Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Matti Friedman basically says that Holocaust education has failed. He does not provide exact recommendations on why and how Holocaust education should be changed, but he hints that it often centers around the question of how Jews were murdered, rather than addressing why Jews were murdered. I regularly read Israeli media, and the topic of why Holocaust education has failed is a common one. Different articles offer different answers and solutions, but it is a popular topic in Israel. It is a dead end.
I am speaking from a European perspective, and in European countries, there is a clear trend: right-of-center parties tend to be more pro-Israel, while left-of-center parties tend to be more pro-Palestine. I come from Eastern Europe, where the public and politicians are, on average, more pro-Israel than in Western Europe. And Eastern European countries are generally more right-leaning than Western European countries in all dimensions: social issues, economic issues, and foreign policy.
General picture applies to all of Europe: the right-of-center is more pro-Israel, and the left-of-center is more pro-Palestine.
If Friedman and others are correct that there is a problem with Holocaust education, they should also explain why there is such a clear left-right divide on this issue. Are right-of-center Europeans better educated about the Holocaust? I don't think so. Are left-of-center Europeans less educated? I do not think so either.
"it is historically quite common for members of a society to identify the evil that preoccupies them and to conflate that evil with Jews, then declare that acting against evil means acting against Jews"
The issue is real and I don't mean to minimize it but we should recognize that for most of America, Jews are a non-issue. I grew up in a community of ~100,000 with very few Jews and way fewer I had any idea they were Jewish. In college there were more but still no issue. Grad school a bit less. In my dept there was a fair bit of animosity towards Asians and some complaints from blacks whom nobody seemed to treat poorly or even had a negative thought about.
Anyway, besides probably kkk-types and prisons, I think most animosity towards Jews is pretty localized to a few urban areas and a smallish minority of college campuses.
Sadly, many discussions on the constitutional mechanisms created to constrain democracy are interpreted to mean that the person saying that is anti-democratic or pro-autocratic. A few years ago, a post on this blog inspired me to write my grad school thesis on how these mechanisms (the Senate, the early powers held by state legislatures, the Supreme Court after Marbury, the Electoral College, etc.) encouraged elite competition and, therefore, contributed to the early United States' progression towards an open-access order using the framework from North, Wallis, and Weingast.
The irony is that demagogic figures in countries with a strong rule of law who desire to push their societies back toward the natural state (limited-access order) usually do so through popular or direct democratic means. The far left and far right in Europe are good examples. The best counterargument that I've seen to the NWW framework would be the neo-reactionary one that developed countries outside the West with high technocratic competence manage to be prosperous and modestly protective of isonomy while being only marginally democratic with limited elite competition at the political level. The primary examples being Singapore, Japan, Taiwan (under the KMT), and Hong Kong (pre-2019).
"[Political parties] have abandoned their core purpose (which is to win general elections on behalf of their coalitions) and their core work (which is to select winning candidates for office)."
It's not that the parties have abandoned their core purpose. The party organizations have been essentially dismantled by the progressive reforms of the nominating process, especially the replacement of party caucuses (smoke-filled rooms) by primaries in most places, for most offices. I call this new system "political entrepreneurialism". The parties are organizational shells used by the candidates, and largely controlled by the candidates. Especially at the national level.
There were certainly ugly aspects to the old system, and unelected party bosses could exercise far too much control, especially at municipal and county levels. But they did want to get electable candidates.
It's not clear to me that "parties" are interested in either winning election of governing in the interests of their voters.
Party insiders on the democrat side would go with far left weirdoes, that's what they wanted to do in 2020 until voters rebuffed them with Biden (the subsequently succeeded in making the Biden administration hard left because he's a senile caretaker).
Party insiders in the GOP wanted to continue neoconservativism, including making another Bush the front runner. Bush won elections, but he was a disaster for governance, and successors like McCain and Romney also lost their elections. Trump was the only Republican candidate in 2016 that said Iraq was a mistake!
You act like parties want to win elections and want to govern well. But not really. That isn't how they act. They act like corrupt ideologues who would like to win elections without changing who they are or how they govern. The entire point of the primary system is to reject that.
"You act like parties want to win elections and want to govern well."
That's not my point at all. I think the parties (at the national level) don't exist, except as organizational shells to be used by the candidates. Some state and city parties definitely want to win elections. I'm not sure they want to govern well, except to the extent that "delivering for the people who put them there" counts as governing well.
We had a system rife with unsavory deals, insider self-dealing, cronyism, pandering to organized interests, and corruption. We've replaced it with a system prone to ideological extremism, pandering to organized interests, and rudderless politics.
To quote a great economist: There are no solutions - only tradeoffs.
Do you think people didn't pander to ideology and organized interest in the smoke filled room era?
Primaries came about in many ways because parties ignored their voters to disastrous results. The Democratic Party ignored its voters on Vietnam, with disastrous results. That's why we have primaries today.
I think both parties were less ideologically extreme, and less polarized, before about 1980. That may be a holdover from the days when parties weren't ideologically aligned the way they are now.
As far as organized interests, I specifically pointed out that both approaches pander(ed) to organized interest. That is unavoidable in politics. The weakness of progressives is that they imagine technocratic experts will govern to reign in the organized interests. The weakness of conservatives is that they imagine their organized interests have universal support.
Good question, I wish I knew. The problem seems to me to be that the primaries are dominated by the extremes of both parties. I have seen it suggested that an open primary system (that is, anyone can vote in whichever primary they want) would help with that. I'm not crazy about that idea, but maybe it's worth trying?
That sounds a lot like California's "jungle primary" - the primary narrows the field down to the top 2 vote-getting candidates, regardless of party. I can't tell that California has better candidates, or more reasonable elections, or better governance than the other states.
The most obvious of those would be proportional representation based on share of votes, with representatives chosen from party lists. This would certainly strengthen party organizations. I'm not sure what other advantages it would have. Certainly, it wouldn't change much about the way we elect presidents, unless we switch to a parliamentary system.
This is a non-partisan book that describes the evolution / dismantling of mechanisms that incentivized the "good parts" of politics in the past. It's written through a business lens, as if a corporate monopoly were forming via regulatory capture.
While there are many incremental steps, they identify two plausible reforms that could result in improved candidates: (1) Open Primaries & (2) Ranked choice voting.
In uncontested elections, open primaries allows all voters to help choose the candidate instead of the most extreme voters (registered party members who vote in primaries). Ranked choice voting allows 3rd parties a chance and has been already instituted in a few smaller states to good effect.
I understand the appeal of open primaries and ranked choice voting. Some states already have these.
Some partisans urge their "team" to vote in the other party's primary, voting for the least electable candidate, to improve their own chances. I'm not sure this is an improvement on anything.
For ranked choice, I've read that some states are trying it. Can you tell me the "good effects?" How have things improved since institution of ranked choice?
I'm skeptical that such a voting organization would cause a problem in practice. In uncontested elections, the primary is the de facto general election, and non-party affiliates would still be incentivized to choose the candidate most palatable to them. See California as an example for how crazy you can go while still being guaranteed to win the general. Also, the idea that there is a large enough organization to convince people to vote against their interests seems a priori unlikely to me. Not only is there no evidence to support it, but there is evidence AGAINST it -- some states do not require party registration to vote in the primary, and the states that DO require it make it an easy checkbox that can be done online. I've changed affiliation multiple times so that I could vote in the relevant primary, since most places I've lived were uncontested.
Also, I left this out, but the book does recommend "Final Five" primaries instead of open primaries. The idea is that all candidates are one ballot regardless of affiliation, and all citizens are able to vote for their favorite. The top 5 vote-getters advance to the general election. This would handle your concern as well.
> How have things improved since institution of ranked choice?
According to the advocacy organization, here are two benefits that Alaska has seen:
1. When used in the primary, ballots cast for candidates which have dropped out still carry weight. 10% of Voters which had Bernie as their first choice, despite him dropping out before election day, had their votes transferred to their second choice candidate (mostly Biden). That's a lot of votes that would have otherwise been ignored.
2. When used in the general election, candidates win by appealing to cross-partisans, not by playing to their team. A while back I saw a more in depth article supporting the claim that this moderated the governorship. IIRC it was something along the lines of "The moderate Trump-skeptical Republican candidate managed to win, while previously we would have expected the (scare quotes) farther right (end scare quotes) to have won".
I don't think it's been tried for long enough or at large enough scale to have a strong empirical case one way or another, but the theoretical case seems pretty straightforward to me and early results seem directionally plausible to support that.
I've felt for awhile that normal people, and even dare I say* - potentially attractive candidates at the state lege level - do not seem to be ascending the ladder. The ladder is not functioning.
*My husband met with a guy a couple sessions ago, can't recall his name. Hispanic, or partly - anyway - Spanish surname. State rep or senator from a border county. Sane and quick on the uptake, not an ideologue. Shiny credentials, I believe. Probably looks good in cowboy boots. And yet all those qualities probably mean you will never hear about him further.
If Matti Friedman did not know about antisemitism he was asleep in history class or Hebrew school(if he went). This applies to any group who seems to be successful.
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
Do we observe sustained institutional deterioration for the whole historical period (since the Ancient Aegypcians)? If not, the institutional decline process identified by de Jasay is counterbalanced by other processes.
I think that is a good point. When institutions are perpetual, or nearly so, bad institutions drive out good. When institutions are allowed to die the bad institutions crumble once they get too dysfunctional. The former is exemplified by government and very large corporations, the latter by small businesses. The middle seems to be occupied by non-profits, which can get terribly corrupted but continue to get supporting funds despite not doing what they are supposed to do.
Yuval Levin from his perch at AEI, Neocon elite central, sniffs at President Trump: "psychologically unfit." He makes no argument, simply presumes that his readers will nod in acquiescence. Evidently he is blind to why his disdained subject has such great political appeal among his fellow citizens. What good is a pundit who can't bring any degree of empathy for them in his analysis?
"Now we have arrived at an election in which one party’s candidate is psychologically unfit to be president, the other’s is physically and mentally unfit to be president, and both are intensely unpopular. Will that be enough to hammer home the lesson that what the parties are doing working?"
I'm one who has never liked either candidate. I don't know what to say about Trump. I wish Haley or someone else could have beat him. Of all the Democratic candidates in 2020, Biden was the only one I was sure I could vote for if the alternative was who it was. If any of the others had won the nomination I'd probably have sat out, maybe even voted for Trump. I don't see how the parties can fix any of that.
A guy a lot smarter than me once said "Politics is downstream from culture."
I think there isn't a whole lot our political parties can do to force some kind of change that would create 'better' candidates, starting with the fact that 'better' is in the eye of the beholder. Taking Trump specifically, he won the nomination in both 2016 and 2020 while being opposed by well funded and well known opposing candidates in a process that was well defined and produced candidates that were considered acceptable in the past. I understand that people like to point to various variables in both years, such as the tone of mass media coverage of his campaign, but those things aren't unique historically and to me don't seem to be something that parties themselves can do much about. I guess what I'm saying is that Mencken was right saying democracy is people getting what they want, and getting it good and hard. Until the culture that has developed over the last two or three decades changes I don't think we're going to see a change in our political culture. (The corollary to that is what has changed one way is likely to change again in time.)
It seems to me that the assertion that America has no legitimacy, that it was tainted in its origins, that there never was a shared culture (we didn't invent rock and roll, nah) because that would be to admit that things weren't so bad as they *need to have been* -- etc. etc. has led to --
not discarding the culture and having a vacuum with no culture, full of pregnant utopian possibilities
-- but rather defaulting to the lowest sort of trashy culture, partly because it was the only thing left that we could laugh at.
But it's no longer a joke. It's seeped into everything.
I disagree on Haley but I agree that Biden was the best candidate the Dems had in 2020 and voters forced it on "the party" who wanted someone worse. For the most part "The Party" got its way in the actual Biden administration as compared to what many voters wanted out of him and how he sold 2020.
"The Party" also choose Kamala Harris as VP because black woman even though voters hated her so it got what it deserved.
I’m sorry, this claim that voters forced Biden on the party is preposterously laughable and the opposite of what happened
After Bernie did so well in Iowa an NH, Dem party insiders forced out everyone (except Elizabeth Warren, who wouldn’t budge) after James Clyburn’s endorsement helped Biden win the South Carolina primary, to ensure that Bernie not be the party’s nominee.
All other claims about what happened are false revisionist history.
But the voters (especially black voters) rejected this and choose Biden.
Having recognized that voters (especially black) choose Biden (as they did in 2016 with Hillary) the Dem establishment (and the candidates understanding their situation) bowed out.
Let's say the primary had proceeded. With the backing of black voters and with white voters split by a field of progressive candidates, Biden still would have gotten the nomination. A more united white electorate failed to stop Hillary in 2016. All that continuing the campaign would have done is tear the party apart for the same result.
At the end of the day white prog voters want all sorts of nonsense. Black voters just want more affirmative action and gibsmethat. They know how to ethnic bloc vote for one person on pragmatic transactional grounds.
Black voters in one state chose Biden based on a strong endorsement from a local Black politician.
Then the Dem party “forced” everyone but Elizabeth Warren out of the race after NC so that Bernie wouldn’t get the nomination. And Warren staying in actually hurt Bernie’s cause rather than help it.
Nothing you wrote changes those facts.
Claiming 2020 was “the voters” forcing Biden onto the Dem elite insiders is preposterous.
That’s fine. I’m not saying for sure who would have won.
The point is that the Dem elite insiders got together to force multiple people out of the race after NC to smooth the path for Biden, to minimize the chance that Bernie would win.
You are probably right not to understand that claim or at least not agree. I don't agree with the mentally unfit claim about Biden but what I most strongly don't understand is saying he is physically unfit. Because he is a tentative walker? Takes naps like Reagan did?
And captures so well how some old people are as nearly* clueless as they started out, while others are the kind of people whose thoughts you seek out, and whose utterances you want to write down.
*Still, under-emphasized, even with somebody who's chiefly good, really good, at being mediocre and thus is always (up until recently anyway) at his best (RIP Michael Corcoran, from whom I stole that line): Biden was born in 1942. Not even a Boomer. For many voters, the commonsense binary of old person/young person probably came into play. I didn't have anything to do with Dem primary voting in 2020, but I remember thinking: Biden's the answer just by virtue of his having been born and lived some of his life through a non-crazy era, and having known people alive in that time. And I think if he still had his faculties/prerogative, he might have made better decisions about the border, for instance. But I am sure he's putty in the hands of his people. He seems like he's steering the ship on foreign policy, though - Israel especially. And the reason for that seems plain to me - the young people in the administration (those 200 trans people) don't care a fig about the actual world at large, so he's given his head on that.
Levin's criticism of Republican elites is unconvincing. In 2014-2016 Republican elites were willing to attack Trump. The reason they don't do that anymore is that Trump beat them. Republican voters soundly rejected the traditional party and chose Trump.
Republican elites lost the party because they failed as politicians. They could not convince voters that their vision for the party was better than that of Trump. Until that somehow changes, the future of the party is Trump and Trumpism.
What deficiency in his education is Friedman deploring (his post is paywalled)? What is the “this” in “this will happen again in your lifetime”? If it’s the Holocaust, that’s ‘way too pessimistic; if it is scattered anti-Semitism, the future tense is inappropriate—it should be the timeless present.
Maybe what he wasn’t taught is that anti-Semitism will sometimes wax as well as sometimes wane. Fair enough; but it still seems to me that waning will largely prevail in the future.
I can't see past paywall either, but if I could design a curriculum it would perhaps not confine itself to the experience of Jewish people in the 20th century as is currently the case in American public education (hence the appeal of and audience for the kitschy, faux-literary novels the writer mentions) but would attempt to describe a wave of murderous ideology all around the same time across (parts of) Western Europe, across Eastern Europe and Russia, and of course large parts of Asia.
“Over time, activists who try to solve social problems will be driven out by activists whose primary motive is to remain in the spotlight,” which they will do by exploiting Social Desirability Bias—a basic concept in sociology (compare: Price Discrimination in economics).
This post might be the most inane yet pernicious doublethink I've yet to see on here (I know, I know, getting angry on the internet about an ignorant person...).
The Israeli right wing government, its worse government ever, did many bad things - towards its own citizens. It actually gave more money to the Hamas.
Suggesting that Jihadis murdering and raping is the fault of their target's government is really the height of doublethink.
War, especially when you are the one attacked, is not mass murder, that too is doublethink - I would assume you think the US perpetrated mass murder against the German people in WWII, and that Ukraine is perpetrating mass murder against the Russians (and maybe against themselves, "they should just give up and stop the bloodshed").
War is an accumulation of casualties over time in a usually (I would say most of the time) futile attempt to gain some sort of political leverage. War conducted in an urban setting is all the more deadly, a fact that no one has yet managed to overcome.
Calling war mass murder is doublethink because it conflates different things into one meaning (what Orwell called newspeak, to further highlight how 2024 can't be talked about without him), thereby losing the nuance and the ability to rationally think, in this case removing the antecedent "why is there a war" - apparently the correct doublethink is to always blame the stronger side in a war, regardless of who launched the war and therefore led to the bloodshed.
As for our current point - even a government made up of 120 Abraham Lincolns with a halo above their heads and cherubim floating nearby would have retaliated to the Hamas in a similar fashion to Israel, and even then people would still have blamed the Jews (if you don't know your history - read up what people wrote about the Rothschilds during the Civil War).
“and it looks like academics, entrepreneurs etc. are specifically targeted.”
Do you have *any* credible evidence for this? Please document and post it if you do; you would likely win a Nobel prize from the very left-leaning voters for those prizes.
And how do you not grok that the SOLE reason that more civilians might be killed than combatants is that Hamas uses human shields and ACTIVELY. DESIRES. THEIR. DEATHS. as its primary tactic?
I agree that leftist whites don't blame Jews, they blame Israel. I disagree with them on that, but I find Jews trying to conflate anti-semitism with what is clearly just anti-whiteness being applied to Jews disingenuous. The Palestinians are the underdogs and have darker skin, and progressives worship the underdog no matter how awful they are.
Non-Whites are actually anti-Jew. The decision of progressive diaspora Jews to support the importation of lots of browns hostile to themselves will go down as a really stupid idea.
Pournelle's Iron Law of Bureaucracy states that in any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:
First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization.
Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself.
The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.
Matti Friedman basically says that Holocaust education has failed. He does not provide exact recommendations on why and how Holocaust education should be changed, but he hints that it often centers around the question of how Jews were murdered, rather than addressing why Jews were murdered. I regularly read Israeli media, and the topic of why Holocaust education has failed is a common one. Different articles offer different answers and solutions, but it is a popular topic in Israel. It is a dead end.
I am speaking from a European perspective, and in European countries, there is a clear trend: right-of-center parties tend to be more pro-Israel, while left-of-center parties tend to be more pro-Palestine. I come from Eastern Europe, where the public and politicians are, on average, more pro-Israel than in Western Europe. And Eastern European countries are generally more right-leaning than Western European countries in all dimensions: social issues, economic issues, and foreign policy.
General picture applies to all of Europe: the right-of-center is more pro-Israel, and the left-of-center is more pro-Palestine.
If Friedman and others are correct that there is a problem with Holocaust education, they should also explain why there is such a clear left-right divide on this issue. Are right-of-center Europeans better educated about the Holocaust? I don't think so. Are left-of-center Europeans less educated? I do not think so either.
"it is historically quite common for members of a society to identify the evil that preoccupies them and to conflate that evil with Jews, then declare that acting against evil means acting against Jews"
The issue is real and I don't mean to minimize it but we should recognize that for most of America, Jews are a non-issue. I grew up in a community of ~100,000 with very few Jews and way fewer I had any idea they were Jewish. In college there were more but still no issue. Grad school a bit less. In my dept there was a fair bit of animosity towards Asians and some complaints from blacks whom nobody seemed to treat poorly or even had a negative thought about.
Anyway, besides probably kkk-types and prisons, I think most animosity towards Jews is pretty localized to a few urban areas and a smallish minority of college campuses.
Sadly, many discussions on the constitutional mechanisms created to constrain democracy are interpreted to mean that the person saying that is anti-democratic or pro-autocratic. A few years ago, a post on this blog inspired me to write my grad school thesis on how these mechanisms (the Senate, the early powers held by state legislatures, the Supreme Court after Marbury, the Electoral College, etc.) encouraged elite competition and, therefore, contributed to the early United States' progression towards an open-access order using the framework from North, Wallis, and Weingast.
The irony is that demagogic figures in countries with a strong rule of law who desire to push their societies back toward the natural state (limited-access order) usually do so through popular or direct democratic means. The far left and far right in Europe are good examples. The best counterargument that I've seen to the NWW framework would be the neo-reactionary one that developed countries outside the West with high technocratic competence manage to be prosperous and modestly protective of isonomy while being only marginally democratic with limited elite competition at the political level. The primary examples being Singapore, Japan, Taiwan (under the KMT), and Hong Kong (pre-2019).
"[Political parties] have abandoned their core purpose (which is to win general elections on behalf of their coalitions) and their core work (which is to select winning candidates for office)."
It's not that the parties have abandoned their core purpose. The party organizations have been essentially dismantled by the progressive reforms of the nominating process, especially the replacement of party caucuses (smoke-filled rooms) by primaries in most places, for most offices. I call this new system "political entrepreneurialism". The parties are organizational shells used by the candidates, and largely controlled by the candidates. Especially at the national level.
There were certainly ugly aspects to the old system, and unelected party bosses could exercise far too much control, especially at municipal and county levels. But they did want to get electable candidates.
It's not clear to me that "parties" are interested in either winning election of governing in the interests of their voters.
Party insiders on the democrat side would go with far left weirdoes, that's what they wanted to do in 2020 until voters rebuffed them with Biden (the subsequently succeeded in making the Biden administration hard left because he's a senile caretaker).
Party insiders in the GOP wanted to continue neoconservativism, including making another Bush the front runner. Bush won elections, but he was a disaster for governance, and successors like McCain and Romney also lost their elections. Trump was the only Republican candidate in 2016 that said Iraq was a mistake!
You act like parties want to win elections and want to govern well. But not really. That isn't how they act. They act like corrupt ideologues who would like to win elections without changing who they are or how they govern. The entire point of the primary system is to reject that.
"You act like parties want to win elections and want to govern well."
That's not my point at all. I think the parties (at the national level) don't exist, except as organizational shells to be used by the candidates. Some state and city parties definitely want to win elections. I'm not sure they want to govern well, except to the extent that "delivering for the people who put them there" counts as governing well.
We had a system rife with unsavory deals, insider self-dealing, cronyism, pandering to organized interests, and corruption. We've replaced it with a system prone to ideological extremism, pandering to organized interests, and rudderless politics.
To quote a great economist: There are no solutions - only tradeoffs.
Do you think people didn't pander to ideology and organized interest in the smoke filled room era?
Primaries came about in many ways because parties ignored their voters to disastrous results. The Democratic Party ignored its voters on Vietnam, with disastrous results. That's why we have primaries today.
I think both parties were less ideologically extreme, and less polarized, before about 1980. That may be a holdover from the days when parties weren't ideologically aligned the way they are now.
As far as organized interests, I specifically pointed out that both approaches pander(ed) to organized interest. That is unavoidable in politics. The weakness of progressives is that they imagine technocratic experts will govern to reign in the organized interests. The weakness of conservatives is that they imagine their organized interests have universal support.
I agree. It seems that what we really need is to reform the primary-election system. Unfortunately, I don't see any indication of that happening.
What would be your idea of a reform? I haven't been able to think of an alternative, other than a return to the insider-controlled system of the past.
Good question, I wish I knew. The problem seems to me to be that the primaries are dominated by the extremes of both parties. I have seen it suggested that an open primary system (that is, anyone can vote in whichever primary they want) would help with that. I'm not crazy about that idea, but maybe it's worth trying?
Try looking up “alternatives to first past the post voting “
That sounds a lot like California's "jungle primary" - the primary narrows the field down to the top 2 vote-getting candidates, regardless of party. I can't tell that California has better candidates, or more reasonable elections, or better governance than the other states.
Instant runoff voting. No need for stupid primaries.
Part of the problem is probably that only the most avid partisans bother to participate in the primaries. That needs to change, somehow...
That seems good. Surely here I would not be alone in my experience that - the *more* into political “party” stuff, the dumber the person.
That may not always have been true but for now, it would be great to demote those people from decision making.
Try looking up “alternatives to first past the post voting “
The most obvious of those would be proportional representation based on share of votes, with representatives chosen from party lists. This would certainly strengthen party organizations. I'm not sure what other advantages it would have. Certainly, it wouldn't change much about the way we elect presidents, unless we switch to a parliamentary system.
That’s ok for multiple position races, but I was thinking more of ranked choice voting for single seat races.
This is a non-partisan book that describes the evolution / dismantling of mechanisms that incentivized the "good parts" of politics in the past. It's written through a business lens, as if a corporate monopoly were forming via regulatory capture.
https://gehlporter.com/
While there are many incremental steps, they identify two plausible reforms that could result in improved candidates: (1) Open Primaries & (2) Ranked choice voting.
In uncontested elections, open primaries allows all voters to help choose the candidate instead of the most extreme voters (registered party members who vote in primaries). Ranked choice voting allows 3rd parties a chance and has been already instituted in a few smaller states to good effect.
I understand the appeal of open primaries and ranked choice voting. Some states already have these.
Some partisans urge their "team" to vote in the other party's primary, voting for the least electable candidate, to improve their own chances. I'm not sure this is an improvement on anything.
For ranked choice, I've read that some states are trying it. Can you tell me the "good effects?" How have things improved since institution of ranked choice?
> voting for the least electable candidate
I'm skeptical that such a voting organization would cause a problem in practice. In uncontested elections, the primary is the de facto general election, and non-party affiliates would still be incentivized to choose the candidate most palatable to them. See California as an example for how crazy you can go while still being guaranteed to win the general. Also, the idea that there is a large enough organization to convince people to vote against their interests seems a priori unlikely to me. Not only is there no evidence to support it, but there is evidence AGAINST it -- some states do not require party registration to vote in the primary, and the states that DO require it make it an easy checkbox that can be done online. I've changed affiliation multiple times so that I could vote in the relevant primary, since most places I've lived were uncontested.
Also, I left this out, but the book does recommend "Final Five" primaries instead of open primaries. The idea is that all candidates are one ballot regardless of affiliation, and all citizens are able to vote for their favorite. The top 5 vote-getters advance to the general election. This would handle your concern as well.
> How have things improved since institution of ranked choice?
According to the advocacy organization, here are two benefits that Alaska has seen:
1. When used in the primary, ballots cast for candidates which have dropped out still carry weight. 10% of Voters which had Bernie as their first choice, despite him dropping out before election day, had their votes transferred to their second choice candidate (mostly Biden). That's a lot of votes that would have otherwise been ignored.
2. When used in the general election, candidates win by appealing to cross-partisans, not by playing to their team. A while back I saw a more in depth article supporting the claim that this moderated the governorship. IIRC it was something along the lines of "The moderate Trump-skeptical Republican candidate managed to win, while previously we would have expected the (scare quotes) farther right (end scare quotes) to have won".
https://fairvote.org/alaskarcv2020/
https://fairvote.org/alaskas-ranked-choice-voting-winners-earn-strong-mandates-and-reflect-the-states-political-diversity/
I don't think it's been tried for long enough or at large enough scale to have a strong empirical case one way or another, but the theoretical case seems pretty straightforward to me and early results seem directionally plausible to support that.
I've felt for awhile that normal people, and even dare I say* - potentially attractive candidates at the state lege level - do not seem to be ascending the ladder. The ladder is not functioning.
*My husband met with a guy a couple sessions ago, can't recall his name. Hispanic, or partly - anyway - Spanish surname. State rep or senator from a border county. Sane and quick on the uptake, not an ideologue. Shiny credentials, I believe. Probably looks good in cowboy boots. And yet all those qualities probably mean you will never hear about him further.
If Matti Friedman did not know about antisemitism he was asleep in history class or Hebrew school(if he went). This applies to any group who seems to be successful.
"Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.”
― Robert Heinlein
Do we observe sustained institutional deterioration for the whole historical period (since the Ancient Aegypcians)? If not, the institutional decline process identified by de Jasay is counterbalanced by other processes.
Creative destruction and hostile takeover. Emphasis on the hostile and the destruction.
Ibn Khaldun! In fact sometimes, institutions are able to keep internal competition for some time.
I think that is a good point. When institutions are perpetual, or nearly so, bad institutions drive out good. When institutions are allowed to die the bad institutions crumble once they get too dysfunctional. The former is exemplified by government and very large corporations, the latter by small businesses. The middle seems to be occupied by non-profits, which can get terribly corrupted but continue to get supporting funds despite not doing what they are supposed to do.
Yuval Levin from his perch at AEI, Neocon elite central, sniffs at President Trump: "psychologically unfit." He makes no argument, simply presumes that his readers will nod in acquiescence. Evidently he is blind to why his disdained subject has such great political appeal among his fellow citizens. What good is a pundit who can't bring any degree of empathy for them in his analysis?
And neither for the 81+ million (!) who voted for President Biden. The article shows no degree of empathy at all to Biden voters.
Untrue.
Biden wasn’t obviously senile in 2020; he is now.
"Now we have arrived at an election in which one party’s candidate is psychologically unfit to be president, the other’s is physically and mentally unfit to be president, and both are intensely unpopular. Will that be enough to hammer home the lesson that what the parties are doing working?"
I'm one who has never liked either candidate. I don't know what to say about Trump. I wish Haley or someone else could have beat him. Of all the Democratic candidates in 2020, Biden was the only one I was sure I could vote for if the alternative was who it was. If any of the others had won the nomination I'd probably have sat out, maybe even voted for Trump. I don't see how the parties can fix any of that.
A guy a lot smarter than me once said "Politics is downstream from culture."
I think there isn't a whole lot our political parties can do to force some kind of change that would create 'better' candidates, starting with the fact that 'better' is in the eye of the beholder. Taking Trump specifically, he won the nomination in both 2016 and 2020 while being opposed by well funded and well known opposing candidates in a process that was well defined and produced candidates that were considered acceptable in the past. I understand that people like to point to various variables in both years, such as the tone of mass media coverage of his campaign, but those things aren't unique historically and to me don't seem to be something that parties themselves can do much about. I guess what I'm saying is that Mencken was right saying democracy is people getting what they want, and getting it good and hard. Until the culture that has developed over the last two or three decades changes I don't think we're going to see a change in our political culture. (The corollary to that is what has changed one way is likely to change again in time.)
It seems to me that the assertion that America has no legitimacy, that it was tainted in its origins, that there never was a shared culture (we didn't invent rock and roll, nah) because that would be to admit that things weren't so bad as they *need to have been* -- etc. etc. has led to --
not discarding the culture and having a vacuum with no culture, full of pregnant utopian possibilities
-- but rather defaulting to the lowest sort of trashy culture, partly because it was the only thing left that we could laugh at.
But it's no longer a joke. It's seeped into everything.
I disagree on Haley but I agree that Biden was the best candidate the Dems had in 2020 and voters forced it on "the party" who wanted someone worse. For the most part "The Party" got its way in the actual Biden administration as compared to what many voters wanted out of him and how he sold 2020.
"The Party" also choose Kamala Harris as VP because black woman even though voters hated her so it got what it deserved.
I’m sorry, this claim that voters forced Biden on the party is preposterously laughable and the opposite of what happened
After Bernie did so well in Iowa an NH, Dem party insiders forced out everyone (except Elizabeth Warren, who wouldn’t budge) after James Clyburn’s endorsement helped Biden win the South Carolina primary, to ensure that Bernie not be the party’s nominee.
All other claims about what happened are false revisionist history.
The Dem insiders wanted a prog candidate.
But the voters (especially black voters) rejected this and choose Biden.
Having recognized that voters (especially black) choose Biden (as they did in 2016 with Hillary) the Dem establishment (and the candidates understanding their situation) bowed out.
Let's say the primary had proceeded. With the backing of black voters and with white voters split by a field of progressive candidates, Biden still would have gotten the nomination. A more united white electorate failed to stop Hillary in 2016. All that continuing the campaign would have done is tear the party apart for the same result.
At the end of the day white prog voters want all sorts of nonsense. Black voters just want more affirmative action and gibsmethat. They know how to ethnic bloc vote for one person on pragmatic transactional grounds.
Black voters in one state chose Biden based on a strong endorsement from a local Black politician.
Then the Dem party “forced” everyone but Elizabeth Warren out of the race after NC so that Bernie wouldn’t get the nomination. And Warren staying in actually hurt Bernie’s cause rather than help it.
Nothing you wrote changes those facts.
Claiming 2020 was “the voters” forcing Biden onto the Dem elite insiders is preposterous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_Party_presidential_primaries
The south (blacks) is Hillary and the North (whites) is Bernie.
Blacks are a huge portion of Dem primary voters and they don't divide their votes like whites.
That’s fine. I’m not saying for sure who would have won.
The point is that the Dem elite insiders got together to force multiple people out of the race after NC to smooth the path for Biden, to minimize the chance that Bernie would win.
Denying this is absurd
"psychologically unfit“
You are probably right not to understand that claim or at least not agree. I don't agree with the mentally unfit claim about Biden but what I most strongly don't understand is saying he is physically unfit. Because he is a tentative walker? Takes naps like Reagan did?
That was great.
And captures so well how some old people are as nearly* clueless as they started out, while others are the kind of people whose thoughts you seek out, and whose utterances you want to write down.
*Still, under-emphasized, even with somebody who's chiefly good, really good, at being mediocre and thus is always (up until recently anyway) at his best (RIP Michael Corcoran, from whom I stole that line): Biden was born in 1942. Not even a Boomer. For many voters, the commonsense binary of old person/young person probably came into play. I didn't have anything to do with Dem primary voting in 2020, but I remember thinking: Biden's the answer just by virtue of his having been born and lived some of his life through a non-crazy era, and having known people alive in that time. And I think if he still had his faculties/prerogative, he might have made better decisions about the border, for instance. But I am sure he's putty in the hands of his people. He seems like he's steering the ship on foreign policy, though - Israel especially. And the reason for that seems plain to me - the young people in the administration (those 200 trans people) don't care a fig about the actual world at large, so he's given his head on that.
Re: Marty Friedman
> at no point in my education did anyone ever sit me down and say something like [antisemitism is and always will be]
All this means is that it seems his own parents were shielding themselves from the truth and so gave him a false view of the world.
Levin's criticism of Republican elites is unconvincing. In 2014-2016 Republican elites were willing to attack Trump. The reason they don't do that anymore is that Trump beat them. Republican voters soundly rejected the traditional party and chose Trump.
Republican elites lost the party because they failed as politicians. They could not convince voters that their vision for the party was better than that of Trump. Until that somehow changes, the future of the party is Trump and Trumpism.
What deficiency in his education is Friedman deploring (his post is paywalled)? What is the “this” in “this will happen again in your lifetime”? If it’s the Holocaust, that’s ‘way too pessimistic; if it is scattered anti-Semitism, the future tense is inappropriate—it should be the timeless present.
Maybe what he wasn’t taught is that anti-Semitism will sometimes wax as well as sometimes wane. Fair enough; but it still seems to me that waning will largely prevail in the future.
I can't see past paywall either, but if I could design a curriculum it would perhaps not confine itself to the experience of Jewish people in the 20th century as is currently the case in American public education (hence the appeal of and audience for the kitschy, faux-literary novels the writer mentions) but would attempt to describe a wave of murderous ideology all around the same time across (parts of) Western Europe, across Eastern Europe and Russia, and of course large parts of Asia.
“Over time, activists who try to solve social problems will be driven out by activists whose primary motive is to remain in the spotlight,” which they will do by exploiting Social Desirability Bias—a basic concept in sociology (compare: Price Discrimination in economics).
This post might be the most inane yet pernicious doublethink I've yet to see on here (I know, I know, getting angry on the internet about an ignorant person...).
The Israeli right wing government, its worse government ever, did many bad things - towards its own citizens. It actually gave more money to the Hamas.
Suggesting that Jihadis murdering and raping is the fault of their target's government is really the height of doublethink.
I will deign one reply.
War, especially when you are the one attacked, is not mass murder, that too is doublethink - I would assume you think the US perpetrated mass murder against the German people in WWII, and that Ukraine is perpetrating mass murder against the Russians (and maybe against themselves, "they should just give up and stop the bloodshed").
War is an accumulation of casualties over time in a usually (I would say most of the time) futile attempt to gain some sort of political leverage. War conducted in an urban setting is all the more deadly, a fact that no one has yet managed to overcome.
Calling war mass murder is doublethink because it conflates different things into one meaning (what Orwell called newspeak, to further highlight how 2024 can't be talked about without him), thereby losing the nuance and the ability to rationally think, in this case removing the antecedent "why is there a war" - apparently the correct doublethink is to always blame the stronger side in a war, regardless of who launched the war and therefore led to the bloodshed.
As for our current point - even a government made up of 120 Abraham Lincolns with a halo above their heads and cherubim floating nearby would have retaliated to the Hamas in a similar fashion to Israel, and even then people would still have blamed the Jews (if you don't know your history - read up what people wrote about the Rothschilds during the Civil War).
“and it looks like academics, entrepreneurs etc. are specifically targeted.”
Do you have *any* credible evidence for this? Please document and post it if you do; you would likely win a Nobel prize from the very left-leaning voters for those prizes.
And how do you not grok that the SOLE reason that more civilians might be killed than combatants is that Hamas uses human shields and ACTIVELY. DESIRES. THEIR. DEATHS. as its primary tactic?
I agree that leftist whites don't blame Jews, they blame Israel. I disagree with them on that, but I find Jews trying to conflate anti-semitism with what is clearly just anti-whiteness being applied to Jews disingenuous. The Palestinians are the underdogs and have darker skin, and progressives worship the underdog no matter how awful they are.
Non-Whites are actually anti-Jew. The decision of progressive diaspora Jews to support the importation of lots of browns hostile to themselves will go down as a really stupid idea.
Agreed. When the Palestinians attacked on October 7th, the Israelis counterattacked. Crazy stuff. Who would do such a thing?
Insane. Why can't the Israelis just kill the guys wearing the Hamas uniforms?
This comment about who is supposedly targeted is beyond delusional.