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Can you steelman the "democracy in peril" argument? As far as I can tell, it's really the core scissor statement of the mainstream-left-versus-alt-right divide in Western countries. People on the left side seem to hold it to be so self-evidently true that you cannot disagree with it in good faith, while it is in equal measures self-evidently false to the point that good-faith agreement is inconceivable to those on the right. I personally always have figured myself broadly closer to the left than the right (if perhaps coping that the race/gender collectivism social justice movement is a temporary aberration), but with one's position on this statement now being treated as a shahada by both sides I find myself driven into the arms of the right wing simply because the left-wing position strikes me as too insane to accept. Unless "democracy" really is code for "whatever my allies want", how can you justify iterated statements that amount to "giving the majority what it keeps voting for is a threat to our democracy"?
If anything, it seems to me that the opposite sounds plausible: democracy as I understand it is threatened by political insiders collectively pulling all stops to prevent giving the majority what it wants, even if this requires wrecking a considerable amount of systems and societal machinery as collateral damage. What is actually the notion of democracy that is imperiled by the right, rather than the left?
(To forestall a possible line of argument, I do find it plausible at this point that, say, the German AfD, if it got into power, would engage in some sketchy reprisals against left-wing institutions, such as pulling funding from nonprofits. Even if on its own this would be a concerning move, I find it hard to put causal blame on them for this, given that the other parties were openly saying since day one that they would sooner ban the AfD than let them get into a position where they could implement their voters' preferences. Something like pointing a gun at someone and then saying that you were right about them being violent all along when they try to wrestle it from you.)
The argument is pretty straightforward: Any democratic system of government relies upon the ruling party being willing to cede power when it loses an election, otherwise the elections would be meaningless (lemma: if any power existed that could force the ruling party to cede power, that entity would be the de facto ruling party). Donald Trump lost the 2020 election. Donald Trump did not conced the election until after his schemes to change state vote counts, appoint fraudulent electors, and pressure Mike Pence to not count the electoral votes failed. Donald Trump's schemes failed because his underlings in the government were not willing to go along with his plans. Given the level of influence that Donald Trump has over the Republican Party, in his second term, he could appoint only underlings who he is sure will go along with his schemes next time.
Hm. This line of argument does not seem persuasive to me because (1) I see the same "threat to democracy" rhetoric, at the same level of intensity, being levelled against candidates and parties running on an anti-establishment line in other countries (Germany, Italy), where there has so far been no indication of them refusing to acknowledge official election outcomes, and started in 2016, not 2020; (2) given that Trump did in fact cede power, I find discussion of counterfactuals to be unproductive since it's not like there is a trusted neutral party that can provide us with particularly likely ones; (3) between the "faithless elector appeals" in the US of 2016 and cases such as the recent elections in Georgia (the country) where the same suspects are actually backing an opposition's refusal to accept election results and currently trying to instigate a violent overthrow in the name of "democracy", the idea that "democracy" and not contesting election results is correlated seems ill-supported.
I do recognize, though, that if you do not accept context from other countries, an argument about Trump on this basis seems more compelling - I guess you would only have to accept that the 2016 rhetoric about him being a threat was properly prophetic, as opposed to self-inflictedly so in the "claim someone is violent to coordinate provoking them into proving you right" way.
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I don't know if I can do justice to this request right now but I'll try briefly to at least copperman the 'democracy in peril' argument. I think we have plenty of evidence that Trump admires dictators and wants to become one and will work towards becoming one. Will he do this systematically and openly? Well no, both for characterological reasons and because it would be self-undermining for him to be seen to be doing this. But if opportunities to take more power come along or can be engineered he won't hesitate to seize them, and he is in a position where he is likely to get these opportunities, especially as he has built a following who trust him above anyone or any organisation. I find it likely that – in the event he's still alive and energetic – he'll be the real power behind the throne of the next Republican candidate to an extent we've never seen before (Putin/Medvedev style). Most of his voters will actively want this arrangement.
I don't really want to get into evidencing all of this – I would be supplying tonnes of quotes of his, that you're likely familiar with already and that Trump's admirers can just choose to say are meant non-literally. To people like me and I suspect George Saunders, Trump comes across as a creature who is transparently knowable. There is no mystery. You can follow his thought processes and drives exactly and see where they'll take him, and you can observe that he's not subject to political norms that do hold other politicians back. (Now it's very interesting that at least lots of his voters appear to either not mind this, or to see something else in him, and does this fact give me pause? Sometimes, but ultimately 99% of people I esteem and respect in the field of ideas/politics/philosophy oppose Trump so this makes it pretty easy for me to conclude that his supporters are the ones with faulty judgement.)
An additional dimension is that 'democracy is in peril' is not only about elections. It's also about the ability of ideas to face off against one another in a somewhat mutually comprehended arena. Trump and/or his followers endanger this because they have special abilities to believe in lies (and I do see this as a collective and advantageous 'ability' rather than simply a failing). Of course people in this forum just think Dems lie more cunningly, whereas Trump's birtherism or election-denying is to them more honest, because less legalistic and more bald-faced. So again, I am not going to try to provide evidence, but this is the gist of my case.
So why didn't he become a dictator during the first four years he was president? I've never heard a good response to this one. He was already president for four years, and yet we still have democracy. He's a known quantity.
Consider the following: I am a Trump supporter. Based on the above, I presume that you would thereby see my judgement as faulty. But the feeling is not mutual. I don't see your judgement to oppose Trump as incorrect; I just think you're a different type of person than me and you have different values, so of course you would think differently. You see me as faulty, whereas I just see you as different; and difference is not in itself a bad thing. Does this fact give you any pause?
I think the left has had a profoundly more deleterious effect on intellectual discourse over the past 10+ years than anything Trump has ever done.
I don't think the left is bad because they lie. In fact I don't think of them as being particularly untruthful at all, not anymore than the right is anyway. If I had to enumerate all my complaints with them, "lying" would not make the list. Rather, I think they're bad first and foremost because they can't tolerate dissent.
Because his plot to overturn the 2020 election failed? Since the DoJ slow-walked the investigations, he's had four years to consolidate power and will have another four years before another presidential election. I don't see why the Republicans (probably not Trump, given his age, but who knows?) wouldn't try again or why anyone would be sure they'd fail.
I feel like that just goes one level deeper (insert Inception fog horn here), because not everyone agrees that such a plot existed to begin with.
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The DOJ did not slow-walk their investigation into 2020 voter fraud; Bill Barr actually moved sufficiently faster than normal that it was, at the time, reasonable to consider this evidence of political pressure campaigns on the DOJ which called their impartiality into question.
I still think that the circumstance the investigations appear to have found nothing is only strong evidence of the investigation not having been conducted properly - based on my understanding of US election and vote-counting procedures I would estimate the probability of there being no voter fraud in any national election at a single-digit percentage (3%, maybe, with the probability mass dominated by scenarios in which I systematically underestimate the checks and balances?). It's just that I would expect fraud to exist benefitting either side (P(fraud only for one party|fraud) is low), and don't have a strong prior as to which side benefits from it more in a given election. My expectation is that the "investigating bodies" know that any truthful answer takes the form "we found abundant evidence of fraud, but no evidence that the number of fraudulent votes each party got isn't basically roughly the same", but they do not believe that making this common knowledge is something that the American electoral system could survive.
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A couple of things to this:
(1) It's hard to become a dictator in the US, would be one huge reason. When people are worried he's going to 'become a dictator' there are a lot of steps that would need to happen, only some of which he has any control over. The right war, the right resistance, the right economic resentments etc. He's not likely to declare himself dictator against the popular will, it's far more likely he'd subvert normal democratic norms and processes by consent. (2) When people find Trump's dictator-forward attitudes alarming, it's not only because they think there is a practical danger of him subverting democracy. It's that it feels like an offence against the office, akin to having a new vicar appointed who is loudly atheist. (Which actually I would like, but you get the analogy.)
I mean, yeah, correct, this is one difference between right and left. A huge part of the pain of this election is (a) feeling a degree of judgement towards the electorate, but then also (b) feeling terrible about this because it seems to confirm the right's stereotypes of the left as being judgemental.
I think the right's self image of being very tolerant of different opinions is massively exaggerated though: there are tonnes of people on the right who absolutely revel in liberal tears and obviously loathe their political opponents. You say you just see me as different but in the end our ideas are probably incommensurate so if you are going to impose your beliefs on mine (as is the right of those who win elections), how do you feel okay about it if you don't think your ideas are superior but just different? Do you just see it as a valid exercise of your tastes?
Sure. But it seems like this is just bolstering my case. Yes, it is hard to turn the US into a dictatorship. That's why he wasn't able to do it in his first four years. We can extrapolate that he probably won't do it in his second four years either.
I don't disagree. Especially if we take a broad historical view. Going back not only through the religious right of the 80s and 90s, but going all the way back, through the centuries of western political thought; if we polled most people who could at all be classified as "rightist" throughout history, "tolerance of dissent" would probably not rank highly as a political virtue for most of them. And the right is no stranger to moral judgement and condemnation, certainly. I don't deny any of that.
Ultimately the only person I can speak for is myself. The views I have expressed here are not universal among "my side", although they are not wholly unique to me either.
The terms "left" and "right", although convenient, may not be the most accurate terms for our current political context. Perhaps "woke" and "anti-woke" might be better?
Oh sure. Some amount of animus towards your political opponents is natural and unavoidable. I get angry at people, I find myself wondering why they have to be such NPCs. But I think all of that is still importantly different from thinking that your opponents are evil. Evil is harder to come back from; there's less chance of redemption. It seems unclear how one could sincerely wish for there to be any space for "evil" to flourish in the world. If possible, I'd like for my opponents to have a space in the world where they can be happy and live their lives according to the principles they believe in. I just want them to do it away from me.
I don't think there's much that can be said in the abstract here without a concrete example to work through (what am I imposing on you, by what mechanism, etc).
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The right pandemic that resulted in people's rights being infringed upon all across the world?
I think if Trump didn't use covid to significantly expand his personal powers, he's pretty harmless.
I don't see how covid presented much of an opportunity for Trump to cement his power. It was a hot potato he had to handle and made life more difficult for him.
Why not? It was an emergency that people were willing to give up their individual liberties for. It'd be easy for a dictator to pull a Palpatine and grant himself emergency powers to do all types of mischief.
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Is Covid not dispositive here?
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I agree that Trump is uniquely brazen (because that is the only kind of opponent that is immune to the "every Republican candidate is a racist misogynist" gambit, at least at the moment) and uniquely dismissive of the rules of decorum (because they have been weaponised against him and his platform). He may be in the 80th percentile for narcissism among top politicians but there are certainly others who surpass him. Is he uniquely powerhungry? I do not actually think so. And if we are taking all of these flaws into account, we also have to look at others: he is rather lazy and disorganized and doesn't actually like governing. And his narcissism also means he has a lot of turnover and has trouble keeping competent people around him. That makes the Orange Reich rather less likely.
And then we are in the sad position that the question we face is "is Trump a threat to democracy?" but rather "of the available options, is Trump the greatest threat to democracy?". The latter question is much, much harder to decide, given the mask-slip Trump induced in his political enemies.
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As I’ve said before- ‘mos maiorum oppugnatus est ait Sulla et veritatem Dixit.’
In other words, democracy really is crumbling, but the people screeching about it do not have clean hands. Trying to jail Trump on pissant charges with legal theories that haven’t been used before after what should have been counted as a hung jury is just transparently a political operation, the sort of thing we see in second world hybrid regimes. Etc, etc.
Trump’s not a saint either, but democrats have actually declared their intent to do the things which hybrid regimes do, just the same. I back the potential illiberal democracy which stands up for the interests of social conservatives(no, not socially conservative interests, the interests of social conservatives), and not the one which announces its intent to persecute us. C’est la vie.
Worse, they are the primary perpetrators.
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