I've always felt that the Trump presidency served as an effective form of "Chaos Engineering". Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered.
The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.
For me, the icing on the cake was the press conference at Four Seasons Landscaping.
Someone made a silly mistake in the booking, but either nobody noticed, or couldn't be bothered to correct it, or dared not be the one to tell Trump the mistake had been made. So the President (staff? apparently not him) gives a final press conference in the parking lot of a suburban store. It would be like watching the Emperor of Japan surrender in a dinghy because somebody brought the wrong Missouri.
Unforced error. Abandonment of dignity. Refusal to acknowledge the situation. Hallmarks of the administration.
(News accuracy notice: while it appears to have been an official press conference only Guiliani was actually there and not Trump himself)
"Book it at the Four Season", "No, not that one", "Yes, the random landscaping company".
I personally cannot tell if it was intentional. Trump has held a lot of events at businesses that I wouldn't traditionally expect to hold the event. The name overlap is very interesting, though.
Was he there? I watched for a few minutes and it just seemed like it was Guliani bringing poll watchers to say how they felt their rights to observe was infringed.
"final" press conference - just so that you're not disapointed later, but Trump is president until 20th of january, so he has some time yet to make announcements when he wants to.
One thing I would like to tell democrats now that you are WINNERS. And I mean it with all well being. Is that I think you should really not focus on your opponent but on your own candidate and party. We are all just humans in the end.
I was not saying we should only elect our most insulated and inbred. Joe Sixpack is a perfectly valid candidate.
The point is that when negotiations are at stake, you want an actual diplomat at the table, not an insult comic. If Joe Sixpack can keep his shit together enough to avert a war, feel free to elect him.
How do behave when you go to Church? To a funeral? Out to dinner? To work in the office? It's just recognizing that not every occasion is a wrestling match.
Politics is about persuasion. You catch more flies with honey than vinegar.
Thanks, I couldn't have said that better myself. I'm no guru. We just seem to have lost touch with why we even have democratically-elected leaders in the first place.
He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor.
Good new ideas:
Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony.
Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.
Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
Globalization has lifted billions from poverty. While it didn't benefit the US middle class in a direct, more money in their pockets way, it did likely prevent horrific wars that ravaged the world in the last century. It's bad business to nuke your customers. So the US middle class did benefit from not being drafted into the global mega-conflicts we avoided.
Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class?
> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class.
I’m from Bangladesh. The US backed world order has been amazing for the country. The World Bank and IMF have helped countries like Bangladesh modernize their economies, and they’re US-led institutions.
As the US pulls out, China displaces it. In Bangladesh, Chinese investment is flowing in, along with middle eastern culture. Neither of those things are good in my opinion.
I don’t think the US needs to continue footing the bill alone. But the other western powers don’t seem interested in helping. When I think about what I want the future of Bangladesh to look like in 50 years, I want it to be basically like the US or Canada, only with different food and religious holidays and movies and literature. And that seemed like the future in the 1990s, but it’s getting cloudy today.
This. US isolationism along with its "take my $ and going home" attitude to global institutions in order to court "one world government" conspiracists has created myriad political vacuums such as this.
It would be nice if we weren't dealing with a poorly-handled pandemic and consequential economic crisis that will take all our attention for the next 3 years. But I'm optimistic that we will develop an outward-thinking foreign policy before the end of this presidency.
> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US?
To paraphrase Churchill: "The US hegemony is the worst hegemony for the world, except for all the other hegemonies."
The US retreating into isolationism would likely open up a vacuum eagerly filled in by less, well, liberal-minded states. The globalization you describe was pushed by the US-EU-(Japan/India/etc.) alliance, with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object. At least this is my current understanding.
>"...with the US's armed forced being the big stick in case someone would object..."
Yup having big stick lets one tell the rest of the world to shut up and do what the're told to do. Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.
> Nice example of democracy and mutual respect in action.
Is that supposed to be a back-handed way of making a point? I don't understand what those things have to do with global stability.
Someone will be the de facto world police by force, now that the technology to utilize energy is so efficient. This situation has nothing to do with some sort of (USA-centered) Politically Correct philosophy. This situation is the eventuality of our time.
The laws of the world are enforced through violence. It's the ultimate power when it comes down to it, so yes, if you want maintain peace then you must also have the capacity to engage the most violence.
This is how peace is kept, regardless of how you feel about it. More importantly, power fills a vacuum, and the choices in the absence of the USA are not exactly better for the world.
>"The laws of the world are enforced through violence. It's the ultimate power when it comes down to it"
And the sky is blue. Everyone including my cat knows it. Of course one with the biggest club gets to write the laws and to ignore those when it suits. Just stop pretending to be a knight in a shining armor. And being not as shitty as some others is not a reason to claim high moral ground.
I believe America is the best country in the world with the strongest ideals. American is not only not as bad as others, it's also better.
You're free to believe something else of course, but then again most people have no perspective or experience of the suffering and violence in the world while they throw out these casual statements about how terrible America is.
America has many things I admire. And yes it is better than many countries. And some countries are better than the US. The US had also done a lot of awful things to other countries and killed/maimed/made destitute/etc way too many people. I do not see what is so casual about this.
That’s correct. This was the only way for the world to pay for WWII and for the US to stem the tide of communism and Stalin’s Russia. Now that the Cold War is over, the US middle class isn’t sure it wants to foot the bill for maintaining this system that no longer seems to provide it much benefit and, in fact, has seemed to harm it. I think the world will see a decent amount of chaos as the US pulls back from protecting global trade routes. Unless all of the other countries of the world want to agree to a global socialistic society, I think the US will likely focus on building back its manufacturing base, opening and maintaining markets for those goods to flow to, reducing the Medicare and Social Security overhead so that this isolationist system can actually survive, and then politics will be focused on traditional values vs progressive ideas. Of course the internet will make this conversation much messier than it used to be in the pre-WWII days.
I’m interested to see how the shifting demographics affect this conversation. The three biggest things that shaped history are demographics, geography, and information flow. Two of these three are going to be significantly different since the last time the US moved towards isolationism.
If you review history, large wars broke out between the major powers vying for dominance on a regular basis in the 19th and early 20th century, culminating in the First and Second World Wars. For all the negatives of what the US has done with its military since then, they're not a hundredth as bad as what went on before by any objective measure.
The Pax Americana has been good for stability and with stability comes prosperity. If the United States truly gave up its hegemony and turned isolationist, you'd see a resurgence of rearmament and jockeying for power among nations, inevitably followed by a new era of war after war.
Complete BS. The US has unilaterally kneecapped the U.N. and every other international organization capable of facilitating a fair world order. We don’t need the US to build a fair world order, contrary to the neocon ‘Pax Americana’ crap. Honestly I was surprised to see that phrase in a hacker news comment.
I'm a European lefty, and I always hated the American imperialism. I was kinda happy about Trump talking about pulling out of all the foreign wars.
Then I thought about it a bit more, and realised (and the last four years have shown) that if America withdraw, the Russians and the Chinese will move right in, and while I'm not a major fan of American imperialism, I'm even less of a fan of the Russian or Chinese flavours.
And the US built the UN and all the other multilateral organisations post WW2, so yeah they work for the US, but they're also pretty good for everyone else.
The UN only "works" because everybody understands that either you do what the US wants or you have a problem. Now? As terrible as the US is, I don't see how a country like China having the space to expand its influence is a good thing, considering the CCP's values compared to the West's values.
> For all the negatives of what the US has done with its military since then, they're not a hundredth as bad as what went on before by any objective measure.
I owe that to hundreds of years of human progression and development, not to the US.
No particular fan of the current administration here, nor do I disagree with you much.
But you have to understand, the shift of manufacturing from the US has just devastated the economies of entire regions. You have children fleeing where their families have lived for generations. I'm convinced a factor in opiates getting a toehold in these areas was due to people going on disability to try to stay economically afloat, and getting prescribed painkillers as cover for faked injuries or in recovery for real but unneccessary surgeries (I have no proof, just anecdata).
US hegemony was good for them. It helped payed their mortgages and their kids' tuitions. It's easy to magnanimous when you aren't the one losing your house or kids aren't ODing from fentanyl. And the resentment is real when you see new grads at Google or Facebook making 10 times what you make, or CEOs making 1000 times what you make.
edit: the president did little, if anything to help their situation and channeled that resentment for his own benefit. It is a matter of national security that we all fix this and I hope the new administration will prioritize it.
> I'm convinced a factor in opiates getting a toehold in these areas was due to people going on disability to try to stay economically afloat, and getting prescribed painkillers as cover for faked injuries or in recovery for real but unneccessary surgeries (I have no proof, just anecdata).
IME it's less about disability fraud and more about treatment of the physical injuries sustained from blue-collar work. Those faking it are the ones with enough foresight to sell their pills to others.
But you are otherwise right from what I've seen; the opiates are addictive, the demands of the job do not lessen (they only increase) and the rest writes itself.
Of course you are right. It can be hard work and takes a toll on the body. I know this directly. I didn't mean to imply it was all fraud, and apologize if it came off that way.
The people in those regions you mentioned are largely conservative. By that measure, isn't their issue with the Free-Market system which they prostrate themselves at the altar of? Conservatives also cite laws as being something that should be left up to the states. And they say that marginalized groups should simply move if they don't like the laws of the state they are in. So isn't the system working as they desired since people are leaving places they don't find suitable?
The function of both parties is to convince their constituents to believe in policies against their own interests.
As someone not steeped in it, I think the charitable interpretation is that these people like working a job for the dignity of supporting themselves. The jobs went away, but the desire for that dignity hasn't. So social welfare policies remain uninteresting. In fact any top-down analysis sets off their "government handout" detectors, so they're left pining for the age before the need for labor dried up.
IMO a lot could have been done (and perhaps could still be) by decreasing the definition of full time work. With technological progress, offshoring, and women entering the workforce, full time employment should be around 10-15 hours per week. It's a radical departure from the status quo, but that's due to progress being held back so long. Instead we're stuck between a rock and a hard place with an economy tuned to force people into working 40+ hours a week, but little actual work to do.
(BTW the work in cities is more about communication, so the same trend manifests itself as the creation of non-producing bullshit jobs. There is less financial pain, but similar existential pain)
It never is and never has been. But that doesn't stop people from invoking it in modern society repeatedly. And I would argue that people leaving these economically dead zones IS representative of labor meeting capital in terms of mobility.
They were union and democrat, and when the jobs left, they looked for someone to blame. I think most people can agree it's a complicated situation. But a lot of them really, really hate NAFTA and there's a reason for the post-Clinton shifts in the midwest. At this point, you have people stewing in partisan radio or tv all day. It takes a very strong person to resist that influence. Most of us wouldn't.
Almost everyone just wants to be safe, happy, economically secure, and the same for their kids. That transcends nationality, religion, or party. I think trying to frame it around economic policy reversed the way the mindset was bootstrapped.
> Also, why is US hegemony a good thing? What good is it for the 96% of the world that is not the US? Does it even benefit anyone outside the US ruling class?
As you alluded to in the previous paragraph, it's good for people because it means we're not participating in the kind of horrific wars that ravaged the world in the century before. And the US has been far less extractive than previous global hegemons. (So in that sense it's worse for US citizens, but better for the rest of the world)
Now, everything is a tradeoff, and perhaps this particular tradeoff hasn't been worth it. But there are most certainly good things that US hegemony has given the world.
The US does not have military hegemony as it shares it with the Russia (both have enough nukes to wipe out each other and the rest of the world). China would probably come to this stage soon as well.
Being economic hegemon (again likely to be challenged by China) is obviously good for the US but the rest of the world might not share this view for the large part.
I have no idea how this is relevant to a comment on US hegemony. Is this the comment you meant to reply to?
If you mean to say that BLM in the US is comparable to the great wars of the 19th and 20th centuries, I'd say that you're off by a factor of a million in deaths.
Well, it that's true it means that wars started by US have only caused less than fifty deaths...
Given that the war in Afghanistan alone caused between 500.0000 and 800.000 deaths (depending on the source), the factor is more probably around 2 to 1
> Over 111,000 Afghans, including civilians, soldiers and militants, are estimated to have been killed in the conflict. The Cost of War project estimated that the number who have died through indirect causes related to the war may be as high as 360,000 additional people based on a ratio of indirect to direct deaths in contemporary conflicts. These numbers do not include those who have died in Pakistan
> US Has Killed More Than 20 Million People in 37 “Victim Nations” Since World War II
Even if that article was remotely accurate (it isn't, see mcguire's comment), the kinds of wars that we fought before the US's new world order could produce that number of casualties in a single year (1942, 1945), so U.S. hegemony would still be a massive improvement. It's a massive improvement even over the two-pole world, as a quick glance at the battle deaths over time graph [1] shows.
Wow, you are arguing against a study by citing Vox
Just WOW
OK, let's make it easy for you
---
VIETNAMESE AND INDOCHINA WAR: A TOTAL OF 5.5 MILLION DEAD
THE VIETNAM WAR - 3.8 MILLION DEAD
1.7 MILLION MORE DEAD IN THE CAMBODIAN, KHMER ROUGE GENOCIDE
Source for death toll: Necrometrics and British Medical Journal, 2008
---
TOTAL IRAQI'S KILLED IN AMERIAN WARS (1990-PRESENT) - 3 MILLION
IRAQI SANCTIONS: 1.7 MILLION TOTAL DEAD [1]
500,000 CHILDREN DEAD [2][3]
Source:
[1] Behind the War on Terror. Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed. 2003.
[2] Food and Agricultural Organization Study (1995)
[3] Iraq Sanctions Kill Children, U.N Reports (New York Times, 1995
---
Just these major events account to more than 10 million deaths
And they stop at the first gulf war
There are many more years to cover
Good luck denying that
> 1942, 1945
The massive improvement from 80 years ago happened even in third World countries run by warlord (financed by the US)
So what?
Can we not have another 80 years of US hegemony and compare the results?
Is it asking too much?
It's how science works: the US hegemony experiment is done and the results are meh, we ended up with Trump, now let's try something else and let's try not to bet on the wrong horse this time, ok guys?
"To the families and friends of these victims it makes little difference whether the causes were U.S. military action, proxy military forces, the provision of U.S. military supplies or advisors, or other ways, such as economic pressures applied by our nation."
"The U.S. is responsible for between 1 and 1.8 million deaths during the war between the Soviet Union and Afghanistan, by luring the Soviet Union into invading that nation."
"Over the years we have repeatedly heard about the Khmer Rouge’s role in the deaths of millions in Cambodia without any acknowledgement being made this mass killing was made possible by the the U.S. bombing of that nation which destabilized it by death , injuries, hunger and dislocation of its people. So the U.S. bears responsibility not only for the deaths from the bombings but also for those resulting from the activities of the Khmer Rouge – a total of about 2.5 million people. Even when Vietnam latrer invaded Cambodia in 1979 the CIA was still supporting the Khmer Rouge."
"Some people estimate that the number of Cuban forces killed range from 2,000, to 4,000. Another estimate is that 1,800 Cuban forces were killed on an open highway by napalm. This appears to have been a precursor of the Highway of Death in Iraq in 1991 when U.S. forces mercilessly annihilated large numbers of Iraqis on a highway."
"Between 8,000 and 12,000 Nepalese have died since a civil war broke out in 1996. The death rate, according to Foreign Policy in Focus, sharply increased with the arrival of almost 8,400 American M-16 submachine guns (950 rpm) and U.S. advisers. Nepal is 85 percent rural and badly in need of land reform. Not surprisingly 42 % of its people live below the poverty level."
"Yugoslavia was a socialist federation of several republics. Since it refused to be closely tied to the Soviet Union during the Cold War, it gained some suport from the U.S. But when the Soviet Union dissolved, Yugoslavia’s usefulness to the U.S. ended, and the U.S and Germany worked to convert its socialist economy to a capitalist one by a process primarily of dividing and conquering. There were ethnic and religious differences between various parts of Yugoslavia which were manipulated by the U.S. to cause several wars which resulted in the dissolution of that country. From the early 1990s until now Yugoslavia split into several independent nations whose lowered income, along with CIA connivance, has made it a pawn in the hands of capitalist countries. (1) The dissolution of Yugoslavia was caused primarily by the U.S."
"Let us put this in historical perspective: the commemoration of the War to End All Wars acknowledges that 15 million lives were lost in the course of World War I (1914-18)." [But see the 1917-1919 flu pandemic, which may have started in the United States, making the US directly responsible for the deaths of 50 million people.]
Globalization transfer middle class jobs/wealth out of America allowing the upper class to gain a larger share of the profit, relying on the state to support the growing lower class but without a large middle class tax base.
The important question is when does it end, the economists that promoted globalization have come forward and admitted that it hurt the US more than planned.
Does it only end when the US population is in the state that the poor Chinese, et al. farmers were in before we accepted this globalism?
At some point we have to stop and say, "OK, we gave you a leg up now let's spend a few decades and rebuild our own country". This is not what is proposed by Democrat politicians, they propose we continue to transfer wealth (in many forms) to other countries and fill the income gap that is produced with social welfare programs.
I second that US policy in American continent has been very infective that still hundreds of thousands migrate to US because their countries hasnt been developed. Let's take aside Civil war in Guatemala, Salvador and Nicaragua. Migrants flood because their local governments can't produce jobs not guarantee basic safety. US trains armies and send equipment through the PPP plan which got not results. Trump idea was to stop migration and the delegation of responsability back which results in basic jobs available for americans, force those countries to develop and at the end you can help them with investment in infrastructure with private money no government tax payer money.
That's what bothers me with the world at the moment, we have powerful states fighting for their hegemony (sometimes with nuclear weapons), not thinking at all about the earth as a unified place full with people and not citizen of whatever country.
Is there a reason you ommitted the working class from your comment? I find it odd you're addressing everything the parent said except for how globalization affects the working class.
Maybe if you live in US you can afford to not care, but I live in a weak, poor, corrupted country. For us it's either US, Russia (now) or China (in the long run) and I prefer US after all.
The US does not prevent wars. It is a cause of most of the wars in modern times. It has done something like 100 military invasions. Toppled countless democratically elected leaders and undermined democracies.
US hegemony is to set be the US, not to serve the world.
Yes, that's the argument, in a hegemony (usa or otherwise), wars basically only happen when the hegemon wants them to, and the hegemon has so much soft power its rare that they want them to, and when it does happen its small scale.
The end result is ordinary people get caught up in less wars because politically war is much more rarely the right answer (either you're too politically weak to start one, or if you are the hegemon you just give people the evil eye and they usually shutup)
That doesn't make it a utopia, just a world with less war dead.
Vietnam was the US standing to a foreign power trying to take over. It is not a war on the nation, but a war on an aggressive faction. Same for Korea really.
The Vietnamese fought for freedom from colonialism. The got that from the French, almost, until the US intervened. The only aggressive factions were the French and the US.
Korea was different, and also backed by the UN. But even there things aren't as clear cut as you imply. North Korea had yet to turn into the Kim-led hard core Stalinist regime.
> Focus on China as an existential threat to US hegemony
This was already being done. That was the whole point of the end of the Obama admins shift to Asia strategy.
> Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.
Troop levels are the same today as they were in 2020. And I also don't think this is a novel idea, everyone wants out, but you have to do it in a way that doesn't leave us in a worst situation than just staying, and that is ridiculously hard. Nature abhors a vacuum.
> Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
This is a mixed bag. Look around and tell me that the general middle class American is worst off than they were in any other decade of modern America. We live safer, cleaner lives. What we don't feel is security, which is a consequence of 40 years of treating the government as an entity that is the problem, and not an entity that can be the solution.
Thanks for the link. I guess I was born in a time (early 80s) where populism was on an all time low. However, the Cold War did exist, and that caused FUD as well (though that term partly unfairly de-legitimizes the realistic fear). So populism, it has been on the rise ever since I became an adult. I wasn't around yet, but what I believe happened was Reagan. War on Drugs. Reaction to the counter-culture, by marginalizing these minorities. If you remember Adam Curtis' series The Power Of Nightmares, already a new threat was on the verge when the Cold War was over. And that threat was exploited on for greed and profit, at the expense of the common men and common women (the soldiers).
That isn't a consequence of globalization. I don't want to downplay the seriousness of this, because I agree that is a problem, but not one caused by globalization, but rather NIMBYism. And this goes into my point about security and government.
Even more so, by Federal Reserve ongoing policy of extremely low interest rates. If the long bond yielded 5% you'd see MUCH lower real estate appreciation, and if it got there quickly, prices would certainly drop significantly.
With that said, there are plenty of affordable places to move to, they just aren't super sexy and cool. But even San Francisco and Brooklyn were completely uncool not that long ago.
>This was already being done. That was the whole point of the end of the Obama admins shift to Asia strategy.
Exactly. You can do this the smart way, by gathering partners and encircling China with something like the TPP, or you can do it the dumb way, by picking stupid playground fights.
True, it's important to remember that every president for the last couple decades except Trump has involved us in some new armed conflict, mostly with poor results for the country. I hope that Biden will continue on this front where Trump left off.
Doesn't mean much to me. We, the public (including people like Biden, and allies of USA) were deceived by the Bush government and its lackeys (Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc) concerning WMDs in Iraq. That not only deceived the American public; the deception included Congress as well. My government (The Netherlands) got lied to as well about WMDs. We ended up with our right-wing government supporting the war in Iraq politically, but not military. I remember protesting against this war, on the streets in Amsterdam. Something I hardly ever did in my life, btw.
For reference, see the movie Vice (2018) which is basically a third party account on Dick Cheney's biography. Scooter Libby, who got sentenced due to Plamegate due to leaking Plame's name while she was an active CIA asset on foreign ground (a retaliation move), as well. He got his sentence commuted by Bush and got fully pardoned by Trump. Why? I don't believe there's a valid justification. Nepotism 101.
Btw, while Obama did a fair amount of drone strikes, was vigilant on leaks, and probably knew all about NSA's ops before Snowden leaked, he did inherit a mess from Bush. After Obama, Trump did an ample amount of drone strikes (tho we need to put both into context as drone strikes are a new technology), and while Trump did not start a war in the traditional sense he escalated enough foreign relations including NATO and other treaties like WTO, Middle East (ISIS being partly a mess USA made with Iraq invasion), China (trade conflict), Iran (killing of Suleimani). Trump was a nationalist, and an egocentric one at that, who did not follow conventional scientific consensus on e.g. climate change. I'm all for freedom and opinion, but denying an important truth which is going to affect all of humanity if we don't act Soon (tm), is dangerous. Especially for people like me who live under the sea level (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). I'm so utterly relieved that Trump is gone. Senate isn't decided yet AFAIK, but I am not anti Republican by definition, and I believe dialogue is the way forward. Dialogue based on rationalization, facts, and science though; ie. not lies, denial, deception.
Trump was rhetorically against climate change but in large part simply because he prefers to use simple words that resonate with the majority. But the policies were primarily aimed at helping the working class - stopping job drain from coal areas (doesn’t actually work, because of economics), preventing fuel price rises (not actually that popular, they tried that in France as well but got massive working class protests) and national security (promoting US and EU energy self-sufficiency means we need to rely less on unstable undemocratic regimes in the Middle East and Russia)
Tax cuts for the ultra rich (who really don't need more money to get about, as they only have gotten more rich while middle class gets marginalized [1] [2]) don't help the working class. Worker's rights, unionization, higher minimum wage, legalization to help hard working in gig economy -- these directly help a working class in a divide and conquer society as it is.
Dividing was his creed. Trump had a lot of hot air about helping Joe Sixpack, ie. rhetoric and short-term gains. On the long-term, climate change affects us all. Including the working class. We've seen some appetizers in the form of drought and massive fires. Reaction? Denial, cause he can't figure a way to profit from it.
There's ways to profit from climate change. Its a lack of willpower and lack of inventive thinking to not opt for it, and unfortunately the world can't afford to ignore it any longer.
I'm not sure those are new ideas, people have wanted to get out of the middle east since even the bush era, and china has been increasing its sphere of influence and on the road to be second super power for a while now. Similarly whether or not globalization is good for the working class or just makes the rich get richer has been publicly debated the entire time i have been alive.
I think the main difference is that trump decided to take tactical action on these positions without regards for the strategic long term consequences, which other presidents have been unwilling to do (except the globalisation point, i think most previous really liked globalisation and werent just worried about the consequences)
A dimension we under-appreciate is how much fail we’ve been tolerating for decades.
The quest to keep NK from going nuclear started decades ago and spanned administrations from both parties, and finally failed miserably and objectively before Trump got into office. This, despite all best efforts from the best minds. The status quo was hardly a defensible glide path.
Similarly, we’ve been after real change in the Mideast for decades across multiple admins from both parties. We’ve never had movement. I’m not saying that the Abraham Accords fix everything, but getting four nations to finally recognize the right of Israel to exist and engage in trade and cultural exchange is certainly visible change. Energy independence also helps lessen our conflict of interest there. That’s visible change that was seemingly unobtainium for decades. Circumstance and technology have their role in this, but there are also specific policy and regulatory frameworks that will make or break this new path over coming years.
China.. I think there’s consensus that Kissinger’s laissez faire approach to opening China has not produced the intended outcome. Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.
So point being that the status quo - the unmovable track our foreign policy was on for decades regardless of president - was due for a shake up. It will be interesting to see what Biden does - revert to old paths, or take advantage of the new paths?
> Similarly, we’ve been after real change in the Mideast for decades across multiple admins from both parties. We’ve never had movement.
Have to go back a little further than that, the romans also wanted change in the middle east and didn't have much luck.
> Basically we’ve taken a totalitarian and repressive state and made them a rich totalitarian and repressive state.
I'd say under trump we have taken a rich toltalitarian and reppressive state and turned them into a rich toltalitarian/reppressive state with new friends in high places.
Just because something is a change does not make it a change for the better. Maybe the previous policy was trying to hold back the tide and failing. Opening the floodgates is a change, but i'm not sure its a good change, even if holding back the tide was a failure on slow motion.
Are you saying any of the above policy shifts (NK, CN, Mideast) have opened the floodgates on something bad relative to the preceding policies? Or is this just a theoretical point? At worst they’ve done nothing (NK). I can cite several overdue improvements in Mideast and China policy though.
By “we” I mean the United States, and by real change by last several admins, I’m of course referring to attempts to break the stalemate between Israel and the other ME nations after the wars (six years, etc), not world wars. Necessarily time-bound. Not sure what Romans have to do with this unless you’re making a point about futility? The Romans certainly impacted the near East for hundreds of years, right?
> Just freaking get out of the Middle East already.
I think this is the biggest place where he said one thing, then immediately did another. We are involved in the Middle East as we ever were, and much much more so with more disastrous effects in places like Yemen. The US' involvement in Yemen should be enough to laugh Trump offstage any time he talks about "getting out of the middle east".
Please please please don't let him off the hook for this by saying he had "good ideas" here when he was talking out of one side of his mouth while civilian families are being slaughtered.
You could also point out that he has abandoned the kurds in Syria (Rojava), where they are losing ground against the turkish army and their jihadist mercenaries. They are about to ethnically cleanse the region, with dramatic consequences for the autonomous zone that has developed a seemingly fair democracy.
The military branch of the PYD party was crucial during the fight against ISIS.
Leaving them to die in Erdogan's hands is tragic.
“As we ever were” - I’m not sure what you mean by that. We’ve been involved in the Middle East substantially since oil exploration there started showing results.
Energy independence from the ME is a reliable quality by which the US (and others) will care less about the region. But this also means leaving the regional developed powers to manage the area with greater and greater autonomy (e.g. Israel and SA).
To that end, we are arguably less “involved” today. Our dependence on that oil and our direct action involvement there are directly related.
By the numbers, we are less involved than in, say, 2005 if the US body count is the metric. If civilian deaths are the metric, Iraq’s numbers have fallen off a cliff since 2017 [0]. I would guess the same for Syria but don’t have data at hand.
It’s tough to want it both ways - asking the US to intervene for peace but not spill any blood. If the ME tells us anything, it’s that peace does not come from doing nothing - it is not the region’s default state given the cultural animosities. Stability seems the best chance for civilian peace there. The US is increasingly delegating or abdicating that role to the most friendly options available.
How would you prefer that the trajectory change? More direct “peacekeeping” involvement? Total abandonment while watching a regional death match play out?
Open borders to all refugees (and literally everyone else)and make is as easy as possible for those under repressive regimes to leave. Other than that, continue to trade with the country for basically everything except weapons or anything that could be used to make weapons.
This is also how I feel about China and Hong Kong, NK, how I would have felt under WW2/Germany, and how I would feel basically every other foreign policy incident.
>Globalization has not been good for the working and middle class.
This seems overly simplistic. Globalization has led to a drop in the cost of many goods as well as multiple new markets for US industries.
I think there's a reasonable argument to be made that the spoils of globalization have not been shared as fairly as they should of, but imo that's way more linked to other policies (like tax rates & spending)
Wars are no longer called wars. The US is much more involved in the civilian slaughter happening in Yemen, we just don't call it a "war" to save face. Don't call this a victory for him, he'll rest in hell for the damage he's done here alone.
The Yemen thing is a war and called that. Just not a US war. Wikipedia has it as "Yemeni Civil War (2014–present)". "The conflict has been widely seen as an extension of the Iran–Saudi Arabia proxy conflict." And then the US gets roped in as mates of the Saudis and enemies of the Iranians but it's not really a US thing and on the go before Donald got in there.
Yes, but we are not "involved" in the war, we are just _involved_ in the war. And I personally don't care if it was there when Trump took office, I care about what Trump did with it.
Like many things in a presidency; this is clearly partially - probably largely - guided by external developments. Sure, the president gets more say that anybody else, but I'm skeptical you can ascribe too much blame (or glory) to the outcomes here; at best you can look at the details, and see if in a given situation (ideally in retrospect) a president made the right choices.
I don't think Trump was tested in this area, and I don't think most wars were trivially the fault of the presidencies they were started in (sure, some exceptions like the most recent iraq may jump to mind). I mean, "just don't participate" is also equivalent to ceding influence to whoever feels like a bit of shelling would do them good, so that's not always a good choice - under the assumption that the US (and world) was well served by some measure of imposed order.
Course, maybe I'm misinterpreting who had agency in those situations - do you think it's largely presidents' at fault for for the post-WWII military engagements?
Where are you getting those numbers? I am looking at https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/ and see only Spain at a higher death per capita of the countries you listed. Even so, I don't think anyone is pointing to the UK and saying they did it right! And the US has a 20% higher per capita death rate than France, which I would call more than "a bit higher."
I have no idea where the worldometers.info data is coming from.
Regardless of small differences, painting Covid-19 as a uniquely American problem stemming from American politics is silly. No countries have performed particularly well, despite trying everything from strict lockdowns to no response at all. East and South East Asia is outperforming, but that likely has more to do with past exposures and disease resistance than it is due to policy difference.
uh what, more likely because disease resistance? places like SK absolutely are doing well because of policy difference. Restricting access in, robust contact tracing, phased levels of lockdown that are clear and unified.
Some of these would never work in the US due to gov't structure and just the culture of people (privacy rights), but to discount American politics is a stretch. The entire debacle has been a war on misinformation from the top down.
If it is past exposures and disease resistence, how do you explain early spread in Wuhan? Why does Aus/NZ enjoy natural immunity but not Indonesia? Quarantines are effective against all infectious diseases and have been for centuries, why do you assume they were not effective in places like China and Vietnam? Where is the evidence that disease resistance plays any role?
Recently, France has been reporting about half as many cases as the entire USA despite its smaller population, and last I checked their testing wasn't even as widespread as in the US. Their numbers keep going up too. I wouldn't rely on their death rate remaining lower.
Which points to a terrible handling of COVID19 by Trump. Given the low population density of the US, the rate should be similar to other low density areas like e.g. Norway and Finland, yet it is more than 10x higher.
The US has numbers comparable to high density countries with extensive use of public transport. That is just terrible outcomes for a country where everybody drives and live far apart.
US is a mix of High and Low Density, you can not just take the national population and divide by land mass to come up with how things "should have gone" with covid
Nor is is really fair to even judge the Federal response to it at all, as under our system of government health care is largely a State matter not a federal one.
Remember the United States is a Republic of 50 States, joined together under a common Defense and Monetary system.
I don't for see large scale changes in policy under a Biden Presidency, you may get stronger messaging but power of the President is largely limited outside of dispersing money, and maybe requiring manufacturers to make certain things if there is a national shortage
Masks Mandates, Lock Downs, etc will still fall under the purview of State Governors as this how our constitution divides the powers of the government
What’s the point of a government or a monetary and defence system if it doesn’t help protect health? Surely keeping citizens alive and well is about the most basic role of a government?
You would have to provide a stronger definition of what you mean by "help protect health"
If you mean full on authoritarian rules where by the government arbitrarily decides by executive fiat who is allowed to work, leave their home, engage in commerce, or other wise gather in any way for months.
I would say no that is not a proper role of a government in a free society that has any respect for civil or human rights...
Not just that, you'd be comparing with countries that also have major cities that are particularly badly affected and have not removed those figures from their total.
IMHO that means that if the U.S. actually had a federal response, if, you know, the Trump administration was actually trying to use the federal government to help the country, that our numbers would be lower.
Which, considering the wealth and expertise of the United States, makes a sort of sense.
At least those other nations are actually making an effort, and not denying science and spreading false, destructive information.
I'm going to ask this in a sincere hope of getting an answer, regardless of how flip it sounds:
What specifically did Trump fail to do that you feel he should have done with regard to Covid? Keeping in mind that the US is a constitutional republic and does not have a lot of the same legal tools to compel people to do things en masse that other nations do.
A lock down which is properly implemented can work, with the most recent success being Australia. I’m in New Zealand and we are likely to have open borders with other clear areas in the not-too-distant future. Time will tell what the cost in dollars and lives looks like with various strategies (or lack thereof), but so far NZ’s approach seems a good choice.
The meaning of Congress’ authority to declare war has been clarified (or changed) over time to mean that Congress provides oversight to the Executive branch’s proactive use of the military. Despite that, though, I think it is still fair to say that the US can effectively not go to war if Congress is not agreeable to it unofficially, as the US hasn’t ever had a situation where its president authorized military use that Congress substantially and seriously opposed.
I guess it’s luck to a degree, but I regard it more as calling Iran’s bluff. There is no defense for their overt funding and leadership of destabilizing terrorism in the region (as evidenced). They have been to war before, it’s not “luck” that they didn’t decide to commit suicide this time. They cannot afford war, and had they started, fighting a coalition of the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia, and a few others would not be good for them, even if Russia or China decided to float them for a while. It would have resulted in a horrible, horrible outcome for the people of Iran, and say what you want about the Theocracy but it’s not that dumb.
Which is, for an US president, an almost unbelievable thing. Especially since he could have used the Iranian missile attacks on US bases to start a war there. He should get a peace Nobel prize for his actions towards world stability, which also includes his efforts to discuss with North Korea (official visit there!) and the arms sell to Taiwan.
The US hegemony exists because we have projected military force across the world, and our companies are the primary driver of globalization. Leaving the Middle East would end any dream of bringing those regions under the western umbrella (as has been successfully done in S. Korea and Japan). Ending globalization would end the thing that has made US corporations uniquely successful, and which makes US economic sanctions so strong.
And focusing on China as the new red scare would (is already?) simply result in a new Cold War, to nobody's benefit.
I personally don't think the US has any business being hegemon (feel free to check my post history), but if your primary interest is maintaining the position of the US from ~1992-2016, then your best bet is to maintain the foreign and economic policy of those times, which is basically what Biden is promising to do.
Depends on where you draw the line on the working class; if anything the working class worldwide has exploded as more people have left poverty in the past 20 years than in the past 100.
Presumably "the US working class". Globalization has enriched the wealthiest Americans and the global poor at the expense of working Americans, and that's a pretty awful charity program IMO.
Why? National mutual self-interest is probably the single most long-term stable and historically workable approach to foreign policy, economics, and so forth that I can think of.
It's not an approach to the world. The US government isn't a beneficient association that is organized to make things better for people in other countries at the expense of US citizens -- it's not an aid organization or a charity or something like that. The interests of non-citizens don't have any representation in it (it's like every other government in that regard) -- it's just the wrong organization to do something like that.
In 100 years we’ll say the same thing when Planet Earth says “it’s not our responsibility to promote the interests of the Mars people”. People just inherently suck.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing for Americans to do things for other people in a way that costs them something, even something considerable; but it is certainly strange for their government to do so by moving jobs abroad and otherwise promoting the interests of the working class of other countries as the comment I was replying to mentions.
Think about this: countries when during elections riot on the streets happen, the incumbing foment a civil war and refuse to admit he's lost the elections, are usually bombed by USA.
They usually are not bombed by the USA. Most countries sort out their own affairs in these kinds of things (witness Brazil) -- in the absence of extended disorder and open warfare.
They didn't need to, they have their men there and hid many former Nazi officials
> The 1964 Brazilian coup d'état (Portuguese: Golpe de estado no Brasil em 1964 or, more colloquially, golpe de 64) was a series of events in Brazil from March 31 to April 1 that led to the overthrow of President João Goulart by members of the Brazilian Armed Forces, supported by the United States government.The coup put an end to the government of Goulart (also known as 'Jango'), a member of the Brazilian Labour Party [...] although a moderate nationalist, Goulart was accused of being a communist by right-wing militants, he was unable to take office [...] The coup brought to Brazil a military regime politically aligned to the interests of the United States government. This regime lasted until 1985, when Neves was indirectly elected the first civilian president of Brazil since the 1960 elections.
The usual same old story.
It's the same thing they did to Lula.
But you're right, bombed was an exaggeration on my part, they usually invade or send weapons and cavalry
I suggest they stop meddling with other nations internal affairs and stop complaining if large parts of the world are challenging their self appointed role of hegemonic country and are calling them out for their past crimes
Colonization through military power is not hegemony, is tyranny
Yes but we have to decide if they are the only ones that matter.
Is it right, or wise in the long term, to use our position of power to stop the growth of wealth in non-developed countries? On the other hand, do we have any sort of obligation to elevate the standards of living of people in non-developed countries, especially when it may impact the standards of people living in our borders?
There is a moral question to be answered, especially given our purported system of values and the way in which the wealthy and wealthy countries came to be as such.
I'm not staking out a position or trying to shame anyone. I'm just saying I think it is the underlying question we should be thinking about to decide how we judge globalization and its effects.
Globalization is good in the aggregate but it does affect negatively some communities. The solution is not to stop globalization but to implement public policies to counter the negative effects.
Outsourcing manufacturing from a country with labor and environmental regulations to a place where they treat workers like slaves and treat the environment like a trash can would be an example.
Saying it’s immoral is one thing that I can agree with. But that’s different than objectively showing how it makes their lives worse. I’m looking for actual metrics like a decline in life expectancy, income, etc.
Just to be clear I’m not on one side or the other because I’m relatively ignorant on the topic. Just looking for evidence
Losing your job because it was outsourced is pretty objectively bad. You can go try to find another job in the same industry but all the competing companies are going to be looking at doing the same thing because they have to compete on margins and their competition just reduced their labor cost by a factor of 2 to 10.
I don't know what evidence for this would look like except for all the goods that are manufactured overseas that used to be manufactured domestically. I'm not making a statistical argument. I'm making an argument based on life experience and inference. Although life expectancy in the US is declining. Wages are stagnant but that's an aggregate over the population. If a 30-year-old worker loses their job and an 18-year-old worker gets hired in a different industry for the same "real wage" then that looks like no change from the perspective of population statistics.
Yes, but that’s talking to the original point I thought you were attempting to refute. I think there’s a lot of case to be made that globalization is a net negative for US workers, but the point being made was that it may also be a net positive for non-US workers. I (perhaps wrongly) assumed your comments about exporting pollution etc. was that it was a net negative in the non-US as well
I think its bad for Earthlings because it pollutes the planet and its bad for the people who lost their jobs because they can maybe afford to replace their consumer goods with crap made overseas but not save for retirement and its bad for the people overseas because they work in factories with no labor protections to make stuff for people in other countries that they cannot themselves afford. I think the whole thing is bad but inevitable.
It makes their lives worse because it puts the workers in competition with workers in those other countries.
Since you asked for metrics, here is a site for working remotely as a freelancer [1]. You'll quickly notice the pay rates are abysmal. $7/hr for a three.js developer. $250 (or lower, possibly as low s $30) to make a fully functional & tested app on android+iphone (would normally take an entire dev team probably well over 1 or 2 weeks).
These are rates below minimum wage for highly technical skills.
This is even more true for hardware too but it's hard to quantify, because e.g. you can't just compare the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Shenzhen with the price of buying capacitors wholesale from Cleveland, because Cleveland doesn't manufacture capacitors.
However, I do have some data (though it's not the most sophisticatedly obtained). Sticking with capacitors as a benchmark, I was expecting there to be 0 US companies manufacturing capacitors, but apparently there are 7 [2]. In contrast, there are apparently 228 Chinese companies manufacturing capacitors [3].
All of this is just to say it's pretty clear that globalization has moved these jobs overseas (and significantly dropped the market rate for those who remain local).
I agree with this but think it misses the actual point. To paraphrase a popular pundit, “People need to realize that things that are bad for the US may not be bad for the world.”
To clarify the point, the US largely rode a post-WW2 manufacturing boom for a couple generations where the relative quality of life for US citizens disproportionately outpaced other countries. Globalization has started to erase that disparity. So while it’s bad for the US middle and working classes it’s largely benefited pulling people out of poverty for other nations, exemplified by China. The irony is that much of this is driven by the US’s addiction to cheap shit.
I’m only saying the above because I think people are confusing the discussion, not because I think that it’s the best long term strategy
I do think it's benefited other nations, but -- getting more into personal opinion -- I also think the "help other nations" argument is mostly used to justify cheapening wages. If companies were paying foreign workers the same rates that they would have paid US workers I'd be more empathetic to the argument. But something about the fact that the top 90th percentile of Americans has seen huge gains in the last 40 years, while the middle to bottom percentile has seen neutral or losses [1] raises flags to me that the push towards globalization was selfishly motivated. I know it's a huge inference to say the stagnating wages are caused by globalization, but realistically I would say it's the combination of outsourced labor/manufacturing, immigration, rise of women in the workforce, rise of minorities in the workforce, and automation. Most of these are positive changes, but I still think the average blue collar worker suffered a cost that the hyper-wealthy elite did not, so at the moment I don't see the push for globalization as a very selfless initiative.
Yes, 100%. I don’t think it was an altruistic motive on either side. The US was acting on behalf of the monied interests and counties like China were acting to become a more dominant economy on the world stage. The fact that it lifted so many out of poverty was a by-product. What I think will be interesting is how China handles a burgeoning middle class that may want a more freedoms as their numbers grow
Wasn't the previous admin already focused on China / the Pacific region already? I do have to agree on the last point, so. And I say that as a globalist, free trade proponent and a supply chain guy. So in a sense, globalization is my job. And while a lot of people, also in developing countries, have profited from globalization, we all have to find ways to adopt the way we do things to get of the less than good parts.
I do think that a lot of people had these things on their agenda already. We didn't need Trump to come to these conclusions. Because he might have gotten the issues right, but didn't really understand them nor did he care about solutions.
Also, he didn't get out of the Middle East, he just picked a side. Not sure what that means for the region.
Not a fan of the current (soon to be previous) admin, but I have to acknowledge that a direct approach on China has been more effective than the last 3 decades of Asian pivots ( Bill Clinton tried focusing on China as well ).
American politics has brief focus windows, direct action has more impact than vague "pivots" or "focuses" which last about as long as the next crisis.
Short term, sure. But as we saw, US admins and foreign policy changes fast enough, max after 8 years. Being they only super power carries the responsibility to keep things stable. That means consistency, direct action of one single admin can very well the opposite of that. Especially when the other party plays the long game.
I would be inclined to agree, if Trump had any strategy behind that. His policies, or rather lack thereof, don't support that. I'd say he just stumbled around and got lucky once. And even that has to be seen.
Many of your goals could be accomplished by transitioning to a carbon-negative (positive?) economy that captures more carbon than it emits.
Energy independence helps us avoid relying on chinese solar panels and middle eastern oil.
Building carbon capture infrastructure in the US means the jobs would be here. Delaying means eventually pumping unprecedented amounts of money into whatever other country gets there first (probably China).
Globalization is demonized but it's a natural consequence of technology. It's easier than ever to work with production facilities around the world. We can't stop businesses from exploring more efficient production. But we can and should level the playing field. One contributor to the difference in wages for manufacturing employees is the lack of regulations and protections for workers in countries like China. Treaties that support trade are one way to level the playing field. TPP had a bunch of bad stuff in it too, so perhaps not a net win.
The much maligned TPP was aimed right at China. It was big business friendly, but it also encouraged the other large economies in the Pacific to align themselves with the US instead of China.
Actually, focusing on attacking china is a big mistake of this admin. It accelerates the decline of US hegemony as we know it. The best strategy for US is to maintain the current world order with China. Only the weaker countries "behind" US/China, e.g. India/Japan/Vietnam/Taiwan, would want the two countries to fight it out so they can benefit. And there are people in the US who believe a trade and technology war with china is easy to win, which are proven wrong.
It appears that we will go from "chaotic and ineffectual" to just ineffectual. Assuming that Republicans maintain control of the Senate, he can suggest all the leftist ideas he wants, but nothing will get done.
What concerns me is that just as Trump's election encouraged the proliferation of racism, Biden's election will encourage the proliferation of cancel/woke culture, which will lead to even more division than we have under Trump.
I agree that Trump is right that something more needed to be done with China. But like most of what he did, his execution was terrible. His need to take credit and inability to work with anyone wouldn’t let him get out of his own way. Hopefully Biden takes the idea and works with legislation and our allies to put more pressure on China.
Globalization and isolation have two sides, neither of which is all pro or con.
I'm looking forward to Trump's caustic personality leaving the equation so we can finally talk about these things in a more neutral way. A lot of people, myself included, cannot look past Trump's obvious flaws despite some of his ideas(at least the overall direction, maybe not the execution) being worth considering.
You think this will happen? The political right have openly embraced demagoguery, authoritarianism, disinformation, and a scorched-earth, because-we-can style of politics. The media have embraced the outrage-factory model for improving as revenues. The electorate have committed to becoming single issue voters. And finally, who benefits the most from this quagmire? The corporate elite who fear the threat of government intervention in free markets.
The end of US egemony could be good for the middle class outside of the US, especially South America and the Middle East.
Not saying it will, but that during the unrivaled US egemony after the end of the cold war things have been worse for the middle/poor segment of society, especially in the west.
Could be a coincidence, could be bad luck, could be a correlation.
It could go back to the laissez-faire system that was present when all the European powers were running around basically doing anything they wanted. (It should be noted that the US wasn't as isolationist as the propaganda would have you believe: how else did they get pre-revolution Cuba, PR, Guam, Hawaii, etc.?)
I think these systems align to a certain power dynamic. Because of national sovereignty, its already as close to a laissez faire approach as you can get, yet there’s a hierarchy across virtually any dimension you want to measure. So if the US loses, for example, its economic hegemony another country will take its place. Same with military or any other measure.
I don’t think the US has been isolationist since before the Spanish American war.
China's Belt and Road program seems to be establishing a competitor hegemony in the eastern sphere of influence, rather than directly replacing the US. They're building a lot of infrastructure in Africa, expanding their already massive supply chain and working effectively towards surviving a disconnection from the West.
I agree that US hegemony isn't gone yet, but we've lost so much of our manufacturing and materials sourcing that we'll soon need them more than they need us.
How are those battle ship groups funded? Foreign debt? When was the last time the US had a balanced budget?
Having a nice battleship group does little for the average american public.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
Eisenhower
People always allude to this, and it's true an adversary could (probably, maybe) sink one aircraft carrier. That same adversary wouldn't sink a second.
> Back in reality, it's true [China] could ... sink 15 aircraft carriers [in an hour].
That is unlikely. The Chinese military relies on a combination of overwhelming manpower and tactical positioning, not aircraft superiority and tactical missile deployment (although they are equipping with more and more ballistic missiles). This puts the US at a distinct advantage in almost every conflict with the Chinese military. This includes the South Seas.
The presence of the 5 US carriers* off Singapore has deterred the staged Chinese invasion force for the last few months
I was going to say China would use submarines for such, but they don't appear to have many (in contrast to USA) [1]. My next consideration would be China's red team (APT) but I'm unsure about aircraft carriers being hackable. I mean, it'd make a great fiction novel, perhaps a sequel to Cryptonomicon. Where does China's military strength lie?
> He was chaotic and ineffectual and mostly focused on dumb peeves. But I do think he got some good ideas through the conventional “wisdom”. His execution on everything was poor.
Ineffectual? I’d argue he’s one of the most consequential Presidents of the past 100 years.
He reshaped the federal bench, confirmed a 6-3 majority on the SCOTUS, overhauled the tax code, negotiated multiple Middle East peace deals, repealed and replaced NAFTA, and didn’t start a single foreign war.
His impact on the US political system will be felt for generations. Compare that to 8 years of Obama that can’t point to any meaningful accomplishment.
I've actually had a related but perhaps converse opinion: it's demonstrated the resilience of our government. A lot of people have been noting his authoritarian tendencies and expressing concern that he might refuse to acknowledge election results, and while that appears to be the case, there's no indication that he will have his way (apart from legal proceedings, which are a perfectly democratic [albeit petulant] way to contest election results). In some countries, a president demanding a stop to vote counting might get their way, but that didn't happen here, and it's good to know that for the endless flack (some fair and some not) America and Americans get, we still have a robust political system.
I agree it has demonstrated resilience, a positive thing indeed. But I think it's good to consider what would happen in other countries should a character like Trump be elected. In Canada, a polarizing character like Trump would be exceedingly unlikely to form a majority government. As a minority government, they would be subject to "no-confidence" votes regularly. When a government passes a budget for example, if the budget does not pass the house, the government automatically crumbles and an election is called. Additionally, as the prime minister is simply the head of the party, his vote carries no more weight than other members, and he can be fired by his own party at any time.
A lot of checks and balances are baked into a multi-party system. One inherent advantage is less polarization, as there are more parties to represent the various views of the people. However, there are of course a lot of improvements that could be made to the Canadian governance system (ditching first past the post for example), but I do believe this style of government is more resilient than the US system.
At the same time, our government has not, and will likely not, be put to the test by someone like Trump. It is commendable that the US system has withstood what many feared could be the start of the downfall of democracy in the US.
We've seen what happens when a Trump figure is elected in the UK: there are no real checks and balances. Once an electoral majority was achieved, anything is possible, including a bill to specifically authorize law enforcement to commit crimes.
On the other hand, Biden has come out backing Ireland. Which is good for sanity and bad for Johnson.
I really wish that a failed impeachment would result in new elections for the House and President. Seems like the only logical conclusion when the democratic chamber of the legislature and the pseudo-democratic executive are at odds.
... and senate above all; definitely. In fact, I'd argue it you had to reelect any one seat of power in the event of a failed impeachment, it should be the senate above the president or house.
I mean, it's never going to happen due to constitutional constraints, but really the very existence of the senate is rather problematic, because it's elections are so very different from those of the house+presidency; the votes are very much non-proportional.
And while non-proportionality is not in and of itself really all that bad - I mean, it's bad in that it's so visibly unfair that it slightly undermines the point of democracy (it makes it look a little hypocritical), but the actual impact of said unfairness (as opposed to perception thereof) isn't really all that problematic; many things in the world aren't 100% fair.
No, the real problem isn't the non-proportionality, it's the gridlock that arises from having so very different electoral systems. That gridlock exacerbates issues with partisanship, because it makes it attractive to play brinkmanship games; and of course gridlock isn't harmless anyhow. The system would be more stable if house, senate and presidency had similar elector biases; regardless of fairness.
Really though, parliamentary systems are in this regard simply better. Having the equivalent of the president serve at the mercy of parliament doesn't make the job at all irrelevant (just look at other democracies), but it does put to bed nonsense like failed impeachments - because it's not about crimes, even in the US; it's simply about political support - and it should be clear whether the president has it, or not - and the current system is almost designed to turn it into a nasty political battle that's simply divisive.
The only situation in which impeachment in the current system is not divisive is when house, senate and president are in the same parties hands - and hey, that's basically a parliamentary system right there!
But why should Senate have to be reelected? This would give opportunity to a House controlled by one party to force reelection of Senate which might be controlled by the other party.
I don't think reelection should be forced, impeachments are not done often and I feel there is no need to protect against it (it wasn't a big deal this time around).
US is in a strange situation where a sitting president is almost impossible to unseat, but that may be seen as a positive characteristic. It allows US to be much more focused and stable in its foreign policy.
Let's be clear this is all an extreme hypothetical, right? And there are all kind of reasons not to do this; to be sure - I don't want to claim it's somehow a good idea to do this; just that in the context of discussion at this point - i.e. given that you retain the current structure of power separation, and the current voting schemes, and decide to call for fresh elections on a failed impeachment, then that there is a case to be made to reelect the entire senate as opposed to president or house. However, that precondition is an extreme hypothetical.
The reason to favor the senate over the president is clear: if they truly believe the president still should retain political support, the president isn't the you should force into a new election.
The reason to favor the senate over the house (if forced to pick just one by this hypothetical) is that the senate is the odd one out here in electoral support, and to make it harder for them to play political games with this choice; i.e. it's in their interest to pick a stance that is supported by voters, because if they don't they'll answer to them. It's also the most impactful reelection to force, because those elections are otherwise spaced the furthest apart. Essentially: by giving the house more power and the senate less, you're inching closer towards the greater stability of a parliamentary system, and additionally it has the most impact because the senate is the least frequently reelected normally. The house really should have supremacy over both senate and president; and it's OK to check that supremacy with voters to make an unleashed house suffer the consequences (because a house that really did abuse this power is still up for reelection quite quickly, and results from the senate election would be very publicly visible).
To be clear; it's just a hypothetical. It'd be better if the senate were simply dissolved, or relegated to a more advisory role as it is elsewhere, or merged into the house, and better if presidents were elected by congress, not directly - but given the hypothetical of just one releection to force, I think there is an argument to be made that a senate relection would have the most impact on the impeachment process.
To be clear: I don't think the US president being hard to unseat is a feature; that's a design flaw. Other democracies have stable foreign policies to, even when just a simple majority in the equivalent of the house is enough to immediately unseat the equivalent of the president, with no recourse to the senate at all. In fact, other democracies seem to have a more stable foreign and domestic policy, because there's less infighting and less need for hyper-speed policy making in the rare moments without gridlock; none of that "but we can't approve that deal because currently the house or the senate aren't in the hands of the same party as the president". The decision-making capability of a parliamentary government isn't perfect, but it's less likely to gridlock for long periods of time.
It also means there's no hope of any party of trying to blockade the other should they lose, so there's more incentive to seek consensus beforehand because they simply won't be able to force anything should an election ever go the other way. And there's more potential cost for reversing previous governments policies, because what's to stop a future government from playing that same game? As it is currently, a party can risk being quite confrontational, knowing that a trifecta isn't all that likely in general. There's a good chance any controversial policy made will stick around simply because there's a good chance future governments will be gridlocked for a good while; worth risking that gamble. If governments knew that a future government could reliably overturn any policy they made, they'd be more careful choosing partisan pet projects, especially those without clear popular support.
It's hard to answer everything so I'll just focus on a few key aspects.
Wouldn't forcing senate reelection in case of failed impeachment allow the party that controls the house to force that reelection?
Let's say Party A controls the house while Party B controls the Senate and the Presidency. If Party A wants, they would be able to send impeachment to trial without real reason and then by the fact that Senate didn't convict you would get a reelection of Senate.
Way I see it, this would allow manipulation of the election process. In my mind, it would be much more logical that the House has to be reelected as they pushed forward an impeachment that was not convicted upon. This would make it so that House would not bring forward frivolous impeachments as they would have their own positions on the line.
About unseating a president, I understand your point. I agree to a degree. A sitting president can be limited in power by the fact he doesn't control the legislative branch. This may seem less optimal but it has a couple of advantages. Executive branch can keep on working within the confines allowed to them, without having to juggle for political support in the parliament. This allows the President to keep working with little regard to losing his position. This is especially good for military or foreign affairs as they can work on this with little to no political support.
Right, but that's a plus - that's more how it works in other democracies; the equivalent of the house having the upper hand; essentially impeachment at that point turns into a milder form of a vote of no confidence. It's still milder than in other countries, because the senate gets a vote at all.
Framing this as if any of the legal constructs (house, senate, presidency) is reasonable, and thus needs to perhaps be punished for abuse of power is I believe pointless. Impeachment is not about right or wrong, it's about political support (I mean, just look at those almost completely party-line votes in house and senate recently!)
For American democracy to start working again - which has nothing to do with fairness, mind you - the power hierarchy needs to clearly weed out obstructionism; and where obstructionism is possible or even valuable as a kind of common sense sanity-check, either side involved needs to be elected or appointed on the same electoral basis (because the other option is political powerplay, rendering the whole point of things like impeachment moot, as it is today).
Pick two: A government that can govern, or elections with differing structures (essentially ensuring various branches will fight simply as a form of party politics, not based on merit), or equal branches of government, where one (plain majority) cannot remove the other.
You can't have all three.
Aside, the idea that the presidency is stable because it's decoupled from congressional support is not born out by simple comparison to other countries. Quite the opposite: by splitting powers like that, foreign actors need to consider internal US politics to a large degree. Stability would be greater if a simple majority in the house had the ability to appoint a new president at a whim - not because whims are stable, but because that shapes the back and forth of political powerplay, and thus renders the house responsible for the presidencies errors, which is how it works in other countries. Countries don't tend to reappoint prime ministers all that often, especially if a coalition is involved, because not only is that likely to be punished by voters, it's quite hard to form coalitions if you break support like that. That's not to say that a coalition of microscopic parties would be a great idea for the US by the way; just that small steps in that direction would increase stability.
I think it’s a feature that we have one house of Congress elected “fast” and the other house elected “slow”. It permits a following of changes in public consciousness without having the entire federal government banging off opposing poles frequently.
(Un- [or loosely] related, I also think there are benefits from gridlock, forcing a certain level of consensus for those things that have to happen federally but leaving most federal things relatively stable over time.)
Sure, that makes sense! Having a fast and slow cycle isn't a bad idea. The problem is rather that the slow cycle has too much power, and additionally uses a different electoral system from the fast cycle, so it's not just an extra brake on overly-radical mistakes, it's a potentially long-term gridlock.
If at least senate "districts" were equivalent to house "districts" (i.e. all state-based or all more regional, and both equivalently proportional), then it would be very unlikely to have long-term gridlock; instead a senate would simply serve as braking mechanism during electoral upheaval, and that's perhaps a valuable feature.
BBC is reporting that he has already told his staff to begin logistical preparations to hand over to Biden. He disagrees with the results, he will do lawsuits, but it doesn't look like he'll do anything more than that. So far, that proves all the naysayers wrong who accused him of trying to not transfer power when not re-elected.
quietly making preparations doesn't outweigh repeatedly and incessantly lying to public about the operation of and outcome of the election, nor sending his supporters to attack vote-counting stations.
I'll believe it when it's said and done. As of now, nothing has changed to his day-to-day, his life is continuing on as if the election happens. As everything winds down, and it sets in that he will be vulnerable to the investigations from NY along with loans coming due that he simply can't pay he may lash out. I've felt the interregnum period will be the most dangerous for the country, moreso than the previous 3+ years.
I don't think anybody reasonably believed president Trump would have actually not relinquished power if he formally lost the election. What he was accused of however, is trying to play nasty with votes, and trying to undermine the legitimacy of his loss. To put it another way: it's not that he wouldn't transfer power, but rather that he's willing to play dirty to try not to transfer power.
The reason why it was never realistic to believe he wouldn't step aside is simply that he does not have the support to pull that off; it's essentially a kind of civil war but one he (and any other president) would likely lose almost instantly - as long as it's clear he lost the election.
And that's why it's so insidious to undermine the election, because that will eventually pave the way to actually ignore election outcomes. Even today, I suspect in all the partisan posturing some voters may have come away with the honest impression that there really was a stolen election. Since democracy hinges on the losing side accepting that loss, action that undermine that are quite problematic.
President Trump's action so far, both before the election and after, are entirely in line with the accusations against him; in essence: he's willing to undermine democracy to try and hold on to power.
Had the election been closer, it's conceivable he might really have engineered some legal shenanigans to try and steal the election. And if he had been backed in that (which isn't entirely impossible, because some of the toss-up states have republican-appointed courts, republican legislatures, and republican governors, and of course the heavily tilted supreme court now), then things would have gotten dicey. In that situation, just like in other strong-man democracies, the outcome of the election would have been rigged. Would democrats have backed down? Or would they have disputed the elections, even though formally they lost them? That's the kind of thing that breaks a democracy; because both backing down and confrontation are terrible outcomes.
To their credit - because that's how it's supposed to work in a democracy - those toss-up states did not seriously try to steal votes (although the vote-segregation thing is pretty close). And of course we don't know Trump would really have stolen the election, given the opportunity, since it never arose. But we can see that he took all possible steps in that direction at least; and that's something the US needs to deal with in the future for the sake of stability. It ended well this time; it might not every time.
It's really not clear who should have won. There are different outcomes from different groups with different, but reasonable, interpretations of what the voter intended.
I want to live in a country where we accept the results of a democratic process instead of spreading conspiracy theories, and yes, that goes for the Russia collusion conspiracy theories and the general "we're going to burn this mf-er to the ground if the election doesn't go our way" sentiments as well.
The reasoning on the demand to stop vote counts was to delay until they could get legal observers in to validate the process, not a bid to stop the entire process altogether.
That's not true. Regrettably we have the nationally televised words of the president on the matter:
This is a fraud on the American public. This is an embarrassment to our country. We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the US Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at four o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. Okay? It’s a very sad moment. To me this is a very sad moment and we will win this. And as far as I’m concerned, we already have won it.
So, so often people only hear what they want to hear. From what we've witnessed over recent times, such thinking is so prevalent that it has to be a part of the human condition.
There were already Republican observers in NV (as per state law) and in PA, including Philadelphia. The argument lawyers are making in Philadelphia is basically incoherent. See the excerpts from the court transcript for PA case.
100% not true. Legal observers were in all places, and Trumps lawyers had to admit it in court when they said a ‘non-zero’ number were present. Most counting places even live streamed the count.
I think this is probably one of the most secure elections ever executed.
cult of personality, attacking the press, denying everything, attacking the legitimacy of our voting system, creating division by refusing to unify people, shouting "law & order" to position himself as the only solution against chaos, inciting young supporters to push his agenda with more violence (akin to hitler youth), etc.
Nearly all of the press and social media companies worked together to fight and censor him and he’s the authoritarian one for calling them out on it?
By creating division you mean sending in troops to end riots that were burning down businesses, beating people, and spreading the virus all in the name of dubious claims of police brutality?
The rioters caused real violence that really happened. What did Trump’s supporters do that is violent on that level?
Trump talks like an authoritarian, but his actual actions have been mainly to reduce the power of a central government, like appointing federalist judges, dismantling federal departments, etc. So the opposite of what an authoritarian would do.
>So the opposite of what an authoritarian would do.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but that's not entirely right.
Authoritarians aim to centralize power to themselves. By removing other sources of power, their power grows. An authoritarian's ultimate goal in the US is to remove all checks and balances they can.
In comparison a libertarian aims to remove non-centeral government, like laws that effect small towns, schools and police forces in small towns, and so on, though each libertarian voter aims to remove different things, so not to mislead: Not all libertarians want to remove police, or schools, or roads, or whatever else. What you will not hear is a libertarian wanting to remove congress or another form of checks and balance.
That's a good point. Removing centralized laws so there is more autonomy for individual states is one thing, which is not removing checks and balances. I overlooked that on the libertarian part of the comment.
Unfortunately, Trump did not go around removing centralized laws, or any I know of at least. Everything he did has more to do with a power grab as best I can tell.
This is an interesting point, but he's also done and said a number of things that indicate a level of comfort with his supporters committing violence that is entirely inappropriate for a leader of a democracy, and suggests that he wants a paramilitary loyal to him. Those are exactly the actions of an authoritarian. "Stand back and stand by"
There's also been a focus on personal loyalty in high office that is also unseemly in a democracy, and has caused problems for the USA in the past too.
I suspect that his choosing of those judges was a combination of him listening to his handlers when they (rightfully) told him big portion of his base was only in it for the judges combined with the assumed belief on Trumps part that any judges he appointed to show him loyalty in any legal situation (they won't).
The pandemic, if anything, has proved the "authoritarian" diagnosis to be false. Authoritarians love to have an excuse to lock everyone up in their homes and decide from on high which businesses will be allowed to operate. Trump OTOH was like "math is tough; let the states handle it!"
I think that's oversimplifying. The fact that Trump is not a full-blown authoritarian, or is bad at it, is compatible with his expression of a number of authoritarian values.
This is true, but it emphasizes the difference between marketing and reality. Trump's evocation of authoritarian imagery has been uncorrelated with genuine threats of increased authoritarianism in USA. These threats do exist, but focusing attention on Trump has been a distraction from genuinely opposing them.
One particularly scary one is 60 minutes recorded footage of rally of Trump supporters, where many of them on their Trump flags had fascist symbolism. This spiked a fear of fascism growing in America.
In response instead of addressing this growing anti-american anti-democratic minority, instead the news decided to associate anti-fascism with riots, protestors, and other scary negative fear based topics. Now the second anyone raises a concern about fascism, supporters will unconsciously turn a blind eye. I'm surprised such word smithing like that works, and frankly I'm scared it does work. I'm terrified that different conservative groups rallied behind not only fascist movements, but invented a boogyman term for it like antifa as a way to make the topic of fascism partisan and questionable. If that's not anti-democratic and unamerican I don't know what is.
I think the interregnum period will be chocked full of rightwingers lashing out at the country and people in general. People that know Trump supporters know that there was a lot of identity wrapped up in his presidency, and see it cut down to one term is going to set them off.
>America is extremely divided, and I'm not sure that it's going to recover from this
Sadly without re-regulating the news it isn't, or some large trauma that brings the entire country temporarily together.
In the US we historically had similar problems, so something called the fairness doctrine was created. It was a law that required news give equal airtime for opposing views. This way no matter where you got your news you'd get the full truth, not half truths as the current American populous is getting.
Decentralization, and distributed power is key to the US System
People need to remember that, no matter who is in power.
The problem is both republicans and democrats "forget" this when they are in power so they attempt to consolidate it, and believe that consolidation grand the virtuous
Then when they are out of power, the "other side" using that power become "corrupt and immoral"
Just like the irony that in 2016 the US electron system was so fragile that Russia stole it, at least that is what he heard for the last 4 years, but now that democrats have won the US Election system is as strong as Plymouth Rock and unwavering in face of people trying to steal it...
//for the record I do not think the election was stolen in either 2016 or 2020.....
I'm still in shock over how Trump actually managed to get into power. To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him (it woke me up as to how a large percentage of the American electorate actually thinks, and for me that's a worry).
You're right, the chaos Trump's created has seen a paradigm shift in the way politics is carried out everywhere, and that's likely not a bad thing. Often things need to get worse before a wake-up call turns them around for the better. We'll wait and see.
Trump's initial success, the lemming-like addiction to smartphones/Facebook mania, and the swathes and swathes of crazy, mad and irresponsible behaviour I've seen over the last seven or eight months in response to COVID-19 has truly shaken my view of humanity. I used to think we humans were smarter than we actually are.
> To me, it's still unclear why so many actually voted for him
Voting in the US, especially in general elections, is mostly about tribal identity, which explains a lot of that part of Trump's election, and he was largely a political unknown who's campaign was ambiguous enough that people could read what they want into it (By 2020, that last part was no longer true, obviously.) In the 2016 primary, he had the ambiguity factor, celebrity, the Republican establishment having trouble figuring out what he was doing, and a Republican Primary system designed to turn early pluralities into commanding delegate leads to avoid long primary fights which backfired spectacularly for the establishment.
In 2016 I put the result down to the general disenchantment in many democratic countries with democracy generally - similar to the 'logic' behind brexit.
That I can understand but it's the relative closeness of the vote in this election that surprised me.
Earlier I was looking at a live online polling update with maps of both state and popular vote figures. The popular vote map was detailed enough for me to drill down to county level and finer. In states like Ohio, N Dakota and Nebraska with sparce populations and high overall Republican vote one would occasionally (but not infrequently) come across small settlements of 500/1000 or so only 20/50 miles apart where the vote in one was say D-70%, R-28%, Lib-2% and the other almost exactly the opposite with Lib remaining the same at about 2%.
This seems to backup your tribal identity point very well. Given that these settlements likely have only trees or farmland between them the figures are actually quite startling. I took into account that some may have been Native American reservations (which I've not yet ruled out), so I resampled in other states with low populations such as Vermont and New Hampshire and found similar instances (of course, with these latter instances the overall state figures had the Democrats in the majority).
These demographics are fascinating to say the least and I'm going to revisit them again shortly.
Trump got into power because he was hailed as a genius business person who would transform the country like a good business person would transform a failing company.
People bought into it, because he's probably the most exposed businessman in America - through his brand name, and media appearances.
Furthermore, he was "hard" on certain populist topics like immigration, as well as conservative on more mainstream topics, like taxes, foreign affairs, etc.
And on the very top of that, the fringes of democratic voters didn't bond with Hilary Clinton getting ushered in as the presidential candidate.
This reminds me of a story about when Kurt Gödel, who had fled Nazi persecution of Jews in Austria, went to apply for US Citizenship.
In the taxi, on the way to the citizenship hearing, Gödel excitedly told his friend Albert Einstein that he intended to talk at the hearing of a flaw he had discovered in the US Constitution that could allow a dictatorship to take over.
Einstein managed to convince Gödel not to talk about that at the citizenship hearing, and just answer to questions.
It was supposedly intended to avoid populism, but given that the electors are likely to be just as influenced by a populist leader as anyone else, it seems like it assumes a level of care picking the electors that isn't really reasonable.
Given rule changes (around punishing electors if they vote against who they are supposed to), and the recent way that electors did and didn't vote during the last few elections, it's clear that the system has no value now.
"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice. A small number of persons, selected by their fellow-citizens from the general mass, will be most likely to possess the information and discernment requisite to such complicated investigations. It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief...
Talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity, may alone suffice to elevate a man to the first honors in a single State; but it will require other talents, and a different kind of merit, to establish him in the esteem and confidence of the whole Union, or of so considerable a portion of it as would be necessary to make him a successful candidate for the distinguished office of President of the United States."
I worry that the people in charge of fixing the systems are also the ones that benefit most from it being broken. At least with the Chaos Monkey, no one is on the monkey's side.
I don't think the US will have the time for a "post-mortem", this is not a bug that just disappeared/was solved because Trump is no longer president. More people voted for him in 2020 than they did in 2016, the racist things that he has said and done have not come out of no-where, he had (and still has) a strong support behind him, and that support won't disappear over night.
He probably received a lot of votes from liberals like myself who see China as the greatest threat the world is facing today, and were thus forced to vote against our interests (since Biden has a history of being pro-China and even said he would end Trump’s China tariffs during the campaign).
The way to deal with China through legislation and working with our allies because it has to be a long term process. Tariffs and photo ops like FoxConn in WI did nothing hinder China.
The allies, just like Biden, have no interest in standing up to China. Tariffs definitely work, because if they’re high enough then companies will be forced to leave to setup shop elsewhere (such as Vietnam).
You can also see that China’s GDP growth (in 2019) was the lowest it’s been since 1990 (2020 will no doubt be much lower), and their reputation around the world is at an all-time low.
It’s also worth noting that the administration did a lot more to stand up to China besides tariffs (but tariffs that force companies to leave will of course hurt them the most).
I agree that China is a big threat, but trade wars is a bad way to address it. History has shown that the US pretty much always ends up losing in a trade war. Mind you, I don't know what the right solution is, but I do know that trade war is not it.
Sometimes it’s necessary to make sacrifices to try to stop an evil regime. This is one of those times, and besides war then there’s no other solution besides trying to isolate China from the rest of the world and hurt their economy. Trump went a long way towards achieving that goal.
It would of course be ideal if EU and all democratic countries got together, but they (just like Biden) unfortunately have no interest in doing so. Biden believe that it’s USA’s self-interest to see China prosper.
I mean Trump's China tariffs have been paid for by Americans. Because that's how tariffs work.
Have they deterred business with China in favor of moving that business back to America? Or have they just passed the price along to the American consumer?
> the weak points in the infrastructure of our government
You're not wrong, but:
> But I go on this great republican principle, that the people will have virtue and intelligence to select men of virtue and wisdom. Is there no virtue among us? If there be not, we are in a wretched situation. No theoretical checks--no form of government can render us secure. To suppose that any form of government will secure liberty or happiness without any virtue in the people, is a chimerical idea. If there be sufficient virtue and intelligence in the community, it will be exercised in the selection of these men. So that we do not depend on their virtue, or put confidence in our rulers, but in the people who are to choose them.
Or as his contemporary French lawyer / philosopher Joseph de Maistre said: Toute nation a le gouvernement qu'elle mérite (Every nation gets the government it deserves)
I would disagree on this point. I believe the constitution and judiciary have been very effective against Trump's attempts to go around Congress. Lots of people are criticising the USA's political system but remember it is the UNITED STATES. The federal system of government and the electoral college system are by built-in features. The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
> The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
It's interesting that you see it that way. From my perspective, it's something that was originally designed with fairly good intentions, that is now being abused by the minority to impose their will upon everyone.
Let's not forget that Democrats have won the popular vote in all but one presidential election this century. And that the Senate's structure has allowed the party representing a minority of Americans to reshape the federal judiciary for years to come. (And unless a rabbit gets pulled out of a hat somewhere, they'll still have outsized control over judicial confirmations for at least the next 2 years.)
I'm all for preventing the tyranny of the majority, but these features of US government haven't resulted in moderation, they've resulted in tyranny of the minority.
> "I'm all for preventing the tyranny of the majority, but these features of US government haven't resulted in moderation, they've resulted in tyranny of the minority."
The alternative is effectively disenfranchising rural areas. Remember that whole "no taxation without representation" thing a couple of centuries ago and how badly that turned out? Rural areas are where all the food, agricultural and mineral resources of the United States are produced, not to mention the source of the majority of its armed forces, so trying to disenfranchise them isn't going to end well.
And the minority isn't small either: the last time I checked, even in archetypically left-leaning California, about 1/3 of the vote went to Trump; for the other two west coast states, the tally was closer to 40%.
The answer, of course, is to focus on uniting the nation, not division, even if it means not all the changes people want happen as quickly as they would prefer. "Politics is the art of the possible" after all.
Rural areas are not disenfranchised in the House though. If anything they're still over-represented because the House hasn't been allowed to scale with population.
Translation: all votes are equal, but rural votes are more equal than others.
Therefore it's "just" for a house, senate, and president representing a minority of Americans to raise taxes on urban Americans (70% of the economy), refuse to fund our infrastructure (HSR and the gateway project), and impose their religious beliefs on us.
These self serving arguments aren't convincing anyone. What urban America has actually heard over the last four years is that "when you have the voted, you do what you want," a lesson we have taken to heart.
Weren’t the main concessions made to Southern slaveholders items like the 3/5 compromise? The senate’s distribution on the other hand would benefit states like Rhode Island, New Jersey, etc...
Slavery wasn’t the only issue that mattered at the founding of the US, and this type of framing is the is revisionism found in things like the NYT’s 1619 project. The EC was well intentioned as a mechanism for federalism and forming a coalition of states that could retain their own self determination (and continue to do so today) while also being part of the union. It spans all issues and policies. And frankly it makes a lot of sense. Otherwise you will have lots of disenfranchised places and cultures and the union would fall apart.
No, of course it wasn't, but I also didn't say that. You're reading revisionism into a statement that is very nearly too short to contain any.
You're also misreading it: my comment was about the Senate, not the electoral college. And I left out the part about how the Senate was explicitly anti-democratic, not just anti-majoritarian, in that it was originally elected by legislators and not the people.
I don’t think this is a tyrant of the minority but rather an appropriate averaging of influenced - it is federalism working healthily. Different places, with different people and cultures, need autonomy and self determination if they are willing to join a union of states. Otherwise why would they take part in the union and give up their ways of life and laws and cultures? The mechanisms for making the union palatable to all are found in how we apportion senators and in the electoral college. I think this IS moderation.
As a non american, the way people describe american judges by their partisan leanings seems really messsed up to me. I would describe that as not how a judicary should work.
Only the partisans describe judges likes that. Judges do have leanings, but it's mostly about jurisprudence, like more originalism, or believing the interpretation should consider the intent of the legislator, or lean towards where society in general is leaning.
These are unavoidable aspects of being a supreme court judge, since you are also deciding what the law means and entails.
There was literally a media freak out over the apointment of Amy Barrett because people thought trump was stacking the court in his favour. I don't know how true that is, but its clear that a significant portion of americans believe it (belief that the court is political is damaging in itself even if it wasn't true).
Most judges actually are non-partisan-decide-based-on-law type. But they simply are not favoured.
Consider that sanders made it a litmus test for his supreme court nominees to overrule an unpopular court decision. Most judges would avoid at a politician demanding this, as it defeats the purpose of a judiciary.
If that were true, there would not be such huge political fights over judges. As it stands, conservative judges tend to vote one way, liberal judges tend to vote another.
That is not the impression my reading about various cases has left me with.
I can't point you to specific cases - I can only say that what has really stood out to me is that the justices do mostly seem to have well-defined interpretive frameworks, and that they work from those.
I can think of an exception, but my experience has generally been that it's the case.
I'm not particularly familar with italy's judiciary and nothing popped out in a quick skim of the wikipedia article, but if you're saying that there are countries that are worse, i don't doubt it. Being not the worst is not the same as being good or being ok.
The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
And yet, the United States does not preach this model when helping to propagate democracy abroad. Tellingly, they don't include:
- first past the post elections,
- bicameral legislative branches, or
- electoral colleges.
We're operating on a model that our own State Department discourages other countries from adopting.
I do hope that the experience of this election will build bipartisan support to nationalize federal elections. Personally, I'd love to see an end to the electoral college, but I can't see Republicans supporting that loss of leverage since their last two non-incumbent wins have lost the popular vote.
I think it would be a very bad idea to nationalize federal elections. Right now, each state chooses how they run their elections. Some states (like Maine) have chosen to use ranked choice voting while others use first past the post.
Nationalizing elections would basically cement first past the post as our permanent voting system forever since it's extremely unlikely you could convince everyone in the U.S. to change to a new one at once.
> We're operating on a model that our own State Department discourages other countries from adopting.
Do you have a source for that?
Especially the point about bicameralism? I think in a federal system, having something like the US or Australian Senate's is useful in it prevents the smaller states from being dominated by the bigger ones. Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.
Leaving smaller states feeling politically powerless can encourage separatist/independence movements and threaten the long-term viability of the country.
Do you have a source for that? Proportional representation does seem to solve for it. See also: far right parties gaining seats in Germany.
Their views get heard (if not enacted), no one secedes, and the system remains stable.
There is no incompatibility between having proportional representation and having bicameralism. Federally, Australia has preferential voting (instant-runoff voting) in the House of Representatives and single transferrable vote is used to elect 12 senators for each state (only 6 in a normal election, the full 12 only get re-elected in a special "double dissolution" election, which the government is allowed to order to break a deadlock between the two houses). You mention Germany, which is a bicameral system as well (the Bundesrat).
For the benefits of federal bicameralism, consider the UK – England has almost 85% of the population, and so in a purely one-person-one-vote system will always outvote the other three constituent countries. The UK does have bicameralism, but non-federal – the House of Lords does not directly represent the constituent countries, and does not provide a mechanism to block an English majority – the majority of the House of Lords is English too. And I think this is one of the major factors driving the Scottish independence movement. If the UK had a system more like Australia – with an upper house providing equal representation to each part of the country, regardless of population, and with constitutional referendums requiring a double majority to pass (both a majority of the national population, and also a majority of the population in a majority of the states) – then I don't think the Scottish independence movement would have anywhere near as much steam as it has.
I think Trump's picks for justices are no different than what some generic Republican President would have picked. In choosing justices, he basically just followed the advice of the conservative legal establishment (Federalist Society, etc). His choices were judicial conservatives, but generic judicial conservatives not Trumpists.
It was pretty shortsighted when Democrats removed the filibuster from judicial confirmations in 2014 to try and ram through judges in Obama’s final years.
This also assume that McConnell wouldn't have just done the same. Remember that this is the same fellow that said both "no appointments in an election year" to "we're appointing with less that 30 days until the election".
McConnell is a political nihilist:
> It was already becoming clear that, in the political world of Mitch McConnell, convictions and campaign pledges were fungible things, easily tossed aside. Throughout his career, as the Republican Party veered right, and then further right, McConnell moved with it. “It’s always been about power, the political game, and it’s never been about the core values that drive political life,” John Yarmuth, Kentucky’s lone Democratic congressman, told Alec MacGillis, author of the 2014 McConnell biography The Cynic. “There has never been anything that interested him other than winning elections.”
> “Trump is about winning the day, or even the hour. McConnell plays the long game. He’s sensitive to the political realities. His North Star is continuing as Majority Leader—it’s really the only thing for him. He’s patient, sly, and will obfuscate to make less apparent the ways he’s moving toward a goal.” The two men also have different political orientations: “Trump is a populist—he’s not just anti-élitist, he’s anti-institutionalist.” As for McConnell, “no one with a straight face would ever call him a populist—Trump came to drain the swamp, and now he’s working with the biggest swamp creature of them all.”
Remember McConnell (and the GOP) were also all about austerity during Obama's terms (when economy could have used economic stimulus). Then, when Trump got in, it was all about tax cuts which caused all sorts of deficit/debt issues—when the economy did not need any help (2017).
I don't see how anyone can argue for the electoral college as a feature in our modern times. Our Senate and the electoral college were designed in order to get support from colonies to form the new USA. It worked well for that purpose.
We have entirely different goals now. We should be aiming for fair elections in which one person's vote is equal to any other's regardless of the state they reside. The electoral college is downright repulsive once you realize how unfairly it treats citizens in more populated states compared to those in less populated states.
The electoral college now has the potential of pulling the union apart. If California and New York see a few more elections in which their citizens' votes are discounted, resulting in popular vote winners losing the presidency, then it would be logical for them to secede. They can take their massive economies and accompanying tax dollars and leave this system behind, as it should've been a long time ago.
Removing electoral college would remove all the interesting stuff about campaigning. Campaigns would focus on large urban areas and no one would set foot in sparsely populated areas.
I always feel that we are highly inclined to promote a voting system which would help the side we support.
The constitution declares that the president is elected by the states, not by the people directly. The electoral college serves to moderate the influence of dense population areas.
On a straight popular vote basis, the large urban centers in a handful of states would select the president. Their interests and motivations will necessarily be different from rural areas.
The electoral college gives populous states proportionally more influence, as they have more congressional representatives and thus more electoral votes. But it serves to balance that against the interests of less populated states, which are also part of the country and should not be considered completely irrelevant in the process.
The reality of the power balance the opposite of what you’re saying, in my opinion. Places like CA and NY have incredible influence and power even with the electoral college. The calls for one person’s vote being equal to others nationally is just a virtuous rhetorical argument to justify a power grab that would take power away from places which already have diminished influence.
The reality is that different locations have different ways of life and culture and politics, and therefore self determination must be supported through some mechanisms (like the electoral college) for a federal union to make sense and for those peoples to feel represented. If we are undoing that we need to also give states the option to secede and go their own way, since this union would simply mean the end of their way of life.
This talk of disenfranchising areas feels bizarre to me. Areas can’t be enfranchised or disenfranchised; only people can. And right now people in more populous areas are less enfranchised than people from rural areas. That has led to minority rule and should not rightly be allowed to stand.
> The senate system of 2 senators per state and the electoral college are fantastic features to provide additional stability across a vast and diverse geography.
What's interesting, and in defense of the electoral college, these three actually pick the winner in very different ways, making it harder for a single party to take control, and requiring some amount of compromise. If we just used popular vote for choosing the president, they're more likely to be the same party as the one controlling the House.
Other countries handle it just fine with popular votes.
E.g., South Korea has a presidential election every 5 years, congressional election every 4 years, and gubernatorial(?) election every 4 years (staggered in the middle between congressional elections). In this way, a government losing popular support quickly finds itself surrounded by elected officers from opposing parties.
I'm not sure at what scale this makes a difference, but South Korea has a population somewhat larger than California in a landmass a little bigger than Indiana. The US constitution obviously wasn't designed with 300M people and 50 states in-mind, but it's larger and more diverse than South Korea, so it probably needs to be governed differently. It's like how having states in Singapore would be silly, just at a different scale. I do think what system of elected government makes the most sense for a given country based on size, population density, population concentration, and other factors is actually an interesting question.
Well last time it happened (2012) the conservative party won the congress in April 2012 and then went on to win the presidential election in December ... the elected person was Park Geun-Hye, widely considered the worst leader in decades, and was impeached among corruption scandal four years later.
Maybe that's an argument for staggering elections even more regularly, or maybe it's just one of those coincidences pundits love to talk about, I don't know. :)
I distinctly remember a tweet from 4 years ago, "this presidency will be a test of our institutions and counter powers".
Well, this did not go _well_.
I wish a lot of luck to the Biden administration, there is a lot to rebuild. I might disagree on tons of policy topics with him but at the very least I can completely agree that he lives up to what should be the bare minimum for any president : respect the rule of law, be the president of all americans, not just the ones who voted for you, etc
Your comments seem fine, but could you please stop creating accounts for every few comments you post? We ban accounts that do that. This is in the site guidelines: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
You needn't use your real name, of course, but for HN to be a community, users need some identity for other users to relate to. Otherwise we may as well have no usernames and no community, and that would be a different kind of forum. https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme...
Yeah. The laws of the land largely assume the president is fundamentally a good actor with the nation's best interests at heart, which I think was sometimes the case with Trump and sometimes not.
We should require a fuller disclosure of a candidate's finances before we allow them to serve. Trump may be deeply in debt to foreign powers. He may not be. We do not know. That is a problem, and it should not be a partisan issue. It is mind-blowing that anybody is okay with not knowing. Let's not let that happen again. That should be the easiest law/amendment to pass, ever. (Of course it won't be)
We obviously have legal machinery in place to remove a president if the need arises, but it is necessarily slow and ineffective.
His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster.
The old 2/3 majority generally ensured that people who were competent centrists got onto the court. Both parties were equally happy with the candidates... or at least equally unhappy!
> His term also (further) exposed big flaws in the way we put people on the Supreme Court. We should go back to the old system of a 2/3 majority required. No more 50/50 simple majority, as the Democrats instituted a while back. I find that a disaster.
Senate Republicans were the ones who lowered the requirement for Supreme Court confirmations to a simple majority, not the Democrats[0]. Senate Democrats had reduced the threshold for presidential appointments excluding the Supreme Court as a result of chronic filibustering by the Republican congress during Obama’s term[1].
I agree with you that something needs to be done about SCOTUS nominations. It’s clear to me that the stakes are currently way too high. Turning the court into a political football has created an incredibly dangerous situation that risks undermining its authority and the rule of law.
make no mistake, trump did nothing intentionally for the nation's best interests, because he was unable to see beyond himself. he's the quintessential selfish actor, and that behavior has been repudiated by the electorate at large.
That's true. I've been kinda shocked to discover how much our system depends on entirely voluntary norms. It's not nearly as resilient to determined attack as I'd always thought.
It also exposed how we've kicked the can down the road with North Korea and China (having to work with local businesses, forced IP transfers, and IP theft). Not that his approaches to either were all that productive; with China in particular, a lot of traditional US allies have similar gripes, so it'd be easy to build a coalition, but not when you're also engaged in a trade war with them.
>Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered.
Chief among which was allowing the election of someone like Trump to begin with.
They have some fault, yes, but not more fault than the Republicans for selecting him, or the American people, or the electoral college or first past the post voting. At the end of the day, all the DNC did was bet on the wrong horse.
Someone like Trump shouldn't have been a viable option regardless of who the Democrats put up.
I don’t think that’s at all obvious. An ineffectual chaos monkey for 4 more years is arguably better than an effective leader implementing Very Bad policies that we will be stuck with for generations. I didn’t vote for Trump, but I can sympathize with that position.
I accept that people will disagree, especially on Hacker News, but I don't consider the willful sabotage of government "just in case" to be a valid form of political exercise. I'm not aware of anything in Hillary Clinton's platform that in hindsight would have made Trump look like the better alternative, or that would have potentially spelled multi-generational disaster.
Hillary was extremely in favor of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was regarded as a very bad deal here on HN. She came out as skeptical of it during her campaign, but that was hard to believe given that she was responsible for it under the Obama administration.
She wanted to strengthen Obamacare, but was against a single-payer option. I'm sure people will quibble, but I'm confident health premiums would have gone up faster under Hillary.
Hillary Clinton was in bed with Wall St firms. A Clinton presidency would have risked undoing a lot of the regulatory protections that have been put in place after the dot-com and 2007 financial collapses.
Compared with Trump, Hillary Clinton is tremendously China-friendly. She would not have countered Xi's expansionist policies.
On more niche (but IMHO important) issues like space policy, Trump-Pence has actually been extremely good, better than any president in living memory. Hillary, on the other hand, considered expenditures on space to be a waste of money.
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There are plenty of arguments a reasonable person can come up with for not wanting a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, with or without the advantage of hindsight. Only through a deeply blue-tinted partisan lens could you say a Hillary term would have been objectively better on all accounts.
As I said way up thread, the DNC is as much at fault as anyone else for continuing to field deeply unpopular and uninspiring candidates, while simultaneously ignoring working class concerns.
>There are plenty of arguments a reasonable person can come up with for not wanting a Hillary Clinton presidency in 2016, with or without the advantage of hindsight.
Sure. But voting for a "chaos monkey" isn't reasonable. It's not as if Republicans would have been happy with another Democratic candidate, and they had an entire field of their own to choose from, and they chose to vote in Nero to watch Rome burn.
I don’t know if you noticed, but out democratic institutions have remained intact.
I don’t appreciate my country being held hostage to extortive tactics: “vote for my candidate—the other guy is a literal Nazi!”
It is not game-theoretic optimal to give into extortion, because things will gradually trend in worse and worse directions. Sometimes a protest vote to the system itself is required to reduce the long term damage.
>I don’t appreciate my country being held hostage to extortive tactics: “vote for my candidate—the other guy is a literal Nazi!”
As opposed to "vote for my candidate - Hillary is a literal blood drinking serial killing baby raping illuminati whore who will start World War 3!"
or "vote for my candidate - Joe Biden is a pedophile with extreme dementia, and we don't know exactly what his son is into but it's probably pretty awful?"
I mean, at least the people calling Trump racist can point to a large pile of circumstantial evidence to back it up. It's hard to believe that is "extortionate" and "holding the country hostage" but not Pizzagate, QAnon, and Stop the Steal vigilantes.
He was completely incompetent in everything he tried to do. Imagine how bad it would be, if he was actually competent. There is a good chance someone exactly like him can come along in the future, except more competent - that is scary to think about
We can celebrate now, but we need to remember that almost 70 million people voted for him, this time. After seeing him on the job for nearly four years :(
Bad poker players do this a lot. You bully and bully and bully, everyone folds, and your stack grows. You win little pots because the opponents don't like the risk. You win bigger pots because they think they have a chance, but you throw lots of chips in and act confident. Eventually some situation comes along where you've run up the pot, but there's no way people will fold.
Covid probably looked like just another thing to him in the early days.
Any illusion Trump was a master negotiator is blown away by listening to Bob Woodward's interviews. He almost incriminates himself, for free, over the phone apparently purely because he wants Woodward to write a better book this time.
Dude's a carnival barker. He's great at working up the crowds, but that seems to be his only talent. Combined with his obvious deficiencies in other aspects of leadership.
I don't think he missed it. IIRC he was appropriately briefed early enough. I just think he vastly underestimated how bad it would be, and once he realized he was wrong, he brand of machismo prevented him from actual showing a strong virus response.
Even during the peak, his team was still trying to play political games (by denying "blue states" federal resources to show it was democratic mismanagement). I think, if he truly made a strong showing (or was at least consistent in his message) he would have blown out Biden.
He did one better, by signing the stimulus checks and branding the CDC guideline mailer. If those stimulus checks kept coming, I think he'd have won handily.
I tend to agree, and I think that is also why no such further checks were issued. Pelosi would not let Trump have that win, at the expense of the people's wellbeing, and the play worked. Not sure how supporters justify that with all the talk of empathy... maybe "it was worth it in the long run"?
This is not accurate. The HEROES Act was passed by Pelosi and the House of Representatives in May, and it would have included stimulus checks. It was never brought to a vote in the Senate.
The thing is he could also have done a macho move by ordering a huge lockdown, have military on the streets, but control the message the way he normally does: claim he was in early, say the economy would have been worse if he hadn't, blame China, point fingers at BLM for defying his orders, and so on.
That seems to fit just as well with his playbook, he just went for the wrong pill.
I think huge lockdowns would have pissed off his base to a greater degree than it would have reassured wavering conservatives. But just shutting up and making sure that his name was on the stimulus checks would have been enough to see him home.
So, assume Trump had a huge lockdown and put military on the streets, trashing the economy, running roughshod over the states, and playing into every narrative about being a totalitarian. Then what? We know from countries in Europe tha tried lockdowns that Covid would just be back in full force by the time of the election. It'd make him look both dictatorial and ineffective, a self-proclamed germophobe that tried to send an army to fight a virus and lost, a paper tiger.
In Europe, it went way down before coming back strongly. In the US, it just stayed big and grew.
The thing about doing something is you can always claim what you did was necessary. It's asymmetric. Do nothing, and if the problem doesn't go away you're an idiot. Do something, and if the same thing happens you can claim it would have been worse if you hadn't. There's always some example somewhere you can abuse to say whatever you want.
Whether someone did badly depends on expectations about how it would have gone if they had done otherwise. Like in sports, you judged less harshly if you lose to the favourite. If you let the "otherwise" happen, people complain that you let it happen.
"Something must be done. This is something. Therefore it must be done."
Note I'm saying nothing at all about what ought to be done about the virus, just how to handle the PR.
The economy, or by Trump's barometer, the stock market, would have been fine. The Fed juiced the economy and then some, SPY is currently trading at pre-COVID all time highs.
Secondly, it's much harder to pin the blame on ~230,000 Americans dead to negligence if Trump actually took some action. Even if COVID came back in full force, you could then say that we have successfully flattened the curve and are now much better at treating the virus.
Great leaders often work entirely from hunches and gut feeling. I think his whole life he did that and so far he got away with it. So along comes COVID and he simply went with his hunch even in the face of an overwhelming amount of contrary scientific and medical evidence.
> This is an example of what a "career politician" would've easily used to their advantage, and handled well.
I’m not so sure about that. There aren’t a hell of a lot of politicians who have handled it well in my view. There are a few and they are lauded for their efforts, but it’s not common. Have you any examples?
He didn't miss Covid, he had a plan, but it wasn't the right plan. To be honest, no one could make plans, only bets.
He wanted to use the pandemic as a way to boost nationalism. The evil virus from China vs America's freedom. Turned out, China handled the situation pretty well and blaming them for everything turned out more difficult than expected. And America didn't deliver, the drug industry couldn't find a treatment, and worse, one of the most effective mitigations, masks, rely on imports from China.
Had an American lab found an effective treatment, had a convincing argument been found against China, the situation would have been different for the elections. But how could one know? Trump just lost his bet.
A lot of people have this image of that there exists these perfect villainous masterminds who always know the truth and always say exactly what benefits them, but in the pragmatic universe of real people and limited intelligence, always knowing exactly what to say somehow comes at the expense of always knowing what's actually happening.
The electoral danger wasn't COVID -- sicknesses and pandemics haven't decided elections in the past, I doubt they do now -- the #1 danger to any incumbent is economic depression: Carter, HW Bush.
I think Trump was very aware of that fact, whether or not he responded in the right way.
You say that like the pandemic and the economic situation this year were entirely unconnected. If the situation would have been handled with more care in the beginning instead of downplaying it, it likely wouldn't have had the economic effect that it did.
I passed no judgment about the effectiveness of Trump's actions.
Just my confidence he was fully aware that the pandemic-affected economy would be an enormous issue (in fact I believe he was hyper-aware...perhaps overly so).
Rereading your initial comment, I can see what you meant.
It still seems strange to me to claim that "X isn't the danger, Y is", if X is a possible cause of Y. That's like people claiming "heart attacks are not what kills people, it's stopped oxygen supply to the brain that does". Sure, it's in a way factually correct, but what's the point in ignore the cause if you know about it?
My point is that Trump was indeed aware of the danger to his election odds that a pandemic-related depression would cause, which is why he opposed lockdowns.
You might disagree with that action, but there's no question he knew (and was motivated by) the threat to his campaign.
but you can use it to escalate executive powers beyond reasonable limits, like many governors did or like the previous two administrations did for the war on terror.
He claimed to be able to shoot someone on 5th Avenue and still get elected. OTOH, Covid could have been his 9-11 moment, with just a teensy bit of effort the resident of the Oval Office could come out a hero, just don’t screw it up.
OTOOH someone in that circle, who did have a 9-11 moment and didn’t screw it up, waited until years later to piss away their credibility. So perhaps the president got some really bad advice.
COVID-19 presented a pat situation, so to speak, for Trump administration. No good moves whichever way to go. Imposing quarantine measures would be going against the very much support base, who not only oppose it, they subverted this into a principle point of distinction synonymous to freedom.
Approving a more substantial aid to people and businesses would go along the lines of "entitlements".
Both of such choices would also align Trump's administration, and by extension the Republicans, with the opposition - something made unthinkable in the current climate.
If anything, COVID-19 underscored more the perhaps cliche saying that "Divided we fall". The strategies that play into devisiveness can only provide a situational advantage; for lasting changes there needs to be unity.
It's a herculean task to unite a nation in the current state of polarisation.
Perhaps people could stand back for a moment and ask themselves what or who is it there that makes people so intolerably polarised; is there a vision that could move the nation forward, define challenges that call for such a united power to overcome them?
There was reporting recently were he followed Kushners plan to open the economy and lay the blame for spreading covid at the feet of the state governors for poor implementation. That "blaming the governors" part never really happened that I saw.
what's more interesting in the discussion is how much attention trump is still getting, rather than the winner, biden. we're more relieved by trump leaving than biden entering. trump being such a poor leader still overshadows how mediocre biden is.
it's still uncertain what biden will be doing, other than occupying the white house, of any substance for the next 4 years. he talks a lot about unity, but isn't reputed to be a unifying force, so that seems an unlikely pillar of his presidency. he recites a litany of standard democratic policy positions, but without any real conviction (even "bidencare" is clichéd already).
does he do anything to moderate political and economic consolidations that have been so detrimental to prosperity and unity over (at least) the last 40 years? doubtful, unfortunately.
> Regardless of your views of Trump's politics, his administration and method of leadership has exposed a lot of flaws in how our government has been designed and engineered.
> The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.
In many cases a thoughtful analysis will reveal that the "flaw" that was exposed was that a particular function of government required good people being elected and good people being appointed. In those cases it might be a mistake to attempt to update the design or structure of government, when the solution is a lot simpler.
Chaos Engineering only works if the next administration is willing to work on the underlying problems, rather than just preventing next Chaos Monkey event.
E.g. imagine after using Chaos Monkey to demonstrate the flaws in structure, instead you just fire the people that made it in the first place.
I'm not holding my breath for that one. Lot of Dems campaign sponsors don't want to fix those issues.
I think see what you are saying, but your framing to me supports a dangerously wrong idea that seems to have a lot of currency . Trump is not some sort of wild outside anomaly, his gaining power is more of an emergent property.
Chaos monkey is intentionally outside the system, poking at it. Trump isn't this.
Sticking to just the topic of chaos, let’s attempt to quantify it. At 91%, the turnover in his “A” team is the highest among the last 7 president. At 100%, the turnover of cabinet posts is 20% higher than the next highest, HW Bush’s, which itself 20% higher than Reagan’s which is itself 20% higher than Clinton’s. Bush had the lowest at 20%. [0]
I curious about other documented quantitative measurements of presidential entropy.
As a side note: I disagree with most of what you wrote, but I respect the thought you put into it and your effort and remaining civil.
So since google employees have an median tenure of 1.1 year then that means google is even more chaotic organization than the US government. Should laws be "engineered" to prevent organizations like google because there is some sort of ephemeral "chaos" problem with it? Or is it that you are politically predisposed to wanting and needing a strong, lets call it, central committee, to centrally plan things and worker turnover doesn't count towards "chaos"
Please note that I didn’t make a value judgement of the chaos. I simply observed it.
Edit: I suppose chaos could have a negative connotation. I used the term in the sense GP used it, i.e. chaos engineering.
As for the inference that because I don’t agree with you I am a communist then I am a Communist, I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you are just having a bad day.
Most would argue that what the right saw as flawed was not based in reality. For example, most terror attacks in the US are conducted by white supremacists[1].
The point is not about trying to prevent other viewpoints, which is obviously bad, but to preserve the rule of law and patch holes in the laws and other customs where they exist. Trump showed where the holes are. I don't think you would be happy if Biden and Democrats started using the same loopholes that Trump and Republicans have been using. By the way, research has shown that conservatives are less likely to be able emphatize with other viewpoints compared to liberals[1].
I want to point out that Trump and the Republican party has taken dishonesty to completely new level in America. The party even came up with a new term to call lies: "alternative fact". Trump has lied more than 20,000 times since taking office.
The issue with the modern Republican party is that they are not going to compromise on anything. It is either their way, or no way. That is not the right way to govern a country. Well, I guess that is the way it is in dictatorships, but I would like to think that most Americans do not want to live in a dictatorship.
It's not the left that is doing the censoring, it is companies, and they're doing it to both left and right wing ideas.
For engineering the government to prevent other view points, that's the whole point of the constitution. Certain view points are disallowed
What was the chaos in the Obama administration? Those seemed like pretty boring years. By contrast, the trump adminstration had the constant leaks, tell all books, and high profile firings/resignations.
What terror attacks happened in the US due to immigration during the Obama years? Acquiescing to foreign powers yeah, Obama should have gone to war with Russia over Crimea, but the trump years are no better. He's pushed Iranians that want peace out of power, given legitimacy to Russia's conquests, and both legitimacy and nuclear weapons to North Korea, while strengthening China's ties to other countries (eg. Brazil is now China's friend due to soy trade)
> Obama should have gone to war with Russia over Crimea
Say goodbye to Indo-Pacific then, land war with Russia (a nuclear major power mind you) will be multiple times more difficult than Iraq and people say that America focus with Iraq allows China ascendency.
10 years after U.S-Russian war, you might face China with probably 50% bigger GDP than America, while America national debt might approach 200% GDP and ultra disillusioned Americans years for isolationism. The entire Indo-Pacific then might be finlandized by China.
Your reality. How many have been beheaded in France in recent weeks by immigrants? Do you even read about those kinds of things or stay in your bubble.
Censorship is not defined as something just a government does. And free speech is more fundamental than the US’s first amendment. Censorship is still censorship when big tech does it and the left’s embrace of it is scary and despicable.
Maybe instead of "failing to conceptualise" they just have a different viewpoint. Why overcomplicate things? And the same is true of the whole censorship issue. People on the left just have different values and that is reflected in policy. That doesn't equate to a conspiracy to destroy freedom of speech.
What flaws did the Trump administration demonstrate that weren’t already obviously flaws? Did we actually get new information about previously hidden flaws?
That's like saying that a machine gun wasn't more deadly because we already had rifles. Trump made a number of major expansions in claims of executive power: spending money which Congress had allocated for different purposes, claiming immunity to legal investigation, using the DOJ to defend him against civil suits predating his run for office, simply putting people in positions which require Congressional approval, claiming that he could override state health authority decisions related to the pandemic, trying to zero out taxes which he doesn't agree with, etc. He didn't get away with all of it but that Unitary Executive theory is a really big shift away from the American system of government and it happened by fiat rather than some kind of reasoned legislative process.
Put more simply, Trump managed to find a position strong enough that he lost the support of even John Yoo, who felt that the President had authority to order torture.
I thought the same thing. Expose our system to an inept wannabe despot. Hopefully the system is antifragile and this will make it much harder for a more serious and competent future one.
For example, in impeachment trials, you might expect partisanship to affect the final vote but for the trial itself to still be thorough, complete, etc. In practice, apparently this doesn't happen if the party is still basically loyal to the president.
I guess it's not surprising. If they already know how they're going to vote, it can only damage the president and the senators to expose any facts that go against that.
Maybe in a case where the president did something even more extreme, it wouldn't work this way. But the sequence appears to be that the president's party would first decide they want him out, then do the trial to make it happen, not the other way around.
Also, when Clinton was impeached, it was a Republican-majority Senate impeaching a Democratic president. So not really comparable to when it's the same party for both as with Trump. Of course they went through all the steps in the trial for Clinton because that Senate wanted to impeach (and probably wanted as much damaging evidence to come to light as possible).
Not exactly true. In every trial in the senate, the guilty votes come exclusively from one side, but the not guilty votes are historically slightly more bipartisan.
For both Clinton and Johnson, all the guilty votes came from republicans, while all senate democrats and a handful of republicans voted not guilty.
Trump's impeachment trial was unique in that it was a straight party line vote.
Nixon almost certainly would have been impeached (the Democrats had a large majority in the house), and a large number of republican senators were expected to vote guilty (which would have been unique). He may have been able to escape a conviction in the senate, but the evidence was pretty damning and the American public would have been furious. In some sense his resignation was the only way to salvage the Republican Party.
The postmortem of the last 4 years should be analyzed deeply in order to identify the weak points in the infrastructure of our government in order to make improvements.
Trump has been a very effective chaos monkey.