Comment by ojnabieoot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ojnabieoot | Hacker News Reader

While it’s true that the US government needs structural reform, the issue wasn’t anything the Constitution can fix by nibbling around the edges. The issue is that the unified Republican elite, along with > 35% of the electorate, is fundamentally lawless and anti-democratic, and will do anything it can to cheat its way into power. All three branches are implicated and have been for a while: Bush v Gore in 2000, the US Attorney firings, Shelby County in 2013, the refusal of the Senate to convict Trump in 2020, the disgusting anti-science politicization of coronavirus, and so on. The scale of Trump’s personal corruption is unique among Republican national figures, particularly in foreign policy. But the racist authoritarianism and fundamental disrespect for elections is a defining creed of the party.

One of the more unpleasant truth about democracy is that it’s quite fragile. In any real sense, the US has only been a democracy since 1965. When large segments of the population are ideologically opposed to democratic governance - universal human rights, respecting fair elections, following the plain text of the law, and so on - mechanisms by which democracy sustains itself begins to fail.

One possibility is to amend the constitution to change first-past-the-post voting in all local-to-federal elections, to let never-Trump types speak out without facing electoral suicide, and to divert right-conservative attention away from a single “leader” figure. And obviously the electoral college needs to go.

But the fact that more than 65 million people voted for Trump at all speaks to a great sickness and nihilism in American culture. Trump himself might be put out to pasture. But Trumpism existed before he got here, and it isn’t going anywhere.

> unified Republican elite, along with > 35% of the electorate, is fundamentally lawless and anti-democratic, and will do anything it can to cheat its way into power.

This is unnecessary. I am of course relieved that Biden won. I am also appalled by Trump and his enablers in the Republican party. I'm also extremely disappointed that more people did not clearly repudiate Trumpism.

But that 35% of the electorate, which is closer to 48% per Trump vote share, are people and neighbors. This kind of rhetoric only serves to continue the bitter fighting. There may very well be a core of unredeemable, white supremacists behind Trump. But I'd like to believe that most are misled, misinformed, yet good people. I know my neighbor is one in fact.

> But I'd like to believe that most are misled, misinformed, yet good people. I know my neighbor is one in fact.

Something I have found increasingly frustrating is this childish attitude that saying “so-and-so is a bad person” means “so-and-so will always be a bad person and can do nothing to change for the better.” Simplistically separating people by “inherent nature” leads to us not calling a spade a spade when someone is being a bad person, and means bad people can’t ever actually appreciate the scope and impact of their misdeeds.

People who voted for Trump did so for reasons that were, by and large, morally outrageous. We don’t need to treat them like lost sheep who were incapable of understanding what Trump represents. There were a shocking number of horrendously terrible people in Germany and Rwanda, and most didn’t go to jail when the genocide ended. After WW2 it was really hard to find a German who would say they voted for the Nazis, and I am sure many or those millions of people led upstanding lives. That doesn’t make their decision to vote for the racist strongman retrospectively defensible.

(There’s also the related problem of “he can’t be a bad person, he’s nice to me!”)

The sentiment underlying your comment is an important one. While it's essential to see the goodness in people, it's also essential that we are honest about bad behavior. Regardless of their goodness, or them being misled or misinformed, > 35% of the electorate has been unwavering in supporting/advocating/justifying behaviors that are

> fundamentally lawless and anti-democratic

If my neighbor, who I believe is a good person, is abusing their spouse, it is absolutely necessary to call the abuse for what it is.

Without the electoral college we become a nation ruled by the cities. I prefer to maintain the republic so all states have a voice and not go full democracy.

That’s a very strange misreading of how elections work (and misstates US demographics, most of us live in suburbs).

But even taken on its own terms, isn’t that better than “a nation ruled by a rotating handful of states with nothing in common other than a somewhat steady 50-50 split in the electorate”? The current system is indefensible madness.

The duopoly has more to do with the bias of first past the post voting than the population demographics. The electoral college exists for the express purpose of preventing population centers from running the country with no regard to the rural population.

Better to let land vote than the actual people right?

Interesting that in your “nation ruled by cities” ranchers in Wyoming would still have about 50x influence in determining the make up of the US Senate when compared to folks in NYC, SF or LA.

The electoral college winner-take-all system has nothing to do with our "republic" or with "rural voters vs city voters".

From: https://www.npr.org/2020/11/06/931891674/as-presidency-hinge...

"States like New York and North Dakota are valued the exact same way under the current system. They're valued not at all, because they're reliably either Republican or Democrat [...] The only way I know how to put urban voters at parity with rural voters and rural voters at parity with urban voters is to make every voter in this country politically relevant in presidential elections."

The way to do that? A national popular vote that would require candidates to campaign in all 50 states. The effect would be that every voter would know their vote matters.

"I don't care if you're in the heart of Manhattan or in the outskirts of Helena. When you go vote for the American president, you know what's going to count toward the final result in a national popular vote election. And you're not going to be treated like a second-class citizen."

We need a better word than "Trumpism". It will be too easy to disregard all the other very good examples you gave by dismissing it as Trumpism and now that he's gone, so is the problem.

There are still a significant minority of single issue anti-abortion voters who will support any candidate on that basis regardless of what else he does. I don't agree with them, but they exist and they are sincere in their beliefs. It's a mistake to confuse that with nihilism.

(We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25017663.)

Nihilism is the truth of the world. Everyone is deluding themselves otherwise. Nearly everyone with significant power is nihilistic. Without god (and even if there was a god) there are no morals. All we have is genetics. Morals are just bias.

Using nihilism as a negative descriptor is funny when nihilism as a philosophy isn't against or for anything.

Reality is of course uncomfortable for most people which is why I'm getting downvoted :)

> "Nihilists! Fuck me. I mean, say what you like about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos."

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