Breakdown values

Michelle seems to be channeling Charlie Pierce who made precisely the same point wrt anti-abortion activists. just yesterday https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a21931194/sarah-huckabee-sanders-red-hen-civility/

The Democratic Party has for a long time existed as a coalition between liberal and conservative wings. See my 2010 piece on the Democratic Party’s internal coalition.

The Democratic Party is still trying to serve both Mammon and the people. It has been “civil” partly to appease its major donors, who are fairly conservative and don’t want a fuss. Also, its leaders are stunningly well-insulated from political reality and still do not seem to grasp an existential threat to both the party and the Republic. They don’t realize that if they keep on appeasing, they will have nothing.

At this point I figure the Republic is over for a generation. Maybe something will eventually be reconstituted from the ashes.

The last time we fought fascism, we ended up bombing the crap out of Germany. Dealing with the contemporary Republican party is going to take a lot more than the violation of norms of civility.

It isn’t a question of whether to play ball, it is or should be by this time the realization that the R’s are not going to play ball with non-R’s, and not so much with each other. Without norms you don’t have a ball game, you have a riot. Without governmental norms, we’ve got some time left while the political/administrative infrastructure unravels but we won’t have a government for long. Personally hoping for something softish in a landing and the growth of some new norms from the bottom up, or from China, hope not. Against slavery this time.

I draw your attention to Occupy Wall St as a recent example of “not playing by the rules” activism on the left*.

Most political parties have internal tension(s) between liberals and radicals of various sorts. You allude to that when talking about the “Republican” anti-abortion radicals, sovereign citizens and tea party types who have largely taken over the party from the right wing (remember when there were centrists in the Republican party?).

The Democratic Central Committee really need move away from their coalition between authoritarians and business… much as the whole of US politics does. The only reason people don’t call them fascists is that their opponents in the Republic party have taken that label for themselves. Put those values into Aoteraoa or Iceland and people would be asking where the brownshirts are.

* bearing in mind that a lot of activists on both sides are only left/right because there are no other frames permitted. You have extreme authoritarian centrists who are “left” because they’re merely not fascist, for example.

That’s probably not going to work out too great for them.

Huh???

Pelosi and Schumer, Obama and Clinton, and their heirs and grandchildren, will be just fine. If they lose, they keep the millions, get some cushy corporate job or a cabinet position. If the country goes full Fourth Reich, it will be easier for the Fuehrer to let them take some millions and emigrate to Dubai or Singapore.

They have two jobs while in office. 1) To make sure they are just fine out of office, and 2) to keep the wrong kind of Democrat from gaining power and making things not fine. That’s why they stick so long. Republicans certainly won’t get in the way of these goals.

The problem is not Republicans, it’s Democrats.
The problem is not the Democratic leadership, but the rank and file.
The problem is that the rank and file want to serve the leadership, to help them be all just fine.

Pack the Supreme Court? Yeah, no. Aside from the low probability (don’t know, maybe 1 in 20) of a group of young buck lobbyist from the Federalist Soc, or AEI preparing a proposal saying ‘Beat the Xmas rush, nominate additional SC judges *now*!’, the same tactics used to give us Goursch instead of Garland will be used even if the Democratic party manages to get it done in the first place.

Norms? The GOP have been doing everything they can to break norms while they are in power and scream for the return to norms when they are not. I cannot find the link but I remember GOP Congress members saying ‘Not My President’ during the Clinton Presidency, way before the Dixie Chicks. See also Senator Helms publicly stating that US soldiers would shoot President Clinton if he ever visited the state Helms represented.

Yes the whole court packing thing is just a rehash of the preoccupation with the court rather than getting things done in Congress. If you control Congress and the Presidency, the right thing to do is pass a bunch of laws.

Sebastian H’s comment at 15 on the “preoccupation with the court” and his recommendation that you “pass a bunch of laws” is either very naive or (more likely) a cynical rehashing of a very dubious republican talking point. The republicans have used the Supreme Court to steal one election, to gut the single most important law (Obamacare) that the Dems passed, and to defend gerrymandering. They consider the supreme court to be so important that they stopped the democrats from filling a space on the court for a year, in flagrant contravention of the constitution. It is literally impossible for the Democrats to just “pass a bunch of laws” while the GOP insists on using the court to destroy everything they do. Once the Dems have control of the presidency and the Senate they should stack the court with a good bunch of young and left wing judges – I would recommend at least 4! – and tell the GOP to go fuck themselves. Then they can do some hard and fast work on reversing gerrymandering, and tell the GOP to just “pass a bunch of laws” – if they ever manage to get elected again.

Pretending that the US system works best when people don’t use the supreme court to second guess laws is naive at best and a cynical attempt to undermine the power of democratic congresses, at worst. In the US system you need to control the courts in order to pass laws. This is obviously a terrible situation but it’s the reality, and pretending that the Democrats or the left are the architects of this situation is both dishonest and nasty.

The civility wing of the Democratic party is like a baseball team quietly waiting for the umpires to intervene when the opposing team brings several armored vehicles to the field and plots to win the game by gunning down their opponents. The defensive strategy at play is a category error in the face of an enemy that is set on extermination.

For nearly three decades the GOP has been building the infrastructure for a defacto one party state while the Democrats have been twiddling their thumbs pretending that nothing is wrong. Abandoning the traditional ‘civilized politics’ norms of the Democratic party is a necessary, but by this point most likely not sufficient, condition for any clawback of illegitimate Republican victories. Do nothing and the situation will degenerate further. However, if the Democrats choose to stack the supreme court one way and it will be stacked the other way at the next Republican opportunity. If the Democratic party passes anti-Republican laws during one Congress, they will be overturned by the next Republican congress or struck down by the Republican court.

The rot of Republican dominance is so deeply entrenched that no probable corrective action is likely to be successful for decades to come. The selfish generation–the boomers–created the monster that is the GOP and they will not abandon their quest to asset strip America until the electoral majority of the boomers are in their own graves.

In the distant future, when power passes from the selfish generation perhaps the first objective, once (if) the immediate crises are restrained, ought to be construction of new rules and norms that take lessons from the democratic catastrophes of this decade–both Trump and Brexit–to ensure that such mistakes are not as easily repeated. Permanently stripping from power the kind of sociopolitical parasites–the elderly and those who live in rural areas–that facilitated said democratic catastrophes would be appropriate. Until that happens, however, nothing will improve.

bob mcmanus

The problem is not Republicans, it’s Democrats.
The problem is not the Democratic leadership, but the rank and file.
The problem is that the rank and file want to serve the leadership, to help them be all just fine.

So where you live there’s only one singular problem?

Plus, your computers can connect to our Internet across dimensional barriers!

You lucky lucky so-and-sos.

Our computers can’t do that. Plus, here where we live there’s more than just one problem. In fact, there are loads of them.

I am too excited to have much to say. Maybe tomorrow.

Ben Jealous won, and Emily Sirota, David’s better half, beat an incumbent. Maybe that’s the best tonight.

When Sanders overwhelmingly won young women of color, and the Clintonites showered them with contempt, the writing was on the wall. This old boomer knows the kids are alright.

2018 will be too much of a wash to change the country, and the next few years can be spent destroying the dollar dems.

Zdenek

… relatively naive view of morality and the role it should play in politics

Your comment might have more substantive merit if you could give a coherent account of your own view of morality and the role it should play in politics. Otherwise it seems as if you just enjoy sneering.

At 11 McManus was complaining that the problem is the democrat base. By 20 he’s sure the kids are alright on the basis of one primary result . I don’t think this is how good political analysis works.

Civility is relative. We’ll get a better sense of what incivility actually looks like when the the puppet-master lands in Britain. I read (a bit of) Sullivan silliness. The fact that Henry is reading him and Goldberg in the NYT pretty much sets up the parameters of ‘realism’ – a witty clown with a mean streak and a less witty clown. Confidence in media ‘sources’ continues to sink. 90 percent of the stories about the administration continue to be negative underling two facts.

The first is the semi-permanent state of hypocrisy of the agitated left (many of whom spend 2008 -2016 steadfastly ignoring kill lists, splitting families at the border, and sundry other ‘non-scandals.’) No need to dwell on that unhappy theme.

The second and more important involves the steadily improving economic conditions of significant sub-sections of the ‘Democratic coalition’ – namely white working-class males, hispanics, and african-americans. The white working-class is already out the door and my guess is that the more conservative members of the other two groups aren’t remotely interested in following the lead of Maxine Waters on any issue. By economic conditions I’m including the generally and too often ignored cultural capital improvements. One might get hooted at for wearing a MAGA hat in a ‘chic’ DC eatery, but in many other parts of America, the MAGA hat is a celebratory – in-your-face elites, whether or not the hat is actually made in China.

Being rude to civil servants in public places isn’t protest, it’s an affirmation of political powerlessness, ignorance, and even indifference. Trump voters aren’t ‘scared’ of Maxine Waters et al. Quite the contrary. The devastation wrought upon the Democratic party was not designed by the Koch brothers, or the gerrymandering GOP. The rot began with the dollar dems and their stooges – the Clintons. Obama was all the Dems had and he’s gone. The bench is empty, as is the idea bank. Sullivan is calling for Dems to build the wall because even he can see that Dems have backed themselves right into an ‘open-borders’ corner. As numerous rightwing critics have pointed out Japan, Canada, and Australia all have immigration policies considerably more restrictive than any Trump is seriously proposing which renders the Trump supporters are nazis argument problematic to say the very least. Which wouldn’t be so bad if Dems weren’t betting farm – as usual – on identity politics. America as an emerging fascist state under Trump is either a cynical fiction, or delusion, to any neutral observer, especially those with some experience with totalitarian regimes. Most of us can remember the immense traction (ahem) the ‘Bush-Hitler’ memes garnered and how effective the name-calling was in preventing the invasion of Iraq and the screwing of the masses.

Most Americans want strong borders and a bright future for their children. Many would like a resolution for the undocumented workers and their kids. Rather than ‘give Trump a win’ on these issues, ‘hard-core’ resistance types such as multi-millionaire Bill Mahr are calling for an increase in homelessness and sundry other miseries which will undoubtably hit the poorest hardest as an acceptable necessity in removing Trump. That’s the state of the discourse.

Henry is bright and careful in limiting his remarks to simple observations, perhaps because he understands there’s no way to put lip-stick on that pig. Two-years wasted on piss-gate, daily hysteria, and now rudeness as the way forward.

Sounds like a plan – and one certain to bring delight to the MAGA crowd.

27: Our base is apparently learning after the Obama years, Clinton campaign, and their cashouts that the establishment Dems sees them as only a money-making machine. Color me surprised, but I don’t hate the base, I just want them to take charge and demand that their candidates have the same stake in elections that the voters do.

I don’t know.

The analysis presented looks at the two US parties as rational actors, as if their actions were directed by some individual or group in charge of them, as they contend and bargain with one another over public policy. That’s an obviously valid frame of analysis in the abstract, but I think that you might almost define the ditch US politics has run itself into lately by the fact that these terms in which a political system would have to make sense if it were functioning at all, just don’t correspond at all well with reality anymore.

There are two ways of approaching that idea that no one is in charge of either party to be its rational actor, structural and functional, how the parties are constituted, and what we have observed them doing.

Structurally, no one person, or group of deal makers, has been able to maintain even temporary control of either US party for two generations. The last time they were capable of direction was back when they were coalitions of state and municipal political machines. But it’s been decades since either party could get through a brokered convention. No brokers left. They understand that a brokered convention could not be brokered, would end up like the D convention of 1860. Both parties now have to conduct nominating campaigns that act as tryouts determining which contender is going to do best at messaging warfare against the other party in the general election.

Everyone understands that the party absolutely must reach a consensus on that question of who its nominee will be before the convention opens, or the convention will never close. Therefore the contenders cannot run against each other on actual public policy issues. That would fracture the needed consensus, and there are no longer machine bosses to reach deals with one another and force a consensus nominee across any ideological divides at all.

In a better world than the one we actually live in, perhaps this would be a great and good thing. The two parties would run candidates who stood for their party’s consensus against that of the other party. No machine bosses! No smoke-filled backrooms in which candidates are foisted on the people! The party that wins elections that are contests between two competing programs, implements its program of public policy, we have 2-4 years to see how that works, and the electorate renders its judgment on that question at the next election.

Now, considering the question functionally, in terms of what the US parties do when in power, there is the complication in US politics that obscures the question, that the divided legislative authority in the US system means that a party has to get the trifecta to implement its program freely. Failing that, they are limited by the other party’s veto, and only such public policy as has bipartisan consensus could be implemented.

Set that complication aside for the moment, to look at the behavior of the parties when they are not hampered by the need to negotiate anything with other party. It’s been generations since either party did that with the US political trifecta, implemented a program. Take immigration, the obvious critical public policy question of today, and for the past two generations during which the number of the undocumented has grown to 11 million. The Ds most recently had the trifecta in the first two years of the Obama administration, yet did nothing to resolve this critical problem, despite the fact that the obvious solution the Ds should be for, immediate citizenship for the 11 million (so they can vote in the next election!) and immigration on demand, lay in their power. The Rs have held the trifecta for even longer periods recently, yet have failed to implement their obviously preferred program of either deporting the 11 million, or, failing that, getting some permanent second-class citizenship arranged for them. Hey, maybe they’re finally going for that, but if anyone was actually in charge over there, they wouldn’t have waited until a dementia sufferer was their titular leader to go forward with it.

The point is, no one is in charge of either party. No individual, no cabal in some smoke-filled backroom, nobody. The parties do not exist to implement public policy. Did they ever? Perhaps not systematically, but in living memory, LBJ was able to get the Ds to abandon the segregationist franchise and hand it over to the Rs. That was an obvious, large, short to medium term detriment to the party’s electoral fortunes, but it was done, it could be done by a small group of Ds, because the party had an identity and a purpose back then, and it had to be done, no matter that doing the right thing meant handing over millions of voters and a dozen states to the Rs.

By 2009, the D coalition couldn’t be jawboned into giving itself 11 million new voters despite that being the only thing to do to head off their ethnic cleansing. This is not a political party, not this 2009 or 2018 D party, it just has the same nameplate as something that used to be a political party.

The US political parties today are best understood as actors in a strange and increasingly dysfunctional psychodrama. They feel most comfortable acting out their roles when neither holds the trifecta, because having the trifecta means that maybe some naïve people will expect them to enact some program. Yikes!

The Rs are our Daddy Party, an alcoholic abusive father who beats the wife and kids from time to time. The Ds are the Mommy Party, a long-suffering abuse victim who puts up with it for the sake of the kids, because they would be in even worse shape if she walked out and left them entirely in the power of the drunkard abuser.

Any talk of the norms of civility built up in the many years in which both of these “parties” have split the trifecta, is just our side’s rationalization for avoiding a final split with the abuser. We have to pretend that things are normal for the kids, that Daddy is just having a spell, but will be shocked back to normal behavior by his conscience, those long-lost moderate Rs who have been about to take over their party since at least Nixon’s administration, but never quite get there. Or maybe, if his conscience fails, onlookers, the swing voters, will be so shocked by the abuser’s behavior, that he’ll be carted off for treatment or jail (after losing the trifecta) for a while. But waiting for the abuser to overreach is the outer limit of this abuse victim’s agency. The Ds will adopt no strategy for winning an election, put forward no program for a permanent resolution of this dysfunctional relationship it has with the Rs. The Ds rely on the swing voters’ eventual disgust and horror at the latest atrocity the drunk abuser commits to put them in charge, but then so carefully avoid any actual lasting change in the relationship, so the swing voters tire of a party in power that refuses to govern and eventually lets the Rs out of jail or the psych ward. They at least have some apparent plan they are willing to stand for, even if it all goes horribly wrong eventually because of the stupidity and cruelty of that plan. But the cycle continues because none of the actors know how to break it.

It’s not going on like this forever. The cycles are manifesting in ever more extreme behavior. One or both parties is going to wind up on a slab at the morgue. Let’s hope they don’t take too many of us with them.

Let Bob be Bob! If he’s happy, even for a moment, I’m happy for him. In the broader scheme of things, who’s hurt by an old leftist’s brief enjoyment of the fruits of his labors? The political fate of Dubček or Allende will lap around the ankles of his current source of elation soon enough.

name (required) @19:
“Permanently stripping from power the kind of sociopolitical parasites–the elderly and those who live in rural areas–that facilitated said democratic catastrophes would be appropriate.”

I do sincerely hope that this is parody. If it’s meant seriously – disenfranchise the old and the rural areas because you don’t agree with them – theft’s the sort of thing that gets right-wingers claiming to be worried about left-wing reeducation camps.

Or if you’re really deeply serious, actually being worried.

Incidentally, what do you want to do about urban people, or younger people, who are so wicked as to disagree with you?

I think it’s a mistake to confuse civility arguments and norms. Norms related to things like court packing. Civility relates to issues like how Sanders is treated outside the political sphere. I might agree with you on some imbalanced civility complaints while disagreeing with your take on norms.

I think you are missing a pretty important argument in favor of norms, which is also a pretty significant part of their support among liberals. Namely that not all political values are measured on a single-dimensional policy axis, but also include procedural concerns. I don’t just want Democrats to win public office and pass Democratic policy priorities. I also want the country to be a representative democracy with a rule of law, not men and constitutional protection of basic rights. Norms are not just a means to my preferred policy ends, they are also the ends themselves – the way we achieve a rule of law and peaceful transitions of power.

With Kennedy’s retirement today and the Dems unable to pull a McConnell before the fall elections, here’s the reality in the US for the next quarter-century as far as SCOTUS is concerned: Roe vs Wade–dead; LGBT rights–dead; unions–deader than dead; “rights” of corporations–oh yeah!; “religious liberty”-style oppression–you bet your brown shirt; etc. etc. I am so deeply angry, mostly about feeling completely helpless and hopeless in the last quarter of my life that things in the US will ever favor anyone but the rich and privileged white folks.

As critics from the right point out, had Hillary won, the 2014 policy of separating families at the border would have continued apace with nobody noticing.

https://www.factcheck.org/2018/06/did-the-obama-administration-separate-families/

Republicans as a functioning, coherent political category will have ceased, for all intents and purposes, to exist.

First remember hearing that in 1964. Then 1975 or so. Then 2008.

So a Democratic Party that can barely dream of 51 Senate seats is talking about packing the court. FDR had a 74-17 majority when he tried it.

Is this still the Reality-Based Community?

By 2050 or so, perhaps earlier, the US will no longer be a majority-white country.

By 2050 the US will be a burning desert

“The democrats had scenario 1 and used it to pass a strong healthcare law. Which the GOP gutted in the supreme Court. And how did they do this gutting?”

First, gutted is way overplaying it. Obamacare is still helping tens of millions of people and is swiftly getting to the untouchable stage (as more and more of the original opt out states opt in). And your solution would have been to not pass a strong health care law and focus on Court packing instead? Do you really think both at the same time would have worked?

Second, the had the most tenuous majority possible, so they were already in scenario 3, not scenario 1.

Third, under your preferred scenario, it sounds to me like you would be seriously be putting Obama’s second term in peril if you just did court packing and almost certainly sink it if you somehow pull off court packing plus healthcare. So then you’re in a position like now, except with totally legitimized court packing. So the Supreme Court is even more permanently wrecked than now, you got 4 fewer years of Obama, and you get health care wrecked before it can reach untouchable status.

@Stephen #37:

The lesson to be taken from the global rise of illiberal democracy in the past decade is that liberalism is increasingly incompatible with democratic governance. In many countries, the voting majority, as embodied largely by elderly and rural voters, does not support civil rights or the freedom of individuals not to be exploited by economic predators. Nominally liberal societies face a stark choice: either disenfranchise the illiberal demographics within their midst–again, the rural and elderly–or suffer the fate of being transformed into illiberal societies where such things as concentration camps become the new normal.

There is no virtue in choosing to uphold democracy in exchange for abandoning even the most basic of civil rights.

@LFC #44:

The basic demographic trends do not favor a long continuation of Republican hegemony.

The demographic trends of South Africa did not favor the National Party, and yet it remained in power for over four decades. Republican commitment to democracy extends only to the extent that the Republican party remains in power. The Republican party has been constructing the foundations of a one-party state for decades; if faced with the prospect of political oblivion it is far more likely that the Party will stop conducting free elections than accept the results of the ballot box.

Second, the had the most tenuous majority possible, so they were already in scenario 3, not scenario 1.

How is 60 Senators a tenuous majority?

Bill Murray, it was 55, in the Senate so thin but not razor thin. The switching shenanigans weren’t until the next year, but the Senate electoral map was such that they knew the Democratic majority was very likely to be in trouble (which indeed it was). So I would say that they were closer to a situation 3 than 1. And in neither case, even in retrospect, would court packing at that point have seemed like a good idea. (If you knew in advance that Republicans were about to win both Houses, is attempted court packing a good idea?)

This is nonsense Sebastian. There is no relationship between the Dems electoral majority and the supreme Court . They can’t pass legislation because it will be ratfucked in the supreme Court, so their only option is to regain control of the supreme Court. The GOP ratfucking of Obamacare is the final proof of that. For decent – not even progressive, just even rational – legislation to exist in the USA the Dems need to pack the court. This isn’t just about passing new legislation either – the supreme Court is slowly grinding away the voting rights Act and also acts to support Republican goals on campaign financing and union busting. If the Dems win in 2020 and pack the court with four young left judges, then the repubs win in 2024 and do the same thing back, the Dems will at least have had four years to reverse the damage. If they follow your prescription they get nothing, existing rights get eroded more, and in 2024 the repubs have Congress and the court.

There is no way for the Dems to win by respecting norms and standards. They need to destroy the Republican party. And need I remind you, the whole world is depending on this. Your country’s bullshit parochial politics and racism will bring us all to ruin. So pack the court and use the time it buys you to destroy the GOP. It’s the only choice.

So pack the court and use the time it buys you to destroy the GOP. It’s the only choice.

In 2020? It isn’t a choice at all, it is an extraordinary delusion.

2020 Senate Election Map Very Red, very mid-country, lots of Republicans but I doubt they are vulnerable, especially is the court-packing plan is made public.

You want an idea, one that each individual might accomplish without our compromised leadership?

Internal migration to real sanctuary areas, probably the coasts, some form of secession or nullification, civil wars in those areas, expulsion of internal Republicans, truce.

The Democratic Party chose to not rule or govern the low-population central states something like a decade ago, and the Dems have no path to such rule that I can see.

How do we start it? Make the Republicans feel very unwelcome in Blue States, so unwelcome that fight or flight, or armed repression by Trump accelerating division, and protection against Trump inescapable, becomes the only option.

This is absurdly difficult, and as we have seen from Pelosi and Schumer, will need to be done against the leadership. But not as delusional as looking at the near-term Senate and imagining 51 radical Democratic votes for court-packing. With a lifetime majority on the bench, the Republicans have no incentive to permit it.

Faustusnotes: Sebastian and I don’t agree on much, but I’d never describe him as cynical. He’s always struck me as someone who thinks quite carefully about his opinions. He seems to be that rare thing – a thoughtful conservative. You on the other hand have a history of rehashing Democratic Party talking points.

One of the reasons that Obamacare was so vulnerable to the court was because it was a complicated Heath Robinson affair (which is characteristic of any legislation that tries to use markets). And Republican lawyers (correctly) identified all the ‘clever’ little hacks as weaknesses. Maybe the solution is to stop trying to be so damn clever, and instead to focus on passing simpler legislation, that people understand. Preferably legislation that doesn’t try to sneak in complicated taxes, or force people to buy stuff.

Once the Dems have control of the presidency and the Senate they should stack the court with a good bunch of young and left wing judges – I would recommend at least 4! – and tell the GOP to go fuck themselves. Then they can do some hard and fast work on reversing gerrymandering, and tell the GOP to just “pass a bunch of laws” – if they ever manage to get elected again.

Given that your plan requires the Democrats to win the senate and presidency we’re clearly in the realm of fantasy, but let’s say the miracle happens:
1) The current Democratic party is going to appoint corporate centrists – we saw that with Obama.
2) So what happens when the Republicans get in and decided to stack the court with a good bunch of young and right wing judges?

Also what about all the lower courts that the Republicans have also over a period of about 40 years stacked with their guys?

@14

“The most relevant examples are a new Voting Rights Act that would criminalize voter suppression (and keep the Repubs out of office for a long time) and a Privacy Act that would enshrine Roe v Wade in legislation rather than constitutional interpretation.”

But legislation can be repealed or hobbled by the next intake of Congressmen. Cf. Affordable Care.

Alternatively, you may actually want to send your enemies to re-education camps, but I hope you don’t.

What do you suggest we do?

Currently we have a significant problem in the US with people who think that being told “you should rip that baby from its mother’s arms” is a good and sufficient reason to rip the baby from its mothers arms. I mean, actual genuine problem, thousands affected. It’s not something we can just put up with; we kind of need it to stop happening.

As I see it, there are three approaches. Approach one is to kill them; this will stop them ripping babies from mothers, but on the downside they’ll be dead and deaths diminish us. Approach two is to hold them in controlled environments, where they won’t be exposed to mothers-and-children or people telling them to rip the two apart, or at least not at the same time. A “prison”, of sorts, a warehouse in which they’ll be held until they’re dead; this will be quite expensive in terms of labour and involves pretty much the same destruction of human potential as just killing them outright.

Option three is to alter the way they think, by the use of trained mental-health professionals, so that they no longer desire to follow instructions involving ripping parent-and-baby apart. To rehabilitate or, yes, reeducate them. In camps, probably, although we could do it outpatient if you prefer. The label doesn’t change the thing, after all; it remains what it is, for good or ill.

Which of these do you prefer? Perhaps you prefer approach four, where we don’t do anything about mothers and babies being ripped apart because we don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings.

“Permanently stripping from power the kind of sociopolitical parasites–the elderly and those who live in rural areas–that facilitated said democratic catastrophes would be appropriate.”

This is wrong on many counts: Violates the principle of equality, counterproductive because oppressing a minority always leads to radicalization and undermines the legitimacy of the oppressor.

The elderly and the rural do not form a majority. What is true in many countries, and especially in the US, is that these groups yield disproportionate power. The elderly because the young are less likely to vote. The young could remedy this if they cared enough. The rural voters however have an unfair and undemocratic advantage, most obviously in the US Senate but due to gerrymandering also in many states where rural minorities voting for reactionary extremists are effectively ruling over the cities. Ending this disproportionate grip on power would be a huge improvement for US democracy.

b. mcmanus @66

You make, for the most part, coherent points about demographics vs. territory. I was perhaps a bit too sanguine on the subject in my earlier comment. In defense of my original point, though, I’d say that the trends of importance are long-term ones and I’m not sure the current adjustments Repubs are making will work so well in the long run. But I agree that, in Texas at any rate and some other places, they seem to have met the demographic challenge for now.

@70 And yet, Medicaid expansion is still happening. The SC just slowed it down.

Cian @64: I will assume that you are serious; if you are trying to be humorous, you have failed miserably. Venezuela assuredly is a dictatorship. The president rules by decree. He has ejected the duly elected legislature from its constitutional role. He has imprisoned opposition political figures for peaceful criticism of the government. Government security squads have killed many innocent people. The press cannot report freely. The government has expropriated private property without compensation. It has introduced food ration cards, which did not exist before Bolivarian socialism, and has made access to food dependent on supporting the government. Now it is even restricting access to water.

The situation is so egregious that the Organization of American States, which has frequently given dictatorships a pass, has issued a number of scathing reports on Venezuela. The fourth report of the OAS Secretary General on Venezuela, dated September 25, 2017, “shows that democracy there was completely eliminated on July 30, 2107, following the establishment of an illegitimate Constituent Assembly.” An OAS report by an international panel of independent experts, dated May 29, 2018, identifies 8,292 extrajudicial executions since 2015; more than 12,000 Venezuelans arbitrarily detained since the 2013 presidential elections; and identifies more than 1,300 political prisoners.

Yes John, the Medicaid expansion continues to happen – contingent upon democratic electoral victories at the state level, which means a large number of people will not see it, and it will never happen for those millions. Texas, for example, will not get the Medicaid expansion until hell freezes over. That’s 2.5 million people who won’t get covered by Medicaid, and 750,000 people who have no meaningful alternative to Medicaid. For them, basic left wing welfare policies won’t “continue to happen”.

But my point here isn’t to suggest that this is some remarkable data point in opposition to your theory, I just want to correct Cian’s wrong idea that it’s the “clever” parts of policy that get attacked, the “hacks” as he put it, and that the solution is simple basic policies. The Supreme Court attacks the fundamentals of left wing policy, and the only way to pass policy is to get complete political control permanently at every level. This isn’t how democracies are supposed to work. This is part of the reason that left wing attempts to make decent welfare policy in the USA have to be so market oriented – because they have to fly under the radar, or be agreeable to the reactionary forces who can dismantle them even when they don’t hold political power.

I don’t think you would be so sanguine about the march of progressive ideals if some far right organization in Australia managed to use the High Court to shut down medicare. I think you would suddenly start seeing basic left wing ideals as being under threat from an undemocratic and dangerous power elite. I don’t think you would feel there was no reason to worry because South Australia had managed to keep Medicare, and one day in the future Western Australia will have a labour government and they, too will return to Medicare. No, I think you would see that as a quite major crisis for basic left wing politics in Australia, and would be concerned at the collapse of the welfare state.

CS@65:

The toxic danger of your modest proposals becomes clear as soon as we remember that someone on the right could take your comment, change nothing but replacing “ripped from their mother’s arms” to “ripped from their mother’s womb”, and have something many on the right would agree with.

bob@66:

It’s hard to get away from the “territory vs. people” perspective, but to a certain degree it would be possible to use it against its current advocates for the rights of empty space. The Constitution grants powers and privileges to states, and when we have a single state constituting 20% of the nation’s population, it would make a great deal of sense to partition that state into a number of smaller states. If densely-packed CA became 6 smaller states, a lot of dynamics change. If DC and Puerto Rico become states, things change more. There’s no reason the union should be limited to 50 states. It may be difficult to convince subnational interests to divide their power and influence, but given the structure of the US system there’s a rather compelling argument to be made that it’s the right thing to do as far as promoting individual citizens’ democratic influence and rights. I’d rather go the opposite direction, but if that’s not feasible… for the system we have right now, more states would help.

Perhaps a note on what I mean by “ruling” recognizing that polysci folk will laugh at me. I am a small-d democrat.

There are for simplicity two levels of governance, elites and people. Most of what is seen as governance is done by elites for elites, in argument and opposition to each other. C0llins doesn’t care what you think of her SCOTUS vote, unless you go to the same cocktail parties. Of course, there is a dialectic with the next level, but neither level rules the other.

The people govern and rule each other, at the neighborhood, town, near town, city council and school board level. This is down in everyday life in conversation and social interaction. Examples of resistance accepted are the protection of fugitive slaves and draft resistors, helping each other get abortion and contraception, etc. Those next door might not approve but look the other way.

Of course all parties look above and below for support, sanction, justification.

Calling it “civil disobedience” is taking the elite perspective, the authoritarian perspective. The everyday has no laws, only behavior and morality.

Breaking up California may be a good idea for all sorts of other justice reasons so far as governing the US is concerned, but for consolidating Democratic power it’s a horrible idea. California has very conservative pockets. Almost any way you broke it into six states would involve making four Republican states. Maybe if you cut LA and the Bay Area in half, you might be able to temporarily pull it off, but anything that works with the city geography or natural geography isn’t going to make things better for Democrats. You shouldn’t think that just because California should have 12 senators, that if you broke it up you’d get 12 Democratic senators.

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Exit poll crosstabs with demographics aren’t necessarily available on the open Internet (although Wikipedia has a crosstab for the last Italian election)

Since you mention it, yes it does have a crosstab, and that crosstab shows the highest rate of voting for the centre-left in the oldest age group. Once again, not conclusive evidence that your analysis is wrong, but more evidence against it (from the source you nominated!) than you have so far produced in favour of it.