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Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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Plurality failing the Independence of clones criterion so badly might suggest the easiest step forward. Switch to approval voting, where sparking a competition between "President Mediocre" vs "President AlsoMediocreButWillFireTheIdiots" no longer risks splitting the vote and getting "President Bad" elected instead (all candidate evaluations in the mind of a partisan voter, not necessarily objective), and we might then see a lot more voter control over the worst bureaucrats.

Though ... I can't actually say that that's not "coup-complete" still. It's hard for me to picture the existing parties agreeing to a voting system that will take away their insiders' power, and it's easy for me to picture a world where voters have been granted a way to remove idiot bureaucrats but never exercise that control because the marginal voters are also idiots.

Much as my Liberal heart loves electoral design, changes to the election system not only basically impossible, they are also not enough. Trump is about as much of an outsider as you're ever going to get and even if we replaced him with a smooth operator who actually wants to clear-them-out he couldn't do a damn thing because generals would tell him to fuck off, Hawaiian judges would stall his every move and the actual power structure would continue to tick the boxes it wants to tick while throwing just enough Russia related nonsense at him to keep him occupied. I say this completely independently of a partisan agenda, a President Sanders would have had the exact same issues.

The only way out of this is for power to diffuse away from administrations and into new hands. The only new set of hands available being private businessmen (as opposed to public corporations) and left wing postmodern revolutionaries.

The former seem to actually be telegraphing an attack at the moment (we shall see if it manifests into anything if Trump wins), and the latter have apparently made their move over Palestine and been soundly beat (though not into submission yet) by Israeli interests.

The tools are available for those who want to fight the battle though, especially with Chevron gone. But I've seen nothing ever happen for too long to expect an actual realignment in my lifetime without collapse.