The questions are too on the nose IMO. To me they read like “If you could be an animal would you choose to be a Social Democrat bird or a Thatcher Conservative horse?”
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https://twitter.com/andrewglobal/status/1284121044702429189
https://twitter.com/andrewglobal/status/1284121045654437889
An incident involving graffiti spray painted on a monument to those who fought in Adolf Hitler’s SS is being investigated as a hate crime by an Ontario police force.
Someone painted “Nazi war monument” on a stone cenotaph commemorating those who served with the 14th SS Division. The monument is located in Oakville in the St. Volodymyr Ukrainian Cemetery.
The division, made up of Ukrainians who pledged allegiance to Hitler, was part of the Nazi’s Waffen SS organization. Some members of the division have been accused of killing Polish women and children as well as Jews during the Second World War.
Halton Regional Police believe the graffiti was spray painted on the cenotaph sometime around June 21. Police said they were investigating the incident as a “hate-motivated” crime but they declined to release images of the graffiti so as to stop “further spreading” of the message.
WTF Canada?
I wanted to hate this but it’s great.
Economic Left/Right: -6.13
Social Libertarian/Authoritarian: -8.46
Doubt anybody here gets outside of the green box unless they try.
Some of those questions are pretty terrible. A couple aren’t even questions. They’re just statements of fact.
Great article. This part stood out to me when talking about money in politics:
It depends on what level of government you’re talking about. When you’re talking about state legislatures, that’s all really low-salience stuff. And the reality is that state parties have to do some ethically questionable things to keep the lights on because small-dollar donors generally don’t donate to their campaigns. So in state and local politics, corporate money is absolutely a big driver.
So if you aren’t donating to Biden (hahaha) and you have an extra $10 bucks, how about donating it to the democrat running for your state senate district. Or county supervisor. Or city councilperson.
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I’m surprised that no one at all is on the authoritarian left. Strange that that’s the only empty quadrant. I’m pretty sure that I’m more on board with the government forcing people to do the the right (left) thing than most people.
I think the Political Compass is biased towards making people see certain parties as bad and coding them as strongly authoritarian.
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We have been doing the political compass thing at least once a year for as long as I’ve been a regular in the politics forum.
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Afaict those people are all well known Americans, so I’m not sure why it would be surprising when the two values most cherished are “freedom” and the dream of getting rich by fucking everyone else over.
I kind of figured. There’s better tests out there that may differentiate us more.
My students have been really curious over the summer. A bunch have PMed me questions about the election and America. Some of it is super-simple stuff. Others are actually pretty challenging to answer without researching. I mean I couldn’t effectively describe what caucuses are to second language students without watching them glaze over.
This has led me to write a bunch of short bits and pieces about elements of American politics and if there’s an easier way to feel depressed, I don’t know it.
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I usually tell people that caucuses are just in-person ranked choice voting.
Sure there’s more to it, but that’s the fundamental truth of it.
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Well, it depends on the caucus. Caucuses vary state to state and party to party. The explanation of the initial one at the precinct is obvious. It’s when it goes to county, district, then state caucuses and how everything transfers from precinct delegates to state delegates to national delegates that gets confusing. I was reading descriptions for hours trying to piece it together before I gave up.
I’m convinced that the confusion and complexity of caucuses is designed to hide any underhanded bullshit from the people but that’s conspiratorial thinking.
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oh, you mean the entire apparatus! Yeah, that’s too much. Most people who asked me about it during the primary we mainly asking about the precinct-level happenings.
I think this article can be more than something to quote and can be something to jump-start a discussion worthy of its own thread. It certainly speaks to my interest in a structural view of politics that isn’t bogged down by issue wonkery.
I don’t feel that the individual thoughts in this article are particularly special, but the interview does bring a lot of threads together and weaves a narrative of how politics works.
There’s very little long-term, strategic planning happening anywhere in the party because no one has an incentive to do it. So, campaigns’ actions, while not random, are more random than I realized.
The Democratic establishment isn’t some nefarious cabal plotting to work against the will of the people. The Democratic establishment is mostly composed of people who do have instincts towards progressive outcomes, but they have a flawed understanding of how the world works and overvalue the necessity of them having power to reach those outcomes. They also suffer from a lack of imagination about how things could be different. They aren’t necessarily corporate tools because they love corporations more than people, but more because they have bought into the myth of the markets. For example, they may believe that universal health care is a laudable goal, but they’re going to pick a stupid path for getting there.
“You should put your money in cheap media markets in close states close to the election, and you should talk about popular issues, and not talk about unpopular issues.”
What needs to be talked about is how to make popular issues that we don’t like unpopular and how to make unpopular stances more popular. Democrats don’t do a good job of trying to shift public opinion. Maybe they shouldn’t do that around elections, but they should be using the rest of their time trying to push people to change their mindis.
I would definitely say that the reason these voters turned against us is because Democrats failed to embrace economic populism.
I’ve always agreed with the need for Democrats to do more of this. I equate embracing economic populism with fomenting class warfare and I think establishment Democrats are too much in favor of maintaining order to do this.
…the real synthesis of these views is that Obama-to-Trump voters are motivated by racism. But they’re really electorally important, and so we have to figure out some way to get them to vote for us.
Shor’s view is that we should just try not to talk about things that agitate racists. I don’t think that is realistic. Ideally, I think we should acknowledge racists as being racists, but not necessarily ostracize them. To put this in the context of forum wars, I would neither favor perma-banning racists so long as they can feign civility nor banning calling people “racist” as a form of personal attack. Race is fundamentally germane to any discussion of American politics.
And the reason is that while voters may have more left-wing views than Joe Biden on a few issues, they don’t have the same consistency across their views. There are like tons of pro-life people who want higher taxes, etc. There’s a paper by the political scientist David Broockman that made this point really famous — that “moderate” voters don’t have moderate views, just ideologically inconsistent ones.
This is the main reason why moderate politicians are garbage; their views don’t exist in the wild. Shor combines this with some of the previous points I have quoted to suggest that Democrats need to stop talking about immigration.
I suggest the actual solution is much harder: Democrats need to develop anti-racist dogwhistles that allows them to talk about immigration in a way that racists are okay with. This may involve talking about maximizing fairness in the process while avoiding talking about outcomes.
But there’s always a mix of violent and nonviolent protest; or, there’s always some violence that occurs at nonviolent protests. And it’s not a situation where a drop of violence spoils everything and turns everybody into fascists. The research isn’t consistent with that. It’s more about the proportions.
Who thought that I wasn’t going to touch on this? This has always been my view on violent protests. I don’t think that you can ever have a purely nonviolent protest movement. There are always going to be some people who want to go farther. That they exist does not invalidate the protest. On the other hand, I worry that the lack of violent outliers is a sign that the protest doesn’t have enough people who are angry enough to sustain the movement.
One goal of protesting is to goad the oppressing culture into a disproportionately violent response. What provokes this response if fear that the protest will become violent. Rhetoric that makes law enforcement more paranoid heightens this fear.
…during [the post-war] era, both parties were run by just about the most cosmopolitan segments of society. And there were also really strong gatekeepers. This small group of highly educated people not only controlled the commanding heights of both the left and the right, but also controlled the media.
What social media has done is diminish the effect of elites controlling the media. The power of Fox News doesn’t make this obvious, but Facebook and Twitter have allowed the masses to set the agenda as to what issues are most salient. Fox News has just figured out a way to push people’s buttons. Trumpism is just the rank-and-file Republicans throwing off the chains imposed on them by the party elites. The cunning politicians who have recognized this and gone with it are the ones who have seized control of the party.
Yes, the people are being manipulated, but they’re not being told how to think. Russian bots didn’t make Americans racist. Americans were already racist. I am skeptical of the idea that we just need to educate people better. People are stupid. The left should be thinking in terms of how we can provide more compelling propaganda, not how we can make people see “the truth”.
Other research has shown that messaging centered around the potential for cooperation and positive-sum change really appeals to educated people, while messaging that emphasizes zero-sum conflict resonates much more with non-college-educated people.
Or, diplomacy is an elitist idea and sometimes we need to be ready for (metaphorical) war.
So if you look at Black voters trending against us, it’s not uniform. It’s specifically young, secular Black voters who are voting more Republican than their demographic used to. And the ostensible reason for this is the weakening of the Black church, which had, for historical reasons, occupied a really central place in Black society and helped anchor African-Americans in the Democratic Party. Among Black voters, one of the biggest predictors for voting Republican is not attending church.
This is a topic worthy of further discussion.
Some other stuff Shor says as I run out of steam that I think should be noted.
- It looks good for Democrats that they seem to be retaining Romney voters who went for Clinton while regaining some Obama voters who went for Trump.
- Small donors are mostly rich, but Democratic donors are to the left economically compared to the rest of the party.
- Corporations drive politics more in places that don’t have these affluent small donors, such as state legislatures or poor states like West Virginia.
In my career, I have seen circumstances where polling has said to do one thing, and then we didn’t do it for ideological reasons. But every single one of those times, we ignored the polling from the left. Like, if Joe Biden wanted to just follow the polls, he should support the Hyde Amendment (which prohibits federal funding for abortion services). The Hyde Amendment polls extremely well. But the people who work on his campaign oppose the Hyde Amendment. So Joe Biden opposes the Hyde Amendment.
So we should be asking ourselves, “What is the maximally radical thing that can get past Joe Manchin.” And that’s like a really depressing optimization problem. And it’s one that most leftists don’t even want to approach, but they should. There’s a wide spectrum of possibilities for what could happen the next time Democrats take power, and if we don’t come in with clear thinking and realistic demands, we could end up getting rolled.
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What percentage of the followers of the UP twitter account are bots? 90%? More?
This is a weird question but is one that has popped into my mind a few times recently.
When we look back at 2016, will we view ourselves as lucky that Donald Trump was the right-wing fascist nutjob that got elected?
As bad as everything is, I shudder to think about how bad things would be under a non-imbecile piece of shit, and the counterfactual is incredibly easy–a competent Trump isn’t so hard to imagine.
It’s crazy to think that we lucked out here to get the least-competent, most-dementia-riddled of all the boomer racists during a legitimate pandemic that will kill hundreds of thousands of Americans, but I started thinking about how a non-idiot right-wing fascist dictator-wannabe could have still pulled off a competent COVID response and guarantee reelection in 2020 and it’s kinda scary.
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Somebody is doing work in the Villages
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I’ve been making this case for the entirety of Trump’s administration. A more adept politician would have figured out how to do things like a Muslim ban without shooting himself in the foot. A more behaved Republican wouldn’t have pissed off John McCain so much that he voted to save Obamacare out of spite.