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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 21, 2024

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  • Trump believed that there was enough fraud to effect the outcome of the election

  • He needed a venue in which to make the argument for this and present the case for why he thought this

  • If there existed conflicting electoral slates, the Vice President had the power to reject the certification, and allow a period of time for the congress to have a debate about the validity of any complaints. Such a debate has occurred in 1876, 1969, and 2005.

This seems pretty wonky, and the type of thing that nobody would usually ever care about or even know about if it weren't for cable news/twitter/hysterics.

To be clear I think that this was a completely reasonable thing to do. I think that our system of government is based on (and functions best) when it is competing forces pulling each other in tension.

I think that consensus arrises from conflict.

Every time that Trump is allowed to make his case publicly, so long as the case has no merit, it will lose supporters. Or, if it does have merit, it will gain them.

By not allowing Trump to make his case, and for trying to punish him for it with absurd conspiracy theorizing about "January 6th", it signals that Trump's opponents might fear that his case does have merit, and that by presenting the evidence for it, it will gain supporters.

Trump was clearly not trying to "overturn democracy" or "change the results of an election" or any other bullshit like that. Especially the idea that he was trying to "change the results" (he wasn't, he was trying to determine them) should disgust anybody who cares about American Democracy.

Daylight is the best disinfectant, etc.

This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not. If you did, then all of Trump's actions are just pushing the boundaries and gray areas of the law in pursuit of trying to right his perceived wrong. However, if you think that he actually knew there wasn't outcome-determinative fraud (with the best evidence of this being Trump's own advisers repeatedly telling him there wasn't along with repeated legal losses), yet pushed to overturn the election anyways, then the parade of horribles of "threat to democracy", "coup", "change the results", etc. would be fair to apply to him.

Also, repeating what I wrote in the other reply, if the best steel man involves Trump being so dumb or crazy to realize there wasn't fraud despite it being obvious to anyone else that would've been in his shoes, then it replaces the best reason to not vote for Trump with another really good reason to not vote for him.

This all seems to hinge on whether you believe Trump genuinely thought there was outcome-determinative fraud or not.

So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says? This whole thing is just the biggest case of typical mind fallacy and projection?!?

I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.

So you're telling me all of the outrage over "democracy being under threat" is caused by people not being able to believe that Trump could genuinely believe things he says?

Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.

I swear to god this country is going to give me an aneurysm.

Ditto. At least we can agree on that.

Well, yeah… The alternative is that Trump is completely untethered from reality, and that doesn’t appear to be entirely the case.

Not really. None of the issues in PA and WI happened in Florida. Florida is another state that used to have large Democrat machines that were routinely accused of fraud, but you could never quite prove it. Then Desantis came in, cleaned up the dirty voter rolls, streamlined the counting process, tightened up the vote by mail process (particularly post date rules and signature rules), got rid of insecure drop box, and then actually enforced all of that.

And magically no shenanigans. No more Miami-Dade reporting after the rest of the state had been done for hours. No more pallets of ballots magically being found at 3am. Etc etc. It turns out there is great evidence for fraud happening, because why you engage in active election security, all these suspicious activities disappear.

That’s not evidence of fraud happening. It could well be evidence that Florida cleaned up their act enough that irregularities from regular organizational incompetence no longer occur. But I suppose that depends a lot on your priors here.

That being said, I do strongly agree with enforcing electoral security the way that you say Florida has done. If the main point was a pre-emptive “Improve election security or else we’re not going to trust the results of this next election,” I would be on board with that. But instead, it sounds a lot more like a post-hoc “Nuh uh, we didn’t lose even though we have no hard evidence!”

Well, sure. My priors is we have known about machine fraud for centuries and nothing has changed so why would it stop?

Is there evidence of it happening repeatedly in American presidential elections to a large enough degree to have affected the results? If so, that would cause me to update my priors by a lot.

Of course, IL in 1960 was a battle of voter fraud wherein the DNC machine in Cook outworked the RNC machine in southern IL.

Most states now acknowledge the existence of ancient (aka 60 year old) voter fraud machines that would routinely manufacture 100k or so votes (see IL in 1982, the sole one contemporaneously caught). But no one has any explanation as to why this magically stopped when procedures in those areas remain the same. Few of the grand jury recommendations from the 1982 case are currently in effect in Illinois, for example.

Almost all of those recommendations are fully opposed by a major American political party for reasons that seem obvious to the curious.

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No. Just because Bill Barr said “we found no evidence of fraud” doesn’t make it a fact there is no fraud. It was fucking weird how all swing states just happened to stop counting at the same time. It was fucking weird how Biden received a vote dump in the middle of the night. If this happened in a foreign country after years of the IC actively plotting against the executive, we’d presume shenanigans.

I do think Trump genuinely believed he was cheated and there was real reasons to believe it. Now I don’t think belief was enough without hard evidence but I do think it is really shitty how unwilling the system was to analyze in detail prior to J6 what the evidence actually was.

It was fucking weird how Biden received a vote dump in the middle of the night.

Nah. It was so non-weird you could see it coming months in advance. It's reasonable to wonder whether the protections on mail-in ballots were sufficient, or whether other election rules like "Wisconsin law requires that the results of those absentee votes be reported all at once" were a bad idea, but when absentee ballots are reported all at once, in large heavily blue cities in a year when a majority of blue voters went absentee and a supermajority of red voters didn't, it would only be weird if the large vote dump wasn't massively blue.

See my other comment. In short the innocent and fraudulent answer looks similar meaning there is an easy ability to do fraud. Especially when you know what the bogey is.

If you'd said "This fucking looks weird", I would have absolutely agreed. The rules for how ballots were counted in Wisconsin were a bad idea. Democracy derives less of its value from "the median voter is super smart and should be in charge of everything" than it does from "there are a lot of people similar to the median voter who ought to be able to trust they're not being screwed over", so predictably reducing voter trust, even if the new suspicion is unfounded, is a horribly anti-democratic mistake. The Democrats used to know this, e.g. back when opposition to voting machines was left-coded, and it's shameful that they're forgetting it when they no longer expect to be the ones who might need to be distrustful.

Weird that this effect only occurred in certain states though -- it's been a while since I dug in, but as I recall the breakdown for mail-in vs in-person ballots is available for most states. If I'm remembering right, Florida is an example of a battleground state in which:

a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner

and

b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.

a. the votes were counted in a prompt manner

A lot of states didn't let mail-in ballots be processed until after election day polling closed. Reasonable if you don't want to risk preliminary count data leaking and influencing later voters, but not great if your priority is "prompt". Florida seems to have figured out how to thread the needle on that by allowing all the tricky work to be done ahead of time:

“They can determine the validity of ballots, confirm they should be counted and run them through machines,” Morley said. “They just can’t press the tally button.”

I'd still worry about possibilities of low-level fraud, since maintaining a proper chain of custody for weeks has to be a lot harder than doing so for hours, but it seems to have done wonders against possibilities of delays.

b. the difference in Dem/Rep turnout for the two methods was not very large.

No? The first data I found claims that early voting by mail was from voters registered 31% R to 45% D (24% minor or no affiliation), versus early in-person votes from voters registered 45% R to 32% D. That's not as large as the "how could you go out in public during a pandemic" vs "are you going to be a shut-in the rest of your life" bluster to pollsters before the election would have suggested, but it's still pretty large, and that's for the state as a whole; I wouldn't be surprised if the less moderate Democrats and more moderate Republicans were disproportionately in the larger cities.

No? The first data I found claims that early voting by mail was from voters registered 31% R to 45% D (24% minor or no affiliation), versus early in-person votes from voters registered 45% R to 32% D. That's not as large as the "how could you go out in public during a pandemic" vs "are you going to be a shut-in the rest of your life" bluster to pollsters before the election would have suggested, but it's still pretty large, and that's for the state as a whole; I wouldn't be surprised if the less moderate Democrats and more moderate Republicans were disproportionately in the larger cities.

I may not have been thinking of Florida, and was definitely thinking of actual vote tallies rather than "registered as" -- but regardless, 45-32 is nothing like the 90%+ D in the late-nite Biden drops seen in other places.

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Trump being so dumb or crazy to realize there wasn't fraud

I'm trying not to get too heated here, but I have to object to this characterization.

In my IRL circles, it's pretty much a unanimous consensus that there was electoral fraud by the Democrats in 2020… because there's similar electoral fraud by Democrats in every election, since probably the late 19th century at least. "My grandpa voted Republican till the day he died… and he's been voting Democrat ever since" isn't just taken as an old joke, but as a broad description of reality. Nixon was the winner in 1960. 2020 was exceptional only in the scale and brazenness of the mass ballot manufacture. Indeed, some hold that, were it not for the need of Republicans to overcome this "margin of fraud," the "silent majority" of Christian conservatives would win every time.

For an example of such views online, one can spend some time reading posts on sci-fi author Sarah Hoyt's blog, and the comments, on the topic — most recent is here. Or just read many of the comments over at Instapundit.

And sure, you can just dismiss all these people — and thus much of "red tribe" America — as all "dumb or crazy." It's not like we're not used to being stereotyped as a bunch of backwards, gap-toothed, inbred morons. (I suppose the Halloween horror movie season has me reminded once again of how many times Hollywood has used "murderous/rapist hillbillies" as antagonists.)

I don't understand your point, are you saying we don't need evidence for fraud because you and your circle have been so sure of it for so long? Do you believe every losing Republican candidate prior to Trump should also have denied the election result? What would you think if dems acted the exact same way?

I don't understand your point

My point is that people who are neither "totally crazy" nor "totally stupid" can still believe that 2020 was stolen, contra OP's assertion otherwise.

The BOP is obviously on the people claiming fraud meaningfully ended.

Democracy only serves its purpose if you can convince the other half of the country that they lost fair and square. If they remain convinced you cheated, it's broken and will eventually spin out into civil war given enough time.

How rational, easy to prove or the character of the people who hold the doubt are all completely immaterial. All that matters is that they are in large enough numbers and capable of violence.

Democracy has to convince the losers, or it is defunct. That is how it is. And all complaints that this is unfair or insane are to lay at the feet of democracy as a concept, not at the those of the electorate. Since its entire claim to legitimacy rests on representation.

If half the people think the election is rigged, it is rigged in any practical sense. The ritual isn't powerful because the incantation was said in the exact right tone. It's powerful because people believe in it. And if they don't, it isn't; and you have to fix it or the magic won't work and peaceful transfers of power will stop.

I'm not sure it's a knock on democracy to say that it can break down and fail at times. We know that. Maybe this is one of those times. I don't know who is to blame? You can't blame someone who's convinced of something despite evidence -- they're idiots. You can't blame someone who's failed to convince an idiot. How could they? At a certain point it's all just atoms and very sad.

You can't blame someone who's failed to convince an idiot. How could they? At a certain point it's all just atoms and very sad.

Of course I can.

Why did that person see fit to extend the franchise to idiots?

At some point refusing to question the assumptions that lead to the end of the republic is dogmatism. Popular suffrage is not a suicide pact. And if this solution doesn't prevent civil wars, there are other ones available.

Hmm, I think the belief that democracy is the least worst system can survive the probability that there are a lot of idiots and it will sometimes fail. But that's a big discussion.

Democracy in America is already dead and dying then, because it seems to me there’s simply no practical way to convince one side of losers because they’ll nitpick any evidence to the contrary to death. Maybe this is to be expected, as a symptom of the larger decline of democracy across the world in recent years.

A couple of weeks ago in the weekly attempt to enforce consensus on the election issue there were plenty of practical ways. Thing is, they all involved actually taking things seriously, not having a prior of 0 on cheating, and not trying to paper over the problem to maintain the appearance of the integrity of the system. As long as your solution set is limited to "keep doing insecure elections, refuse to disallow obviously fishy things like ballot harvesting, and have no remedy when election laws are violated e.g. by ejecting observers or having the observers not be able to object", yes, you can't convince one side that things are on the up and up.

To that side, what you're asking is "how can we cheat outrageously and have the result be accepted by you?" and obviously the answer to that is "you can't".

Or, to quote @naraburns in that earlier thread, 'Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."'

Ok, if you truly need better election security to be convinced to accept the results, then make that a core part of your platform. Don’t focus on a whole bunch of other things with election integrity only a marginal footnote, and then afterwards come out with “Heads I win, tails the election was rigged because you can’t prove it wasn’t!”

If that’s truly your biggest concern with democracy, then make it an issue front and center and make the Democrats pay when they try to avoid it, just like how the Democrats have done that this election by focusing on Trump’s disregard for the electoral process. Instead, the revealed preferences of the MAGA constituency don’t appear to be anywhere close to emphasizing election security as one of their foremost issues.

That is also my appraisal of the situation.

For an example of such views online

Sure, those views are there. But where’s the actual proof from unbiased third party sources? Last time I participated in such a discussion on TheMotte, the answer was that it does not and cannot exist because there are no unbiased sources, which I suppose is a valid viewpoint to hold, but means that any further discussion is moot.

Trump said he thought there was fraud, and acted like he was genuine in this belief.

He has maintained this now for 4 years despite substantial incentive to change.