Here’s how Stoermer describes Liberal Nationalism and the role it plays in american politics:
There’s a belief system that combines two things — first, that change must happen through official channels (voting, courts, proper debate), and second, that this procedural faith is wrapped in American exceptionalism. The system isn’t just legitimate. It is sacred because America itself is exceptional.
Now here’s where it gets complicated. Klein says the project is “the American experiment.” Newsom builds on that. Kirk said the same things, but meant something completely different. Kirk’s American experiment would destroy Klein’s and Newsom’s — he wanted to dismantle multiracial democracy, restrict voting, and return to what he called the real Founders’ vision. That would end everything Klein and Newsom claim to value.
Yet Klein’s nationalism enables Kirk’s. By treating Kirk’s anti-democratic project as legitimate discourse within the American experiment, by claiming they share common ground, Klein validates extremism as just another voice in the great American conversation.
And I keep wondering: Does the white Christian nationalist movement understand something about liberal nationalism that we don’t? Do they realize that as long as they frame their goals in terms of the Constitution, the Founders, and the American experiment, individuals like Klein will always find common ground with them?
I found other notable liberal figures saying similar things while perusing twitter. Notably senator John Fetterman recently insisted that americans (sorry, I refuse to capitalize demonyms. Sue me) should stop calling Trump an autocrat and pleaded for toning down the anti-Trump rhetoric. To me this attitude plays right into MAGA’s hands. This is the kind of stuff that whitewashes bigotry and helps reactionaries move the Overton window further right.
I would venture that in a similar situation, on this side of the pond we would be out on the streets, striking the economy to a screeching halt. But in the US, there seems to be this nationalist bootlicking mentality that prevents people from even considering direct action, simply because they believe the system will somehow fix itself and everything will be honky dory in the end.
I can’t help but think the US of A was never truly the haven of freedom we were told it was. And as much as I appreciate the comparably stronger fighting spirit of the working class here, I’m not sure it will be enough to resist the rise of the far right here in Europe either, propped up by the ever influential american politics. I’m a pessimist, so please give me hope, or don’t. Thoughts, please?
Erik:
Right, and that’s why I think liberals should engage in in-person debates despite the fact that the format isn’t ideal. You have to reach people where they are.
Impeachment was the best hope to prevent Trump from becoming President again. If convicted, Trump could have been barred from office by Congress. Also, impeachment was a worthwhile effort politically even without a conviction, because the very fact of the impeachment is damning, and via the Senate trial (and the January 6 committee hearings) the public got to see the evidence against Trump. Also, the fact that a majority of senators voted to convict is significant, even though the number fell short of the required two-thirds majority.
Insurrection is a criminal offense, and a civil lawsuit, even if successful, can’t establish criminality.
Election lies aren’t illegal, so that one’s a nonstarter. He was charged for election rigging, both by the federal government and by the state of Georgia. People really were trying to enforce the law.
But here’s the thing: criminal convictions don’t disqualify you from running for President, as ridiculous as that is. Perhaps the founders thought it was a given that America wouldn’t actually elect a criminal like Trump. Anyway, people were actually pondering the possibility that Trump could in be convicted, sentenced to prison, and campaign for President from a jail cell.
The only thing that would have disqualified Trump would be if he’d been found guilty of insurrection in the second impeachment trial, or maybe an act of Congress could have established him as an insurrectionist, though constitutional scholars are divided on the latter. Democrats had to go with impeachment.
I don’t think got Trump got special treatment in that regard. I remember Cohen’s charges being more serious than Trump’s, and the respective judges following sentencing guidelines in giving prison time to Cohen but not to Trump. It would have been interesting if the guidelines had called for Trump to serve prison time, though.
The sorry fact is that very few people are in the places where debates happen. There are more people in position to watch or read the debate after it happened, but even they do not add up to any sort of critical mass to sway the general mindset. The absolute majority of voters will probably never know that a specific debate happened. And the absolute majority of those who know about the debate know about it from secondary and tertiary sources, such as colewd through Grok (and colewd will attribute “liberal spin” in his particular arbitrary way) and petrushka through a Q conspiratorial podcast (and probably also through a regular news snippet and he will decide “It’s all very odd” and leave it at that).
No. None of this is significant. The end result is: Nothing happened. Nothing was achieved. Trump keeps saying (falsely) that he was totally exonerated and there are no consequences for that for him.
And? That’s the reason to avoid suing him? Must I conclude that USA has no legal sense whatsoever?
Election lies are illegal as proven by the Dominion lawsuits. As a minimum, election lies are unethical as proven by the disbarments of Sidney Powell, Rudy Giuliani, and others. In political terms, a politician who denies the legitimacy of elections that have been determined legitimate has no business of being in politics.
Note that I am not talking only about what’s legal or not. I’m talking about everybody’s duty to uphold the rule of law. Trump fails on this point. What is the mechanism in USA that makes a politician uphold the rule of law – and removes him from the political sphere when he does not do it? You’re clearly saying that there is no such mechanism – and this is what I keep pointing out too.
“I need 11000 votes, give me a break” would have been a slam dunk in a country of law and order. USA is not a country of law and order.
Erik:
Any given debate isn’t going to be the tipping point for the general population, but that doesn’t mean that debates aren’t useful. Trump’s opponents need to get the message out in order to chip away at his support. Debates are just a small part of that, but why cede ground to the MAGA types by refusing to debate?
keiths:
Erik:
Are you suggesting that the Democrats shouldn’t have even tried? It wasn’t at all obvious that impeachment wouldn’t succeed, and it was the one thing that could have disqualified Trump from running for office.
Also, do you think that no one in the country was influenced by the impeachment, or the findings of the Jan 6 committee?
keiths:
Erik:
You’re saying impeachment didn’t make sense, but a civil suit would have?
keiths:
Erik:
The Dominion cases were defamation cases. It’s illegal to defame, but not to lie about elections.
I agree. They’re blatantly unethical, and Trump’s election lies alone, along with his attempts to steal the election, should have been enough to convince voters not to vote for him.
That’s putting it mildly. Trump not only fails to uphold the law — think of his Jan 6 pardon spree and his quashing of the Tom Homan investigation, for instance — he actively violates it. His strategy has been to do whatever he wants, without regard for the law, and then see what the courts do about it.
The judiciary is that mechanism, except when the Supreme Court is actively neutering it by issuing ridiculous rulings in favor of Trump and granting him broad immunity against the obvious intentions of the founders.
It may still be a slam dunk if the case goes to trial. That phone call is damning evidence. It’s stalled for the moment because the District Attorney was disqualified.
I agree that the country is screwed up and dysfunctional. I’m just pushing back a little against the idea that law and order mean nothing here. Right now, the courts are the one thing restraining the actions of the administration, since Republicans in Congress are so spineless.
dazz:
If you’re worried that debating bigots gives them credibility, as if theirs was a legitimate, respectable position, then I get your point. I just think that what you gain by dismantling bigoted arguments in debate outweighs any cost in terms of seeming (to some people) like you’re legitimizing bigotry as merely a difference in political views, a valid opposing position. You can make it damn clear in debate that bigotry is vile and immoral.
I saw a CNN panel recently where Scott Jennings and Shermichael Singleton? (I can’t remember his surname and can’t be arsed to look it up) were defending Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military, arguing that it’s his prerogative as Commander in Chief to decide who’s fit to serve. They were defending blatant bigotry, since there’s no evidence that trans people are worse at their jobs or that they negatively affect combat readiness. The courts have found otherwise. It’s just that Trump (and Hegseth) are transphobes.
The Trump critics on the panel (including one transgender woman who had served) posed a hypothetical to Jennings and What’s-his-name. What if, hypothetically, Trump wakes up tomorrow and bans blacks because he feels they are unfit for duty and that they negatively impact readiness? It was an effective argument, and the bigotry apologists had no response other than to dismiss it as “ridiculous”, without being able to say why it was ridiculous.
That segment was worthwhile, and I don’t see any way in which it legitimized bigotry. It made bigotry look stupid and hypocritical. And there are certainly people out there who are unaware that trans people are just as fit for duty as anyone else, as established by the courts. It’s worth getting that message out. Committed bigots aren’t swayable, but others can be swayed.
What makes them independents is their lack of party affiliation. There are independents of all stripes: bigots and non-bigots, Trump supporters and Trump critics, persuadable people and inflexible ones.
Who on the left is saying that any of that is acceptable? ‘Worth discussing’ doesn’t mean ‘acceptable’. How can you decry something without discussing it? Who would be swayed if liberals refused to discuss those things?
I understand your frustration. In a healthy society, bigotry would be a fringe issue and shunning bigots while keeping an eye on them might be an appropriate response. But when bigotry is as widespread as it is now, and sanctioned by one of the two major political parties, we have to address it. We can’t just scrunch up our noses and refuse to debate.
What specifically should liberals be doing, in your opinion, that they are not already doing? I’m not arguing that there’s no room for improvement — far from it — but what would that improvement look like, in your view? You mentioned general strikes earlier, but those aren’t going to happen for reasons that we’ve already discussed. What are some of your other ideas for improvement?
Who on the left is saying “Republicans are trying to eliminate reproductive rights, which sucks, but let’s go along with it for the sake of national unity?” I haven’t heard a single liberal make that argument. Dems didn’t simply give in after SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade. They swung into action, one result being that seven states have now passed ballot measures protecting reproductive rights, including some you wouldn’t expect, like Missouri and Montana.
I don’t see evidence that libs are rolling over on reproductive rights or any other issues simply for the sake of national unity.
The point of the “I need 11000 votes” trial (and of the govt secrets theft trial and of insurrection accusations) was to prevent Trump taking office the second time. Now there’s no longer any point. The point of the Hollywood tape, his tax records, recalling his racist Central Park and Obama birth certificate statements was to stop him from running the first time.
There are neither law or morals in USA. There is even no proper definition to political parties. Normal parties have actual leadership and an ethics committee who convenes and decides “Guys, we’d better throw out bribe peddlers, rapists and open Nazis…” USA does not have any of this.
You can make it damn clear in debate that bigotry is vile and immoral and that the opponent you are facing is a bigot *in your opinion*. The thing is that this is not enough to stop neither the bigotry or the bigot.
Didn’t you just say a post ago that the most equal (and probably even the best) kind of debate is in written form? When did a written debate last happen with, say, a fascist? Do you think someone’s written debate with Trump would have stopped him, all other circumstances (including the press, online media etc.) remaining the same?
Now Trump has declared antifa a terrorist organisation. Except that there is no such organisation. This means that USA is now like Bolshevist-Stalinist Russia – people can be accused of being terrorists due to association with an organisation that does not exist. Can you debate your way out of such an accusation? It has not helped to make it damn clear to colewd and petrushka that Trump does not know what tariffs are and that he was Epstein’s best friend, so how can it help when the debate opponent is an ICE agent or worse?
Erik:
The point of those cases was also to do justice and deter future violators, and the Georgia case could still do that, although it would obviously be less important politically. Also, my understanding is that a future DOJ under a different president would technically have the option of reopening both of the federal cases, because those cases were dismissed for reasons unrelated to the merits. That means it wouldn’t count as double jeopardy if they did so, though I’m sure it won’t happen.
The Republican party has completely betrayed the country. Trump is amoral, so it isn’t surprising that he’s doing what he’s doing, but what’s really disconcerting is seeing the rest of the Republican leadership going along with it when they know it’s wrong. Lindsey Graham is the poster child for this.
Erik:
It doesn’t have to stop the bigot or the bigotry outright. It’s just a contribution to the fight.
Yes, and I also lamented the fact that it’s an ineffective format for a general audience, since most people don’t have the patience to read a long written debate. You have to reach people where they are, and in-person debates posted on YouTube are a better way to do that even if the format is less conducive to a thoughtful discussion.
First, Trump isn’t capable of participating in a meaningful written debate because he doesn’t have the cognitive capacity to maintain a train of thought and write about it coherently. This is a speech sample, not a writing sample, but it’s an indication of the likely flavor of any Trump contributions to a written debate:
Setting that aside, you ask if a written debate would have stopped Trump. The answer is no, of course not, and a spoken debate didn’t stop him either. He got trounced by Harris and still won the election. I’ll add that Trump definitely doesn’t argue in good faith, yet it was still a win for Harris to force a debate with him, which Trump tried to chicken out of. Both sides knew that debates were good for Harris and bad for Trump. You don’t need a good-faith opponent in order to gain something from debating. You just need to know how to effectively combat a bad-faith opponent.
Are you arguing that the only reason to engage in a debate would be if the debate were a tipping point? Very few things amount to tipping points, but we do them anyway in hopes that their cumulative effect will make a difference. How is it to liberals’ advantage not to debate?
It’s also worth pointing out that debate in the broadest sense is the meat of political campaigning. Candidates state their positions and attack their opponents’ positions. That’s debate, even if it isn’t in person. It’s why we refer to “the abortion debate” and “the climate debate”.
I’m sure that you and dazz would agree that liberals have to make their case to the public in some form, so the real question concerns which kinds of debate to participate in and which to avoid. I think in-person debates are a net gain for liberals, but I’ve already explained why I think so elsewhere in the thread, so I won’t belabor it.
And we also have people being indicted despite the fact that the prosecutors involved recommend against charging. Any shred of credibility the Trump DOJ retained is gone now. The DOJ has become the DOR — the Department of Revenge.
No, and you can’t chop down a tree with a screwdriver. Does that make screwdrivers useless? I’m not suggesting that in-person debates are a panacea. I don’t think anyone is. They won’t solve all problems, but they’re still a useful tool.
Some people aren’t reachable. Others are. The latter are the target audience when we debate.
dazz,
By coincidence, I ran across an actual example of liberals acquiescing to an abuse of power for the sake of unity. It happened in Russia, when Putin forced the cancellation of a puppet show that mocked him. From Wikipedia:
Yes, this is political campaigning, but after the campaigning there comes actual politics. You will have to win and then you can do politics. Politicians do not stop at debating about abortion and climate. They legislate. Only those who won elections can legislate. When we are dealing with politicians who do not value democracy, they do not even have to win elections – they can steal elections, smear and doxx their opponents, and lock opponents up when in power. Debate will be moot at that point – and that point is now.
The thing is that liberals actually made their case in some form. And you say that Harris won her debate. I think so too. Trump lost conclusively the moment he started ranting “They are eating the cats! They are eating the dogs!” Yet American public looked at those two debate performances, the rational winning one and the lunatic losing one, and they voted for the loser.
Do not underestimate the appeal of bigotry. You may rationally dismantle it in public debate and lucidly expose it as bigotry, yet onlookers may decide that e.g. trampling on immigrants feels good, therefore let’s go with that.
The undecided ones may be reachable. They are also reachable by the fascists and can be swayed either way until they make up their own mind or find out the hard way.
I saw reporting that a Venezuelan immigrant organisation (kind of a community club) got a visit from Trump’s camp before the elections, and Trump’s representatives nicely explained to them that Trump does not really mean to deport anybody, that it is just a campaign trick, he is joking etc. Would you say that it’s good that these people were reachable and in fact were reached? They were reached by lying fascists!
Somebody somewhere has said, “First they go after comedians.” Ban on Kukly was among Putin’s early deeds. This term, Trump has ordered the cancellation of Colbert and Kimmel. W had the guts to invite Colbert to perform on White House dinner and visibly suffered on the occasion. Has Trump ever had a White House dinner with a comedian performing?
The concept of having a civil presentation of conflicting viewpoints, where facts are marshalled and organized into cogent arguments, strikes me as increasingly quaint. Republicans understand that the goals are visibility and power. Saying outrageous things isn’t presenting a position, it’s attracting enough attention to drown out disagreement. If you can own the major “news” outlets (like Murdoch and Sinclair and Nexstar and Musk), control the social media, relegate opposing ideas or political positions to the fringes, you win.
People like Orban and Erdogan didn’t come to power suddenly, and they didn’t come to power through more widely accepted politics. What they did was control what the media published, what the law permitted, how elections were managed. They never lost sight of the goal, which was sheer power. You don’t contest Orban by getting on some popular program with your facts organized – there are no such programs and your facts are irrelevant. Democracy cannot return to Hungary through election of democratic candidates – they aren’t allowed to run, to wage a campaign, to generate public appeal. I think the US is now probably past the point of no return, but next year’s elections are critical. Republicans have realized that to win a political argument you don’t out-debate your opponents, you silence them.
keiths,
Yeah, I watched a video about that a few days ago, can’t remember where. Could it be in Jimmy Kimmel’s show? Not sure
Erik:
He never will. Narcissists can’t stand being the butt of jokes. Watch his reaction to being mocked by Obama at the 2011 White House Correspondents’ Dinner:
Watch Obama roast Trump
Trump himself says that being humiliated at that dinner was a major factor in his decision to run for president. It must chap his ass that Obama is far more popular than he is.
dazz:
I ran across an old article about it while googling something completely unrelated. Makes sense that it’s getting attention, though, given the obvious parallel with Trump and Kimmel. Like Trump, Putin is a narcissist. Think of those goofy photos of him riding barechested on a horse. I wonder how many autocrats in history weren’t narcissists.
Earlier in the thread, I linked to a clip of Eric Swalwell going after Kash Patel. Here’s another masterful demonstration of how to debate a MAGA type. The victim is, once again, Kash Patel:
Jeff Merkley grills Kash Patel on due process
And by winning this debate, the Democrats gained…maybe more midterm votes?
Flint:
Yes, most likely. And even if they didn’t, it was still helpful, as I’ll explain.
Why they probably gained midterm votes:
In order not to gain midterm votes, every single person who watched those interrogations of Patel who was planning to vote Republican, or third party, or not to vote at all, or was undecided — to not vote Democrat, in other words — not a single one of those people was close enough to voting Democrat to be pushed over their personal threshold by what they saw. Seems pretty unlikely.
Now, you can argue about how many people actually got pushed over their thresholds, but here’s the thing: even if not a single person actually got pushed over, those grillings of Patel were still beneficial. Why? Because they pushed some people closer to their thresholds, making it more likely that something else will push them over before Election Day. What counts is the cumulative effect of everything a voter sees between now and then. Whether a particular thing they see pushes them over isn’t important as long as they get pushed over at some point.
Think about it this way: how many people get pushed over their threshold by a particular campaign speech? By a particular political ad running at 9:30 PM on a Thursday in Toledo? By a particular flyer that ends up in their mailbox? By a particular news story? By a particular person knocking on their door? Those things add up, and it’s the total effect that counts.
Besides the political gains, the interrogations were beneficial in other ways too. I can’t see any reason for Democrats not to engage in those confrontations. Can you?
Pushed over to vote for Dems or not vote for Repubs, you mean?
This is really bad and pathetic for several reasons. First, you treat voters as push-overs – which makes them positively want to vote for disruptive maniacs who promise demolition of the system. Second, you assume that voting matters. In a totalitarian society, which is what USA is now, elections are stolen by the political establishment. Voting matters less than it used to.
Moreover, in USA elections were never properly democratic to begin with. Elections in USA were never proportional (which makes sense, since in a two-party system it is assumed that proportionality takes care of itself). They were always subject to massive gerrymandering (and the gerrymandering is decidedly being ramped up now), always subject to selective exclusion by voter registration methods and always subject to voter intimidation and manipulation at the ballot box. Also let’s mention election officials who steal for their party, always Republicans without exception.
These are the real methods that decide elections. This is how Republicans have stayed afloat all these decades, until they decided it’s time to go full authoritarian. Debate only serves to give air to their lies.
You can begin taking debate seriously as a method to get political results when you have managed to “push over” colewd and petrushka. This will happen exactly never ever. In my own online debates with Repub/Q/Maga/KKK wackos elsewhere, I have seen two instances when the wacko stopped to reconsider his position. The reason in both cases was that they noticed that their personal Medicare (or was it Medicaid, idk) was being cut. Whereas all the discussions and explanations on points of any sort of policy, reasonings on ideology, exposition of lies and hypocrisy achieved exactly nothing at all. It is important to know that even absolute morons, mentally ill brainwashees and dangerous bastards are not easy to push over and they resist mightily.
Thinking about the psychology of colewd and petrushka, I think that colewd is swayable when his investment portfolio falls apart under Trump’s reign. As to petrushka, he is absolutely immovable. He already thinks that he is firmly settled in the centre of the universe, no need to step either to the left or to the right. He thinks he is being as fair and balanced as Jehovah and nobody can add anything to his infinite wisdom.
Erik:
Flint’s question was about winning more votes for Democrats, so that’s what my response addressed.
Are you saying that because I used the words “push” and “over”, that means I am treating voters as pushovers? Your English is excellent, but I know it isn’t your first language, so perhaps that has something to do with this. “Pushover” is not synonymous with “someone who can be influenced”. There are plenty of people in the latter category who are not pushovers. Being persuadable is desirable; being a pushover is not. The point of political debate is to reach those who are persuadable.
So liberals shouldn’t engage in political debate? Swalwell and Merkley shouldn’t have grilled Patel? Buttigieg shouldn’t go on Fox News? Dems should stop making campaign speeches and buying political ads? What’s wrong with trying to persuade voters?
It does matter, which is why Republicans are panicking and trying to gerrymander the hell out of the states where they have control. They don’t want it to matter, but it still does.
It matters less, but it still matters. Do you think Dems should give up on trying to win over voters? If voting doesn’t matter, as you maintain, they’re wasting their time, effort, and money.
There are lots of flaws in the American electoral system. The electoral college is broken, which is why a bunch of states support the National Popular Vote Interstate Compac. I think all the states that have signed on are blue or blue-leaning, but I’m not sure about that. Partisan gerrymandering is a problem, which is why Democrats introduced a bill a few years ago to mandate nonpartisan redistricting commissions. Every Democrat voted for it; no Republicans did. It passed the House but was filibustered in the Senate. Just a week or so ago, Democrats introduced a bill that would mandate nonpartisan redistricting commissions and also outlaw mid-cycle redistricting. Dems are pushing to make the system fairer; Republicans oppose that.
Does that extend to political campaigning? Should the next Democratic presidential candidate refuse to debate the Republican, for fear of “giving air to their lies”? If not, what exactly are you proposing?
Getting more votes benefits Democrats even if people like colewd and petrushka aren’t swayed. You don’t have to persuade everybody.
“Wackos” aren’t representative of the general population. Debate is targeted at people who are persuadable, not at the diehards.
Which is a debating point Dems can use. Point to a right-wing person who is being hurt by Trump — a small business owner who is going out of business due to Trump’s tariffs, for instance — and say to other Trump supporters “That could be you. He’ll screw you just like he screwed them, if it’s to his advantage.”
Of course. Some people are persuadable and others are not. Debate is aimed at the persuadables.
I have never voted for a Republican.
You keep making assumptions and make no attempt to understand what I say.
petrushka:
Is that directed at me? I haven’t made any assumptions about your voting record. In fact, I recall you saying that you didn’t and wouldn’t vote for Trump, though you also said that you vote the way your family wants you to. Have they never wanted you to vote for a Republican?
Whatever your voting record, you seem averse to our criticisms of Trump. For example, you defended him against our accusations of stupidity, yet he demonstrates it on a daily basis. You made an odd claim about how we dislike him only because he keeps his campaign promises. You’ve been saying that you doubt the authenticity of the Epstein letter, and you’ve stuck to that position despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. That’s why I consider you tough to sway.
We have been through this, little boy. Every time a shooting occurred, probably as far back as the one against Trump, you *assumed* it was a leftie. So, who is making assumptions? I go exactly by what you say. And at this point it is absolutely fair to assume that you lie as horribly as your Fuehrer.
Grilling the cabinet is called a hearing. Going to television is, usually, an interview. They are not debates in the sense of equal footing. They are interactions where the participants have very different roles.
I have a general cultural aversion with the Anglo-American concept of “trying to persuade”. What it looks like is sheer brainwashing, especially in the two-party system of USA. There is no persuasion going on other than fomenting certain sentiments and inciting certain behaviours. Given the two-party system, there is no rational way whatsoever to persuade in the first place, because voters have no rational choice to make.
Last time they had a choice between a criminal and a woman. Rationally speaking, a criminal for president is not a choice that voters should be facing in a sensible system of government at all, yet they were presented with this choice, proving that the system of government is not sensible. A criminal and a woman – and Americans showed (for a second time) that they sure as hell are not going to vote for a woman.
You can pretend as if the choice was between certain policies or such. To an extent I agree, because Trump’s authoritarian tendencies were evident enough the first time, so some people may have paused to think whether to cast their vote in favour of the policies of anti-constitutional authoritarianism or not. And here’s the thing – they cast their vote in favour of it.
Which one is worse – either they voted for Trump without thinking too much or they decided after careful thinking, “The insurrectionist criminal Fuehrer wannabe who wants to deport all *legal* immigrants and to tariff *me* is the one I am going to vote for”? My stance is to be charitable and assume that there were hardly any thinking people among the voters. My point is that insofar as there is no rational choice to be made in American voting, also debate is just a pretension.
Republicans win voters over by lying, by appealing to low instincts and irrational fears, by gerrymandering the hell out of the states they control, and by blocking access from targeted segments of voters. Given this, Democrats can win voters how? By appealing to rational choice that does not exist? By promising not to institute a dictatorship? When the choice is between a dictatorship and not, this is an example of an irrational choice, and it was already presented to voters last time – and they made their pick!
All along, the more fundamental problem remains: Democrats are not the solution. The country as a whole is broken. The constitution is not functioning. According to the constitution, Trump should have been behind bars after the insurrection at the latest. This did not happen, hence the constitution has ceased functioning. To think that USA is still somehow the beacon of freedom to the world (or, more fundamentally, to think that it ever was… the idea of American Exceptionalism is one of the delusions that has led to the current situation and makes it unfixable) is to refuse to solve the problem.
The electoral college is the least of your problems. Without electoral college, the president would be voted in by the people directly, and the president – in this case Trump – would be able to declare that he has absolute popular mandate and therefore anybody who opposes him opposes the popular mandate. In fact, he is already touting it anyway, so the correct point of view is that electoral college is an insufficient solution to a very serious problem in the constitution of USA.
The most urgent problem is that the president of USA has too much power (and even while having too much power, there are the “unitary executive theory” people at work right now arguing that the president has too little power, so they are clearing away the remaining guardrails from the president’s path). The single supposed check and balance, impeachment, never ever worked.
Is anybody fixing this, the actual problem? Is anybody proposing proper workable limits to president’s power the way it is in the rest of the world (see how e.g. Brazil and South Korea behaved like normal countries and jailed their presidents when the president overstepped)? Nope. In fact, you are not even mentioning it. You are not seeing it. Neither do any of the Democrats. Thus, in my not-so-humble view, a perfectly practical solution is to let Trump destroy USA and hope that something more fair and balanced emerges from the ashes. Meanwhile, neither voting or debate will matter at all.
Are you saying that e.g. colewd is not representative of the general population? If not, why are you debating him?
It has been quite amusing to observe how this does not work. There is no empathy whatsoever in them. All debate and discussion for them is remote and abstract until they *personally* get hit. This is why my debate tactic is increasingly to get personal rather sooner than later. Instead of the hypothetical “This (an unfortunate business owner) could be you” I say “This (irrational hyperpartisan hypocrite wacko) *is* you!”
I’m averse to the implication that things were just fine before Trump. I’m curious if you foresaw the election results, and if not, why.
I’m skeptical about your assessment of the economy and about your assessment of Trump’s unpopularity. I haven’t detected any interest here in actually looking forward to what is likely to happen.
I’ve said a number of times that I have no power to change things, and I think is is counterproductive to be stressed out over things I cannot change. What I think about is whether there is anything I could to maintain or improve my prospects.
I do not post to change people’s minds.
For the record, I imprinted on JFK.
When I say imprinted, I do not mean I agreed with everything he did, but I approved of his tone.
From my viewpoint, every president makes catastrophic mistakes. Kennedy had the Cuban missile crisis, Bay of Pigs, Vietnam.
When you are amusing yourself over AI insanity, consider that humans do insane things, even when they are trying to do the right thing.
My hindsight is better than my foresight, and I have reevaluated many historical events. But I have not abandoned my approach to discussion. I prefer to be non confrontational.
petrushka,
I don’t think anyone argues that. Another strawman implication one could advance: things were bad before so let’s make ’em worse. What’s the worst that can happen? Apart from civil war, martial law, suspension of due process, my missus getting deported, an economic illiterate on the throne, etc.
That is fortunate.
It’s neither fortunate nor unfortunate.
Argument does not change people’s minds.
Science advances one funeral at a time. Evolution took 80 years to become academically respectable.
It’s not just Trump. We can’t even have a respectful discussion of mathematics. We are more interested in winning than in conversation.
petrushka,
It was a joke.
I get it: Where you come from, obvious factlessness, pro-Trump propaganda and Q conspiracies are considered non-confrontational discussion. However, by now you should have figured out that for everyone outside the MAGA bubble (which is roughly half of Americans plus pretty much the entire rest of the world) your Trump-worshipping drivel comes across as highly inflammatory. Defending the pedo is not exactly a neutral position to hold – it’s quite damning that this needs to be pointed out to you.
keiths:
Erik:
Who says debates need to be on an equal footing? If the parties disagree on something and are arguing back and forth, that’s debate. Congressional hearings sometimes turn into debates. That describes Swalwell/Merkley vs Patel. Interviews sometimes turn into debates. That describes Buttigieg vs Fox News. If you think congressional hearings and interviews are fine, but debates on an equal footing are not, I’m open to hearing why.
Persuasion is global and as old as humanity. Who goes through life without ever trying to persuade?
So when Dems were explaining the “Big Beautiful Bill” to the American people, pointing out the tax cuts for the wealthy and the benefit cuts to food stamps and Medicaid, they were just brainwashing people? When they point out that tariffs are a consumption tax that will disproportionately hurt lower-income people, they’re engaging in sinister brainwashing?
There can’t be a rational choice between two alternatives, but there can be among three or more? If ever there were an opportunity for voters to make a rational choice, the 2024 presidential election was it, despite the fact that we have a two-party system.
I agree that a criminal history should be disqualifying (with the caveat that a corrupt government can pin phony crimes on the opposition in such a system), but the fact that there was a criminal on the ballot made the rational choice even clearer. The system didn’t make rational choice impossible — it just served up a ridiculously irrational option, thus highlighting the rationality of choosing the other one.
Americans did vote for a woman in 2016. Clinton won the popular vote, 48% to Trump’s 46%. The screwed-up electoral college converted that into a loss.
Some of the people who voted for Trump did so because they were attracted to his authoritarianism, but others did so because they actually believed he would be better at handling key issues, the economy being the main one. They got suckered into believing that Trump was a smart and successful businessman who understood the economy better than his opponent.
They didn’t all think that Trump was going to deport legal immigrants and tariff them. Some of them were people who believed Trump when he said that he was simply going to go after “the worst of the worst” among the illegal immigrants, that he was going to bring prices down starting on day one, that he wasn’t going to cut Medicaid, that the tariffs weren’t going to affect them, etc. Those people weren’t voting for authoritarianism and they weren’t voting to be tariffed.
How could voting for Harris over Trump not be a rational choice? Was I being irrational when I did that? Debate is one of the tools we have for influencing others to make rational choices.
One of the options is irrational, but that doesn’t make the choice irrational. Harris was the rational choice over Trump. Cough syrup is the rational choice over frontal lobotomy when you have a cold. The fact that one of the options is ridiculous doesn’t mean there isn’t a choice.
Trump declared that he had a popular mandate in 2016, when he lost the popular vote, and he’s declaring it now, when he won the popular vote but has dismal approval ratings. Electoral college or no, Trump will claim a mandate. Trump’s gonna Trump. He’s even resorted to citing the number of counties he won (2,633 vs Harris’s 427) as evidence of his supposedly overwhelming mandate. If land could vote, he’d have a point. But people vote, and there are some 10 million people in America’s largest county (LA county) and 64 people in the smallest (Loving County, Texas). The number of counties won means nothing.
And no, the electoral college is not the least of our problems. If we’d had a popular vote system in 2016, Clinton would have won and Trump’s political career would have been over. The electoral college was an essential link in the chain that led to the current catastrophe.
What should Dems be doing, specifically? That’s a genuine question — I’d like to hear your suggestions. They don’t have the power to jail Trump, unless they stage a coup. They don’t have the power to amend the constitution, since that requires 3/4 of the states. They don’t control either house of Congress. They can’t reach into the minds of the conservative SCOTUS justices and restore sanity. They impeached Trump twice, but Republicans in the Senate blocked a conviction both times. They backed the criminal prosecutions of Trump. What else should they be doing right now, in your view?
Voting and debate still matter, even if their power has diminished. Again, why would the Republicans be desperate enough to gerrymander mid-cycle if voting didn’t matter? And if voting matters, then debate matters, because debate affects voting. Giving up now would be foolish when the fight is not over.
Yes. He’s a cult member, and cult membership is not a defining national characteristic. Most Americans aren’t cult members, and most Americans disapprove of Trump.
I’m only allowed to debate people who are representative of the general population?
“No empathy whatsoever”? You’re engaging in the same sort of Us-vs-Themming that many of them practice. Some of them lack empathy in situations where we think they shouldn’t, as when ICE breaks up a family in order to deport a long-established, hard-working member of society who pays taxes and abides by our laws, but it’s ridiculous to suggest that all of them feel no empathy whatsoever, as if they were a monolith.
That’s a vast overgeneralization. As a counterexample, consider that an overwhelming majority of Americans oppose Medicaid cuts. They aren’t all on Medicaid or personally affected by the cuts, but they still think it’s wrong.
If your intent is just to vent, that approach is fine. If your intent is to persuade the person you’re attacking, it won’t work. If your intent is to make rational arguments (which is why I’m here), then you need to keep your personal attacks within the bounds of rationality and and add some rational substance. (I’m not saying that you don’t do that — sometimes you do, sometimes you don’t — I’m just making a point.)
keiths:
petrushka:
No one has claimed or implied that things were fine before Trump. You seem to be the one making assumptions here.
How is that relevant to what we’re discussing?
petrushka:
Why not give your reasons? Off the top of my head, here are the things I remember you saying about it: you argued 1) that it takes a long time for economic policy decisions to propagate through the economy and have an effect, and that our judgments are therefore premature, and 2) that the primary purpose of Trump’s tariffs is to repatriate manufacturing. I responded to both of those. Did I miss any? Are there others you’d like to bring up?
Again, let’s hear your reasons. I’ve cited poll after poll, and your only response that I can recall has been to say that polls don’t reflect popularity, only elections do. That makes no sense to me. If a president polls as badly as Trump, then he’s unpopular, regardless of how many people voted for him 11 months ago.
Seriously? This entire thread has been about what liberals can and should do to help steer the country away from the future that lies ahead if we don’t.
Neither do I. If it happens, great, but that’s not my goal. It’s just a bonus.
petrushka:
Every president makes mistakes. Nevertheless, some presidents are great, like Lincoln, and others are shitty, like Trump. Trump, in fact, has been judged the worst president of all time by historians and presidential scholars. I agree with them. If you think that “every president makes mistakes” means “they’re all the same, more or less” and that our criticisms are therefore unfair, I strongly disagree. In any case, every president’s mistakes are fair game for criticism, and Trump is no exception, even though he’d like to be and is actively trying to shut his critics up.
Your point reminds me of colewd pointing out that many presidents have narcissistic traits, as if that means that Trump is just one of the boys. He isn’t. He’s pathologically narcissistic.
As for mistakes, some are worse than others. Some presidents are worse than others. Some presidents don’t merely make mistakes, they actively do harm. Trump is the poster boy for the latter.
I have no idea why you think I haven’t considered that, or what point you’re trying to make. Are you suggesting that Trump is trying to do the right thing? The only sense in which that is true is if you define “the right thing” as “what’s good for Trump”. And if Trump does insane things, aren’t those grounds for criticism, regardless of intent?
My impression is that you interpret criticism of your views as confrontation, and they are — this is The Skeptical Zone, and people confront each other’s views all the time. That’s not a bad thing. I’ve also noticed that you’re somewhat reluctant to state your views outright, which makes me think that you’re uncomfortable going out on a limb and subjecting them to criticism.
A lot of your comments feel like passive-aggressive attempts at criticism with plausible deniability. You’ll say things like “I’ve noticed that some people will…” (fill in the blank) when it’s clear that you’re talking about someone involved in the conversation. Why not just say it plainly? Criticism is fine. You may get some pushback, but again, this is The Skeptical Zone and pushback is appropriate.
One of your comments that has stuck with me was in an exchange with Allan:
I still have no idea what point you were trying to make. Yes, I get the Palestinian reference, but how does it respond to Allan’s point? Why not just tell us what you mean?
If you’re talking about the potshots that Jock and I exchanged, sure, they might not qualify as respectful, and they aren’t to everyone’s taste. I personally think they’re funny and add to the entertainment value as long as they don’t displace substance. And they didn’t. Take a look at those threads and tell me that that math wasn’t being substantively discussed.
That’s your go-to criticism, but I can’t figure out why. We have plenty of substantive conversations across a wide spectrum of topics. Of course people want to win — along with its other functions, debate can be a sport — but that’s only a problem if it prevents meaningful discussion.
Because otherwise you will end up calling non-debates debates, as you are already doing with committee hearings and TV interviews.
Two alternatives provide a rational choice when *both* of the alternatives are reasonable. For example, when you give your child a choice between chocolate ice cream and a pile of shit, this is not a rational choice you’re offering. You’d expect the child to go for ice cream, but the child may feel insulted by the choice you are offering and go for the pile of shit out of spite, to take it and throw it at you or whatever. In elections people inevitably pick shit when shit is on the ballot. Why do this? Who/what are you testing and why?
A rational choice would be two different ice creams, or an ice cream and a fruit. You know, pleasant and meaningful choices. Don’t serve up criminals and absolute incompetents for presidential candidates, thank you very much.
As to three or more choices, compare with the rest of the world. In an average multi-party democracy, if a party attempts a coup, an illegal powergrab, this party will be banned, usually forever. In USA you unfortunately cannot make this perfectly reasonable move, since you have only two parties, and by banning one of them you’d become a single-party country. If USA were a normal democracy, Repubs would have been banned after Jan6 and you would not have Trump’s second term.
As long as you have the president as the chief executive (and you do not have an additional prime minister), you honestly do NOT want the president to be elected directly by the people. If you had direct elections of the president, you’d have Trump going at it even more viciously than he is now. And even now it is so vicious that the constitution and the courts and Dems cannot handle it.
I hope that I have explained this: It is not rational to choose between e.g. a chocolate ice cream and a pile of shit. When given such a choice, it can be perceived as an insult. And when insulted, people can make choices out of spite.
In USA, people also make choices clearly out of ignorance, and oh boy is their ignorance profound. Therefore avoid giving people such irrational choices, thinking they’d “naturally” go for chocolate ice cream when it stands next to a pile of shit. They might not. And in fact they did not.
I will believe it when I see it. In colewd and petrushka, according to my observations, there is zero empathy. Namely, colewd will only believe that tariffs and other Trump’s disruptive policies are bad when his personal investment portfolio plummets, while petrushka has spent much of his eloquence to defend pedos from pedo accusations – Epstein’s birthday letter from Trump is not real, Trump and Epstein never were friends, and no (or not enough) victims have stepped up. There is no empathy whatsoever in them, not to mention their appalling disregard for facts.
This is exactly my example, not a counterexample. Moreover, according to more polls and focus group reporting, even while Trump voters think that cutting Medicaid is bad, they do not think Trump is cutting any Medicaid – until they notice it in their *personal* Medicaid, and even then they try to rationalise it as if somebody else made a mistake.
Yes, I am generalising, but very rightfully. After all, this is Trump’s *second* term. There are no excuses anymore. The ignorance of American voters is probably much more profound than I am able to gauge.
I’m curious how long it will take for the trade policies to be reflected in the stock market. There was a lot of math in the tariff post. Does any of it involve predictions about trends in consumer princes, or stock prices, and predictions about the time frame? Yes or no question. And perhaps a number of months or years.
Tariffs are not near the top of my concerns.
Wars are at the top of my list, and I confess I have no great wisdom to add on the topic. Superficially, it would seem we have returned to the Biden doctrine, at least the part about bleeding Russia.
As for Gaza, I continue to think most middle eastern leaders want Hamas eliminated, but want to blame Israel. The most striking thing is the absence of inflammatory rhetoric.
But the future of Trumpism rests on his immigration policy. Even the threatened shutdown seems to revolve around immigration. My only thought is that the topic is so toxic, that discussion seems impossible. Everything is about motives, and it’s like a divorce custody dispute.
You are always wrong about everything.
The immigration/deportation discussion is, naturally, about constitutional rights. You know that Trump is deporting *legal* and *documented* immigrants, right? You know that he is even deporting citizens, right?
Who am I kidding. Of course you know nothing – and you don’t want to know. You don’t even know that Kristi Noem, the chief of ICE, the official whose job it is to know what Habeas Corpus is, got Habeas Corpus upside down.
petrushka,
The future of Trumps doctrine is about strengthening the US both economically and militarily as the primary focus. Immigration control is a piece along with building military strength, rebuilding manufacturing, modernising our financial system, reducing educational indoctrination, reducing media indoctrination and eliminating useless wars.
I think immigration control is part of a bigger strategy of strengthing the American consumer in order to maximise our international bargaining power.
keiths:
Erik:
The first definition in Merriam-Webster’s entry for ‘debate’:
That covers Swalwell’s and Merkley’s confrontations with Patel, and it covers Buttigieg’s appearances on Fox News. But that’s just semantics. Use whatever word you want. My question is: What forms of “contention by words or arguments” are OK and productive for libs and Dems to participate in, and which are not? For the ones that aren’t productive, why do you say that?
Was it a mistake for Harris to debate Trump? That was a formal debate, on an equal footing, with a moderator, an audience, and rules. It more than satisfies your definition. She blew him away, and both campaigns knew it, which is why the Harris campaign wanted more debates and the Trump campaign didn’t. Do you truly think that Harris should have refused to debate Trump? How would that have benefitted her? Should future Democratic presidential candidates refuse to debate their opponents?
keiths:
Erik:
A choice can be an opportunity to select among options, or it can be one of the options presented. Harris was the rational choice in the second sense; Trump was the irrational choice in the same sense. The fact that there was an irrational choice in the second sense doesn’t mean that the opportunity to choose was irrational. The opportunity to choose is the foundation of democracy, and that seems pretty rational to me.
Criticize the American system for producing Trump — an irrational choice — and I’ll agree with you. Label the opportunity to choose as irrational, and I’ll disagree. So when you say that
…my response is that they did have a rational choice to make, and her name was Harris. The opportunity to choose was also rational. The only choice that was irrational was Trump. So why not try to persuade people to make the rational choice?
From any particular person’s perspective, the rational choice is the one that best serves their needs and desires. If that kid values vengeance more than the enjoyment of chocolate ice cream, then choosing the shit is the rational choice. If they love chocolate ice cream more than the satisfaction they would get by throwing the shit at the person offering it, then the ice cream is the rational choice. (And if their momentary anger causes them to choose the shit but they regret that choice later, then the ice cream would have been the rational choice.)
They don’t inevitably pick shit. Roughly half of the voters rejected shit in all three of the last presidential elections. And do you really think that a significant number of people voted for Trump out of spite, because they were insulted that the Republicans presented him as a choice? That’s not plausible. Voting for someone you think shouldn’t even be on the ballot isn’t a protest vote, it’s a capitulation. It’s rewarding the Republicans for nominating a shitty candidate.
I’m not arguing that a two-party system is better than a multi-party system. I’m just saying that having a choice between two options isn’t irrational even if one of the choices is. I’ll choose a massage over having my fingernails pulled out any day, and I’ll be grateful for the choice if the alternative is to have my fingernails pulled out with no other options given.
I see no evidence of that. In all three elections, Trump has claimed that he won the popular vote and that he had a popular mandate. In 2024, he won the popular vote. Is he thinking “I won the popular vote, but I’m going to restrain myself since the electoral college was the actual means by which I became president”? That makes no sense, especially when we’re talking about Trump.
keiths:
Erik:
Your observations are limited to what they’ve said on this blog. Pretty silly to generalize from that to the rest of their lives. You have no basis for claiming that they have “no empathy whatsoever”.
For readers who might be wondering, Erik isn’t wrong about that. Here’s colewd in his own words:
keiths:
colewd:
That’s appalling, and it does show a lack of empathy for the people who are being hurt by Trump and his policies. You’re right to call him out on that. Nevertheless, you’re going too far when you claim he has “no empathy whatsoever”. You don’t know that.
He’s wrong to defend Trump, and like colewd, he doesn’t seem to be showing much empathy for the people Trump is hurting. That doesn’t mean he has “no empathy whatsoever.” He has evinced concern for his granddaughter, and he was a social worker for years IIRC. Neither of those absolutely guarantees that he feels empathy, but I think they’re pretty suggestive. It’s a huge and unwarranted leap to claim that he feels “no empathy whatsoever”.
Erik:
keiths:
Erik:
Huh? Of course it’s a counterexample. They oppose Medicaid cuts despite not being personally affected by them.
That’s a lack of knowledge, not of empathy.
Generalizing to claims you can’t support isn’t right. Don’t fall into the Us-vs-Them trap. That’s exactly what Trump is doing, over and over, and we’re rightfully condemning him for it. Let’s not emulate him.