Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
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User ID: 373
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
hard men create good times, good times create weak men, weak men create bad times, bad times create hard men
I think this phrase is mostly BS, but here it seems appropriate, at least insofar as "hard men" = "tough on crime" and vice versa. This issue seems alarmingly cyclical.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
These are flaws in the implementation of democracy, not indicators that we should abandon democracy altogether. There's a huge difference between European or American governance systems and those of a real dictatorship like Russia.
Immigration issues typically have a huge amount of fraudulent "compromise" because corporations like cheap labor, so they bribe (through political "donations" and other kickbacks) politicians to "compromise" on the issue, effectively relegating countries to open borders in some cases. Support to Israel is also held up above and beyond popular approval due to AIPAC corrupting the US political system.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
If you want a more rigorous answer to this question, I recommend this book.
For a shorter answer, being democratic makes us massively less corrupt than Russia, even though, yes, corruption is still an issue in the US (and everywhere) but comparing the US to Russia is just worlds apart.
We're also far richer and have much better public services like education and healthcare. It's possible for some rich countries to be authoritarian, but it's the exception rather than the rule. Though there is some debate on which way the causality goes here, although I would personally say it's more a case of democracy --> stability --> rich.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Democratic Russia was indeed very corrupt, but the attempt at democracy only lasted for ~10 years. Democracy isn't a magic panacea that fixes everything instantly; rather, it's a way to change institutional incentives to slowly guide countries to better outcomes. The book I listed above goes into this more. It would have taken decades to root out the centuries of corruption that had been caked into East Slavic society through the Tsars and Bolsheviks. Even before the war Ukraine was still very corrupt, but its democratic path gave it a far better chance than Russia to actually fix its problems, which we're seeing now. Most other Warsaw Pact states like Poland saw massive reductions in corruption after they switched to democracy.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Corruption definitely happens in the US armed forces, but comparing what goes on to the Russians is at a whole different level.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
I'd say it's not particularly fair to give no evidence yourself, ignore the evidence I gave, and then claim "assertion without evidence". But fine, a book is indeed pretty long.
If you look at the corruptions perceptions index, apart from a few exceptions (that Why Nations Fail goes into), the least corrupt countries are overwhelmingly democratic, and the most corrupt countries are overwhelmingly authoritarian, or at the very least anocratic. This includes nonwhite countries like Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Most Latin American countries have very flawed democracies that tend to slide in and out of despotism, but the more consolidated and well-functioning ones like Uruguay also have less corruption.
I don't know what you're saying with the Polish example. Communism was bad due to inefficient markets, but also because it engendered a secretive and authoritarian society, which is where corruption flourishes. The move to democracy slowly started fixing that.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
One important historical factor here is that perceived national security interests almost always trump short-term economic concerns. A lot of people loved to trumpet something akin to "global trade is too important, major wars will never happen" or that Europe would be forced to capitulate. In the end, though, Russia's King Gas had as much staying power as the South's King Cotton.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
It's kind of weird for Brazilian leftists to criticize Bolsonaro so harshly for being authoritarian, then have their guy Lula turn around and start feting the leaders of the most autocratic countries like Russia, Venezuela, and China.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Democracy in a single nation is very different from a single democratic world country that encompasses the entire planet. Pointing at some hypothetical superpower UN and claiming its potential sins proves anything about democracy is an absurd strawman.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
America doesn’t have a democracy
The only way anyone comes to this conclusion is by playing games with definitions. Communists like doing this by retorting "real Communism has never been tried" whenever someone points out the faults in their ideology. This post is doing something similar, except instead of defending a system, it sets out an unrealistically high bar for being defined as a "democracy", then using any faults to say "hey the US isn't a real democracy!!!"
democracy presupposes rational actors, informed voters, and an absence of psychological manipulation
The first two would be nice, but are not necessary. See Bryan Caplan's rational irrationality for example. The last one, "psychological manipulation" is just "persuasion" written in inflammatory language.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Tell me how far apart you would measure an early American democracy and a democracy in which a ruling party controls all media exposure.
Various levels of control over the media and political writers has been going since the nation's founding.
In a modern context, the left does not control the media. Many employees of the mainstream media are left-leaning and that certainly tilts coverage in a lot of ways, but anyone is free to start their own news organization, and there are several ones in existence right now like Fox and Breitbart that cater to right wing views.
Early American democracy had a vigorous debate
The internet has made debating easier than ever, and presidential candidates have several debates while they're running.
once corporations and wealthy donors are able to “persuade” anyone they want without regard for facts, we don’t have a democracy anymore
I'm not sure what the quote marks around "persuade" are supposed to imply. Rich people can hurl tons of money towards basically whatever political cause they want thanks to the SCOTUS's asinine decision in Citizens United, but thankfully money doesn't have that much of an impact outside the margins. Bloomberg's campaign in 2020 was an example of this.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Why use a goofy, excessively stringent definition of democracy like this? It doesn't conform to common usage nor to the dictionary definition.
Then following this up with a very lax definition of oligarchy reeks of noncentral fallacy.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Any state, democratic or not, becomes pretty untenable when there's a significant, politically empowered portion of people with a different culture. For most countries that line is drawn at ethnicities, e.g. unrest that perennially rises in the Balkans. The US is weird in that its cultural ingroup is a strange amalgamation of mutable racialism and civic nationalism. The intricacies of how that works for the US are certainly interesting, but the pertinent point is that there's certainly still a cultural ingroup. An assimilated, 3rd+ generation Chinese living in Philadelphia is very different from a Chinese living in Beijing.
Sliders' post implies that democracy means we should let Chinese living in Beijing run American politics. But that's obviously wrong. It's pure strawman.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
I'm not sure what you're getting at, but the effects are an extension of money = speech, thus allowing for the formation of superPACs and a greater emphasis on money in political campaigns.
Sure, I trust your explanation is more correct than my simplification.
But the important bit was that it threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics. That said, I still don't think it matters all that much since people overrate the power of money in politics.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Wish I could have read what you replied before you deleted it.
But it seems like you blocked me instead =(
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
I'm not a lawyer so my description probably isn't perfectly accurate; The_Nybbler gave a more precise definition. The important bit was that it threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
if you claim that the decision "threw gasoline on the fire in terms of money in politics"
I don't understand your point here. The "gasoline in terms of money in politics" was a reference to superPACs. Are you saying Citizens United didn't lead to the creation of superPACs?
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Asserting Citizens United had "nothing to do with superPACs" is going way too far, as most of the logic and legal articulation for the formation of superPACs happened in Citizens United, while the Speechnow case simply applied that logic to explicitly allow superPACs. After Citizens United, the creation of superPACs was inevitable, hence why everyone knows about Citizens United while Speechnow is relatively obscure.
While the precise notion of which court case started and ended where might be interesting, I kinda feel like this whole digression was more of a "gotcha" on a specific technical detail, rather than a pushback on the central point I was making.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
The important point was that it led to the creation of superPACs, which it did unless you want to get nitpicky. Describing that as like "Hamlet as a play created in ancient Greece by Emperor Nero" is uncharitable.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Richard Hanania thinks Desantis should challenge Trump to a boxing match. Desantis's campaign so far has been pretty pathetic. He's been afraid to really push back against Trump despite Trump lobbing almost daily attacks against him. Desantis is great on paper, with his victories against woke institutions in Florida, but he's failed to appeal to the Republican id so far. Many Republican voters care far more about appearance and physical vigor than policy positions, good governance, intelligence, etc.
I don’t think Trump can lose a Republican primary at this point. But if I were giving DeSantis advice, it would be to do the opposite of what Abernathy suggests. Republican voters love the stupidity, obnoxiousness, vulgarity, and simian chest-beating. While the conventional wisdom seems to be that Rubio and Cruz tried rolling around in the muck with him and failed, Rubio’s most vicious personal attacks in 2016 didn’t come until after Trump had won the New Hampshire primary and Nevada caucuses, that is, pretty late in the game. And Rubio wasn’t the guy to do it.
Instead of seeing Republican primary voters as concerned citizens seeking a voice, try to imagine them as chimps laying around under a canopy. They’ve chosen the alpha male. He’s the loudest, most obnoxious member of the tribe, and his power depends on the degree to which other apes are afraid of him and give him symbolic displays of respect, which in this case has meant saying, for example, that he actually won the 2020 election. What could break this spell? Not reasoned arguments, but signs of weakness. And no, not weakness in the sense that he might not be the most electable candidate — that’s counting on a level of thinking that is far too abstract for this population.
Rather, one needs to emphasize literal physical weakness. Notice how obsessed Republicans have been with the real and imagined physical and cognitive shortcomings of figures like Biden and Hillary. In many corners of right-wing media, “our opponents are old, fat, ugly” seems to get at least as much attention as actual issues, especially during election season. In 2020, we saw doctored videos of Pelosi slurring her words go viral on social media, and this shows not only how susceptible the Republican base is to fake news, but also how obsessed they are with physical and physiological correlates of health.
The Dylan Mulvaney hysteria is another demonstration of the red tribe being driven by the most base and primitive instincts. These people started shooting beer cans with assault rifles because a company sent a six pack to a guy who acts like a sissy. Good luck explaining to them the importance of going after higher education accreditation agencies.
You might think it’s strange for a group like this to have chosen Trump as their leader. But when he posts memes of himself as an Adonis or says things like he’s in better shape than Obama or Bush were while they were in office, and no one corrects him, that serves to only cement his dominance over the party. Trump’s perfect body is like the unreliability of Dominion voting machines. Shirtless Putin has a similar effect in Russia. Educated Westerners roll their eyes at his primitive demonstrations of vigor, but I suspect that, like Trump, he’s a much better student of human nature than they are. The conspiracy theories might have been false, but the Trump-Putin bromance was real, and no accident.
This means that DeSantis’ best shot is trying to emphasize that Trump is physically weak and he no longer intimidates others in the party. You can’t do this with words alone. DeSantis can call him fat, and Trump can reply everyone is saying that I’m in the best shape of any man who’s ever lived, and the voters will eat it up. The Florida governor needs a way to clearly highlight that he’s younger, stronger, and more physically courageous.
DeSantis should therefore challenge Trump to a boxing match. Trump will almost certainly refuse, at which point he can say that this shows what a coward the former president is. Or, DeSantis could say that, on further reflection, maybe it wasn’t fair to challenge an 85 year-old man (yes, lie and exaggerate, Republican voters love that too), and he understands that his opponent is too feeble at this point in his life to get into the arena.
DeSantis shouldn’t do this out of the blue. He could start by trying to bait Trump into saying something particularly nasty about him, or preferably his wife or kids. Then he can play the role of the justifiably angry patriarch. Every time Trump launches a personal attack, DeSantis can reply by saying that his opponent is a pathetic coward, and if he has a problem with him he’s already made clear that they can settle their differences like men. If he’s not willing to do that, then we can stick to the issues, at which point DeSantis can go on about whatever he did in Florida. At the very least, a challenge to fight will eat up all the energy and make sure no other candidate gets any attention, as one of the main things DeSantis needs to do is make the primary into a two-man race.
Right now, the DeSantis strategy is to try to get the Republican voter to ask questions like “who is more electable?” or “who has shown more focus in fighting woke?” Those are exciting questions to conservative intellectuals but way too boring for the Republican masses. They will never tell a pollster this, but they resent anyone trying to make them think too hard, which is part of the reason they hate liberals in the first place.
There are a lot of ways that this could go wrong, and it probably wouldn’t work. But I think people are still yet to truly understand that, if things proceed as normal, Trump is going to be the nominee. Making sure he’s not would require meeting Republican voters where they are, instead of continuing to wish they were something else.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
nationally has gained ground as well.
Flatly wrong. He went from 30% after the midterms to 20% now. He's down in both the polling aggregators like 538 and in betting markets. He's up maybe a point or two from his nadir, but that doesn't come close to catching Trump, or even to reversing his spring/summer slide.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
The legal issues related to Trump don't seem particularly troubling. Trump has always been in a legal gray area with stuff like the Russia investigation, but Mueller cleared Trump of collusion when most of the media thought he would go down for sure. Counting on a legal issue to bring down Trump seems like a bad bet unless he does something particularly egregious.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
11mo ago
Agreed, Hanania's great. He's kind of replaced Scott for me since Scott doesn't write much about politics any more.
The black population is estimated to remain stable at 11 to 13% of the US population out to 2100 last time I checked. I haven't heard about Jews but I imagine they're not declining precipitously.
So the US is moving from whites to more Hispanics, which aren't as pro-SJW as blacks are but certainly are sympathetic in many ways.
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