A Threat to U.S. Democracy: Political Dysfunction
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The term "working class" has been racialized and regionalized to somehow refer exclusively to white people in rural states, even while non-white and/or non-rural people work most of the low-wage jobs in the country. Meanwhile, actual class politics is regularly preempted from above, preventing localities and states from improving their labor laws, health-care programs, or the like.
Norms around the Senate filibuster broke down years ago when it was changed into a mere procedural maneuver that allows for blocking literally anything without a supermajority. The bargaining process of nominating Supreme Court (and federal court) justices has turned into a stonewall.
Oh, and most so-called ballots in the United States don't actually have more than one candidate for each office, which contributes heavily to the >90% re-election rates for incumbents.
In short: we live in a de facto one-party state, with the only real variation being whether the Blue neoliberal capitalist party or the Red authoritarian nationalist/identitarian capitalist party has one-party control where you live.
And now the New York Times call it a threat to democracy?
The problem with the topic of gerrymandering is that it's always been a discussion relegated to the political rags, wonks and Sunday morning policy discussion shows. Your average voter flipping through the channels looking for sports and weather isn't going to stop and listen in on an in-depth conversation about gerrymandering. Even if they do, they most likely will say "well, what can I do about it?" and move on with their day.
For an example I'm familiar with, here in Virginia we have 5.5 million registered voters, and 3.9 million of them voted in the 2016 election. Yay! However, in the 2015 election, when the entire state legislature was chosen, as well as many local offices, only 1.5 million people voted. And then people are shocked, shocked, when the state government doesn't represent them very well.
If people would stop thinking that President is the only office that really matters and start voting at every opportunity, a lot of these problems would just go away.
Huh. You just now made me realize that I (we) have been using the wrong rhetoric (framing) about redistricting (gerrymandering).
For future, I'll talk about voter choice, instead of maximal fairness.
Thank you.
It's all pretty gross and cyclical. Identity politics in general is often a shiny thing waved around to distract people from difficult or politically costly work, usually regarding how much rich people and corporations have to pay for things.
So for instance, the Democrats run on, "We need equal pay for women." The actual size of the wage gap can be debated as a factual matter (once you factor out different professions and hours-worked, it's usually about 5-10%). Then the Republicans run on, "Real Americans need to take our country back!", despite their "real Americans" (as a conjunction of features) composing a minority group that's only 20% of the country[1].
One of them plays the identity politics of inclusion, often duplicitously. The other plays the identity politics of exclusion and minority rule, often honestly.
There's a vast difference between obnoxious campaign rhetoric along the lines of Clinton and an organized decades-long campaign to disenfranchise people who don't vote the way you want or don't share your conjunction of identity features.
[1] -- http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/only-20-percent-of-voter...
My objection is that if I work outside the two-party electoral system I am labelled a lunatic and potentially even criminal, while if I work inside it, my voice is diluted for partisan advantage.
I don't think that's really fair: the difference is regarding whom they exclude & whom the include. Democrats, for example, appear to be quite glad to exclude Christians.
I suspect the country does better when the government isn't passing all sorts of new laws. Remember when Congress spent the whole year investigating Clinton rather than "getting things done"? The country had a very prosperous year.
When one party controls Congress and the other controls the Executive it tends to be good for the country.
You're entitled to that opinion. You're not entitled to rewrite the rules to enforce it on everyone -- that's supposed to require a Constitutional amendment.
>When one party controls Congress and the other controls the Executive tends to be good for the country.
Right now we have one party controlling the House, the Senate, and the Presidency, despite the fact that they got strictly fewer votes for both the Senate and the Presidency. In fact, they only control the House because it hasn't been readjusted for population size since 1910: actually restoring the original ratios of voters to Representatives would create hundreds of new seats in the more urbanized states.
This is undemocratic, and no amount of whining about the procedural finery of the American regional-federal system changes that. The majority of Americans are disenfranchised by our existing system, which no longer operates according to anything like nonpartisan rules, but instead operates to ensure perpetual Republican government.
Besides, if we really wanted to equalize things, even within a federal system, we could just split up some of the larger states, which would instantly increase the voter efficiency of people living there.
Whether power rests at the federal level or the state level, people deserve control over the decisions that affect our lives.
in a way, it seems natural that rural voters will lean a little toward whatever party is out of power in the cities.
e.g. urban voters are happy to add more land to parks and monuments, while rural voters might be happy to leave the land open to hunting, cattle grazing, logging, etc because that's their livelihood.
urban voters may be happy to rearrange water rights so that water flows into cities more easily. rural voters probably prefer to use the water locally for farming.
in rural California, a voter who perceives that Los Angeles wants to take water away (hurting farms), might start supporting whatever political party pushes back on Los Angeles even if the voter disagrees with some of that party's positions on other issues
Only if there are more urban voters than rural voters, with little spread of suburbia between them. For almost all of American history, this wasn't true.
The original reason to over-enfranchise rural areas was because in the Colonial period, rural areas were wealthy and urban areas were perpetually in debt. The Founders didn't want the urban areas, which held pluralities but not majorities of the population, to vote away their debts to the rural landholders.
Of course, nowadays it's the opposite way around: the cities hold the wealth and the rural areas are in perpetual debt, as well as constantly receiving net transfer payments from urban America even when rural citizens are not actually poor at all. If we had a one person, one vote system, I would be happy to discuss the cultural and economic divides between urban and rural voters. As it is, we have a system in which rural voters just count for more seats than urban ones, so the particular parties and policy positions don't matter nearly as much as that foundational issue.
Problems with US elections, in rank order:
* Gerrymandering (unfair redistricting) * First Past the Post * Restrictive voting rules * Expensive campaigns
Very briefly...
REDMAP worked too well, gave us the Tea Party, enabled unprecedented obstructionism. Both the GOP and the Dems have an interest in undoing REDMAP. Maybe with Iowa style redistricting.
Problems with FPTP are widely documented. Fix is Approval Voting for executive races and senators, Proportional Voting for assemblies. One side effect will be reduced campaign expenses and mudslinging, because Approval Voting makes the candidates play nice (mostly).
Adopt universal voting, re-enfranchise felons. This will prevent caging, purging. Sadly, it does not increase voter turnout.
Campaigns costs are currently being driven by ballot chasing (enabled by switch to postal ballots) and advertising. Everyone knows its past the point of diminishing returns, but no one can "disarm" unilaterally. So the madness continues. Switching back to (mostly) poll site based voting and restoring the Fairness Doctrine would mostly fix this problem. Another solution is publicly financed campaigns, which would be more palatable once costs come back down.
I could go on and on. But that's the thumbnail of the most important.
Source: Election integrity activist (voting machines, HAVA) for years, ran for office.
PS- While popular vote for US President is inevitable, absolutely support it, it's not my personal highest priority.
Gerrymandering segregates like with like, increasing partisanship. Favoring the most extreme candidate. Meaning seats are won during low turnout primaries vs general elections. Meaning voters have no meaningful choice.
Gerrymandering is incumbency protection. If you support term limits, you'd logically also support more competitive redistricting.
"From the sources I can find, it's around a net 5..."
Look harder.
And at that point, we might as well institute California-style jungle primaries everywhere, which at least ensures that a real "general election" takes place (albeit at an awkward time) followed by a runoff for the "lesser evils".
This would save (the tax payers) money.
Having fewer elections would help reduce voter fatigue.
It'd also moot the spoiler effect, so third parties can be granted access to the ballot, with little downside, leading to more voter choice.
My only (hypothetical) concern with Approval Voting is having too many choices (per race), the paradox of choice leading to indecision. But that's just an intuition; I have no data.
The state governments control how voting works in the state, which can lead to distortions at the federal level.
If offering tax breaks to a company to get it to offshore fewer jobs (but not all) is not state control of the economy, then what is it?
Tariffs were the first major thing the first US congress implemented to ensure domestic manufacturing could be established and compete with what were up until then cheap imports.
The question is to what end will this be done, and will it be effective in reaching that end?
It's pretty crazy to claim that providing Delaware corporation law, bailing out Wall Street, funding the IMF and World Bank, maintaining the neoliberal trade regime, and acting as one of the world's major tax havens isn't managing the economy.
"Populist" is about his attitudes & political views, not about his relative popularity or the lack of it. It's related to "populace", not "popular".
It's not just that he's a populist, although that's part of it (just saying extraordinary things to get people riled up--and then literally dismissing those things later saying "it worked great before the election but there's no interest now"). It that and that he is a globalist, selfish, opportunist that does not give a shit about the people.
He's a billionaire elitist who's claiming to drain the swamp of elites. And then appoints more elites to cabinet positions. That is, he has all these populist claims but he's so clearly part of the problem, so why are voters buying it "hook, line, and sinker" so to speak?
Just being a billionaire doesn't mean he is a globalist. Running a multinational corporation doesn't mean he us a globalist. A globalist is someone who wants to subjugate the sovereignity of individual nation states under the power of a global government, whether overtly (the un) or covertly (bilderbergs/free masons/other conspiracy groups). His whole campaign was about increasing American sovereignity. Perhaps you've heard of his catch phrase, make America great again?
In that case, outside crazy conspiracy websites, there are basically no actual globalists on the planet. Literally zero office-holding politicians have proposed a world government.
> outside crazy conspiracy websites
You could potentially dismiss any Web source with this standard. What makes a website a crazy conspiracy web site?
> basically no actual globalist on the planet
The un is literally a globalist organization that nation states voluntarily subjugate their natonal sovereignity to.
> literally zero.
There is never literally zero of people holding various political beliefs.
Anyways, I agree with you, but maybe you should reevaluate your critical thinking skills and base political assumptions.
No, it isn't. Every country belonging to the UN is sovereign. The UN has zero legislative power, no enforcement arm, no army or police force. International law is still based on treaties between sovereign countries, not on a global legislature.
>There is never literally zero of people holding various political beliefs.
I did not say literally zero people. I said literally zero elected officials, which is a much smaller set of people with much more constrained political opinions. At worst, you could find a Green Party city official somewhere who might talk about world government if you get them thoroughly drunk.
"Elite" is a worthless word. What makes someone "elite?" Money? Political experience? Pinball skills? News outlets like NYTimes will jump all over his appointments regardless because if they are successful, accomplished individuals they will be labeled "elite," and if they aren't they will be labeled incompetent.
The whole "drain the swamp" line is about rooting out shady, questionable, secretive behavior like Loretta Lynch meeting on the back of Clinton's plane or Holder running a bunch of guns to Mexican gangs. It's not about wealth or political views.
I'm eager to see how well this holds up when the other team holds power.
But when you try to do things that the other side ought to like, and then they block it out of spite, that seems like a good sort of action, and preventing it is worthy of condemnation. For two recent examples, Obamacare is basically a copy/paste of a Republican health care reform proposal, but had heroic efforts to block it by Republicans, and Merrick Garland was presented as the sort of moderate justice that Republicans wanted but Obama would never in a million years nominate, then when he nominated Garland they immediately turned around and refused to even discuss him.
As far as false equivalence between the two major parties goes, Democrats are already talking about trying to work with the new Republican administration and it hasn't even been sworn in yet.
Just goes to show people are willing to appeal all the way past the legal/political system to the foundations of our country due to losing a vote.
If his words had any practical influence or any accountability for the implications of such a statement I'd be more likely to take him seriously.
What does that even mean?
It might be viewed as a battle of the major billionaires against the minor billionaires -- and the major billionaires lost. In any event, the vast majority of the wealth was on Clinton's side or at least critical of Trump.
Billionaires who directly supported and/or endorsed Hillary Clinton:
* Warren Buffett: $73 billion
* Bill Gates: $84 billion
* Carlos Slim: $50 billion
* Michael Bloomberg: $40 billion
* George Soros: $25 billion
* Laurene Powell Jobs: $19 billion
* Elon Musk: $12 billion
* Eric Schmidt: $11 billion
Billionaires who (at least) were critical of Trump, and refused to endorse or support him:
* Jeff Bezos: $65 billion
* Mark Zuckerberg: $53 billion
* Charles Koch: $43 billion
* Mark Cuban: $3 billion
Billionaires who supported Trump:
* Sheldon Adelson: $32 billion
* Carl Icahn: $18 billion
* John Paulson: $8.6 billion
* Woody Johnson: $3.5 billion
* Peter Thiel: $2.7 billion
* Wilbur Ross: $2.5 billion
* Tom Barrack: $1 billion
* Stephen Feinberg: $1.25 billion
* T Boone Pickens: $0.5 billion
* Steven Mnuchin: < $1 billion
Clinton was a candidate with a long track record, Trump is essentially unpredictable. The billionaire vote in this election isn't particularly surprising, or indicative that they form a Sekrit Global Cabal.
Indeed, it's more worthwhile to consider prior times that sort of anti cabal rhetoric has been deployed.
Anyway, what's surprising is not that the majority of the wealthiest billionaires supported Clinton. What's surprising is that the majority of the wealthiest billionaires supported a candidate who went on to lose the election.
if we just add up the Buffett, Gates, Bloomberg and Soros fortunes, the number is awfully large though. it's about $225 billion. and you end up thinking "if Trump had equal support from the wealthiest billionaires, who are they? i can't seem to find them."