United States Politics Thread 46

[Nortaneous]

They don't much seem to care for things that were common in the past, like the breakup of monopolies, or the institution of policies to give the economy more long-term stability, and neither do they seem to like the sort of United States that mobilised in the face of large-scale perceived threats with a great deal of efficacy, which would fit better with a more narrow definition of "conservative".

I don't think that's accurate. It's certainly right about the pre-Trump GOP, but this is an argument in favor of Trump - in a two-party system, positions on charismatic figures of one party or the other are properly calculated by deltas. The case for Trump is the same as the case for a figure like Goldwater or McGovern (probably also William Jennings Bryan): sure, he's an unlikable idiot, but did you see the other guys in the primary?

Realistically, though, a realigning candidate wants to run against an opposite-party incumbent - his victory in the primary will serve as a sign that the party will have to change, but no one will hold it against him when he loses in the general. If a realigning candidate runs in an open election, there's no good outcome. If he loses, he'll have lost; if he wins, he'll have to contend with the opponents of the realignment completely unprepared. If Goldwater had won, he'd have had to staff the Cabinet with Rockefellers or incompetents - his wing of the party just didn't have enough people.

A realignment was and is still necessary, though. Now that the Trump plotline has reached its stage-managed conclusion, the Republicans have returned to their pre-Trump platform of... ignoring all substantive issues facing the country, such as the rise of monopoly power and the obvious absence of long-term economic stability or even forethought, and whining about vaccines and trans people.

(Trump refused to support bathroom bills on the campaign trail in 2016, which precisely no one noticed. Social conservatives held their noses and voted for Trump anyway because SCOTUS. Wouldn't you rather they keep holding their noses?)

I would rather ask how it wasn't. It would imply that he is either (1) callous enough not to care about the broad harm caused by Trump's social policies, including his politicisation of a pandemic that's killed hundreds of thousands

Pfizer preregistered a protocol for its COVID-19 vaccine trial. This protocol called for interim analyses at 32, 62, 92, and 120 cases in its trial group. They decided not to follow this protocol - as the New York Times put it, they "worked with the FDA" to change it. Instead, they chose not to process test swabs from October 29 until the day after Election Day, at which point they discovered that they had enough test swabs to blow past their first three interim analyses, all of which would've shown evidence of efficacy.

Please explain.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Rounin Ryuuji: I broadly agree with this. If I were to go out of my way to find problems, I could mention, for example:

If we had a different socioeconomic structure (if the means of production were widely-spread, so that standards were not as difficult to enforce, and no one private group could gain too much power), we would probably need "less government" in that "cooking the books" and other forms of business fraud could not be carried out on grand scales, and neither could large-scale abuses (as with Amazon) be swept under the rug by companies that are bigger economically than some countries.

It's not obvious that standards would be easier to enforce if means of production were distributed more widely. While each potential perpetrator would have less power, the state would have to police more people.

In the reality in which we live, it is much easier to bring fifty local businesses into compliance with some new health regulation, where the fines for violating it would be so onerous they would not have any other choice, where a giant corporation might just consider it part of the cost of doing business. If I'm not much mistaken, this is not that uncommon.

Also, capital concentration is a self-perpetuating process, though the absolute concentration Marx imagined was a figment of his imagination. Even if the means of production were widely distributed initially, they would be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands over time as they are acquired by businessmen to get an edge over the competition. The initial equilibrium would be unstable over significant periods of time.

I mentioned explicitly the breakup of monopolies, and would certainly include that provisions against large-scale capital accretion ought to be in place

It's also a very silly idea that capitalism runs well without regulation. Without heavy intervention from a State actor, it tends to be exceedingly fond of crashing itself, and taking the rest of society down with it. Of course, some people are okay with this, but my chief political position is generally, "Human suffering is bad, and things that sustainably reduce human suffering broadly and over the long term are good; things that cause it, however, are also bad. Also, let's not kill the Earth because we kind-of need it."

Reducing suffering is a good rule of thumb in some situations, but it's terrible as a strong first principle from both theoretical and practical standpoints.

Note the qualifiers "sensible" (not tending to fringe ideas) and "sustainable" (not likely to cause broadly harmful knock-on effects).

Theory: If reincarnation does not occur, then optimizing for bringing suffering close to zero leads to practices that are not very nice. For example, misleading people, drugging them, lobotomizing them, killing them, etc. If you can kill entire groups of people who care about each other, the suffering experienced by the whole clan drops to zero in a single instant.

This is a silly theory. This would be both (1) not sensible; and (2) not sustainable.

Practice: It is very common for shy people like me to greedily "reduce suffering" by avoiding awkward situations. This very frequently leads to much greater suffering in the long run.

And this has what, exactly, to do with public policy?

Of course, you could say that what we should do is to reduce suffering over time rather than immediately, but that leads to difficulties related to limited investigative, computational and ultimately, metaphysical resources.

I've never heard of such a thing as a "metaphysical resource"; I would appreciate clarirification as to what, exactly, you mean by this?

There may be cases where ripping off the bandaid does more good than harm, and other cases where it does more harm than good. Not only can't we tell which is which because we don't know all the facts or can't apply logical inferences lucidly enough, but moreover, there is no universally agreed on way to compare the different kinds of suffering caused by different courses of action in a quantitative sense.

This is why I usually refer to survival rather than reducing suffering.

Survival can imply something too basic for my liking — subsistence agriculture or fishing is survival, but humans are capable of doing so much more than that. Whether or not one think they ought to, they also generally will. Humans are curious, intelligent (though in crowds this is often obscured by a subconscious tendency to conformity), capable of communication in various forms no other known animal can use. They can also be callous (though when faced with a suffering person before them, will generally want that suffering not to be present, as their mirror neurons are designed to produce an empathic effect), and tend to like structures, and so the concept of the "State" has become fairly broadly established. With the creation of the State has come the duty to make certain that people not merely survive, but that the amount of harm caused to them (I might have specified more closely "human suffering caused by other humans, or by pathologies which are treatable or preventable", but I thought that was fairly clear from the context).

It might also be useful to precise that I tend to conceive of "harm" in this context as something done to somebody, generally against their will except in the case of certain pathologies, as opposed to "grief", "pain", and "sorrow" (which are things that may occur without explicit reason, or which are the result of inevitable things, like the death of somebody to whom one is close), or "depression" (a pathology, typically caused by some problem with neurotransmitters, but connected with the others); one might describe depression as "harmful", and consequently think having the resources to treat it widely available something to be aspired to — I also think this.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Please explain.

You like silly ideas and deflecting from any sort of serious criticism by bringing up an irrelevant topic and asking that it be talked about instead? I don't see what Pfizer has to do with anything, but you may elaborate at length on why this means Trump didn't do something he did on public record if you choose. Kindly don't bother my notifications with it if you do, however.

[zompist]

It's not obvious that standards would be easier to enforce if means of production were distributed more widely. While each potential perpetrator would have less power, the state would have to police more people.

In the reality in which we live, it is much easier to bring fifty local businesses into compliance with some new health regulation, where the fines for violating it would be so onerous they would not have any other choice, where a giant corporation might just consider it part of the cost of doing business. If I'm not much mistaken, this is not that uncommon.

Not really. Corporations are much easier to regulate than hundreds or thousands of small businesses. They're also much more receptive to regulation: they have experience with logistics and internal standards and quality assurance. For that matter, their owners are likely to be more progressive. (Millionaires are usually Republicans; billionaires are much more divided.)

You can see this right now with, say, vaccine mandates. A business like Delta or Fox News can strongly favor requiring masks and vaccines; if Joe Employee doesn't like it, Joe Employee is out. A business with five or fifty employees may itself be run by anti-vaxxers, or feel that it can't get rid of the minority of anti-vaxxers on the payroll.

Health care in general fits the same pattern. If you work for a big business, you're likely to have company-provided health care. If you work for a small business, good luck, you'll need it.

Now, everybody hates big business, and often for good reasons! But is is much easier to regulate.

[zompist]

The case for Trump is the same as the case for a figure like Goldwater or McGovern (probably also William Jennings Bryan): sure, he's an unlikable idiot, but did you see the other guys in the primary?

Yeah, the 2016 Trump was far more interesting than the 2017-21 one. Partly this is the reason you point to:

he'll have to contend with the opponents of the realignment completely unprepared. If Goldwater had won, he'd have had to staff the Cabinet with Rockefellers or incompetents - his wing of the party just didn't have enough people.

That is, Trump's populist instincts didn't lead him to put populists in power, and quickly let him be captured by conservatives. Though surely that's on him, at least partially? If you want to reorganize a party, surely you ought to have better people-choosing skills.

A realignment was and is still necessary, though. Now that the Trump plotline has reached its stage-managed conclusion, the Republicans have returned to their pre-Trump platform of... ignoring all substantive issues facing the country, such as the rise of monopoly power and the obvious absence of long-term economic stability or even forethought, and whining about vaccines and trans people.

I don't really want to encourage a general rant, but I am curious what GOP realignment you think is necessary, and is there in fact a GOP constituency for your idea? Do you mean you want to break up Disney, Walmart, and Berkshire Hathaway (to name some of the top 10)? Is there a single GOP officeholder who's on board for that?

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Not really. Corporations are much easier to regulate than hundreds or thousands of small businesses. They're also much more receptive to regulation: they have experience with logistics and internal standards and quality assurance...

You can see this right now with, say, vaccine mandates. A business like Delta or Fox News can strongly favor requiring masks and vaccines; if Joe Employee doesn't like it, Joe Employee is out. A business with five or fifty employees may itself be run by anti-vaxxers, or feel that it can't get rid of the minority of anti-vaxxers on the payroll.

On this level, perhaps, but they're much more efficient at union busting, and generally have more power to sue, to donate money to rival candidates (though money in politics is its own big kettle of fish), and to do other things, like proliferate propaganda, that make them harder to control, as they can more effectively fight back against regulation. Otherwise, this is a pretty good point.

For that matter, their owners are likely to be more progressive. (Millionaires are usually Republicans; billionaires are much more divided.)

Socially progressive, perhaps, but I can think of extremely few ethical ways to come by a billion dollars. It generally involves the economic exploitation of employees. If you are willing to do this for money, chances are you aren't particularly economically progressive. There may be exceptions, but I can't see somebody greedy enough to amass billions in assets really thinking they don't deserve to have it.

Health care in general fits the same pattern. If you work for a big business, you're likely to have company-provided health care. If you work for a small business, good luck, you'll need it.

This is really a separate issue. Tying healthcare to the employer is a terrible idea.

[Nortaneous]

Please explain.

You like silly ideas and deflecting from any sort of serious criticism by bringing up an irrelevant topic and asking that it be talked about instead? I don't see what Pfizer has to do with anything, but you may elaborate at length on why this means Trump didn't do something he did on public record if you choose. Kindly don't bother my notifications with it if you do, however.

I agree that it is bad to politicize pandemics. Please explain how stalling a vaccine trial to influence an election is not politicizing a pandemic. Or at least not as bad as saying the phrase "China virus".

(Did this WHO place-of-origin rule exist before "COVID-19"? If it did, did anyone care? Remember MERS? Caused by MERS-CoV?)

The case for Trump is the same as the case for a figure like Goldwater or McGovern (probably also William Jennings Bryan): sure, he's an unlikable idiot, but did you see the other guys in the primary?

Yeah, the 2016 Trump was far more interesting than the 2017-21 one. Partly this is the reason you point to:

he'll have to contend with the opponents of the realignment completely unprepared. If Goldwater had won, he'd have had to staff the Cabinet with Rockefellers or incompetents - his wing of the party just didn't have enough people.

That is, Trump's populist instincts didn't lead him to put populists in power, and quickly let him be captured by conservatives. Though surely that's on him, at least partially? If you want to reorganize a party, surely you ought to have better people-choosing skills.

There weren't people. Obviously he made some poor choices - more than someone else in his position who wasn't a New York celebrity who went to an Ivy and took forever to stop respecting NYT would've made - but he couldn't have made zero, or even the baseline number you'd expect from a long-established party faction.

I don't really want to encourage a general rant, but I am curious what GOP realignment you think is necessary, and is there in fact a GOP constituency for your idea? Do you mean you want to break up Disney, Walmart, and Berkshire Hathaway (to name some of the top 10)? Is there a single GOP officeholder who's on board for that?

Disney, yes and there isn't. Google, yes and there are. Berkshire Hathaway, maybe, I've never thought about it. What's the case against Berkshire Hathaway?

(Or just shut them down - 99% of advertising should be banned and general-purpose internet-wide search was a mistake. The constituency for that is everyone who uses Google as a frontend for Reddit. Which, like, has search. You can get to it quite trivially, but it doesn't have focus on Ctrl+T.)

It's easier to understand if you contrast "Trumpism" with "Reaganism" - trickle-down economics, militarism, and Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society", held together with Moral Majority voter chow, which you probably agree is a bad thing. Trickle-down economics doesn't work, militarism is destructive when you can win and stupid when you can't, and society exists until enough people decide it doesn't, at which point people wake up, go to work, come home, and watch Netflix until they pass out, which is no way to live. Or they just OD on fentanyl.

Some points I've noticed the pro-Trump, anti-Reagan types raising, that could become a platform for a "Trumpist" GOP, and that might even have a constituency:
- Industrial policy vs. financialization and the "service economy"; opposition to offshoring (remember Perot?)
- Infrastructure investment (sometimes people even realize the scale of the anti-corruption initiative this would require)
- Absence of social conservatism, except maybe in the Coming Apart sense that's concerned by births out of wedlock
- Trying to identify ways the Bowling Alone stuff can be addressed by political means
- Less illegal immigration
- Less immigration in general
- Affordable family formation (this is mostly Steve Sailer's thing, but it's a good idea and the GOP won't remain a viable party without demographic levers to check the Democrats' creative use of immigration policy - and now the exodus from California to large swing states)
- Controlling degree inflation and credentialism (one proposal was to make it illegal for corporations to consider degrees in hiring decisions, and then do something about the legal chilling effects against aptitude testing that everyone's pretty sure exists even though every tech company does it instead of credentialism and it's fine)
- '90s indie rock lyrics about how you shouldn't own a television

Sometimes there's some stupid stuff about HCQ or whatever, because Trump, but that's nothing compared to Goldwater's boner for nukes, and his faction managed to seem almost sober after a generation.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Please explain.

You like silly ideas and deflecting from any sort of serious criticism by bringing up an irrelevant topic and asking that it be talked about instead? I don't see what Pfizer has to do with anything, but you may elaborate at length on why this means Trump didn't do something he did on public record if you choose. Kindly don't bother my notifications with it if you do, however.

I agree that it is bad to politicize pandemics. Please explain how stalling a vaccine trial to influence an election is not politicizing a pandemic. Or at least not as bad as saying the phrase "China virus".

I've already expressed we aren't playing the "But what about this not-presently-relevant thing, though? Talk about this so I can control the narrative and never actually address any valid criticisms!" game today. You're welcome to pursue whatever problems with Pfizer all you like, but it won't change that Trump politicised it.

[zompist]

I don't really want to encourage a general rant, but I am curious what GOP realignment you think is necessary, and is there in fact a GOP constituency for your idea? Do you mean you want to break up Disney, Walmart, and Berkshire Hathaway (to name some of the top 10)? Is there a single GOP officeholder who's on board for that?

Disney, yes and there isn't. Google, yes and there are. Berkshire Hathaway, maybe, I've never thought about it. What's the case against Berkshire Hathaway?

Just that it's the largest financial company in the US, bigger than Visa, Chase, Bank of America. Warren Buffett is the 5th richest American, and he's probably way too liberal for your tastes. (As billionaires go, Buffett is kind of charming, and it's hard to hate a company whose website is this retro.)

It's easier to understand if you contrast "Trumpism" with "Reaganism" - trickle-down economics, militarism, and Thatcher's "there is no such thing as society", held together with Moral Majority voter chow, which you probably agree is a bad thing. Trickle-down economics doesn't work, militarism is destructive when you can win and stupid when you can't, and society exists until enough people decide it doesn't, at which point people wake up, go to work, come home, and watch Netflix until they pass out, which is no way to live. Or they just OD on fentanyl.

Some points I've noticed the pro-Trump, anti-Reagan types raising, that could become a platform for a "Trumpist" GOP, and that might even have a constituency:
- Industrial policy vs. financialization and the "service economy"; opposition to offshoring (remember Perot?)
- Infrastructure investment (sometimes people even realize the scale of the anti-corruption initiative this would require)
- Absence of social conservatism, except maybe in the Coming Apart sense that's concerned by births out of wedlock
- Trying to identify ways the Bowling Alone stuff can be addressed by political means
- Less illegal immigration
- Less immigration in general
- Affordable family formation (this is mostly Steve Sailer's thing, but it's a good idea and the GOP won't remain a viable party without demographic levers to check the Democrats' creative use of immigration policy - and now the exodus from California to large swing states)
- Controlling degree inflation and credentialism (one proposal was to make it illegal for corporations to consider degrees in hiring decisions, and then do something about the legal chilling effects against aptitude testing that everyone's pretty sure exists even though every tech company does it instead of credentialism and it's fine)
- '90s indie rock lyrics about how you shouldn't own a television

That's an interesting list, but I think you're overestimating the daylight between Trump and Ted Cruz-- at least after December 2016. Social conservatism gets the punters to the polls and sells an awful lot of merch.

[alice]

As a diversion, one of today's Impossible Things To Do Before Breakfast: how would one go about making the USA less divided?

[alice]

People usually enjoy certain kinds of suffering.

Grad school....

Or certain aspects of conlanging

[Ares Land]

As a diversion, one of today's Impossible Things To Do Before Breakfast: how would one go about making the USA less divided?

Oh, as an alternate diversion, is America really that divided?

I've been hearing for about, oh, 25 years now from People In The Know that the US are incredibly divisive and on the brink of breaking up or going into civil war or something. I really don't know that much about the US and my perspective is that of an outsider, but a) the United States are still, well, United b) honestly from my outsider perspective politics don't seem much more divisive than in any other Western country. Less so, really, compared to some countries really (look at Britain!)

[Vardelm]

Or certain aspects of conlanging

Phonology???

Note that I didn't say phonology was not interesting, just less interesting. A more succinct view of what I was saying is that I find con-phonetics super boring. And as I did say, where phonology interersects with morphology and syntax – that stuff is super interesting.

Ah, I agree much more with this phrasing.

That's basically my position as well.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Amusing.

[Vardelm]

Oh, as an alternate diversion, is America really that divided?

I've been hearing for about, oh, 25 years now from People In The Know that the US are incredibly divisive and on the brink of breaking up or going into civil war or something. I really don't know that much about the US and my perspective is that of an outsider, but a) the United States are still, well, United b) honestly from my outsider perspective politics don't seem much more divisive than in any other Western country. Less so, really, compared to some countries really (look at Britain!)

Have they had armed citizens storm their capitol buildings? How many families have stopped communicating at all based on political disagreements?

[Ares Land]

Have they had armed citizens storm their capitol buildings? How many families have stopped communicating at all based on political disagreements?

I stopped seeing some of my friends when they got really into fascism. And there are, indeed, part of my family or my wife's we don't see much or at all anymore, after one awkward post-dinner talk too many (again, fascism). So yeah, political disagreements do get nasty.

No armed people stormed official buildings, though not for lack of trying. The gilets jaunes demonstrations got pretty violent here.


(And that's just France. My own impression is that post-Brexit Britain is worse.)

[Vardelm]

I stopped seeing some of my friends when they got really into fascism. And there are, indeed, part of my family or my wife's we don't see much or at all anymore, after one awkward post-dinner talk too many (again, fascism). So yeah, political disagreements do get nasty.

No armed people stormed official buildings, though not for lack of trying. The gilets jaunes demonstrations got pretty violent here.


(And that's just France. My own impression is that post-Brexit Britain is worse.)

Good comparisons. Americans are maybe just not used to this level of political divide. Not that we SHOULD get used to it, but it's good to have wider perspective.

[Ares Land]

Wasn't there a really big gap when George W. Bush was president as well?

[Vardelm]

Wasn't there a really big gap when George W. Bush was president as well?

Yes, but not like this. It ramped up during the 2010 Tea Party protests, more with Trump taking office, and even more as the whole QAnon bullshit took root. Jan. 6th was the height of it.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Among developed Western countries, it might also be worth pointing out that the United States has more armed civilians than I would expect in France or the United Kingdom.