Israel's internal security apparatus has the legal authority and is fully capable of identifying and finding each individual who crossed over the line into illegal intimidation, violence, etc. and making examples of them sufficiently severe to put a quick and firm end to that activity. It is choosing not to do so, when the activists are on the left.
Same goes for the US - consider the way BLM and Antifa protesters get treated with kid gloves and receive exorbitant sums in sham "settlements" while the January 6 protesters were easily tracked down, thrown into solitary confinement, and had the book thrown at them with sentences exceeding those handed out for homicide. No one on that side is going to "take to the streets" when they know for sure that's what is going to happen to them.
The truth is that all western-style developed countries now have at their disposal all the technological power of the Chinese panopticon surveillance state, it's just that their interest in using it against internal movements is highly selective.
"In an unhealthy culture elections are a war by other means". Well maybe but in a really unhealthy culture like Britain's, elections are a farce because:
a) the real power, the civil service, the courts and the quangos are permanently left wing.
And b) there effectively no longer is a conservative political party .
The Netanyahu government, (whatever it's troublesome fringe coalition partners ) is simply trying to head off the same thing happening in Israel. Good luck to them. Once the tendentious judiciary becomes unchallengeable Israel will be doomed.
I largely agree, although I would add that one doesn't know for sure that the surveillance state will be used against them in the specific case that they think they will win, or the outcome will be the same no matter whether they play the game or not. I don't generally expect right wing violence or protests in the US, not in the short term, but sufficient left wing violence might force it if people think "it is now, or never." At some point one wins and dismantles the surveillance state apparatus, or one is subject to it until it crumbles of its own accord.
There is no possible, successful "now or never" ad hoc reaction against a state like the US. The amount of preparation, organization, and resources required to have even the slightest possibility of victory are many orders of magnitude greater than anything any movement with an aim to replace the existing regime could even remotely hope to build without being noticed and preemptively crushed, mercilessly.
The problem is that in the breakdown of "law and order", people are focusing on the loss of order, which they can see but instead they should be panicking over the demise of "law" which they still do not appreciate, and even the Federalist Society has taken its eyes off the most essential ball of all.
"Three Felonies a Day" is bad enough when administered impartially and even incompetently and haphazardly. But when traditional discretion is brazenly abused into corrupt favoritism and prosecution is extremely selective - letting your caught-red-handed friends get away with murder while your enemies get the maximum for petty transgressions - then there is no "law" in the "equal justice under" sense, only power and domination.
This isn't a warning, it's an obituary. The state can maintain exactly as much order as it wants to. But it can't restore genuine widespread respect for the rule of law once the spell is broken and people stop living in the past and continuing to believe in an illusion.
I don't know about winning against the US. I was more thinking "winning the presidency and legislative branch, such that laws abolishing much of the state over reach/abuse of power apparatus can be enacted." I don't think starting from "new Constitution" is in the cards.
I am a bit too exhausted to really grasp your last three paragraphs. After some sleep I will apply some thought tomorrow. Your writing is always worth a good think!
The right is all about the rule of law. The fact that it no longer exist is so hard to believe that each person must experience his own come-to-Jesus moment.
Activists act, they do not think. Parents need to ridicule and dismiss activists as morons. Currently, activists are held in high regard, that needs to change.
I would put it differently. Activists operate in a world of conversion and intimidation far more than persuasion. Activism also attracts the morally disordered as they are insulated from consequences and bad behaviour is valorised. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4204827
I live in a very progressive area of Boston. Many of my neighbors consider themselves activists. They are not the street protesters you see destroying things. they are responsible home owning grownups that use twitter hashtags as a decision heuristic. Around 10 make their living off of activism - community organizers, speakers, etc.
The valorisation of activism leads to increased identification as activists. But a lot of activism is still toxic, even when done by home owning grown ups.
The leaders, yes. I do not consider them activists. Activists, the ones doing things, do not think. Have you ever asked an activist a question and received an intelligent well thought out answer that address 2nd and 3rd order consequences of the object of their activism? I haven’t.
They don't care, or they don't believe in those 2nd and 3rd order consequences. That is different from "not thinking". It is never wise to underestimate the enemy. In this case, reason is not a useful weapon.
The left organized violent riots in every major city across the USA in 2020 to hurt Trump. They looted and burned down stores and police departments in almost every major city throughout the US. Watch videos in May/June of protestors setting fires all around the White House, including St Johns Church. Remember large crowds tearing down fences and launching fireworks towards the white house. Remember, the mockery of Trump hiding in a bunker inside the White House with large mobs committing arson all over the White House? Remember the outrage of Trump's "photo op" visiting St John's Church that had been set on fire?
Remember when the left staged protest events aimed at physical intimidation at the homes of Tucker Carlson and Mitch McConnell and Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices? Remember when various Trump Staffers were physically harassed in public at restaurants. Left wing groups even set up groups to find leading Republican figures in public at restaurants to harass them.
Even before Trump was elected, protesters used violence to shut down rallies and boasted of that. Videos displayed Trump fans pelted with eggs. That's not lethal violence but that's real political violence and it was systemic and widespread. College campuses nation wide praised the protest movements and downplayed the violence. I sat in required courses at a flagship public university and listened to professors praise the protests and downplay violence. NPR gave positive coverage to a book "In Defense of Looting".
It's outrageous to see Kling downplay all of the above as "relatively peaceful", and then be outraged to see the exact same tactics deployed against groups that Kling is sympathetic with. Two wrongs don't make a right of course. I definitely oppose what Kling is describing. But it is hypocritical of Kling to accept these tactics when used against Trump and cry foul when the same thing happens to groups he is sympathetic with.
Next, the left used tactics of organized political violence in 2020 to win. The left weaponized instutitons, notably the intelligence agencies, to reduce/amplify narratives to benefit the Democratic Party. This is cheating and it worked and won the election for the Democrats. Kling recently posted that Trump is a loser and suggested other public figures insult him in public that way. But he's crying foul that the same tactics ultimately defeated the pro-Israel group he mentions.
Lastly, Trump and Trump's fans were very kind to Israel and supporters of Israel and that kindness wasn't reciprocated. Israel should make all the friends they can.
"In 2017, we had “The Resistance” and the “Pussy Hat” protests, which were relatively peaceful. In 2021, we had the January 6 protests, which were relatively disorganized. "
You forgot the big one in between, where the police danced the macarena while the antifa and BLM burned it all down in the name of Floyd. Remember when Trump was nearly color-revolutioned in Washington? The picture with the counter-sniper by his side as he walked to St John's church was powerful. Really a summer to remember.
Yes. I made the same point in a separate comment. But the left deliberately used tactics of violence to hurt Trump and that is arguably part of why they won 2020. And Kling downplays the violence brands it as "relatively peaceful", close to the official party line of "mostly peaceful" and ridicules Trump as a loser.
In 2016, Trump got 46.1% of the vote. The GOP got 49.1% in the House.
Trump -3%pts on the GOP House vote.
In 2020, Trump got 46.8% of the vote. The GOP got 47.2% in the House.
Trump -0.4% pts on the GOP House vote.
In 2016, Hillary got 48.2% of the vote. The Democrats got 48.0% in the House.
Hillary +0.2%pts on the Democrat House vote.
In 2020, Biden got 51.3% of the vote. The Democrats got 50.3% in the House.
Biden +1.0% pts on the Democrat House vote.
In 2016, Trump got 2.1% pts less than his opponent.
In 2020, Trump got 4.5% pts less than his opponent.
By any metric, Trump is an electorally weak candidate. My view is that any Republican would have beat Hillary in 2016, but by more than Trump did. What was remarkable about Trump is a whole string of counties that only vote for Republicans in landslide years voted for him. That makes him culturally significant.
It does not change that he is an electorally weak candidate.
Arnold has been saying for years that Trump was the only Republican who could have won in 2016 and is the only Republican who could lose in 2024. I have agreed with that. Your data here makes me question the 2016 piece, and the incredible weakness of Joe Biden makes me question the 2024 piece. For what it’s worth I still believe he was a stronger than average candidate in 2016 because he showed the Republicans that you can effectively fight the MSM if you stand up to them. Whoever wins 2024 is going to inherit a dumpster fire that has been raging for 8 years. I hope someone under the age of 70 wins and can take a good faith swing at the economic, social and institutional monsters that have grown out of control.
Any Republican in 2016 who got the House GOP vote would have won the Electoral College handily. The only postwar 3 term Administration was Reagan-Bush. I never believed Hillary was likely to replicate that feat.
Thanks for some good metrics, Lorenzo. But the 2020 election results are, in the 70 million mail in ballots, I believe around 2% garbage because of low signature rejection rates.
Trump’s 75 mln votes was more than a 12 mln increase from 2016. This is the single most important metric, tho the NeverTrump hate & demonization metrics are also true-and show the weaknesses of US Western Civ. The 2020 election was rigged against Trump, thus stolen, on semi-illegal censorship by … the M7 companies with Dem deep state orders.
Kling & most FIT apologists for the deep state election riggers don’t want to face the truth. It’s frightening, and should be outrageous, but confirmation bias allows rationalizations to assuage consciences.
Trump has already changed the Rep Party voters into being the not rich, but not poor, working class. The Rep donors don’t yet realize this.
Demonization leads towards violence, all against the violence need to oppose demonization, which Arnold does more than most, but less than optimal.
The obvious problem with all that is the increase in the House GOP vote over 2018. It is an odd sort of rigging when the person being rigged against increases his share of the vote and his Party gets a bigger increase (+2.4%pts). While the House vote for the Democrats fell even more (-3.1%pts).
Trump is simultaneously electorally weak and electorally strong.
The reason is the electoral collage!
The only way for the GOP to win a presidential election is to win the upper midwest working class whites. You can get a higher % of the popular vote and lost if you waste that popular vote on coastal professionals. That's what Romney did.
This is what happens when immigration makes the coasts completely uncompetitive.
Beyond that, if Romney won, would it have made a difference? Trump has his failings and might not be the answer, but I think the GOP voters were correct to recognize that electing GOPe candidates wasn't getting them what they wanted.
Barack Obama got 51.1% of the vote, Romney 47.2%. That was a losing result no matter how you spread it.
Yes, I absolutely agree that Trump has a cultural significance that other GOP actual or potential nominees did not have. He is still an electorally weak candidate and was not very good at translating rhetorical combativeness into useful policy.
Trump got 46.1% of the popular vote, less then Romney, and won. That's how the electoral college works.
Romney got 59% of the white vote in 2012. In 1980 Reagan got 56% of the white vote. But demographics did its thing, and so Reagen won a landslide and Romney lost.
It's the GOPs fault that immigrants flooded the coast, made it completely electorally uncompetitive, and left electoral college games in the Upper Midwest amongst dwindling whites as the only path to victory. It's a bad hand to play, but its the hand they have.
Trump won because his opponent failed to get a majority of the popular vote. When his opponent did, he lost.
Competitiveness among migrants is not inevitably a problem for centre-right Parties, as the LNP Coalition in Australia demonstrates. Though the pattern of migration does make a difference. US migration policy is much more socially corrosive than is Australia’s, even though we have a much higher rate of migration (as % of population).
I find it interesting that AK’s timeline of poltical violence at the end of his comments highlights Pussy Hat protests on the left and Jan 6 on the right to assert the disorganized nature of the violence. Neither were as sustained, violent or organized as ANTIFA and BLM whose actions are clearly violent, coordinated and nationwide and all on the left. There has not been anything comparable on the right. ANTIFA and BLM are everthing he fears and are widely accepted...on the left. The future is here and arrived some time ago. Why the blind spot? I find it amusing that AK holds out Weimar as the future when future is already here. Amusing because that is exactly how Weimar came about. History’s rhymes once again.
This is the result of selective prosecution: the courts are treating similarly situated political terrorists differently because the judges like some terrorists and dislike others. The problem with relying on this method to try to impose one vision on a divided society is really that all modern governments rely on speed, communication, surveillance, and training to use fairly small numbers of guys to discipline very large populations. The legitimacy of the state (which is a fancy way of saying the faith people have in the magic of its laws and institutions) makes up for the rest. If people stop believing in the magic, you have a serious Girardian problem. This type of tyranny corrodes the simple faith in government held by the people, and without that simple faith you do not get to enjoy peace and order.
Even though France held it together until the tanks rolled in, one of the major reasons why the French were incapable of "coming together" in a way that might have prevented the outcome was the level of division. The centrists in France did manage to maintain an illusion of cohesion until the end, but ultimately the whole right wing (center and extreme) went over to Moustache Man the moment it was feasible. This is one of the reasons why the military analysis of France's "strange defeat" is inadequate. The means was present but the will was lacking.
> ultimately the whole right wing (center and extreme) went over to Moustache Man the moment it was feasible
You forgot to mention that the whole left wing (and specifically the French Communists) did all it could to discourage the military and prevent resistance. Recall that USSR was Nazi Germany's sworn ally at that point!
That's a big theme in Shirer's book (the dysfunctional dynamic between the rightists like Action Francaise, the communists, and the feckless middle). He has big time center-left sympathies but he tells the story in exhaustive detail.
From what he writes, the French were in Spring 1939 struggling very hard to create an alliance with the Soviets to get them to guarantee Polish sovereignty (see 423-428 both in this archive.org edition and my print edition). The M-R pact in Aug. 1939 caught the cabinet flat-footed, because of course the Daladier government expected the Soviets to be on their side as it related to Poland. "Why Die for Danzig" was written by a socialist. Even though they did ban the Communist Party on 9/26, all that was far too late to really get the country to gel together. It's a ~1k page book, so it's tough to overview it in a blog comment.
With that out of the way, I think Israel and the US are on different paths. Netanyahu and the Right in Israel are actually growing in supporters, not declining like in the US. Israel isn't open to immigration except for Jewish ones, and the ones who want to live in Israel lean significantly to the right and the ones who are more fertile are much further to the right politically, too. The Left in Israel was only able gain a partial measure of power in the penultimate election because they finally made common cause with the Israeli Arab parties, but that wasn't enough to win a second election and Netanyahu returned to power. In my opinion, Netanyahu's mistake with regards to the judiciary was in not simply making the judges run for popular elections, too.
The J6 protests were only "disorganized" because they were infiltrated by hundreds of FBI agents provocateurs, who committed all the violence (except that done by police) in order to both smear the entire conservative movement and to frame the victims who are now political prisoners. This is what happened at "Unite the Right" as well. The message is that the Right can no longer hold peaceful demonstrations, because the Left-run FBI will always do these things. The FBI operation also purposely cheated VP Pence of his ability to object to the election fraud and have the election decided by the House of Representatives, which would have re-elected Trump. There is doubt as to whether Pence was going to do this anyway; but the point is that by blocking peaceful political protesters in a way that blames the victims, the Left forces and therefore justifies violence should the Right have used any (which it did not).
The same goes for activities like blockading or destroying an opposing political group's offices. When you forcibly prevent peaceful actions to transfer power, you make a response-in-force both necessary and right. To get back to where they are not, the Left must stop it, which is unlikely as long as it works.
a pity if Israel had to commit a historical and political suicide by listening to the ones who shout the loudest. these youngsters are allergic to democracy, they grew up with the idea that if they don't win the game must stop or they should let be winners. drawbacks from having all the luxuries.
Also on the road to Weimar is our massive money printing. The money printing came first here, and it came first in Weimar. Are 2 data points too few to draw causation? Anyone who has a 0% allocation to Bitcoin isn’t playing the probabilities correctly.
Like Handle below, I am basically hopeless and have nothing positive to write. The Left today in the US is only constrained by two things- the armed population and SCOTUS, and they will act to change both of those the minute they control the Presidency and Congress again. They only need to retake the House in 2024, and I think they will do so given their further refining of mail-in-voting tactics.
I guess we will see if there is any fight left in the Right when the federal government comes for the firearms.
One commonality of recent Israeli and US politics is that the right has attempted to use extremely narrow electoral majorities, obtained with less than a majority of the popular vote through quirks of the electoral system, to make sweeping institutional changes that a majority of the population passionately despises. Trump got a 46% not-even-plurality and used it to get three new Supreme Court justices, in collaboration with bare Senate majorities representing less than half the country's people; Netanyahu's coalition parlayed 48% of the vote into 56 MKs and is using that to try to destroy judicial independence entirely.
Whatever that is, it isn't democratic. Right populists claim to represent the Will of the People, but the popular vote results, not to mention the polls, do not bear them out. The structural lesson-- which has been unpopular on both left and right from time to time depending on who is in power-- is that a sound democratic system requires limits on what narrow majorities can achieve, because narrow majorities will inevitably sometimes be elected by passionate minority factions, and the attempt of those factions to impose their will on the majority delegitimizes the system and creates demand for violent protest.
Trump won 30 out of 50 states, Nicholas. Like it or not, that is what the Constitution set up. If you and the Left don't like it, write and pass a Constitutional amendment changing it to popular vote and make the Senate proportional. What were the Republicans in 2017 supposed to do with regards to SCOTUS- nominate and approve Democrats to those seats?
Harassing and threatening people is illegal and even though Philadelphia is controlled by the left, clearly a billionaire has resources to file lawsuits and runa pr campaign against those responsible…why didn’t Kohelet help him fight back? Clearly Israeli right needs to develop a legal and pr counter-strategy as this type of strongarm tactic is standard operating procedure for the left.
They do try to fight back in the same manner using lawfare, but it doesn't work for the Right because the judiciaries in the specific jurisdictions are controlled by the Left. Also, a right-leaning billionaire whose security harms a protestor outside his home, located usually in a leftist jurisdiction, will find himself personally charged with felonies.
1) They would continue to lose in landslides if they didn't move to the right.
2) The Soviet Union, the literally embodiment of lefts dream, collapsed.
3) Blacks were engaged in an unprecedented degree of killing each other at the height of the crack wars and everyone was fed up with it, even many blacks.
But demographic shifts and educational indoctrination kept doing their thing such that by post 2012 the left thought they could get away with anything and didn't need to moderate anymore. They were wrong but only barely, and time will continue to be on their side.
Israel's internal security apparatus has the legal authority and is fully capable of identifying and finding each individual who crossed over the line into illegal intimidation, violence, etc. and making examples of them sufficiently severe to put a quick and firm end to that activity. It is choosing not to do so, when the activists are on the left.
Same goes for the US - consider the way BLM and Antifa protesters get treated with kid gloves and receive exorbitant sums in sham "settlements" while the January 6 protesters were easily tracked down, thrown into solitary confinement, and had the book thrown at them with sentences exceeding those handed out for homicide. No one on that side is going to "take to the streets" when they know for sure that's what is going to happen to them.
The truth is that all western-style developed countries now have at their disposal all the technological power of the Chinese panopticon surveillance state, it's just that their interest in using it against internal movements is highly selective.
"In an unhealthy culture elections are a war by other means". Well maybe but in a really unhealthy culture like Britain's, elections are a farce because:
a) the real power, the civil service, the courts and the quangos are permanently left wing.
And b) there effectively no longer is a conservative political party .
The Netanyahu government, (whatever it's troublesome fringe coalition partners ) is simply trying to head off the same thing happening in Israel. Good luck to them. Once the tendentious judiciary becomes unchallengeable Israel will be doomed.
I largely agree, although I would add that one doesn't know for sure that the surveillance state will be used against them in the specific case that they think they will win, or the outcome will be the same no matter whether they play the game or not. I don't generally expect right wing violence or protests in the US, not in the short term, but sufficient left wing violence might force it if people think "it is now, or never." At some point one wins and dismantles the surveillance state apparatus, or one is subject to it until it crumbles of its own accord.
There is no possible, successful "now or never" ad hoc reaction against a state like the US. The amount of preparation, organization, and resources required to have even the slightest possibility of victory are many orders of magnitude greater than anything any movement with an aim to replace the existing regime could even remotely hope to build without being noticed and preemptively crushed, mercilessly.
The problem is that in the breakdown of "law and order", people are focusing on the loss of order, which they can see but instead they should be panicking over the demise of "law" which they still do not appreciate, and even the Federalist Society has taken its eyes off the most essential ball of all.
"Three Felonies a Day" is bad enough when administered impartially and even incompetently and haphazardly. But when traditional discretion is brazenly abused into corrupt favoritism and prosecution is extremely selective - letting your caught-red-handed friends get away with murder while your enemies get the maximum for petty transgressions - then there is no "law" in the "equal justice under" sense, only power and domination.
This isn't a warning, it's an obituary. The state can maintain exactly as much order as it wants to. But it can't restore genuine widespread respect for the rule of law once the spell is broken and people stop living in the past and continuing to believe in an illusion.
I don't know about winning against the US. I was more thinking "winning the presidency and legislative branch, such that laws abolishing much of the state over reach/abuse of power apparatus can be enacted." I don't think starting from "new Constitution" is in the cards.
I am a bit too exhausted to really grasp your last three paragraphs. After some sleep I will apply some thought tomorrow. Your writing is always worth a good think!
The right is all about the rule of law. The fact that it no longer exist is so hard to believe that each person must experience his own come-to-Jesus moment.
Re: "In the unhealthy culture, the tribal hostility is too severe and the perceived stakes are too high."
Not only the perceived stakes, but the *actual stakes*, too, are too high.
Power has become more centralized, within States and in the Federal Government.
Federal agencies (law enforcement, public health, regulatory agencies) have become highly politicized and partisan.
Impeachments and prosecutions of political opponents have become normal.
The sheer value of resources allocated directly in appropriations and indirectly by regulations is enormous.
Activists act, they do not think. Parents need to ridicule and dismiss activists as morons. Currently, activists are held in high regard, that needs to change.
I would put it differently. Activists operate in a world of conversion and intimidation far more than persuasion. Activism also attracts the morally disordered as they are insulated from consequences and bad behaviour is valorised. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4204827
I live in a very progressive area of Boston. Many of my neighbors consider themselves activists. They are not the street protesters you see destroying things. they are responsible home owning grownups that use twitter hashtags as a decision heuristic. Around 10 make their living off of activism - community organizers, speakers, etc.
The valorisation of activism leads to increased identification as activists. But a lot of activism is still toxic, even when done by home owning grown ups.
https://www.marinatimes.com/ceo-of-the-homeless-industrial-complex
They don’t simply identify, they are. They March, protest, and 2 even wrote books
I think this very naive. Activists do think, they just think differently and more ruthlessly.
The leaders, yes. I do not consider them activists. Activists, the ones doing things, do not think. Have you ever asked an activist a question and received an intelligent well thought out answer that address 2nd and 3rd order consequences of the object of their activism? I haven’t.
They don't care, or they don't believe in those 2nd and 3rd order consequences. That is different from "not thinking". It is never wise to underestimate the enemy. In this case, reason is not a useful weapon.
They call the 2nd and 3rd order consequences unintended consequences when they inevitably occur. They don’t think.
The left organized violent riots in every major city across the USA in 2020 to hurt Trump. They looted and burned down stores and police departments in almost every major city throughout the US. Watch videos in May/June of protestors setting fires all around the White House, including St Johns Church. Remember large crowds tearing down fences and launching fireworks towards the white house. Remember, the mockery of Trump hiding in a bunker inside the White House with large mobs committing arson all over the White House? Remember the outrage of Trump's "photo op" visiting St John's Church that had been set on fire?
Remember when the left staged protest events aimed at physical intimidation at the homes of Tucker Carlson and Mitch McConnell and Republican appointed Supreme Court Justices? Remember when various Trump Staffers were physically harassed in public at restaurants. Left wing groups even set up groups to find leading Republican figures in public at restaurants to harass them.
Even before Trump was elected, protesters used violence to shut down rallies and boasted of that. Videos displayed Trump fans pelted with eggs. That's not lethal violence but that's real political violence and it was systemic and widespread. College campuses nation wide praised the protest movements and downplayed the violence. I sat in required courses at a flagship public university and listened to professors praise the protests and downplay violence. NPR gave positive coverage to a book "In Defense of Looting".
It's outrageous to see Kling downplay all of the above as "relatively peaceful", and then be outraged to see the exact same tactics deployed against groups that Kling is sympathetic with. Two wrongs don't make a right of course. I definitely oppose what Kling is describing. But it is hypocritical of Kling to accept these tactics when used against Trump and cry foul when the same thing happens to groups he is sympathetic with.
Next, the left used tactics of organized political violence in 2020 to win. The left weaponized instutitons, notably the intelligence agencies, to reduce/amplify narratives to benefit the Democratic Party. This is cheating and it worked and won the election for the Democrats. Kling recently posted that Trump is a loser and suggested other public figures insult him in public that way. But he's crying foul that the same tactics ultimately defeated the pro-Israel group he mentions.
Lastly, Trump and Trump's fans were very kind to Israel and supporters of Israel and that kindness wasn't reciprocated. Israel should make all the friends they can.
"In 2017, we had “The Resistance” and the “Pussy Hat” protests, which were relatively peaceful. In 2021, we had the January 6 protests, which were relatively disorganized. "
You forgot the big one in between, where the police danced the macarena while the antifa and BLM burned it all down in the name of Floyd. Remember when Trump was nearly color-revolutioned in Washington? The picture with the counter-sniper by his side as he walked to St John's church was powerful. Really a summer to remember.
Yes. I made the same point in a separate comment. But the left deliberately used tactics of violence to hurt Trump and that is arguably part of why they won 2020. And Kling downplays the violence brands it as "relatively peaceful", close to the official party line of "mostly peaceful" and ridicules Trump as a loser.
In 2016, Trump got 46.1% of the vote. The GOP got 49.1% in the House.
Trump -3%pts on the GOP House vote.
In 2020, Trump got 46.8% of the vote. The GOP got 47.2% in the House.
Trump -0.4% pts on the GOP House vote.
In 2016, Hillary got 48.2% of the vote. The Democrats got 48.0% in the House.
Hillary +0.2%pts on the Democrat House vote.
In 2020, Biden got 51.3% of the vote. The Democrats got 50.3% in the House.
Biden +1.0% pts on the Democrat House vote.
In 2016, Trump got 2.1% pts less than his opponent.
In 2020, Trump got 4.5% pts less than his opponent.
By any metric, Trump is an electorally weak candidate. My view is that any Republican would have beat Hillary in 2016, but by more than Trump did. What was remarkable about Trump is a whole string of counties that only vote for Republicans in landslide years voted for him. That makes him culturally significant.
It does not change that he is an electorally weak candidate.
Arnold has been saying for years that Trump was the only Republican who could have won in 2016 and is the only Republican who could lose in 2024. I have agreed with that. Your data here makes me question the 2016 piece, and the incredible weakness of Joe Biden makes me question the 2024 piece. For what it’s worth I still believe he was a stronger than average candidate in 2016 because he showed the Republicans that you can effectively fight the MSM if you stand up to them. Whoever wins 2024 is going to inherit a dumpster fire that has been raging for 8 years. I hope someone under the age of 70 wins and can take a good faith swing at the economic, social and institutional monsters that have grown out of control.
Any Republican in 2016 who got the House GOP vote would have won the Electoral College handily. The only postwar 3 term Administration was Reagan-Bush. I never believed Hillary was likely to replicate that feat.
Thanks for some good metrics, Lorenzo. But the 2020 election results are, in the 70 million mail in ballots, I believe around 2% garbage because of low signature rejection rates.
Trump’s 75 mln votes was more than a 12 mln increase from 2016. This is the single most important metric, tho the NeverTrump hate & demonization metrics are also true-and show the weaknesses of US Western Civ. The 2020 election was rigged against Trump, thus stolen, on semi-illegal censorship by … the M7 companies with Dem deep state orders.
Kling & most FIT apologists for the deep state election riggers don’t want to face the truth. It’s frightening, and should be outrageous, but confirmation bias allows rationalizations to assuage consciences.
Trump has already changed the Rep Party voters into being the not rich, but not poor, working class. The Rep donors don’t yet realize this.
Demonization leads towards violence, all against the violence need to oppose demonization, which Arnold does more than most, but less than optimal.
The obvious problem with all that is the increase in the House GOP vote over 2018. It is an odd sort of rigging when the person being rigged against increases his share of the vote and his Party gets a bigger increase (+2.4%pts). While the House vote for the Democrats fell even more (-3.1%pts).
Trump is simultaneously electorally weak and electorally strong.
The reason is the electoral collage!
The only way for the GOP to win a presidential election is to win the upper midwest working class whites. You can get a higher % of the popular vote and lost if you waste that popular vote on coastal professionals. That's what Romney did.
This is what happens when immigration makes the coasts completely uncompetitive.
Beyond that, if Romney won, would it have made a difference? Trump has his failings and might not be the answer, but I think the GOP voters were correct to recognize that electing GOPe candidates wasn't getting them what they wanted.
Barack Obama got 51.1% of the vote, Romney 47.2%. That was a losing result no matter how you spread it.
Yes, I absolutely agree that Trump has a cultural significance that other GOP actual or potential nominees did not have. He is still an electorally weak candidate and was not very good at translating rhetorical combativeness into useful policy.
Trump got 46.1% of the popular vote, less then Romney, and won. That's how the electoral college works.
Romney got 59% of the white vote in 2012. In 1980 Reagan got 56% of the white vote. But demographics did its thing, and so Reagen won a landslide and Romney lost.
It's the GOPs fault that immigrants flooded the coast, made it completely electorally uncompetitive, and left electoral college games in the Upper Midwest amongst dwindling whites as the only path to victory. It's a bad hand to play, but its the hand they have.
Trump won because his opponent failed to get a majority of the popular vote. When his opponent did, he lost.
Competitiveness among migrants is not inevitably a problem for centre-right Parties, as the LNP Coalition in Australia demonstrates. Though the pattern of migration does make a difference. US migration policy is much more socially corrosive than is Australia’s, even though we have a much higher rate of migration (as % of population).
I find it interesting that AK’s timeline of poltical violence at the end of his comments highlights Pussy Hat protests on the left and Jan 6 on the right to assert the disorganized nature of the violence. Neither were as sustained, violent or organized as ANTIFA and BLM whose actions are clearly violent, coordinated and nationwide and all on the left. There has not been anything comparable on the right. ANTIFA and BLM are everthing he fears and are widely accepted...on the left. The future is here and arrived some time ago. Why the blind spot? I find it amusing that AK holds out Weimar as the future when future is already here. Amusing because that is exactly how Weimar came about. History’s rhymes once again.
This is the result of selective prosecution: the courts are treating similarly situated political terrorists differently because the judges like some terrorists and dislike others. The problem with relying on this method to try to impose one vision on a divided society is really that all modern governments rely on speed, communication, surveillance, and training to use fairly small numbers of guys to discipline very large populations. The legitimacy of the state (which is a fancy way of saying the faith people have in the magic of its laws and institutions) makes up for the rest. If people stop believing in the magic, you have a serious Girardian problem. This type of tyranny corrodes the simple faith in government held by the people, and without that simple faith you do not get to enjoy peace and order.
This dynamic was a major cause behind the collapse of France in the 20th century. See Shirer's "Collapse of the Third Republic" https://archive.org/details/collapseofthirdr00shir.
Even though France held it together until the tanks rolled in, one of the major reasons why the French were incapable of "coming together" in a way that might have prevented the outcome was the level of division. The centrists in France did manage to maintain an illusion of cohesion until the end, but ultimately the whole right wing (center and extreme) went over to Moustache Man the moment it was feasible. This is one of the reasons why the military analysis of France's "strange defeat" is inadequate. The means was present but the will was lacking.
> ultimately the whole right wing (center and extreme) went over to Moustache Man the moment it was feasible
You forgot to mention that the whole left wing (and specifically the French Communists) did all it could to discourage the military and prevent resistance. Recall that USSR was Nazi Germany's sworn ally at that point!
That's a big theme in Shirer's book (the dysfunctional dynamic between the rightists like Action Francaise, the communists, and the feckless middle). He has big time center-left sympathies but he tells the story in exhaustive detail.
From what he writes, the French were in Spring 1939 struggling very hard to create an alliance with the Soviets to get them to guarantee Polish sovereignty (see 423-428 both in this archive.org edition and my print edition). The M-R pact in Aug. 1939 caught the cabinet flat-footed, because of course the Daladier government expected the Soviets to be on their side as it related to Poland. "Why Die for Danzig" was written by a socialist. Even though they did ban the Communist Party on 9/26, all that was far too late to really get the country to gel together. It's a ~1k page book, so it's tough to overview it in a blog comment.
With that out of the way, I think Israel and the US are on different paths. Netanyahu and the Right in Israel are actually growing in supporters, not declining like in the US. Israel isn't open to immigration except for Jewish ones, and the ones who want to live in Israel lean significantly to the right and the ones who are more fertile are much further to the right politically, too. The Left in Israel was only able gain a partial measure of power in the penultimate election because they finally made common cause with the Israeli Arab parties, but that wasn't enough to win a second election and Netanyahu returned to power. In my opinion, Netanyahu's mistake with regards to the judiciary was in not simply making the judges run for popular elections, too.
Agree. What's going on in Israel is demographic change.
The J6 protests were only "disorganized" because they were infiltrated by hundreds of FBI agents provocateurs, who committed all the violence (except that done by police) in order to both smear the entire conservative movement and to frame the victims who are now political prisoners. This is what happened at "Unite the Right" as well. The message is that the Right can no longer hold peaceful demonstrations, because the Left-run FBI will always do these things. The FBI operation also purposely cheated VP Pence of his ability to object to the election fraud and have the election decided by the House of Representatives, which would have re-elected Trump. There is doubt as to whether Pence was going to do this anyway; but the point is that by blocking peaceful political protesters in a way that blames the victims, the Left forces and therefore justifies violence should the Right have used any (which it did not).
The same goes for activities like blockading or destroying an opposing political group's offices. When you forcibly prevent peaceful actions to transfer power, you make a response-in-force both necessary and right. To get back to where they are not, the Left must stop it, which is unlikely as long as it works.
a pity if Israel had to commit a historical and political suicide by listening to the ones who shout the loudest. these youngsters are allergic to democracy, they grew up with the idea that if they don't win the game must stop or they should let be winners. drawbacks from having all the luxuries.
Also on the road to Weimar is our massive money printing. The money printing came first here, and it came first in Weimar. Are 2 data points too few to draw causation? Anyone who has a 0% allocation to Bitcoin isn’t playing the probabilities correctly.
Like Handle below, I am basically hopeless and have nothing positive to write. The Left today in the US is only constrained by two things- the armed population and SCOTUS, and they will act to change both of those the minute they control the Presidency and Congress again. They only need to retake the House in 2024, and I think they will do so given their further refining of mail-in-voting tactics.
I guess we will see if there is any fight left in the Right when the federal government comes for the firearms.
One commonality of recent Israeli and US politics is that the right has attempted to use extremely narrow electoral majorities, obtained with less than a majority of the popular vote through quirks of the electoral system, to make sweeping institutional changes that a majority of the population passionately despises. Trump got a 46% not-even-plurality and used it to get three new Supreme Court justices, in collaboration with bare Senate majorities representing less than half the country's people; Netanyahu's coalition parlayed 48% of the vote into 56 MKs and is using that to try to destroy judicial independence entirely.
Whatever that is, it isn't democratic. Right populists claim to represent the Will of the People, but the popular vote results, not to mention the polls, do not bear them out. The structural lesson-- which has been unpopular on both left and right from time to time depending on who is in power-- is that a sound democratic system requires limits on what narrow majorities can achieve, because narrow majorities will inevitably sometimes be elected by passionate minority factions, and the attempt of those factions to impose their will on the majority delegitimizes the system and creates demand for violent protest.
Trump won 30 out of 50 states, Nicholas. Like it or not, that is what the Constitution set up. If you and the Left don't like it, write and pass a Constitutional amendment changing it to popular vote and make the Senate proportional. What were the Republicans in 2017 supposed to do with regards to SCOTUS- nominate and approve Democrats to those seats?
Harassing and threatening people is illegal and even though Philadelphia is controlled by the left, clearly a billionaire has resources to file lawsuits and runa pr campaign against those responsible…why didn’t Kohelet help him fight back? Clearly Israeli right needs to develop a legal and pr counter-strategy as this type of strongarm tactic is standard operating procedure for the left.
They do try to fight back in the same manner using lawfare, but it doesn't work for the Right because the judiciaries in the specific jurisdictions are controlled by the Left. Also, a right-leaning billionaire whose security harms a protestor outside his home, located usually in a leftist jurisdiction, will find himself personally charged with felonies.
Take it to the Supreme Court, controlled by GOP.
Controlled by the GOP until it is increased to 15 judges.
Even if that works, you would be put through the wringer for several years.
After the Republican Party accepted the “one man, one vote, once”, I don’t see why shall the other side yield to the result of the election.
In the 1990s leftists realized that:
1) They would continue to lose in landslides if they didn't move to the right.
2) The Soviet Union, the literally embodiment of lefts dream, collapsed.
3) Blacks were engaged in an unprecedented degree of killing each other at the height of the crack wars and everyone was fed up with it, even many blacks.
But demographic shifts and educational indoctrination kept doing their thing such that by post 2012 the left thought they could get away with anything and didn't need to moderate anymore. They were wrong but only barely, and time will continue to be on their side.
That was Obama's doing and on purpose. Race wasn't an issue until Obama raised it from the dead. And of course Biden is Obama's third term.
It's a longstanding disagreement Deirdre McCloskey takes the more bottom-up side.