Almost half of the voting public intentionaly acted to sabotage the country. Let's stop treating them with kid gloves, they are anti-American and should never be forgiven.
This is not how to reverse the damage that has already been done, if you are unwilling to forgive, you are as bad as MAGA, perhaps worse. Forgiveness is a core human virtue we do not want to lose.
No, half of the voters did not intentionally vote for this. Half of the voting public doesn't pay any attention and votes based on their finances or party allegiance.
You and I saw all the bad things to know what would happen. That was hidden from many people. Yes you can fault them for being ignorant, but that doesn't imply intentional malice
There is no forgiveness without contrition. However you want to spin it, they did vote for this and as long as they don't acknowledge culpability for their actions there is no point in forgiving them -- they'll just continue blamelessly voting to sabotage the country.
The sad truth is that it's millions of people. These people just want to see the world burn due to nothing but narcissism and hate of the imaginary "other side".
There are a lot of people on "both sides" who choose their positions on the issues to fit their political party as opposed to choose the party that fits their positions. Particularly for an issue like offshore wind or Keystone XL that is basically "out of sight and out of mind" there are millions of people who would change their position if the right people told them to.
99% of every person's beliefs are driven by what "the right people told them," of course.
That's not really the point nor the problem, because some people choose to listen to very stupid or malicious people and others are (by chance or by skill) more susceptible to being steered by more credible people.
Half the country is in thrall with a uniquely malicious and moronic force, and the other half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus (even though it's sometimes wrong!). These are not at all the same, even if they both are technically "believing what people told them to."
>half is vaguely in alignment with the vague directional gestures of expert consensus
Their beliefs are driven by a different set of oligarchs and imperial mandarins who have their own set of self serving reality distortion fields.
The companies which donate to both sides and the countries which collect enough komptomat are often able to set up bipartisan reality distortion fields.
That's how parties work, of necessity. They are all uneasy alliances of people who can barely tolerate each other. People find the one that supports their most important issues and hopefully few things they really detest. Then they have to pay at least lip service to all of it. By getting everyone else's support, at least one or two of your favorite issues get worked on.
In doing so you need to find a way to live with the cognitive dissonance. The best way is to truly buy into all of it, as hard as you can. That wins and keeps on winning. Or you can try to mitigate things to your conscience, but that leads to a lot of halfhearted efforts and poor turnout.
Having seen student politics with and without parties - my student union had them, my engineering society banned them - I'm convinced that it's not bad voters that ruin democracies but political parties. Parties need to simplify their messages to get buy in, and promote a 'team first' over 'issues first' mentality in their members. They're anathema to principles of honest debate and compromise.
The large scale something is, the more a political party matters. At a school level you can be closely informed about all of the issues and know all of the players. You can barely do that at the level of city politics. State and federal politics simply doesn't allow it.
Large scale democracies only work when people are willing to live together. If you play democracy as a winner-take-all game, it's going to fail sooner or later.
I'm not convinced that anything works at the national scale, at least not over the long term. I suspect that the US, as one of the oldest-and-largest democracies, is demonstrating a path that others will eventually follow.
The problem is that the side that organizes always wins over the side that does not. And it's very difficult to ban political organization (which is ultimately what parties are) in a way that is actually enforceable.
The American founding fathers were mostly of the opinion that political parties are bad and should be avoided if republic is to stand. Yet they found themselves organizing into parties before the ink was dry.
So the best we can do in practice is engineer the political system such that the damage from party groupthink is minimal.
This is all true, but I think the issue is upstream of where you're pointing - democracy declines when the goal becomes to win rather than to serve the constituents. Parties are a way to win and they also reinforce the idea that winning is the goal.
I'm not sure as to solutions but I don't think they're impossible - something like an inoculation of the entire political class against the memeset that prioritizes winning over serving the constituents. Then if an unofficial party tries to seize power in a system that officially disallows them, the majority is already primed to respond in an organized way.
There are democracies with proportional representation out there. Those have their own problems in forming coalitions, but the parties themselves are much closer aligned with their base.
It comes at the cost of locality, but that's far less important today than it had been in the past. Nobody knows their congressman anyway.
I'd really like to give PR systems a try, if for no other reason than to do a reset on the current coalitions. I fear that they will eventually settle down into a pair of coalitions very similar to the current parties, but that leaves us no worse off.
It need not; you can have more proportional representative in a district based system (and still also have vote-for-person), using multimember districts with a system like Single-Transferrable Vote.
You can also get finer grained proportionality with Mixed Member Proportional which combines a district-based system (either single-member or a multimember proportional system described above) with top-up representation from party lists.
MMP would require Constitutional change in the US; but multimember districts with STV (in states with more than one seat, as well as increasing the size of the House so more states would have more than one seat) can be done by Congress without Constitutional amendment.
It's not an either-or. In mixed-member proportional system, you still get a representative specifically for your district who can thus argue for its interests. But you also get some people elected on party lists so that the representation as a whole remains proportional to party vote. New Zealand is a good example of the system in practical use.
There it is, the both sides brigade, right on time!
No, Keystone XL was not the same level of pettiness as offshore wind. Find me the IPCC report equivalent that makes the case for wind farms doing whatever social damage Trump says they do. I'll wait.
(feels authentic to somebody even when it is completely disingenuous)
and the left wing version is
smart + stupid = inconsistent -> loses
(feels demoralizing to the true believers, feels disingenuous to everyone else, see Kamala Harris) e.g. "woke" is really a left wing retread of right wing ideology, for instance that "defund the police" slogan cribs Reagan's "defund the left" slogan, because it is so exhausted it can only mine Thatcherism for ideas.
The emotional concerns that underly this ineffective (akratic) behaviour seem to come from uh "rationalist suffering" (the modern day version of white man's burden?)
Piketty 2022 section on Educational Justice (page 1007) thinks that its because dems are the overeducated children of the "Brahmin left".
So I think you've got the right diagnosis- reps are the undereducated children of the "Merchant Right", so their rationalist* cover stories are naturally more convincing :)
*Pecuniary===rational as in the "Legitimation Crisis"
Ps: somewhat better (=less overtly social-darwinist) handwringing, but not quite a bandaid
There are not in fact millions of people who want to burn the world just to spite others. If you truly believe that then you have really failed to understand people around you, and should try to better empathize. As a rule, people do what they do because they believe it to be the right thing. They might be misguided in that belief, of course, but the idea of millions of people deciding on a cartoonishly evil course of action is not an accurate analysis of anything.
I have an interesting perspective because my town is currently being sued by the state for years of secret discrimination by police and authority(my neighbors obviously voted strongly MAGA) so its an interesting hard right perspective.
After sitting and observing my local town's MAGA base for the better part of two years straight(by attending town meetings and joining all their facebook groups) it is clear that there is no real long term plan. They just love to get a rile out of others and deeply believe that Trump is doing great and that any problem is caused by someone else.
Its depressing trying to steelman that behavior because you realize that the country you grew up in had these people there. Growing up in the same town, everyone I interacted with was serious about excellence. My parents, my neighbors, my teachers and my classmates. There was this minimum standard where everyone from the businessman to the garbageman may have had different views on life but everyone still did their best every single day and still had this mentality of growth.
Its gone now. The cracks started to form after 9/11 when the quiet racists came out but it really seems like one grievance after another built up until Trump came along and caused all these people to put all their chips on supporting him do or die. Man going back to 2016 if Hillary had won, I wonder if the temperature would have come down. Part of the current hubris that they have is the same thing I saw under Bush(many Trump people are former all in on Bush supporters). They think they can do no wrong but eventually reality set the Bush people straight because when the economy crashed and people started to feel real pain, all those people went back into their caves for a while. I think the only thing that will stop MAGA is that the coming crash has to really really hurt. Thats when the jokes stop and they become serious again. It has to be absolutely obvious that Trump caused it which means that it has to be severe.
I often hope that maybe if Trump just peacefully passes away that it will finally fizzle out. Maybe thats a better outcome?
> Its depressing trying to steelman that behavior because you realize that the country you grew up in had these people there.
Maybe we should stop steelman them all the time. That is how they got enabled by centrists and pundits and moderates so much, they became the rulers. Steelmanning obvious bad faith actors is just another fallacy.
Steelmanning consists of ignoring disturbing claims conservative right says, not listening to what they are actually saying and replacing what they are saying by some feel good fiction of good intention.
The other method of challenging them and trying to prove your point does not work either. There is no solution it seems. They need to suffer the consequences of their decisions on their own.
Thats why I was so depressed. I have an engineering mindset of finding out how to improve things and there seems like there is no solution to this problem that involves remaining with this group as part of your society because it takes two to tango (ie. both sides need to put in genuine effort at growth).
Steelmanning is not challenging them at all. It is whitewashing them, making softer argument so that they are more palatable and frequently undistinguishable from support.
The only person challenged by such steelmanning is opposition to MAGA. They now have two opponents. They are made look as if they were exaggerating or were crazy when they accurately report to what MAGA does or says. They now have an additional, basically unintentional bad faith, rationalization to deal with against them.
> there is no solution to this problem that involves remaining with this group as part of your society because it takes two to tango (ie. both sides need to put in genuine effort at growth).
The problem is that what happens is that the opposition to MAGA is constantly asked to do growth, to steelman, to concede and move more to the right to accommodate MAGA. It is highly asymmetric and provably does not work.
> I have an engineering mindset of finding out how to improve things
I think that making it clear what MAGA wants says and supports to moderates and center is way better strategy then basically helping them.
>Steelmanning is not challenging them at all. It is whitewashing them, making softer argument so that they are more palatable and frequently undistinguishable from support.
I think you misread what I wrote. Yes Steelmanning them is not challenging them. What I said was that if you go the other direction and challenge them it does not work either. It might makes you feel good but no progress gets made.
You put way too much emphasis into my original comment of steelanning them. The original goal of sitting and observing them for two years was to try to understand their mentality, their point of view to then figure out how to convert at least some of them. Thats where the depression came in when I realized that there is no plan, no ideology, and no real end state: just vibes in the moment. This is not a cohesive vision for the future of a country.
I'm strongly of the opinion that we're seeing the consequence of 40 years of neoliberalism in which there's no longer any political objective of actually improving things for normal people, just hoping the private sector will sort things out.
Its certainly a symptom. With corporate financing of elections in the post Nixon years, neoliberalism has run amok and led to the disaster we are in. What I worry about is that only about 50% of the country has a passport. Half the country have never seen how other places are run and now 40+ years later a large percentage of the country wouldn't even remember how things used to be. They just think this is how every place runs.
The movie Fahrenheit 11/9 builds up understanding of the theory using specific case studies on the behavior you describe. They also discuss efforts to try and fight back. It is a recommended watch for anyone interested in understanding the underlying reasons for how we ended up where we are now. I can't believe the film is now eight years old yet feels like it was produced right now. Some of the people who were high school kids in the movie graduated college and are now even running for congress to try to fight back against neoliberalism! :O
“I voted for him, and he’s the one who’s doing this,” she said of Mr. Trump. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”
The child may be mad but he is happy to take bribes from the oil industry so they are as guilty as he is. And the same goes for most right wing politicians in Europe.
Humanity needs to wake up to the fact that our supposed "leaders" only lead us toward servitude. Our economic and political systems are designed to keep the vast majority of people in either literal or figurative chains so 25 people can get rich.
The entire system needs to be smashed to bits for the good of the many. Because after all, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of a few, or the one. But not in current human societies -- currently we value cruelty and malice.
The Keystone XL pipeline had been partially constructed before President Biden revoked the permit on January 20, 2021 on his first day in office.
About 300 miles had been completed when TC Energy officially abandoned the project.
