I will close this month and begin the next with a political-philosophical analysis of the competing policy platforms of the Presidential regime that We the People will be electing in about a month. This is a blackbox analysis. Meaning, I’m not concerning myself here with any other issues that might affect how one should vote; I’m just going to pretend none of that exists, and that the competing candidates are the same except for their policy platforms. That’s wildly not true. But I want to focus on that one issue, since it tends to get washed under the flood of so many other important things rightly being covered elsewhere.
Methodology
So the question I am asking today is, who is offering the better platform?
Apart from the fact that Donald Trump is a liar, a felon, a racist, a bribery-accepting profiteer, a lunatic in documented mental decline, a shockingly incompetent businessman, objectively one of the worst presidents in recent memory, a probable rapist, and a multiply-indicted criminal and insurrectionist, who has threatened to weaponize the legal system against his political opponents and destroy the protections our democracy depends upon, and who has already been granted authority to commit crimes by the Supreme Court and who will likely appoint even more anti-constitutional fascists to that and other courts, and whose most singular achievement (that he has said he will maintain or even advance) was taking away American reproductive rights (effectively violating the Constitution’s ninth and fourteenth amendments)—you know, apart from all that—how does his policy platform compare with that of Kamala Harris? Harris doesn’t need to be perfect to perform better than Trump on all those other metrics (from honesty to appointing judges), so there is no need to take any of that into account here (citizens can take it into account at the ballot box). Here we will bracket all that away, and simply weigh her platform against his.
For the purposes of this analysis I will set aside the fact that Trump is such a ubiquitous liar that we actually can’t trust anything he “says” is his policy to be anything he will actually do, because he is incompetent and insane and changes his mind at random. He also often says things just to be popular that he never really believes or intends to follow up on. A naysayer might make the same accusation against Harris, but that would just bring us back to ceteris paribus. There is better evidence that Harris actually intends to try to do the things she wants than that Trump will, but even if we assumed they were equal on that score, then they are back equal on policy metrics: for every policy you might claim Harris is shining us on about and really will drop, we could say the same of Trump, and so neither of them outscores the other there.
Instead, I will pretend none of that exists, and look at what Trump has claimed he will do in terms of policy, and pretend he will actually give it a shot. Harris we can trust will actually at least try to implement what she says. We all know a Republican congress will sandbag her and try to prevent any of it from happening (just like they did with Obama and, indeed, Biden), or try to break it if it does happen so they can disingenuously claim it doesn’t work. But that’s on them. Here what I mean to do is evaluate Harris’s platform, not the GOP’s promise to destroy it. Which, of course, we could prevent by kicking all those bums out; but that’s not the issue we’re examining today. Today, the question is, if Trump and Harris could succeed at what they claim they want to do, which will produce an outcome better for America?
This analysis will also follow a couple of additional rules:
- Vague promises devoid of any described policy will not be counted. In other words, if they claim they will do something, but not how they will do it, then they are not presenting us a policy at all, but just an “attitude,” which tells us nothing except their feelings (e.g. “We will end all crime in America!” How?). Aspirations are not policies. Policies have calculable costs and consequences. We can analyze those. Hence a President can only be evaluated based on actionable policies, not wishes and dreams.
- Trump and Vance say a lot of random things and then forget them; and rarely build out an actionable policy from them. So it’s impossible to keep track of all these ephemeral, on-the-fly, and dubiously sincere assertions (like, will they or won’t they untax social security checks; or will they or won’t they implement Project 2025). The only steady account of their policy plans I can find is the official platform paper on their campaign website. So that’s what I will analyze. Likewise, the Harris-Walz platform is also summarized on their campaign website (with a much more detailed policy report than the GOP’s rambling and hard-to-follow-equivalent, Agenda 47).
- I will score a policy a 1 if it’s substantive enough to evaluate, will likely produce a net good for the country, and isn’t matched by a comparable policy in their opponent’s platform. I will score a 0 if it fails at any of those three metrics. And I will score a -1 for any policy substantive enough to evaluate that will likely produce a net bad for the country, and isn’t matched by a comparable policy in their opponent’s platform. I’ll then compare their total arithmetical scores.
That said, let’s take a look. Here in Part 1 I will address the Harris campaign platform. Then in Part 2 next week I will address the Trump campaign platform, and compare their scores.
The Harris-Walz Platform
Harris’s slogan is “Creating an Opportunity Economy,” which is nice, if a bit cliched. It does communicate a policy vision: she wants to increase the amount and degree of “opportunities” for all Americans to get out of any hole they may be stuck in and get ahead. And in general, I will say I believe there are better ways to do that than her fairly centrist platform (I am, after all, an advocate of universal basic income, and single-payer healthcare like the most of the first world has). But I understand she has to get elected to implement anything, and most American liberals are centrists terrified of bold goals, so we have to move incrementally (see my discussion of this point in How Far Left Is Too Left?). That’s fine.
You’ll notice a stark difference once you get to read my Part 2. Even Harris’s summary is substantially more specific than Trump’s; and they add an expanded document (called a Policy Book) that gets into yet more detail, including summarizing or citing reports and scientific studies and expert polls confirming that the impact of Harris-Walz policies will be substantially better than Trump’s. So Harris is making an argument for her platform, in a way that the corresponding Trump-Vance policy document does not (it has only rhetoric, not an evidential case; their paper is also shoddily composed, with an excess reliance on all-caps text and weirdly capitalized words, and formatted worse than a high school report, but I’m ignoring that). I also didn’t vet all of Harris’s cited evidence. I’ll just be looking at the policies as stated, given what I know personally from my own research.
- Middle Class Tax Cut
Top of the list, they promise “100 million working and middle-class Americans will get a tax cut.” That is already more specific than what we’ll get from Trump (stay tuned). And they say how they will pay for it: by “rolling back Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, enacting a billionaire minimum tax, quadrupling the tax on stock buybacks, and other reforms,” including an increase in the capital gains tax for millionaires. We know she believes this, and that it is the fiscally responsible thing to do. Our best tax regime, along with our best economy, was in the late 1950s, and we should return to it; our current regime is not only harmful economically, it’s a threat to national security—the rich should be taxed way more here, as they are everywhere else in the world that has a better quality of life.
Their clarity on this point also doesn’t stop with that vague “100 million working and middle-class Americans will get a tax cut.” They actually lay out how they will do that: they “will do this by restoring two tax cuts designed to help middle class and working Americans: the Child Tax Credit and the Earned Income Tax Credit,” including a double credit for newborns. The DNC has always wanted this, so there is no doubt Harris-Walz will press for it, and it will help a lot of people. Taxes should be lower on the poor (especially parents raising children, if you believe in family values) and higher on the rich, and all past evidence in our country, and all evidence from present peer countries, demonstrates that that always works out better for everyone by every pertinent metric.
So this scores 1 for Harris-Walz. To be fair, as soon as she proposed it, Trump-Vance claimed they’d do it, too. But, even if we believe them, it doesn’t score here, because they will only increase the CTC, not the EIC, and are unclear on how much, while they offer no explanation of how they will pay for it. I also should note that the Trump website’s platform document says he won’t increase the CTC but keep it where it is (p. 9).
- Expanding Home Ownership
Next on the list, they “will provide first-time homebuyers with up to $25,000 to help with their down payments, with more generous support for first-generation homeowners.” This will certainly increase opportunity for ordinary Americans, and along with her plan to expand rental housing, it is surprising to see her jump on this so well when Trump is supposed to be the real-estate genius. She does not specifically say how this will be structured or how it will be paid for, but her Policy Book describes trial programs it is based on that have already proven successful (like the Detroit Down Payment Assistance Program which also awards $25,000), and those are structured as zero interest loans, meaning the buyer pays it all back eventually, so the same money can be turned back around to loan again. That means her program will only have a small net cost (for defaults and administration). And her policy here is based on empirical evidence and experience. Trump has no comparable policy.
So, score 1 for Harris-Walz. She’s batting 2 now.
- Helping Renters
Third, Harris says she has “a comprehensive plan to build three million more rental units and homes that are affordable to end the national housing supply crisis in her first term,” and she “will cut red tape to make sure we build more housing faster,” and “penalize firms that hoard available homes to drive up prices for local homebuyers.” Her expanded document gives more details on how she will accomplish each thing, and the effect will undeniably be good. But her specifics do start to run out at zoom.
For example, Harris says she will cut red tape and reduce the regulatory burden slowing housing supply, but it is not clear how she can do that. Most of it is not under federal control, and locally it has proven very hard to identify what red tape even can safely be cut. This issue isn’t new; communities have been struggling with it for years with little progress, so I am less certain of her success on that point. Regulations exist for a reason, and while Al Gore’s famed program under Bill Clinton to reduce unnecessary or excessive federal regs and red tape was remarkably successful and would be worth resurrecting, I’m not seeing specific promises like that here.
Still, I will score this at 1 (bringing Harris to 3), because the overall policy is at least a net positive, well-informed, and could bear fruit. In the Policy Book, Harris does describe more specific objectives like “the Stop Predatory Investing Act” that will “remov[e] key tax benefits for major investors that acquire large numbers of single-family rental homes,” thus reducing control of the housing market by predatory mega-investors, and the “Preventing the Algorithmic Facilitation of Rental Housing Cartels Act, to crack down on companies that contribute to surging rent prices” with computerized market manipulation, and various kind of grant programs and incentives, building on or even using already existing infrastructure funds. All of this will undeniably be good (we should live in a world where these laws exist), even if what impact they will have (how much any or all of these will actually reduce rents nationwide) is unknown. It’s at least a substantive policy with hopeful prospects.
There isn’t anything comparable from Trump. We’ll get to it in Part 2, but the Trump-Vance platform makes promises on this, but lacks any clear or specific policy.
- Promoting Small Businesses
Fourth, Harris “will expand the startup expense tax deduction for new businesses from $5,000 to $50,000 and take on the everyday obstacles and red tape that can make it harder to grow a small business,” or as they expand on in their fuller doc, “making it easier for small businesses to file taxes and removing unnecessary or excessive occupational licensing requirements.” Trump also promises to cut red tape, but he doesn’t get even this specific (the phrases “small business” and “startup” aren’t even in his plan). But Harris is still inadequately specific herself, giving no examples of what she means we could “cut” here. What licenses will we be getting rid of? And is that even a good thing?
I’ll say more about that when I get to Trump’s proposals in Part 2. But unlike him, Harris does have pages and pages of ideas in her expanded document, of programs to develop or laws to pass to help small businesses, and her startup deduction bump is a good idea and will have an impact. And though she doesn’t specifically say how she will pay for it, I think that’s calculable. Even if we don’t count the new tax revenues earned from those businesses, she expects to grow six million businesses a year, which puts this program’s cost at around 1% the national budget—and her plan to make reasonable increases in the corporate tax rate (yet still to below historic highs, and close to global average) will more than cover that. So this scores 1 to Harris, bringing her to 4.
- Reigning in High Prices
Fifth, Harris “will build on the anti-price gouging statutes already in place in 37 states” to fight artificially rising prices and “will take on Big Pharma” and “middlemen” to “lower drug prices.” The full doc has pages of examples of successful price-gouging laws, many even in red states, demonstrating proof of concept (and, in case you were wondering, she is not talking about price controls, but defining and penalizing improper markups, based on already successfully implemented laws).
Meanwhile, the Biden administration has already born fruit with its sensible drug pricing policies, based largely on allowing medicare negotiation, and partly on some reasonable price caps, such as for insulin, all of which really just bringing America in line with what other first world countries are already doing. I think these two programs will work (they already have in various places), and they will undeniably be good. One might question how much impact they will have, but it will be a net positive. Trump also promises to bring down prices, but he does not have any similar plans to actually do that (we’ll see what his platform says about this in Part 2). So Harris scores a 1 here, for a total of 5.
- Improving Healthcare
Besides the obvious (Harris will protect and improve the ACA, continuing Biden-era policies to that end—we’ll see in Part 2 how that contrasts with Trump’s plans), Harris says “medical debt will be removed from credit reports,” and she has already “helped cancel $7 billion of medical debt for 3 million Americans” and “as President, she’ll work with states to cancel medical debt for even more Americans.” There is a proof of concept, a program implemented in North Carolina that Harris has been closely coordinating with. Since this is really just a stopgap stepwise measure toward universal healthcare, it counts essentially as moving in that direction, and is therefore a net positive, regardless of its costs (and its costs aren’t high). Substantive medical debt, really, should not even exist in this country (as it doesn’t in most first world countries). Yet Trump’s platform does not even mention this as a problem. So I have to give Harris a 1 here (making 6).
- Protecting Social Security and Medicare
It’s unclear what Trump will actually do about these programs. He waffles, and wavers based on which position he thinks makes him the most liked. His policy document says he will make no cuts and won’t increase the retirement age. Harris quotes and cites him saying the opposite. It’s unclear which position would prevail with him, so I consider this a wash as far as scoring goes. If he makes you nervous on this point, Harris is definitely a step up for you as a voter, because she definitely believes in these programs and wants to strengthen and protect them. But there is one substantive policy difference between Harris and Trump here: she vows to make “millionaires and billionaires pay their fair share in taxes” into these programs, ensuring their solvency. I believe her (it’s long been a DNC goal). And it’s the right thing to do (it’s what every other decent country does). So on that point alone—proposing an actual solution to the solvency issue of these programs—she scores 1. She’s batting a 7 now.
- Promoting Jobs
Both Trump and Harris speak about bringing more manufacturing jobs back to America. I’ll discuss what Trump proposes in Part 2, but it’s nothing comparable to Harris, so I’ll score it on its own. But contrary to Trump’s repeated lying about them, Biden-Harris have already been much better on this metric than Trump, and their policies, if kept in place, will only continue this marked improvement. For example, Harris plans to continue the push to onshore more microchip manufacturing. And she will support unions (something a union-busting Trump is less likely to do), and (unlike Trump) she has offered specific legislative proposals to do that, including signing into law the PRO Act and the Public Service Freedom to Negotiate Act.
I think this matters more than many voters realize, because manufacturing (particularly at the foundational level, such as machining, without which you can’t even build the factories that make stuff) is essential to national security. Just imagine a war with China, when we have been relying on Chinese machinists rather than honing our own—we wouldn’t even be able to expand military capacity like we did in WW2, because we literally won’t have enough skilled labor. What would we do when all trade with China ends—how will we keep our cars running, still have smartphones for everyone, or even manufacture basic pharmaceuticals? Trade with other manufacturing countries is a net good (it can even help improve the economies of the third world, which we benefit from in less conflict and immigration pressure); but we can’t become critically dependent on it. Although a 21st century economy is more dependent on other professions now (like services and coding), it still rests on a foundation of manufacturing. Trump seems to also get this, but he has different ideas about what to do for it, so I’ll score that separately.
Harris will also aim to “raise the minimum wage, end sub-minimum wages for tipped workers and people with disabilities, establish paid family and medical leave, and eliminate taxes on tips for service and hospitality workers.” All good things that other countries have, and we should have had long ago—and that have been amply studied and worked into specifics, so it’s not even novel or radical to support these things. Trump has nothing comparable on offer.
One might worry that raising the minimum wage will reduce rather than increase jobs, but when staged in implementation until the minimum wage is locked to inflation, it doesn’t. Which is why we saw the federal minimum wage go from $3.80 under Reagan to $7.25 under Obama (where it has remained stuck ever since), yet gained 50 million jobs in that same period, and why even the unemployment rate does not correlate with minimum wage increases. For example, the wage went up nearly a dollar in every year from 2007 to 2009, yet by 2011 the unemployment rate was plummeting, dropping nearly a whole point every year, from a high of 9% in 2009-2010 to a low of 4% by 2019, where it remains today (after an expected spike during the pandemic).
So with all of these plans to help the job market together, I give Harris another score of 1 (bringing her now to 8). Trump could earn a point here, too, if his different policies also merit; but we’ll see.
- Promoting Education
The Harris-Walz education platform summary is too light on specifics to score (just lots of promises, and descriptions of what Biden has already done that Harris would continue). Her Policy Book fills in some blanks, but not enough (apart from policies I already scored above).
For examples:
- That Harris “will get rid of unnecessary degree requirements for hundreds of thousands of federal jobs” is at least semi-specific, but lacks an important piece of information: examples. What jobs can actually be done by people not meeting those requirements? It’s important to remember that American education objectively sucks. The average high school student can’t even write a coherent letter. The reason we have leaned on college is to weed them out (and even then only to moderate success), which is an extremely expensive and inefficient solution. By contrast, other countries’ school systems leave secondary school graduates with college-level competency already. I am not confident Harris’s plan to skip that step will be good for anyone; it might simply degrade the quality and competency of federal administration. Her policy thus lacks required specifics, such as how these applicants will be vetted for competency without the college degree replacing that function, or statistics on how many viable non-college applicants even exist in America, or whether this will be hurting college graduates by rendering their degrees a loss. For example, are job positions going unfilled now so that we need to expand the hiring pool, or will letting non-graduates in only block advancement for graduates? It could be the former (as college degrees tend to get higher pay in the private sector). But…is it? Without relevant data here, I can’t vet this policy’s merits.
- Conversely, Harris boasts of how Biden “invested more than $750 million in expanding Registered Apprenticeships and pre-apprenticeship programs,” which is great, but not new. The policy is already in place. Harris doesn’t say by what dollar amount she would increase this (if at all), or how she will pay for it (although to be fair the current price tag is so low as to be essentially budget-invisible). There is a lot of this sort of thing. Harris touts the Biden “Good Jobs” and “Workforce Hubs” initiatives, for example, which are great, but she doesn’t make any specific claims about how she would increase or improve them. It’s likely Trump will kill them (as they fit the category of the kind of thing he calls waste), but we can’t be sure of that, so I can’t really give a confident score here.
- Similarly, Harris promises to “provide nearly $170 billion in student debt relief” but she doesn’t say how, or how she will pay for it. I agree it would be good (some successful countries already have free college education for their citizens, and many American states already have state-subsidized college education for their citizens, so we have empirical support for moving in that direction), but it all depends on the specifics of how it will be implemented, which I don’t see provided.
So on education, though I see some good ideas here (including some solid accomplishments under Biden-Harris), her future policy changes aren’t specific enough to score. She gets a 0.
- Care Economy
Harris promises to expand “high-quality home care services for seniors and people with disabilities and ensuring hardworking families can afford high-quality child care,” and likewise support care workers. But the summary states no actual policy to accomplish any of this, and her expanded Policy Book doesn’t do much better. She discusses things already done under Biden-Harris, reiterates increasing the Child Tax Credit (which I already scored), and cites some evidence of how Trump went the other direction on this industry, making childcare more expensive. Trump’s official policy says he will do kind of the same things Harris vaguely promises, and though he might be lying (you can be the judge of that), I’m going to score these policies as stated. As such, the net effect here is a score of 0. Which again is not a criticism; Harris’s goals are valorous, and I trust her more than Trump on them, but in terms of described policy, they are a wash.
- Energy Policy
Harris’s summary is vague (I suspect editorial fatigue set in, given the last few entries were weaker tea than the first several), promising to lower energy costs and expand clean energy (and thereby increase jobs), but with no actual policy described. The Policy Book only describes statistical accomplishments toward these ends under the policies of Biden-Harris that Harris vows to continue (p. 29). But we cannot be sure Trump wouldn’t also (I leave that to your own judgment as a voter). I must note that Trump lies about this repeatedly. Domestic oil and gas production, including fracking, have actually reached record highs under Biden-Harris and due to actual Harris votes, so she has proven her record here; and investing in clean energy, such as Biden-Harris did through the Inflation Reduction Act and other infrastructure bills, is a boon and not a threat to the economy, both creating jobs and reducing overall energy costs. But since no specifically new policy is described here, I have to score it a 0. We’ll see what Trump scores on energy later.
Conclusion
My scoring for the Harris-Walz platform is an 8 overall. This does not measure degree of impact, so it’s anamorphic. I’m just counting things she says she will do and whether they will be in any degree a net positive or not. I’ll give Trump the same chance to rack up points on the same terms in Part 2 next week. But I have to bring special attention to the fact that Harris has a detailed policy platform, often full of specifics or even empirical arguments for them. Trump’s policy document doesn’t. Harris also gives empirical reasons to believe she will pursue these policies, as a matter of consistent styling of each policy entry. Trump doesn’t have that; he only occasionally throws in a random argument to this effect, and none well developed. And all of Harris’s ideas are evidence-based and reasonable (IMO they aren’t ambitious enough, but any step forward is good). This is one thing we tend to get from the DNC and not the GOP: detailed, science-based policy. The difference has never been starker than in this election cycle, as you’ll see in my next entry.
IMO, we have quite a few specifics on what trump and his controllers will do, it’s called Project 2025.
I’ll mention that in Part 2, although they have publicly “disavowed” that in place of Agenda 47. Obviously you need not believe them (their claim is dubious). But the objective of the present study is to only consider the platform they have publicly affirmed to be theirs. So that’s the only one that pertains here.
Can someone explain why Democrats are eager to bring back those god-awful jobs to America? I’ve worked in four factories, and they all sucked. Unless you’re the plant manager or an engineer, you’d be a fool to want those jobs. Those American hippies who move to Prague to play acoustic guitar in random coffee shops (like one of my undergrad friends did) have a better life than many of those who do manual labor in factories. You’re not going to lose an arm picking the G-string at open mic in a land-locked European country, but I know from experience that even in Ohio, many factories have utter shit safety standards. You have people like the Paul brothers (Logan and Jake) who made millions just uploading YouTube videos and celebrity boxing. Ironically, the same Democrat politicians who want (mostly white) Americans to go back to factory work are the same ones who went to law school and graduate school and got internships at the White House when they were fresh out of undergrad.
I’m assuming you are being disingenuous.
You seem unaware of the fact that neither Harris nor Walz enjoyed any such career path.
Walz worked in a tanning bed factory out of high school, was career military for over two decades, went to state colleges, and worked years as a school teacher and coach, until he only went to Washington when he was hired by millions of people to represent them there. He never held any White House internship nor moved to Prague.
Harris worked her way through college in menial factory-like jobs until completing a law degree (attending no elite schools) and working as a lawyer and public prosecutor, and worked her way up to district attorney and then state Attorney General, until she only went to Washington when she was hired by millions of people to represent themselves there. She has never held any White House internship. She has never lived in Prague. And she did all that being a woman, Asian, and Black.
So, clearly, you need a reality adjustment.
And then there’s your strange wingeing about American factories.
“I hate hard work” and “I hate modern industrial manufacturing” is eyerollingly ironic for someone typing this on a computer manufactured in a factory and transmitting it through an internet manufactured in a factory—and probably neither factory as well run or safe as an American factory.
You depend on factory labor. If you think it is ill-treated, support the Harris-Walz plans to strengthen unions, elect representatives who will ensure safety code violations are better policed, and signal-boost public awareness programs promoting shorter workweeks and better labor conditions.
Don’t sit on your couch and whine. Be a useful citizen and vote for an incrementally better world—and certainly vote against it becoming worse. If you think your complaints matter, that is the only rational choice for you. Otherwise you prove by your actions that you don’t really care about factory conditions. Prove you care. Speak and vote the gradual path to bettering them.
Neither Walz nor Vance have promised to bring back academic jobs. Neither has encouraged the founding of more universities or encouraged SCOTUS to accept law clerks from law schools that aren’t Harvard or Yale. Biden, of course, didn’t nominate someone who went to the University of Toledo Law School for the Supreme Court, but someone who went to Harvard, the same one almost all the other justices went to. Detroit is still a third world country, as is Gary, Indiana. Even after injecting all those Arab and Indian doctors into the suburbs, Detroit still has an incredibly high murder rate in particular and high crime rate in general. If tens of thousands of immigrant doctors and lawyers can’t change the economic landscape of Detroit, how can Vance or Walz? Then there’s Gary/East Chicago where one is likely to get shot just pulling off the turnpike. Those two cities, unlike Detroit, don’t have a vast number of wealthy people living in the general area and so might continue to resemble a Mad Max movie until aliens come down and either colonize them or incinerate them with a giant laser.
Neither side has any policy on academic jobs. So that’s a wash. They are equal on that metric.
You can’t assess that, though, by SCOTUS appointments, because those reflect the biases of Congress, not the President (i.e. Presidents do not choose people from elite schools because they want to, but because they need to to sway Congress to accept them; there is very little a President can do about the prejudices of Congress).
Likewise on restoring our worst cities. Neither side has any specific policy difference. So, a wash.
Although those cities were worse off under Reagan (when, for example, Detroit’s murder rate was several times its current), and so despite appearances are actually already improving.
In addition to what Richard has pointed out, Bill, not only should you count on Harris more than Trump to care about academic jobs and be reachable on that topic (as compared to the labor-hating, intellectual-hating, idiot billionaire Trump who has been associated with people in the for-profit education industry), but it’s also pretty precious of you to bring up cities that have had incredible challenges like Detroit precisely because the manufacturing base fucking left and then the welfare state was slashed (yes, in part thanks to Clinton). Bringing back manufacturing jobs to urban centers like Detroit would help massively to deal with these social problems. This is a grab bag of complaints and not really very legitimate, I have to say.
Fred reminds me of the importance of understanding the deep history of problem areas in the country. Rather than just railing against their statistical present, ask why are they like that. Why is city X so much worse than city Y, even though they may be even in the same state, or indeed even half an hour’s drive from each other.
History illumines more than you expect. I’ll give an example I know particularly well, because I lived there and I took an advanced college course covering it at UC Berkeley: Richmond, California. Often flirting with national murder or crime capital status. Yet surrounded by far less ruined cities (it’s just a hop skip away from Berkeley itself—hardly known for murder).
Turns out, almost all the crime in Richmond existed in a single neighborhood, called the Iron Triangle (not as Wikipedia has it after Vietnam, but after the fact that it sits in a triangle formed by dead shipyard railway lines that segregated the neighborhood, literally putting it “on the other side of the tracks”). If you removed that one little neighborhood from the stats (and it’s, like, ten blocks square), Richmond looks just like Berkeley.
Then if you look at why, you find the story: it started in WW2, under Jim Crowe. The U.S. needed labor to build warships, and built a port for it in Richmond, then sent agents to round up thousands of poor black laborers in the Old South, trained them all the way to California, and put them up in newly built homes with good jobs at the shipyards.
Then the war ended and the government…left. They literally just closed the shipyards and left. And they left all the laborers there. With no industry, no economy, no jobs. A cycle of poverty and crime spiraled out, business and investment flees, housing values crater, and all along with justifiable resentment at the shitty move White America pulled on them, which led to distrust of authority, particularly white authority, mainly cops and officials who didn’t even live there. It took literally half a century to rebuild trust and get the city out of the churn, which of course started with investment in surrounding white neighborhoods first, leaving the Iron Triangle corralled and uncared for.
Only recently has it been on any visible path to recovery. And it’s still a long way to go.
In many ways this is the same problem facing rural America: abandonment by state and corporate investors, and left to rot, festering in economic decay, followed by drugs and crime, causing even more withdrawal of investment, and thus even more economic decay, and thus even more crime. Only in cities, it’s ghettos (isolated neighborhoods), rather than towns or villages. But it’s the same causal system.
These wells of despair cannot be solved by magic bullets like “let’s move West Indians in there” or “just cut government regulations and unlock the free market” or “broken windows policing will get it done.” Those are all bullshit. So much damage has been done by the initial shock, that there is no easy solve, and it requires concentrated and considerable investment to repair and get it back in shape. And then if not careful you can generate the opposite problem (the gentrification doomloop).
So these are issues that require serious, multifaceted, evidence-based recovery programs. Not slogans or fantastical promises.
And the key takeaway here is that these are not “whole cities.” Even Detroit is mostly quite lovely. And even overall homicide is at a record low there. Still a ways to go, but how it turned around is well studied. While the remaining high crime areas are oddly historically locked in specific geographical zones. Each one likely has its own historical story of how it got that way.
And most of America is not like that. Most American cities are not like that. Even most neighborhoods in even the worst cities are not like that.
Because lots of people are unemployed or underemployed and the gig economy sucks worse.
Those old industrial jobs, utterly flawed as they were, created consistent, regulable workplaces rather than service job hellscapes that are also dangerous. (Pizza delivery? Dangerous. Food service? Dangerous. It’s not just meatpacking and similar garbage industries that explains America’s intolerably high rate of job-related injuries and illnesses). These jobs tend to be full-time, at a consistent location, and can be urbanized, helping to deal with the urban decay problem. The golden age of state capitalism was based on these kinds of jobs, letting people have upward mobility. Moreover, those jobs often require little education. So for those Americans who can’t afford a degree, it’s an option. There’s a reason why the manufacturing industry engaging in the neo-liberal race to the bottom has been correlated with horrible outcomes for American workers.
And those manufacturing jobs being in low-wage countries also means that those countries’ workforces are exploited with things like child labor and thus subsidized (though we subsidize too) by their local countries’ corruption and vicious human rights standards. Establishment Dems don’t always care about this, but it’s actually a good thing too.
Now, notice that this isn’t their only job promotion program. They’re promoting small business, and trying to get college to be fairer. So you’re also poo-pooing a policy in isolation that’s part of a broader thing.
And not everyone is going to be a millionaire thanks to being Disney kid crypto scammers. Policy should be made on realistic outcomes.
I should add, now that Fred reminds me, that “factory work” doesn’t make either the top 10 or even the top 25 most dangerous professions in the U.S. The only honorable mention is “iron workers” in the T25 but “smelting” isn’t usually what is meant by “factory work” in this context. Otherwise, the Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries doesn’t even list factory work as a category, and logs “transportation and material moving occupations” as having “the most fatalities” by far (a whole order of magnitude more than “production occupations”).
Likewise, Fred’s right to point out that the Harris policy is broad: it includes small business growth and tip-wage industries (and even expanding access to government jobs), for example.
God, Richard, I can’t believe I didn’t even mention trucking. It’s almost certain that the kind of guy who would have had a manufacturing job from the 1950s to the 1970s is now often the kind of guy being fucked over sideways by the trucking industry, which overworks people, puts them in huge danger, and gets them away from their families. Obviously that industry just needs massive regulation and isn’t going to go away (though maybe better mass transit infrastructure and city design would help), but the point is that the type of people who were blue collar industrial workers before are not suddenly accountants now.
Actually, manufacturing jobs only started substantially disappearing in the 21st century (decline began in the 1980s but cratered after 2000). Most of it is offshoring. They did not go into trucking. More likely, they went to service industries (education, healthcare, food) and warehousing.
Warehousing, also a job that people drastically underestimate the danger of and is at double the national average in terms of injuries. Forklifts are heavy and can tilt and crush, palettes and racks can be knocked down, work rates are high enough that people sometimes get serious health issues and hours often are at night so people are often taking huge amounts of caffeine, falls from scissor lifts can be fucking lethal, etc. I have worked warehousing and have friends who have worked warehousing, and it’s astonishing how quickly you are using big machines that can easily crush and kill you.
Great analysis I totally agree. After 8 years all tRump can come up with is a concept of a health care plan.
Ultimately, there is only one criterion for this election. Trump has promised to eliminate our “need” to vote for a president, and to make himself a dictator immediately upon his swearing in. So, this election amounts to a referendum on democracy itself: shall we continue representative government, or be ruled by a succession of self-chosen autocrats? While it might be possible to maintain democratic institutions against him and his enthusiasts’ efforts, I cannot risk that. Any differences I might have with his opponents’ policies pale under the question of whether my vote will ever count again.
I fully concur.
That’s why I took care to note that there are many and ample reasons to positively act to stop Trump gaining the Presidency apart from their purported platforms.
And what is Harris, Richard? A liberal champion of Democracy? She’s residing over a genocide, has ZERO fucking delegates, was appointed by wealthy donors, cannot put a complete sentence together without a teleprompter, doesn’t support M4A, and locked up black kids for smoking weed, and when was ordered to release them, refused to and said she used them for the sole purposes of “slave labor”. You need to stick to Biblical studies cause you are as ignorant as Sean Hannity on political issues.
Your perspective is irrational and false and looks more like either raw emotivism, or rationalizing some ulterior motive.
So I don’t expect “facts” will have any effect on you. But just in case they do…
Harris has no real control over what Israel does. Only Congress actually controls that. So that is not an option in this election. Neither Trump nor Harris will improve things for Gaza, so that is a wash as far as any decision matrix goes.
Harris was not appointed by anyone but Biden. She was elected by American citizens—twice (once as actual VP, and again as the nomination to VP; a VP is by definition the person we elect to replace the President should they become unavailable).
Contrary to your racist insult, Harris actually speaks more eloquently impromptu, without a teleprompter. There is a vast library of video evidence proving this, including even spontaneous press interviews in hallways.
Harris literally voted for M4A (see sponsors list for Medicare for All). She has reasonablt explained that the only reason she does not have it in her platform now is that she doesn’t see it as achievable with the present Congress and thus is opting for achievable incremental progress toward affordable care instead. Like any rational person must do.
Harris wants to stop locking anyone up for weed. She did not have the option to selectively enforce the law before; as a state employee charged with enforcing the law, she had to. Now, soon, she will be empowered to do something. And she has said what she will do. It’s the opposite of what you claim.
And it wasn’t Harris who argued for maintaining low-wage prison labor (unsuccessfully); that was a subordinate prosecutor, and she did not approve their argument.
Rational choice thus depends on actual facts (not legends and falsehoods) and what actually will be different depending on whether you pull the switch or not. Trolley problems never have utopian outcomes. Only least worst outcomes.
Choose the least worst outcome. And that requires comparing actual obtainable differences in outcome. Not urban legends, lies, and non-differences.
Be rational.
Vote for the better option.
Because the utopian option isn’t on the ticket, and holding out for it while letting the wolves in, is simply irrational.
You can choose to be rational instead.
Matt obviously doesn’t understand that Hamas and Hezbollah use their fellow Muslims as human shields and so inevitably, civilians are caught in the crossfire. Matt also doesn’t know that the UN halved the alleged number of “genocide” victims as recently as several months ago, so he’s behind on the news. He also doesn’t understand that what Hamas did to Israel last October counts as genocide (it’s accurate to refer to it as “Israel’s 9/11”), but no, let’s keep repeating antisemitic talking points that Matt totally thinks are not coming from the Ayatollah……
sources: https://www.cfr.org/blog/un-halves-its-estimate-women-and-children-killed-gaza
https://theconversation.com/how-much-influence-does-iran-have-over-its-proxy-axis-of-resistance-hezbollah-hamas-and-the-houthis-221269
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Damascus_affair
This, by the way, is the kind of stuff that led to Europe’s holocaust: Islamist alliances with non-Muslim antisemites. The blood libel, which existed for centuries in both Europe and Islamic countries, was cited as justification for persecuting Jews and restricting their rights, expelling them from almost every European and Arab country. All that led to the Shoah. Jews still cannot return to Iraq or Yemen, yet Hamas-backed “protestors” are demanding that their universities “divest” from Israel!
(I know Matt probably already made up his mind, I am just posting the above for other readers)
What’s also disturbing is that some “left-leaning” Catholics repeat this same libel, today, despite several popes condemning it as baseless. Pope Gregory X, Benedict XIV (and XV), and Pius X would be shocked to see that it is still “in vogue” even in America.
Bill, your factchecks are fine, but do not substantially relate to anything. “They only genocided half as many people as we thought” does not seem to change any point that anyone is making here. And that’s saying something, because I’m on your side against Matt. But you really do need a better talking point.
“But they tried to genocide us” is also not a valid excuse for genocide. If both sides are evil, both sides are evil. There is a reason even one in five Israeli citizens opposed the Gaza war. That is interestingly about the average rate of non-compliers in Milgram experiments. Nearly a third of American Jews agree Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. And there are plenty of expert and professional analyses of genocide to consult on that.
Reality does not fall into neat black and white boxes. And Israel is not The Jews. It’s not even Israelies.
Those “professors”, have they received funding from Jordan, Qatar, or the Aytaollah? Most Iranians support Israel, as do Ukrainians. Israel contains Jews, Christians, Muslims (who also serve in the IDF and the Knesset), Samaritans (whose existence is never acknowledged by critics of Israel, either at Hamas-funded “protests” or in academia), Hare Krishnas, Buddhists, and atheists. Recently, the IDF saved a Yazidi woman who had been held hostage for over a decade. No Arab government had any part in that rescue and a big part in her story being buried under cries of “genocide” on the part of Israel.
Israel gets blamed for every bad thing that happens to Arabs, either in Gaza, NYC, or Midwest America. American Jews are told they must denounce Israel, but Arabs in Ohio or Dearborn, let alone NYC, aren’t expected to denounce the 1,400 years of Islamic antisemitism, including Hamas and Hezbollah. I’ve seen (supposed) Jews denounce Netanyahu, meanwhile Arabs in America openly cheer on Hamas. Israel, coincidentally, is about 20% Arab. Also, Israel withdrew from Gaza and got rid of its “settlements”, two things which led to the present war. Had Israel stayed in Gaza and obliterated Hamas, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. I still see on social media comparisons of Israel to Nazis, but no acknowledgement of the fact that it was the PLO who directly hired former SS officers to smuggle guns. No Israeli is going to come to America, hold someone at gunpoint, and tell them to “convert or die”. That’s not an Israeli thing. Samaritans aren’t forced to convert to Judaism and neither are Yazidis, Christians, nor Muslims.
Funny enough, no “Palestinians” in the Holy Land were complaining about being under Ottoman rule, the Mamluks, or Jordan. As I’ve pointed out multiple times on this blog, Jordan would most likely still have control of East Jerusalem and the Western Wall had implicit antisemitism not manifested itself during the Six-Day War. After Israel won, IDF soldiers found shelves upon shelves of vapid antisemitic literature in the schools run by Arabs. No Israeli ever wrote anything even remotely comparable to the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, yet Arabic translations of it are STILL CITED by Hamas cheerleaders.
Funny how the alleged genocide against the “Palestinians” has not extended to “Palestinian-Americans” or “Palestinian-Germans”, given that “Palestinians” bombed the Olympic games in Munich in the 70s with the explicit purpose of killing Israelis. If Israel is somehow committing genocide, it is the most restrained genocide in the history of warfare. Typically, one does not warn civilians in enemy territory a day in advance that a bombing raid is going to commence.
For the nth time, nobody chanting “Free Palestine” seems even slightly concerned about the fact that blaspheming Islam is punishable by death in both Gaza and the West Bank, nor are these “enlightened activists” concerned about Abbas’ fifteen years in power with no elections, or how Arabs who sell land to Israel are officially punished with death. So much for “human rights”.
I fail to see any relevance of your points here, Bill.
My original point stands: yoy are ranting about irrelevancies, in aid of dismissing fundamental realities.
That is not rational behavior. Your epistemology is broken. Fix it.
Looks like a ‘hold your nose and vote’ election to me. The Democrat platform is horrible and Trump is, as you say, saying random things that even prominent people in his own base think are lies (e.g., no tax on overtime). I definitely won’t be voting Harris-Walz. Just need to work out whether its worth turning up at all. Not an attractive pool of talent IMO.
What is “horrible” about the platform I just described?
And why are you figuratively killing ten people instead of saving nine? Or do you not rationally understand how Trolley Problems work?
Yeah, as a leftie far to Richard’s left, I think her platform is perfectly reasonable. She’s not going to implement socialism overnight. But trying to deal with the housing crisis? Drug price negotiation? A ton of this is the kind of thing Robert Reich would propose and is actually pretty progressive for the Dems.
Yes, I wish that the focus was less explicitly capitalistic (e.g. just assuming that entrepreneurship is actually an unvarnished good), but in isolation I don’t see much objectionable with anything (e.g. I have been a proponent of reparations that target autonomous black communities and for the time being under capitalism that’d mean entrepreneurial assistance in part, because it really is better to have a small business equitable capitalism than the late-stage hellhole we currently have), and in any case this lets her outflank Trump. And beating fascism is not a footnote.
Fred reminds me to mention: a lot of lefty goals can be snuck past aggrieved white people by Mark Twaining wealth transfer.
Example: national healthcare literally is “equal” (everyone gets the same access; the access distribution is “race blind”) but de facto benefits minorities more. Their resulting net gain in wealth is greater, e.g. white people tend more often to already afford pricey plans, so replacing them with free plans frees up cash but otherwise leaves them health-same, whereas handing free healthcare to the poor gives them something they never had (they thus benefit from improved health), and insofar as it frees up cash, dollar for dollar it means more (since the value of a dollar rises as overall access to cash declines, i.e. a dollar is worth more to a poor person than a rich one).
So one way to effect Reparations that white people might actually vote for is universal basic income. You can sell it to white people as “everyone gets the same thing” while in practical effect you repay black families for centuries of wealth suppression. Reparations thus doesn’t have to be sold as “some special thing only black people get, and why is that, I never had slaves, so why am I being punished, fuck them, this is unfair.” You can effect it with universal social justice and successfully boil the frog.
Not today though. Someday.
Dr. Carrier what are your thoughts on the take of Republicans who point out in response to Harris claims that once she is on office “Day One”, she is going to implement this policy and that policy to make things better.
They point out that hey you’ve had 3 1/2 years to do that. Why haven’t you done that yet? Why don’t you just do that now? Why make promises about what you will do once you are elected President when you could just do it now?
Harris isn’t president. She can’t implement policies.
If you mean Biden, Congress has blocked most of his policies. That’s not on him. That’s on them. And Biden has mostly been tasked with recovering the economy after the plague; that left little room for him to build on that.
But now that Harris will not be beholden to Biden, and can build on his foundation of restored stability, she will be free to take the country in her own policy direction, insofar as Congress allows.
Meanwhile, you should be less gullible and less easily manipulated by Republican propaganda. Harris has never said what you claim. What she actually said was that she would get started on implementing her policies on day one, not that she would complete them on day one. Harris has actually never said what she will do literally “on” day one, which is sensible: she has avoided making exactly the absurd promise you falsely accused her of.
I must have missed the immigration policy scoring, the ONE thing she was supposedly in charge of. As you said, “a President can only be evaluated based on actionable policies”
Vice President Harris’s role in the Biden administration’s border and immigration policies has been a point of focus for Republicans, who blame her for the surge of migrants into the U.S. This is another GOP lie. President Joe Biden did not assign her the title of “border czar,” but she played a significant role in addressing the global migration surge. Although her early efforts were criticized for being ineffective, she worked to attract investments in Central America, resulting in job creation and economic opportunities. This included securing over $5 billion in funds, which created 30,000 jobs with 60,000 more anticipated. She also pushed for regional refugee protection programs and engaged with Central American governments to tackle migration’s root causes. Despite her efforts, migration from countries like Haiti, Venezuela, and Cuba increased, leading to criticism that her focus on the Northern Triangle was too narrow. Her work in rallying investment and fostering diplomatic relations was seen as vital, though the results of such initiatives will take time to fully materialize.
This appears to be the “Kamala was Border Czar, why is there still a problem?” talking point. But in the US we do not have Czars, we have laws. The solution to the border problem was the bi-partisan immigration bill that was before Congress, that Trump ordered his lackeys in the House to axe so that he would have something left to blame on Biden, so here we are. Maybe if Congress flips, a bill can be passed come January.
And incredibly, somehow, without an immigration bill, the Biden administration has managed to significantly stem the flow of illegal immigration…6 months before the election.
As ncmncm points out, Roy, you have deployed what is called an equivocation fallacy (also a fallacy of moving the goal posts). You started talking about policies, then switched to talking about bills. Bills are just one instrument of policy.
If you actually care about evidence or the truth (I do not get the impression that you do), and you actually want to know what Biden policies have started reducing pressure on our southern borders, you should be able to do this yourself. But let me hold you hand and walk you through it…
Google “Biden border policy.”
Ignore all opinions and editorials. Just pick hits that describe the policy, without a bias toward concealing what that policy really is. For example, there is a fact-filled (and thus checkable) analysis at CBS Online; there is also an informative fact-filled article on it at the Cato Institute, by a Libertarian arguing for an Open Borders policy.
When I did this just now, none of the first page hits were Biden describing his policy actions. But we should always check that. So I tried different search strings until I found one. For example, my first guess was to just type “white house what is being done about the border” and the first hit I got was this June 4, 2024 Presidential declaration describing their policy actions.
Combine what you learn from these three sources, and can confirm with your own fact-checking of the claims in them, and you will have a sense of (a) what Biden’s policy really is (and not lies about it), and (b) why it is having the observed effect that it is.
If you are still harrumphing by then, you should find the best steel-man of an opposition argument and compare it: how many of its claims are already refuted by the checkable facts you already collected by the procedure above; how many checkable facts does it rely on; and do any of those fact-claims (that haven’t already been refuted or checked out) fail to check out as true?
-:-
Rational thought is critical thought. And critical thought only exists when you sincerely try to disprove your beliefs. So rather than assert armchair opinions like you just did, first try to prove yourself wrong. Ask yourself: does Biden actually have any policies he has enacted, and have they actually had any effect, and is there enough data to confirm that you were wrong to think what you did before becoming informed of these facts?
You also need to have some basic background understanding of reality. For example:
A correct grasp of how reality works is essential to understanding the world and having correct opinions about it.
The word you have suddenly forgotten, from your original remark, is “policy”.
Roy, that’s a Republican myth. Harris was never assigned any such role. And she has no relevant powers. That’s Mayorkas.
When Harris was assigned the task of diplomacy with Central American states to try and stem their refugee exodus (a hyper-specific and entirely diplomatic goal, suitable for a Vice President among enumerated constitutional powers), Republicans invented the label “border czar” to try and discredit her work by mis-framing what it even was (and entirely ignoring what she actually did—which was successfully stem refugee flow from those states and likely set up further reductions by increasing stability in that region; we have since met with new refugee crises that she wasn’t tasked with, e.g. Haiti and Venezuela, which made up the difference).
You should endeavor to be less easily manipulated by Republican propaganda.
For a better handle on what’s really happening, start here and here.
As for policy, the Biden administration had a bill, and Harris backed it then and still does. It’s more sensible than anything Trump has to offer (as we’ll see in Part 2). A bill is a policy. In fact it is the most concrete form of policy that can exist. And since it’s already a thing, they don’t need it in their platform. That they intend to get that bill passed is already common knowledge; and that Trump killed it so he could run on the issue is common knowledge; and that Trump will no longer care or be able to do that once Harris is in office is also common knowledge. You, as (presumably) a voter, are responsible for knowing all this.
Otherwise, in terms of border policy outside that bill, Biden has done as much as he could without Congress passing that bill. There is no sign from Harris that she will undo any of that, and she has signaled she intends to further it (e.g. she has repeatedly called for increased border control and customs staffing, something the bill Trump killed would have provided).
Even given that you’re repeating Republican propaganda and thus deceptively ignoring that she succeeded at her assigned tasks, and also deciding arbitrarily to not score her good policies here because she hasn’t had the chance to implement them, and also conflating execution with intent, so this is off topic, she was the Vice President. There’s a vast gulf between what you can do with a single remit in the executive branch and what you can do when you are President and effectively are key in dictating your entire party’s policy slate. So this argument is completely fucked top to bottom.
Also, immigration is a joker that Republicans focus on because they’re racist and Democrats acquiesce to them too readily about not least because they all too often don’t mind shutting the door in the face of the poor.
Also also, source country assistance of the kind she was doing takes time to work. Yet another failure of conservatives; applying unrealistic timetables for success to their opponents and unlimited timetables to themselves.
I concur with Fred.
Adults know problems are hard and take time and require revenue.
Republican rhetoric is not for adults.
Dr. Carrier one question that opponents of Harris bring up, which seems to be a fair question, but seems to ignored is this. Harris keeps talking about what she plans to do when she gets elected, even what she will do on her first day.
Opponents respond by pointing out the fact that she is already in office and has been for almost four years.
If she was going to do these things and is capable of doing these things, why haven’t they already been done?
Why doesn’t she start right now?
The only valid response that I can think of is that the sitting President (Joe Biden) doesn’t share the same ideas or have the same interest in pushing her agenda. And that once she is actually the POTUS, she will have the power to actually drive her agenda. But she has never said anything that I’m aware that suggests that the two are not (at least in large part) in alignment with respect to their policies and ideologies.
So once again I think it is at least a fair question. I’m curious what your response would be to that criticism.
That’s not quite right. See my related comment.
It is true that Harris wants to do things Biden didn’t, and is glad of the chance to get out from under his wing to do her own thing.
But that is not entirely at issue. Biden was tasked with a plague and recovering our crushed economy during and after it. That left less room to be ambitious. So there are things Harris will do that Biden likely would have done, if he had a stabilized economy to work with and didn’t have to absorb all his efforts toward stabilizing it and dealing with the plague altogether. Harris will not be in that position. She can build on the stability of Biden’s recovery.
So their differences aren’t simply a function of their differences, but of the different economic circumstances the country is in. (And indeed, I would not be surprised if a lot of the Harris Policy Book is based on the one they were building for Biden.)
As always, despite conservative bloviating, the only people who bother engaging in any costing are liberals and leftists.
It’s particularly telling how Trump is able to constantly defend tax cuts and tariffs just by the bald assertion that they’ll pay for themselves. It’s a budget based on magic fiat.
The string pullers of the corporate media, their advertising sponsors, and the owners to the means of industrialized production benefit from having the GOP maintain power. Built off the backs of GOP policy since the days of Nixon, through Reagan and the two Bush presidencies.
Trump is nothing more than a puppet for multinational business interests, as is the case of all dictators, so he behaves like a media arsonist. He calls, the corporate media responds.
So the corporate media has always been in the bag for a Trump admin, and every GOP administration that Trump was built off of.
It’s anticipated that climate change is estimated to produce $38 trillion/yr in global economic damage by 2049. This damage is already starting to be felt by worsening climate crises in the US and the resulting economic fallout.
The conservative agenda is rooted in keeping the masses ignorant of their plans while using corporate media to disinform the public about policy and issues.
Their power has two arms depending on the make-up of the government:
•1)Fast-track industry-backed conservative legislation when they have a majority.
•2)Strategically stalling important governmental responses when they have a minority.
Project 2025 looks to restructure the government in favor of the GOP’s top donors such that they maintain an indefinite “wall” of economic and social separation between themselves and the American people. This separation is fundamentally rooted in religious bigotry, racism, and classism.
However, unlike the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate For Leadership under Reagan, this current plan is being stressed because the conservatives can no longer hide behind the realities of climate change.
Basically, the Republicans look to continue to weaken individual freedoms by weakening governmental protections through restructuring of the government to leverage corporate rights against the rights of individuals. This will continue to be done using conservative interpretations of legislation and the Constitution.
The corporate media’s role in this transitional dictatorial take-over has been strategically minimized in the wake of January 6th 2021. Let me be clear, the corporate media is to blame for keeping the public in the dark about the fallout of conservative policy, leaving the individual to believe that “God” is responsible for the individual’s problems, instead of society’s rot from conservative policies.
Currently the corporate media has the public focused on these cycles of presidential elections every 4 years, and they have managed to massively disinform the public as to the abilities of what the President is legally capable of accomplishing.
More recently, the corporate media appears to leverage those limitations against pre-seeded conspiracies and half-truths to undermine any Democratically elected President by omitting facts about Congress.
There will be a corporate media circus of confusion following the election, the likes of which we have never seen, as they look to legitimize the installation of Trump, in a similar fashion to Bush v Gore.
As far as Project 2025 is concerned, I suspect that the corporate media is going to play into conservative hands and omit key facts about the 2024 congressional election results to downplay the appearance that the Democrats truly won control over the House and the Senate. They will always keep the public distracted with the latest insane thing Donald Trump or JD Vance has said, while continuing to pigeonhole Vice President Harris with issues that she will not be able to fully address as President by 2026 or even 2028.
As for their post-January 20th, 2025 plans, the 922 page document lays out their overall goal at the state level. They’re going to misappropriate federal funds at the state level to weaken education and promote homeschools and private Christian school “militias.”
Or, the corporate media is still going to cover Donald Trump indefinitely, even after he loses in 2024, while a Republican controlled Congress does everything it can to keep the country and President Harris handcuffed when it comes to fighting our enemies or infrastructurally preparing the country for the economic damage from climate change. They will make all of us shoulder the burden of climate change unequally.
Project 2025 is a threat to National Security because it’s based on keeping the government and the American people reliant on superstition and ignorance of the natural world to fight climate change instead of using science, reason, and logic.
Just to be precise: I agree he is a useful idiot; but he is most definitely more than that, because he is exceptionally dangerous and hard to control. The powers that want to use him have already lost control of this monster; which means it’s even worse than if he were simply their dutiful agent. Unless we factor in the unexpected grace of his capriciousness and incompetence, whereby a smoother operator (like, say, his VP, Vance) could do more damage by actually being consistently effective.
In any event, what you are saying has two well-research books backing it:
Brian Tyler Cohen, Shameless: Republicans’ Deliberate Dysfunction and the Battle to Preserve Democracy
Ari Berman, Minority Rule: The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People—and the Fight to Resist It
You hit on a good point, and I conceptualize it like this:
Trump is akin to “The Wizard of Oz”
The multinational business interest string pullers are akin to “man behind the curtain”
The well-intentioned influencers, the likes of Brian Tyler Cohen, Ari Berman, Thom Hartmann are the Munchikins.
Cable News is the wicked witch, right wing media are the flying monkeys.
We’re not in Kansas anymore.
Bob: The problem with that analysis is the same as any analogy for fascism that doesn’t acknowledge that fascists sometimes win. The better analogy is a rabid attack dog. It will bite its owner. Trump, as a fascist, is primarily dangerous to marginalized people, but the splash damage he and people like him inflict will hit privileged people. And that populist rhetoric isn’t wholly BS. Fascists get people angry at traditional elites motivated in destructive ways. And a lot of people are angry enough to burn everything down. So it is actually not useful to think of Trump only as a puppet, precisely because he (or more likely, a more competent fascist who follows in his wake – even Hitler and Mussolini were not the only people in their movements) has his own agenda.
In particular, Trump is such a brazen attention-seeking narcissist that he will absolutely implement right-wing populist nonsense if he calculates that it’ll get him adoration.
What’s important is to remember that the Republicans let loose this monster and not let them off the hook with “Let’s just move on” when Trump is dead (since they have yet to find someone who can replace him).
Regarding the references to the genocide in Gaza as a reason to not vote for Harris that is expressed again and again by some American leftists including in the comments here:
I am an Egyptian, lived there until I was 26 (moved to Europe in 2021), my late uncle fought in the Six-Day war (or the 1967 نكسة/catastrophe as we call it in Egypt), my best friend’s father fought in the Six-Day war and the Yom Kippur war (or the 6th of October war as we call it in Egypt), my father vividly remembers the alerts issued by the Egyptian government to hide/shelter from Israeli air force raids in his childhood and teenage years in the 1960s and early 1970s and one of my closest friends is half Egyptian half Gazan and 70% of his father’s family were killed in the current Gaza war including 27 people in one air strike. Yet if I had a vote in the current US elections, I’d have definitely, and without even thinking twice, voted for Harris-Walz and for a straight Democrat ticket.
Trump is guaranteed to be worse towards the situation in Gaza and the difference between the Democrats and the Republicans in that regard was very evident when Netanyahu addressed the US congress.
I am utterly confused by people who clearly only have two choices, one is 80% good and the other is 100% evil and yet deciding to not participate or to vote for a candidate who has no chances, thus only ensuring that they get the 100% evil option closer to the White House.
Amen.
Let me try to steelman this part of the left a little here.
Part of this is “purity” politics, but it’s not just about the bad feeling and lack of excitement of voting for a candidate that you feel is worsening genocide or at least being complicit in it. It’s also a signal. “I take this problem so seriously that I will deny you my vote”. Sometimes, you do need to have an issue that is something you are willing to walk away from the table for.
That’d be much more reasonable if Trump wasn’t totally odious and actually much worse than every previous Republican in being likely to back Netanyahu and worsen the crisis while also generally engaging in extreme anti-Muslim bias (except for Saudi Arabia and the other oil plutocracies – there he’s a garden variety conservative hypocrite), and so voting against him wasn’t harm mitigation even on the Israel issue (since I think any rational person would have to agree that the Dems are much more likely to be able to try to negotiate a ceasefire and won’t just sign off on literally anything the Israeli military does).
Moreover, for many, this is a reason to vote Green. And ordinarily, as I live in California and so am in a safe state (I would never vote Green in even a mildly purple state), I would join in, as I did from 2004 to 2016.
But, as with all post-Trump elections, this is about resisting fascism, which no leftist should be ignoring. We can kill fascism and then get to work on Israel. We definitely can’t help while we’re drowning in the same sickness they’re in.
Also, this year, Stein is a nightmare . If she is the candidate again in 2028 I am changing my affiliation. Have you seen the Mehdi Hasan interview with her? She couldn’t call Putin a war criminal. Fucking shameful. I don’t know if she’s literally on the Kremlin’s take or if her grift just needs to not piss off tankies, but it means she has no integrity and no credibility.
So, this year, there is no alternative party to try to build . And it’s a queer commitment against genocide to vote in protest of one by ignoring another.
I have to be a bit snarky here about mechanism, but:
As a side-effect of Duverger’s Law, third parties always devolve into crankery or kookery, because legitimate actors gravitate to where they can impact policy, the actually electable parties, leaving a detritus to staff the third column (the gunk at the bottom of the barrel).
If any third party were actually a serious party, they wouldn’t be fielding presidential candidates until they have members sitting in a substantial number of city councils and state legislatures. The fact that they almost never run serious campaigns at those grounding levels signals that their campaigns (and thus candidates) are just commercials for ideologies and not any real attempt to actually govern anything.
So I don’t even think symbolic votes for them do any good. They just encourage this behavior (and keep a bunch of leeches employed on ragecash) rather than rewarding real political action. Third parties should be punished by voters until they start running real campaigns at the ground level.
But that’s just my salty opinion. 🙂
Fair point! The Greens got away with being reasonable enough for so long (even Stein circa 2016, though deeply flawed, largely survived even an Oliver piece looking pretty reasonable, with really the only substantive blow scored being “It’s pretty perverse for a doctor to be this soft on anti-vaxx nonsense”, but it’s just a reality in left-wing spaces that you need to be careful on that score and be ready to focus in on Big Pharma sucking but that not meaning every alternative is ideal or that we shouldn’t follow the science and so I did not score that as decisive though I did recognize that in some hypothetical universe where she won I’d have to be pretty loud in fighting for science-based medicine outcomes to make sure she didn’t virtue signal to weirdo crunchies), but frankly, they may actually be an outlier in terms of how long it took for something like post-COVID irrationality to hit. To be fair, I haven’t checked on other Green candidates (few as they are) because I’m voting straight blue at least until Trumpism is dead and frankly likely for some time after.
It’s objectively pretty unlikely that a more rational left-wing party will emerge in my lifetime, though I could maybe imagine some Sanders supporters trying to find a way of making one while still caucusing with the Dems. But the Dems of 2024 aren’t even the Dems of 2016, and there may just not be enough of a difference between Justice Dems and a hypothetical third party.
And it’s a sign of just how non-viable third parties are in the U.S., barring things like ranked choice voting, that our one remotely sensible leftie party was what would in any other country be a one-issue party.
Note that although ranked choice voting might negate Duverger’s Law and thus make third party access possible again (this hasn’t been tried on a large enough scale yet to see), the only proven way to that outcome is parliamentary legislatures, i.e. parliaments that seat according to proportion of vote (so that, say, if 5% vote Green, 5% of congressional seats go to Green reps).
I’d like to try lottery legislating. Set mininum reqs (like, say, the already existing constitutional reqs plus any accredited college degree and a certification of compos mentis, which then entails volunteering to be in the lottery), then award seats in the House at random. Then we’d get proportional representation by almost every metric (roughly half women, roughly proportional by race, disability, ideology, etc., with some skew to the sample reqs of course, but that can be rectified by increased access to the reqs).
The Senate can then stay the same as now (complete with unjust proportionment). The difference in outcome between the two bodies would become so increasingly stark that eventually the idea of getting rid of the Senate would enter the Overton Window.
I think we are mostly in agreement.
I was not trying to strawman their position, but tbh I have heard them enough to understand that steelmanning them doesn’t make much of a difference in this situation.
I think we differ in one aspect here: I get the “Denying them your vote” line of reasoning, but I don’t think it will do anything in this particular case even if Harris was running against a much more moderate Republican. The pragmatic problem here is that if Harris went full on what they (and I) consider the correct position on this issue, she would probably lose a lot of votes from centrist Democrats and Democrat leaning independents which will make her loss much more likely. I’d still prefer to have a center left president who I can fight and pressure on a critical moral issue like this on a common background than even a moderate conservative who probably doesn’t even share this common background.
I know this comes out as very pragmatic, but tbh I don’t think the US political system gives any other morally better course of action that will achieve anything.
As for Stein, I didn’t watch her interview with Mehdi Hassan, but I am aware of her suspicious stances on Russia and Putin. I totally agree that anyone not taking the Russian aggression on Ukraine as serious as the Israeli aggression on Gaza is a hypocrite.
I think that’s a totally accurate observation of the realities of our fucked-up political system.
It’s the electoral college, the Senate, gerrymandering, and the ghost of Jim Crow voter suppression (which in turn incentivizes propaganda machines like FOX News that exacerbate irrational bigotries and fears and literally destroys the cognitive capabilities of the people) that all leaves us in this mess.
Although the UK and Canada, who don’t have these anchors around their neck, have met with some pretty stupid and reactionary mass decisions as well. So it’s not just the system. It’s also just a lot of the people. The reason Trump and Brexit are a thing is that near half the populations of America and England are just, quite simply, irrational and immoral. And there’s no real fix for that. Except time, I guess.
Oh, 100% Islam! You were being wholly fair, I just wanted to give insight from someone on the anarchist Chomskyan left who has this debate every four years. Even back during the Obama campaign, Tim Wise and I both pointed out to Paul Street that using the Zinn “not a dime’s worth of difference, Obama is just a corporate stooge” rhetoric during the ascension of the first black President might make the left look like joyless wet blankets at best and cynical nihilists at worst. The differences between Obama and McCain were already more substantial than things had been for decades. By the time it got to Trump, I was aghast at people like Jimmy Dore (who turned out to be a real, real champ by the way, big leftie appearing on Tucker fucking Carlson’s Nazi Power Hour ) arguing that we needed to let Trump win instead of Hillary because Trump might make people wake up and force the end. Which is such an atomically dead-brained take (which I may have been too soft on) that so dramatically ignores the dangers of fascism.
The people who take this seriously (IMHO) have said, for decades, “Vote blue in contested states, vote for your best alternate party in safe states, and then focus on much more productive issues 364 days out of the year”. Which really is such a key point to a lot of these lefties: If the choice between the two is so small, why are you flipping out over it ? It betrays a subconscious fetishization of the voting process that as a long-time leftie I find so bizarre.
Recently, again, I think the calculus has changed so dramatically that, in particular, marginalized people need to see the numbers against fascism be so loud, so clear, so unequivocal, and right now that is accomplished by a Democratic vote that pushes the party left as it and is as loud as possible as to why the vote happens.
However, these voices are pretty marginal. Kamala is legitimately energizing and exciting people, even people like me. And I don’t think that’s actually going to lead to too much burnout, both because she isn’t actually overpromising and also because it’s not like Obama where we are voting only out of excitement (though 2008 was dreadful) but also to beat evil.
That having been said, your pragmatic argument, though reasonable, I think is a bit reductive, on multiple levels.
Having both a maximalist and a minimalist vision is actually critical. Lots of lefties get the maximalist part right but the minimalist one wrong, especially those getting mad at “reformists” rather than recognizing that reforms are part of a trajectory toward revolutionary outcomes.
Having people like me on the left wing can, with proper tactics, have many effects.
1) Maximalist visions get people excited. We don’t need to peel some feckless undecided voters. If we just got 10% of Americans who don’t vote to vote Dem every year, the left would start winning by a landslide. Your analysis is closer to true when turnout is higher. (This is yet another weird thing about America as a democracy, our super-low turnout and poor concordance between public desires and policy). And, yes, you can even excite people to your rightward flank, because sometimes some of them hear at least something interesting . Lots of Republicans liked Bernie because he was saying something new and sincere. Yes, people will call you a socialist, but they do that no matter what you do.
2) We maximalists are scary. This actually comes up in the atheist movement too: Firebrands and diplomats are actually a team. As long as the maximalists aren’t being unrealistic, cruel or ideological, them saying “Hey, you want to fight us? We want way more” can get the right to give in. It’s like any negotiation: You need a high point to be bargained down from. Starting low, even when that low point is pragmatic, is unwise because it means that’s your ceiling. And sometimes, when you start high, you get it. In particular, the Republicans right now are potentially facing internal issues and competence problems thanks to the Trumpist wing that they may not actually be able to stop a stronger agenda.
Now, this does depend on the firebrands being ready to back up the diplomats when they get a concession and not sell them down the river.
Steinberg in Ethnic Myth makes a really strong argument that the race riots in the 60s did as much as King and even X did to shock white America into giving concessions.
In particular, I actually think liberals underestimate how much conservatives like someone telling it like they see it. Yes, they’ll yell at you, but they yell at everyone. But having someone say “No, actually, I’m not going to compromise or be nice on this, this matters to me” is actually really important because, to be fair to them, how the hell else are they going to know how important this is to you but to fight for it?
3) Your model is what we called the “political capital” model back in high school debate, but that’s not the only way politics work. There’s also “winners win”, or momentum-based strategies. So sometimes a maximalist vision can so disrupt your opponent and change the meta that you can keep on getting more past them. This isn’t something you can do indefinitely, all disruptive strategies reach a saturation point, but it is a reason to be ready to go on the offensive.
Again, look at the success of the right. They don’t compromise and they seem to be able to do just fine. They focus on getting their base out and just winning, and satisfying that base so they keep voting. And our base is larger.
I do agree with nearly everything you said Fred.
Outside of the current urgent election, I do agree that a more ambitious and more leftist left wing is very useful. I am just not totally sure why the Democrats always fail to energize people enough to vote and thus enable more ambitious leftist programs despite having what seems to be a 60% majority or so in the general American public.
It’s a rock-and-hard-place of two competing problems:
Old Democrats are centrists and terrified of lefty ideas and thus won’t vote for a non-machine, non-centrist candidate. But they reliably vote (close to 70%).
Young Democrats despise centrists and are frustrated by the above situation and thus “check out” on the “youngthink” that their vote doesn’t matter. So they don’t reliably vote (it was once close to 30% but has risen this century to various points below 50%).
If you are a political party, you can get elected without the nonvoters (because they don’t vote anyway), but you cannot get elected without the reliable voters. So candidates have to appeal to centrists (Hilary Clinton and Joe Biden are golden examples of this).
Any effort to try and get more Youth Vote in will alienate too much Old Vote, with the result of a net loss in votes. So it generally is not of use to even try.
That’s the overall thinking. I see some changing ideas about this that may be having an effect. IMO, it is possible to make the pragmatic appeal to the Youth Vote (i.e. to simply acknowledge all this and explain the value of incremental progress) and test the Old Vote for what concessions they won’t defect over and thus give the Youth Vote something at least, something therefore to vote for (i.e. to “energize” them).
But that is hard. Whereas just defaulting to centrism for the reliable Old Vote is easy. Or at least was. One of the reasons I think elite thought on this is changing is that the easy way isn’t working so well anymore. And that may be because the traditional Old Vote is dying off, and being replaced by more radical voters, but not fast enough to make a switch in strategy easy, leaving party strategists in a confusing and unclear position as to what to do.
-:-
I think our discussion earlier here about “debate strategy” and “the playbook” touches on this: the “old playbook” worked for a while because of the above (mollify the Old Vote, so don’t pander too much to the Young Vote, which requires strict control of messaging and not “speaking your mind”), but is now not working, but they aren’t quite realizing yet that the playbook sucks and needs to be ditched. In some ways this is Trump’s doing. He completely smashed the playbook and reaped huge rewards. The democrats need to figure out how to do that, too, only without the dishonesty and misplaced-hate-and-fear mongering.
And even then, the most they can hope for is incremental change, not big-vision change. At least yet. The demographics might allow the latter in a generation or two. It’s hard to say, since it depends on where the future electorate diverts (conservative or liberal).
Islam: Have an hour? 😀
It’s obviously really complicated, and I am sure I would miss massively relevant details. I think the core problem is to realize how much the post-Watergate culture turned America’s libertarian, individualist values into something deeply dysfunctional.
For all the potential problems of a more communitarian, collectivist culture and worldview, when they have a crisis of institutions, they have a built-in reason to get involved and fix it.
But after Americans lost trust in institutions, they overcorrected. They went from frankly pretty embarrassingly childish trust in the news, government, corporations, etc. to an opposite extreme. And, because people are not actually skeptics by default, when that happens, they fall into other authorities. New faith movements and cults. Fundamentalist churches. Sports teams. Sigma male grifters.
So lots of Americans absolutely see huge institutional problems, but they want to disconnect, “go off grid”, just be with their family.
I’ve talked to people in temp jobs who were absolutely ready for outright socialism, and definitely for labor unions and all sorts of stuff. They just hadn’t heard anyone talking to people like them about it. (This is a failure of the left and something we need to be making organized efforts to do: meet people where they are).
It’s why you see polls that show black people reporting higher levels of optimism, both on race issues and not, than whites. When shit is already bad, there’s nowhere to go but up!
So why can’t the Dems fix that?
Well, it’s a pretty vicious problem. To gain the trust back, you need their votes to put into place the policies to gain their trust back.
Dems, who have corporate backing, often can’t make a suitably ambitious slate.
And even if they do, and find things that would actually make change that is perceivable by people in their shitty jobs and fucked neighborhoods, the Republicans ruin it. And even when it’s true that there was traffic, it still breaks the reforming trust in Dad when he misses the dance recital.
Incidentally, as critical as I am of conservatives and especially reactionaries, this all ties in to them too, and in places the left can be a little reductive.
For example: The “economic anxiety” of Trump supporters is real, and remains real even as a lot of them are affluent . Yes, it’s racially coded, but they do fundamentally see an economy where they are likely to be doing worse at least in relative terms . There are actually lots of people who will fume about immigration one day and support a minimum wage increase another.
Tim Wise had an excellent podcast back after “What’s Wrong with Kansas” where he reframed it as “What’s Wrong with White People”. And what he pointed out is that anyone in a non-class privileged position who is being asked by the left to embrace a class focus is being asked to simultaneously abandon the possibility (however remote) of upward mobility and to embrace identifying with a loser identity, an identity of weakness. And in America, that’s a no go for tons of people. Hence the Dems struggling with white males in specific.
It’s not even really that irrational. A white man who could see past his bias could say, “I know that the economic system is unfair, but that’s not getting fixed. But I can make sure I still have my cushy management job and a woman doesn’t get it, and that is better for me in the short run, and that’s all I’ve got”.
So that explains why you can see 60%+ support for a huge raft of liberal policies on average and not see that transmute to excitement. The lack of trust and the available options to disengage from healthy politics are just too strong. It’s not insoluble, but it’s a tough nut.
And what Fred said about the electoral conundrum the DNC is in is also on point. Race is a major issue in the U.S. in a way I don’t think other countries really comprehend.
I think Richard put the calculus of the Dems succinctly. And it even makes sense from that perspective why we would all be spending time over an objectively small number of undecided and single-issue voters: they at least vote.
The issue with the Dems’ calculus there is at least twofold, and both come from establishment biases.
The first is that, even if the Dems themselves need to be appealing to the moderates, they should be in league with the left and encouraging the left to get out the vote. Even someone who erroneously thinks I am the moral equivalent of a Nazi should still be pragmatically doing what the Republicans did pre-Trump: Happily use the “crazy woman in the attic” on your side to get the vote going.
Now, of course, if one again thinks of the left as precisely analogous to the far right (far beyond any remotely valid horseshoe theory), then the Dems’ reticence here is almost commendable. Because there is a risk with “extremists” (though frankly we’re talking here about pretty milquetoast progressives – you’re not getting the average tankie to vote Dem ever, not least because lefties actually need more than cryptic allusions to their positions unlike the right) that eventually they take over the party. But not only is that a matter of not getting a Trump in your party, some jackass who doesn’t understand what a euphemism is, which I think the Dems can swing, but in any case that means the Dems are putting the risk of their party later becoming a much more radical party over winning fucking elections .
So the Dems should be actively, if maybe quietly, courting progressive think tanks, voices, etc. and getting them on board. It wouldn’t be hard: Even just some funding would do it.
Again, this is not only smart electorally, it’s smart from a negotiating position. You know exactly where to cite a very well-reasoned and backed-up report that is far outside the Congressional Overton window and you can put that draft language into any bill you want to kill.
Which in turn takes us back to the Democrats’ undue obsession with procedure as fetish rather than as mechanism that one needs to adjust or abandon when it doesn’t work for the goal.
And all of this has to do with misunderstanding the left, which means Democratic establishment people are not actually talking to their potential future voters. Which is terrifying.
The second problem is that the Dems have been therefore outflanked even on their actual voters.
The voter suppression that will hit potential voters and add that last bit of annoyance in the way also hits existing voters .
So the Dems not bothering to court beyond their left wing and protect beyond their left wing also has hit within their left wing.
And just in general, the traditional DNC machine logic is to pursue existing votes rather than create them.
In other words, they go looking for what voters want and try to build a package that appeals to them, combating only the reticence to believe them.
But what they should be doing is change voters’ minds with persuasion, argument, evidence—in other words, decide on an actually best package and actually sell it.
The GOP does the latter only with lies instead of the truth, e.g. the whole immigrant panic angle is designed to create rather than merely get voters, by persuading fence-sitters that they are in danger and must act to stop the immigrant hordes from raping their pets and stealing their homes. The GOP gains voters by cultivating panic and resentment with false stories and claims.
But you could do that with the truth instead, by simply explaining why a policy (like: universal health care) is better, and with evidence (like: every other nation’s healthcare). They then have to combat the GOP lies about that (like: the false claim that Canadian healthcare has unusually long waitlists for care; they don’t, but worse, our capitalist-driven wait-lists are longer). That requires actually arguing things, actually marketing evidence and ideas, actually fighting for an outcome with reason and honesty and persistence.
And the DNC is the only party really positioned to try and succeed at that. I don’t think they’ve realized that yet. I think they are stuck in the old idea of getting rather than creating, which compels them to shelve or sideline actual bold policies (the real left), and chase the center, and just hope the Overton Window is leaning their way this election cycle (rather than moving it themselves).
Fred and Dr. Carrier:
I have benefited a lot from your comments regarding the DNC voters and the race issue (I totally agree that the race situation in the US is really hard to understand for non American people like me).
As for the point that it’s a people problem as well, I totally agree. People who voted for Brexit here were either xenophobic (immoral) or thought it will save the UK a lot of money that could then be spent on the NHS and other services (ignorant and irrational). We don’t even have to go back to Brexit, a few months ago 4 million people (~14% of voters) voted for Reform UK, the alt right fascists whose ideology caused the riots that happened two months ago in the UK where their thugs were physically attacking literally anyone who is not white. We also had 6.8 million people vote for the Conservatives again after 14 years of them crashing the country to the ground. Sigh.
My general perception of the UK is that, as much as there are obvious distinctions, they are far more similar to the US than they would like to admit. The dilemma of Labor post-Blair is roughly comparable to the Dems, just with the Overton window in general somewhat to the left (though including a farther right wing thanks to being a parliamentary system) and the history of Labor including a recent-enough actual status as a labor party that there is less trust lost to restore (and, by my read, lacking something like a Watergate as a single moment that people at least credit in their minds with a change in perception of institutions).
Tbh, I am still learning about the political system in the UK and the US.
The main difference I see in the UK until now is that the system is really a pseudo two party system, not a real one like the US. The Liberal Democrats for example won 71 seats in this year’s elections with 12.2% of the vote. No third party in the US can achieve something similar in my opinion.
A tabe of results like this is nearly impossible in the US as far as I understand:
https://imgur.com/a/LoKrE3u
The Reform UK results are highlighted in this screenshot because I took it just after the results came out to share it in a discussion on the far right major election gains back in July. It’s not intended to make a point related to the Liberal Democrats (although it shows that that the Conservative party can lose about a third of its vote to a competing party which I also think can’t happen easily in the US)
Hassan: Yep! And this actually ties in with a fun bit of political science.
See, there’s a bit of naive political theory that winner-take-all systems like America should better represent the population. Because, the logic went, in a parliamentary system, you can have a situation where the median legislator is slightly to the left or right of the median voter, whereas in winner-take-all (or presidential) systems, people are voting directly rather than for a party slate.
But, in practice, due to, well, all the things that every America experiences every election cycle, that’s false. Parliamentary systems actually better represent the median voter.
Now, parliamentary systems do have the weird outcome that wing parties can have huge effects. The religious parties in Israel are a great example: They are vanishingly small, but they vote super consistently, they have really consistent demands, and Labor and Likud never get a strict majority. So each of them always have to either try to find some other coalition members to ally with or… parley with the religious parties. And they effectively always do that. So you can have a situation where you can have an entire population generally leaning one partisan direction but policy swinging back violently because one wingnut party manages to succeed more effectively and can kick and scream unless they are coddled.
Though even this has some positive effects. It’s part of why parliamentary systems have better concordance: if you’re a wingnut, you actually have your view represented in a politically relevant way, so you’re not just shaving off the outliers.
I remembered Dr. Carrier’s sentence in this thread while pulling an all nighter to follow the US presidential election results while they came out:
It’s a real shame that more than 70 million Americans voted for this deplorable human being for the third time.
I appreciate the sympathy. Americans are terrible. This wasn’t news. But I honestly thought we were getting better. Alas, not enough. The lunatics now run the asylum.
“Half Egyptian, Half Gazan”
So he’s either half-Egyptian, half-Greek or he’s 100% Egyptian. The ancient Philistines were not semites and the Egyptians often hired them to fight the Israelites, which explains Egypt’s millennia long hostility to Israel. What a lot of people don’t know, or don’t want others to know, is that Philistine (Greek) settlements existed in what is now modern day Jordan and the “West Bank” confirming long suspicions that no “Palestinian” is of whole semitic background and possibly have none at all. The Ottomans did their fair share of intermarriage among the Muslim population before the British kicked them out (somehow, nobody was chanting “Free Palestine” during the centuries of Turkish rule!)
Nobody sees the problem with having a reminder of the Abbasid Caliphate (where the Jews were forced to live as second-class citizens) in the “Palestinian” flag, yet are surprised when Jews around the world stand by the IDF and Netanyahu. Flawed he may be, but Netanyahu isn’t trying to establish a Jewish theocracy in Iraq or Malaysia, unlike the enemies of Israel, who want the entire world under a Caliph or Ayatollah. Judaism has no history of forced conversions, even in the Biblical texts, which sometimes exaggerated Israel’s victories (Ai).
The Decapolis, which extended into what is now Jordan and parts of southern Syria, was inhabited by ethnic Greek settlers who spoke Greek and ate pork. Jesus’ casting the demons into the swine is a clear reference to non-Jews, as many have noted.
Also, regarding the comments below by other users, Stein is a self-hating Jew if one ever existed. She openly praised a kuffr for igniting himself in front of innocent people who could have died as a result of his decision to die as a martyr for Arab Nationalists and Jihadists. Of course, Islamic teaching states that he is in hell for being a non-Muslim (educated Muslims know that Muhammad tried unsuccessfully to have Allah grand jannah to his parents, though his uncle was saved since he hid Muhammad). I saw her speak about six years ago and she is a narcissist. I also saw Obama and Bill Clinton a few years before that, and both were far more intelligent and capable of grasping reality than she is.
I also took the time to check out an online “gift shop” run by a well-known “Palestinian” Christian leader. It consisted of, frankly, the crappiest art I have seen in my life. It literally looked like a five year old saw a garage sale in Mid-America and decided to poorly copy every grandmother creation there. There was nothing remotely resembling an unique “Palestinian” identity in the whole gift store, despite being founded by a strong supporter of Abbas. The whole “Palestine” identity is a psy-op created and spread by white Europeans (Romans and British), Arab Nationalists, and Islamists. That’s why jihadists don’t hesitate to destroy tombs associated with Jewish figures but expect the IDF not to annihilate the Dome of the Rock. Of course, the Western Wall had no significance in Islam at all until less than a thousand years ago, and was not under Jewish control until 1967, when several Arab countries fought like hell to prevent Israelis from even existing. There was never a so-called “Palestinian” Empire and even forty years ago, “Palestine” would have required the military assistance of at least two-three Islamic countries (Egypt, Jordan, and Lebanon) to withstand an assault from another country, Israel or otherwise. Russia of course is pro-Hamas and pro-Iran, but leftists in the West often choose to ignore that.
People are just mad that Jewish women don’t wear burkas, niqabs, or hijabs, or have to marry men three times their age (as in Islamic countries). Even in “progressive” UAE, apostasy and homosexuality are punishable by death, yet morons like Jill Stein and her pink-haired undergraduate followers aren’t encouraging “encampments” about that.
And lastly, as I keep repeating, why the absolute hell is nobody complaining about Abbas not allowing elections during the past fifteen years or mandating death to anyone who sells land to Israel?
For fuck’s sake, Bill.
First of all, whether Palestinians are of Semitic origin is irrelevant. They have human rights and it is perverse that Palestinians and Arabs are paying for the crimes of Europeans. I have no objection even conceptually to the original founding of Israel, but it should have been done in partnership with and not driving out the local people, and the people who came back because distant ancestors (and possibly not even that) had lived in the area clearly have infinitely fewer salient ties to the region. It’s moot now because Israelis live there and have rights too, but let’s not miss the forest for the trees here: The Palestinians not having their national rights to self-determination respected for decades is perverse colonialism, no matter their descent.
Second, how the hell does “There were Philistines in the past here, therefore they can’t be Semitic now” even fucking track? As you always do, you conflate thousands of years of irrelevancies. By your own admission the area would have had plenty of inbreeding. And so, when you goddamn check, Palestinians are indeed of Semitic origin: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/11543891/#:~:text=The%20genetic%20profile%20of%20Palestinians,in%20the%20Mesolithic%2DNeolithic%20transition. . In particular, because you uncritically regurgitate Biblical propaganda, you missed the fact that the Hebrews were Canaanites and not Egyptian. ” Archaeologic and genetic data support that both Jews and Palestinians came from the ancient Canaanites, who extensively mixed with Egyptians, Mesopotamian, and Anatolian peoples in ancient times. Thus, Palestinian-Jewish rivalry is based in cultural and religious, but not in genetic, differences”. So your bullshit armchair history is scientifically wrong.
Obviously, again, it doesn’t really matter, but the situation does become that extra bit more ironically perverse that “anti-Semitism” now means anti-Ashkenazi people but not much more closely related Palestinians and that Israelis are tormenting people who are otherwise very close to them. It’s so fucked up that a Sephardic Jew is almost certainly more closely related to (and may even have even some broader modern interests with) a Palestinian she may be giving shit to than an Ashkenazi.
And if ancient symbols matter, David was an imperialist murderer and the Star of David in Israel’s flag discredits it, and it is also the symbol of Zionism, a movement emerging from racist colonialism and perverse nationalism. So why the fuck does the one ancient thing matter but not the other? Right, your racist cherry-picking.
Bill: I will only reply in a single comment as I try my best to be a nice moral human being and part of that is that I have a personal commitment to not ignore people when they talk to me even online. I won’t engage after this comment though.
I have read your comment here and all your previous comments on various articles here about both Islam and the Palestine/Israel issue.
I know enough about genetics and the specific genetic studies (even the most recent of them) on modern Palestinians and Jews to know that you are substantially wrong but I don’t care to correct you honestly.
The worse part is your knowledge about Islam. I am an ex Muslim who was literally a fundamentalist at one point and very conservative until I left Islam less than two years ago. I am also a native Arabic speaker and have a good command of classical Arabic. At one point I memorized two thirds of the 600 page Quran and have read it tens of times including 5 times in one month back in 2012. I have read Muhammad’s hadith literature literally since I was 6 years old. Not even to mention the other Islamic literature that I read in about two decades.
All this prefix is just to say that your knowledge about Islam which you repeatedly boast about is abysmal. Literally every comment you have made about Islam I have seen is substantially wrong. I loathe Islam and Muhammad now and yet your comments about them are usually so factually wrong that they irritate me. You seem a smart person to me but one who is overly sure about everything. If you are willing to take a piece of advice: please try to adopt more intellectual humility.
I only replied because you replied directly to me. I usually just read your comments in full to see an opposing perspective and move on.
I wish you all the best and apologize for not continuing the conversation any further. You are welcome to continue it with Fred and Dr. Carrier in this thread of course if they want to.
I’m posting this, not so much as a response to Islam (who stated he no longer wishes to continue) but for the general reader. The study Fred cited was published in 2001, coincidentally during the Second Intifada when there would be political motivations for ignoring the genetic differences between Israelis and “Palestinians”. The PLO directly hired former SS officers to teach weapons usage. Fred also conveniently left out the fact that “Palestinians” supported the murderous dictator Saddam Hussein. Only someone completely ignorant of history would suggest that “Palestinians” are a thing, rather than props used by Islamist and Arab Nationalist dictators. I am curious if Fred can cite a work of “Palestinian” poetry before the 20th century. Of course, as I mentioned about a thousand times on this website, “Palestinians” were just fine living as second-class citizens under the Ottomans, yet vomit at the thought of living next to Jews…..
Okay, Bill, I’m not going to publish any more of these remarks from you. They are irrational and obsessively racist.
You are obsessed with biological facts that have no relevance to literally anything here. You are conflating biology with culture. You are ignoring the fact that mixed races and cultures are globally normal and have none of the political entailments you are pushing. You are conflating organizations with entire peoples. You are making distinctions that don’t exist (e.g. the U.S. hired its share of Nazis, too—so what does that prove?) or don’t matter (e.g. the distinct national unit of Palestine begins in the 20th century—not its inhabitants and their culture) or actually operate against you (the contrast between Ottoman and Israeli rule is precisely proved by how they differed in their treatment of Palestinians—when they were also “living next to Jews” for hundreds of peaceful years).
And that’s even before we get to your dubious relationship with factual truth. All your purported “facts”need some serious fact-checking, and that’s tedious to the point of useless, given that you aren’t even using them logically to begin with.
Public Notice:
Bill Kennedy’s comments devolved so far into dismissive ad hominem and racism that I did not post his latest comments and am now in fact banning him permanently for repeated violations of my comments policy.
In twenty years of blogging, I have banned fewer than ten people. So this is not trivial.
I totally understand the permanent ban decision.
It’s a little sad that he kept obsessively getting into racist talking points about the Israeli/Palestinian issue and into Islamophobic generalizations about Muslims everywhere as he did sometimes have some interesting, but still mostly incorrect imho, points about other topics.
I concur.
For the record, again though it does not matter both because Bill has been banned and because this is immaterial to the human rights of people living in an area no matter how recently, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00439-012-1235-6?trk=public_post_comment-text confirms the same point: “On the nearest-neighbor-joining tree, the Yemenite Jews were on a branch between Palestinians and Bedouins, and the Ethiopian Beta Israel Jews were on a distinctive distal branch”. Because of course it does. Neither Bill nor any of the other dishonest peddlers of this approach can do anything more than invoke conspiracy theories and irrelevancies to explain where Palestinians came from if not, you know, the place they’re living now.
For any third party reading this, for non-racists, the reason why the close relationship between Jews and Palestinians in the area is telling even if not strictly important is because it makes the mistreatment of these people so much more perverse. Just like how in Yugoslavia or Rwanda where people who had been interbreeding, living together, trading, etc. started killing each other, it’s so perverse that people who have been neighbors suddenly engage in such nationalist cruelty.
I do understand the empathy that people have for Israelis. Constant terror attacks can’t be fun. But the Palestinians deserve empathy too. And so much of the tenor of this debate has been about demonizing them as an entire people, including justifying collective punishment and sieging and denying them their rights to manage their own national funds if we don’t like who is elected (rightly or wrongly – and Hamas sucks so in this case rightly).
I concur.
Fred: I actually didn’t even want to engage him on this genetics game because, as you and Dr. Carrier already said, it actually doesn’t matter and doesn’t mean anything (and also because frankly I was really disappointed that someone would see “70% of his father’s family were killed in the current Gaza war including 27 people in one air strike” and then think that the important thing to comment on here is my friend’s ethnicity).
But, yes, the close genetic relationship between Palestinians and Jews is so widely established that I don’t know of any relevant experts who would disagree. And actually ironically this genetics purity game is played by the racists in the other camp against Ashkenazi Jews in exactly the same way.
Absolutely agreed, Islam. I just don’t like conceding that front both because it’s clearly important to them and because it really does go to show just how utterly tragic and stupid this conflict is. They’ve been trying this bullshit for decades because they know that their intended audience is racist enough that they will ignore that Palestinians could have arrived there a day before any Zionist settlers and they still would have had a right to national self-determination and to not be murdered and expelled.
One of the most fucked up things about genocides is how intimate they can be. People in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia recounted being friends with and shopping from people they’d go on to kill or drive out or beat. You have people who often look identical, who speak each other’s languages, who worship together or in close proximity, who do business, who attend barbeques, suddenly murdering each other. From the perspective of (some) Palestinians. some neighbors had some new guys show up, including some exciting socialists and people fighting against injustice, and then after a horrific genocide they were driven out so their neighbors could have a state.
And condolences about your friend. I am sorry that I didn’t notice that in my zeal to engage intellectually and to deal with Bill, but as shocking as all of this is and as much rage and sadness as I can have, I can only experience it through my friends. But people like you experience it either directly or immediately and viscerally second hand, in missing friends and family members, in Facebook messages that no longer come, in birthdays you won’t be attending.
And you are absolutely right that his invocation of your friend’s ethnicity with no regard for the other context is not only telling about Bill’s character (a really huge giveaway and shocking to me even as I had seen him behave quite apishly) but also about this entire discussion. It’s the ugliest of identity politics.