complete surprise, when it comes to policy. Biden has talked about court reform before, so it entered the realm of plausibility. Zero people with any power have made nationalizing Twitter arguments, so it's not. Kind of Overton window type stuff, here. Trump has talked about deploying the military in controversial circumstances at least five times, so it enters the realm of discussion and analysis.
Then pick a different example. There has to be some unlikely scenario. Let's go with your original court packing one.
You care about unlikely scenarios that happen at the 5-10% level, yet you don't care about unlikely scenarios that happen at the 3-5% level. Even assuming I fix the numbers so it isn't exactly at 5 (which is covered by both ranges), that's making a really, really, fine distinction. I simply would not be able to estimate such things with enough precision to say "well, maybe it's as high as 3-5%. but it couldn't possibly be as high as 5-10%". And I highly doubt you could really make such estimates either. It's not only subjective, but it can't be anything else; you're pulling numbers out of your hat.
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The lesson of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" is that it doesn't matter if the wolf has arrived, the boy has repeatedly abused his responsibility and fostered the conditions for a disaster.
At a certain threshold (we've crossed it!) any villager who comes when the lad calls is a sucker and if the town is ruined by this convergence of circumstances the boy is at fault.
Any self-respecting game theorist would be a fool to heed Blue Media's wailing and gnashing again.
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Why do you care about this, and why should anyone else care about this? The Constitution is dead, and there will be no resurrection. I do not believe that it protects me or my tribe in any meaningful way, and I do not see why I should respect claims of its protection put forward by other tribes. Constitutional claims are useful when they convince other people to drop opposition to one's values or goals. There is no reason to allow them to obstruct one's own values or goals. The constitution means whatever five justices say it means, without limit; benefits are entirely derived from controlling the mechanisms of interpretation, not the document being interpreted. If you have political and social control, you don't need the Constitution, and if you lack it, the Constitution will not help you. This is how the document observably works, and knowledge that this is how it observably works is now reasonably common across the population, and will only grow increasingly common over time as the contradictions inherent to the system continue to express themselves.
Deploying troops domestically was the correct response to the Floyd riots, and the failure to do so seriously damaged what remains of our country. The riots were the culmination of Blue Tribe's long-established strategy of employing organized, lawless political violence to secure political and social power, and they succeeded to an unbelievable degree specifically because no one was willing or able to deploy the appropriate response of overwhelming lawful force on the part of the authorities. That failure made the culture war much, much worse in a way that probably cannot be fixed.
Trump is not a unique threat. He exists because a critical mass of Red Tribe has lost faith in the existing system and wishes to coordinate meanness outside it. If he is finally destroyed that critical mass will find some other avatar or method to coordinate meanness through. They will continue to do so until either they find an effective method to obtain real address of grievances, or until society suffers a fatal rupture. The later seems, admittedly, a more likely outcome, but the former should not be underestimated. The current systems which prevent redress seem to me much more fragile than they generally appear.
Some thoughtful replies to this post. I think your take is pretty interesting.
I'm hesitant to ascribe too much power to the BLM riots, though. While many perceived this as the Left flexing its practical power and control over the masses, I sort of thing it was just an over-indulged feel-good moment for people feeling a bit disempowered (a disempowered feeling being the true, root, and universal problem of our age I feel) on the left and a lot of cognitive dissonance too. So it drew in more people than expected due to those forces, but also on the flip side, I don't think it meaningfully demonstrated any actual control over the masses. Perhaps part of this lies rooted in media distortion yes, on both sides of the riots. For most participants, the talking point about peacefulness was actually true, and protest is objectively a significant and specially protected right as well as a force for change, generally and historically. Like, for a lot of people, it was like my sister's experience, where she was an impressionable and impassioned 16 year old who stood out with a sign in my very low-Black state of Oregon, in the suburbs, and... yeah that was the whole experience. Fox News did not portray this, not to a degree proportional to its reality OR its importance. Conversely, MSNBC was patently dishonest with its viewers. Ignoring the, uh, literal fucking flames, the beatings, the violence, all of this was difficult to watch. Police were defanged and demonized. Random Defund types were given megaphones. A lot of Red people were rightly feeling like they were watching some news describe an alternate reality.
Turns out all the public really wants is slightly more police, but with some accountability mechanisms that actually work, and which currently only barely exist. And guess what? BLM protests were actually, uh, fucking successful in the sense that body cam adoption rates among police officers have skyrocketed. Okay, fine. The accountability portion did not happen, not really. I still am waiting for that. It sucks. At the same time, it's clear that a lot of the numerical bigness of the BLM protests was not in fact "true believers" but fadsters. The accountability portion didn't happen because it turns out that while people vaguely want accountability, they currently don't actually want it bad enough. Possibly because most voters don't imagine themselves ever being on the wrong side of the law? Maybe we just need a few more scandals? Some police union reform? It will happen eventually.
The constitution has actual and practical meaning insofar as the well-founded and established legal protections derived therefrom provide functional and meaningful relief to abuse when seeking legal recourse. This actually accounts for many citizens, including you. Even top-end brokenness doesn't cancel out the taken-for-granted norms that are backed up by this option of last resort. Dysfunction in the Supreme Court does not in nearly any practical way diminish you and your actions, because they are not rewriting the entire body of common law that works jointly with relevant daily laws. The legal inertia of the legal system is not just massive, it is gargantuan. Of course, state-level laws are far and away the most impactful to individuals. There is likely some merit to a dedicated color-tribe to moving into an aligned state, but beyond that, no difference.
I think people confuse the lethargy of the system with inherent dysfunction. However, to throw out an ad-hoc rule of thumb, it only takes 10 years at a maximum for true and deep-seated, popular change to show up in actual law and legislatures. This is often longer than comfort. I get it. But redress is most certainly there.
You missed something. The document still has a strong guiding influence on the forms and functions alike of the use of said control. It's a well-worn groove that least-resistance rules say will often offer an underlying structure and direction to this exercise of power. In addition, there is strong legal inertia as previously discussed. In fact, the whole point of the Constitution, at its core, is that it provides a robust mechanism that can balance majority-tyranny with minority-rights while also accounting for future shifts in opinion, because some shifts are fleeting fads while others are more durable. Almost every single mechanism in the document is concerned with allowing some small amount of temporary change just in case the feeling ends up being real, while allowing for great shifts when these changes end up being persistent, and the latter is often deemed more important when the two conflict.
However! The only non-intuitive thing in the constitution is that it has a very strong allowance and permissions for State structures specifically. This is, in a way, a historical artifact of the at times greatly autonomous 13 colonies with separate charters and governance. Thus, the Senate being the way it is. Population disparities between states is the greatest foundational threat to the country and constitution, in this framing. The current national political situation almost perfectly reflects this. Personally, I'd split up the bigger states and admit them to the Union as new states, with combining states on the table as the stretch goal and totally redrawing lines as the super stretch goal, but I'm sadly not in charge :(
The problem with doing this is that this is unequivocally and permanently bad for Blue power.
Which, obviously, Blues won't like; since this will create a permanent Red Senate that can just block Blue policy goals (which will tilt the balance of power even more in the relatively-unaccountable executive direction) and has long-term ramifications about how their Tribe can exert influence going forward (since a sudden loss of territory in close proximity to the cities opens the door to massive State income and sales tax arbitrage, resource extraction is still rather lucrative in the states that have them, lawfare/process-as-punishment against Blue policies is more practical due to newly-independent police, etc.).
And sure, it's possible to create new states such that it advantages both Blue and Red, but doing that would require nonsense solutions that create city-states in flyover country (because cities are the only places that vote Blue, almost like the Blues are a purpose-built city interest faction or something). Sure, it could give the political situation a chance to stabilize if there were any other fault-lines other than "urban core" vs. "everyone else", but the economy has been hollowed out so much that I'm not convinced it's even possible (as the nation to the immediate north demonstrates: the "third way" Western left party was extraordinarily strong ~15 years ago, but is on track to disappear entirely in the next election).
Really? I’m pretty sure this is considered a Blue policy, though it might depend on the construction. Overall the Democrats usually win the popular vote but the Senate skews Red, this proposal is intended to level out the disparity between the two. Merging in particular disfavors Red, since rural states are lower population.
No, the trickiest issue is that even if we could balance the Red/Blue short term impact, it’s hard to actually draft a workable compromise because literally every state needs to individually give specific consent to border modification. Any one single state could torpedo the whole deal. There’s currently only a few places that would probably assent right away: for example Eastern Oregon has long wanted to join Idaho, and honestly they are a great fit.
I am visualizing an approach that would keep as many current state borders as-is as possible. So in practice we wouldn’t be gerrymandering cities, just slicing up bigger states into logical regions. For example California seems to be able to split in either 2 or 3, vertically stacked, without too much issue.
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A North/South/West Texas split would create three upper-end-of average states, all of which would be pretty red. You could do a state of Rio Grande, which would probably be swingy, but look like obvious gerrymandering, or a set of even more obviously gerrymandered exclaves that are solid blue states. Ditto Louisiana; the obvious split would be north/south, both of which would be small red states.
But nobody's proposing those sets of splits. The main demand for a new state is to split off eastern Oregon- again, pretty red. Likewise, Northern California has a fairly fringe but real movement to split off from California; this is a red-leaning state of Jefferson. Upstate New York has wanted to split in the past, I doubt they're going to be a blue state.
For some reason, the people who actually want to have their state split up such that they're under a different government are all republicans with democrat-controlled state governments.
Whereas the split they'd actually need to come up with would be "State of Austin" and "State of Texas", since Austin's policy goals are quite a bit more suppressed by the rest of the state than the converse [whether the policies Austin wants are right or wrong is out of scope].
Which is why I think that, if we wanted it to be perceived as fair by both sides, it'd have to be city-states made up of Blue cities in perma-Red states- as this is the reverse of the "some reason" you're hinting at (which, again, comes down to "consent of the governed is not equally geographically distributed", and both Blues and Reds have motivated reasoning for not understanding that).
But nobody seems to want that. Even in blue cities on the borders of red states(that is, not Austin), they usually don't want to have a different state. I don't think there's any movement for Kansas City to be its own state. Nor New Orleans or Miami.
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Deploying troops is a serious matter and a last resort to only be used in the most serious riots that are absolutely beyond the control of the police and state National Guard. Once a riot becomes an insurrection the insurance policies aren't required to pay due to the exclusion for acts of war. If Trump had invoked the Insurrection Act he would have drawn the ire of the people he was supposedly trying to help, which is why he didn't do it.
Local authorities across the nation ordered their police to stand down. State authorities refused to deploy the national guard. Innocent people were victimized en masse and without recourse by organized political violence with clear, bidirectional ties to both the Democratic party and to Blue Tribe institutions generally. Those few who tried to defend themselves were subjected to nakedly political prosecutions on the flimsiest of pretexts and in defiance of the facts.
Blue Tribe, both its elite leadership and its general population, accepted, endorsed and supported these crimes. They collectively encouraged and enabled rampant, lawless political violence with the explicit goal to secure political and social power for themselves and their own interests, and they coordinated overwhelming retaliation against anyone who resisted or objected. Many of the Blue commenters here did the same. One of them argued at length and quite explicitly that it was better for people like myself and my family to accept beatings at the hands of a mob rather than defend ourselves with lethal force, because criminal mob beatings were statistically less likely to kill people than lawfully justified gunfire. That's the sort of conversation that leaves an impression.
Given those circumstances, the military would have been the correct response. It would have been an entirely reasonable response in the face of far less severe violations of the peace. The government's failure to deliver the appropriate response lingers, and the debt to justice will need to be repaid at some point in the future. It manifests, here and now, in markedly reduced trust in our social institutions, and a reduced willingness to expend efforts and make sacrifices for the preservation of those institutions. Every dispute is now conducted in the knowledge that Blues, speaking generally, are the sort of people who will happily endorse our victimization without apparent limit, and think themselves virtuous in the process.
You couldn’t be more wrong. Almost everyone who was ‘victimized’ by BLM / Summer of Floyd riots voted Democrat. Red tribe suburban and exurban neighbourhoods were almost never targeted and their residents suffered minimal deterioration in QoL compared to inhabitants of big cities.
Showing these people what the logical outcome of what was previously considered harmless hippie justice reform activism actually is was a necessary and important move, even if it led to the unfortunate deterioration of some American cities. The idea that the army was necessary to control the riots is laughable. A few dozen police officers could have controlled even the absolute worst of them. It was state and municipal elected officials who were responsible for what happened.
If Trump had sent in the military to crush the riots, the violence would have been solved, the blue urban governments would have grandstanded against the racist, oppressive, anti-black hijacking of the federal government by colonialist forces in collaboration with the brutal right wing military that oppresses PoC at home and abroad, and their constituents would have loved it, even as intervention saved their cities.
Rising crime, homelessness, and lawlessness had to be blamed by blue tribe citizens on their own elected officials with no convenient scapegoats or excuses. Sending in the military would have guaranteed no negative repercussions for the justice/police/bail/etc reform movement whatsoever.
As the saying goes "could've, would've, should've". The point is they didn't.
The Insurrection Act specifically takes that into account (or Eisenhower couldn't have used it). From 10 USC 253: "the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection"
Sure, but it doesn’t matter; Trump sending in the troops to control the riots would guarantee Democratic controlled cities remain shitholes for decades because local government can swing to the left with zero backstop, safe in the knowledge that if things get really out of hand the federal government will rescue them and provide a convenient scapegoat for any excess heat generated in trying to solve the problems caused by leftist policies.
OK, so where's the downside for the Republicans? They send troops in and stop the riots. Democrats let their cities go to shit, and every once in a while they burn until the Republicans send in the troops to stop the riots. Looks to me like a nationwide advertisement to oppose the Democrats.
Swing voters don’t think there’s a huge problem with lawlessness if it’s just a little one-day thing and then quickly shut down by the feds. They do if it goes on for months/years, then some go Red.
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Do you remember the most recent presidential inauguration when DC was literally locked down by troops despite there being literally zero threat of any kind?
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I don't think this is true. If the supreme court did things obviously false, and the executive disagreed, on something that mattered, and had popular opinion on his side, I don't think there'd really be too much trouble with him doing what he wanted.
This is just false. Supreme court justices are not infrequently honest, and trying to do interpretation, not fabrication. At the very least, they always are pretending to be interpreting the text, which does provide constraints on their behavior.
Treating the constitution with respect is a valuable norm because it does, in fact, constrain behavior. Less than it used to, as people kept stretching things, but it does constrain behavior, and usually in ways that make things better.
I'm not claiming the Court can't be defied. Obviously it can be, and in fact several of its recent pro-2A findings are being defied at this very moment in various states, most notably New York and California, and have been for years now. I'm claiming that to the extent that any outcome can be attributed to "The Constitution", it is actually happening because the Justices want it to happen, not because of the ink on the paper. There is no ground reality, there is no platonic form, and anyone who believes otherwise is fooling themselves. Abortion has both been protected and not protected by the Constitution, and the answer to the question of which state was "correct" is mu.
It is of course the case that things happen because they (in some sense) want them to happen; actions happen by agents. But pretty often, the reason why they want it to happen is because that's what they think the Constitution says, and they're trying to be faithful interpreters.
Why not? I think language has meaning.
This particular piece of language has managed to hold enough people in its sway that something vaguely approximating its meaning has been the basis by which we govern the United States of America.
If you try to strip out the Constitution from your understanding of the United States, you will understand it worse, not better.
No, it's not moot. The norm of following the Constitution is important and a valuable check against limitless power-seeking. That norm means that it's useful that we should try to care what the Constitution says. Further, interpretation socially recognized as correct helps to confer legitimacy. Social recognition of correctness of interpretation tends to correlate with correct interpretation loosely, at least, because many people can read.
Language has meaning to the extent that people are willing to cooperate in building and maintaining that meaning together. If they are not, then it cannot. For any deeper "meaning" than that, I think you need something approximately like an appeal to God. I'm willing to accept such appeals, but others are very clearly not, and neither you nor I have any means by which to compel such acceptance.
And it just so happens that "faithful interpretation" consistently results in judgements that match their own perceptions of what is just and good, and sometimes no more than what is expedient. Any contradictions between these judgements and the text itself are easily resolved by words words words. I'm given to understand that "emanations" and "penumbras" are sometimes involved.
In the past, certainly. In the present, not really, no. In the future, not at all, I should think. Common knowledge and path dependency trump all other factors. It is certainly true that understanding the Constitution is necessary to understand how we got to where we are now, and the short version is that when it was written people really believed in it. But to understand where we are going, one needs to understand that this belief has largely died, and within a generation at most will be entirely extinct.
Supreme Court decisions favoring Blue Tribe observably have vastly greater impact than decisions favoring Red Tribe. Decisions favoring Red Tribe have been quite explicitly defied by lower courts, and the Supreme Court has then quite explicitly allowed such defiance to stand. I have no problem explaining such behavior: the Court realizes that its power derives from social consensus, not formal law, and recognizes that the consensus is against it and that further attempts to enforce the law will cost it more than it can afford. But if you believe the Constitution is really where their power springs forth, I'd be interested in your alternate explanation of such behavior. The Supreme Court sided with Dick Heller, yet he still can't have his gun. Why is that?
And given that I observe that decisions favoring my tribe are routinely nullified by Blues wherever they are stronger, why should I support upholding decisions favoring blues where we Reds are stronger? What value is secured by doing so?
I don't think I can offer a response better than that of Lysander Spooner:
The value of the Constitution came when it acted as a hard limit on the scope and scale of political conflict. People understood it to put many tools of power off the table for most practical purposes, removing them from the normal push and pull of the political contest. When we vote, the Constitution means that we're voting on policy, not on our basic political rights. If we lose, we suffer the other side's policies for a few years, but our rights are inviolate.
Only, they aren't, and anyone who believes otherwise at this point is quite foolish indeed. Progressives and their Living Constitution ideology mean that all bets are off, and indeed we have seen abuses and usurpations committed and upheld that would have been unimaginable as little as ten years ago.
"They wouldn't do that...." Yes, they would, for any value of "that" that one cares to specify. Americans, Blue or Red, are human, and "that" is what humans reliably do. Presidential candidates have campaigned on the idea of taxing religions they don't like, and openly laughed at the idea of constitutional limits on their ambitions. The theoretical grounding is solid, and the underlying logic is simply correct. Where your "norms" are supposed to fit into this picture I really cannot say.
Turn back to your favorite histories, and contemplate the fact that for all our technological sophistication, nothing about our core nature as humans has ever really changed. Humans will inevitably human. We create systems to control and channel our nature, but what our hands make, they can unmake as well. The Constitution arose from a specific culture, and it worked due to a specific set of cultural norms and assumptions. That culture changed, the norms and assumptions no longer apply, and so the Constitution is dead. To the extent that common knowledge of its death has not proliferated, it serves mainly to fool people into making sacrifices that will not be reciprocated by those who caught on a little quicker.
I don't have much to add, been reading you for a while, but just want to say that you have a fascinating blend of what I think is cynicism and naivete. You are aware of power law and how politics aren't real, just kayfabe thrown over the squabbling of groups in the game of power, but you also believe that, in your words, the hunger for justice and the desire to rebel against the intolerable is a part of human nature.
I find this fascinating. I don't believe the latter at all; in the words of greater men than I, all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.
I think cooperation is possible at scale, because societies that can coordinate meanness to other societies generally tend to do better than those who can't. They just need, I don't know, some kind of mutually acceptable target. Nothing unites people like a common enemy, especially if the enemy is existential.
The perception of naivete comes, I think, from a gap in priors. Part of that is that I'm a Christian, so I am committed to a belief in objective morality and ultimate justice. Another part of it is that I am quite convinced that human systems are unavoidably fallible. There are no stable dystopias, nor stable utopias, no thousand year Reichs, no iron laws of history grinding out some inevitable sociological outcome. Everything we make ends, usually sooner than later, and sooner still when other humans are incentivized to hasten that end's arrival.
This seems like a reasonable axiom. Would you mind examining it in a bit more detail, though? Specifically, the term "while evils are sufferable": is the sufferability of evils a universal constant, or does it change over time? Will all men in in all places and all times accept one specific evil and reject another specific evil, or do we observe variance in their tolerance over time? And if we observe variance, what causes this variance?
Certainly. But when we observe past societies, we see that the capacity for coherent meanness ebbs and flows. The state long united divides, and the state long divided unites, no?
I should think that simple history would demonstrate that "sufferability" is not, at least in absolute terms, a constant. We can see this by comparing the conditions animating different revolts over time: the peasants in Wat Tyler's rebellion lived in manifestly different conditions than the frontiersmen who rose in the Whisky Rebellion, even though both uprisings were putatively triggered by taxes that were perceived to be too high, and the decisions of local officials which were perceived to be abusive. We can also see it by comparing the circumstances of protesting/revolting groups and comparing them to other groups similarly situated in time and place who did not engage in such protest/revolt. Thus we can see that, for example, there were several serious slave revolts in the U.S. during the first decade of the 19th century, then again in the 1830s, but otherwise seem to have been very rare, even though those same revolts often resulted in the passage of increasingly strict laws circumscribing what limited freedoms slaves had.
A hard question, but one the best explanations I've seen is de Tocqueville's - revolutions and revolts happen not when people are maximally oppressed, but when things are getting better sufficient for them to develop expectations that then go unmet, and when repressive forces are weak and/or internally conflicted.
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Or you can just be a textualist about meaning. Sentences make assertions, commands, etc. Words have ordinary denotations, at least within a given language and context. You can throw that together with some grammar and get a more-or-less well-defined meaning to what it's saying. I don't think my writing this only contains any meaning from social consensus; if you all died halfway through my writing this, it'd still have meaning.
I said "pretty often". I did not say always. Further, if they are erring in their judgment, even just trying, or feeling pressured to make a "good enough" argument will help to constrain.
That said, yeah, the things you list tend to be bad, and were deliberately trying to stretch things.
Don't help it. It's useful.
It's not just path-dependency, as it continues to be used as a reference, and is treated as the supreme law of the land, however poorly. If we collectively, openly, decided tomorrow that it doesn't matter you'd see large changes.
Anyway, I don't think it'll be dead. Conservatives not infrequently turn to it to back up their preferred policies in guns or speech, so there's at least some motive to keep it around, even just in the domain of "let's bash my enemies".
In the recent past. Wasn't true of Lochner, though. (Not that *Lochner was right). In any case, the left kept winning because they'd built up enough institutional power, both in the presidency and in the court system. The right is not currently at that state. That's why it does worse. But what. Do you really think that Blue entities will become more moderate when you tell whatever portion of them who currently have principles that they don't have to care about those pesky things any more?
It'd be more useful, if the right got the level of power that would be needed to effectually ignore the constitution, to bring force to bear to ensure that it's actually followed.
We control SCOTUS now, for the first time in nearly a century. Give it time; the pendulum will swing as bad precedent after bad precedent falls and in 50 years the blues come asking you that same question. Feel free to aid in overturning those precedents, if given the opportunity. But treat it with sufficient seriousness, so that it sticks, instead of giving them an out as soon as your side has power.
If there's one thing the conservative movement's actually managed to do institutionally, it's the federalist society. Don't throw that out.
Yeah, this quote is wrong. It's better to view it as a headwind, maybe—it can be resisted and defeated, but that takes effort, and less is done than without it's presence.
So, sure, we've gotten such a government, but it was slower in coming and still, somehow, smaller and more constrained than it would be did the Constitution not exist.
Sure, it's bad, but imagine how much worse off we'd be without it.
Yes, this is what it's trying to do. Yes, this isn't really what happens, often. But the commitment to constitution means we are at least having to pretend to be trying, which puts us in a better state than if no one cared.
In every trickling force making it easier to follow the status quo. In the respect many people have for things like "rule of law," and so they yield.
I guess I see it as having more weight even with the blues than you do. At least, in things without political valence, like the existence of the 4th amendment, is a very good thing. Don't get rid of that. But even in matters with political valence, they do listen sometimes.
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Why even have a country if you don't believe in anything except exatly what you want? You are kind of that guy though, you're a boogaloo boy.
The point of a country is cooperation to secure the common good. This doesn't work if, as in our present circumstance, we collectively can't agree on the common good. It's not about getting exactly what "I" or "we" want. It's about whether or not there's a rational basis for believing cooperation is possible. With regard to the Constitution, such a belief is no longer rational, and it doesn't seem to me that it can be recovered, because the evolution of our Constitutional understanding is necessarily path-dependent. The arguments that worked before, worked because at the time we hadn't seen their long-term results. We have seen those results, so they won't work again.
If you say so. What follows?
You want violent confrontation to bend others to your will, hoping for collapse for some excitiment, and are dissatisfied when things are going ok.
No, I want me and mine to be left alone to live in peace. I'm happy for offer the same to others. That's just not the direction we appear to be heading in.
How'd you feel about watching the police station burn?
Things are generally not "going okay". It's possible that they'll get somewhat better, and it's also possible that they'll get a whole lot worse. Even the worse outcomes are preferable to living at the mercy of people who hate myself, my tribe and my family, though.
On the topic at hand, I think my argument is pretty solid. The court exists to limit the scale of conflict, but it is failing to do that. If you think the Court is important, this should concern you.
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I just told you not to do this.
You said what you said, he responded, and now you're just repeating yourself. If you want to engage with someone on why they think they way they do, actually engage them, don't just sneer at them.
He asked what follows, that is what follows. The dude self identifies as a violent radical.
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You cannot simply say this isn't working.
What's the alternative?
Radical federalism or large-scale violence, one imagines, but we will be free of each other, one way or the other. Society requires coherent values. That can be accomplished by all the blues sorting themselves into blue areas ruled by blue laws, and all the reds sorting themselves into red areas ruled by red laws, and the two areas generally leaving each other alone. Alternatively, it can be accomplished by not having a society any more. Those seem the most likely outcomes, and I obviously prefer the sorting one. I think you should as well.
It's possible I'm wrong, of course, and time will tell. Given that this is a massively-multiplayer game, though, I'm skeptical as to how long the waiting can really last before things break one way or the other.
Does it? Or does it just require sufficient force to keep the cork in the bottle?
The rhetorical point is well-taken, but if this is a genuine question that you're interested in discussing, I'd invite you to offer an answer to the questions posed in this comment.
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There is one more. The small, radical, defiant bits of Red Tribe are crushed by main force, the way the stupider parts of it were crushed on January 6. The rest is basically oppressed and shrinks away as its children defect to Blue, with the tactic or explicit approval of their parents. Any Red Triber who becomes defiant is kept in check by other Red Tribers, partially for fear they'll bring Blue's wrath upon themselves, but mostly because Red accepts Blue's legitimacy as long as they hold the institutions with the correct names (by hook or by crook, it doesn't matter).
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Can I ask you to try reading some right wing literature from the late 80s, early 90s? They were also convinced that things couldn't keep getting worse and more degenerate, and that a glorious revolution would happen soon.
They were wrong.
I'm always up for reading, but I did in fact read a fair amount of 80s and 90s right-wing literature in the 90s themselves. I remember quite well the triumphalism of Bush's election in 2000, and the bellicose swagger post-9/11, and how it all went straight to shit in short order, because I lived through it directly. I'm aware of the intellectual failings of Conservatism as a movement, and to the extent that I hope for political solutions at all, those hopes are not based on what is commonly understood by the term "Conservatism". Also, I am neither expecting nor predicting a "Glorious Revolution".
One of our first conversations was about whether you would push a certain button. You said you would, because you wish that button existed. I would not, because I know that button exists, and further that, in a manner of speaking, a small but steadily-increasing number of those buttons gets mailed out to random addresses every day. Against all expectations, I'm hoping that things will somehow calm down before someone decides to press one of them, but if things don't calm down a press seems inevitable. And in the end, I'm okay with that; as a matter of personal inclination, I much prefer this flag to this one.
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This is too antagonistic - don't just throw personal attacks like this.
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