Reposting some comments I just put on a JVL thread:
Trumpy intellectuals say they want to trim back the "administrative state" in order to restore democratic accountability -- which is fine as far is it goes. The promoters of Schedule F will say it's about letting a "duly elected president" enact his own agenda as the Constitution allows…
Reposting some comments I just put on a JVL thread:
Trumpy intellectuals say they want to trim back the "administrative state" in order to restore democratic accountability -- which is fine as far is it goes. The promoters of Schedule F will say it's about letting a "duly elected president" enact his own agenda as the Constitution allows.
But when Donald Trump is the hero of that project -- and when Trump loyalists applaud playing hardball to prevent a Democratic president from enacting his agenda -- one has to suspect that something other than democratic accountability is at its heart. It looks more like: "A president who will do what I want should not be limited in any way -- or held accountable for illegal acts."
Trump himself clearly has an expansive view of presidential powers & immunities, and obviously believes that federal employees owe personal allegiance to him. His elite defenders aren't bothered by it. Instead, they've attacked those who insist that the president is not supposed to be a monarch.
Among hard-core Trumpites are people who suggest that democracy itself is problematic in that it allows the wrong kinds of people to gain power. And unlike much of America, they don't identify Trump as the wrong kind of person. Also in MAGA-land one can find a belief that the Constitution is defective insofar as it's informed by Enlightenment liberalism and doesn't give religion a dominant place in public life, and it allows cultural changes they dislike.
So if you delve into the world of those saying “We must restore and defend the American constitutional order," you may come upon a fantasy of repealing essential features of the Constitution and putting in place a different kind of governance.
The line of thinking for the promoters of anocracy/authoritarianism seems to be a resentment backlash against the post-college economic class who control everything and treat people with lower levels of information literacy and wealth than they do like second class citizens. Welp, on a long enough timeline of defining people by education and wealth--which the entire way our country works enforces socially, economically, and romantically--you get massive horizontal inequality in society that is defined around economic and educational class, and when the number of "losers" in that system exceeds a certain majority percentage of the base population then you're already on the slow road toward anocracy via class-based inequality leading to horizontal inequality.
In my opinion, the only way you avoid this kind of class-based resentment from developing in the first place is to have better parenting from folks in the upper classes. What we've had since the 1970's is an economic competition where one half of the middle class continues to concentrate wealth from generation to generation by having their kids go to college and eventually marry like-minded college grads, thereby concentrating the inheritances of both post-college families into the next generation of their offspring. When enough middle class parents have done this at scale, it breaks the meritocracy by creating a class of millennials who can buy not only their own way through life with wealth and social capital, but the lives of all their children as well. The new generation of the 9.9% who keeps the 90% below them aren't changing their ways, they're doubling down on their parents' fear of falling out of the middle class and so they're doubling down on the greedy behavior it takes to construct a dual-diploma/dual-income family that will *definitely* be middle class, especially once they start inheriting wealth when their parents die off.
The fear of losing the level of decadent living these kids grew up comfortable with is generating the greed that keeps a lot of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes off of their okay-to-date-and-potentially-marry-someday list simply because they aren't smart enough or don't make enough money. THAT is treating other people like second class citizens as part of the culture, and THAT is the kind of culture that breeds horizontal inequality by class. The horizontal inequality that emerges as a result of lifestyle choices made by the post-college middle class creates insane levels of class-based resentment, and when that class-based resentment starts to build communities of resentment online they will eventually act out violently because they have no other peaceful recourse. You can't FORCE the post-college middle class to treat the people they consider beneath them with more respect (that has to come from within), but you CAN punish the shit out of them with a fucked up government if you get enough anti-elitist votes together and bring about some good old fashioned anocracy and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the millennial progressive post-college class keeps doing literally everything in its power to widen that wealth gap and keep the economic losers so far out of their families that they don't even have to smell them, so I wouldn't expect the anocratic populism to go anywhere anytime soon.
I've watched the educational and economic winners of my millennial cohort from back home in Queens, NY intermarry across class over the last 10 years. They are selling out harder than their boomer parents did while simultaneously pretending to give a shit about wealth inequality (they're all post-college progressives mostly working in medicine or finance). I don't know a single person from back home who had a college degree and a job that rakes in more than $75k/year and chose to marry someone who makes less than them and doesn't have a college degree. Folks THIS is how we both widen the wealth and education gap generation-to-generation until the people who are left out of that "rising tide that lifts all boats" decide that if their boat is never going to be floated because of the Economic Big Lie ("try hard and you'll succeed") was just a line used by the wealthy to keep the folks who didn't marry into their worlds in check culturally. Well, once the people getting played by the winners figure out that they're been being told that it's actually just raining right now while the economic winners are pissing on their heads generation to generation. Things will get worse politically and economically for everyone who isn't a member of the top 10% in the generations ahead, mostly because that top 10% keeps bogarting the best jobs and spouses for themselves and their kids and just expect things to stay peaceful while everyone who isn't them are losing their pathways for better lives for their kids. Bold move Cotton, lets see what kind of world your kids are going to grow up in 15 years from now. The populists of tomorrow are going to hate your kids even more than the populists of today hate you. They'll have 15 years to grow their rage at your kids while stocking up on increasingly deadly firearms that you can't ban anymore because they already took control of all of those levers at the state level after the AWB expired while the people they hate were getting real decadent and complacent about the world they were living in. Things will get worse from here if present trends continue, not better. "With great power (education and wealth), comes great responsibility." When the people with the power act irresponsibly with it on a long enough timeline, physical strength and force of will start to make a comeback against education and wealth as a means of finding success in life and enforcing cultural change on society. At least that's what studying human history has taught me.
Oh good grief. Education has been the tried and true most accessible way to escape from the ghetto. College grads, in spite of everything, are still more likely to have better incomes than high school grads. Most employers require college even for relatively mundane jobs. Asians are considered the "model immigrants" precisely because of their emphasis on education. Your chances for success are still much better if your "try hard" than if you do not.
The question of treating all people with respect is a different one.
You didn't learn all that from studying human history. You heard it from guys like Ross Douthat promoting yet another form of radicalization. People have always married other people they felt they had more in common with. Unnecessarily attributing malfeasant motivations contributes to your own brand of self-admitted dangerous radicalization.
The problem of the current record income disparity is yet a third question.. See Nick Hanauer: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/ Your implied solutions are completely impractical. It would make more sense for the government to stop subsidizing the obscenely wealthy such as oil companies and let them pay their own way. Employers such as Walmart should pay a full-time wage high enough that their employees don't need SNAP, etc. These taypayer-funded programs are yet another subsidy for businesses that should pay their own expenses including wage expenses instead of pocket the additional profit gained by passing wage expenses to the taxpayer. The estate-tax exemption should not have been doubled to $11 million.
Finally, America is the richest country on earth. Even the "lowest" class worker contributes to that prosperity. I can agree that children should be taught to respect that contribution. For example, people demean garbage men, but instead teach the children how important it is there is someone who picks up the garbage every week, and that the garbage man deserves respect for his work. All citizens should share in the prosperity of the richest country in the world simply because they are citizens. I liked Yang's promotion of UBI. The money is there, but it is locked up in the coffers of people like Elon Musk.
You have a number of partial points, but the overarching principle needs work.
"Education has been the tried and true most accessible way to escape from the ghetto."
I disagree with this simply because escaping the ghetto via education is at least partially dependent on things like:
1) what *type* of degree one attained--engineers, nurses, mathematicians, programmers, etc. vs non-STEM fields that pay significantly less post-college
2) the corporate reputation of the university one attained that degree from (if it has a rep at all)
3) How much money one had to take out in loans to attend university--a factor of how much money their parents have and are willing to spend
4) How smart the student is on entrance exams compared to the peers he's competing against to get into the desired colleges--also a factor of time/money due to how many kids are put onto test prep versus those whose families don't have the time/money
5) Extra-curricular activity is now a fucking recorded entrance metric as to whether or not kids should be given admission to top competitive schools
^All of this is to say that even the "meritocracy" in the *education system* is broken, and since it's the pipeline feeder to America's best jobs and marriages and family net worth, having a broken meritocracy pipeline produces broken meritocrats who get put in charge of BIG things and then fuck them up without consequence.
In addition to the meritocracy being broken by familial wealth-gaming, the benefactors of this broken meritocracy marry only across or above class to concentrate wealth and bless their kids. Folks like you come up with the bullshit cultural excuse of "like marries like" without understanding that when the rich marry the rich, the result IS the wealth inequality that we pretend is a result of a meritocracy that supposedly separates us into productive vs non-productive, but the reality is that when rich marries rich and concentrate wealth, they buy their kids way through the pay-to-play "meritocracy" that simply reinforces generational wealth inequality while pretending to solve it.
Keep pretending this is about "like marries like" as if these people don't have any agency or a choice. They're better informed than most of us. Occupy Wall Street was *11* years ago. Did these people NOT get the fucking message? Do we have to do some worse shit next time before they collectively say "oh, we fucked up and really need to change our culture and how we look at others before things get way way worse for us." You're just defending their pay-to-play access and wealth-mating and pretending that the wealth inequality we live with is a natural outcome rather than a collection of personal choices made by these people and their kids across the country.
Go read Matthew Stewart's "The 9.9%" if you want a take on this same stuff that doesn't come from Douthat or me. I promise you'll find all the statistics you need to change your views if you read that book. Otherwise we're going to continue to live in a world where the scribe class is driving the wealth inequality that fuels anocratic populism. Unequal systems only last so long before the social construct dissolves and the rule of law becomes just another casualty of the power imbalances kept alive in this country by the economic winners who can't possibly be bothered to think about the country and their disenfranchised citizens more than their own family's wealth maintenance so that their kids can win the next round of the rat race that they already own.
Your five points do not really matter. A college degree, any degree, has become a "requirement" for almost any decent job with better pay. Without education, minorities cannot even begin to think about escape, and you sound like you want to deny it to them. Minorities know this and thus push education. Look at all descendants of slaves in congress. Education was the first step. Of course, they want to pass on what they have accomplished to their kids and grandkids.
The main advantage the college-educated have is knowing their way around around the system and the ability to guide their kids. High schools guidance counselors are supposed to provide this same guidance to working-class kids whose parents cannot provide that guidance.
Folks like me? You know nothing about me. The fact is people marry people they feel they have much in common with. That doesn't necessarily make them carbon copies of each other. Education is just one axis. The other fact is people marry people who intersect their life somehow. When more woman started going to college, naturally men began to meet more college-educated women.
Here is another fact: Society needs all sorts of jobs to maintain itself----like garbage men. ditch diggers, and a whole assortment of so-called "unskilled" labor. One reason so many college grads cannot actually get the higher income jobs they think they deserve is simply because there are far more college grads than the number of those aspirational jobs. It is one reason why employers can get away with requiring a college degree for jobs that should not require one, like bank teller. The same sort of education "inflation" happened with high school. Finally high school became compulsory.
Meritocracy never separated productive from nonproductive. In fact, it could be argued that a stock broker is far less productive than a ditch digger as far as contribution to society. A marriage with money is not necessarily a "best" marriage. Women especially have tolerated very bad marriages for the sake of economic stability when a divorce can even now impoverish women with the education and resume to be high earners especially if they have kids.
I have always promoted respect for others. And I already gave a number of suggestions for dealing with high income disparity. Short of Marxism, you are never going to achieve equality of outcome, and Marxism has been perverted to make some people more equal than others wherever it has been tried.
I am not "defending" anything. I believed I addressed income inequality. Our various economic policies that relentlessly redistribute money from the bottom to the top could be fixed. It is strange the number of working class people who want to abolish the estate tax, and otherwise support the same policies that redistribute their wealth upwards. For example, we did abolish the estate tax which affects a couple thousand people per year whose estates won't even miss it. The working class rejoiced without realizing that the same bill paid for it by removing stepped-up basis which negatively affects millions of people per year.
Nick Hanauer: "You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when. .... The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts.
What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too. ..... [Seattle's minimum wage law] happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees. We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn’t have to make up the difference. "
I read the article and agree with its premises. I've also long called for a bottom-up economy that focuses on maximizing the purchasing power of the consumer class so that they can move the economy via maximized domestic consumption. All I'm saying is that marriage used to be a way up the economic ladder (I've cited stats for this) and is increasingly not, even as young people wait longer to get married on average now than before. These aren't kids marrying their college sweethearts by and large. These are young professionals free to find and fall in love with whoever, but are increasingly narcissistic and want people just like them in their lives. Well, you don't get to societal harmony by only ever sticking to people just like you when it comes to building families. Instead of building bridges across class you're raising moats. What you end up with is more economic incest that breeds higher degrees of wealth inequality down-generation.
In prior generations, marrying the perfect "best friend" that you had so much in common with was a luxury good. Most people didn't marry their best friends. Nowadays most of the post-college class does do exactly that, and as a result, we get economic and cultural incest that segregates society via class and that affects our politics. How many post-college progressives do you know right now marrying non-college conservatives? That shit used to happen A LOT more even back in the 70's after the libs/cons were at each other's throats in the 60's. Nowadays? Good luck finding a post-college progressive woman willing to marry a non-college conservative man. Goooooood fucking luck lol. If we can't respect each other enough to fuck and marry each other then there's *no way* we're going to respect each other in politics. Getting the left and right to start cooperating in politics starts with their voters respecting each other enough to fuck and marry each other across tribe and class. When that respect breaks down, the politics break down. Lets see how far we get to go with this whole hating each other to the point of not being able to start families together experiment (shrugs).
I don't want to deny minorities access to higher education at all. All I'm saying is that minorities from poor communities typically don't get good education because of shit like white flight and property taxes funding the quality of schooling you get locally. Shit, the rich families send their kids to private school anyway to get a leg up on everyone else's because the public school classes are too big and there aren't enough teachers or rooms. Why aren't there enough teachers and rooms? Because the housing values there won't cover the property tax revenues to fund those solutions. Why won't the housing values cover it? Because rich people don't live there because the crime is too high. Why is the crime so high? Because the school system sucks and doesn't produce hardly anyone who can make it into the competitive colleges. It's a self-perpetuating cycle that nobody wants to fix, mostly because the rich people who could fund a good school district won't marry the broke single moms living in high-crime neighborhoods--even though they could totally afford to. No, they'd rather do the easy work of marrying someone just as successful as they are and keeping their future offspring as far as humanly possible away from those broke single moms near that shitty school district. Rich people could rescue these communities by marrying into them and moving into them and building these communities up. Instead, they'd rather show off the rich daughter they married who is a nurse anesthesiologist and got discounted fake tits. That's a rich people problem that poor communities refuse to call out. If you're not willing to challenge the privileged for their station then your children will be destined to live as their indentured servants. The people with the education and financial power in this country are *selfish* and don't give a flying fuck about the working class. That's why they won't fuck or marry them once they're in their late 20's/early 30's. I don't know how much clearer I can make this for you dude lol. Rich kids of a feather stick together. That's the way it is until we make them shift their culture by calling out their disgusting fucking culture of only ever fucking each other so they can bless up the next generation of trust fund babies just like their parents did.
Even young professionals tend to marry someone who intersects with their life somehow. Why do you think marriage is a problem now. Since the dawn of history, people have been marrying pretty much "within their class" whether by their choice or because of an arranged marriage. What is exactly the difference now? You are dreaming if you think marrying down will save society You are never going to get the numbers you need. Better to improve everyone's lot with wide-ranging economic policies that don't make a woman's economic stability or prosperity depend on some man.
There are not actually as many trust find babies in the US as you think. Only about 1% of beneficiaries inherit wealth via a trust fund. The median inheritance is about $300,000. Just because a family has established a trust fund does not mean they are wealthy. A lot of time the only asset in the trust fund is the house. You are building a radicalized worldview out of stereotypes, not facts.
I mean, if we don't give a shit about classism because it's been going on "since the dawn of time" then why should we care about racism since that's been going on since the dawn of time and continuously reemerges?
If we can decide to tackle racism and make it *not okay* as a cultural artifact then we can do the same thing with classism. We just choose not to. Classism leads to wealth inequality via wealth-mating, and if that's not something you can recognize as being destructive to society in the form of growing the wealth inequality generation to generation then I don't know what to tell you man.
I'm not advocating that women's economic stability should depend on some man, and I'm not sure how you got to reading it that way. Frankly, I think more women who are doctors--and are thereby already financially independent--should marry fewer doctors. If all we got from the sexual revolution women getting better jobs just so that they could play egoist and marry someone just as successful as they are because they care more about personal status than they do about greater society, then I'm not sure it was a great tradeoff for all of society. If they're going to do the same wealth-hoarding shit the men do by marrying across or up then they're just as culpable in growing wealth inequality as the shitbag men who have been doing it all this time. Now the power women of the world get to be just as shitty and decadently indifferent as the power men they hated all this time. It's like they finally got the power they wanted and just basically copied the bad shit the power men they hated were doing. Now we're doubly-fucked with wealth inequality and power-mating because it is coming from both sexes now instead of just dudes.
We can keep this up for as long as it goes. I don't care. I won't be the primary victim of the anocracy that comes because rich people with power couldn't fucking get right. I hope they enjoy the pitchforks that are coming for them in the years ahead. They've done everything in their power to earn them. People like them make me wish democracy was coming to an end so that they wouldn't have this bullshit system of fucked up laws to protect their systematic greed. Fuck em dude. At least if democracy goes out the window these people might become open game. I'll be just as indifferent about their lack of physical security and freedoms as they were about their own greed back when times were good. What good is democracy when it insolates and protects greed ass people and their decadent bullshit while so many others struggle and suffer?
You are deliberately missing the point. You have taken legitimate concerns and turned them into yet another version of chauvinistic economic control of women. Same with your abortion discussion. That became just another version of if the women doesn't agree with the MAN'S choice to keep the baby or abort. then the financial burden either way is all on her. YOU said that well-off men should charitably "lift up" women in poverty by marring them. Marital arguments would eventually devolve to the man saying, 'Hey you would still be dirt poor without me."
You also exaggerate the extent of the inequality in the LARGER society. The huge disparity is between the tiny fraction at the top and everyone else. For example, the average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received). However, the vast, vast majority of workers are median workers on a pay continuum. There are about 200,000 CEOs in the US. If every CEO married a poor person, the household is still in the top 1%.. There are 37 MILLION people in poverty in the US. The top 10% are by definition only 10% of all adults. 27% of US adults are of typical marrying age. 10% of 27% is a mere 2.7%. You would need 100% compliance with your plan to lift just 2.7% out of poverty. Historically and mathematically it simply won't work.
I agree that classism is destructive. Never said anything else. However, history teaches that you are never going to voluntarily get the solution you propose at a scale large enough to make a difference. Only wide-ranging economic policies that do not include a subtle sexual quid pro quo will do that. Your radical idea is actually dangerous. You sound like Greiten in his RINO ad with your open game comment. And people are not all that discerning with their pitchforks. Hawley knew that on January 6. That's why he ran. He knew the mob would not even recognize him. Your "don't come after me. I married a poor woman" won't save you either.
We have learned that every Trump supporter who says "America is a republic, not a democracy," is not simply ill-informed. They are speaking aspirationally. As often as they fling "chi-com" at anyone who disagrees with them, the People's REPUBLIC of China is what they want for America.
Republican/fascist propaganda peddlers leaders taught the mouthbreathing base the "constitutional republic" line so they could mindlessly regurgitate a justification for getting the presidency while receiving several million fewer votes.
1. Our Constitution doesn't establish a direct democracy in which citizens vote on every policy. For the most part, citizens only vote for the people who will make policy - or who will delegate it to executive agencies, staffed by people with more knowledge of the issues at hand than the average elected rep (to say nothing of the average voter) is likely to have.
2. Our Constitution codifies protections for the rights of minorities against pure majority rule. Surely you wouldn't want to throw those out in favor of pure democracy..
Are people who say "America is a democracy" aspiring to have a country like the "DEMOCRATIC People's Republic of Korea," or the old "German DEMOCRATIC Republic"?
I am not sure how your comment is relevant to mine. I am saying that trump supporters who say that the US is not a democracy have shown by their actions that they mean to gt rid of democracy as we know it. That is why concerned citizens say that democracy is at stake in the midterms.
It's relevant because the U.S. is in fact structured as a representative republic, not a pure democracy. Pointing that out doesn't mean that one wants a country like the People's REPUBLIC of China, any more than saying "we have a democratic republic" means you want something like the DEMOCRATIC People's Republic of Korea or the German DEMOCRATIC Republic.
If you think there's something sinister about the word "republic," I can make an equally plausible case that "democratic" is sinister because the Norks call themselves that.
I knew all that when I wrote my comment. Read it again. The people pointing out that the "US is a republic, not a democracy" is not me, but people we all took to be disingenuously ignoring the representative part.. they really mean, as indicated by their actions, that they would just as soon get rid of the democracy part. I never implied there was anything sinister about the word "republic." You seem to freighted my comment with a whole bunch of assumptions I neither expressed nor implied.
II recall when many people on the left, claiming to be committed to "real" democracy, praised or defended (or at least refused to criticize) some of the "Democratic people's republics" that were actually oppressive dictatorships that purported to bring about equality, but never really did.
While some people on the left gave a pass to Communists, that was never the DOMINANT faction of the party. Trumpist rule the Republican establishment, who even now, cannot admit 2020 was a legit election.
I have never seen any of the America is a republic folks talk about how we have fundamental civil rights regardless of the majority intent ( at least in theory) is the one of the benefits of not being a pure democracy by the strictest definition.
In practice, I have seen every politician that quotes the America is a republic is using it diminish the fact that a majority (52%-53%) of Americans are affiliated Democrat but how much harder it is for Democrats to win power at national level due to Electoral College, the caping of the total house representatives, and state based Senate system.
Or the dilution of political power of the the Super majority of Americans that live in large population states.
The people who are using the America is a republic are involved in an othering technique trying to justify the inequitable distribution of political power that is getting worse instead of better. It's a dog whistle or maybe even out in the open human whistle saying that the people you don't agree with don't deserve equal political power and opportunities.
And I am not okay with that. And they shouldn't be given quasi intellectual benefit of the doubt.
Oh and I agree with you that a lot of countries official titles of republic versus democracy doesn't actually reflect the reality of the situation.
That is why this talk of the definition of words without context or nuance gets silly.
If you've near heard anyone say that having protected constitutional rights is a virtue of having a constitutional republic rather than a pure democracy, maybe your range of reading & listening is too narrow, I have certainly read and heard it.
I won't dispute the point that Republicans have disproportionate influence in the Electoral College & the Senate, but that isn't an inevitable consequence of the U.S. being, in fact, a representative republic and not a pure democracy. I also think there's a lot of cynicism in the GOP use of that advantage.
At the same time, I don't assume that the 52-53% you refer to would always respect the rights & interests of the minority unless the system was structured to require it.
Oh I am fundamentally glad that we have rights that are supposed to be unalienable and not subject to the whims of majority rule. I never assume my civil rights are perfectly safe unless clearly codified.And the best thing about not being a pure democracy.
I would also say that modern life is complicated enough that having technical experts make regulations.
Having geographical representation rather the population representation in theory helps prevent succession movements. And there is a lot of evidence that the Senate distribution helps bring federal funding to areas that would most likely be overlooked which helps us be one country at least in theory.
And you could be right about needing to expand my reading range. Twitter's character limit is not great for nuanced debate.
But the big problem is our undemocratic institutions are reinforcing each other (Electoral College, Senate (particularly with the filibuster) , Supreme Court) into an ever increasing undemocratic spiral.
And those who like to talk about how the America is a republic are increasing that undemocracy rather than trying to prevent it because they benefit from it.
Also apparently the only pure form of direct democracy exists only in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell, Innerrhoden and Glarus.
So assuming people mean pure democracy when they mean the US is a democracy is a bit disingenuous.
The truth is that both statements are correct the US is a republic and a democracy. So it's a bit of a Rorschach test what you choose to emphasize.
And I think the authors point is the people who but in to correct that the us is a republic not a democracy especially when it's to highlight the downsides of a republic (like unequal political power) not the upside (Constitutionally Protected rights) well it's pretty telling what they prioritize.
I will also say that the last time I was aware of the the republic versus democracy terminology debate exploded was the House debate to make the District of Columbia a state. . . And at least the "it's a republic" side at least to me really emphasized the undemocratic aspects.
And DeSantis is all about this. He wrote a book about it. Thiel and his acolytes, too. They believe that democracy threatens THEIR liberty and freedom to reach the heights of capitalism. Read that Substack post that was going around yesterday about Thiel. Tim did a terrifying “Not My Party” about Thiel a few months ago. I can’t quit thinking about it.
The truly hilarious part about Thiel is that he continues to give huge amounts of money to candidates who EXPLICITLY want to toss his marriage into a shredder and say it undermines "Judeo-Christian Family Values"--Masters, Vance, etc. For someone supposedly fantastically book-smart, he is just as fantastically people-dumb.
Exactly. I doubt that most MAGA extremists actually think much about democracy, but there are certainly NatCon enthusiasts and SCOTUS justices that want it dismantled.
The odd thing is: people in that orbit also complain that the establishment has been too protective of "elites" at the expense of ordinary people. That's the central rhetorical theme of Trumpism.
But for the mega-wealthy who favor Trump and promote Trump-aligned candidates, the problem is that the wrong elites have been in charge. Trump adopted a populist pose as a way of aggrandizing himself, and the other wealthy Trumpites may be doing the same thing.
Reposting some comments I just put on a JVL thread:
Trumpy intellectuals say they want to trim back the "administrative state" in order to restore democratic accountability -- which is fine as far is it goes. The promoters of Schedule F will say it's about letting a "duly elected president" enact his own agenda as the Constitution allows.
But when Donald Trump is the hero of that project -- and when Trump loyalists applaud playing hardball to prevent a Democratic president from enacting his agenda -- one has to suspect that something other than democratic accountability is at its heart. It looks more like: "A president who will do what I want should not be limited in any way -- or held accountable for illegal acts."
Trump himself clearly has an expansive view of presidential powers & immunities, and obviously believes that federal employees owe personal allegiance to him. His elite defenders aren't bothered by it. Instead, they've attacked those who insist that the president is not supposed to be a monarch.
Among hard-core Trumpites are people who suggest that democracy itself is problematic in that it allows the wrong kinds of people to gain power. And unlike much of America, they don't identify Trump as the wrong kind of person. Also in MAGA-land one can find a belief that the Constitution is defective insofar as it's informed by Enlightenment liberalism and doesn't give religion a dominant place in public life, and it allows cultural changes they dislike.
So if you delve into the world of those saying “We must restore and defend the American constitutional order," you may come upon a fantasy of repealing essential features of the Constitution and putting in place a different kind of governance.
The line of thinking for the promoters of anocracy/authoritarianism seems to be a resentment backlash against the post-college economic class who control everything and treat people with lower levels of information literacy and wealth than they do like second class citizens. Welp, on a long enough timeline of defining people by education and wealth--which the entire way our country works enforces socially, economically, and romantically--you get massive horizontal inequality in society that is defined around economic and educational class, and when the number of "losers" in that system exceeds a certain majority percentage of the base population then you're already on the slow road toward anocracy via class-based inequality leading to horizontal inequality.
In my opinion, the only way you avoid this kind of class-based resentment from developing in the first place is to have better parenting from folks in the upper classes. What we've had since the 1970's is an economic competition where one half of the middle class continues to concentrate wealth from generation to generation by having their kids go to college and eventually marry like-minded college grads, thereby concentrating the inheritances of both post-college families into the next generation of their offspring. When enough middle class parents have done this at scale, it breaks the meritocracy by creating a class of millennials who can buy not only their own way through life with wealth and social capital, but the lives of all their children as well. The new generation of the 9.9% who keeps the 90% below them aren't changing their ways, they're doubling down on their parents' fear of falling out of the middle class and so they're doubling down on the greedy behavior it takes to construct a dual-diploma/dual-income family that will *definitely* be middle class, especially once they start inheriting wealth when their parents die off.
The fear of losing the level of decadent living these kids grew up comfortable with is generating the greed that keeps a lot of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes off of their okay-to-date-and-potentially-marry-someday list simply because they aren't smart enough or don't make enough money. THAT is treating other people like second class citizens as part of the culture, and THAT is the kind of culture that breeds horizontal inequality by class. The horizontal inequality that emerges as a result of lifestyle choices made by the post-college middle class creates insane levels of class-based resentment, and when that class-based resentment starts to build communities of resentment online they will eventually act out violently because they have no other peaceful recourse. You can't FORCE the post-college middle class to treat the people they consider beneath them with more respect (that has to come from within), but you CAN punish the shit out of them with a fucked up government if you get enough anti-elitist votes together and bring about some good old fashioned anocracy and authoritarianism. Meanwhile, the millennial progressive post-college class keeps doing literally everything in its power to widen that wealth gap and keep the economic losers so far out of their families that they don't even have to smell them, so I wouldn't expect the anocratic populism to go anywhere anytime soon.
I've watched the educational and economic winners of my millennial cohort from back home in Queens, NY intermarry across class over the last 10 years. They are selling out harder than their boomer parents did while simultaneously pretending to give a shit about wealth inequality (they're all post-college progressives mostly working in medicine or finance). I don't know a single person from back home who had a college degree and a job that rakes in more than $75k/year and chose to marry someone who makes less than them and doesn't have a college degree. Folks THIS is how we both widen the wealth and education gap generation-to-generation until the people who are left out of that "rising tide that lifts all boats" decide that if their boat is never going to be floated because of the Economic Big Lie ("try hard and you'll succeed") was just a line used by the wealthy to keep the folks who didn't marry into their worlds in check culturally. Well, once the people getting played by the winners figure out that they're been being told that it's actually just raining right now while the economic winners are pissing on their heads generation to generation. Things will get worse politically and economically for everyone who isn't a member of the top 10% in the generations ahead, mostly because that top 10% keeps bogarting the best jobs and spouses for themselves and their kids and just expect things to stay peaceful while everyone who isn't them are losing their pathways for better lives for their kids. Bold move Cotton, lets see what kind of world your kids are going to grow up in 15 years from now. The populists of tomorrow are going to hate your kids even more than the populists of today hate you. They'll have 15 years to grow their rage at your kids while stocking up on increasingly deadly firearms that you can't ban anymore because they already took control of all of those levers at the state level after the AWB expired while the people they hate were getting real decadent and complacent about the world they were living in. Things will get worse from here if present trends continue, not better. "With great power (education and wealth), comes great responsibility." When the people with the power act irresponsibly with it on a long enough timeline, physical strength and force of will start to make a comeback against education and wealth as a means of finding success in life and enforcing cultural change on society. At least that's what studying human history has taught me.
Oh good grief. Education has been the tried and true most accessible way to escape from the ghetto. College grads, in spite of everything, are still more likely to have better incomes than high school grads. Most employers require college even for relatively mundane jobs. Asians are considered the "model immigrants" precisely because of their emphasis on education. Your chances for success are still much better if your "try hard" than if you do not.
The question of treating all people with respect is a different one.
You didn't learn all that from studying human history. You heard it from guys like Ross Douthat promoting yet another form of radicalization. People have always married other people they felt they had more in common with. Unnecessarily attributing malfeasant motivations contributes to your own brand of self-admitted dangerous radicalization.
The problem of the current record income disparity is yet a third question.. See Nick Hanauer: https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/ Your implied solutions are completely impractical. It would make more sense for the government to stop subsidizing the obscenely wealthy such as oil companies and let them pay their own way. Employers such as Walmart should pay a full-time wage high enough that their employees don't need SNAP, etc. These taypayer-funded programs are yet another subsidy for businesses that should pay their own expenses including wage expenses instead of pocket the additional profit gained by passing wage expenses to the taxpayer. The estate-tax exemption should not have been doubled to $11 million.
Finally, America is the richest country on earth. Even the "lowest" class worker contributes to that prosperity. I can agree that children should be taught to respect that contribution. For example, people demean garbage men, but instead teach the children how important it is there is someone who picks up the garbage every week, and that the garbage man deserves respect for his work. All citizens should share in the prosperity of the richest country in the world simply because they are citizens. I liked Yang's promotion of UBI. The money is there, but it is locked up in the coffers of people like Elon Musk.
You have a number of partial points, but the overarching principle needs work.
"Education has been the tried and true most accessible way to escape from the ghetto."
I disagree with this simply because escaping the ghetto via education is at least partially dependent on things like:
1) what *type* of degree one attained--engineers, nurses, mathematicians, programmers, etc. vs non-STEM fields that pay significantly less post-college
2) the corporate reputation of the university one attained that degree from (if it has a rep at all)
3) How much money one had to take out in loans to attend university--a factor of how much money their parents have and are willing to spend
4) How smart the student is on entrance exams compared to the peers he's competing against to get into the desired colleges--also a factor of time/money due to how many kids are put onto test prep versus those whose families don't have the time/money
5) Extra-curricular activity is now a fucking recorded entrance metric as to whether or not kids should be given admission to top competitive schools
^All of this is to say that even the "meritocracy" in the *education system* is broken, and since it's the pipeline feeder to America's best jobs and marriages and family net worth, having a broken meritocracy pipeline produces broken meritocrats who get put in charge of BIG things and then fuck them up without consequence.
In addition to the meritocracy being broken by familial wealth-gaming, the benefactors of this broken meritocracy marry only across or above class to concentrate wealth and bless their kids. Folks like you come up with the bullshit cultural excuse of "like marries like" without understanding that when the rich marry the rich, the result IS the wealth inequality that we pretend is a result of a meritocracy that supposedly separates us into productive vs non-productive, but the reality is that when rich marries rich and concentrate wealth, they buy their kids way through the pay-to-play "meritocracy" that simply reinforces generational wealth inequality while pretending to solve it.
Keep pretending this is about "like marries like" as if these people don't have any agency or a choice. They're better informed than most of us. Occupy Wall Street was *11* years ago. Did these people NOT get the fucking message? Do we have to do some worse shit next time before they collectively say "oh, we fucked up and really need to change our culture and how we look at others before things get way way worse for us." You're just defending their pay-to-play access and wealth-mating and pretending that the wealth inequality we live with is a natural outcome rather than a collection of personal choices made by these people and their kids across the country.
Go read Matthew Stewart's "The 9.9%" if you want a take on this same stuff that doesn't come from Douthat or me. I promise you'll find all the statistics you need to change your views if you read that book. Otherwise we're going to continue to live in a world where the scribe class is driving the wealth inequality that fuels anocratic populism. Unequal systems only last so long before the social construct dissolves and the rule of law becomes just another casualty of the power imbalances kept alive in this country by the economic winners who can't possibly be bothered to think about the country and their disenfranchised citizens more than their own family's wealth maintenance so that their kids can win the next round of the rat race that they already own.
Your five points do not really matter. A college degree, any degree, has become a "requirement" for almost any decent job with better pay. Without education, minorities cannot even begin to think about escape, and you sound like you want to deny it to them. Minorities know this and thus push education. Look at all descendants of slaves in congress. Education was the first step. Of course, they want to pass on what they have accomplished to their kids and grandkids.
The main advantage the college-educated have is knowing their way around around the system and the ability to guide their kids. High schools guidance counselors are supposed to provide this same guidance to working-class kids whose parents cannot provide that guidance.
Folks like me? You know nothing about me. The fact is people marry people they feel they have much in common with. That doesn't necessarily make them carbon copies of each other. Education is just one axis. The other fact is people marry people who intersect their life somehow. When more woman started going to college, naturally men began to meet more college-educated women.
Here is another fact: Society needs all sorts of jobs to maintain itself----like garbage men. ditch diggers, and a whole assortment of so-called "unskilled" labor. One reason so many college grads cannot actually get the higher income jobs they think they deserve is simply because there are far more college grads than the number of those aspirational jobs. It is one reason why employers can get away with requiring a college degree for jobs that should not require one, like bank teller. The same sort of education "inflation" happened with high school. Finally high school became compulsory.
Meritocracy never separated productive from nonproductive. In fact, it could be argued that a stock broker is far less productive than a ditch digger as far as contribution to society. A marriage with money is not necessarily a "best" marriage. Women especially have tolerated very bad marriages for the sake of economic stability when a divorce can even now impoverish women with the education and resume to be high earners especially if they have kids.
I have always promoted respect for others. And I already gave a number of suggestions for dealing with high income disparity. Short of Marxism, you are never going to achieve equality of outcome, and Marxism has been perverted to make some people more equal than others wherever it has been tried.
I am not "defending" anything. I believed I addressed income inequality. Our various economic policies that relentlessly redistribute money from the bottom to the top could be fixed. It is strange the number of working class people who want to abolish the estate tax, and otherwise support the same policies that redistribute their wealth upwards. For example, we did abolish the estate tax which affects a couple thousand people per year whose estates won't even miss it. The working class rejoiced without realizing that the same bill paid for it by removing stepped-up basis which negatively affects millions of people per year.
Nick Hanauer: "You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state. Or an uprising. There are no counterexamples. None. It’s not if, it’s when. .... The model for us rich guys here should be Henry Ford, who realized that all his autoworkers in Michigan weren’t only cheap labor to be exploited; they were consumers, too. Ford figured that if he raised their wages, to a then-exorbitant $5 a day, they’d be able to afford his Model Ts.
What a great idea. My suggestion to you is: Let’s do it all over again. We’ve got to try something. These idiotic trickle-down policies are destroying my customer base. And yours too. ..... [Seattle's minimum wage law] happened because we reminded the masses that they are the source of growth and prosperity, not us rich guys. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers—and need more employees. We reminded them that if businesses paid workers a living wage rather than poverty wages, taxpayers wouldn’t have to make up the difference. "
Read the link. https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-pitchforks-are-coming-for-us-plutocrats-108014/ Again, what you are talking about is just another sort of dangerous radicalization. All radicals have at least a nugget of legitimate grievance (except the J6 rioters--the election was fine). Your cures are worse than the illness.
I read the article and agree with its premises. I've also long called for a bottom-up economy that focuses on maximizing the purchasing power of the consumer class so that they can move the economy via maximized domestic consumption. All I'm saying is that marriage used to be a way up the economic ladder (I've cited stats for this) and is increasingly not, even as young people wait longer to get married on average now than before. These aren't kids marrying their college sweethearts by and large. These are young professionals free to find and fall in love with whoever, but are increasingly narcissistic and want people just like them in their lives. Well, you don't get to societal harmony by only ever sticking to people just like you when it comes to building families. Instead of building bridges across class you're raising moats. What you end up with is more economic incest that breeds higher degrees of wealth inequality down-generation.
In prior generations, marrying the perfect "best friend" that you had so much in common with was a luxury good. Most people didn't marry their best friends. Nowadays most of the post-college class does do exactly that, and as a result, we get economic and cultural incest that segregates society via class and that affects our politics. How many post-college progressives do you know right now marrying non-college conservatives? That shit used to happen A LOT more even back in the 70's after the libs/cons were at each other's throats in the 60's. Nowadays? Good luck finding a post-college progressive woman willing to marry a non-college conservative man. Goooooood fucking luck lol. If we can't respect each other enough to fuck and marry each other then there's *no way* we're going to respect each other in politics. Getting the left and right to start cooperating in politics starts with their voters respecting each other enough to fuck and marry each other across tribe and class. When that respect breaks down, the politics break down. Lets see how far we get to go with this whole hating each other to the point of not being able to start families together experiment (shrugs).
I don't want to deny minorities access to higher education at all. All I'm saying is that minorities from poor communities typically don't get good education because of shit like white flight and property taxes funding the quality of schooling you get locally. Shit, the rich families send their kids to private school anyway to get a leg up on everyone else's because the public school classes are too big and there aren't enough teachers or rooms. Why aren't there enough teachers and rooms? Because the housing values there won't cover the property tax revenues to fund those solutions. Why won't the housing values cover it? Because rich people don't live there because the crime is too high. Why is the crime so high? Because the school system sucks and doesn't produce hardly anyone who can make it into the competitive colleges. It's a self-perpetuating cycle that nobody wants to fix, mostly because the rich people who could fund a good school district won't marry the broke single moms living in high-crime neighborhoods--even though they could totally afford to. No, they'd rather do the easy work of marrying someone just as successful as they are and keeping their future offspring as far as humanly possible away from those broke single moms near that shitty school district. Rich people could rescue these communities by marrying into them and moving into them and building these communities up. Instead, they'd rather show off the rich daughter they married who is a nurse anesthesiologist and got discounted fake tits. That's a rich people problem that poor communities refuse to call out. If you're not willing to challenge the privileged for their station then your children will be destined to live as their indentured servants. The people with the education and financial power in this country are *selfish* and don't give a flying fuck about the working class. That's why they won't fuck or marry them once they're in their late 20's/early 30's. I don't know how much clearer I can make this for you dude lol. Rich kids of a feather stick together. That's the way it is until we make them shift their culture by calling out their disgusting fucking culture of only ever fucking each other so they can bless up the next generation of trust fund babies just like their parents did.
Even young professionals tend to marry someone who intersects with their life somehow. Why do you think marriage is a problem now. Since the dawn of history, people have been marrying pretty much "within their class" whether by their choice or because of an arranged marriage. What is exactly the difference now? You are dreaming if you think marrying down will save society You are never going to get the numbers you need. Better to improve everyone's lot with wide-ranging economic policies that don't make a woman's economic stability or prosperity depend on some man.
There are not actually as many trust find babies in the US as you think. Only about 1% of beneficiaries inherit wealth via a trust fund. The median inheritance is about $300,000. Just because a family has established a trust fund does not mean they are wealthy. A lot of time the only asset in the trust fund is the house. You are building a radicalized worldview out of stereotypes, not facts.
I mean, if we don't give a shit about classism because it's been going on "since the dawn of time" then why should we care about racism since that's been going on since the dawn of time and continuously reemerges?
If we can decide to tackle racism and make it *not okay* as a cultural artifact then we can do the same thing with classism. We just choose not to. Classism leads to wealth inequality via wealth-mating, and if that's not something you can recognize as being destructive to society in the form of growing the wealth inequality generation to generation then I don't know what to tell you man.
I'm not advocating that women's economic stability should depend on some man, and I'm not sure how you got to reading it that way. Frankly, I think more women who are doctors--and are thereby already financially independent--should marry fewer doctors. If all we got from the sexual revolution women getting better jobs just so that they could play egoist and marry someone just as successful as they are because they care more about personal status than they do about greater society, then I'm not sure it was a great tradeoff for all of society. If they're going to do the same wealth-hoarding shit the men do by marrying across or up then they're just as culpable in growing wealth inequality as the shitbag men who have been doing it all this time. Now the power women of the world get to be just as shitty and decadently indifferent as the power men they hated all this time. It's like they finally got the power they wanted and just basically copied the bad shit the power men they hated were doing. Now we're doubly-fucked with wealth inequality and power-mating because it is coming from both sexes now instead of just dudes.
We can keep this up for as long as it goes. I don't care. I won't be the primary victim of the anocracy that comes because rich people with power couldn't fucking get right. I hope they enjoy the pitchforks that are coming for them in the years ahead. They've done everything in their power to earn them. People like them make me wish democracy was coming to an end so that they wouldn't have this bullshit system of fucked up laws to protect their systematic greed. Fuck em dude. At least if democracy goes out the window these people might become open game. I'll be just as indifferent about their lack of physical security and freedoms as they were about their own greed back when times were good. What good is democracy when it insolates and protects greed ass people and their decadent bullshit while so many others struggle and suffer?
You are deliberately missing the point. You have taken legitimate concerns and turned them into yet another version of chauvinistic economic control of women. Same with your abortion discussion. That became just another version of if the women doesn't agree with the MAN'S choice to keep the baby or abort. then the financial burden either way is all on her. YOU said that well-off men should charitably "lift up" women in poverty by marring them. Marital arguments would eventually devolve to the man saying, 'Hey you would still be dirt poor without me."
You also exaggerate the extent of the inequality in the LARGER society. The huge disparity is between the tiny fraction at the top and everyone else. For example, the average gap between CEO and median worker pay jumped to 670-to-1 (meaning the average CEO received $670 in compensation for every $1 the worker received). However, the vast, vast majority of workers are median workers on a pay continuum. There are about 200,000 CEOs in the US. If every CEO married a poor person, the household is still in the top 1%.. There are 37 MILLION people in poverty in the US. The top 10% are by definition only 10% of all adults. 27% of US adults are of typical marrying age. 10% of 27% is a mere 2.7%. You would need 100% compliance with your plan to lift just 2.7% out of poverty. Historically and mathematically it simply won't work.
I agree that classism is destructive. Never said anything else. However, history teaches that you are never going to voluntarily get the solution you propose at a scale large enough to make a difference. Only wide-ranging economic policies that do not include a subtle sexual quid pro quo will do that. Your radical idea is actually dangerous. You sound like Greiten in his RINO ad with your open game comment. And people are not all that discerning with their pitchforks. Hawley knew that on January 6. That's why he ran. He knew the mob would not even recognize him. Your "don't come after me. I married a poor woman" won't save you either.
We have learned that every Trump supporter who says "America is a republic, not a democracy," is not simply ill-informed. They are speaking aspirationally. As often as they fling "chi-com" at anyone who disagrees with them, the People's REPUBLIC of China is what they want for America.
Republican/fascist propaganda peddlers leaders taught the mouthbreathing base the "constitutional republic" line so they could mindlessly regurgitate a justification for getting the presidency while receiving several million fewer votes.
It's when they leave out the constitutional in constitutional republic that I start to get concerned.
And personally what I have seen from GOP politicians.
I wouldn't go that far.
1. Our Constitution doesn't establish a direct democracy in which citizens vote on every policy. For the most part, citizens only vote for the people who will make policy - or who will delegate it to executive agencies, staffed by people with more knowledge of the issues at hand than the average elected rep (to say nothing of the average voter) is likely to have.
2. Our Constitution codifies protections for the rights of minorities against pure majority rule. Surely you wouldn't want to throw those out in favor of pure democracy..
Are people who say "America is a democracy" aspiring to have a country like the "DEMOCRATIC People's Republic of Korea," or the old "German DEMOCRATIC Republic"?
I am not sure how your comment is relevant to mine. I am saying that trump supporters who say that the US is not a democracy have shown by their actions that they mean to gt rid of democracy as we know it. That is why concerned citizens say that democracy is at stake in the midterms.
It's relevant because the U.S. is in fact structured as a representative republic, not a pure democracy. Pointing that out doesn't mean that one wants a country like the People's REPUBLIC of China, any more than saying "we have a democratic republic" means you want something like the DEMOCRATIC People's Republic of Korea or the German DEMOCRATIC Republic.
If you think there's something sinister about the word "republic," I can make an equally plausible case that "democratic" is sinister because the Norks call themselves that.
I knew all that when I wrote my comment. Read it again. The people pointing out that the "US is a republic, not a democracy" is not me, but people we all took to be disingenuously ignoring the representative part.. they really mean, as indicated by their actions, that they would just as soon get rid of the democracy part. I never implied there was anything sinister about the word "republic." You seem to freighted my comment with a whole bunch of assumptions I neither expressed nor implied.
II recall when many people on the left, claiming to be committed to "real" democracy, praised or defended (or at least refused to criticize) some of the "Democratic people's republics" that were actually oppressive dictatorships that purported to bring about equality, but never really did.
While some people on the left gave a pass to Communists, that was never the DOMINANT faction of the party. Trumpist rule the Republican establishment, who even now, cannot admit 2020 was a legit election.
I have never seen any of the America is a republic folks talk about how we have fundamental civil rights regardless of the majority intent ( at least in theory) is the one of the benefits of not being a pure democracy by the strictest definition.
In practice, I have seen every politician that quotes the America is a republic is using it diminish the fact that a majority (52%-53%) of Americans are affiliated Democrat but how much harder it is for Democrats to win power at national level due to Electoral College, the caping of the total house representatives, and state based Senate system.
Or the dilution of political power of the the Super majority of Americans that live in large population states.
The people who are using the America is a republic are involved in an othering technique trying to justify the inequitable distribution of political power that is getting worse instead of better. It's a dog whistle or maybe even out in the open human whistle saying that the people you don't agree with don't deserve equal political power and opportunities.
And I am not okay with that. And they shouldn't be given quasi intellectual benefit of the doubt.
Oh and I agree with you that a lot of countries official titles of republic versus democracy doesn't actually reflect the reality of the situation.
That is why this talk of the definition of words without context or nuance gets silly.
If you've near heard anyone say that having protected constitutional rights is a virtue of having a constitutional republic rather than a pure democracy, maybe your range of reading & listening is too narrow, I have certainly read and heard it.
I won't dispute the point that Republicans have disproportionate influence in the Electoral College & the Senate, but that isn't an inevitable consequence of the U.S. being, in fact, a representative republic and not a pure democracy. I also think there's a lot of cynicism in the GOP use of that advantage.
At the same time, I don't assume that the 52-53% you refer to would always respect the rights & interests of the minority unless the system was structured to require it.
Oh I am fundamentally glad that we have rights that are supposed to be unalienable and not subject to the whims of majority rule. I never assume my civil rights are perfectly safe unless clearly codified.And the best thing about not being a pure democracy.
I would also say that modern life is complicated enough that having technical experts make regulations.
Having geographical representation rather the population representation in theory helps prevent succession movements. And there is a lot of evidence that the Senate distribution helps bring federal funding to areas that would most likely be overlooked which helps us be one country at least in theory.
And you could be right about needing to expand my reading range. Twitter's character limit is not great for nuanced debate.
But the big problem is our undemocratic institutions are reinforcing each other (Electoral College, Senate (particularly with the filibuster) , Supreme Court) into an ever increasing undemocratic spiral.
And those who like to talk about how the America is a republic are increasing that undemocracy rather than trying to prevent it because they benefit from it.
Also apparently the only pure form of direct democracy exists only in the Swiss cantons of Appenzell, Innerrhoden and Glarus.
So assuming people mean pure democracy when they mean the US is a democracy is a bit disingenuous.
The truth is that both statements are correct the US is a republic and a democracy. So it's a bit of a Rorschach test what you choose to emphasize.
And I think the authors point is the people who but in to correct that the us is a republic not a democracy especially when it's to highlight the downsides of a republic (like unequal political power) not the upside (Constitutionally Protected rights) well it's pretty telling what they prioritize.
I will also say that the last time I was aware of the the republic versus democracy terminology debate exploded was the House debate to make the District of Columbia a state. . . And at least the "it's a republic" side at least to me really emphasized the undemocratic aspects.
Senator Mike Lee was big on America is a republic. But is now asking people to vote for him like America is a democracy. . .. Hm
hahahha
And DeSantis is all about this. He wrote a book about it. Thiel and his acolytes, too. They believe that democracy threatens THEIR liberty and freedom to reach the heights of capitalism. Read that Substack post that was going around yesterday about Thiel. Tim did a terrifying “Not My Party” about Thiel a few months ago. I can’t quit thinking about it.
The truly hilarious part about Thiel is that he continues to give huge amounts of money to candidates who EXPLICITLY want to toss his marriage into a shredder and say it undermines "Judeo-Christian Family Values"--Masters, Vance, etc. For someone supposedly fantastically book-smart, he is just as fantastically people-dumb.
Exactly. I doubt that most MAGA extremists actually think much about democracy, but there are certainly NatCon enthusiasts and SCOTUS justices that want it dismantled.
The odd thing is: people in that orbit also complain that the establishment has been too protective of "elites" at the expense of ordinary people. That's the central rhetorical theme of Trumpism.
But for the mega-wealthy who favor Trump and promote Trump-aligned candidates, the problem is that the wrong elites have been in charge. Trump adopted a populist pose as a way of aggrandizing himself, and the other wealthy Trumpites may be doing the same thing.
You can't get more undeservingly elite than Trump. He had a mega rich father and inherited a wealthy profitable business. He is a big spoiled baby.