The myth of an ending: why even removing Trump from office won’t save American democracy

[Emily Lake]

Ya, neither of those groups actually represent your interests.

Agreed.

 

[Emily Lake]

The Senate doesn't represent the interests of the citizens, it represents the interests of the States. The House of Representatives represents the interests of the citizens... at least, hypothetically.

No, the House doesn't. By your logic, it actually represents the interests of a myriad of small congressional districts, a great many of which are gerrymandered to represent Republican interests.

Technically, yes, you are correct. I was speaking more to the intended role of the House versus the intended role of the Senate. Senate is supposed to represent the voice of the states as semi-autonomous entities, whereas the House is supposed to represent the will of the population semi-independently of the States. This House is based on the distribution of populations, and Senate is based solely on the count of States.

But yes, you're quite correct... The House represents the interests of weirdly shaped gerrymandered fillets of the population, and in no way actually effectively represents the citizenry.

- - - Updated - - -

My point is that it is inaccurate to think that the modern US system works in the way it was originally envisioned. What we have is a mutated version of that vision, and it produces abominations like the makeup of the current federal government in Washington.

Agreed.

 

[Emily Lake]

But the compromise they came up with the division of government was to make she concetrated areas didn't completely overrule less ones. They never believed in a full democracy.

'Full democracy' is, like all purely ideological systems of government, shit.

The assumption that 'more democracy' is synonymous with 'a nicer place to live' has generally been true throughout history; but only because democracy to any degree was rare.

There are lots of things that should be decided by expert bodies, or even by individual experts, where replacing that decision making process with democracy leads to bad outcomes. The election of judges, district attorneys, and other specialist roles in government, is one such instance.

Democracy is what you do when all other options are even worse than asking idiots their opinions, and taking the average. Doing it any more than is necessary to avoid dictatorship is generally a poor idea.

But many people in the west (and particularly in the USA) seem to take the very simplistic view that if a little democracy is good, more must be better. Indeed that assumption is so common and widespread that it's very rare to see it questioned at all. Usually it is just assumed that more democracy is automatically a good and desirable end, and that the only discussion should be on the details of how to achieve it.

That the founders of the US strongly felt otherwise is clear. It's a shame that people today seem less inclined to think long and hard about just how widely it is wise to apply democratic ideals.

Anyone who has had to try to get actual work done through a large cross-functional committee should be well aware that full democracy frequently comes up with bad ideas, poorly executed solutions... and does so at glacial speed.

 

[Trausti]

But the compromise they came up with the division of government was to make she concetrated areas didn't completely overrule less ones. They never believed in a full democracy.

'Full democracy' is, like all purely ideological systems of government, shit.

The assumption that 'more democracy' is synonymous with 'a nicer place to live' has generally been true throughout history; but only because democracy to any degree was rare.

There are lots of things that should be decided by expert bodies, or even by individual experts, where replacing that decision making process with democracy leads to bad outcomes. The election of judges, district attorneys, and other specialist roles in government, is one such instance.

Democracy is what you do when all other options are even worse than asking idiots their opinions, and taking the average. Doing it any more than is necessary to avoid dictatorship is generally a poor idea.

But many people in the west (and particularly in the USA) seem to take the very simplistic view that if a little democracy is good, more must be better. Indeed that assumption is so common and widespread that it's very rare to see it questioned at all. Usually it is just assumed that more democracy is automatically a good and desirable end, and that the only discussion should be on the details of how to achieve it.

That the founders of the US strongly felt otherwise is clear. It's a shame that people today seem less inclined to think long and hard about just how widely it is wise to apply democratic ideals.

Anyone who has had to try to get actual work done through a large cross-functional committee should be well aware that full democracy frequently comes up with bad ideas, poorly executed solutions... and does so at glacial speed.

Occupy Wall Street

 

[Emily Lake]

Seems to me that you're advocating for some kind of hybrid democracy/aristocracy....

I'd settle for a re-engineering of a representative democracy. We just need to define some realistic and more robust guidelines for how those representatives are selected and what their roles are.

 

[Emily Lake]

Anyone who has had to try to get actual work done through a large cross-functional committee should be well aware that full democracy frequently comes up with bad ideas, poorly executed solutions... and does so at glacial speed.

Occupy Wall Street

Also a good example of full democracy failing to make headway.

 

[coloradoatheist]

Seems to me that you're advocating for some kind of hybrid democracy/aristocracy....

I'd settle for a re-engineering of a representative democracy. We just need to define some realistic and more robust guidelines for how those representatives are selected and what their roles are.

I guess returning to the purpose of the Constitution and the understanding that trying to solve problems for 300 million people isn't the answer. Move democracy to the local and state governments and only have the federal govt do small things.

In terms of taxes, it should be 5% or so at the national level and the other levels at the state govt.

 

[Copernicus]

Seems to me that you're advocating for some kind of hybrid democracy/aristocracy....

I'd settle for a re-engineering of a representative democracy. We just need to define some realistic and more robust guidelines for how those representatives are selected and what their roles are.

I guess returning to the purpose of the Constitution and the understanding that trying to solve problems for 300 million people isn't the answer. Move democracy to the local and state governments and only have the federal govt do small things.

In terms of taxes, it should be 5% or so at the national level and the other levels at the state govt.

I think that the purpose of the Constitution was exactly the opposite--to move representative democracy away from local and state governments. That was the situation we had under the deeply flawed Articles of Confederation, which almost brought about the demise of the Continental Army during the Revolution. The fundamental idea was to give the federal government broad powers of taxation and governance--to form a strong union rather than a loose confederation of states.

 

[bilby]

'Full democracy' is, like all purely ideological systems of government, shit.

The assumption that 'more democracy' is synonymous with 'a nicer place to live' has generally been true throughout history; but only because democracy to any degree was rare.

There are lots of things that should be decided by expert bodies, or even by individual experts, where replacing that decision making process with democracy leads to bad outcomes. The election of judges, district attorneys, and other specialist roles in government, is one such instance.

Democracy is what you do when all other options are even worse than asking idiots their opinions, and taking the average. Doing it any more than is necessary to avoid dictatorship is generally a poor idea.

But many people in the west (and particularly in the USA) seem to take the very simplistic view that if a little democracy is good, more must be better. Indeed that assumption is so common and widespread that it's very rare to see it questioned at all. Usually it is just assumed that more democracy is automatically a good and desirable end, and that the only discussion should be on the details of how to achieve it.

That the founders of the US strongly felt otherwise is clear. It's a shame that people today seem less inclined to think long and hard about just how widely it is wise to apply democratic ideals.

Seems to me that you're advocating for some kind of hybrid democracy/aristocracy, and I think that's roughly what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Problem is that today, the less populated states are generally full of uneducated redneck racists (the FF didn't worry about racism, since everyone knew at the time, that blacks were not human), not intellectually and educationally privileged "aristocrats" as was the case when the Union was founded.

More for a hybrid democracy/meritocracy; and I am thinking more widely than just the USA.

The problem with meritocracy is preventing the wealthy and/or powerful from turning it into an aristocracy, by declaring wealth or power to be a proxy for merit. The value in democracy is in preventing that from happening. But unfortunately it tends to do so at the cost of also preventing genuine meritocracy, as the public are by definition not qualified to assess the merits of candidates.

 

[SimpleDon]

A good read, and a pragmatic look at the state of our democracy and how the end of the Trump presidency won't fix our problems.

I think this article is spot on, and I find myself saddened by the state of our political system. Until recently, I've been pretty optimistic about our country, but I'm becoming increasingly the opposite. Discuss.

I agree that this article is spot on. I am congenitally optimistic but have become increasingly dismayed at the direction of our democracy, which is spiraling down to authoritarianism. But before we can start to think about what we can do to fix our democracy we have to know what broke it and why.

This started a long time ago and has been building over fifty years or more. The steps that got us to this point;

1.	Convincing a large part of the electorate that the government that pulled us out of the Great Depression and that along with the Soviet Union saved the world from fascism is incompetent and not needed.
1.1	This was accomplished by leveraging the opposition to the civil rights legislation, through the age-old racial appeal that the black and brown people are genetically inferior coupled with the modern twist that the government is going to elevate these inferior people above the racially superior population.​
1.2	This is embodied in the ideas that black and brown people are on welfare or want to be on welfare and that the poor deserve to be poor because of their failures as parents and their lack of initiative.​
2.	Convincing some people that the economy would operate better if the federal government left it alone, that the market is capable of self-regulation and would bestow the greatest degree of social justice on the greatest number of people if it was left alone by the government, all of the market failures of the economy are due to the interference of the government.
6.	Convincing some people that the government should be run more like a business, that businessmen could run the government better than the politicians and the government bureaucracy run it.
7.	Convincing some people that higher wages can only mean higher prices and inflation, therefore anything that supports higher wages is evil incarnate, things like the minimum wage and unions.
8.	Convincing some people that profits are desirable and necessary, that there is no such a thing as excessive profits, making profits for the shareholders is the sole reason that corporations exist, that profits don't increase prices and can't cause inflation, unlike wages.
9.	Convincing some people that free trade is necessary and inevitable, the lower cost of imported goods is a greater benefit to consumers than the cost of a few jobs, that supply and demand setting prices to prevent anyone from earning excessive profits from offshoring jobs.
11.	Convincing some people that American industry needs more H1B1 visas for foreign workers because they can't find enough people to fill the positions that they need, at the salaries that they want to pay, and paying more will just increase inflation.
12.	Convincing some people that inflation is a greater evil than unemployment and that increasing interest rates is the best way to fight inflation by creating unemployment in industries that depend on debt; housing, automobiles, appliances, etc., except for inflation in the stock market, bonds, derivatives and real estate, this inflation that we call "capital gains" is a good thing.
13.	Convincing some people that illegal aliens are going to take their jobs and that other countries send us their worse people, criminals and such, that the illegals vote illegally, en masse, which is why we need to pass tight tighten voter id Iaws even if it does disenfranchise some legal voters, because even one illegal vote makes a mockery of our democracy.
14.	Convincing some people that all of the mainstream media intentionally lie to push their liberal, one world agenda, that many of the universities are hotbeds of socialism that indoctrinate their students to support it, both groups tearing up the traditional values that have made this country great.

[td="align:right,width:80"]
3.[/td]
[td]Convincing some people that this self-regulating free market is predicated on the "natural" values of goods, services and especially labor wages and any monetary values above the natural values are responsible for disruptions in the economy like inflation and recessions.[/td][/tr]
[td="align:right,width:80"]
4.[/td]
[td]Convincing some people that the worse interference by the government in the economy is through the imposition of regulations, especially those that impose costs on to the operations of businesses, for things like controls for the mitigation of pollution, forced overtime pay, the government's obsession with food, drug and workplace safety, building codes, the overly restrictive child labor laws and regulations that attempt to prevent innovations in the financial sector to make capital more widely available and cheaper through competition, like the derivatives that made so much mortgage money available in the first seven years of this century.[/td][/tr]
[td="align:right,width:80"]
5.[/td]
[td]Convincing some people that there is nothing that is accomplished by the government that couldn't be done better and cheaper by private, for-profit business, i.e. the free enterprise system.[/td][/tr]

[td="align:right,width:80"]
10.[/td]
[td]Convincing some people that either everyone is baffled why income inequality continues to grow or that the continuing increase in income inequality is probably due to some unknown and apparently unknowable new structural change in the economy, probably having something to do with the greater education requirements of today, but again, who can say?[/td][/tr]

The problem is all of these are wrong. Well, profits are desirable and necessary, but currently are excessive.

We have to push-back on these false beliefs, all of which I have seen repeatedly expressed on this discussion board.

Have I missed anything?

Have I constructed a strawman that is overly harsh on the unnamed "some people" who have been deceived into believing such things?

If so which ones are part of the strawman and how should they be phrased?

Or are these thing true in the whole or in part?

Which ones are true and why?

 

[LordKiran]

'Full democracy' is, like all purely ideological systems of government, shit.

The assumption that 'more democracy' is synonymous with 'a nicer place to live' has generally been true throughout history; but only because democracy to any degree was rare.

There are lots of things that should be decided by expert bodies, or even by individual experts, where replacing that decision making process with democracy leads to bad outcomes. The election of judges, district attorneys, and other specialist roles in government, is one such instance.

Democracy is what you do when all other options are even worse than asking idiots their opinions, and taking the average. Doing it any more than is necessary to avoid dictatorship is generally a poor idea.

But many people in the west (and particularly in the USA) seem to take the very simplistic view that if a little democracy is good, more must be better. Indeed that assumption is so common and widespread that it's very rare to see it questioned at all. Usually it is just assumed that more democracy is automatically a good and desirable end, and that the only discussion should be on the details of how to achieve it.

That the founders of the US strongly felt otherwise is clear. It's a shame that people today seem less inclined to think long and hard about just how widely it is wise to apply democratic ideals.

Seems to me that you're advocating for some kind of hybrid democracy/aristocracy, and I think that's roughly what the Founding Fathers had in mind. Problem is that today, the less populated states are generally full of uneducated redneck racists (the FF didn't worry about racism, since everyone knew at the time, that blacks were not human), not intellectually and educationally privileged "aristocrats" as was the case when the Union was founded.

More for a hybrid democracy/meritocracy; and I am thinking more widely than just the USA.

The problem with meritocracy is preventing the wealthy and/or powerful from turning it into an aristocracy, by declaring wealth or power to be a proxy for merit. The value in democracy is in preventing that from happening. But unfortunately it tends to do so at the cost of also preventing genuine meritocracy, as the public are by definition not qualified to assess the merits of candidates.

To my mind, the only way you can have a meritocracy that doesnt become an aristocracy is if you restrict or abolish inheritance. The only way you can have a meritocracy that doesn't creep into mass inequality is if people's wealth is recycled rather than passed on.

 

[Trausti]

To my mind, the only way you can have a meritocracy that doesnt become an aristocracy is if you restrict or abolish inheritance.

So how do you prevent children from inheriting their parents' genes?

Adoptive parent income has almost no impact on adoptive child income.

 

[bilby]

To my mind, the only way you can have a meritocracy that doesnt become an aristocracy is if you restrict or abolish inheritance.

So how do you prevent children from inheriting their parents' genes?

Adoptive parent income has almost no impact on adoptive child income.

Why do you imagine that it might be in any way necessary or desirable to prevent children from inheriting their parents' genes?

If someone has the ability to do a particular job well, they should not be beaten out for that job by someone less skilled, but who has well connected or wealthy parents; Nor should they be able to use inherited money to give their chances a boost that is not related to their own level of skill.

How they acquired their ability - whether through genetics, diligence, pure luck, an expensive education, or some other means, is completely irrelevant.

But anyone who can buy their way into an influential position using inherited money, wherein they can use their influence to become even more wealthy, and thereby gift their heirs a position of influence, is undermining meritocracy. Wealth might correlate with ability, but the correlation is far from perfect, and inheritance of wealth (and therefore power) tends to weaken the correlation from generation to generation.

Genetics is far to imprecise to allow a study of parental ability to be used as a viable means of assessing offspring ability. Inheritance of wealth is even less precise. These are useless as indicators of merit. But they are often an effective means to bypass merit based appraisal of candidates.

 

[RVonse]

To my mind, the only way you can have a meritocracy that doesnt become an aristocracy is if you restrict or abolish inheritance.

So how do you prevent children from inheriting their parents' genes?

Adoptive parent income has almost no impact on adoptive child income.

Perhaps it has nothing to do with genes.

A biological parent knows their biological seed is being preserved and highly motivated to leaving money to those offspring.

But the non bio related parent might prefer leaving to other worthwhile charities.

And the difference in income between having the inheritance vs not having the inheritance would be huge. Especially if the parents are really rich. And that alone would account for your graph without consideration to any skills or abilities from genes.

 

[Opoponax]

The only way to avoid driving the whole nation into a ditch would be to convince millions of Republican voters that they are wrong, and I just don't see how that's possible. Decades of indoctrination have made them completely immune to facts or reason.

This^ hits the nail on the head.

It's the people, not the politicians.

One of the great presumptions that democracy rests on is that the people will be informed enough to cast an intelligent vote.

One need go back no farther than 2000. Bush/Cheney truly fucked things up in just four short years to the point that it should have rendered the GOP a smoking ash heap, scooped up and dumped into history's dustbin. Following that, all the lies that Obama was going to destroy the country was completely disproven by reality.

Any person should have been able to admit that all the fear mongering about Obama simply wasn't true. It doesn't take a herculean intellectual effort to notice the difference between the right wing scream machine and reality.

But then Trump got elected. Over 60,000,000 Americans voted for him. Sixty-fucking-million.

A democracy cannot survive that kind of overwhelming stupidity. Yes, the right wing propaganda machine in the form of Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. is strong and relentless, but that shouldn't render so many people so intellectually bereft such that Trump should've ever gotten closer to the White House than as a tourist on a visit there.

Barring some unforeseeable turnaround, the U.S. is going to end up like Russia; a formerly great power whose only relevance lies in the fact that they have a shit ton of nukes.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

It’s worth noting that Trump supporters at the time of the election only constituted about 25% of the total population. And the reason I keep bringing up Clinton’s victory is because it not only topped that in votes counted, it blew that out of the water in votes intended, but for various non-partisan reasons were either not cast or not counted (e.g., gerrymandering; various election fraud tactics; “Hillary is a lock/Trump can’t win, so I didn’t bother to vote”; the still not measured impact of Russian interference; the Sanders zombie civil war; etc., etc., etc.).

The point being that there never was any ideological shift in the country. Even if you ignore all of the factors, a 40,000 vote differential—in any other instance—would be statistically non-existent, falling well within the over/under margin.

Now add into the mix the numbers of Trump supporters that have seen what is going on and awakened out of whatever stupor they may have been under. I believe the latest approval polls show that among previous supporters, the numbers are down by some ten percent and those are just the ones who will admit it.

The problem at this point is more Dunning-Kruger and a strong denial mechanism. They just don’t want to be proved wrong, but again, you can see their “tells” in their increasing desperation.

Regardless, the country ideologically never moved and we are seeing that being borne out again and again in the various state and special elections of late and will likely see more of it in November, but it’s not a sea change as it is a sea correction; a boat that got hijacked and we’re in the process of killing off the hijackers. Or, rather, they’re in the process of self-immolation as one after another have been pinned down and pleaded out.

The only remaining question, of course, is how Mueller will go after Trump and it seems quite clear that his approach has been to very slowly tighten the noose from the outside in, so that Trump has nowhere to go but into the noose.

But it’s a clean up job, not a grass roots movement. This should not have happened based on any number of different metrics, the least of which was ideological.

 

[braces_for_impact]

The problem as it stands though with the number of voters that are actually involved in the process is that even with these low numbers of support (in the '40's) Trump could still win reelection in 2020.

 

[Trausti]

The only way to avoid driving the whole nation into a ditch would be to convince millions of Republican voters that they are wrong, and I just don't see how that's possible. Decades of indoctrination have made them completely immune to facts or reason.

This^ hits the nail on the head.

It's the people, not the politicians.

One of the great presumptions that democracy rests on is that the people will be informed enough to cast an intelligent vote.

One need go back no farther than 2000. Bush/Cheney truly fucked things up in just four short years to the point that it should have rendered the GOP a smoking ash heap, scooped up and dumped into history's dustbin. Following that, all the lies that Obama was going to destroy the country was completely disproven by reality.

Any person should have been able to admit that all the fear mongering about Obama simply wasn't true. It doesn't take a herculean intellectual effort to notice the difference between the right wing scream machine and reality.

But then Trump got elected. Over 60,000,000 Americans voted for him. Sixty-fucking-million.

A democracy cannot survive that kind of overwhelming stupidity. Yes, the right wing propaganda machine in the form of Limbaugh, Fox News, etc. is strong and relentless, but that shouldn't render so many people so intellectually bereft such that Trump should've ever gotten closer to the White House than as a tourist on a visit there.

Barring some unforeseeable turnaround, the U.S. is going to end up like Russia; a formerly great power whose only relevance lies in the fact that they have a shit ton of nukes.

Good grief. Every partisan likes to pretend that they are so smart and their political opposition is so dumb. Likewise, their political opposition thinks they are so smart and you are so dumb. Just because someone votes differently than you doesn't mean you are better, or more intelligent, or more informed. Plenty of dumb people voted for Obama and Hillary Clinton. And saying that the US is turning into Russia is embarrassingly laughable.

 

[Trausti]

To my mind, the only way you can have a meritocracy that doesnt become an aristocracy is if you restrict or abolish inheritance.

So how do you prevent children from inheriting their parents' genes?

Adoptive parent income has almost no impact on adoptive child income.

Why do you imagine that it might be in any way necessary or desirable to prevent children from inheriting their parents' genes?

I am genuinely surprised that this is how you interpreted my post. Children are the products of their parents and intelligence and behavior are highly heritable. Any political goal to root out generational meritocracy is thus at war with nature. Most millionaires are self-made. Who is and who is not in the 1% changes all the time. It is an attractive myth that all will be better if we stop parents from passing on material wealth to their children. If parents passed on high intelligence and good behaviors their children will be more likely to accumulate their own wealth, power, position, etc., simply because they are their parents' children.

 

[Koyaanisqatsi]

The problem as it stands though with the number of voters that are actually involved in the process is that even with these low numbers of support (in the '40's) Trump could still win reelection in 2020.

How? He did not win the vote; he won a technicality that hinged entirely on a minuscule voting differential in three “blue” states and that almost exclusively due to uneducated whites who normerly voted Democrat, but this time shifted due primarily to a combination of latent racism (i.e., “no one is paying attention to my white needs”), sexism (i.e., “women can’t be President. Full stop”) and the Comey effect—i.e., the catch-all effect of decades of lies about Hillary; the overwhelming bad press about Hillary; the coordinated Russian and Trump hacks and attacks against Hillary; the Sanders zombie civil war against Hillary also boosted by the Russians and Trump and the GOP—all of which combined to cause unprecedented numbers of late-voting undecideds to be swayed just enough by Comey’s allegedly unintended October surprise.

Iow, all factors that won’t be present in 2020 even if Trump were to survive unindicted until then. The only way he became President is through a massive amount of cheating and then only by the most minuscule of differentials in certain counties that now know what happened to them and what a complete clusterfuck Trump’s administration has been.

It’s not about core supporters. Forget they exist as they will always exist. It’s about the swing that swung to Trump last minute who will now no longer have any of those reasons in place in 2020. Unless we run Oprah, I guess.

Hillary Clinton won the election in all but one albeit primary manner. Americans wanted Hillary over Trump by millions of votes (not just a minuscule percentage). When you include the other 20-40 million intended votes that—again, for non-partisan reasons—were not cast, but nevertheless still count in measuring the ideological “pulse,” you understand that it was Trump that was the blip and is now being corrected, not some sort of fundamental problem inherent to all Americans.

This was the right’s (white’s) last ditch effort and to achieve it they had to collude with Russia; openly appeal to nazis; call Mexicans rapists and Muslims/Immigrants terrorists; grab pussies; suppress millions of minority votes; change laws; close voting stations; etc, etc, etc.

Iow, they had to be the absolute worst of the worst and pull out ALL the stops—including treasonous acts, ffs—and they STILL could not beat Hillary. What happened was a miracle (in their eyes; a nightmare in ours) just barely slipping by.

I don’t know what it is about the psychology behind “win” or “lose” being an all or nothing binary, but it’s got to stop. Hillary isn’t President because of a razor thin paper cut that took Herculean efforts to accomplish, not a game-changing machete hack from a blunt blade that can just keep on hacking away unfettered. In so doing, she holds the second place record for raw votes—beating every single white candidate in US history—while running as a Dem (and first female) in an election that followed a two-term Dem administration (who also happened to be the first black POTUS).

Iow, impossible odds all the way around and she still beat them. Nate Silver calculated the chances of what happened (Clinton wins popular vote; Trump wins electoral) at just 10.6%. And since then, Trump has only gone significantly down in approval, not up.

Trump is the death knell, not the clarion bell.