As a guy who's spent countless thousands of hours at the Taj Mahal poker room and others around Atlantic City, I've been intimately familiar with Trump for decades, obviously he's an unfit sociopath child. That being said....I do feel his election is about the most perfect expression of American democracy I've seen in my life, followed closely by the election of my favorite Barry O.
Just because the "will of the people" was completely misguided doesn't mean the system malfunctioned. These folks simply made a decision fueled purely by anger. If we need a revolution similar to France/Russia....what is it against exactly? We have no monarchy or autocracy that I can see. If anything these two Presidents were the last people the establishment wanted in office, and if Bernie is next that's three in a row.
I think we're in the middle of a very progressive political change, this part just feels bad because it's the diarrhea phase. Voters are finally beginning to feel they have power, and the most positive mobilization has been on the anti-Trump side. You gotta be patient, recognize the positive, and trust the process.
I'm hoping the political swing to the left in this country will stop the march towards open conflict. I heard an interview with one of the freshmen congresswomen from Michigan a few weeks ago. She's a Democrat won in a fairly red district and she made the point that most of the people in her district have seen their lives get progressively worse over the last 30 years, regardless of who is in power.
They voted for Donald Trump because he was different and they hoped he would be a disrupter in the right direction, but he's turned out to be a disrupter that has caused acceleration in the wrong direction.
Since Reagan, the middle class has shrunk, the wealthiest people have become vastly richer (middle class and lower incomes have been flat or declining while upper incomes have skyrocketed), infrastructure has deteriorated, and there has been a flood of good paying jobs that have gone overseas. The last part is hard to counter, new technologies like the shipping container and better worldwide communications have made it cheaper and easier to send unskilled and low skilled manufacturing jobs overseas.
But the other elements have been due to Republican driven greed. The mantra of trickle down economics combined with the mantra of constantly lower taxes has created a massive imbalance. Give someone who's under the poverty line $1000 and they will spend it on necessities. Give someone who's middle class $1000 and many will spend it on something they want but don't need. Give $1000 to someone who's rich and the money will go out of circulation.
The myth that has also been perpetuated during this Republican run is that the "investor class" are job creators. To some degree investing can create jobs, but the way the markets are structured today it's about the most inefficient way to create jobs ever conceived.
The vast majority of stock trades are between one entity that owns the stock and another that is buying. The company who issued that stock makes nothing on the transaction. A healthy stock price helps boost consumer confidence in a product. People don't tend to buy a product if they know the company's stock is tanking, but that's the only effect that stock trade has on the health of the company. The vast majority of people buying a Tesla today have no idea what the stock price is today, nor do they care. If the news was full of stories that the stock went from $200 a share to $5 in the last few weeks they might hesitate, but otherwise the day to day movement of the stock has no impact on sales.
There are investments that can directly lead to jobs, but not all of those are jobs in this country. A lot of the job creation by US capital over the last 30 years has been in other countries. A lot of whites with less than a college degree are anti-immigrant and make noises about foreigners taking their jobs. They are right, foreigners did take their jobs, but it was someone in China or Bangladesh who never set foot in this country, not the Guatemalan picking their produce.
The vast majority of wealth held by the super wealthy is just hoarded and it is doing very little to benefit the rest of society. There are two types of super-wealthy, the people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, even Bill Gates got super wealthy creating something new. They invented the proverbial better mouse trap and reaped the rewards. Some people hate all rich people, but less vitriol is directed at this group than the klepto-capatalists who are just in it to make money.
The Showtime show Billions is partly about these sorts. The show has some brilliant characters who have the talents to be great innovators in industries that could benefit all, but instead they are just accumulating a bigger hill of gold for themselves and a small number of their friends. It's all about accumulated wealth for the sake of accumulation with no real goal in sight. Donald Trump has always cast himself as one of these people, even though he never really had that much wealth.
The former group see wealth as capital to do something new an innovative, the latter group only think of wealth as how to keep score. The wanna be score keepers like Trump don't understand and are driven nuts by people like Elon who are not all that impressed by their own wealth. The creators don't care about being wealthy. They buy nice houses, nice cars, travel by private jet, but they feel no need to lord it over anyone else. I've spoken with some people who have known Bill Gates personally and they all said that Gates is completely unimpressed with where he falls on the world's richest ranking.
Those who have been hurt by these policies are becoming aware of how they have been scammed and they are getting angry. It's exactly the same pattern Karl Marx talked about in his works of the 19th century. The conservative media has redirected some of the rage away from the real culprits, but there is a whole generation now who are aware of who is to blame and they are gunning for the klepto-capitalists. They would prefer things to change peacefully and they will if the political environment changes more to their liking, but if things don't start changing soon, there probably will be violence.
I think to solve some of the systemic issues being discussed here it may be more productive to attack the foundations of power from outside the political system (
see my post from the Investor Roundtable Thread), but that’s not to suggest that we can’t walk and chew gum at the same time. Here’s one idea for a structural change to the US political system that I think could be extremely beneficial:
make politics more expensive. Mind you, I’m not talking about the cost of
running for office. I’m talking about the cost to swoop in to a congressional race(s) with outside money to “purchase” a victory for a candidate or slate of candidates who may not win if s/he had to rely on their wits, popularity, and policy chops alone.
Not being in the market myself, I don’t know how expensive it is to purchase a winning political coalition, but it sure seems like a lot of people/interests can afford it, and to me, that suggests it’s too cheap. Take the “Freedom” caucus in the House for example. It has 33/435 seats in the chamber (33/199 in the Republican caucus) and it has wielded a truly inordinate amount of power. If all you need in order to hijack the policy agenda of one of the two major parties in your interests is a vocal minority of 33, then even if each campaign costs 10 million dollars (which I think is way above average), it’s a bargain. 330 million dollars might buy you billions in favorable tax law, subsidies, you name it. There are a number of powerful interests that could foot that bill on their own, and it’s truly a drop in the bucket if they join forces.
For my proposed solution, let’s all open our hymnals to the third paragraph of Article 1, Section 2 of the US Constitution. What does it say? Well, it describes how representatives should be apportioned: “The Number of Representatives shall not exceed one for every thirty Thousand…”. With a population of 330,000,000, that works out to ~11,000 members of the House of Representatives. So why does the House only have 435 members today (1 rep for every 750,000 citizens)? Because of the Permanent Apportionment act of 1929, which enacted a cap on the number of representatives. With the population at the time, this would have meant about 1 rep for every 275,000 citizens.
If we reinstated the apportionment spelled out in the Constitution, instead of buying 33 congress critters, you’d have to buy 835 for the same relative proportion. Even if each race is cheaper (say 1 million dollars a pop), it’s still a lot more expensive overall. Plus, money might not be as much of a determining factor in smaller races where candidates don’t have to rely on expensive ad buys to reach voters. Local politics can be a lot more responsive and less crazy/heated than big races because if you actually meet the candidates, or even know them personally, it’s a lot harder for someone to use the media to influence your opinion (kind of like how the best inoculation against FUD is driving a Tesla). Now, there
might be some practical considerations that would make it difficult to reinstate the original representative to population ratio (can you imagine a session of Congress with 11,000 reps? Good lord.), but increasing the number of reps even a relatively small amount could be healthy.
A post I wrote in the EV market share thread is apropos here. I discuss how in evolutionary biology, natural selection is less efficient in small populations than in large populations, and apply it to a discussion about the relative speed of cost reductions in solar and wind technology. For details, you can read that post, but the basic idea is that in small populations, natural selection can lose out to other evolutionary forces such as drift (random effects) and migration, producing an outcome that wouldn’t happen if natural selection were operating on it’s own.
Electoral politics is analogous to natural selection. Ideas and policies that enjoy a majority of public support “should” win because politicians who don’t support them should be voted out by the majority in preference of politicians who do. Likewise, in evolution, traits that increase an organism’s fitness (lifetime reproductive success) are “supposed” to increase in frequency. But in both cases, there are other forces that can impact the course of events, producing results that run counter what “should” happen. In evolution this may be migration from some outside population or a random natural disaster. In politics, this may be powerful interests that flood campaigns with money. By increasing the population size, the relative effect of those other forces is reduced, and the impact of natural selection (in biology) and popular policy support (in politics) on determining outcomes is enhanced. Basically, the idea for politics is to make it extremely difficult to build a majority coalition by any means
other than enacting policies with majorities of public support.
All of this said, I actually doubt that this proposal would change much on its own - after all, if the Senate remains unchanged, powerful interests would just redeploy resources there to exert control. But still.
There was a court case a few years about that thing about the cap on congressional districts being 30,000. I don't know what happened to it. It's interesting, but congressional districts that small would be unwieldy.
The Freedom Caucus has more power than its size, and was a factor in the last Congress because it was just big enough to play the spoiler in House legislation. Today it's much weaker. The only time this year it has had any impact is when Jason Amash spoke up. The next gen Democrats like AOC are now in the position to play the spoiler if they want to.
And the problem with majority support is that the bulk of people voting really have little idea what they are voting for. If every Republican sat down and fully thought through how much each party's policies affected them personally and how they did, a large percentage would switch parties. The Republican propaganda machine has been very effective at getting a segment of the population to vote against their better interests.
Some are one issue voters. The evangelical coalition has figuratively sold their souls over the abortion issue. If SCOTUS upholds any of these extreme anti-abortion laws passed recently, it could end up fracturing the Republican coalition because for Evangelicals, they got the one thing they were voting for and everything else that the Republicans stand for is not in their interests.
But a lot of Republican voters are sold on the idea that the Republicans will deliver what's best for them even though they have only made their lives worse for almost 40 years.
This last sentence is, flat out, what I disagree with. This is the thinking which nominated a whole bunch of losers, from Kerry to Hillary.
In 2004, Bush's share of the popular vote was almost exactly equal to his approval rating on election day. A re-election of a president is largely an initiative on that president. Kerry didn't help his cause, but Romney blew up his chances worse than Kerry did.
Hillary was nominated in an environment without the Democratic party that it was her turn. She lost narrowly to Obama in 2008 and many felt 2016 was her chance. But the country had moved on and she was the wrong candidate for 2016.
Back in 2008 a rather militant feminist friend was quite angry that Obama won, but thought it would be OK if Hillary was the nominee in 2016. By the time 2016 rolled around, she was more interested in Bernie than Hillary.
A larger field in 2016 might have left Hillary out, but the common wisdom was that Hillary was going to win in 2016 and anyone who challenged her was a fool.
And even the right-leaning independents are sick of this crap. And THAT is why he's a bad candidate. If you can find someone who seems "safer" than AOC and Bernie but does not have Biden's strong ties to the ideas which the populace has *rejected*, that would be fine.
Maybe Steve Bullock or Cory Booker or something.
But Biden? Have you *looked* at how unpopular he is below the generation gap, in the Oregon Trail Generation, Millennials, and post-Millennials? He is *extremely* unpopular. How many young people will canvass for Biden? NONE. How's the GOTV program going to go? Well, there will probably be some good effort for a bunch of Democrats running for Congress, and we'll have to hope Biden will ride in on the wave of Congress, the opposite of coattails.
But if we nominate a candidate who isn't Biden, we'll have a massive volunteer campaign apparatus.
This does highlight the massive gap between the generations. Biden is popular among the pre-Oregon Trail generation, which is why he's leading in the polls, but the younger voters hate him. Especially young, white Democrats. He's relatively popular among African Americans.
We're in a political environment that's tough to predict. Instead of sitting out the race, a lot of young Democrats may hold their nose and vote for Biden while championing down ballot progressives. It may look more like the 2018 elections where people were passionate about their House rep candidate instead of the top of the ticket.
Polls have shown that a very high percentage of Democrats say they will vote and the number of my candidate or bust types is unusually low this year. A large percentage of Democrats have said they will vote for Biden if he's the nominee. Maybe without much enthusiasm, but the alternative is clearly worse.
If Trump strokes out eating a family bucket of KFC at 3 AM, that could completely change the dynamic. If the Republicans nominated someone who was personable, Biden could be in trouble. If Mike Pence was the replacement nominee, he wouldn't be tough to beat. Most of the non-religious in Trump's coalition would stay home.
Unfortunately, that required the assassination of McKinley. McKinley was accumulating massive opposition and setting the stage for a huge loss at the next election, and then he was assassinated, and things started looking up for the country.
Hopefully. McKinley was a corrupt sellout, so there was substantially more to hate about him than about Biden.
Unlike McKinley. I hope so!
Traditionally VPs were pushed aside and given little to do. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama gave their VPs a bit more of a voice. Roosevelt was chosen as VP to shut him up. He was rabble rousing and the McKinley Republicans wanted him silenced. The assassination of McKinley messed up their plans.
The difference is that while Biden may not agree with Warren and AOC, he isn't as hostile to their ideas as McKinley's people were to Roosevelt's. A progressive VP probably would be allowed to speak their mind more than most VPs have. A progressive VP could end up having a real impact on the national political debate.
The state governments have a lot more legitimacy because they do respond to public opinion (yes, this is shown in studies).
I agree that we are in the middle of a very progressive political change. It is very important that voters are beginning to feel that they have power. But enough obstructionism by elected / appointed officials, and voters will start to look at the other ways in which they have power. If the ballot box doesn't work, they will turn to the other methods.
On the state level both House and Senators come from your neck of the woods. The lobbyists still court them, but you can actually contact your state representatives and they will actually respond. I've written my state reps and actually got a response written by them personally. I've written my Congress rep and US Senators a number of times. With the senators I sometimes get a note back from a staffer that indicates a human actually read it, but all I ever get from my House rep are canned messages that don't even address what I wrote about. But my house rep is a Republican back bencher who has never done much. She's best known for her very difficult pregnancy in her first or second term in the House.
