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It really isn't. It will be ok if Biden wins and it will be ok if Trump wins and it will be ok if Haley or DeSantis wins. For the vast majority of people life will not change much in any of those cases. Taxes might rise or fall immigration might rise or fall, but the political fallout overall will be more theatre than anything else. For 95% of people in the country, the differences will be actually tiny.
agree it's not. people say this every four years and then lo and behold things go on. It is changing, no doubt, but this is not the same as its destruction. Metrics such as GDP and others remain strong.
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This would be more believable if we hadn't gone through the entire Covid debacle, where one side was utterly hellbent on following a set of barely-supported policy guidelines with large amounts of ideologically motivated reasoning and would have imposed these guidelines on the Federal level had they had the levers of power at the time.
And so, we have a clear, stark example of a situation where the leadership of the country can have direct impact on the lives of most of the population, where literal TRILLIONS of dollars can get flung around depending on who controls the pursestrings.
So yeah, its fair to think that the country could be made better or worse off depending on who won.
Now, CARING too much when you, individually, cannot impact the outcome is a different matter.
Except most of the lockdowns by governors happened while Trump was President. And was the one who signed the CARES act (2.2 trillion dollars and the largest stimulus package in US history), the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and another 900 billion in the December Appropriations act. When Biden passed his 1.9 trillion stimulus package in Feb 2021, Trump wanted bigger direct payments not smaller!
If you want to say that governors made a big difference, I would agree with you. But the actions taken by Trump and Biden were pretty similar overall. And the discussion we are having is the difference the president makes to the standard person.
Vaccine Mandates and penalties were one of the major flashpoints.
Biden tried imposing them nationally.
https://apnews.com/article/biden-lloyd-austin-e4047962b92087be278c6886e2e2d0c5
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Federation_of_Independent_Business_v._Occupational_Safety_and_Health_Administration
Biden also tried to pull the student loan forgiveness card a couple times.
https://www.ncsl.org/state-legislatures-news/details/supreme-court-strikes-down-student-loan-forgiveness-program
He used the Pandemic as the justification in that one:
Even if I grant that Biden and Trump's approaches were similar in many ways, the ways in which they were different are pretty damn salient.
Sure, but I'll note that you used the word tried multiple times there. My argument is not that Trump and Biden are the same, it's that the office of President is much more limited than people think. Biden trying and failing to do something, that Trump didn't even try to do has exactly the same outcome. The thing does not get done. So the difference in actuality was vaccine mandates for the military. Which the link says affected 8,400 servicemen/women.
If the Presidency gave you unlimited power then the differences between a Trump and Biden presidency would be huge, I agree. But it is highly constrained, so when it comes down to it, their differences of what they actually did was I maintain pretty small.
If you're the victim of an 'attempted' murder I think you still will have certain rational opinions about the perpetrator who tried to kill you but failed.
I just think it's odd to make the argument that it 'doesn't matter' when we've got a recent example of how much it can matter.
Which still subsumed by the point that one shouldn't worry too much about it because the factors we can control have little influence on that particular outcome.
Again, that is fine, I am not saying that having preferences between them is a problem. And it's absolutely fine to prefer the person who didn't even try to do X in the first place. That makes perfect sense!
My very narrow point is the system has built in rails, and those rails in general mean, that in practice, the difference presidents make to their citizens as opposed to the difference the legislatures, governors et al make is actually pretty small. And much, much smaller than most people think. A combination of the deep state, federalism, separation of powers and so on contributes to this.
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Many effects of the president are downstream. If the president pushes a trade deal, or energy policy, or whatever, you're not going to see new prices and changes in the economy the next day; it's going to take a while. Even something like picking Supreme Court justices isn't going to have an effect the next day.
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This is just demonstrably untrue. Have you considered that some of us believe that current levels of mass immigration are an existential threat to the future of this country? That whether or not DEI and affirmative action programs expand or retract will have a measurable and significant effect on the efficacy of our institutions and infrastructure? That one presidential candidate is more likely than another to create the conditions that will plunge the country into a large-scale war?
How exactly is immigration an existential threat to America?
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It can't be demonstrably untrue, because whether the country is fucked or not is not an objective question. It's a subjective one. You think it is, I do not.
I think it is better than it was 50 years ago. I think tomorrow will be better than today no matter who is president, because most of the changes have nothing to do with who is president. Who is president is downstream of cultural change, not upstream.
In other words if people turn against DEI or AA in then it will go no matter who is elected president. The president is a figure head, a lightning rod, a symptom, not a cause.
I’m not saying it’s demonstrably true that the country is fucked. You’re of course correct that this is subjective.
I’m saying that it’s demonstrably untrue that 95% of Americans’ lives will not change at all depending on who is elected president. The president does obviously have the power to affect the day-to-day lives of citizens. The government’s response to COVID, for example, had very significant and tangible effects on the day-to-day lives of nearly every American. If you want to argue that any imaginable president would have handled the situation in exactly the same way, you have to explain why other countries’ COVID responses varied so significantly.
Americans have opposed AA in large numbers for decades now. Multiple states - including California - passed ballot measures and laws to ban it. This did not have a significant effect on its spread or its implementation, because the ban was trivially easy for institutions to skirt around by appealing to the logical extrapolation of the Civil Rights Act, and to the decisions of unelected judges, including ones nominated by past presidents. Very very few Americans support DEI, and yet it is ubiquitous in both the public and private spheres.
Woodrow Wilson was elected on a promise to keep Americans out of the First World War; less than six months later, American soldiers were dying in Europe. Ronald Reagan’s voter base largely opposed mass immigration, yet Reagan himself signed the largest amnesty of illegal immigrants in American history. Presidents can simply lie about their intentions, or change their mind after being elected. It’s simply not true that they are merely catspaws of public opinion.
Did the response vary much between Trump and Biden? I would argue not much. Trump championed the vaccine etc. etc. The fact that different countries react differently does not mean changing the president within the same country changes much! The difference is confounded by different government, different history, different "deep states" etc.
I think you are making my point for me. Regardless of who was elected in before WW1 Wilson or someone else, America would have almost certainly ended up at war. Who was president was largely not important. Do you think Wilson was lying about being isolationist? Or was it simply that the president is simply not that important? Even a man who promised to keep the US out, could not do so. And you want to argue the president really makes a difference?
Only once people are REALLY against something (not just wishy-washy against it, but still go on as normal) will the establishment change. Who the people vote for as president is a symptom of that feeling, but it doesn't mean it is enough in and of itself, it's just one signal. Reagan enacted the amnesty but tied it to making it illegal to hire illegal immigrants. He said he wanted to eliminate the incentive for illegal immigration. But that is similar to stances he took in 1980 before he was elected. Ergo, it seems his immigration stance did not dissuade voters from picking him. They may even have agreed with his stance that, spending money trying to get rid of current immigrants was a waste and only be disincentivizing future immigration could change happen.
Consider Macron moving to the right on immigration et al, because there have been more than just votes. Your president can stay the same and public feeling can be strong enough then so to will the president.
It's not just a symbol, it is one of the mechanisms holding people in check, a ritual people perform that has 'given them a say in how the country is run', enforcing acceptance of the legitimacy of the election process and also making them complicit. The shit will really hit the fan when the people give up on voting as worthless imo.
Sure, but as pointed out people still supported Reagan even if they were against illegal immigration, because in reality people care about more than one thing. It's only when one thing begins to be the reason why people vote or don't vote for someone does it actually realistically matter. If you heard Reagan speak about immigration in 1980 and voted for him anyway, then clearly illegal immigration is not really a big enough issue for you to switch your support. You have to make trade offs on which values are important to you. So, his supporters had other things they prioritized (primarily the economy).
If illegal immigration had really been a huge deal for people Reagan likely would not have been the nominee in 81 indeed both Reagan and Bush in 1980 advocated for a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. If it had been the top issue, someone else with more hawkish immigration positions would have been the pick no?
Yeah man, no argument here - I was actually trying to build on what you were saying, not refute it. Just by engaging in the voting process people endorse it and implicitly accept that framing. When they are really against it I think they'll give up on the electoral process entirely.
Yeah, and I agree that is a risk!
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I'm sure you are aware that there are many other people in the government and adjacent to it besides the president. People that don't change much between term changes in USA, but are completely different in other countries. You're also aware that other countries operate under different arrangements of those people and different laws that take various lengths of time to change, when they can be changed at all.
You know all this, so why not skip to the point and explain why you believe the president has more influence on the covid response than all the rest of that?
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