[CoffeeDregs]

From TFA: "Democratic regression is particularly visible among the G-20 countries". This is the money-shot. I went back after I speculated that the big deal would be if existing, strongly "democratic" countries were sliding and found this quote. Strong democracies are sliding which is a much bigger deal than young, weak democracies doing so.

I'm in the US (so this comment is US-centric). As with so much else over the past 6 months, the tension between federal powers and state powers is being thrown into relief. In particular, the popular idea that democracy is good/right has long been suspect: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fath... .

This is the effect of the Internet and of the "Long Tail": the monetization/politicization of the "long tail" is in segmenting and then aggregating bits of the long tail into larger and larger groups of marginalized members of the population. With poor communication, "the fringe" is only a fringe locally; with near-infinite communication, the fringe is everyone: FB and the various tailored news feeds drape a comfortable bubble over us and cause us to see our view as (manifestly) the only view (since it's our only view, it must be the only view).

As a "Republican", I point the finger at Republicans, a political group which has been a 10x political operation. Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. And Republicans have played the state/local-politics game very, very well.

As others have noted, democracy is a game best played locally but our pervasive communications systems are forcing it to be played globally and this is happening quickly enough that our political systems haven't come to grips with it yet.

[ShamelessC]

It's pretty refreshing to see a republican admitting their party has dialed politics to 11.

I agree that a discussion over the merits of democracy is currently taking place. I _don't_ think merely questioning the electoral college counts as suspicion of democracy itself. I know many argue that the problem with the electoral college is in fact that it is _less_ democratic by some definition of the word.

[mkolodny]

Democracy means rule by the people. When you elect leaders, you're not ruling - you're choosing who rules.

I don't think people are questioning the merits of democracy. I think people are questioning whether the US truly is a democracy.

I'd love to see a shift from voting on leaders to voting on laws and projects. The idea that one person could represent hundreds of millions seems impossible to me.

Participatory Budgeting [0] is truly democratic. Citizens get to vote on how their tax dollars are spent.

I hope that current backlash against our system of government leads to more democracy, not less.

[0] https://www.ted.com/talks/shari_davis_what_if_you_could_help...

[starfallg]

>I'd love to see a shift from voting on leaders to voting on laws and projects

We have enough complexity in our lives as is. We need a better structure to manage this, not less structure.

[AnimalMuppet]

The electoral college is undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw.

The Senate is also undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw.

The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy. That difference is why we have the electoral college and the Senate.

[lordnacho]

> The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy.

I see this repeated so much in online discussions, and it makes no sense to me. Is it enough to not have a monarchy? There's no actual reason why democracy and republic need to be distinguished, because we're almost always talking about a system where people get a say in how they are governed, not whether there's a monarch.

Nobody doubts whether Denmark, Norway, Sweden, The Netherlands or Spain are democracies.

Now to the point about the constitutional issues. Why is it that it's fair for a minority to decide who gets to be leader? To people who've grown up in democratic systems, it certainly seems to be a flaw that it's possible for someone get less support than the loser.

To put it another way, what is having a senate and electoral college that isn't proportional to votes supposed to save you from? Is there a good argument or example of a situation where that made sense?

[coffeefirst]

Fair, but the Senate was designed as a moderating influence to hedge against mob rule. That may be a good idea, but today it's also a joke.

[lostcolony]

Yeah; it just means we have a non-representative mob. Good idea in theory; clearly not so much in practice.

[AnimalMuppet]

Why is it a joke? Or, why do you think it's more of a joke than mob rule is?

[lordnacho]

A mob at least doesn't pretend to care about whomever it's bullying. The senate whose majority represents a minority has to make all sorts of contortions to act like they're doing the right thing, because they have to both justify what they're doing and their right to do it.

I think the US founding fathers somehow thought the senate would be populated by people who could put some sort of "good of the nation" ahead of their own interests.

[travmatt]

The senate was originally elected by the states directly, the general population didn’t play any part of the process. This was abolished, in addition to many responsibilities of the senate - oversight of the executive, a leading voice in international relations - have been ceded to the executive branch. I wouldn’t say it’s more of a joke than mob rule, but it’s a thin veneer of respectability.

[dfxm12]

Because congress represents lobbyist interest and not the interests of their constituents. It's not a democracy, it's not a republic. It's an oligarchy or corporatocracy. That's the joke. It's just that the mob is the few people who have most of the money.

[js2]

Poppycock. For the first 50 years of the nation, only 6% of the population could vote. White, male, landowners.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_voting_rights_in_t...

The founding of the nation was built on compromise. The direction ever since has been to greater equality. To more representation. To form a more perfect union. Senators used to be appointed by state legislatures until 1913. Would you advocate for a return to that? Neither party used to have primaries as we know them today. Would you advocate for a return to that?

https://www.cop.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/brie...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_pri...

A republic just means that we elect leaders who pass laws, instead of voting on those laws directly.

The EC was a compromise just as much as the 3/5ths compromise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-Fifths_Compromise

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_Colleg...

The last two presidents elected by a minority of the vote have been an unmitigated disaster for America. The EC has enabled that. The EC serves no useful purpose anymore. We should abolish it or work-around it with the National Vote Compact.

As far as the Senate, 53 Senators currently represent 15 million fewer Americans that the other 47. I think that's that's a problem. It tilts in favor of the GOP today, but tomorrow it may tilt in favor of Democrats. I would still think it's a problem.

The 26 smallest states make up only 18 percent of the population.

We can mitigate it by adding DC and Puerto Rico (should they so chose) as states. DC and PR residents are Americans. They should be represented in the Senate.

But I suppose, if I were around at the nation's founding, I would have been a Federalist.

Relevant piece on the Senate with some astute observations about why it used to work (TL;DR: compromise) but no longer does, and the danger of minoritarian rule:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/21450891/mitch-mccon...

[curiousllama]

... and also why we had so much injustice.

You can change the framing but not the core issue: why is this particular form of a Republic best?

[curiousllama]

Note, they didn't say Republican, they said "Republican"

The Dem Convention was filled with "Republicans." There were/are a fair number that tried pushing back against the Tea Party first, then Trump (remember "Never Trump" Republicans? Or "Log Cabin" Republicans?).

The issue is not that Republicans went crazy; it's that party dynamics shifted. So, consistent with your surprise, there's a word for, , as GP put it, "Republicans": "Democrats"

[atomi]

You are so on the nose. Politics is now global and constituencies that were never exposed to other political realities and were protected by local politicking are now facing a political shock.

The chickens are certainly coming home to roost.

[api]

I recall having this kind of thought when the whole Russian election meddling thing started to get talked about. This is a phase of globalization. Politics is now global.

If you're a large country and especially a superpower, everyone in the world has a stake in the outcome of your elections and political process. This means we should expect more and more foreign "meddling" in elections as well as direct meddling in the political process through foreign lobbying/bribery and covert methods.

Maybe what we're seeing is the beginning of the accretion process of a true global government. Eventually the people will realize that since politics is global political awareness must be as well. Campaigns could globalize. Then we're a few steps away from global political parties and then global government.

[maxerickson]

It's long been the case that large countries meddled. The change is that it isn't as asymmetric as it used to be. If your citizens are on Facebook, it doesn't take a lot of resources to mess with them.

[mistermann]

Indeed there is most likely some foreign influence in Western beliefs, but in the process perhaps we shouldn't overlook the broader reality of things which is that domestic organizations of various flavors allegedly have a long track record of actively persuading us to believe certain things. And then on top of that there's the complex nature of the human mind's perception of reality, how it forms beliefs based on a torrent of conflicting information, etc, and then the tricky problem that these phenomena are near-impossible to detect by the person who owns the mind.

[mattlutze]

National politics has been global for as long as we've had international trade. The way in which we experience that has changed though, and perhaps more of us now are able to see the extra-national players in any particular field.

[metiscus]

Look at the talk given by Yuri Bezmenov, this type of thing has been ongoing for a very long time.

[malandrew]

Any in particular that you would recommend as a place to start?

[CoffeeDregs]

Agreed with sibling. References would be great (I'd love to view them).

[metiscus]

https://youtu.be/KLdDmeyMJls

That's my main reference.

[dfxm12]

Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it.

For most values of "we", sure. There are a few who are benefitting immensely from this at the expense of the rest of us, though. I'm not sure how to get your average voter interested in understanding things like intersectionality while conservative propaganda feeds into their basest predilections.

[lukifer]

This exemplifies the point: our very language has become politicized. Robin Hanson calls the phenomenon "RightTalk" [0]: we care less about outcomes, or even policy positions, than simply cajoling people to use the right keywords. A trigger word like "intersectionality" (whatever the intrinsic merits of the model), yields very different mental associations and emotional reactions [1] depending on who hears it, and the ideological/tribal waters in which they swim.

Probably the most absurd political divide I've ever heard in my life is between the slogans "Black Lives Matter" and "All Lives Matter": on their surface meanings, not only are they logically compatible, but the latter actually eclipses and reinforces the former! But it's another case in point: the meanings of the phrases don't matter, let alone any ostensible outcomes. It's simply a way to wave a flag of team membership.

[0] https://www.overcomingbias.com/2020/07/beware-righttalkism.h...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotive_conjugation

[AstralStorm]

No, the latter is attempting to wash out the problem, removing the mention of the people most affected by it. It's transparent and reactionary.

[rbecker]

Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions?

It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.

It should not surprise you that the people whose group self-interests are proclaimed illegitimate by a social theory (more than just illegitimate - the cause of the suffering of all the other groups!), would not agree with that theory.

[dragonwriter]

> Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions?

> It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set.

That is not a conclusion of intersectionality. That is, to the extent it is a component of the anti-racism movement, much older than intersectionality and operates on a level logically orthogonal to intersectionality. It's basically the discrimination + position of power view of racism combined with the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive but racism is strongly negative.

(I get that this is confusing because right-wing critics of the movement keep taking the names of individual elements of theory embraced by segments of the left and attaching everything they disagree with by everyone on the left [and then, every generally-seen-as-bad movement in history whether it relates to either the particular element or the left] and attaching it rhetorically to that element, and the mass media—including the center-right corporate media attacked by the right as leftist—covers the right-wing attacks more than the theory itself, so that those attacks shape the understanding of the terms by people outside of either strongly-interested camp.)

[rbecker]

> That is not a conclusion of intersectionality.

Could you explain more? Because it seems to me that's how it's used in practice. See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change [1,2,3], and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears [4].

> the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive

Again, depends on the group. For example, white privilege is seen as negative, but it's just white group solidarity.

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/06/28/kashmir-muslims-fe...

[2] https://time.com/5877176/kashmir-special-status-india-domici...

[3] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2019/08/08/kashmirs-new...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/14/why-ho...

[dragonwriter]

> > That is not a conclusion of intersectionality.

> Could you explain more?

Sure. Intersectionality is a comparatively recent concept that privilege and disadvantage experienced by individuals is not a simple additive or multiplicative combination of the privilege or disadvantage associated with isolated parts of their identities, but that the interaction of such group privilege and disadvantage is more complicated, and particularly that discourse and solutions centered on serving the needs of single-axis identity groups in isolation, even when aggregated, often do not well serve the interests and needs of individuals in overlapping disadvantaged groups; it specifically originated in the late-1980s/early-1990s black feminist movement with the argument that generalized race and gender dialogue missed the particularized issues faced by women of color.

The idea, on the other hand, that there are ethical differences between (in the US, particularly) white identity movements and black, etc., identity movements (and, more generally, in identity movements among locally advantaged classes and those of less advantaged ones), is many decades older than intersectionality theory, having a variety of different roots, the clearest theoretical one (that not the oldest or necessarily the most important) being the "prejudice plus institutional power" view of racism (first expressly articulated in the those terms in 1970), which was immediately applied to the idea of relative merit of group identity movements.

The two ideas can interact (as they do in, e.g., dialogue about "Trans-Exclusionary Radical Feminism"), but are essentially orthogonal concepts. One can fully subscribe to either without subscribing to the other.

> See for example the sympathy shown to Kashmir's fears of demographic change, and the condemnation as racist of the UK's same fears.

The difference there is about institutional power and single-axis identity movements. It has nothing to do with intersectionality, and everything to do with perceived alignment of group identity and preference with institutional power (Muslims being seen as disadvantaged with regard to the Hindu-dominated institutions in India, while no similar institutional disadvantage is perceived for the white ethnically-British in Britain.)

[rbecker]

> The difference there is about institutional power...

Doesn't that effectively mean only groups without the ability to stop immigration, can have legitimate reasons to stop it? As soon as you have institutional power (i.e. power to shape immigration law) your reasons for opposing immigration become illegitimate?

[js2]

The GOP cannot win free and fair elections unless its willing to moderate its views and accept non-white and conservatives into the party. The GOP knows this. Barry Goldwater foresaw what welcoming the religious right into the party would do, and the GOP commissioned its own study (which it promptly ignored) about how to attract Black voters.

This has been terrible for both parties, the GOP obviously because through its own gerrymandering it’s beholden to extremists. And for the Democrats who assume Black votes and haven’t been forced to implement meaningful change since the Civil Rights Movement.

So we’re stuck with a party that has only a minority of votes retaining power through anti-democratic means.

The answer to me is more democracy, not less. I hope for a Democratic blow out in November, want to see the Supreme Court expanded, and hope to see legislative change to expand voting rights, overturn Citizens United and pass campaign finance legislation, and start using non-partisan commissions to establish voting districts. I also want to see a national popular vote for presidents. And we have to reform the Supreme Court... term limits, a rotating bench, something.

The Democrats do not have all the answers, but the opposition party has to be interested in democracy and the good of America.

[Fauntleroy]

There are a lot of lovely ideas here, but I'm shocked Ranked Choice Voting isn't among them. Sticking with First-Past-The-Post will keep us stuck in the two party system—it simply has to go if we're ever going to have more than two parties (or better yet: true independent candidates!).

[andrekandre]

link for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

[krapp]

As far as I'm concerned the Republicans signed their death warrant when they decided to respond to Obama's election by ginning up the narrative of a "cold civil war" and "grassroots" right-wing reactionary movements like the Tea Party, implying Obama was such a danger to the country that an uprising would be imminent if not inevitable, were he allowed to remain in power.

I believe what they wanted was to repeat the Southern Strategy by fanning the fuel of racism, xenophobia and right-wing hatred among their white base (an obvious tack to take with Obama) but the Republicans underestimated just how extreme that base had become since the Goldwater days and how unhinged the presence of a black "leftist" in the White House made them.

The Tea Party, being a Republican Party proxy movement, wasn't anywhere near as radical enough as its purpose was maintaining the Republican status quo, and for all the Tea Party's talk of "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" and such in their campaign ads, wasn't going to give the right the blood in the streets that they wanted.

Thus, we ended up with the reactionary movement against both the left and the mainstream right in Trumpist populism, the rise of the alt-right and embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and the start of open violence by right-wing militias against black and leftist "agitators."

Barring some effective, widespread counter-Conservative movement to return the party to sanity and core non-crazy-racist principles (which doesn't appear to exist) the Republicans have no alternative now but to ride the Trump train all the way to the end, or else split and form another party.

[dfxm12]

To add, this didn't really start with the Tea Party. You can trace this violent and racist "New Right" [0] back to at least Reagan and the Kanawha County textbook controversy bombing in the mid 70s [1].

0 - https://www.ushistory.org/us/58e.asp

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanawha_County_textbook_contro...

[js2]

We're seeing the effects of capitalists having pitted laborers against each other in order to undo the New Deal coalition. It has many facets. For a very sympathetic view of coal miners, I highly recommend watching Harlan County, USA, made in 1976:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA

Coal miners have been getting screwed for generations.

I wonder how many Americans know about the Battle of Blair Mountain. I never learned about it in my history books.

[travmatt]

I’d start with Barry Goldwater and the rise of the conservative movement.

[clairity]

the circumspection over democracy is as much a consequence of elitism as it is political wrangling.

as a member of the (extra-)educated class, the failure to convince the ignorant masses of our superior ideas and policies lies squarely at our feet. we fail to realize that education and intelligence are differences we magnify in our egos and thrust upon others, without regard to circumstance nor environment. we know better, so why don't they listen to us, their betters?

wedging happens all around. it's most insidious when blinded by (self-)righteousness. clumsy terms like cancel culture and wokeness try to describe/mock this sort of tribalism, but the underlying impetuses those terms describe is a significant contributor to division as well.

[pfraze]

Well, look at the economic reality of rural America. They've been on the losing end of policy for the last 30-50 years. They don't want handouts that lead them to subsist as an underclass; they want a thriving economic base which they can pride themselves on. In the absence of that, the country has self-sorted into an urban/rural divide where almost all the economic activity occurs in cities. "Elites" have failed to appeal to other classes because their only message has been "leave your way of life and join the elites." That's not a bad impulse, but I think we've explored that option as much as we can by now.

I can't say I can prescribe any great solution here, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring manufacturing back.

[dkn775]

As a country boy who had to come to the “big city” and leave my hometown behind, I really miss the way of life in the country. Additionally, I come back home occasionally and get this feeling that I’m superior to the lowly bumpkins, even though they know more about engines and tools than I know about statistics. It’s crazy that the wealth gained in the city (which often feels digital, service based, non-physical in nature) imposes this viewpoint. It is what is real and yours that is truly valuable in my opinion.

[clairity]

an interesting economic parallel is that the intellectualization of vast swaths of the economy led to the creation and exploitation of immaterial wealth (to the benefit of urbanites), things like culture and derivatives, rather than material wealth, like food and housing. we even went as far as to vilify the material over the immaterial.

in this way, the rural/urban shift can be understood as an extraction of esteem as much as wealth.

[efavdb]

The idea that long range communications enables echo chambers etc is compelling. However, I'm intrigued by the point that similar cycles have occurred elsewhere before the internet, e.g., in eastern europe in its transition to communism which was preceded by a coalescence into different camps on far right and left, and an absence of a political center. [caveat, I don't know much about this history. it's just my understanding from some recent readings].