This is because the party will ostracize you if you don't conform. You can't survive in a liberal environment if you don't support abortion and you can't survive in a conservative environment if you support gun control.
Your friends will argue with you, you'll be surrounded by memes making fun of people who believe what you do. There's incredible social forces to conform to the exact set of beliefs espoused by political parties, which are mostly set by corporate interests.
It's a huge part of what the Republican party has struggled with: There's both the clear vision of conservative values and ideals... and Donald Trump. You can practically see on people's faces trying to reconcile their beliefs with party platform. And there's a massive amount of pressure to stay in line with everyone else.
The core disagreements seem more moralistic and personal security issues rather than corporate pandering. The gun manufacturing industry is small and weakly compared to the real players--healthcare, finance, tech, MIC. While the left loves to paint the NRA as evil--and it is a bit, and grossly mismanaged--it is at its core a grassroots organization; rural people and some others will not consent to giving up 2A or being disarmed, full stop. Likewise there are no shadowy "Big Abortion" interests propping up that side of things, nor am I able to think of anyone poised to profit by forbidding it.
That said, the no-compromise issues really do have the effect of shoving all the important stuff into the background...
> Likewise there are no shadowy "Big Abortion" interests propping up that side of things, nor am I able to think of anyone poised to profit by forbidding it.
In fact, there are numerous pro-life groups who directly benefit from moving the ball around but never actually winning the game.
The same is true of race relations organizations, animal cruelty activists, the NRA, etc. With all of these, the spoken platform may or may not be a good thing, but
the largest stakeholders would lose tremendous money and influence if they ever actually won.
You're describing pretty standard "mission creep." I.e. "if the problem this organization exists to address is fixed, fundraising efforts stop and staff must be fired. But we don't want to fire people, so we must perpetually move the goalposts to keep the momentum going." MADD is the classic example here.
> benefit from moving the ball around but never actually winning the game.
This is exactly how you win elections. If you gain enough single-issue voters you never need to debate the complex issues that might split your base.
It's important to portray the situation as if they are losing. Pro-Choice is a great example. Abortion-right are frequently portrayed as "under attack and imminently about to be destroyed" despite almost every SCOTUS judge publicly saying it's "settled law".
It is a political form of George Orwell's endless war, and the ultimate distraction.
Corporations don't need to fund them directly as politicians are happy to play this game so that corporations can fund THEM directly since the political attention is placed elsewhere.
> rural people and some others will not consent to giving up 2A or being disarmed, full stop.
I read some “gun people” discussing this. An argument was that they were not single issue voters, but rather they were a foundational issue voters.
That all rights (to him/them) are supported by the idea the public is a counter force to the government. Fundamental before all other issues because is the prevention of the gov backtracking or infringing on anything “down stream”. So...
That if a politician supported the disarming of civilians that was indeed a full stop to other thoughts on abortion or the foreign trade or etc.
It was a good read really, because calling them a single issue voter may give the wrong impression, which is good for no one coming to the table on other issues.
Tanks are fully legal to own. So are the cannons. Not thinking a tank is a good buy doesn’t make a gun rights advocate any less of a foundation issues voter.
I’m pretty sure you dismissing the conversation I reported as “identity politics” is exactly what the argument was warning against; people misreading opponents of gun control as some surface level thing that can be hand waved away.
Also, “identity politics” isn’t right. No one is born a gun owner, nor can you identify one in a line up or nod to one walking down the street unless they want you to know they are “one of us”. Nor does owning a gun preclude you from another group like being white or black might, although there is a long running AK vs AR debate, but I think that’s pretty much been settled!
I'm not making an argument about the effectiveness of small arms, I'm saying if you punt on tanks, you aren't actually an absolutist about the right to bear arms.
> I'm saying if you punt on tanks, you aren't actually an absolutist about the right to bear arms.
Black's Law Dictionary defines the word arms as "anything that a man wears for his defense, or takes in his hands as a weapon."
The word "arms" in the right to keep and bear arms explicitly meant weapons that could be carried by a single infantryman. It was never about (and still isn't about) tanks, or cannon, or warships, or nukes. So no, you don't have to be committed to allowing tanks to be fully keen on the right to keep and bear arms.
(if you still doubt this, focus on the word "bear". You can't "bear" a tank, if anything a tank bears you.)
That said, it actually happens to be totally legal for private citizens to own a tank in most countries, including the US. They're expensive, get terrible gas mileage, probably not street-legal to drive on the freeway, unlikely to fit in your garage and the neighbors are bound to complain if you fire the main gun...but you totally could own one (and drive it around your own private property) if so inclined.
I don't think that any American civilians own a working MANPADS, regardless of willingness to undergo background checks or pay for tax stamps. And that's explicitly designed for a single infantryman. I'm not well versed in the constitutional law but there seems to be a principle that extremely dangerous weapons will not be owned by civilians in the US, regardless of historical precedents, textualism, originalism, or any other contrary principles.
I'm also curious about the constitutional ramifications of the ban on civilian ownership of machine guns manufactured after 1986. Could any class of small arms be gradually banned by specifying a date of manufacture cutoff for legality in a similar way? Seems contrary to a plain reading of the 2a to phase out weapons this way but I know that my layman's plain reading is worth very little here.
Actually it may also be about warships; the US has language related to the issuing of letters of marque embedded within the Constitution, and issued them from the nation's creation up through the civil war.
You could register the gun and make it fully legal to use under the NFA in which case yes, you could possess shells and even fire them. There's paperwork, but it's possible and some people do it. Um, here:
(Making, say, a 50 caliber gun legal under the NFA is indeed somewhat more onerous than owning a shotgun. And a gun rights advocate certainly could care about trying to make it less so but they're not required to care about it because - as I said above - a tank doesn't count as "arms".)
Even say free speech absolutists don’t pretend that the interpretative process doesn’t matter. Pretty much everyone recognizes say that fraud was never protected as free speech.
“Nearly alter the executive succession contrary to the election results by application of violence to high government officials”, would be more technically accurate.
The photos/videos of people milling about after members and staffers narrowly escaped those in the crowd clearly intending violence combined with a rather intense propaganda effort aimed at minimizing the autocoup attempt have effectively spread a false narrative of the attack, though.
It will take some time yet to unravel what happened, and more importantly, who permitted it to happen that way. Their arms didn't enter into the equation, and frankly it is shocking that violent insurrectionists at the Capitol weren't met by a hail of rubber bullets or worse.
"and frankly it is shocking that violent insurrectionists at the Capitol weren't met by a hail of rubber bullets or worse."
For the cynics and BLM activists and more, this is seen as obvious (no rubber bullets, no real resistance). The police forces will tear gas (illegal in warfare), rubber bullet, etc. black lives matter protestors, but won't dare go against white protestors / insurrectionists. We still have a 'uge race issue here. We just cover it up with policies. In reality (aka both insurrection and protests) we clearly see the two groups treated completely different.
> This is because the party will ostracize you if you don't conform.
Is it? When I debate some partisans, I can't find bedrock logic under their opinions. It's like the opinions are pointers to beliefs they receive from an authority figure.
They are unconvinceable--because the decision maker isn't in the room.
Probably also worth nothing that our political view point(s) may, to a certain extent, be biologically determined:
> Studies have found that subjects with conservative political views have larger amygdalae and are more prone to feeling disgust. Liberals have larger volume of grey matter in the anterior cingulate cortex and are better at detecting errors in recurring patterns. Conservatives have a stronger sympathetic nervous system response to threatening images and are more likely to interpret ambiguous facial expressions as threatening. In general, conservatives are more likely to report larger social networks, more happiness and better self-esteem than liberals. Liberals are more likely to report greater emotional distress, relationship dissatisfaction and experiential hardship and are more open to experience and tolerate uncertainty and disorder better.
I agree. Many political topics are very complex, and it is hard to independently form opinions on them. Humans rely on fallacious shortcuts all the time when making decisions, otherwise we’d be paralyzed. We would see people switching their views even without social pressures.
A book I always recommend on this topic is by Jonathan Haidt "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion"
Also, there is a page in there where Haidt hypothesized that the low agreeableness/asperger personality people actually do better in the startup world precisely because they don't fear being ostracized and thus don't engage in the groupthink showcased in the article. Peter Thiel type people. Of course that's hard to really test one way or another, but the narrative fits...
I normally avoid these political threads on HN, so made another throwaway.
I and friends have for a few years discussed the idea of freezing all gun and abortion laws in place for 20 years as a means to declawing the US parties' stranglehold on dialogue.
Entirely entirely unrealistic and would go nowhere. Both sides love their wedges. They campaign on they both saber rattle with, they make their careers on them. When they have a chance to make movement, they usually don’t, if they fixed the issue it wouldn’t raise money anymore.
Look how many people already say there is a UniParty when looking at pretty shitty things like both sides voting for Iraq war, Patriot Act, meager amounts of citizen Covid relief compared to corporate interests... so take away the wedge issues and the two parties may look far more similar.
I’d like to see viable third and fourth party options. No decent person can be entirely red or blue.
Uniparty is a bit over the top for me, but Washington Economic Consensus is near spot on. That said, you are plenty close to the mark. Subtract the wedges and it is awful bland.
I have quit responding to labels directly and nearly always move to clarity first and foremost.
Uniparty?
Usually this is met with either righteous indignation, or a hard pass, or agreement of some kind.
When I ask, "how so?", I tend to understand the other person better and have an opportunity to have a respectable, sometimes productive dialog.
Re: more parties
I agree with you. Sadly, I do not believe those party options make much sense in our current system.
And it is the system, meaning changing it will require similar effort as it does to get anything else done, so...
I feel factions, blocs, caucuses can serve a similar role. On the right, the Tea Party was quite effective. Not endorsement, just noting dynamics that apply here.
The economic left is contemplating similar ways and means.
The other tool we do have is collective action. Class type moves that can deliver very significant incentive to change.
I don’t mean to diminish the importance of “wedge” issues—but the terminology is useful for thinking about the nature of the polity. There is a center of political gravity in the country that’s somewhat left of center on economic issues, and somewhat right of center on social issues (I.e., as you say, populist): https://s.wsj.net/public/resources/images/BN-UO873_BUCKLE_8H...
> There is a center of political gravity in the country that’s somewhat left of center on economic issues, and somewhat right of center on social issues,
That center is always moving: over the last 30 years, the economic center has moved rightward (see Bill Clinton and the "Third Way", or the tax rate of the top bracket), while the social center has moved leftwards (see public opinion of interracial marriages and LGBTQ unions). On both axes, the US center is right of center, compared to the rest of the world.
I have been framing things in terms of priorities to get at this kind of thing.
Ie: Let's make sure everyone sees the doctor without going bankrupt or being denied for lack of money
, or
relitigate the SCOTUS decision gun ownership being an individual right, and like all rights, is not absolute, subject to reasonable regulation.
Pick one.
And one is all we get due to how politics currently works in our US system. As for changing it? Same priority discussion.
Without our people being able to express consensus in a potent way, we basically ignore them right now. No judgement there, just hard reality.
How do we want to play it then?
So far, these kinds of conversations have been super interesting! They often go pretty well. The core idea is being for something we have majority consensus on rather than burn time on things we don't.
Expressing all this stuff in terms of priorities could be a way to get past how toxic it all is.
What I will say is quid pro, pro. Get health care sorted and we all can have a much lower cost, lower risk conversation about guns...
Thats a real interesting thought, it really is issues like these that basically make every other actual issue fade into the background fir many voters. Of course, good luck getting it passed...
It's hardly possible with one, creating a an amendment that is somehow immune to further amendment for 20 years and constrains state's abilities to change their laws would be unlike any other amendment ever passed.
I still love the idea a little bit, federal abortion and gun laws have moved only incrementally in the last 20 years and yet they've prevented coalitions surrounding so many other pressing issues from forming.
In ancient Athens they used to try to make laws like that. They would create a penalty for bringing up certain ideas like melting down golden statues in their temples for money or proposing ideas that disasterously failed in the past. These laws had a tendency to be broken though.
You still need to account for the leap from party to community. Unless you are active in politics in a capacity that needs party support (such as running for office), you don't really care if the party ostrizes you, as long as the community does not.
I've regularly found both issues retaining liberal and conservative friends because I don't fully support the party platform of either. As long as sharing political memes of your party to the community continues, many people are outright pushing away anyone in the middle.
Bear in mind, many people's politics and values have become very aligned: If you don't support someone's views on identity issues, for instance, they may not feel they can be friends with you anymore. If you consider abortion to be literal murder, the color it places on someone who supports or has had an abortion, may make friendship similarly challenging.
You really hit the nail on the head. I've had issues even outside of politics. For whatever reason, if you don't conform to certain beliefs in a group, other members will sooner or later think you're the nail and they're the hammer.
Worth pointing out that the political spectrum isn’t a line with democrats on one extreme and republicans on the other, it stretches much further on either side and probably has more dimensions. I’d put myself much further left than the establishment democrat platform.
But your main point is right, that things like memes often serve to push people away if you’re not already in the in-group.
Nobody (ed: I mean, "few people", as of course there are non-zero people who believe this) believes abortion is literal murder. They might say they do, but if there were buildings where actual literal murder were happening it wouldn't be long before people would destroy those places. Folks would lynch abortion providers -- not one or two, but en masse. Plenty of conservative women get abortions. If it were the type of thing that led to social ostracization as a general rule, you'd see articles being written about it. It doesn't.
That's actually kind of the point of this article, as I read it: political opinions are very malleable. Tribal identification is one mechanism by which they can be changed. If the tribe decides we're cutting taxes, we change our opinion to favor cutting taxes. If the tribe decides that trans identity is extremely important, we do too. Not because of any overt pressure but simply because of natural herd and instincts.
But self-interest is an even stronger hammer with which to shape political opinions. If it is strongly in my economic best interest to get an abortion, there's a pretty decent chance I'm gonna finagle my way to believing it's OK -- at least for me -- even if I "thought it was literal murder" before. It's easy enough to do because abortion has none of the physical hallmarks of literal murder (you know, struggling, screaming victims, blood everywhere, etc.) and society clearly treats it as a different thing, no matter where in the U.S. you live. I have noticed a similar pattern whereby rich liberal friends are slightly less in favor of eating the rich than poor liberal friends, even though the Twitter crowd has pretty much decided where they stand on this issue. Self-interest is a powerful motivator! Us rich folks like to talk about all the entitlements we support but we get a little less comfortable when it comes time to talk about who pays for them.
This is just a general rule, it doesn't apply universally by any means. Even this article suggested that there's just a 15% shift in personal opinion directly after a tribe opinion change. But I guess the change grows over time too. I hadn't heard a damn thing about illegal immigrants from my conservative father until about 2016. Now sometimes it seems like every third article he sends me is on that subject.
Hey, you know another interesting thing about this: everyone hates literal murder, but somehow murderers families often -- not always, but often -- come around to forgiving them. Sometimes they forgive the murderer so hard that they come to court to support them before they're even convicted, pay for lawyers, etc. You'd almost never do that for someone who wasn't family. Self-interest, family, and tribe are extremely powerful mutators of political and even moral opinion!
Many people absolutely do believe that abortion is state-sanctioned murder and in fact there have been terror attacks against providers [1]. The ones that aren’t carrying out terrorism like this still believe that clinics and doctors are complicit in murder, they’re just smart enough to know that reacting with violence would not work to their benefit and/or just aren’t unhinged enough to do it.
> Nobody believes abortion is literal murder. They might say they do, but if there were buildings where actual literal murder were happening it wouldn't be long before people would destroy those places
The number of clinic bombings and assassinations of abortion providers in the US particularly given how few there are in slem areas demonstrates that enough people believe it to feel compelled to act.
Sure people do. There are plenty of us. Even those of us who are atheist and/or pro-LGBT. It doesn’t strictly align with parties; for instance my own views are rather liberal except for this particular issue.
> Folks would lynch abortion providers -- not one or two, but en masse
This did not happen for a lot of other viewpoints throughout history that we now consider illegal and unthinkable. Those of us who are anti-abortion consider abortion to be much the same—it will take a long time to change society’s opinion but violence is not the answer to solving the problem.
>They might say they do, but if there were buildings where actual literal murder were happening it wouldn't be long before people would destroy those places.
What if it's state sanctioned? Where were all the people destroying nazi concentration camps?
Well, the Nazi concentration camps were guarded by lots of soldiers with many guns, so that's one thing. My understanding also is that people had largely changed their opinions on whether killing Jews was actual murder by the time Hitler got around to setting up his final solution. For example, there was never a point, during Hitler's reign, where a political opposition strongly opposed to killing Jews controlled all branches of the government. (This did happen with the Republicans in 2016, and they did not stop abortion at that time, though it was within their power to do so.)
I would also just note that there are policies that have been clearly demonstrated to reduce the number of abortions, but they require a small amount of spending. I struggle to believe that someone who believes abortion is literal murder would shrink from providing e.g. free contraceptives, given the alternative. Yet Republicans tend to be opposed to these things, certainly at the legislative level. The behavior and voting patterns just don't support the claim, IMO.
It was not within Republicans’ power to stop abortion so long as Roe v. Wade is on the books. And a significant fraction of Republicans don’t oppose abortion (just as a significant fraction of Democrats do).
Packing the court and organizing a case to arrive at the correct time would seem to have been an option to do just that. Although I'm not sure the moderate Republicans could have been convinced (maybe just moderate Republicans don't believe it's murder?). So you may have me there.
Packing the court would destroy it and the country, and even if you believed abortion was murder you’d have to balance it against the suffering caused by the destruction of the rule of law.
> You can't survive in a liberal environment if you don't support abortion and you can't survive in a conservative environment if you support gun control.
Would that explain why Catholics, who, ah, generally don't support abortion, are split ~50/50 between blue and red? [1]
It's more complex than that but does work with the parent's comment. The official policy of the Catholic Church is that abortion is a terrible sin. Many other (but obviously not all) Christian churches have the same views. That does not mean that individual Catholics or their Christian brothers and sisters agree with the views of their churches on abortion or don't always agree that their religious views should be imposed on all of society. Abortion, while an important issue, is just one of thousands that church dogma preaches and there is no party that matches up to any of them completely. Some members of the church simply see the balance of other issues as being greater than the issue of abortion.
So, you are saying that when one social group you belong to (the church) has an inconsistent belief system with another social group you belong to (loose party affiliation), you pick the one that suits your personal opinion on other issues.
This begs the question - why do people pick and choose their religious dogma, but not their political dogma?
I feel that the answer to this question is 'The world is a little bit more complicated than the parent poster claims.' These claims have little predictive, or explanatory power, given this rather prominent counter-example.
People pick and choose both. What I have seen is that people generally start with what their parents taught them, but it's not that uncommon for them to end up completely different. And it changes over time. I was very much a "D" voter when I was young (as my parents were) but mostly vote "R" now. I've never been religous though (neither were my parents).
> This begs the question - why do people pick and choose their religious dogma, but not their political dogma?
Well, in a multiparty democracy (which was where the study happened; if you didn't know that going in to the article, the reference to multiple center-right parties should be a pretty big giveaway) if you dissent from a party on an issue of any salience, there's a pretty good chance there is another party available that is just like that one, except for it's view on the issue you dissent on. So, if the party fails to convince you when it changes, you stop being a party member rather than become a dissenter on the one issue.
That's less true for religions (especially religions with certain features: you aren't going to find a Church like the Roman Catholic Church including it's view of the papacy and it's historical descent, but differing on the moral parameters of abortion.)
It's also less true of parties in a system which isn't a robust multiparty democracy, which is why both major parties in the US system are big tent parties with stark internal divisions that sometimes try to paper over them to present a united front.
Probably because most people don't pick what church they belong to; their parents do that for them. While people do convert between religions, most will stay with what they grew up with and try to make things work within that framework. Sometimes that's not possible so they pick one or the other of their religion or their political ideology. Religion doesn't always lose out and my gut instinct is that it wins out more than politics does but that's more difficult to see since membership and public interaction for religion works differently than it does for political parties.
> This begs the question - why do people pick and choose their religious dogma, but not their political dogma?
Interesting possibility: Religion is a protected class, politics isn't. So people fear viewpoint discrimination (i.e. getting canceled) for diverging from the dominant political party, because that isn't protected, but not for diverging from any given religious doctrine, because that is protected.
Maybe we just need to declare the political parties to be religions. In a way they are. And it's in the same way that caused religions to be protected to begin with, isn't it?
California has some pieces of political affiliation carved out as a protected class.
It feels risky to me. Coupled to the protection of freedom of religion in the US is both the interpretation of the First Amendment and the political custom that there be a "high wall" between religion and politics. In practice, this isn't always true, but the principle serves as a counterweight to people's faith not being formally, structurally questionable.
For obvious reasons, no such high wall can exist between people's politics and politics, so making political affiliation a protected class risks giving protection of the law to things that society will greatly suffer under if they are protected (imagine if he SPLC couldn't fire a staffer who's an active Klansman).
> For obvious reasons, no such high wall can exist between people's politics and politics
I don't know if I buy it, because the purpose of the wall is to constrain people from being punished for their beliefs, which you could do just as well with politics. That isn't the same as having their beliefs questioned in a public debate -- which we already do with religion. Questioning isn't punishment. Getting fired is punishment.
> imagine if he SPLC couldn't fire a staffer who's an active Klansman
The strongest objection to a Klansman is that they commit acts of violence. But violence isn't protected speech. If they're committing acts of violence, fire them.
Whereas if your only objection is that they go home and give sermons against interracial marriage while wearing a stupid hat, isn't that kind of the point?
How is it any different than Planned Parenthood can't fire a Catholic for opposing abortion outside of work?
The larger concern is they use SPLC's money to pay for venues for those sermons, or direct SPLC's resources away from SPLC's goals because those goals are counter to the individual's politics.
Companies ought to have the right to fire people acting counter to their goals.
It's not "SPLC's money" once they've paid it to someone else for labor, any more than it was Planned Parenthood's money when a Catholic donates it to a church that gives sermons against abortion.
> Would that explain why Catholics, who, ah, generally don't support abortion, are split ~50/50 between blue and red?
American Catholics support legal abortion at pretty similar rates to the general population. [0] The Church heirarchy may not, but that’s not the population of interest.
> You can be culturally catholic and support abortion
You can be religiously Catholic and support legal abortion, and do so without dissenting on any essential doctrine (though you’d be in tension with how the heirarchy tends to apply certain important doctrines.)
If you morally support abortion, you'd be in dissent, but doctrinal dissent isn't really unheard of among Catholics (even within the heirarchy.)
>You can be culturally catholic and support abortion.
No actually, you can't. You can fit the broader definition of Christian but if you hold these views and profess to be a Catholic, you are in fact a heretic and can be excommunicated[1]. I see this fiction posted again and again on HN, and while it's not my intention to support or oppose the Church's viewpoint on this people should be educated and aware that they can't claim to be certain things if they aren't them.
This is technically correct (the best kind of correct! ;) ).
In practice, there's a wide gulf between what the Church formally establishes as dogma and the adherence of individual Catholics. It's generally resolved as the Church holding the door open for forgiveness through a person's entire life, as long as penitence is a possibility. It's rare for the Church to excommunicate an individual Catholic (or even deprive them of communion) even for very public statements regarding their support of abortion.
Sometimes, the door is held open so long the Church's view on the topic changes and forgiveness is no longer needed to align the practitioner with the Church's stance.
> if you hold these views and profess to be a Catholic, you are in fact a heretic and can be excommunicated
No, you can't, and nothing at your link supports your claim. Support for legal abortion (or the non-criminalization of anything; criminalization is not symmetric and there are cases where this wouldn't be the case for supporting criminalization of an act) is, where not obligatory, inherently a prudential judgement as criminalization always inflicts harm intentionally.
Moral support for abortion would be dissent from authoritative teaching, which is of a more serious (both doctrinally and in canon law) character, but that's an intensely different thing.
As a catholic, I would say that the catholic church has done a pretty decent job of not taking sides in politics. (Probably so as to not push anyone away from church, they dont suck people in and have growing memberships like some other denominations ). I have friends and extended family in those “newer hyper Christian” churches, and they all somehow manage to attach way more identity into their church life than any catholics I know. As well as pushing their beliefs on other people. Whereas the catholic view as I have experienced it is “you're different? Thats cool, lets be nice”. Theyre still super pro life, but i havent heard anything that makes me think the overarching catholic political stance is a one issue vote.
For a Catholic, supporting abortion by knowingly voting for it is "formal cooperation"[1] with the taking of innocent human being's lives. This is why by Canon law, not that it's always followed, politicians who support abortion should not be given communion: they are manifestly in a state of mortal sin and giving them communion is desecrating the Eucharist and causing scandal[2]. Because of this, well catechized Catholics will oppose abortion. That said, it's unproductive to be a jerk about it and the correct response for those who don't have pastoral responsibility for the individuals in question is just to pray that they realize their error and repent.
While what you say is true, what im trying to say is that my experience has been that most catholics (that i know anyway) are not “well catechized”, the church i go go has not been pressing your points, and other denominations seem to be more focused (than the catholic church) on pressing their religion into political votes and action these days.
> As a catholic, I would say that the catholic church has done a pretty decent job of not taking sides in politics.
Have you not seen the current Pope? Far more injecting in politics than the previous. Obvious in a historical perspective, this is still very hands off for the church.
A large portion of Catholics (about 35%) are Latino, who are often more socially conservative.
The European Catholics (Primarily Irish, Italian, German ancestry) are often more liberal, perhaps because historically they've lived in the urban North East.
Two things come to mind. First (and I don't know how true it is), some contemporary Catholics are not hard-line anti-abortion; second, at the end of the day you usually have a choice of D or R. You go with what lines up best. Voting for either one does not mean you lockstep agree with their position on every issue.
My mother is very anti-abortion while also being a die hard straight ticket Democrat. Not all Catholics in her social circle are the same but many are. I can't say she has a political social circle, so maybe she is able to balance her beliefs because she isn't called on them. The issues her and her friends care about tend to be about extending entitlement programs, public education, assistance to immigrants, and things of a similar nature. For these the Democrats are much more inline with their views than Republicans, which is probably how she and other Catholics like her justify supporting the pro-choice political party despite being strongly against abortion.
People flip flop on policies because they are part of social groups, not coherent ideologies. They don't perceive themselves as flip flopping, because of course they have not changed groups.
If a 'strong' leader of a group such as the President, characterizes something as positive, followers will buy it.
Especially when there is a political divide, people tend to be 'against' ideas as well, much more so if 'the other side' approves or proposes them.
If you gave any number of policy recommendations to a random group, and indicated at random they were proposed by either Republicans or Democrats, I suggest you'd get responses more consistent with group alignment than ideological alignment.
> There's both the clear vision of conservative values and ideals... and Donald Trump.
I've lived long enough to see the terms "liberal" and "conservative" morph multiple times. (You will too eventually, just watch carefully.) They've long since lost any connection to their origin in classical European political philosophy and have now become merely placeholders to give the pretense that the two major US political parties have some kind of consistent ideological (as opposed to financial) backing, which they don't.
There's a certain irony in Barry Goldwater being credited with launching the modern "conservative" movement in the US when Goldwater himself could be considered much more "libertarian" and was opposed to the policies and increasing influence of "conservative Christians" such as Pat Robertson.
Scratch either of the two parties and underneath you'll see a very loose coalition of differing, sometimes opposing interests, not a clear set of consistent, unwavering beliefs. It's an ongoing power struggle, and the political labels just reflect the currently dominant group in the power struggle.
It’s not that hard to survive having thoughts of your own, you just have to surround yourself with people that think for themselves and are ok with differences of opinion. More succinctly, separate out intolerant followers from your life.
The Battle in Seattle in 1999 was when I first became aware of opposition to globalism. At the time I was confused because I'd always been taught more connections between the peoples and nations of the world was always good. To see people who I recognized as having very similar values to my own fighting so passionately against something I had until then never questioned being good was quite the wake up call to learn more about all sides of the issue. So now it's very odd to me to see many of the same people and groups have turned into cheerleaders for globalism. The position now doesn't seem to be so much a position as an anti-position against the anti-globalist views of the rising populist groups. The speed at which it has happened is what's really surprising.
Globalism is not so much about 'connecting people'.
It mostly has a neolibaral foundation, and secondarily a governance and NGO ethos.
Anti-Globalism in the 1990's was by the Left, and they were against the WTO and mostly neoliberal world order.
Anti-Globalism today is much more complicated issue, but with the more popular versions being more or less Nationalist, anti-UN/WHO/Multilaterialism.
Personally - I think there are very good arguments on all sides of this subject and it's sad that it's ideologically aligned.
Global neoliberalism has brought zillions out of poverty, but has wicked externalizations and a lot of inequality.
Globalist institutions have a certain kind of individual corruption (think FIFA) and are also subject to the completely antithetical influences of bad actor states (think Saudi Arabia on Human Rights) etc. and finally, very susceptible to ideological institutionalization, elitism and creeping, ineffectiveness and bureaucracy.
Yet at the same time there are some parts of some orgs that are super essential. Like the WHO right now and probably the IPCC for a few reasons.
Great comment. I think globalizations problems are those of accountability at scale. I think one constant of humanity is that hierarchies / cultures / institutions will grow. So in that sense I see globalization as inevitable, but we haven't solved accountability. If we want to go the liberal route, our institutions need to be accountable for the externalities. I think this is almost impossible without backsliding into (also potentially-apocalyptic) factionalism
The whole concept of 'neoliberalism' is simply the far left being angry at literally everybody to the right of them. People from right wing nationalists, libertarians, center leftists all with diverse opinions were all simply called neoliberal. Neoliberalism has never been an actual movement or philosophy or anything coherent but rather is everything the far left doesn't like since the late 70s.
What both the left and the right complain about in their 'anti-globalist' is 'we are unhappy with the situation here' and we blame the rest of the globe. The left believes that all changes to the economy they don't like could just not effect them if you didn't have free trade. And the right, by now is basically the party of the white working class has the same issue.
This is also why the left is now the pro globalism party, they are now the party of the urban people rather then the (white) working class and cities have much fewer of the problems from change in industrial structure.
Same. I was there, and young, and righteous/whatnot. It was a mad experience that taught me a lot about media and power.
At the time, the "left" was rabidly anti-globalism and anti-GMO-those were themes. I was on a youthful anarchy kick that was informed by the archives of 80s non-leftist anarchist zine world, but also interested in economics and futurism.
As an aside wrt today: my area was tear gassed to such an extreme that I had to carry a guy a dozen blocks while throwing up ropes of phlegm and while national guard stalked through the zero-visibility beating anyone they found with what looked like long wooden dowels.
Later, helicopters lobbed flash bangs and cs gas into residential neighborhoods through which I was slowly escaping. At choke points, random people would band together to make fire barricades before escaping.
I keep hearing people say there is an attack on free speech, on platform after platform after platform. It's like a canary in a coal mine, It seems perfectly alive to me, I'll be concerned when I dont see that statement any more.
Personally, I find the government censoring the CDC, and not getting accurate information from government agencies a much larger imposition on free speech. The silencing or the Florida data scientist sharing public information that conflicted with official reports.
Why? Because the government is using legal threats to silence someone on every channel.
Still is with us rebels. How the hell free speech became counter culture I have no idea, but I’m 90% sure it has to do with almost all media in the USA being run by 6 corporations.
Real free speech is always counter cultural. You only need it when you're saying something counter to what the culture thinks.
But I'm talking about the speech itself, and you're talking about support for free speech. You'd expect support for free speech to not be counter-cultural. But when what's being expressed is counter-cultural, support for the speech may be somewhat weaker among the culture, at least among those who aren't sticklers for principle.
There are so many issues like this that have effectively flipped. It’s maddening.
Take for example the anti-war stance. As far as I know Trump is the only one continually advocating for a troop withdrawal in the Middle East. This used to be a solid progressive issue.
>Take for example the anti-war stance. As far as I know Trump is the only one continually advocating for a troop withdrawal in the Middle East.
Not to be pedantic but you're conflating two issues: being anti-war and being pro-troop presence. One of the big reasons the US has kept a troop presence in the middle east is to deal with the human cost of the instability that was created in the 2000s by those wars of choice.
I can't speak for all progressives but those that I know have both anti-war views (stop shit-stirring with Iran) and pro-troop presence (try to stabilize the region before withdrawal). I will admit that both have been going very poorly lately.
The remaining troops were there in an advisory capacity. And Trump has been trying to pull out those advisors.
The needle has been pretty steadily moving for the last 10 years, it's just been slow going. It's also debatable if the number of troops there should ever be zero if they're only acting as advisors.
Trump called for a reduction of on the ground troops, but also increased the military contractors and kept up/increased the bombing and drone strikes. That isn't an anti-war stance, it's a naked appeal to family of the military.
I find the concept of Trump "advocating" anything with regard to troops odd. Isn't military where the authority of the president is the strongest? If troops are still in the Middle East he can't very well be too against them being there.
It’s a humanitarian problem. If you have a people that will starve without food aid, will you also say it’s not the west’s problem?
Obviously the use of force and popular support for the Taliban complicates things in Afghanistan, but I believe it still needs to be looked at in terms of the real results of our actions.
Most of those people are still fighting global capitalism though. Six American tech giants, more or less, having a global monopoly on media discourse, advertising, and payment processing... Well, that's exactly what they were warning us about. I'm not a fan of Donald Trump, but the fact that half-a-dozen mega corporations can effectively silence the American president is frightening.
Silence? Or just force him to use the means of communication used by every other president in history?
Obviously there is some interesting power here that I'm not sure if I feel comfortable with Twitter having, but having to use press releases and TV speeches instead of hammering a first draft tweet out into the internet is what the vast majority of presidential communication has been
The vast majority of presidential communication took place before Twitter existed.
Every notable politician that I know of has a Twitter now, and uses it to some extent.
I truly wish DJT hadn't used twitter, like ever. But he did, and it was his main outlet, and then he was silenced on it. I personally don't think that's okay (while still supporting the idea that Twitter had the right to do that).
It's patently obvious to everyone that they're playing sides, when it's convenient. Not just enforcing their TOS or something.
Well it's the politician's own fault if they use Twitter et al to communicate. It's not like they don't have the means to make their voices heard in other ways. Imo we should ban all politicians (and police departments etc) from using platforms controlled by private entities for official communication.
He has a full time press secretary, multiple media assistants, and the white house press corps is considered elite tier journalism territory with journalists practically begging to be let in. He can walk out on camera at literally any moment, and immediately have an audience of millions. But he chooses a private platform with a TOS that he has never abided by. That's on him.
I'm skeptical, though not enough to drop $8 on the paper. The quote, "If citizens just blindly follow their party without thinking much about it..." sets of my BS detector, because it's one of those pat statements that (other) people are predictably dumb or gullible.
The first problem with saying people take positions uncritically is that you need to determine how interested they are in the subject. Assuming this was a longitudinal study, I'd want to know how much thought respondents had put into an opinion when doing the survey. The simple explanation is the 15% who flipped likely never had strong (or well-developed) opinions in the first place.
It's fairly unusual in politics to see reversals without any explanation, simply because politicians have to interact with people who are very invested in politics. And if you read those explanations charitably, most reversals aren't. For instance, government programs are sold to the public with warranties of fitness of purpose. If your welfare program was sold with such a guarantee and doesn't live up to that promise, then you're not reversing yourself to oppose it.
It's right to be skeptical of reversals and the explanations, but if you're buying into the notion that people are "blindly" following their leadership, you're probably falling for some cheap partisan rhetoric yourself.
>The quote, "If citizens just blindly follow their party without thinking much about it..." sets of my BS detector, because it's one of those pat statements that (other) people are predictably dumb or gullible.
Is it bad? I dunno. I'm sure people who are Very Rational Independent Thinkers will interpret it that way.
But maybe people aren't well informed about the issue, so they go with the group they trust on other issues, because of a shared value system. Maybe there's a public debate which convinces them, or something in the news that provides color on the issue. Or all these things together. Or something else.
Yeah, especially since the effect is only 15%. It also seems possible that public sentiment was already shifting, which caused the party to shift, which influenced the undecided 15%.
For example, if you look back now in the US, you could probably find that some Democrats started supporting gay marriage after the party changed its stance. It's also the case that the party changed its stance in the middle of a large scale shift in public opinion that was occurring.
this is a good point. I can't possibly be well-informed on every single important issue. whenever I pick an issue to dive into deeply, I find that my conclusion almost reverses with each layer of the onion that I peel back. eventually I have to stop, still wondering whether the next piece of information would change my stance again.
>But maybe people aren't well informed about the issue, so they go with the group they trust on other issues, because of a shared value system.
There is one safeguard known generally to the wise, which is an advantage and security to all, but especially to democracies as against despots. What is it? Distrust.
-Demosthenes
I mean yea, sure. But I'm not sure we should expect everyone to have done a ton of research on every issue, and for something not very hot button (like presumably support for reducing unemployment benefits in Denmark), and you have a sensible default of the party you currently like's position.
Maybe a direct democracy is the way to go... if there’s no representatives, there’s no parties. People may be more likely to make up their own minds (or at least vote for policies that would obviously help themselves).
I don't love the idea of having to vote on every single thing. There's too much to learn -- being properly informed is a full time job.
San Francisco and CA in general have a lot of "direct democracy" items on ballots (a couple dozen props each cycle) and nobody really understands more than one or two at the level they probably should. I personally have never read the full text of a CA prop, and I'm guessing most others haven't either.
> Voters can either vote directly or delegate their vote to other participants; voters may also select different delegates for different issues. In other words, individual A of a society can delegate their power to another individual B – and withdraw such power again at any time.
The obvious issue with liquid democracy is vote buying. There are various proposals to fix this (from banning to "what's the problem?") but nothing that seems to address the issue that it's really easy to corrupt.
There are quite a few permutations on liquid democracy, some of which stake out different points on openness vs. susceptibility to vote buying.
For example, you could have only people who have delegates have open votes, while those that don't have anyone delegated to them can vote or delegate secretly. This isn't much worse than our current delegative system, which admittedly does have an issue with vote-buying!
Indeed, the fact that Uber managed to straight up buy a way to undo the law to suit their business... direct democracy doesn't prevent money and influence, which are really the root of political parties.
>Indeed, the fact that Uber managed to straight up buy a way to undo the law to suit their business
Did they? Ballotpedia says that the support side outspent the oppose side 10:1, but maybe californians just like their cheap taxi/delivery service (just like they like their cheap apparel/electronics manufactured in developing countries), or they thought that AB-5 is riddled with exemptions already?
It'd be inconvenient for you, but there are some big advantages. The number of people involved is too large to be bought off by corporate interests, for example.
Politicians aren't fully informed about these issues either, there are a lot of examples where they vote laws through where it is pretty simple to deduce they haven't read the bill. The current legal framework in the US is so large and complicated nobody understands it all either, raising questions about how the politicians could even theoretically understand what they are dealing with.
The quality of the decisions would rise under direct democracy, and laws would probably become more general and the body of law would shrink to something more manageable.
I think that the scope of government has grown so big that it's impossible for representatives to know what's going on, let alone understand the domains. The problem is they're trying to do too much.
What generally happens is people who don’t understand or know effectively become random “noise” and cancel each other out. Then those who are informed/care become the “signal” and you get a pretty good representative decision in the end. Better than with politician I’d say. It’s kind of like “ask the audience” in who wants to be a millionaire..
Tim Stryker, the author of Major BBS, wrote a cover article for Boardwatch Magazine about what he called 'Superdemocracy', which was a hybrid of representative and direct democracy. Stryker was a bit of a crank with some odd views but the article does have some interesting thoughts on how to make a hybrid system work. It was written in the days of dial up, so would have been rather cumbersome to implement, but easier in this age where even many homeless have phones with data plans. I don't know how well such a system would work in practice. I suspect that it wouldn't scale well but would be interested in seeing someone give it a try on the local level to see how it turns out.
Some issues of Boardwatch are available on archive.org but I'm not sure if that particular issue is. It's been a couple of decades since I read the article so it's also possible my much younger mind thought more of it than I would if I found it again.
> People may be more likely to make up their own minds
almost nobody does this. Minds are molded by something, which, in the internet age, is extremely easy to do.
Media/Tech companies foster a narrative and narratives influence voting.
There are few people who realize this and even less who completely unplug from popular media.
I actually think we need to rethink politics in the internet age. I've been thinking about making counties (no "r") stronger and voting is more focused on local issues. The distributed nature is like federated social networks where it's hard to influence/censor the whole.
You can't really have direct democracy, specially not in a country with millions of people.
I'm from Switzerland and we have probably the most direct democracy in the world and we do have parties (many in fact) and representatives.
The direct democracy aspect however is a very important check on what the government does and it allows for grass root initiatives to get national discussion.
We are not part of the EU because of population went against the parliament on that issue. Something most other countries in Europe didn't get the option to do.
It also has some negative sides as well.
In general I would say having more parties, would help a lot. If your social circle is full of people who have slightly different parties switching party is a lot easier.
In the US the most important system is the get away from First Past the Post single election for congress and presidency. Remove primaries, use either larger districts with representative representation of some kind, or smaller districts with ranged/score/star voting. Ban the president primary and have people use range/score/star voting to select an actually popular president. This I think would eventually destroy the two party system in the US.
Seems like this might still run into the same problem. People naturally look to authority figures for what to think about the issues, and even without political parties this will still be the case.
The deeper problem is people who broadcast their political views do it to signal their identity and to feel important. I wish there was a way to decouple identity from political issues a bit more, at least for issues that aren't strictly social issues.
Maybe it’s more about authorities changing their opinions as a bloc, similar to how OPEC adjusts oil prices as a bloc? (The issue isn’t that any one oil company sets prices, but that companies form a cartel that colludes on a price at the cost of consumers)
Not when it comes to voting. You vote for someone to represent you on all issues (at least in the US). If you disagree with them on some issues, there is no way to indicate that with your vote.
To be honest you can just go with the reasoning to its logical conclusion and switch your stance depending on what gives you the most personal benefit (clout or material gain) rather than switching based on party stance. From the looks of it all ideology is artificial, imposed on you by others. And personality is the same, an artificial mask set upon yourself by random circumstance. Better free yourself to seek your own gains.
This is extremely rational. Most people probably only care about 1-2 issues, and pick a party based on that. For all the other issues, the most sensible strategy is to advocate for their party, tying to sway people who care about other issues.
That is to say - for any individual, they are part of a faction of their party. For the faction to prosper, the party must prosper. So the individual strategically should advocate for whatever the other factions want without worrying about the details too much.
Kinda confirms Scott Adams' assertion that the large majority of people do not have personal opinions per se (at least not to the degree that they think they do); they choose an "opinion package" in the sense that their main choice is which media package they choose to consume, and are subsequently assigned their opinions from that; a far more economical heuristic for having a range of complex opinions, than having to weigh each one of them individually.
A 15% shift, while quite substantive, is actually a little lower than I would've guessed. I could totally see this number shifting based on geopolitical climate, but that percentage switch is lower than it could be. Perhaps a minor silver lining?
This absolutely drives me crazy. I know so many people who simply blindly follow whatever stance their preferred party has on every issue, rather than having their own educated opinion. And since I dare to have my own views on different issues that sometimes align with one party sometimes the other, and sometimes neither, I've seen hatred from both sides.
It's worth noting that this study focuses on two Danish parties. It's honestly not clear that the magnitude of these shifts is consistent — see, for example, https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/797kzj/comment/do..., which convincingly argues that the American parties have different willingnesses to shift in order to follow party orthodox.
>their voters immediately moved their opinions by around 15% into line with their party.
Maybe I don't totally understand what 15% means here, but it sounds like the vast majority of supporters did not switch their opinions? If my interpretation is correct, this title feels very misleading, but it's also possible I'm just misunderstanding.
There is nothing wrong in switching your opinion based on facts that come to light later. Parties and their supporters have every right to do that. However, when a party wrongly or subjectively changes its position, that is when things get murky. Supporters have to either fall in line, or be silent, to be accepted as "one of them".
Political parties can be harmful because once you have made your allegiance you do not need to expend much energy to research policies and can just support your party's position.
That's why there is I think some merit to how some elections are run in Cuba where candidates essentially run as independents. Whatever the motivations of this system are I see multiple benefits:
- candidates themselves have to show policy acumen and cannot rely on party policy
- Each candidate's personal opinion is therefore more likely to be relayed to the public
- less political conformism as large parties cannot dominate
- Voters are forced to review policies every election rather than simply voting for the same party/party candidates
>Political parties can be harmful because once you have made your allegiance you do not need to expend much energy to research policies and can just support your party's position.
This isn't just limited to political parties, but group "identity" in general.
When Fox News reversed their stance, they lost half their audience.
This study seems almost like an anecdote as it only studied two issues in a single, small European country. I have a feeling the results aren't reproducible in any meaningful way.
However, this won't fit those looking for a "all people/parties are the same" narrative. One party changed their opinion by 64%, the other party was unchanged.
That's kind of expected in a robust multiparty democracy, if you are examining the universe of party members before and members after a change, because people who don't follow where the party is going leave, and the system supports variations on multiple axes.
(From the article here, I'm not sure if that's what was studied or not, and I haven't read the underlying study.)
I've been noticing this shift recently taking place with US party opinions on foreign policy. Republicans have historically been more anti-Russia and hawkish, but during the Trump presidency, Democrats started calling out Trump for getting close with Russia. The Republican voter base has also suddenly turned into a bunch of doves, getting behind Trump's calls to pull out of Syria and Afghanistan.
Something I've been trying to understand lately is Republicans' view of "Big Tech" as the new bogeyman. My impression is that Republicans are generally "business friendly", which can take on forms like a certain Midwest state giving billions in tax cuts for a TV factory to the tune of $200k+/employee, seizing land by eminent domain when necessary. And now only a couple years later you have the same party berating tech CEOs and threatening to regulate or break up Facebook and Twitter. What happened to laissez faire?
With regards to ending foreign conflicts, to me it seems more like a desire to return to America's pre-WWII isolationist position. It might be hard to imagine now, but up until Pearl Harbor there was virtually no desire among Americans to enter "Europe's" war (>90% opposed).
That isn't the only thing that Trump has flipped on Republicans. Trade issues are another...Donald Trump has more in common with the 1999 anti-WTO rioters in Seattle than he has had with any Republicans in the same time period. But in comes trump and all of a sudden Republicans and Trade Unionists are in bed together.
The problem is you people think all Republicans are the same. When there are only two parties, you get a wide variety of views funneled into those parties.
Ron Paul was very popular among Republicans. And before him Ross Perot, who basically gave Clinton the White House in 1992 by taking a huge percentage of voters who would have voted for George H.W. Bush. His #1 issue was anti-NAFTA.
They didn't "suddenly become doves" or "became anti-trade". They have always been there, but the party didn't have to listen until 2016.
I have noticed this with Republicans after the advent of Trump. Suddenly things like close ties with Russia or moral transegence, major criticisms of past democrats, either no longer mattered or were suddenly a good thing, i.e. maybe Russia is our friend after all, and character doesn't count that much. It was very strange, especially trying to persuade fellow Republicans that this was happening. I found history started getting revised after the fact, and it felt like maybe I lived in an alternate timeline.
It's shameful your comment is down voted because it speaks right to the heart of the issue.
Republicans are historically far more Hawkish on Russia, Iran etc. and with Trump was saw the tables reversed.
The answer is likely because people attune to groups and individual leaders of those groups more than ideology.
Trump supporters accepted his 'Tough on China' but 'Weak on Russia' brand of personal foreign policy essentially because he told them to. It's about him, not ideology or even ideas.
Especially with Syria, It's been equally funny watching the centrist Democrats have to push back and make big public statements in support of trying to keep the troops there and stop Trump from pulling out abruptly.
People are more consistent with the people they follow than the ideas they maintain.
"We don't want no government run healthcare, and keep your goddam hands of my medicare!" - angry person at Obama rally, 2008.
Watching the comment boards on all of the various sites, it was hilarious to see FoxNews commenters recently rally behind Trump's $2K last minute populist wrench-in-the-works veto threat/demand.
All of a sudden 'empathy for working people' became a really important issue!
It was always there of course among rank and file working class, they just needed someone 'patriotic!' to say it.
And then the other articles would lament socialism with bated breath.
I'm not taking sides here, other than to point out this one very specific and recent populist issue very viscerally demonstrated how this can happen.
I should say it's also not entirely duplicitous, the same policy can be arrived at via different principles. In particular, populist-Constitutionalism can be a funny thing when it clashes with ideology, for example, the 1st Amendment doesn't protect 'free speech' at all in the way people think it does, many are surprised to learn.
Edit: I should add, in the months leading up to the budgetary standoff, as 'one party' was pushing hard for said stimulus checks, there was no support at all among the Fox News commenting section, at least from my observance. And then when some 'other person supported it' the support was loud and clear.
It's from my personal memory of seeing the woman on the News yell at him, which I remember because I just couldn't stop laughing. Unfortunately, I can't find the reference, but while trying I did come across some references to him also talking about letters he had received to that effect.
> And then the other articles would lament socialism with bated breath.
FWIW there is a line of reasoning in which neither of these is inconsistent.
The strongest opposition to socialism is really opposition to central planning, with the consequent inefficiency and corruption that tends to imply.
Giving everybody a uniform amount of money is about the smallest amount of central planning you can have and still be said to be doing anything. The decision of what to do with the money goes to the individual rather than the party apparatchiks. It's something you can do (help people) without doing the thing you don't want to do (give power to bureaucracies).
Yes, you can try to bend that reed in the wind, but mass welfare and social assistance is fundamentally, straight up socialism.
There is a completely unambiguous divide on that issue in the regular political context - Democrats are 100% on the side of more personal stimulus, and Republicans entirely on the other side. That war plays out like clock work every budgetary period.
Trump's last minute monkey-wrench was really interesting for a whole slew of reasons beyond the scope of this, the flip-flop was crystal clear among the commenting proles.
The evidence, is of course that 'large stimulus checks' had been pushed by the Dems for months (!) leading up to the final negotiations, and nobody thought they were a good idea until 'Trump Said It'.
But that's really just the other members of the coalition fighting over the pie. If you send people checks, the money comes from somewhere. The somewhere is more taxes or less military spending or something like that. So they fight sending people money primarily because they want to use the money for something else. The opponents aren't the anti-socialist crowd, they're the pro-defense spending crowd.
Also:
> There is a completely unambiguous divide on that issue in the regular political context - Democrats are 100% on the side of more personal stimulus, and Republicans entirely on the other side.
Keep in mind that "tax cut" and "giving people money" are economically equivalent. EITC was created and expanded under Republican administrations.
Both of your comments are out of sync with crude, real-time populism.
$2K checks means "MONEY FOR ME NOW" to the proles, ideas like 'tax cut' (which FYI usually are targeted at the rich), or 'we have to pay for other things over there or' 'but the deficit is big!' - are all rational, but ultimately second order thinking. Not populist. Those matter to people 'paying attention'. Most people are not.
You're also missing the fact that it's a very poignant 'flip flop' in that for months, the 'Evil Nancy Pelosi and AOC' had been pushing for exactly that, and were ridiculed for it.
Trump's move was savvy: he wanted to put Mitch McConnel in a corner and he really did, and he was smart enough to know that his followers are not ideological and will get riled up and support pretty much whatever he says. Especially if it's 'free money'.
It's a really crystal clear example of flip flopping among the proles, in this case, purely on the basis of individual populism.
And again I'm not taking sides here, I'm not saying whether it's a good or bad idea etc. just realpolitik populist observation.
> ideas like 'tax cut' (which FYI usually are targeted at the rich), or 'we have to pay for other things over there or' 'but the deficit is big!' - are all rational, but ultimately second order thinking. Not populist. Those matter to people 'paying attention'.
But those people (i.e. McConnel) are the ones opposing the $2000. Sending the money is hugely popular with the public, including Republicans.
Also:
> 'tax cut' (which FYI usually are targeted at the rich)
The top marginal rate has been in the 35-39.6% range since 1993. And before then it was lower.
> > 'tax cut' (which FYI usually are targeted at the rich)
> The top marginal rate has been in the 35-39.6% range since 1993.
In 1993, the top 39.6% rate applied starting at $89,151 ($169,407 in 2020 dollars). In 2020, the top 37% bracket starts at $518,401. So, not only is the top rate lower, you have to be making more than 3× as much, adjusted for inflation, before you start paying it.
> And before then it was lower.
Only from 1987-1992. In 1986, it was 50%, and the top 4 brackets were 42% and up. The 42% rate cut in at $44,781 ($105,746 in 2020 dollars, lower than where the 39.6% in 1993 applied) and even the penultimate 48% rate applied from $59,671 ($140,908 in 2020 dollars, still less than the cutoff for the 1993 39.6% rate.)
At that 50% top rate? It was the result of cuts from Reagan's famous giant tax cuts; prior to that tax cut (which was applied in steps from 1981 on) the top rate was 70%.
Also, the second highest bracket now is still 35% and starts at $207,351.
But for "the rich" (e.g. Bezos) the 2.6% difference in the highest bracket is far more significant than any of the rest of it anyway, and it's a difference of 2.6%.
Meanwhile increasing the thresholds for the various rates (it wasn't just the top one) reduces the rates paid by the people who make less money.
> prior to that tax cut (which was applied in steps from 1981 on) the top rate was 70%.
Rates prior to Reagan are incomparable because the rate cuts were coupled with the elimination of massive tax loopholes that were widely exploited, to the point that the high marginal rates only existed on paper and weren't paid in practice.
Yes, McConnell and most Republicans want to avoid the $2K spend which is consistent with their ideology.
Trump's support of $2K checks is completely against policy instinct of his side. It's purely populist.
The fact so many Trump supporters support these $2K checks now that they are proposed by him, and not 'the other side' - is the clear indication of the policy flip flop among the proles.
> Yes, McConnell and most Republicans want to avoid the $2K spend which is consistent with their ideology.
It's consistent with their politics, for the reasons already mentioned. The major US political parties don't have any consistent ideology.
> Trump's support of $2K checks is completely against policy instinct of his side. It's purely populist.
Explain why Milton Friedman and others like him on "their side" supported a negative income tax, which is effectively the same thing as sending the checks.
". The major US political parties don't have any consistent ideology."
Yes they do.
You are missing the point with Milton Friedman. This is not about 'what works and what doesn't work. This isn't about ideas or their validity.
This is about populism and opinions.
The 'Right' consistently, ideologically wants 'Restrained spending, balanced budgets, possibly military spending and supply-side economics, Constitutional Originalism, fairly free markets, limited social spending.
The 'Left' wants deficit spending, demand side economics (i.e. stimulus cheques) etc. etc..
This is very, very consistent throughout the last many decades.
Donald Trump flipped the narrative by pushing for 'free money' for people, which is something 'the Left' has been pushing for hard since the start of the pandemic, and which was consistently rebuffed by the GOP - both sides consistent with their ideology.
Because Trump followers support him and don't even understand their own ideology, they think anything he says is 'Conservative' even when it's not.
So commenters in Fox News are all huff and puff about 'hard working people need that money' the day Trump made the claim, even though for months, 'the Left' had been pushing that only to rebuked by Fox News readers as being 'socialism'.
The plebes are often dumb, and believe whatever their populist leaders tell them, even if it's directly against their own supposed ideologies. This basically the nature of the article.
> The 'Right' consistently, ideologically wants 'Restrained spending, balanced budgets, possibly military spending and supply-side economics, Constitutional Originalism, fairly free markets, limited social spending.
Those things are consistent with neither one another nor the actual behavior of Republicans. How are restrained spending and profligate military spending consistent with one another, when they're opposites? When was the last Republican administration to lower the deficit or cut Social Security or Medicare?
Your friends will argue with you, you'll be surrounded by memes making fun of people who believe what you do. There's incredible social forces to conform to the exact set of beliefs espoused by political parties, which are mostly set by corporate interests.
It's a huge part of what the Republican party has struggled with: There's both the clear vision of conservative values and ideals... and Donald Trump. You can practically see on people's faces trying to reconcile their beliefs with party platform. And there's a massive amount of pressure to stay in line with everyone else.