[alephnerd]

Vote banks and patronage politics has always been a thing in the US, especially at the local and state level. The main difference is a significant portion of governance was temporarily de-politicized in the 1960s-90s period as leadership on both sides of the aisle had formative unifying experiences during the World Wars and the Korean War, but has been re-politicized now that activism on both sides of the aisle has resurged and social polarization has taken root.

The expansion of executive powers also played a role in this erosion, as both the judicial and legislative branch increasingly devolved their prerogative to the executive, leaving it much more open to political tampering and reducing the power of checks and balances.

There's a reason LKY in SG, Yoshida Shigeru and Sato Eisaku in Japan, and François Mitterrand in France tried to decentralize power to a semi-independent civil service.

[pessimist]

Low-level corruption at the local/state level is related but its effects are different though. In fact even today low level corruption in the US is extremely low by global standards - you can't bribe your way to a drivers license openly, for example. I'm sure it happens but it's not common or openly boasted about (parts of CA or DC could be an exception).

Here the corruption is openly displayed as a kind of peacock-tail to the beneficiaries.

[alephnerd]

I'd rather not have a whole discussion over this atm (I'm out rn - maybe later), but I recommend reading Yuen Yuen Ang's paper on "Unbundling Corruption" - there are different typographies of what "corruption" is, and some nations have always had a similar type of corruption compared to others.

In addition, low level corruption is orthogonal to grand corruption as can be seen in Singapore, Japan, South Korea, and the US.

Finally, Indian public discourse around corruption is non-targeted, and fails to contextualize significant institutional differences in how local, state, and federal governments operate in India compared to other states (be they democratic like the US or authoritarian like China).

[Feel free to add questions or points of contention, but I won't be able to reply quickly]

[pessimist]

Fine, I don't disagree with anything you point out. However where we differ is that I believe identity politics is the trigger factor here, all the other changes you mention (loss of balance of power etc) are downstream of this.

[lern_too_spel]

Your causal diagram is backwards. Identity politics isn't the path to corruption. Corrupt politicians like Trump use identity politics to gain power to practice their corruption. Nobody who wanted to bring back Christian hegemony and re-oppress minority groups is cheering that Trump is threatening to take away contracts from Musk because "their side is winning."

[lostlogin]

> minority groups

This includes ‘women’. A group that probably has a small majority.

[brookst]

Women are definitely a majority by demographics.

But in the US, “minority” means “less poticial power”. By any reasonable measure straight white “Christian” men should be about 20% of the population, yet somehow they have 80% of political power.

[hiatus]

> Identity politics isn't the path to corruption. Corrupt politicians like Trump use identity politics to gain power to practice their corruption.

These two sentences, taken together, lead me to exactly the opposite conclusion—exploitation of identity politics allows one to gain power to enact corruption. You play into what people want by being the savior they think they need and then once in power do whatever the hell you wanted in the first place.

[walleeee]

Idpol can exacerbate corruption. There are strong feedback dynamics.

And to reply to the comment above yours, there are material factors upstream of idpol. It's not a coincidence that sort of thing is in renaissance across the world.

[wqaatwt]

> you can't bribe your way to a drivers license openly

No but when it comes to local government contracts, building permits and similar stuff its quite different. Also a lot of (what sane people would consider) corruption is legal and institutionalized.

i.e. bribing politicians running for office is perfectly legal and entirely expected by all sides (that Americans are so open about this is quite unique).

[0xDEAFBEAD]

I understand that US federal law makes it difficult for a politician to appropriate campaign donations and use them for personal expenses.

[neilv]

Interesting; is there an accessible 10-minute read on this US (edit: governance) de-politicized/re-politicized history, or does it have a name?

[medler]

The notion that this kind of politicization started in the 90s is fanciful revisionism. It wasn’t really a thing in the US until about 2017. The word it’s known by is Trumpism.

[neilv]

I'm familiar with the rise of talk radio, News Corp, Web propaganda, alt-right, etc., in politics and public sentiment.

What's new to me is that the last couple decades might be a reversion to a pre-war mode of US governance.

(I know WW2 was unifying in some ways, as we'd expect, but I don't recall much from school about how US politics was played before then, other than punctuated events like the Civil War, civil rights movement, etc.)

[throwawaymaths]

its revisionism to say that the US has been free of politicization this bad. for most of its history, not counting the civil war very minor (and very major) issues sparked massacres, revolts, and even minor wars between states.

[KennyBlanken]

First off, Trump skyrocketed to political fame with his nonsense claims about Obama's citizenship.

The slide started in the 80's when Reagan killed off the 'fairness doctrine' which meant news outlets could present completely one-sided coverage of an issue.

Couple that with massive consolidation of newspapers and TV news stations where all the programming is heavily coordinated and groups like Sinclair started pushing identically worded "false news" narratives across all their stations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fHfgU8oMSo

[nfg]

I recommend people read this to see why this comment is wrong: When the Cloke Broke by John Ganz https://a.co/d/hL4vo7d

[fcatalan]

9/11 was a big turning point in my experience. American conservatives that I considered online friends were simple impossible to reason with within days and completely alien beings after a few weeks.

[jfengel]

Interesting. Things did change on 9/11 but it seemed incremental to me. Before that was the constant investigation of Clinton by Gingrich, the dog whistling of Reagan, Nixon's Southern Strategy, and before that to McCarthy and so on.

This is high level rather than your direct experience, so it's not a contradiction. Just a different perspective.

[xnx]

Yes. Almost everything about our current situation can be traced back to Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh. Things were much more civil and reasonable before that point.

[seanmcdirmid]

I don’t know. Nixon had goons breaking into the DNC headquarters (and his whole southern strategy led to racially polarized politics up to this day), and there was that senator who got beaten by another senator just before the civil war. Eisenhower waited in the car rather than attend a meeting with Truman on his inauguration.

[metabagel]

It has actually been a gradual process for decades from the John Birch Society to Paul Harvey to Rush Limbaugh to Newt Gingrich to Dick Cheney to Citizens United to Donald Trump.

Edit: Forgot Pat Buchanan. He belongs in there somewhere.

[alterom]

Trumpism is just Reaganomics brought to its logical conclusion.

[baobun]

This predates Trumpism.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

You can see the rise of left-wing identity politics by looking at term usage in the NY Times:

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2019/06/th...

It started before 2017. The right adopted identity politics as a response to the left doing so. Note that even NY Times word usage is a lagging indicator -- this is a case of prestige media picking up trends which originated on social media such as tumblr.

Vox even wrote a defense of the shift back in 2015, with an article called "All politics is identity politics":

https://www.vox.com/2015/1/29/7945119/all-politics-is-identi...

[sirtaj]

Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"? Because the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.

Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.

[0xDEAFBEAD]

>Are you tracking actual identity politics or the term "identity politics"?

The term "identity politics" is not being tracked. Rather, terminology used by modern left-wing idpol ideology is being tracked. See here: https://davidrozado.substack.com/p/new-york-times-word-usage...

>the meaning of the term applies just as much to ending slavery, womens' suffrage and civil rights movements.

I'm not sure that's true. E.g. Martin Luther King Jr spoke of the "magnificent words" in the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. Modern activists would say: "Written by dead pale male slaveholders. We need more diversity! Where are the voices of women and POC?" For King, ideas took precedence over identities. For modern activists, it's the opposite.

The American Anti-Slavery Society was predominantly white. That's puzzling for a movement driven by identity politics. It does make sense for a movement driven by universal humanitarian ideals.

In any case, if you still think I'm wrong, and identity politics is an essential force behind trends such as the civil rights movement -- then I suppose you'll be happy that it's being adopted by the political right in the United States? Since it's got such a great historical track record, surely results will be good? ;-)

>Otherwise, you might as well argue that fake news only existed from 2016 onwards, because that's when Google Trends says it did.

This is a bad analogy, because fake news itself doesn't use the term "fake news". If "fake news" was an ideology which was characterized by particular terminology, we could graph the use of that terminology to document the rise of the ideology. That's what's being done here.

In any case, I do believe that "fake news" (in the narrow sense of websites which write completely bogus news, with no effort at reporting, to drive clicks) is a phenomenon which has, in fact, become more widespread relatively recently (due to the ease of internet publishing etc.) So that's another way in which your analogy is invalid. Fake news did increase in popularity when Trump was the GOP candidate, relative to when Romney was the GOP candidate. And Google Trends helps illuminate that!

[sirtaj]

I think our definitions of "identity politics" differ too much to have a useful discussion about it. I'm going off the most common definitions I can find (eg dictionaries, wikipedia), but perhaps I'm looking in the wrong place.