Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
If your suspect is guilty of a crime which will earn them ten years, don't offer them a plea deal for three years, just drag them in front of a jury.
I've got a copy of Stuntz's The Collapse of American Criminal Justice, so one big issue immediately comes to mind. The problem is that however good this might sound, and however abominable threatening longer sentences for exercising one's right to a jury trial may be, we're just not able to do this.
It's hard to get exact numbers, because most the data is on plea bargains as a fraction of convictions rather than of defendants, so you need to find the overall conviction rates — and thus acquittal rates — to compute that, and it's somewhat harder to find (and varies from state to state). But for the Federal government, you've got plea bargains at 98% of convictions, combined with a (2012) 93% overall conviction rate, to give something like 91% of all Federal criminal defendants pleading guilty. For the states, these numbers are a bit lower, something like 95% of convictions; which, for example, Texas, with an 84% average conviction rate (higher for misdemeanors than felonies), gives approximately 80% of all criminal defendants pleading out.
Thus, if something like one out of every nine Federal defendants who would currently take a plea deal insisted on a trial, you'd double the number of trials. If half of them did so, the number of trials would increase sixfold. (Similarly, one quarter of Texas plea-takers choosing trial to double trials, and half choosing juries would triple the court cases.)
Our systems already strained, overloaded, and prone to long delays with just the load it has now. I can't see any path to the vast expansion that would be necessary if any significant fraction more insisted on their day in court.
Now, the usual answer many people give to this issue is that we need to find a way to reduce the load by charging fewer things as crimes. While you might get some traction there at the Federal level, the problem is then that there isn't really all that much of the "Three Felonies a Day"-type offenses. Even the "mere drug possession"* cases make up a much smaller fraction of convictions than many people think. The bulk of felonies remain things like murder, assault, theft, rape, etc. that pretty much every society criminalizes. In this very example, we're already seeing many offenders of this sort being "let loose on the streets" — can we really picture even more "legalizing crime" than we already have?
If a state can't afford a separate prosecutor and judge, it can't afford a justice system.
If a state can't afford a defender, it can't afford a justice system.
Yes, that's exactly the point — with the crime rates of the current American population, we really can't afford a traditional Anglo-American justice system.
This is a point I've been talking about online for years. When you look at things like police per capita, police funding, prisoners per capita, and then set them against violent crime per capita, and compare internationally, the US winds up an unusual outlier — because we, pretty much uniquely, combine the police force of a wealthy "first world" nation… and the crime rates of a "third word" one. On the prisoner/crime ratio, we come out as locking up less of our criminals than many European nations… it's just that we have a crime rate many times higher. On Wikipedia's list of intentional homicide rate per 100,000 people (a proxy for violent crime in general), the United States sits right between Zimbabwe** and Yemen. It's four times higher than in France, over five times higher than that of the UK or Finland, eight times that of Germany, and thirty-two times that of Japan.
To change our current situation, we're looking at radically reforming and vastly expanding our entire justice system (and associated expenditure), or else the population either turning to non-state methods of addressing crime.
* It's my understanding that in many cases where an individual is convicted and sentenced for just illegal drug or gun possession, it's because they were also charged with other, more violent offenses and pled down to those — the plea bargain going in that direction because crimes of possession are the easiest, relatively, to prove in court — thus making the odds of losing in court the highest, and the value for the defendant of pursuing a jury trial the lowest — while the other charges would likely involve attempting to elicit testimony from victims and witnesses who live in communities where "snitches get stitches" and such.
** Where, recently, police were reportedly driven from a police station by goblins.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
The available policies with regard to democratic representation aren't universal suffrage or bust.
Except, first, I'm not sure how restricting the franchise would resolve the issue in question, at least not without restricting it down to a tiny fraction of the population. (But which one, then?)
Second, I'm not sure how it would be done. Because I remember once looking up, over a decade ago, the historical precedents for narrowing the franchise — without eliminating it, that is. And while it's been awhile I do remember a few things from what I was able to find. First, that no nation with universal adult suffrage has ever even tried to narrow the franchise back from that (again, as opposed to suspending or ending democracy entirely). That the only one I found that tried to go back from universal male suffrage was the 2nd French Republic, with the 31 May 1850 electoral law. This mostly served to let Louis-Napoléon grow his support with the people by opposing it, and he undid it the next year, and restored universal male suffrage, during his December 1851 auto-coup, in which he assumed dictatorial powers, and which led to a new constitution a month later that essentially ended the Republic, and set the ground for the Second Empire officially declared that following Christmas. And lastly, that every place that tried to narrow the franchise significantly saw massive political unrest, destabilization, and, similar to ol' Napoleon III, some sort of coup or dictatorship emerging.
Sure, there were some times in early US history where various states made changes to their voting laws that removed the franchise from some subset of voters; but in all of those cases that I found, those same changes also expanded the franchise to some other, generally larger, set of new voters, leaving it an expansion in general.
Tl;dr, the franchise never really gets narrowed in any lasting manner, only expanded or eliminated.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
However, just because the outcome is inevitable doesn't mean it shouldn't be changed.
If it's inevitable, doesn't that mean, definitionally, that it can't be changed? At least, not without replacing the entire system itself.
That's why I would hope that undervoting across the board might help communicate that we need to come back to basics
What makes you think it's a matter of "communicating"? That doesn't really change the fundamental incentives, nor does it address irreconcilable differences in fundamental values, or deeply incompatible group interests.
Then perhaps democracy as a system of government should be retooled or abandoned.
In which case (particularly the latter, which is my position), voting a blank ballot — which, as you note, affirms belief that the current democratic processes are important — is not the right response.
(Indeed, it remains a bit of a question, how one best expresses in a democratic election opposition to democracy and elections.)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
Your vote for no one affirms that you believe democratic processes are important
But why would you believe this? After all, it's those same democratic processes that gave us our current parties and politicians. Have you considered that maybe this is the inevitable outcome of the system and its incentives?
I believe that candidate selection should be based on their character, their ability to be charitable, kind, compassionate, driven, and most importantly, a leader who is willing to actively listen.
You can believe that, but that's clearly not how they're actually selected, and I don't see how to change that. What if that goal isn't really achievable?
Get more decent human beings up for election and then I'll consider voting for them.
What if modern democracy isn't actually compatible with having "decent human beings up for election"? Consider that perhaps the nature of American politics makes the current crop you find so distasteful unavoidable. That this unfortunate outcome is simply what American democracy is.
What if some better democracy, with better candidates, simply isn't achievable, and the only choice is between the current dysfunctional, partisan democracy that has you disillusioned; or abandoning democracy altogether?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3d ago
b) the only appropriate guarantor against too much democracy is a managerial elite with the backing of the state.
I'd say this needs slight modification — that a managerial elite need not be the only appropriate guarantor against too much democracy, just the best option. And what alternatives do you have in mind? How else do you propose to keep the governance of a modern, complex nation state going when the electorate will, if allowed, vote for the Wrong Choice?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3d ago
What happens once the immigrants can't fuck either?
They go back to their home country with the wealth they've accumulated working in the US, which being far more than they could have earned there, greatly improves their marriage prospects?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
3d ago
which probably leads to them not being very productive.
Given mass immigration and increasing automation, how much of a concern is this, really?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4d ago
this sounds like a right-weighted version of basically the same thing?
I'm hardly an expert on Europe, but I did just read a piece on the topic which makes an argument that this will indeed change little. From Thomas Fazi at UnHerd: "Europe’s insurgent Right won’t change anything"
Depending on where you stand politically, you might view the Right-populist surge in the European Parliament as either a grave threat to democracy, or as a striking victory for it — and a major step forward in “taking back control” from the Brussels oligarchy. But both positions would be wrong. The truth is, despite yesterday’s hysteria, compounded by Macron’s decision to dissolve parliament and call an election, the impact of these elections won’t be as significant as people fear or hope.
Consider the victors: the ECR and ID groups, who made significant gains. Both blocs are made up of various Right-populist parties who are deeply divided on several crucial strategic issues: social and economic matters, European enlargement, China, EU-US relations and, most important, Ukraine. This means that, even if they succeed in pushing the European Commission to the Right, they will struggle to turn their electoral success into political influence; on Europe’s most important challenges, it seems unlikely they will vote as a bloc. But on a more fundamental level, to assume these elections will radically alter the course of the EU’s policymaking agenda, or even threaten democracy itself, implies that the EU is a functioning parliamentary democracy. It is not.
Despite the fanfare that surrounds every European election — each one tediously described as “the most important elections in the history of the European Union” — the reality is that the European Parliament isn’t a parliament in the conventional sense of the word. That would imply the ability to initiate legislation, a power the European Parliament does not wield. This is reserved exclusively for the EU’s “executive” arm, the European Commission — the closest thing to a European “government” — which promises “neither to seek nor to take instructions from any government or from any other institution, body, office or entity”.
…
There’s also another to point to be considered. On the one hand, the fact that the European Parliament, the only democratically elected institution in the EU, exercises some oversight over the Commission’s policies, might be seen as a positive development. In this sense, the bigger presence of the Right-populist parties will certainly have an impact of the legislative process, especially on highly polarising issues such as the European Green Deal and immigration.
But on the other, this doesn’t change the fact that the European Parliament remains politically toothless. The entire legislative process — which takes places through a system of informal tripartite meetings on legislative proposals between representatives of the Parliament, the Commission, the Council — is opaque to say the least. This, as the Italian researchers Lorenzo Del Savio and Matteo Mameli have written, is exacerbated by the fact that European Parliament is “physically, psychologically and linguistically more distant from ordinary people than national ones are”, which in turn makes it more susceptible to the pressure of lobbyists and well-organised vested interests. As a result, even the most well-meaning politicians, once they get to Brussels, tend to get sucked into its bubble.
…
All this means that, while we may expect a change of direction on some issues, these elections are unlikely to solve the pressing economic, political and geopolitical problems afflicting the EU: stagnation, poverty, internal divergences, democratic disenfranchisement and, perhaps most crucially for the continent’s future, the bloc’s aggressive Nato-isation and militarisation in the context of escalating tensions with Russia. In this sense, it’s hardly surprising that around half of Europeans didn’t even bother to vote. Ultimately, the EU was built precisely to resist populist insurgencies such as this one. The sooner populists come to terms with it, the better.
So consider this a data point in favor of "basically the same thing."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4d ago
You seem to be operating from a bizarre definition of fascism
It's one a lot of people I encounter seem to share, though. Set up something like the usual two-axis "political compass," only with different axes: let the left-right axis be the social axis (that has become the most salient of our current culture war), and the vertical axis be the economic axis, with laissez-faire anarcho-capitalism at the bottom extreme end and total communism at the top — the actual space of interest being confined to a much smaller window somewhere in the middle. In the lower left, we have the Libertarian Quadrant: "fiscally conservative but socially liberal." Low taxes, low redistribution, low regulation, but left-wing social politics. Above that, we have the Progressive Quadrant: high taxes, high redistribution, high regulation of markets, and left-wing social politics. (The trend of the past decade has been for the Democratic party electorate to actually move closer to the Libertarian/Progressive border on economic issues as they move left on social issues.) Over on the bottom right, we have the Conservative Quadrant of the GOP establishment — the people who think the best way to promote traditional values is to lower taxes, reduce regulations, unleash the free market, and "shrink government until you can drown it in the bathtub." (I could go on about this group, and how they respond to tensions between market forces and right-wing social values.)
But what about the quadrant above them? People who are socially conservative, but also in favor of wealth redistribution and business regulation? Who want to use the same government powers, particularly over the market, as the Progressives, only for right-wing social ends instead of left-wing ones? (Who those in the Conservative Quadrant would describe as "abandoning their (free-market) principles" and "sinking to the enemy's level" by adopting the enemy's tactics tit-for-tat.)
I've had people in all four quadrants label that corner the Fascist Quadrant.
A number of historical works have pointed out that the tactics used by Mussolini's Fascists and Hitler's Nazis during their rise were developed and used by far-left Communist groups first. Thus, again, "fascism" is when the Right uses the Left's tactics against them. Indeed, in the wake of the Trump convictions, we've been seeing quite a few right-wing commentators arguing that, contra the likes of Asa Hutchinson and Dr. Phil, the GOP needs to stop "taking the high road" and start using the Left's tactics against them in retaliation. And I see plenty of others on the right — when they're not denouncing it as literally Satanic — saying that such proposed actions would constitute fascism.
I have a real-life acquaintance who, about half a year or so ago, made a short argument — I don't remember the precise phrasing, only that it was more succinct and pithy than I can manage — that the average post-Trump Republican voter "wants fascism." To try to lay it out here, first, the average GOP voter has become ever-less wedded to worship of free markets and absolute opposition to redistribution over the course of the 21st century. I remember when people made fun of the old lady at a TEA Party protest with a sign reading "Keep Your Government Hands Off My Medicare" for the incoherence of that statement when taken at face value. But I also remember someone arguing that it makes sense if you understand it as a person trying to express support for a portion of the welfare state via a political language limited to anti-government Reaganism. There were plenty of socially-conservative people who were unhappy about the role of "too big to fail" firms in the financial crisis and sympathetic to the economic goals of Occupy Wall Street (and according to one left-wing person I knew, the driving away of such people by the "progressive stack" and embrace of all the usual lefty social causes was not a bug but a feature, because any socially conservative person who would agree with OWS's economic positions is a fascist, and better that OWS fail than let fascists into their movement). Economic protectionism and opposition to globalization — left-wing positions back in the late 90s — are now more popular on the right. You see increasing support for anti-trust laws, particularly with the rise of "woke capitalism," DEI, and ESG scores. Even George W. Bush's "compassionate conservatism" was a step away from the "drown government in the bathtub" position (which is why classmates at Caltech denounced it as fascist). More and more, younger right-wingers are moving toward the sort of things people of my parents' generation used to denounce as "socialism" — and even that set is coming around to the bits like Social Security and Medicare that they're increasingly depending on.
But they're not exactly becoming truly socialist, are they? They don't want a command economy. As my acquaintance put it, they want a government that intervenes enough against Big Business to let the little guy compete, without outright picking winners and losers. They're looking for something in between unfettered capitalism and Soviet communism — a third position, you might say.
Second, when we talk about conserving social traditions, just whose social traditions are we talking about? Basically, the historic majority population of the USA — which is to say, white (more precisely, Western European inside the Hajnal line) and Christian (more precisely, Protestant). At least implicitly.
Next in this vein, I turn to this comment from @FirmWeird from six months ago:
the economy, housing unaffordability (including BlackRock namedrop), the degeneration of The American Woman, the lack of respect from all of society including the command hierarchy,
These are all largely the same thing. From the perspective of the heterosexual male warrior-type, the ability to support and defend a woman/family is extremely important. He's not tying it in to everything, all of those seemingly disparate concepts roll straight back to being able to satisfy the drive for a woman to have kids with.
So our straight working class Trump voter wants policies, both economic and social, that improve his or her ability, and the ability of people like him or her, to find a spouse, settle down, and raise a family in conditions that allow them to pass on their values to the next generation. You might say that this group of people — mostly and implicitly white (or "white-adjacent") — want to secure the continued existence of their group and a future for their children.
Or, to succinctly sum up these two points, they want fascism.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
4d ago
And if those experts were neutral and ideologically uncommitted, that would be fine.
I'd argue that this is impossible. An expert class, by virtue of being a coherent social class, will inevitably end up with their own ideological commitments. Of course the so-called 'deep state' "aren't immune to partisan pressure." And the very idea of "expertise" implies that sometimes, one party will be "more correct" than the other — how do you distinguish that from "partisan pressure"? ("Reality has a well-known liberal bias," "reality-based community" and all that.)
They overreacted, and their having listened to people they shouldn't have listened to
Says you, a non-expert.
The argument isn't that "the deep state" is perfect, or even neutral, but that it's far better than the alternative, wherein the ignorance and bigotry of deplorable flyover chuds is allowed to influence the state. That's how you get another Hitler.
So does the average expert, apparently
No, because the "experts" are left wing, and "fascists" are right wing. "Socially conservative/fiscally liberal" is the fascist quadrant, "socially liberal/fiscally liberal" is the progressive quadrant.
Yeah, I remember when Louis XVI and Charles I said that too.
They didn't have fighter jets and nukes, did they? Less flippantly, the rebellions of the seventeenth and eighteenth century were unusually successful, historically speaking, because of changes in military technology — the rise of firearms — which vastly favored quantity over quality and labor over capital in military effectiveness. That "age of the gun" is over; the trend for at least a century has been back toward the medieval and early modern condition of capital-intensive warrior elites defeating vastly larger numbers of less-skilled, less well-equipped peasants.
I've seen arguments rethinking "corrupt" machine politics of the "bad old days" like this for at least a decade now (it's pretty much the standard position of the Good Ol' Boyz podcast, for one). Some point out that ethnic machines did better at integrating and assimilating immigrant minorities like the Irish than the subsequent "neutral" civil service. I remember once reading an academic paper by a non-westerner pointing out that many different things get subsumed under the label of "corruption" by modern first-worlders; things which are not equally bad, and some of which — particularly paying officials to expedite an approval that would otherwise be long-delayed — can be beneficial at least in developing countries. I remember a Chinese-American individual (iirc, originally in the context of an Avatar the Last Airbender fanfic) talking about a similar distinction in Chinese culture between expected "skimming off the top" to mostly spread around greasing the creaky wheels of the bureaucracy (while keeping some for yourself, of course) versus taking so much it gets in the way of the job getting done. I recall another Asian author arguing similarly about "cronyism," and the difference about hiring through personal connections someone you know can do the job — in particular, because of those personal connections — and giving a job to an incompetent relative or such. Some point out how, with the proliferation of NGOs, QUANGOs, non-profits, consultants, et cetera (the "NGOcracy") even more money disappears into the pockets of various people whose contributions to the processes of getting things done are opaque, if not outright dubious — it's just done lawfully now.
I recall many times seeing people argue that our current system, while all legal and above-board, spends more money and gets less done for the average voter. What I've seen argued in reply only a few times, but sticks deeply into my memory, is that this is the whole point of civil service reform — government doing less is not a bug but a feature. The illegality of the machine system was bad, sure, but the real problem with it was that it delivered for the electorate too often.
Debates about the role of meritocracy aside, Civil Service reform went a long way towards eliminating the middle ranks of the machines, those on whom men like Plunkitt relied.
Hiring on connections means you can hire too wide a variety of people — variety in ability to do the job, but more importantly, variety in social class. Switching to hiring on credentials — particularly with academic capture — could possibly get you more competent people, but it definitely gets you more of the right sort of people, the right social class.
From the perspective of the twenty-first century, one is half-tempted to ask: do you want the deep state? Because this is how you get the deep state.
The answer, in this view, is yes. You should want the "deep state." Because you need experts in charge, not the ignorant masses. Too many voters are ignorant, deplorable, bitterly clinging to their superstitions and bigotries, unable or unwilling to recognize progress, on the wrong side of the long-but-inevitable arc of history. The average Republican voter wants fascism.
In the process of enshrining their ideals in law, the professional-managerial class of the day created the legal basis for entrenched bureaucracies to pursue their collective interests even in the face of opposition from the nominal chief executive.
Again, the chief executive has to be nominal, and the entrenched bureaucracies able to act in opposition to him, because he's too beholden to the electorate. An important part of "defensive" democracy — perhaps the most important part — is defending said democracy from it's electorate. You can't let them, or their representatives, have much real power — that was proven once and for all by Weimar Germany. As H.L. Mencken put it:
As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart's desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.
We are a democracy, because we agree that such is the only legitimate form of government, and that our government derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed. But "consent" in this context means something rather different from most others — very different indeed from the consent of "consenting adults" or "affirmative consent." It is through the great civic ritual of elections that this consent is collectively expressed and renewed, and our collective identity as a country reaffirmed. Hence, refusal to let parts of the citizenry participate is contrary to our commitment to equality. Hence the historical expansions of the franchise, the current movements to stop the disenfranchisement of felons, and even the work by some to extend the franchise to non-citizen residents.
But precisely as we allow more of the population to participate in elections, the less sway upon government said elections can be allowed. Democratic legitimacy requires that the people — the whole of the people — be free to make their collective voice, their collective opinion, heard. But just because the government hears that voice, doesn't mean they have to listen, that they have to treat it as in any way binding upon them. "Willie hears ya, Willie don't care."
Mencken also defined "democracy" as "the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." But, the argument goes, nowadays we know that a country don't deserve something so awful, and thus, democracy is when society is ruled by a technocratic bureaucracy, led by an intellectual vanguard elite who know what is best for society, and which does that regardless of what the common people think about it.
The "liberal" in liberal democracy already means the options available to the voters are limited; people have inalienable rights, and choices that would violate them are "off the table" no matter how much a majority of voters would want that. So, given such limits exist, it then leaves only to negotiate how wide or narrow they can be. Why would one where there are "various safeguards and provisions to ensure that the “will of the people” would not get out of hand" and the political spectrum is confined to "a narrowly defined spectrum of acceptable opinion" set by elites, with parties and politicians outside that narrow range banned, be any less "legitimate" or "democratic" than one where democracy is less managed? You can get your Model T in any color you want, so long as you want it in black.
In short, the argument is that the "populist" reasons for which the common voter might have preferred the old machine politics are exactly the reasons it had to be destroyed. We need managed, defensive democracy and a deep state to save our democracy from a dangerous excess of democracy.
Edit: I'd also like to add here a quote from Mary Harrington's recent UnHerd piece:
Does this mean everyone is now better represented than before? Perhaps not. For at the very moment the universal franchise was granted in the early 20th century, extra-democratic bodies such as NGOs and international regulatory entities began professionalising and proliferating, and in the process draining ever more power into pre-political fields closed to the democratic process. It’s possible that this was a coincidence, of course. But perhaps it wasn’t. Perhaps the patrician preference for keeping popular opinion at arm’s length never really went away, meaning that the arrival of the popular voice in the halls of power necessitated new mechanisms for routing around that voice where necessary.
Certainly, it was striking to see this lordly attitude at full volume, in the aftermath of the Brexit vote, as the Remainer great and good united in defence of their beloved, extra-democratic, supranational technocracy. And I’m sure you remember, as I do, every well-connected such individual insisting the referendum should be struck down because people didn’t know what they were voting for, and had been duped by the side of a bus.
Since then, though, I’ve started to wonder whether the technocrats were at least partly right. Given that a great many Tory MPs still don’t seem to understand EU regulatory mechanisms, it’s is at least plausible that no one else did either. Hence, the Remainers may have been, like Cromwell in 1066 and All That, “Right but Repulsive”.
Isn't that to be somewhat expected of the elderly? I guess it depends. ;)
(Sorry, I just couldn't resist the opportunity you provided with that choice of idiom.)
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