From TFA: "Democratic regression is particularly visible among the G-20 countries". This is the money-shot. I went back after I speculated that the big deal would be if existing, strongly "democratic" countries were sliding and found this quote. Strong democracies are sliding which is a much bigger deal than young, weak democracies doing so.
I'm in the US (so this comment is US-centric). As with so much else over the past 6 months, the tension between federal powers and state powers is being thrown into relief. In particular, the popular idea that democracy is good/right has long been suspect: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fath... .
This is the effect of the Internet and of the "Long Tail": the monetization/politicization of the "long tail" is in segmenting and then aggregating bits of the long tail into larger and larger groups of marginalized members of the population. With poor communication, "the fringe" is only a fringe locally; with near-infinite communication, the fringe is everyone: FB and the various tailored news feeds drape a comfortable bubble over us and cause us to see our view as (manifestly) the only view (since it's our only view, it must be the only view).
As a "Republican", I point the finger at Republicans, a political group which has been a 10x political operation. Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. And Republicans have played the state/local-politics game very, very well.
As others have noted, democracy is a game best played locally but our pervasive communications systems are forcing it to be played globally and this is happening quickly enough that our political systems haven't come to grips with it yet.
It's pretty refreshing to see a republican admitting their party has dialed politics to 11.
I agree that a discussion over the merits of democracy is currently taking place. I _don't_ think merely questioning the electoral college counts as suspicion of democracy itself. I know many argue that the problem with the electoral college is in fact that it is _less_ democratic by some definition of the word.
Democracy means rule by the people. When you elect leaders, you're not ruling - you're choosing who rules.
I don't think people are questioning the merits of democracy. I think people are questioning whether the US truly is a democracy.
I'd love to see a shift from voting on leaders to voting on laws and projects. The idea that one person could represent hundreds of millions seems impossible to me.
Participatory Budgeting [0] is truly democratic. Citizens get to vote on how their tax dollars are spent.
I hope that current backlash against our system of government leads to more democracy, not less.
> The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy.
I see this repeated so much in online discussions, and it makes no sense to me. Is it enough to not have a monarchy? There's no actual reason why democracy and republic need to be distinguished, because we're almost always talking about a system where people get a say in how they are governed, not whether there's a monarch.
Nobody doubts whether Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands or Spain are democracies.
Now to the point about the constitutional issues. Why is it that it's fair for a minority to decide who gets to be leader? To people who've grown up in democratic systems, it certainly seems to be a flaw that it's possible for someone get less support than the loser.
To put it another way, what is having a senate and electoral college that isn't proportional to votes supposed to save you from? Is there a good argument or example of a situation where that made sense?
A mob at least doesn't pretend to care about whomever it's bullying. The senate whose majority represents a minority has to make all sorts of contortions to act like they're doing the right thing, because they have to both justify what they're doing and their right to do it.
I think the US founding fathers somehow thought the senate would be populated by people who could put some sort of "good of the nation" ahead of their own interests.
The senate was originally elected by the states directly, the general population didn’t play any part of the process. This was abolished, in addition to many responsibilities of the senate - oversight of the executive, a leading voice in international relations - have been ceded to the executive branch. I wouldn’t say it’s more of a joke than mob rule, but it’s a thin veneer of respectability.
Because congress represents lobbyist interest and not the interests of their constituents. It's not a democracy, it's not a republic. It's an oligarchy or corporatocracy. That's the joke. It's just that the mob is the few people who have most of the money.
The founding of the nation was built on compromise. The direction ever since has been to greater equality. To more representation. To form a more perfect union. Senators used to be appointed by state legislatures until 1913. Would you advocate for a return to that? Neither party used to have primaries as we know them today. Would you advocate for a return to that?
The last two presidents elected by a minority of the vote have been an unmitigated disaster for America. The EC has enabled that. The EC serves no useful purpose anymore. We should abolish it or work-around it with the National Vote Compact.
As far as the Senate, 53 Senators currently represent 15 million fewer Americans that the other 47. I think that's that's a problem. It tilts in favor of the GOP today, but tomorrow it may tilt in favor of Democrats. I would still think it's a problem.
The 26 smallest states make up only 18 percent of the population.
We can mitigate it by adding DC and Puerto Rico (should they so chose) as states. DC and PR residents are Americans. They should be represented in the Senate.
But I suppose, if I were around at the nation's founding, I would have been a Federalist.
Relevant piece on the Senate with some astute observations about why it used to work (TL;DR: compromise) but no longer does, and the danger of minoritarian rule:
Note, they didn't say Republican, they said "Republican"
The Dem Convention was filled with "Republicans." There were/are a fair number that tried pushing back against the Tea Party first, then Trump (remember "Never Trump" Republicans? Or "Log Cabin" Republicans?).
The issue is not that Republicans went crazy; it's that party dynamics shifted. So, consistent with your surprise, there's a word for, , as GP put it, "Republicans": "Democrats"
You are so on the nose. Politics is now global and constituencies that were never exposed to other political realities and were protected by local politicking are now facing a political shock.
I recall having this kind of thought when the whole Russian election meddling thing started to get talked about. This is a phase of globalization. Politics is now global.
If you're a large country and especially a superpower, everyone in the world has a stake in the outcome of your elections and political process. This means we should expect more and more foreign "meddling" in elections as well as direct meddling in the political process through foreign lobbying/bribery and covert methods.
Maybe what we're seeing is the beginning of the accretion process of a true global government. Eventually the people will realize that since politics is global political awareness must be as well. Campaigns could globalize. Then we're a few steps away from global political parties and then global government.
It's long been the case that large countries meddled. The change is that it isn't as asymmetric as it used to be. If your citizens are on Facebook, it doesn't take a lot of resources to mess with them.
Indeed there is most likely some foreign influence in Western beliefs, but in the process perhaps we shouldn't overlook the broader reality of things which is that domestic organizations of various flavors allegedly have a long track record of actively persuading us to believe certain things. And then on top of that there's the complex nature of the human mind's perception of reality, how it forms beliefs based on a torrent of conflicting information, etc, and then the tricky problem that these phenomena are near-impossible to detect by the person who owns the mind.
National politics has been global for as long as we've had international trade. The way in which we experience that has changed though, and perhaps more of us now are able to see the extra-national players in any particular field.
Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it.
For most values of "we", sure. There are a few who are benefitting immensely from this at the expense of the rest of us, though. I'm not sure how to get your average voter interested in understanding things like intersectionality while conservative propaganda feeds into their basest predilections.
This exemplifies the point: our very language has become politicized. Robin Hanson calls the phenomenon "RightTalk" [0]: we care less about outcomes, or even policy positions, than simply cajoling people to use the right keywords. A trigger word like "intersectionality" (whatever the intrinsic merits of the model), yields very different mental associations and emotional reactions [1] depending on who hears it, and the ideological/tribal waters in which they swim.
Probably the most absurd political divide I've ever heard in my life is between the slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter": on their surface meanings, not only are they logically compatible, but the latter actually eclipses and reinforces the former! But it's another case in point: the meanings of the phrases don't matter, let alone any ostensible outcomes. It's simply a way to wave a flag of team membership.
Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions?
It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.
It should not surprise you that the people whose group self-interests are proclaimed illegitimate by a social theory (more than just illegitimate - the cause of the suffering of all the other groups!), would not agree with that theory.
> Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions?
> It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.
That is not a conclusion of intersectionality. That is, to the extent it is a component of the anti-racism movement, much older than intersectionality and operates on a level logically orthogonal to intersectionality. It's basically the discrimination + position of power view of racism combined with the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive but racism is strongly negative.
(I get that this is confusing because right-wing critics of the movement keep taking the names of individual elements of theory embraced by segments of the left and attaching everything they disagree with by everyone on the left [and then, every generally-seen-as-bad movement in history whether it relates to either the particular element or the left] and attaching it rhetorically to that element, and the mass media—including the center-right corporate media attacked by the right as leftist—covers the right-wing attacks more than the theory itself, so that those attacks shape the understanding of the terms by people outside of either strongly-interested camp.)
Could you explain more? Because it seems to me that's how it's used in practice. See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change [1,2,3], and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears [4].
> the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive
Again, depends on the group. For example, white privilege is seen as negative, but it's just white group solidarity.
> > That is not a conclusion of intersectionality.
> Could you explain more?
Sure. Intersectionality is a comparatively recent concept that privilege and disadvantage experienced by individuals is not a simple additive or multiplicative combination of the privilege or disadvantage associated with isolated parts of their identities, but that the interaction of such group privilege and disadvantage is more complicated, and particularly that discourse and solutions centered on serving the needs of single-axis identity groups in isolation, even when aggregated, often do not well serve the interests and needs of individuals in overlapping disadvantaged groups; it specifically originated in the late-1980s/early-1990s black feminist movement with the argument that generalized race and gender dialogue missed the particularized issues faced by women of color.
The idea, on the other hand, that there are ethical differences between (in the US, particularly) white identity movements and black, etc., identity movements (and, more generally, in identity movements among locally advantaged classes and those of less advantaged ones), is many decades older than intersectionality theory, having a variety of different roots, the clearest theoretical one (that not the oldest or necessarily the most important) being the "prejudice plus institutional power" view of racism (first expressly articulated in the those terms in 1970), which was immediately applied to the idea of relative merit of group identity movements.
The two ideas can interact (as they do in, e.g., dialogue about "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism"), but are essentially orthogonal concepts. One can fully subscribe to either without subscribing to the other.
> See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change, and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears.
The difference there is about institutional power and single-axis identity movements. It has nothing to do with intersectionality, and everything to do with perceived alignment of group identity and preference with institutional power (Muslims being seen as disadvantaged with regard to the Hindu-dominated institutions in India, while no similar institutional disadvantage is perceived for the white ethnically-British in Britain.)
> The difference there is about institutional power...
Doesn't that effectively mean only groups without the ability to stop immigration, can have legitimate reasons to stop it? As soon as you have institutional power (i.e. power to shape immigration law) your reasons for opposing immigration become illegitimate?
The GOP cannot win free and fair elections unless its willing to moderate its views and accept non-white and conservatives into the party. The GOP knows this. Barry Goldwater foresaw what welcoming the religious right into the party would do, and the GOP commissioned its own study (which it promptly ignored) about how to attract Black voters.
This has been terrible for both parties, the GOP obviously because through its own gerrymandering it’s beholden to extremists. And for the Democrats who assume Black votes and haven’t been forced to implement meaningful change since the Civil Rights Movement.
So we’re stuck with a party that has only a minority of votes retaining power through anti-democratic means.
The answer to me is more democracy, not less. I hope for a Democratic blow out in November, want to see the Supreme Court expanded, and hope to see legislative change to expand voting rights, overturn Citizens United and pass campaign finance legislation, and start using non-partisan commissions to establish voting districts. I also want to see a national popular vote for presidents. And we have to reform the Supreme Court... term limits, a rotating bench, something.
The Democrats do not have all the answers, but the opposition party has to be interested in democracy and the good of America.
There are a lot of lovely ideas here, but I'm shocked Ranked Choice Voting isn't among them. Sticking with First-Past-The-Post will keep us stuck in the two party system—it simply has to go if we're ever going to have more than two parties (or better yet: true independent candidates!).
As far as I'm concerned the Republicans signed their death warrant when they decided to respond to Obama's election by ginning up the narrative of a "cold civil war" and "grassroots" right-wing reactionary movements like the Tea Party, implying Obama was such a danger to the country that an uprising would be imminent if not inevitable, were he allowed to remain in power.
I believe what they wanted was to repeat the Southern Strategy by fanning the fuel of racism, xenophobia and right-wing hatred among their white base (an obvious tack to take with Obama) but the Republicans underestimated just how extreme that base had become since the Goldwater days and how unhinged the presence of a black "leftist" in the White House made them.
The Tea Party, being a Republican Party proxy movement, wasn't anywhere near as radical enough as its purpose was maintaining the Republican status quo, and for all the Tea Party's talk of "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" and such in their campaign ads, wasn't going to give the right the blood in the streets that they wanted.
Thus, we ended up with the reactionary movement against both the left and the mainstream right in Trumpist populism, the rise of the alt-right and embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and the start of open violence by right-wing militias against black and leftist "agitators."
Barring some effective, widespread counter-Conservative movement to return the party to sanity and core non-crazy-racist principles (which doesn't appear to exist) the Republicans have no alternative now but to ride the Trump train all the way to the end, or else split and form another party.
To add, this didn't really start with the Tea Party. You can trace this violent and racist "New Right" [0] back to at least Reagan and the Kanawha County textbook controversy bombing in the mid 70s [1].
We're seeing the effects of capitalists having pitted laborers against each other in order to undo the New Deal coalition. It has many facets. For a very sympathetic view of coal miners, I highly recommend watching Harlan County, USA, made in 1976:
the circumspection over democracy is as much a consequence of elitism as it is political wrangling.
as a member of the (extra-)educated class, the failure to convince the ignorant masses of our superior ideas and policies lies squarely at our feet. we fail to realize that education and intelligence are differences we magnify in our egos and thrust upon others, without regard to circumstance nor environment. we know better, so why don't they listen to us, their betters?
wedging happens all around. it's most insidious when blinded by (self-)righteousness. clumsy terms like cancel culture and wokeness try to describe/mock this sort of tribalism, but the underlying impetuses those terms describe is a significant contributor to division as well.
Well, look at the economic reality of rural America. They've been on the losing end of policy for the last 30-50 years. They don't want handouts that lead them to subsist as an underclass; they want a thriving economic base which they can pride themselves on. In the absence of that, the country has self-sorted into an urban/rural divide where almost all the economic activity occurs in cities. "Elites" have failed to appeal to other classes because their only message has been "leave your way of life and join the elites." That's not a bad impulse, but I think we've explored that option as much as we can by now.
I can't say I can prescribe any great solution here, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring manufacturing back.
As a country boy who had to come to the “big city” and leave my hometown behind, I really miss the way of life in the country. Additionally, I come back home occasionally and get this feeling that I’m superior to the lowly bumpkins, even though they know more about engines and tools than I know about statistics. It’s crazy that the wealth gained in the city (which often feels digital, service based, non-physical in nature) imposes this viewpoint. It is what is real and yours that is truly valuable in my opinion.
an interesting economic parallel is that the intellectualization of vast swaths of the economy led to the creation and exploitation of immaterial wealth (to the benefit of urbanites), things like culture and derivatives, rather than material wealth, like food and housing. we even went as far as to vilify the material over the immaterial.
in this way, the rural/urban shift can be understood as an extraction of esteem as much as wealth.
The idea that long range communications enables echo chambers etc is compelling. However, I'm intrigued by the point that similar cycles have occurred elsewhere before the internet, e.g., in eastern europe in its transition to communism which was preceded by a coalescence into different camps on far right and left, and an absence of a political center. [caveat, I don't know much about this history. it's just my understanding from some recent readings].
I have my own pet theory - based on nothing - that we're seeing the political consequences of massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap watching massively wealthy individuals controlling a large portion of your daily life while accumulating more and more wealth for themselves, populism is really appealing! You get to watch people who think they're better than you (see comments in this very thread about how this is about "education" and "ignorance") squirm and sweat because things aren't going the way they think they should.
The article notes that democratic backsliding is a global phenomena, particularly in the G-20. Seeing as countries with much less wealth/income inequality than the US are experiencing the same trend, that kind of disproves this theory. There have been populist revolts in countries with a pretty low Gini, most recently Chile which is in the middle of the pack inequality-wise for Latin America. Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory. I recommend reading Revolt of the Public by Martin Gurri for a deeper explanation of how the Internet Age enables rolling, continuous populist revolts that have inchoate goals and accomplish little
> Basically, this is a popular but demonstrably wrong theory.
Knowing whether income inequality has some effect on the popularity of populism in a particular country cannot be "(dis)proven" one way or the other based on low-dimensional observations of (alleged) behavior and motivations of people in another country. Each individual person holds an incredibly complex set of beliefs in their heads that drive their actions. Some people go to school to learn some things about human behavior and cognition, and then get jobs hypothesizing about the causal underpinnings of human behavior, and then broadcast these hypotheses to the world from where they are picked up and stored in other minds, which then also proceed to hypothesize about other things based on the aggregate of information (of which this is only a small part) they have consumed in the past.
These hypotheses, the ideas the mind conjures from thin air, seem largely indistinguishable from reality, but this is a clever illusion that (allegedly) arose out of millions of years of evolution. Seeing speculative beliefs in other people is easy, seeing them in oneself is not so easy - or so psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy would have us believe.
It's only demonstrably wrong if you assume that wealth inequality should be calculated within the borders of a nation. That people in Chile should only compare themselves to their nearest oligarchs.
With a longer view of history, we can remember that invention of mass printing led to a huge uptick in conspiracizing and sectarian violence across Europe. While widespread literacy proved a long-term good, it was quite a rough ride from start to finish.
But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it. They can benefit from lax regulation and low taxes and political turbulence and simply leave when things get out of control. It’s fun watching elites squirm but they have an exit plan. Most Americans can’t. They don’t have the skills or the money to go anywhere else. Using your politics to troll the elites is very much an example of cutting off your nose to spite your face. I wonder how long it’ll take for people to realize that.
While they certainly would have the resources “to go anywhere else” - where would all these very rich people actually want to go? Where can they maintain a high status lifestyle while also enjoying low taxes? Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems like a mighty short list and, hence, an empty threat.
It depends on the threat. If the United States actually descends into any real chaos they can and will bail. For now, they can just move to their second home in Montana. But if gets bad, they’ll leave. They always do.
Sure. Which is true of all people. You don’t have to be rich to flee violence.
I guess my question relates more to the idea that the US has a “business friendly” economic regime and any change to that status quo is going to cause the very rich to leave. I’m sure a few will move to Monaco (as suggested by the other poster) but I’m not super convinced there are a bunch of viable alternative places to live.
I would also say that cold places are also a good option relatively speaking as they aren't very forgiving if you can't provide yourself with a warm home through the winter. This is why rampant poverty such as tent cities tend to migrate to cities with warmer or at least moderate climates. Norway, Iceland, Canada, etc.
I guess it sort of makes sense that it appears much of the homelessness in Canada clusters around Vancouver since it is far more mild than the Eastern portion of the country.
It's worse than that. Modern day populists usually don't harm the elites, and don't benefit anybody but the poorest segment of society. Many don't even benefit the poorest segment, only harm everybody but the elite.
Modern populism is just a set of lies, where they harm poor people on less visible ways to make money available to distribute, most of it to the elites, and a small share back but on very visible ways.
It is not the elite that sustain governments nowadays, so it can't really be any different.
So what if they leave? The Federal Reserve is in the United States, so is the political power, the military, the banks, the land, the factories, etc, etc, etc. The US government can tax US citizens from anywhere in the world. The government can print or redistributed as much money as they want. A few people leaving a country and taking some gold with them won't matter in the end.
>But what people don’t realize is the the rich and the even the upper class aren’t stuck with this country and generally don’t feel much allegiance to it.
Spicy take: the nationalist branch of populist voters are very aware of this, and are actively exploiting it to make the internationally mobile professional class suffer.
> When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter.
It’s sad because they’re not getting those things through nationalism either. In fact they’ll lose international relevance and their homes, jobs, and communities because of the folks selling them nationalism.
When you put it before the voters as America's relevance to the international order versus their houses, jobs, and communities, they're gonna choose the latter.
These researchers would agree with you, so it's not exactly a fringe idea. I think it's not more commonly discussed because most people aren't used to doing root cause analysis that spans several steps. It's easy to just assume the other side is filled with uneducated fools or truly evil people than it is to keep asking "why" repeatedly and come to conclusions. Also it makes sense that both major US parties are mostly filled with wealthy people, so if they can keep "the poors" fighting about orthogonal issues, the two parties can stay in power.
I would think that income inequality in terms of real wealth (food, shelter, pocket-sized entertainment-rectangles) is not as bad as it seems in nominal terms, especially when you look outside the US. The ability for trades and unskilled labor outside of the US to take advantage of arbitraging wage differences across national boundaries has never been greater. Outsourcing and insourcing labor is much easier than it was in, say, 1964. For many countries, remitted wages are a source of income which has lifted many from extreme poverty. I think you could observe some of the biggest changes in quality of life over the last 60 years in places where wage arbitrage is popular. Of course, by extension, the larger your hiring pool, the less pressure there is to increase wages.
Also, I think many studies on inequality assume things like stocks are all worth face value, which is optimistic to say the least. Stock valuation has almost everything to do with faith in a bigger fool and almost nothing to do with tangible benefits. GOOG, for example, has a market cap of >$1T, now ask yourself, how did it come that there are even USD 1T in existence? Were they printed? Can you touch them? Did Eric Schmidt hold the poor up by their ankles and steal $1T one pocketful of quarters and dimes at a time? Or maybe, just maybe, these numbers are all just make-believe.
At least, I think it's not as simple as people who live in the suburbs must have wronged some particular voting block and should be punished.
A quote from 2016 that I heard agrees with your thesis: "I can't throw a Molotov cocktail through the window of the White House, but I can throw a Donald Trump." Many view him as a "fuck you" candidate and like him precisely because the majority of the elite and the political process doesn't. They don't care if he does a lot of damage or even acts against their interest because it's not like anyone was paying attention to their interests beforehand anyway.
My related theory is that it's a decoupling of politics from material outcomes.
Both parties are under the control of professional classes who don't actually need to care about the material outcomes for them. David Brooks type Republicans supported a "tax cut" which raised their taxes. Woke liberals want different TV characters represented while knifing Bernie Sanders in the back.
The professional classes have the privilege to engage in culture war, and it's what the parties respond to because that's the donor base. Actual policy and material outcomes are irrelevant to everyone across the spectrum.
> "Most enemy themes are beyond reach, especially those of inter-ideological warfare. The Nazis and Russians made the best propaganda against each other when they got down to the basic necessities of life, not when they were trying to weave finespun theories about each other's way of thinking or of life."
but on the other hand, Linebarger was aiming at a much wider[1] population than a donor base.
> "The first thing to do with the hypothetical man is to make him fit the kind of person who does get propaganda. In dealing with China, for example, it would be no use to take a statistically true Chinese, who lived on a farm 1.3 acres in size, went to town 5.8 times a year, had 3.6 children, and never read newspapers. The man to be set up would be the reachable man, the city, town or village dweller who had an income 2.1 times greater than that of the average in his county, who owned 1.7 long coats, and who shared one newspaper with 6.8 neighbors. Take this lowest-common-denominator of a man who can be reached by enemy propaganda and by yours. Name him the Propaganda Man. (Realistically speaking, modal and not arithmetical classes should be set up.)"
I mean, if we're talking about the Eastern Front, the basic necessities of life were a lot more stark there than they are in 21st century America, right? "These people are coming, and they're gonna kill and rape everyone" is a pretty easy propaganda pitch on material grounds.
That's a very interesting quote about the reachable person in an agricultural society. It's worth noting that after taking power, one of Mao's highest priorities was raising the literacy rate.
Graeber, the anarchist anthropologist who coined the phrase "we are the 99%" and wrote Debt: The First 5000 Years talks about the idea of revolutionary non-confrontation in Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology.
One of the ideas he discusses is intentionally keeping your literacy low and your population itinerant.
"...under the French, administrators would complain that they could send delegations to arrange for labor to build a road near a Tsimihety village, negotiate the terms with apparently cooperative elders, and return with the equipment a week later only to discover the village entirely abandoned—every single inhabitant had moved in with some relative in another part of the country."
> "Recteur Leray lectured mostly on calculus and topology. He had succeeded in hiding from the Germans the fact that he was a leading expert in fluid dynamics and mechanics (a mécanicien, as he liked to say). He turned, instead, to algebraic topology, a field which he deemed unlikely to spawn war-like applications."
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For a certain period (when the lifestyle was actually militarily superior) roaming worked well for steppe peoples.
I doubt there'd be much theological overlap, but do the BenOp people ever think to look at what the least english-dependent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plain_people already practice?
Bossmang! Mi du sensa. Milowda na sasa lang inya, keya?
Unless someone shows up who'll defend BenOp, I'm not looking further into it. As far as cursory surfing reveals (I have only been able to find a table of contents online whose chapter headings are not helpful) not only does Dreher not bother with the separatism of plain religions in the US, nor the experiences of other more heavily persecuted, more melaninly enabled, christian churches in the US, his doctrine doesn't accord with any of his[1] religions, nor does it, according to secondary criticism, seem to have been informed much by actual Benedictines[2]. Indeed, he's even been accused of rooting the whole project in reaction to Obergefell v. Hodges, 576 U.S. 644 (2015)[3].
[1] protestant, catholic, and orthodox, in that order. One is reminded of the person who is constantly looking for the New Shiny Library/Language instead of writing their app with the ecosystem they have at hand. (cue GKC quote on difficulties untried, Benedict on Sarabaites)
For more similarities to open source schisms, consider https://blog.ayjay.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/BenOp-788x... and replace the christian references with geeky projects such as "building a modern operating system", "immanentising the crypto eschaton", "welcoming our new GPT-N overlords", etc.
[2] who are still around to ask. There's a non-benedictine abbey near me which celebrated its 1'500th birthday a while ago, and at least a handful of benedictine which are probably not many centuries younger.
[3] as I'm not charitable, I'll suggest that being afraid of Obergefell then writing phrases such as "L.G.B.T. activism is the tip of the spear at our throats in the culture war" reminds me of Poe's law. Then again, I'm not sure if he fears swallowing "liquid modernity" as much as being swallowed by it. (a complaint which I believe Dreher shares with another movement I doubt he covered: the Taliban)
Good point, I believe Linebarger was talking about whole-country operations, not just messaging for the fronts.
"Political Limitations of Psychological Warfare." and "Definition of the Enemy." are interesting sections.
He does mention that communication, even mid-20th century, was prone to retweeting: "German broadcasters who emphasized the anti-capitalist character of National Socialism in the programs beamed to Eastern Europe found that B.B.C. picked up the most tactless statements and repeated them to Western Europe, where the Germans posed as anti-Bolshevik champions of private property. American attacks on the Germans for associating with Japanese monkey-men were passed along by the Japanese to the Chinese, who did not like the slur either."
(Another anecdote he tells is about getting into a flame war that went around the world. In hindsight, he regrets getting mixed up in it, yet admits he'd had the dopamine hit at the time.)
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interesting to view this para of "Political Limitations" in hindsight:
> "President Roosevelt, in his conduct of the political world role of the United States, promised Manchuria to the Chinese, Korea "in due course" to the Koreans, and the integrity of the French Colonial Empire to the French; outside of that he avoided specific promises. In another instance (to put a complicated matter baldly), the British promised Palestine to both the Arabs and to the Jews in World War I, and consequently got themselves into a political mess which, thirty years later, was still a mess."
It not only explains indochina/vietnam but also I think we could fairly update that "thirty years" to 100.
It's definitely a super interesting piece, thanks for linking, I've emailed it to myself to give a deeper read.
This one resonates with me in our current moment:
> From the very beginning the British had the lead. They nailed German propaganda as propaganda, while circulating their own as news, cultural relations, or literature.
I don't think you should be downvoted. Admittedly, I agree with your opinion, but I also think you phrased it civilly and made a contribution to the forum.
> massive income inequality. If you're at the bottom of the heap watching massively wealthy individuals controlling a large portion of your daily life
this is a perfect microcosm of the confusion about inequality (you didnt say inequality but MASSIVE inequality, but the magnitude is not important). the inequality premise is non-causal to the actual problem, which you yourself immediately state: control. the issue is not inequality, but the loss of ability to transition from low to high income. inequality is a necessary, sufficient, and desired outcome of any system - by definition.
we should be fighting generational inequality, not inequality itself. the system needs to encourage mobility and allow for potential maximization. its ok that there are poor neighborhoods, but its not ok that poor neighborhoods have gang, drug, crime, and school quality problems. equality of opportunity, not equality of outcome. chasing down outcome inequality is murder-suicide. marxists and communists have killed hundreds of millions of their own people in the last two centuries.
I think the main cause is actually democratic leadership, or the lack thereof. Even 20 years ago it was unimaginable for people to give away rights and freedom, but the reaction of the US on the WTC attack and subsequent focus on terrorism and security were main factors in the regression we can now see more clearly.
Fear is most often the reason with added inexperience of people not knowing what a dictatorship entails.
Only the profoundly ignorant are supporting these wannabe autocrats. We can look to our failures in public education over the past century for explanation, but what to do about it now? Americans want the right to vote and participate in democracy, but are generally unwilling to take the responsibility to be informed. You can't forcibly educate adults, of course, so I don't know what the solution is.
More effective public discourse between private citizens, particularly when in disagreement... instead of the taboo and fear of confronting opposing views, seek it out and approach all with an open Socratic mindset. If every moderate deradicalized one person per month, the problem would be manageable by the next midterms.
Restore regulations on “news” mass media, and regulate their political advertising. Including social media.
Reform campaign financing. Apply the fixes recommended by SCOTUS in Citizens United.
State-level voting reform, including universal and automatic mail-in ballots, and ranked choice voting.
Perhaps throw in a reform of security agencies that have been misused to interfere in domestic elections. You won't get rid of them ever again otherwise.
Other adults watch the news, read the paper, read forum posts by other adults who have also consumed similar information, and also think they are informed.
There is reality, and then there is each individual's perception of reality. Each person believes with near-absolute certainty that their personal model (based on a tiny slice of actual events, the majority of which are first run through third parties for ~interpretation and adjustment) of reality is accurate, and often enjoy chuckling at other people's models, but the unfortunate fact is that no person has an accurate model - and perhaps more importantly: hardly anyone seems to realize this (in depth, and on a continuous basis).
I understand what you’re saying, but I will not be gaslit. Some sources are better in quality than others, considering multiple sources is better, critically considering the information in those sources and discussing it is the best. It is entirely possible to still get at the truth. The propaganda is the USA is bordering absurdity in its believability. The president says exactly what he means, and his words are interpreted by others like a horoscope to mean whatever they want. This is the reality of the situation. Unless you’re traveling at the speed of light or some bullshit.
I think CSPAN is the best source for anything government related on the national front. Honestly I even feel NPR can be a little too biased at times. Locally I get a kick out of reading the raw PDFs of proposed policies, strategic plans, city council videos etc. Throw in some opensecrets.org type research if needed. It’s interesting to read the raw truth without interpretation from others. It just takes some practice to know where to look.
My money and politics teacher @ CMU - John Delano said something that has always stuck with me when in doubt about motivations - “in politics, follow the money”.
I suspect you actually don't, due to the underlying complexity and ineffable, counterintuitive nature of the subject matter.
> but I will not be gaslit.
Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person or a group covertly sows seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or group, making them question their own memory, perception, or judgment, often evoking in them cognitive dissonance and other changes, including low self-esteem.
There is gaslighting, and then there is psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy - and then there is each individual's knowledge (actual and perceived) in each field, all of which is implemented by the human mind, which is not well understood at all, but understood well enough that it is known to be very imperceptibly deceiving.
> Some sources are better in quality than others, considering multiple sources is better, critically considering the information in those sources and discussing it is the best.
I completely agree, and nothing I said suggested the contrary. Although, you may have the intuition that it implicitly communicated it, just as you seem to have the intuition that I am gaslighting you.
> It is entirely possible to still get at the truth.
Sometimes it is, sometimes it is not - it depends. And sometimes, that which is considered to be true, is not actually true.
> The propaganda is the USA is bordering absurdity in its believability.
100% agree - to me, it passed surreal levels years ago. Even more surreal is the percentage of intelligent people who seem to believe that they have a firm lock on "the truth" about a system this complex, despite often having extensive background knowledge in the complexity that lies within far simpler systems.
> The president says exactly what he means, and his words are interpreted by others like a horoscope to mean whatever they want.
Serious question: how is it that you came to know the beliefs of other people? Trace the lineage of that belief in your own mind, and see what you come up with.
This is not conspiracy theory or trolling, it is the result of scientific investigations performed over decades by specialists in various overlapping fields, who are doing their best to understand the mysteries of the human mind. And scientists aren't the only source of substantiation - not that long ago philosophy and literature were very seriously by a lot of serious people, and may have a thing or two worth learning.
It's hard to resist picking a side and getting down into object level mudslinging in the information war currently playing out in the media (mainstream and social), I'm very often guilty of it myself. But I propose that there is another alternative available: that of a disinterested (as possible) 3rd person observer who engages his/her mind with the abstract perspective of the battle, observing with playful curiosity the rhetorical strategies, strange supernatural beliefs, and various other absurd behavior that until recently only the human mind was capable of producing. Not only is this perspective far more interesting, but once you do it for a while some interesting new thoughts might come to mind, like "Just what exactly is going on on this planet? These humans have the ability to have a realtime video conversation with someone half way around the world, or deliver a package there by the next day, yet at the same time millions of their offspring die every year due to a lack of the basic essentials required to sustain their lives, and all they seem to do is post short "tweets" to each other lamenting that "nothing can be done". What mysterious force underlies this madness?"
Many feel that policy is easier to grasp than tech algorithms so they feel the solutions are obvious. The amount of competing legal, administrative, and regulatory obligations alone in what can be one policy is way more complex than code. While science is more rigorous, it is easier to build consensus, and it can be done with minimal human contact.
> While science is more rigorous, it is easier to build consensus, and it can be done with minimal human contact.
Agreed, which is why I believe we should take a more scientific approach to discussions. For example:
>>> Those adults watch a few conspiracy YouTube videos and Fox News and consider themselves educated and informed.
Is this statement True? At best, it has some truth. But this type of language and thinking is incredibly common right here on HN, a place we consider to be a place of quality discussion. For sure, things are better here than most other places, but it is still chock full of objectively incorrect statements and erroneous thinking, much of it being very nuanced and easily dismissed by "don't be pedantic", "you know what I meant", etc.
Science does not operate by ignoring details or requiring listeners to infer things from vague messages, and this is why it produces successful results. The way we manage and discuss affairs on planet earth however, is almost entirely operated in this non-scientific, error-riddled form.
To be clear, this is my personal opinion (an estimate) about reality. What matters is what the true state of reality is, and almost no one seems to care about that, at least based on discussion and voting patterns here.
I wonder if some sort of a browser addon that added a metadata layer to forums would be helpful in surfacing these things, such that patterns could be recognized over time, which might bring to mind ideas of how we could improve our thinking and discourse.
>Americans want the right to vote and participate in democracy, but are generally unwilling to take the responsibility to be informed.
I'm not so sure about that. Especially given that only ~42% of eligible voters cast votes in the 2016 US elections[0].
What's most troubling about that statistic is that more eligible voters did not vote than voted for any of the presidential candidates.
Without ascribing motives or intentions, it's not clear that your statement is supported by the facts.
I don't know what the motives/intentions of those non-voters might be. Given that I always vote in every election, because I see it as my duty and responsibility as a citizen, and because that's how we choose the path our government (and, more broadly our society) will take. Especially in local and state elections, where my vote (given the smaller size of electorates in such elections) is more consequential.
In any case, while voter suppression and disenfranchisement are all too common in the US, such activity doesn't explain why nearly half of eligible voters abdicated their responsibility and gave away their opportunity to create the government they want to have.
The reaction to it certainly was. You can see the paranoia on every airport or public place. Having security in every corner of the public sphere nurtures distrust and distrust is one of the worst poisons for democracy.
>distrust is one of the worst poisons for democracy
I'm gonna challenge this assertion. I would actually assert the opposite: that trust is one of the worst poisons.
Why? Because trust breeds weak restrictions (checks/balances), and weak restrictions are easy for dictators to exploit, thus undermining democracy.
Rather, I say you want those in a democracy to assume everyone (including everyone within their own party) is a potential tyrant and to structure (and enforce) the restrictions accordingly.
Where the US in particular has really fallen down, in my opinion, has been the enforcement of those rules upon those in office because of partisan favoritism. Perhaps those showing favoritism haven't realized that in the bigger picture, although favoritism is convenient, it undermines the whole system in the long run.
You are correct. I meant trust in a sense that there is an understanding between political opponents that there is a common goal to work for the benefit of society. Not that you can skip checks and balances. It is indeed a problem that control mechanisms don't seem to work for executive organs.
I am not located in the US and there is no law that declares it mandatory in my country, but there is a political culture that a successor administration doesn't reverse the policies the predecessor has enacted in the previous term. That is to give it a chance to have an effect. There can be exceptions of course but there is a general understanding and it is regarded as good conduct to adhere to it. Honor amongst thieves perhaps, but it doesn't have to always end in nepotism.
As an American, I doubt it's a main factor in the US as well.
Xenophobia, racism, and war are deeply routed in the culture, and date far before 9/11. We're simply witnessing the culmination of the slow erosion of checks and balances over centuries, which has exposed the raw flaws that have existed since the beginning.
the aftermath of 9/11 sparked an aggressive new era of us foreign policy that has been broadly destabilizing both in terms of direct anti-terror and troop actions, 'engineering' color revolutions and indirectly creating the drivers for mass migration from into both the us and europe.
Political leadership grows from below. People have started consume politics as an entertainment. You can't get good leaders in that kind of environment.
Spending hours per day following and discussing politics for emotional and intellectual reasons, instead of power-seeking organized action destroys democracy.
>"For most people who are political junkies, their news consumption is not really geared toward information that is going to help them be active citizens in the community. And even if it is, they’re not being active in the community. Most people who are daily news consumers belong to zero organizations and have worked zero times in the past year with other people on a community problem. So, most people are not doing anything."
> People have started consume politics as an entertainment.
I actually see this is a really important factor, and the people who are doing it are kind of like Bruce Willis in the sixth sense. It's so easy to rationalize as "being informed". This combined with the massive amounts of information, misinformation, and disinformation at your fingertips is just too much stuff, all the time.
> I suspect social conservatives have so much power in the US because they attend church and that forms a nexus of political organization.
I think it's more that it's easier to agree on things as a conservative. "I don't want rapid social changes" is pretty much the defining trait of someone being conservative, and since it's based on the past or present, there isn't much room for interpretation or different viewpoints. For progressive voters, they want things to change, but there are a ton of different ideas for how they want things to change, so you see a lot of "snake eating it's own tail" as groups don't agree on how things should change. Conservative politicians can just sit back and go "look at the crazy libs tearing themselves apart" and get people to vote for them.
If you’re lumping in economic change with social change, I think that’s broadly true. What’s also easier is the fact that progressives generally have to 1. Pick things to change and 2. Give some indication of how they’ll change it. Often it’s pretty easy for conservatives to point out flaws in prioritization for #1 or flaws in unrealistic plans for #2.
I disagree that the progressives need to do that- as a conservative myself. I think both sides need to take a step back. Here's the process I would follow:
1) Agree on a set of problems are valid problems faced by everybody- say high cost of housing, expensive healthcare, crumbling infrastructure, police violence, children being raised in single-parent households, a completely worthless education system, non-compete agreements, war on drugs, prison reform, etc. Maybe someone thinks one problem is more important than others, but it doesn't matter- pretty much everybody can agree that these are problems. You don't need to trivialize things that other people think are important.
2) Discuss the causes of the problems. Again, there might be disagreement, but you can get some facts. If you approach it as a problem to be solved, people can agree.
3) Discuss possible solutions to the problems. Doesn't need to be 100%, and think about how hard these solutions are to implement. For example, with police serving warrants- maybe you limit it to waking hours, except for hostage situations or some immediate emergency. That's low hanging fruit. If you can fix a bunch of small things, it can still make a big difference.
Whenever I discuss politics with people, that's how I approach it. You can't take an all or nothing approach, it's just not feasible. But if we break down big problems into small problems that people can understand, we can slowly make progress.
To some extent it worked the other direction, in that church involvement, specifically in the Evangelical community was used as a tool to create the social conservative movement (see Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority) as a response to the forced desegregation of religious schools.
Kids generally see right through social delusions of their parents though. And what's driving the Republican party right now is echo chamber insanity. They won't simply follow in their parents' footsteps of getting riled up by conspiracy theories on faceboot. (disclaimer: The Democratic party certainly has its delusions as well, but they don't seem to be pathological at the moment)
If the only thing that you knew was that there would be a massive recession starting in 2007, and that 13 years later there would be no meaningful return to the pre-2007 growth trend, this would not be hard to predict.
This is a lot like the Gilded Age in the US back in the late 1800s, early 1900s. You had massive political polarization, like today, massive income inequality, and industry that was controlled by a few large companies. It eventually boiled over and led to a large progressive movement.
Those progressive movements are critical to emphasize, underlying the renaissance of the current era, but they also came with violent upheaval. In many ways, the world wars were one long conflict over those movements and their competitors, followed by a long period of residual conflicts in the form of the Cold War, Korean War and conflicts, Mideast politics, and many other things.
What that portends for the future is difficult to say, as this could all swing the other way very rapidly. However, it's hard not to see data like what's presented in this paper, combined with things like inequality and the global displaced persons crisis, and not conclude that something significant is coming worldwide.
Democratic regression measured by the methodology of one NGO - the Freedom House and the Economist. Their methodologies do not have ground truth - so like school rankings they are completely made up.
I can have a measurement, equally plausible to many, that democracy has gone up. These are also left-leaning organizations and there facts almost always target countries with governments of the opposite ideological bent -
"And then are the states that remain democratic but have been deteriorating in quality, including the world’s four largest democracies – the United States, India, Indonesia, and Brazil – and the largest democracy in Central and Eastern Europe, Poland. 12 In 2019, India suffered one of the steepest declines on the 100-point Freedom House scale (4 points). Since 2012, India has declined by 5 points, Indonesia by 7, Brazil by 6, Poland 9, and the U.S. 7 points."
There is no scientific basis to assert that Freedom has actually gone down in these countries. Just like more coverage of murders and crime on the evening news makes us think that crime has gone up, greater coverage of so-called illiberal events makes us think that democracy is in danger.
Lacking data, I would go with the earlier in the graph of Democracy trending up and not down (null hypothesis).
> In fact, 2006 was the high water mark for democracy in the world, with the percentage of democracies peaking that year at 57% among states over one million population (Figure 1), and 61% of all states. 9 Since then the proportion of democracies in the world has gradually declined, to 55% of all states and 48% of states above one million population.
So you are in opposition to even the simplest provable fact provided in the article. And you wish to replace a statistic you don't approve of with... made up measurement? You then bring up that somehow, measurement of liberties would have a scientific basis? Liberties are not a physical quantities. They choose indicators and measured them. You chose to no indicators and simply stated your political bias.
I will choose to appreciate the more rigorous of the two.
You're not disagreeing with the conclusion, you're disagreeing with the premise. If someone accepts the premise then they should also accept the conclusion.
Personally, I agree with the Freedom House and the Economist hallmarks of democracy. Therefore, the conclusion is significant to me.
I wonder if the marriage between China & US for the past 30 years have played a role in this. Generally manufacturing are moved out of US which could cause a bigger wealth gap between the the rich and working class. Rich people become richer because they are the first receiver of the benefit from exploiting China, while working class don’t have much better alternatives. Democratic system IMO is more fragile when the gap is widen
I've had the same questions myself. America has this dual system of capitalism and democracy. We are greatly affected by both. When the two exists in our borders, we are able to sort of use one to effect the other, etc. but globalization expanded our markets (supply, labor, and demand) while leaving all the democratic restraints and "feedback" at home.
It looks like you are asking people to have a lot of “good intentions”/hold high moral standard. What are the mechanisms given we are all greedy human?
Imagine you've coded a little game played by bots in which all of them are greedy and they compete aggressively. How do you set up incentives so that they willingly cooperate, without changing their definitions in the code?
Pointing the bots to a higher "moral standard" will not work unless they are programmed to follow it. But you can't refactor humans, sadly
Now imagine that the bots can learn and can modify their behavior. And eventually through chaotic trials some of them learn that even a small gang can defeat / out-compete a large number of un-associated individuals -- and thus satisfy the greed of each individual gang member. And then they would learn that for a gang to hold its member should observe certain rules. And that those who don't must punished and/or expelled. Because otherwise the whole gang would break up.
And so on. And so forth.
That's how modern societies came to be.
Not through "intelligent design".
But though competition, trial and error, learning and adapting.
I don't think your assertion necessarily holds. There are several schools of philosophy that assert that selfishness is the highest moral standard. If I were selfish enough I should realize that being cooperative with my fellow man was the best way to get more for myself in life. Recognizing that the pie can be grown allows one to align their personal greed with the common good. I don't go to work every day out of the goodness of my heart (some perceived moral standard), but to provide a better life for me and my family.
Take for example all the technological progress of the modern era. Little of that would be possible if we didn't have massive, stable, cooperative societies. Any rational, selfish agent should recognize this and not resort to hunger games. This is also the reason capitalism seems generally more productive than communism. Instead of trying to fight or rewrite human nature, its more productive align incentives such that we can harness it.
Good argument! But logically doesn't line up. The sense of community itself is opposite of selfishness. If a person is selfish they don't think about community. Capitalism mixed with right amount of socialism (or vice versa) thrives! IMHO, being greedy for doing good to others & self (community) - is great! But greedy for only self growth at the cost of anything is dangerous & the success from it is short term. Then the person next to you doesn't think about any morale - thereby destroying the concept of community.
I decided to dig into the raw data. What I could find was the country by country narrative for 2018 which has each country ranked on a bunch of metrics out of a total score and then those scores are combined via some weighting into an aggregate scores. These component scores are entirely subjective and have no ground truth - worse than college or hospital rankings. College rankings have some quantitative basis - average starting offer for college graduates and hospitals have risk of death or readmittance for hospitals. Freedom house metrics have no quantitative basis (see below).
The country narratives are not available for 2019 or 2020. I can assure you that if you dig into the raw data you will most certainly find it rife with ad-hoc assumptions to justify their conclusions.
The fact that they have a magical threshold of 1 million for a country and that country get a weight of 1 and India with a population of 1.4 billion gets a a weight of 1 which leads to this gem:
"From 2006 to 2020, the number of democracies contracted to 108 and the percentage of democracies to 55%. Among states over one million population, the decline in the number of democracies was more dramatic, from 86 to 75, a drop from 57% to 48% (Table 4)."
I can tell from a fairly informed perspective that the quality of the process of voting in elections in India over the past decade has gone up significantly due to tamper-proof EVMs and the fact that India's voting commission is an independent constitutional body. Just that gain alone should make India's ranking move up in the Democracy index. India has added ~100 million people over that time. So the sheer number of people being able to exercise that vote freely and have it be counted dwarfs the population of countries who have become undemocratic.
To quote Charlie Munger, incentives matter and to quote Taleb - always always ask what they are selling. Freedom house is selling their rankings to Donors. Press like this gives them the ability to show donors the PR and raise more dollars. Freedom House rankings are optimized to raise the $30,000,000 they need every year from Donors. They are incentivized to say - Democracy is in Danger - for it raises more dollars. Dem are there incentives. Even better when you can demonize the countries whose governments are of the opposite ideological strain than that of the donors. India's rating has cratered since 2014 since Modi got elected.
Incentives matter and always always ask what they are selling and why.
these conclusions seem to depend almost entirely on the freedom house scale -- who can explain more about what that is? it seems to be a ranking, so is it objective and robust enough to fit this analysis, espscially over time? a cursory look at wikipedia makes it look like an arms length extension of the CIA...
I can't speak for any other countries, but from the American perspective, civics education in this country is really lacking. If citizens don't understand the basics of the American government works, it's very easy for people like Trump to lie to them. Media literacy classes would also be helpful. A lot of citizens are not capable of separating fact from fiction.
Posts prior to yours have stated other causes (lack of leadership, economic issues).
But a strong and widely shared/held understanding of civics would have provided a framework for discussing these issues and potential resolutions.
civics to include both the what (how government works) and the why (power arising from the people, leviation so life is worth living, government to secure rights (which includes economic provisions such as a social safety net to ensure delivery of those rights), ...), leading to the responsibility/expectations on all of society, from the individual on up.
We today (as a culture) are so advanced in terms of STEM that we think we know it all, and are completely blind to how much we don't know. The founding fathers had much greater wisdom/understanding on how politics and society work and how to make them work, we've lost that.
Finally, ALL of the above is completely neutral to "conservative" or "progressive" politics. The founding fathers debated these just as strongly as we do today, on all aspects of every point I raised above.
Civics is definitely lacking, but I feel like the bigger issue is that information sources in general have become highly biased and prone to misinformation (especially if you consider social media an information source). And at the same time we aren't teaching kids to seek truth, question what they hear, and think critically. In fact, a lot of times it seems like the opposite is being taught - "believe me because I'm in a position of authority".
I'm not sure why you're getting down voted; this is an accurate comment on the condition of things, especially about the media literacy. I'll add one more point that for some people, it's a badge of honor to actively remain uninformed on certain topics. Not sure what you can do about that.
Yep, the government is very slow to change, by design. If more people understood that, they'd see that politicians on any side who promise major overhauls to how the country runs are lying, it's simply not possible with our current setup. Whether the government becomes more liberal or conservative, it'll take a while. At the same time, it's important to not get complacent, because the further the government goes down a path you don't like, the harder it gets to turn it around.
I enthusiastically support a candidate who advocates for dramatic change, and my fellow volunteers and I understand that they almost certainly won't happen.
Our experience has been that anything that results from our work will be compromised, and we want to aim high so that we can compromise somewhere in the middle.
It seems like you're implying that people who argue for "x" are ignorant of the fact that they'll get a fraction of x. Anecdotally, people who argue for "x" are aware of the fact that they'll get a fraction... so they ask for very high values of x.
> I can't speak for any other countries, but from the American perspective, civics education in this country is really lacking. If citizens don't understand the basics of the American government works, it's very easy for people like Trump to lie to them.
Even worse I'd say is the lack of psychology and neuroscience education. If one doesn't understand the fundamentals of how the human mind works, it's very easy to fall victim to lies from any source, including their own mind.
> A lot of citizens are not capable of separating fact from fiction.
Including people that perceive that they do have the ability. Everyone suffers from it to varying degrees (the specifics of which are not known, despite the patterns that appear to be there), but it is near impossible to perceive in oneself for many interesting reasons, including some possibly significant ones which have been observed but have not yet gotten much attention in the scientific community (who does not know what it does not know, something which may only be perceivable in certain states of mind).
My conspiracy theory is that it is not accidental that we don't teach these things in school outside of specialized programs, because it is a vector that can be used to distort beliefs across all demographics, including self-perceived informed rationalists, and the effects of this can be observed on a daily basis.
Democratic regression began beneath the surface long before it became obvious through overt anti-democratic movements.
Democratic regression started when the majority of people in countries like the USA started to feel as if they had no viable choice that actually represented their own interests or ideas. This is why most people don't vote. They see it as a choice between "the puppet on the left" and "the puppet on the right."
I mean take 2012. Obama had clearly demonstrated himself to be Bush's third term, at least when it comes to quite a few issues such as banking reform and remaining entangled in Iraq. For all his "change" rhetoric Obama didn't change much. His opposition was Mitt Romney, a literal member of the financial elite who signaled nothing beyond an intention to represent that elite.
Nobody signaled an intent to represent the actual interests of the middle or working class in the US. Nobody talked about pushing back on unfair trade policies or taking any other steps to return good jobs (a.k.a. not service jobs) to the US. Nobody even really acknowledged that there was a problem.
Then in 2016 you had Hillary Clinton who clearly would continue Obama's policies and seemed to be working on trade pacts to further accelerate outsourcing to China, and you had a wildcard self-styled populist upstart. I can't stand Trump, consider him dangerous, and did not vote for him, but I can totally understand people who did. He was the first candidate in at least a generation to even acknowledge the economic collapse of the American center.
The Democratic Party and the left continue to think Trump's victory was about race, and I still think they are wrong. Yes there are racists and yes they like Trump, but those people were never going to vote for Hillary Clinton anyway. Maybe a few of them voted when they otherwise would have stayed home, but I don't buy the idea that some tide of closet neo-Nazis and 4chan incels swept him into office. Do they ever ask people in these polls if they actually voted or intend to vote?
Trump won because historically blue "rust belt" states tipped, and that was because of his economic rhetoric... which was ironically liberal in some ways. He ran as a social conservative but as an economic liberal, and that overlaps quite well with working class America. He may be lying and just saying what he needs to say to get elected, but that's what he said and that's what people voted for.
Another major ingredient was the collapse of trust. The Bush administration lied us into a war, and then in 2008 we bailed out the banking interests that created the crisis while leaving the actual economy to rot. Those two events did more to undermine American democracy than a thousand Russian troll farms could ever achieve. People no longer believe in our system.
We've been a very dysfunctional democracy for decades. What we are seeing is the final collapse of the facade revealing the rotten structure underneath.
taibbi and thomas frank's writings on this subject have been very good. racism is an easy scapegoat because it is more or less a purely effervescent moral failing that can be broadly applied without asking uncomfortable questions about the institutional failings of establishment neoliberalism, clintonism, "nudge theory" and the rest.
Yes, culture war issues are used by both the right and the pseudo-left to avoid talking about economic issues. As soon as you bring up race, abortion, or homosexuality, it sucks all the air out of the room and everyone stops talking about unfair trade policy, unfair and in some cases outright regressive taxation, crumbling infrastructure, growing monopolies, wage stagnation, or the exploding costs of health care, real estate, and tuition.
The things people talk about and get emotional about are the things that sway elections, and therefore these are the topics politicians focus on. I don't think you have to imagine some sophisticated conspiracy to sideline economic issues... politicians just don't pay much attention to them because their constituents aren't bringing them up. Meanwhile their donors have a clear position in favor of the status quo, so that ends up being their economic agenda by default.
Look at how charged the Supreme Court battle is, which is mostly about abortion, and compare that to the complete lack of interest shown by politicians on either side regarding our record unemployment numbers or the COVID driven collapse of small businesses across the USA. We are in the midst of a small local business holocaust in the USA and a profound consolidation of corporate "big chain" control over local economies, and not a word... we are too busy screaming about Ginsburg's replacement.
I am not saying those "culture war" issues don't matter. Clearly they matter a lot to some people in very real ways. I'm just pointing out how they dominate the political discourse and prevent other issues from being debated. The economic and operational issues I listed above arguably affect more people than most of the culture war issues, and the Venn diagrams overlap quite a bit too. Gay rights mostly affects gay people, but wage stagnation affects everyone including gay people.
bloggers and twitter people do. people within the democratic machine do not. up until maybe the past 2 years it was entirely heretical to even lightly suggest that obama did not do a good job without shifting all the blame towards mitch mcConnell or the koch brothers. actual critiques of the power structure from within are rare and even then, hardly ever substantive or satisfying.
... which is why the Democrats keep losing easy elections, like against Donald f'ing Trump.
Clinton almost won with an absolutely horrible campaign that failed to excite anyone. She even through in that awful 'deporables' comment. I know what she meant, but it sounded like she was insulting the entire US working class.
Donald Trump is one of the most consistently unpopular and widely disliked presidents in history. He has his fanatical base, but that base is no more than 30% of the population at best. Most other people can't stand him and the only reason they'd vote for him is if they feel there is no better choice. The fact that there is any question at all about the outcome of this election shows just how pathetic the Democrats are at connecting with the electorate.
The problem is that it has become acceptable to treat ideas as dangerous. For example, if I want to deny the Holocaust, that is my right. No one has the moral, and no one should have the legal, right to try and prevent me from doing that. But that is not the view of those who control the discourse. They have accepted that certain views are inherently dangerous.
The slope is slippery. It begun with Nazism and pedophilia advocacy but already includes Corona "misinformation", r/The_Donald, r/ChapoTrapHouse, Hamas' Twitter account, WikiLeaks, Mila Yanniopolis, and a whole host of stuff I just don't know about because some powerful fucks decided it was too dangerous for me (please don't read so much into my examples - these are the ones I know about. I think both the left and the right is guilty of trying to censor the other side). If you don't believe this creeping censorship will eventually reach you, you either have very vanilla opinions or are very naive.
Furthermore, more and more power over expression online is concentrated in a handful of American mega corporations, making it practically impossible to escape it. You can't "just start your own site" if Google blacklists it and refuses to index it because no one will find it. They effectively control the online discourse.
Just yesterday, Leila Khaled was supposed to participate in an discussion panel online sponsored by an American university. Zionist lobby groups got her booted from Zoom, YouTube, and Facebook, preventing the meeting from taking place. Reportedly, the university had a backup if one platform would boot her, but not all three! To the best of my knowledge, there are no alternative to these platforms. If they won't allow you to stream to an international audience, you just can't do it. At least not if you are not a techie who knows how to setup your own video streaming server.
I think there is a huge need for software for censorship resistant online platforms. Something that is distributed so that it can't be taken down, but not so complicated that only a few can use it.
The problem that companies are trying to navigate is how to keep speech as free and open as possible without permitting state-sponsored disinformation operations to fester within the platform.
I agree that individuals should have the right to believe what they wish, however heinous their opinions may be. But it's clear that social media platforms are very powerful credibility launderers that give nefarious actors an incredible amount of power in shaping public discourse, and we can't ignore that either. We have to take disingenuous efforts to pollute discourse by malicious actors as seriously as we take protecting genuine speech.
Given that you can give a laundry list that includes Nazi advocacy, ChapoTrapHouse Hamas' Twitter account, And Mila Yanniopolis, it seems the attempts to censor aren't really working.
Hypothesis: it's the opposite. The era of bidirectional mass communication is allowing geographically-dispersed fringe interests to consolidate into political blocs. Interest groups that previously would have been censored implicitly (by being a small, isolated group in a larger community) or explicitly (by the authority-controlled media, such as cable, television, and radio, having standards and practices that excluded giving pedophiles a half hour to plead the pro-side of their case on the air) now have the tools to communicate with each other and the public outside of gatekeepers.
Although I understand the worry, I am getting more and more annoying with people painting all populist leaders as anti-democratic, even when they are trying to make institutions more democratic.
I am from Brazil, and media (both local and international) loves to portray him as some sort of conservative dictator.
Except he been trying to do the opposite for a while now, for example people called him "genocidal" because he opposed cities issuing lockdown orders.
Thing is, in our constitution only the president can issue lockdown, and only after being reviewed by three different oversight groups, because we had a nasty dicatorship during cold war, our new constituion was written deliberately to make really hard to create a new dictatorship, yet our supreme court is happily ignoring a lot of parts of our constitution to give the government dicatorship powers, and the president is opposing it, but every time he does so, people say he, is the dictator.
Another case: population voted against arms control in a country-wide vote around 2003, government back then issued arms control anyway (they made it legal to have weapons if you had a license, and then stopped giving licenses, thus effectively banning weapons against the wishes of the population), Bolsonaro more than once talked about it, and tried to undo the ban and follow what was voted for, again people kept saying that this was him being a dictator.
Our supreme court been under heavy criticism lately for various reasons, and they reacted badly (for example one judge called police on a guy that criticized him in person on an airplane and got him arrested), the media is portraying this as the president trying to get rid of the supreme court and have more power for himself, and the supreme court as democratic heroes, but that is obviously not what is going on, the supreme court for example breached a fundamental principle of democracy recently when they started a case themselves, becoming court+pŕosecutors at same time, something that is NOT supposed to ever happen, they also are trying to institute a "Fake News" law, something that obviously goes against our constitution that guarantees free speech.
“But we can’t let this place become known as a gay tourism paradise. Brazil can’t be a country of the gay world, of gay tourism. We have families,” Bolsonaro added
Bolsonaro, a former army captain, has long been notorious for his homophobic comments, once declaring: “Yes, I’m homophobic – and very proud of it.”
Bolsonaro claimed “homosexual fundamentalists” were brainwashing heterosexual children to “become gays and lesbians to satisfy them sexually in the future”.
A nine-day old greenhorn account is here telling us that LGBTQ+ rights are not only a social good, but the pillar of democracy, and if someone disagrees, they are fundamentally antidemocratic?
I'm sorry, but I think you're confusing liberalism with democracy. In a liberal democracy, we usually balance the two, by placing some realm of basic human and constitutional rights outside the realm of democratic political contestation. To say that submitting certain questions to the voters is undemocratic is a contradiction in terms.
The study is suspect. The transition of a country from non-democratic to single party democracy to multi-party democracy can be tracked reasonably well. Scoring multi-party democracies is more problematic. For example, the study uses data claiming the US is down 7 points, which is quite significant given that the entire global decrease cited in the study is only a few points. The US continues to be a multi-party democracy where rights and freedoms have actually expanded over the last decade, for example adding by additional rights for gay marriage. Universal health care in the US could be viewed as a loss of freedom, but I perhaps incorrectly assume the article is “left-wing” from a US standpoint and is viewing the Trump presidency as the loss in rights. On the contrary, the large protests over discrimination that has existed for 300 years are helping increase freedoms, and the deportation/lack of rights for immigrants is open for debate in the context of a democracy score, where those born in the country are given the rights. Election turnout and voting system technology had continued to improve, and scrutiny of fraud continues to hone in at more and more granular levels (national news about inconsistent practices at a town level). Overall, the conclusions of the study merit skepticism given the arbitrariness of democratic scoring. The difference between a democracy and a dictatorship is clear, and those metrics are clear/transparent.
Countries where regular elections are held with a single party/major candidate. Minor opposition candidates may be present but may not capture a large share of the votes. A positive indicator for a democratic system is regular transition of power, and a system in which a single person is consistently re-elected, or a single party. If the voter has only 1 choice in an election, the election is less democratic than one with multiple choices
This means countries like Japan or Singapore, where while technically multi-party, in practice the opposition parties never win. Obviously a country where other parties are outlawed (e.g. communist countries) is not a single party democracy, it's just a single party dictatorship.
I'm in the US (so this comment is US-centric). As with so much else over the past 6 months, the tension between federal powers and state powers is being thrown into relief. In particular, the popular idea that democracy is good/right has long been suspect: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fath... .
This is the effect of the Internet and of the "Long Tail": the monetization/politicization of the "long tail" is in segmenting and then aggregating bits of the long tail into larger and larger groups of marginalized members of the population. With poor communication, "the fringe" is only a fringe locally; with near-infinite communication, the fringe is everyone: FB and the various tailored news feeds drape a comfortable bubble over us and cause us to see our view as (manifestly) the only view (since it's our only view, it must be the only view).
As a "Republican", I point the finger at Republicans, a political group which has been a 10x political operation. Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. And Republicans have played the state/local-politics game very, very well.
As others have noted, democracy is a game best played locally but our pervasive communications systems are forcing it to be played globally and this is happening quickly enough that our political systems haven't come to grips with it yet.