[rayiner]

Both Canada and Australia have strong federalism. About half of all expenditure is run through the state and local governments in the US. In Australia it’s similar, and in Canada it’s 75%.

I think the Presidential system has a lot to do with it. The people have a lot to do with it too. Large-scale immigration of Germans, then Irish and Italians, and now Hispanics has left a long tradition of ethnic machine politics in the U.S. that’s simply absent from Canadian and Australian politics. Even as say distinct Italian or Irish identity has diminished, our politics, especially on the left, is still centered around identity. In a typical national election, almost no political bandwidth is spent discussing efficiency of government services.

Look at Obama—the archetype of the modern Democrat. What was his job before politics? He wasn’t a labor leader or anything like that. He was a community organizer in Chicago’s ethnic-based political machine. He’s inspired a generation of people on the left—necessarily, the ones who would otherwise be most invested in government efficiency and quality of services—to become activists for their various identity groups. Do you think those folks are going to become efficient and confident administrators when they grow up?

[tptacek]

Barack Obama was a community organizer working with the Catholic church for like a minute and a half in the mid-1980s.

You didn't live here at the time (also, you were like 2 years old), but you went to NWU and so you're still probably aware of what was happening on the south side in the '80s: the steel industry collapsed, gutting the south side economy. If anything, organizing in the 1980s was distinctively class-based, not race-based. It was a big story. The nuns taught it to us at St. Barnabas.

Meanwhile, Obama's "job" before "politics" was as a well-regarded full-time law teacher at the University of Chicago, a job he held 3x longer than his brief stint as an organizer 20 years prior.

[rayiner]

2008 was a spell ago, but it seems my recollection is correct that Obama was the one who emphasized his experience as a community organizer: https://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/07/us/politics/07community.h... (“Mr. Obama’s three-year stretch as a grass-roots organizer has figured prominently, if not profoundly, in his own narrative of his life. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Obama called it ‘the best education I ever had, better than anything I got at Harvard Law School,’ an education that he said was ‘seared into my brain.’ He devoted about one-third of the 442 pages in his memoir, ‘Dreams From My Father,’ to chronicling that Chicago organizing period.”). Certainly, Obama was steeped in racial politics prior to his becoming president. And racial activism has flourished in the aftermath of his presidency—though it’s unclear whether he’s a cause of that or a symptom of it.

I’m not blaming Obama for these things—it’s not clear that politics in the US could be otherwise given the facts of history. But it’s certainly not conducive to good government.

[tptacek]

I don't know what you're trying to say here. Obama's work history is knowable. We don't need to reconstruct it from the gists of his speeches. He was a community organizer in the mid-1980s, working with the Catholic church, when he was 22-24 years old, in the wake of the collapse of the steel industry in southeast Chicago and northwest Indiana --- a series of events that were not, as you would have had it in your previous comments, racialized. But his job immediately prior to his career in politics was adjacent to yours: he worked in the field of law.

[rayiner]

My comment isn’t about Obama’s job history. It’s about what drives politics in the Democratic Party. When he ran for President and wrote his autobiography, community organizing was what he emphasized because that’s what plays to Democrats.

[tptacek]

Respectfully, that's not what you said, and what you said was false.

[skissane]

> Both Canada and Australia have strong federalism. About half of all expenditure is run through the state and local governments in the US. In Australia it’s similar, and in Canada it’s 75%.

Just looking at who spends the money ignores some big differences. For example, unlike the US, Australia has a unified court and criminal justice system - the federal courts have jurisdiction to hear appeals even on purely state law questions; there are no federal prisons (federal prisoners serve their sentences in state prisons); outside of the military, almost all federal criminal trials happen in state courts (technically some federal courts have the jurisdiction to hold criminal trials, but that almost never happens-federal courts do try civil cases, but in criminal matters are effectively appellate only); state prosecutors can prosecute federal crimes and federal prosecutors can prosecute state crimes (common for federal prosecutors to add on lesser state charges and vice versa)

Australia has institutions like the National Cabinet (council of heads of federal, state and territory governments) which have no parallel in the US-“cooperative federalism”. Formal agreements between the federal and state governments plays a big role in Australia’s federalism, lacks much of an equivalent in the US-e.g. Australia’s food safety system is governed by an agreement between Australia’s federal, state and territory governments, and also the national government of New Zealand.

> The people have a lot to do with it too. Large-scale immigration of Germans, then Irish and Italians, and now Hispanics has left a long tradition of ethnic machine politics in the U.S. that’s simply absent from Canadian and Australian politics. Even as say distinct Italian or Irish identity has diminished, our politics, especially on the left, is still centered around identity

Last time you made an argument like this, I pointed out it ignores the importance of figures like Daniel Mannix (Irish Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, 1917-1963) and B.A.Santamaria (Italian Catholic anti-communist activist; his height of political influence was in the 1950s) in Australia’s political history - between them those two men changed the outcome of more than one national election

And as to Canada, this argument of yours ignores the existence of Quebec, and also the (lesser) role that Anglophone-Francophone conflict has played in the history of some other provinces (e.g. New Brunswick, Ontario, Manitoba)

> What was his job before politics? He wasn’t a labor leader or anything like that. He was a community organizer in Chicago’s ethnic-based political machine.

Ethnic-based political organising exists in Australia too. For example, both major parties have done a lot of work on wooing the Chinese-Australian community, which includes interacting with that community’s social clubs, doing political interviews in Chinese language media, sometimes even running candidates from that background, etc

[rayiner]

> Last time you made an argument like this, I pointed out it ignores the importance of figures like Daniel Mannix (Irish Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, 1917-1963) and B.A.Santamaria (Italian Catholic anti-communist activist; his height of political influence was in the 1950s) in Australia’s political history - between them those two men changed the outcome of more than one national election

I’m not denying that immigrant groups were influential in Australia. But even today, 60% of Australia is English or “Australian” (which is mostly English). 80% are from the British Isles. By contrast, English are not even the plurality in most U.S. states: https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_groups_of_the_Unite.... Germans are the most common in the Midwest; Italians are the most common in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut; Mexicans are the most common in the southwest; etc.

That has led to a completely different political mentality, where for more than a century, the center-left party has largely been organized around mobilizing its ethnic factions to “turn out” to vote. E.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tammany_Hall.

Of course you’re correct that Canada has a similar problem: the British were actually the ones who took over and supplanted the French founding population. They agreed to split up the country and give the French a great deal of latitude to do their own thing. That has mitigated what otherwise would have created tremendous conflict.

You’re certainly seeing more of that in Canada and Australia now given the mass immigration from Asia. But in the US this is been happening for 170 years or so. We’ll see if Canada and Australia are still well functioning and efficient after Chinese and Indian ethnic politics becomes a major force.

[skissane]

> But even today, 60% of Australia is English or “Australian” (which is mostly English). 80% are from the British Isles

From my perspective, you keep on wrongly downplaying the role that Irish Australians have played in Australian history. You acknowledge the significance of Irish Americans in American history, but ignore that Irish Australians are at least as significant in Australia's history, arguably even more so. By some estimates, 30% of Australians have Irish ancestry. [0] From the beginnings of British colonisation up until at least the end of WW2, the Irish have been Australia's single largest ethnic minority; in the US, I doubt they held that title for long (if ever), ending up being outnumbered by the Germans. The first substantial armed rebellion against British rule in Australia (there have not been many) was carried out by Irish convicts in 1804 near Sydney, many of whom were veterans of the 1798 United Irishmen Rebellion. [1] You seem to view Australia as a country which is mostly English, when the truth is that the majority of Australians have non-English ancestry (of course, English and non-English ancestry are not mutually exclusive categories).

> the center-left party has largely been organized around mobilizing its ethnic factions to “turn out” to vote

Irish-Australians have played a rather comparable role in the history of Australia's main center-left party (Labor) to what Irish-Americans have played in the Democratic Party. [2]

> You’re certainly seeing more of that in Canada and Australia now given the mass immigration from Asia. But in the US this is been happening for 170 years or so.

When you consider Irish immigration – in 1871, 25% of overseas-born Australians were born in Ireland [3] – it has been happening in Australia since the 19th century – which is significant given that modern Australian history begins in 1788.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_Australians

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

[2] https://www.jstor.org/stable/23193797

[3] https://www.homeaffairs.gov.au/mca/files/2016-cis-ireland.PD...