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Apologies for the low effort but things are looking to get interesting because in the last 60 seconds Trump not only announced that he's running, he's announced that if he's elected going to seek specific laws against insider trading by members of congress, and ban on mail in and electronic voting. Direct quote "third world countries are better at democracy than we are and that is embarrassing"
Edit: "we will be attacked slandered and persecuted by one of the most dangerous and pervasive government apparati ever designed by man or women but we will win."
"We we will defend life liberty and the pursuit of happiness against the great enemy."
Edit 2: Speech has just concluded; Stand Up and Heroes are odd but appropriate choices for walk off music given the speech.
If were being honest I'm actually kind of nervous. On one hand this was a good speech that hit the right notes, it's what Trump needed to say if he wants to get elected. On the other this is the second time in 3 months (the other being Biden's Leni Riefenstahl moment) that a mainstream political candidate walked right up to the line of calling for the opposing party to be arrested and or shot and reading the reaction in red leaning spaces I gotta say that I'm feeling a lot like RDml Painter
The current top comment on the /r/politics post on this is:
(Post did not include a link to NYT, but here is the source from an article titled "Trump Announces 2024 Run, Repeating Lies and Exaggerating Record".)
I pretty much agree. I wasn't happy about Trump being elected but at first I was hoping there may be some silver lining in him actually being serious in his claims to care about corruption. But that hopefulness didn't last long. (Also, I'm not entirely sold on term limits; I think looking at other structural reasons for incumbency like first-past-the-post elections making it difficult to run an ideologically similar campaign is probably a better idea.)
I still don’t understand how the poster child for “draining the swamp” is a billionaire real estate mogul and entertainer from New York City. The constant self-advertising alone surely raised red flags. And that’s before the scandals, the inability to fill offices, the nepotism, the public infighting, and the general inability to pass anything.
Damn it, we need an alternative to FPTP.
I favor approval voting. You vote to "approve" as many candidates as you want; the candidate with the most approving voters wins. Unlike RCV, there aren't situations where you win by being less popular, there are no spoiler effects, it is extremely simple, and you end up with centrist politicians instead of maximally divisive ones.
It’s my single-issue vote.
I will vote for any goddamn candidate who credibly supports approval or even ranked choice. I don’t care if it throws my vote away or if they’re otherwise detestable. I’ll advocate for others to do the same, too.
It hasn’t done any good yet.
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I'm not sure this is true, because voters are not incentivized to vote entirely honestly.
Ie, if the true global popularity of candidates goes A > B > C
and everyone knows it, then people who honestly approve A,B but prefer B > A > C have some incentive to not vote A, because if the numbers are close then artificially dropping A's apparent popularity gives B a better shot. And then in response people who prefer A > B > C might counter by not voting A. And then seeing this turmoil people who prefer C might fail to vote A,B even if they do approve of them, because this gives C a chance to shoot up.
But the spoiler effects are certainly more limited, this issue only comes up when comparing multiple similar candidates that are simultaneously approved by individuals and close to each other in the rankings. It would do a better job of having people be able to support third party candidates and their true preferences (since you always want to include your actual favorite) and introduce more centrists while still hedging their bets on the lesser-of-two-evils candidate most likely to prevent the evil villain on the other side.
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I'll take this opportunity to pimp my impractical idea for a decentralized voting system. Everyone gets to vote for whomever they like to delegate for them. Then, if no one has (50%+1) of the vote those delegates then vote for themselves(person with least delegates can't vote for themselves) or someone else and the votes are recounted. This is repeated until someone hits the majority bar. You'd have to register as actually wanting the job and if you don't the people who delegate to you just have their votes immediately passed through you to whomever you voted for.
You have a friend you trust who cares about politics but you don't give a shit? delegate your vote to them and sit back. There are lots of cryptographic schemes that could make this work. Although it's pretty impractical I think it'd result in winners much more people trust.
From a game theoretic and psychological perspective, I'm not sure this would be meaningfully different from first past the post. To a first approximation, everyone just votes for the same person they would now: red team or blue team, and then one of them has 50%+ and wins (I guess it eliminates the electoral college if this is in the U.S.)
Theoretically, it might help third party candidates, because you can vote for one and if they lose your vote won't be wasted, but this is only true if you're certain that candidate is going to delegate to the correct side. For instance, if Scott Alexander was in a standard election and had a good shot at becoming President I would definitely vote for him over pretty much any politician (because they're all scum). But under normal circumstances I would not delegate my vote to him in your system because he's not going to win, and then he's very likely to send it to some Democrat, and I think they tend to do slightly more damage than Republicans. Even if he delegates it to an above average Democrat, they're also going to lose and then the vote stays in house until eventually it ends up with Hillary Clinton, or whoever else ends up on top of the Democrats that year (I'm using the 2016 election as an example since it's a strong case of when I'd very strongly prefer my vote not stray).
So in practice, all the high up Republicans and Democrats end up in bed with each other and refuse to send votes to the other side, all the voters loyally vote for someone on one side or the other, and their vote stays in house, until eventually whichever side got more votes ends up sending them all to the most popular person on that side. Theoretically, this would allow someone to vote say Bernie Sanders instead of Hillary Clinton, but then he loses and delegates the votes to her and she has them all, which is kind of what the primary system already does, it chooses the most popular person on each side to pre-emptively delegates all of the votes to. If anything, this system makes things worse because if someone had a preference for, say, Bernie > Trump > Clinton, then Clinton unfairly siphons votes by being vaguely associated with a more moderate person even though she isn't him. Your system will incentivize more moderate people to run for office, on both sides, but only for the purpose of siphoning votes for their party's main candidate.
And the strategic thing for voters to do in response would be to not trust any of the moderates who are unlikely to win and are just going to siphon their vote for one of the two main parties, and instead just vote for their favorite party directly rather than risk choosing the wrong moderate. And then we have FPTP again.
If you don't trust Scott to not give his vote to dems why would you trust Scott to not side with them on policy? I think the opposite of what you say would happen, the extremist candidates will get less votes and need to win the acceptance of moderated or the moderates will pool their votes and the extremists will have to capitulate. Really it would cascade in the direction that's actually more popular. And you could always delegate to someone who says they'd never give their vote to the extremist as well.
Because policies aren't binary like that. I think Scott would side with them on policy like 60% of the time, but he would pick the better 60% of policies they have and leave out the insane culture war stuff.
The extremist candidates will get less initial votes, but if each moderate delegates to someone 10% less moderate than themselves then it ends up with the extremists anyway. Look at how Trump has captured the Republican party. I suppose you could model it as splitting the Republicans into two factions, the pro-Trump and the never-Trump. So suppose at the end of the day you end up with three leading candidates: Democrat with 45%, pro-Trump Republican with 35%, and anti-Trump Republican with 25%, the anti-Trump Republicans are going to be forced to delegate. If the anti-Trump Republicans decide to delegate to Trump in this circumstance to keep the Democrats out, then we see how extremists capture the moderate votes. If the anti-Trump decide to delegate Democrat because their candidate is more moderate, and if this stance is known ahead of time, then voting anti-Trump Republican is equivalent to voting Democrat. And some Republicans did that in the current system: they voted Democrat because it was preferable to Trump. But there is still the same pressure towards extremism for the same reasons as in the current system: ie the median voter theorem. Which hasn't exactly worked out nicely.
But there is another world where it's D/mR/tR = 45/35/25 where trump delegates to the moderates. You've put your thumb on the scales in this example. More importantly the point is essential to imbue your vote with the intelligence to make these kind of game theory decisions iterated down where there is much more flexibility. Are you really better off if you have to decide if you're going to need to guess if trump is the only way to stop the democrats from winning before you vote or by giving your vote to someone who can try every other options before it comes to that? Your example actually seems like the best outcome for someone whose preference is mR > tR > D, you complaint is contained in the fact that you've built a scenario where trump would have rightfully be who was selected.
And is that not the world we live in? In the existing system, with primaries, the electorate all decide which among their party is the most popular, and then the chosen candidates of those parties go against each other. In the delegation system the electorate all choose their favorite candidates, and then candidates within each party pool their votes together towards the most popular one. It's the same steps just in different orders, and the forces towards and away from extremism seem pretty much the same to me. In the world where it's D/mR/tR = 45/35/25, the moderate would have won the Primary in the current system and become the Republican party candidate instead of Trump.
There are small technical differences, such that you can come up with very niche scenarios where the outcome will differ. But I think the general pattern of having two monolithic parties with extreme candidates are the same in both systems for the same reasons, and in almost every circumstance they will lead to identical incentives and outcomes.
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The last poster boy for draining the swamp was a rich kid from New York, too. My guess is having wealth and fame from the main commercial city in the nation provides a base that allows an outsider to enter high level politics.
Who’s that?
My first guess was Nader, but he’s not NYC, specifically. Perot, definitely Texan.
Teddy Roosevelt, trust buster and machine breaker.
and perhaps prophetically TR also spoiled the Republican's chances in 1912 by running as an independent.
Yeah, even though Bull Moose is the best possible party name, imho.
Agreed, and I probably would've been stumping for the Bull Moose Party were I around back then.
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That or we need people to actually use the system in the way it's intended. If people actually voted for the candidates they wanted instead of stupidly saying "well I have to pick one of these two or my vote is wasted" (and therefore, ironically wasting their vote) then the system would work great. I'm not opposed to designing a system which has rules to work against human foibles, but I do think that the voters deserve their fair share of blame too.
This is not true. FPTP is a relatively poor voting system regardless of the level of tacticalness we assume of voters. In fact FPTP can lead to some truly ridiculous results if people truly refuse to vote tactically.
Imagine an election with 99 candidates. The first 98 all support the exact same platform with very minor differences. This platform is very popular and almost everyone supports it. The last candidate supports an opposite platform that almost everyone thinks is terrible. Each of the first 98 candidates gets 1% of the vote and the guy with the crazy ideas wins with 2% of the vote. This is a horrible outcome for the country.
I disagree. That is in fact a good outcome. The candidate who had the most support won.
So the whole country ends up miserable with policies that 98% of people hate and that's good? What definition of "good outcome" are you using?
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This is false for pretty any reasonable definition of "great". Vote splitting is a real thing, and with just 3 candidates honest FPTP voting can cause a candidate to defeat a loser who was preferred by as much as 33 points. And in a non-evenly split election? The odds of affecting an election via a tactical vote are exponentially (literally, not hyperbole, and the exponent is often large) greater than the the odds of affecting one via an honest vote for a non-competitive party.
None of that means you should never vote for a non-competitive party anyway. I had three Libertarians on my last ballot, knowing none stood a chance, because in a race between "bad" and "very slightly worse" it's freeing to abdicate and cast "pox on both your houses" instead. But at least try to understand how the expected value tradeoffs work, so you can discard that value with your eyes open.
If a plurality of people actually think candidate A is the best on the ballot, then even if candidates B and C split the rest of the vote then I think that's a fair outcome. My beef is nothing to do with vote splitting in itself, it's that it tends to happen because everyone has this mass delusion that votes for third parties are a waste and so they vote for someone they don't actually want.
The system of FPTP only works if people actually vote for the person they want in office the most. But people don't do that, so it breaks down. That is something we can (and should) address with a more robust system, but it doesn't absolve people of their responsibility in the breakdown either. It's kind of like how, despite having traffic rules, people who don't follow them can still cause accidents. We can (and should) try to make it so that people who don't want to follow the rules can't cause accidents, but in the meantime it's still their fault for ignoring the rules.
De gustibus non est disputandum, I guess. But would you extend the same latitude in return? When others think that "nearly two thirds of the electorate wants a Foo to win and there are two equally popular Foo candidates in the race" should not lead to "therefore the Bar candidate will win", could you at least not refer to that as "stupid[ly]"? Seems kind of smart to me, frankly.
To be clear, what I'm calling stupid is the idea of "my vote is wasted if I vote for a third party". That is untrue and a frustrating myth that people keep perpetuating. What actually wastes your vote is to cast it for someone you don't actually want in office. If you are tactically voting that isn't stupid by itself, though it does break the system if you do that.
It sets up an awful hysteresis in the system, at least. It's a sad fact to me that most Libertarians don't have a shot because most people aren't at all libertarian ... but I do think that Gary Johnson would have had a decent shot against the most-hated and the second-most-hated Presidential candidates of all time, if only the game theory of FPTP didn't boil down to "he can't win because he can't win".
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This is akin to saying "FPTP cannot fail, it can only be failed." A system that can only work if the populace ignores strategic considerations, and otherwise outsizedly rewards the people who actually do vote strategically, is already broken.
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This can only be practical if combined with term limits for all federal employees of similar timescales. Else what you end up with is a Congress in Eternal September, newbie Senators being lead around by lifetime bureaucrats and Generals (but I repeat myself) who have been in DC for decades and know the scores. Term limits for politicians is a massive power grab for the federal bureaucracy.
Yeah, that and the similar argument for lifetime lobbyists is a common argument against term limits... that seems like a pretty good argument to me.
To be fair, you really could just term limit bureaucrats. I'd love to see a world where national service is a life phase rather than a lifetime.
There are two key problems.
One is that some roles really do require technical skill. What’s the point in hiring a construction worker to the IRS audit department? To military contract awards? Shorter terms limit the opportunity to learn the ropes, even from a blank slatist perspective.
Second is career. Getting someone to drop, say, 6 years on a job which they can never hold again is a hard sell. No guarantee of transferable skills. Probably terrible compensation compared to market rate labor. It’s got all the problems of maternity leave, except for longer.
Maybe mandatory service can assuage 2 at the cost of making 1 worse. I don’t want to see what command-economy contortions would be needed to mitigate 1. Better, I think, to let government careers exist.
Relatively few government roles require non-interopable skills. You mention the IRS, why would we be hiring construction workers when accountants exist? Hell, off the cuff, let's make working a couple years in audits a mandatory part of licensing. Or, make all licensed accountants do a few audits a year as pro Bono work.
Or my preferred solution, privatize tax collection, the IRS is hilariously clunky and bad at its job. Give JPM and BAC and Goldman the opportunity to bid on federal tax collection for each state, the government will raise more money and it'll be so much user friendlier.
There's a considerable amount of domain expertise in government work (like any other field), even between departments. In the absence of long-term federal employees, these functions will be performed by contractors.
The history of tax farming suggests it will be anything but cost effective and user friendly.
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There's also the flip incentive problem that term limiting in any serious capacity means that having a stable alternative career path becomes much more valuable leading to the revolving door of politics. It also empowers those who can retain knowledge of the system who are not term limited by being outside the government entirely such as lobbyists and consultants.
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So, if anything, it would only entrench the "Deep State"?
Yes. Congresspeople would be reduced to tourists still trying to find the bathrooms by the time their terms end and they move back to Iowa. They'd still be learning how castling works when the bureaucrats are setting traps in every law and regulation and procedure.
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