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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   34913 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 3, 2025

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Elected leaders should be respectful of the elected leaders of other countries, even if they privately hate them.

This is just tit-for-tat - the Europeans violated this first, with Starmer sending staff over to campaign for Kamala and Zelensky doing it in person. I agree that the norm of not interfering is good, but it was broken a long time ago (and it isn't like the US has clean hands here either).

You'll have to go further back to find out who started it. Obama campaigned against Brexit in person.

If you rule out something like that, what kind of international opinion-giving would be allowed, if any? He was presenting an argument on behalf of the UK government not pro or con a specific political party.

If you rule out something like that, what kind of international opinion-giving would be allowed, if any?

Whatever is already allowed after you rule out foreign politicians campaigning for political parties during an election. Referenda should be treated basically like elections as far as norms around foreign interference are concerned, you're trying to sway voters at that point not just addressing the government.

The exchanges (mostly of backroom staff) between the US Democrats and UK Labour party on the one hand, and the US Republicans and UK Conservative party on the other, have been going on unobjectionably since at least the Reagan/Thatcher era. 2024 is slightly different in that the MAGA Republicans prefer to work with Reform, which didn't have the infrastructure in place to do such exchanges party-to-party so they ended up in effect working with Farage personally. The outrage on the right was (while real) both clueless and entirely hypocritical. The claim @FirmWeird is making that Starmer started something is straightforwardly false.

I remember at the time that the British Deep State used sympathetic media to grumble about the unusual level of support John Major's Conservative party gave to Bush Sr's failed 1992 re-election campaign and worrying that the Clinton administration would be hostile to the UK as a result. They weren't - they returned the favour by helping Blair in 1997, and in turn that didn't affect the ability of the Blair and Bush Jr administrations to cooperate after 9-11. We used to be able to distinguish between party-to-party and government-to-government interactions - I think that stopped when US partisanship got so bitter that the idea that a politician could speak for the country in a non-partisan way became quaint.

The norm that private citizens don't interfere in foreign elections, or that political parties qua voluntary political associations don't interfere in foreign elections might be a good one, but it isn't a norm that actually exists. There is a norm that incumbent executive branch officials don't interfere in foreign elections, and it is a good one (and should probably be extended to backbench legislators). But even that tends to fall apart when one country's perceived-existential issue is another country's partisan controversy - as with Ukraine supporting the party that doesn't want to hand it over to Russia, or previously with Netanyahu's 2015 speech to Congress (explicitly co-ordinated with Congressional Republicans as an attack on the Obama administration) against the Iran nuclear deal. I'm sure we are going to see Canadian politicians attacking the Trump tariffs in ways which they see as standing up for the Canadian national interest and American Republicans see as partisan interference on behalf of the Democrats.

The other problem is that social media context collapse means that people don't always bellyfeel that they are getting involved in foreign politics when they poast about something that shows up in their timeline in the same way a domestic political item would.

The claim @FirmWeird is making that Starmer started something is straightforwardly false.

I agree with the rest of your post, but I just want to clarify that I wasn't saying this was the start of all foreign election interference. I was making that claim in a more limited context (the current slapfight), which is why I then went on to say that the US did not have clean hands and that the supposed norm was broken a long time ago. My apologies for being unclear!

And, of course, there was a lot of open and hidden American electoral interference to European electoral politics during the Cold War. A lot of political forces in Europe basically ran entirely or mostly on American cash.

So while we're doing this, can we also admit that the hysteria around Russian influence was always nonsense?

I've never considered direct Russian influence to European electoral politics to be as meaningful as claimed by many, though there have been clear attempts by the RF to do so.

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