Saying that the left spends too much effort on rhetoric might be valid criticism, but focusing on it as reasons to "walk away from the left" (which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW) is disingenuous. Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights. It's fine not to like everything a certain political camp does, but presenting things as if that's where all or even most of the effort is is just factually wrong. Of course, knowing that this aspect is less popular, media organisations like Fox News have chosen to focus on Dr. Seuss for the past couple of weeks rather than the debate on minimum wage, so really this aspect is more of the right's focus than the left's. "Wokeism" (and the even more made-up "cancel culture") is the new War on Christmas. Sure, there are enough instances to turn into hysteria if that's in your interest, but the actual work is elsewhere.
> "Wokeism" (and the even more made-up "cancel culture") is the new War on Christmas.
Saying that woke excess is "made-up" and "hysteria" is gaslighting. Coca Cola ran a diversity training encouraging employees to "be less white": https://indianexpress.com/article/explained/explained-why-co.... The Smithsonian has a whole page on "whiteness" treating it like it's a bad thing. If you work a college degree-required job, you've probably had an employer recommend you read something by Robin Di Angelo, who claims she "tries to be a little less white every day."
I've never met anyone who got offended when I said "Merry Christmas." I've repeatedly run into instances of woke excess over the past year. The faculty at my law school declared themselves "gatekeepers of white supremacy" on a Zoom call: https://freebeacon.com/campus/northwestern-law-administrator.... (The interim dean, who declared himself a "racist," is a friend of mine, and I was shocked to read about his behavior.) Even the whole Dr. Seuss thing--"Mulberry Street," which was cancelled, is one of my daughter's favorite books. I bought it for her a couple of years ago new at a Barnes and Noble in Annapolis. It's not some obscure relic of history.
I think it's tremendously disingenuous to deny that this phenomenon has crossed the line from "manufactured outrage" into "real concern."
And I think it is tremendously disingenuous to claim the opposite. The very same attacks on the "excesses" of progressivism, and "if only you'd focus on this instead of that you wouldn't antagonize people" were beat-up clichés at the time of the women's suffrage movement if not abolition. In fact, calling the claim that there is some widespread suppression of speech and reduction in freedom at a time when clearly more people can say more things to wider audiences than ever before, and with the least interference from anyone, mere "disingenuous" is an understatement. It is hysterically delusional.
Whenever you criticize "progressive excess," some progressive says "well you would have said the same thing about slavery/women's sufferage/integration/etc".
This highlights the disagreement perfectly. Progressives view history as "the long march of progress". To progressives, ceasing to publish certain Dr. Seuss books, saying "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Chistmas," using terms like "latinx" and "BIPOC," announcing your pronouns, denouncing "whiteness," etc are part of the same historical process that ended slavery and passed the Civil Rights Act.
I just don't view history that way. I view historical causation and direction as fundamentally mysterious. There are a very large number of plausible interpretations of history and they all seem pretty convincing while being completely contradictory. We should argue over these interpretations, because some of them are better than others, but we shouldn't take any of them as gospel.
I think you accurately describe the misconception many progressives labor under. In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things. White abolitionists were evangelical Christians. The confederates attacked them as religious zealots, clinging to morality that was at odds with the emerging "science" regarding the races: https://www.battlefields.org/learn/primary-sources/cornersto.... Woman's suffrage was also a highly religious movement.
There's also lots of progressive ideas that turn out to be ideological dead ends. Prohibition was heavily supported by women's suffragists, and was seen as a progressive social reform. Building highways through the middle of cities was seen as a progressive and futuristic approach. Eugenics was, of course, the nadir in terms of progressive ideological dead ends in the 20th century.
Take the example of same-sex marriage. Academics like Judith Butler have consistently opposed same-sex marriage because they believe it does not go far enough to dismantle, and indeed entrenches, what they see as a repressive, patriarchal institution: https://theconversation.com/why-same-sex-marriage-is-not-the... ("But there is actually a large amount of anti-homophobic academic and everyday writing from thinkers and activists that probes the numerous problems associated with same-sex marriage."). Andrew Sullivan recognized this back in 1989, arguing that same-sex marriage was the conservative option to accommodating gays and lesbians, compared to the radical dismantling of traditional norms that people like Judith Butler espoused: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/06/gay-marriage-vot....
That same Judith Butler is a leading academic in the field where "whiteness" is used as a pejorative and "objectivity" is attacked as "white culture." Maybe that, too, is an intellectual dead end, not real progress?
> In reality, however, there is not a single ideology connecting all those things.
I don't claim there was a single ideology underpinning the reasons for the calls for social change. I'm saying that there are usually people (radicals, progressives) calling for social change, and others (conservatives) warning against it, and the rhetoric employed is similar throughout history (e.g. "if you only asked for a little less", or "the previous demands were reasonable, but the new ones are excessive"). That's understandable, as conservatives throughout history sometimes don't like to appear -- possibly even to themselves -- as the enemies of progress so they claim to be in favour of "reasonable progress," but whatever it is that the progressives currently call for is unreasonable; of course, a generation later, the story repeats. Ideas like women's suffrage were deemed outright preposterous, risible, and too silly to seriously consider; in fact, it took actual acts of terror by feminist activists and a world war to get them the vote.
So if you want to compare current demands to previous ones in order to explain the reaction to them, I'm saying that you should also compare current reactions to previous ones. "Previous demands were reasonable, but now they've really crossed a line," has been pretty much the conservative refrain going back millenia to the patricians and plebeians of ancient Rome. All of this is why I reject talk of "excess." It's just how conservatives speak of social change for millenia. You can say that you agree or disagree with some policy, but the "this is too much" line is just a cliché.
At any given instant in time, progressives and radicals are calling for lots of different things. Some of those are good ideas, and some of those are bad ideas. It's the job of conservatives to filter out those bad ideas. The fact that they oppose the good ideas too doesn't mean they're wrong when they push back on the bad ones. It's like the old trope: they laughed at Einstein, but they also laughed at Bozo the Clown: https://wiki.c2.com/?TheyLaughedAtEinstein.
Criticizing "defund the police" (as in, actually defunding the police) or normalizing the use of "whiteness" as a pejorative is not a bad thing just because conservatives do it. In fact, conservatives are doing society a valuable service by pushing back on those things. I'm quite sure in the retrospect of history, those will be proven to be "bad ideas progressives tried at one point" rather than examples of real advancement.
I'm not saying that everything conservatives say is wrong nor that everything progressives want is a good idea, just that speaking of "excesses" does not actually make them so, because that's how conservatives have always talked about demands for change.
Having said that, I'm fairly certain that in the retrospect of history, conservative pushback on the change in our understanding of race would look like another incarnation of white supremacy, and would appear as horrendously wrong to the people in the future as segregation appears to us to day, so much so that the conservatives of the future will use them as an example of something that is obviously right, unlike whatever social change people call for then.
Perhaps the difference is that I spent a few years studying history in grad school... I'm not saying that "latinx" is analogous to abolition, but that during abolition there were also behaviours analogous to "latinx" that conservatives used to ridicule abolitionists with.
This cartoon, ridiculed abolitionists as espousing all sorts of radical ideas that just sow discord (you can search for more ridicule the men in the picture were subjected to): https://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2008661525/
“ s. Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights.”
I don’t think the person you are replying to would agree with you about affirmative actions being a good thing. Other than that, the left is super repressive of free speech which is the only civil right left to win , detrimental to wage growth and worker rights by supporting unlimited immigration, bad for education by siding with teachers unions, manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections. The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left
Free speech is the only civil right left to win? Fear not, then, when the state legislatures get around to the Equal Rights Amendment maybe they can spare a thought for ratifying the First Amendment. It has waited long enough.
The right does not exist in the institutional level? Has anyone told Mitch McConnell about this, or Justice Thomas?
The last "right-wing" move I have seen in recent history was Trump's nerfed-ban of critical race theories. I do not remember any culturally significant initiatives produced by McConnell or Justice Thomas or anyone else on the right. The only true "right-wing" issue they still talk about is abortions.
Heritage Foundation? Rand Corporation? Cato Institute? American Enterprise Institute? The institutional right is unimaginably huge and well-funded. Half of them even have "institute" in the name.
All the policy since they source most of the ideas and especially political strategies. Since the early 2000s they ("they" now extending beyond just the think tanks listed previously) directly control the media by sourcing/compiling news for all major sources, so they basically control all political opinion. After a brief respite from their influence on social media, they seem to now do a pretty good job of influencing the influencers there as well.
Heritage Foundation: starting with Reagan and encouraging the right's obsession with smaller government, was a large advocate for us going into and staying in Iraq, and was a major influence on Trump - at least 66 foundation employees worked in the administration and advised Trump who should be in his administration, including advocating for Mick Mulvaney when other Republicans were pushing against him. After his loss, they hired three of Trump's immigration team. They have also promoted the voter fraud claims about 2016 and 2020 elections, saying that it was "rampant", and also are heavy deniers of climate change, the Clean Energy act and Kyoto Agreement.
AEI has been a little less controversial, although they've also leaned heavily on politicians about climate change, and their biggest funders are/were the Koch brothers. Notably, they were one of the earliest predictors of the 2008 housing crisis, though their focus (while not entirely incorrect) was about the causing effects of government banking, rather than private sector greed.
The Cato Institute is another organization founded and funded by one of the Kochs. The Cato Institute has lobbied hard for the deconstruction, outsourcing and privatization of the USPS (to recent great success), NASA, TSA. They have lobbied for the abolishment of minimum wage and in the absence thereof have fervently pushed for not increasing it (which hasn't happened since 2007 - legislation-wise, though the last increase went into effect in early 2009). It opposes overtime regulation and of all things, child labor prohibition (thankfully this hasn't gained much traction). It is one of the biggest opponents of universal health care, and of campaign finance reform.
In 2006 it helped Republicans propose a Balanced Budget Veto Amendment. It also strongly criticized the tobacco settlements.
Interestingly enough, the Cato Institute also supported striking down state laws against homosexuality, and the Federal Marriage Act (which would have prohibited same-sex marriage).
The Heritage Foundation's solution to climate change (if it turns out to be real), is more fossil fuels: "How Fossil Fuels Will Help Us Confront Climate Change" [1].
That article describes how in Dubai they handle an average temperature of over 100 ℉ with no problems by having air conditioned homes, offices, cars, buses, trains, and shopping malls. It's abundant oil and a government that promotes economic freedom that allows this, it says.
It then ties it to dealing with climate change:
> The current average world temperature is about 58 degrees. The true believers in climate change are predicting global catastrophe if that temperature rises by a worst-case estimate of 7 degrees Fahrenheit. That would bring the world average temperature to about 65 degrees.
> Dubai, today, is doing quite well at an average temperature 35 degrees higher.
> Obviously, Dubai is on the cutting edge of technology and prosperity as a result of its oil endowment and government policies that promote economic freedom and growth.
> Not every country has oil, but in a globalized market, cheap fossil fuels are available everywhere to spur rapid growth and technological change.
I agree with you that it's not strictly a "left" issue - and certainly the recent election in the US had the "right" bringing up voter fraud.
But it's important to remember the "left" raising flags about fraud in the 2016 election, and primary. Everything from harping on the legitimacy of a candidate that lost the popular vote, "not my president" protests, accusations of voting machine fraud, primary delegate issues, conflating gerrymandering with federal elections, etc...
In general, it seems whichever side loses is increasingly blaming "unfairness" to generate more outrage to de-legitimize winners of the election. ...rather than trying to appeal to more voters.
We're all losers in this situation because it is the voting system that keeps us from killing each other.
My only issue with this comment is that it seems to discount the idea of "unfairness" in our elections. Yes, in a federal election the districts don't matter. However, as we can see right now, the state legislatures that are elected via those districts can drastically change the landscape of a federal election within their state. The republican legislatures are moving en masse to "prevent fraud" in a way that seems to be directly aimed at making it more difficult to vote[1]. Appealing to more voters is hard when fewer people are able to vote.
If you believe only officially identified US citizens should vote, the left started attacking decades ago. Also, there was a strong 'Trump stole the vote' campaign 4 years ago, similar to the current narrative pushed by Trump supporters.
From the sounds of it, you think the beginning was 2020. There's a long history of implying the "other side's" win is questionable, across the globe and including the US.
Affirmative action biasedly lifts up minorities over others. It looks noble on the surface, but realistically creates more of the same problem.
When I applied to college, I (and all of my friends), knew that ticking any non-white ethnicity box on the application made you more likely to get accepted. I don't know that any of us did, but it was very well known that you could game the system this way.
It made acceptance into college less about your academic merit and more about your ethnicity (or ability to use ethnic bias to cheat the system) - aka, more racism.
Affirmative action is here for a reason. If there wasn't systemic racism in hiring, there would be no need for it.
What affirmative action is supposed to do is to ensure that your race isn't a determining factor in not getting hired for a job that you are qualified for.
The Rooney Rule in the NFL wouldn't need to be a thing if being a black coach in the NFL meant statistically you had a greater chance of getting fired or not being hired at all
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rooney_Rule
What affirmative action is supposed to do is to ensure that your race isn't a determining factor in not getting hired for a job that you are qualified for.
No, that's wrong. If that were the goal, it would simply be made illegal to ask about race (or race-proxy) on college application forms.
Affirmative action is meant to artifically boost the number of college graduates from a selected set of underrepresented backgrounds. If it weren't the goal, this blind recruitment trial wouldn't have been immediately canceled: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-06-30/bilnd-recruitment-tri...
I'm talking about job applications here.. not all job applicants have college degrees. And your link is to an Australian gender study. We are talking about similar but different issues
> the left is... manipulative when it comes to voting to the point when half of the country does not believe in elections
I disagree with essentially everything you're saying, but how on Earth can you write that with a straight face? I mean, five seconds on Google gives me:
Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results. How is that 'the left' being 'manipulative when it comes to voting'? Not to mention the slew of disenfranchisement policies being drawn up by Republicans at the moment.
> The right simply does not exist in the institutional level at this point, all they can do is whine about excesses of the left
No, because that didn’t happen. If you were following the news the claim actually made is what the intelligence agencies of multiple countries concluded: Russia spent a considerable amount of money _influencing_ the elections with fake news and social media and they supported targeted attacks on Democrats.
There were concerns over attempts to compromise election systems, which again were confirmed by subsequent investigations, but that was reported by the mainstream media in the context of the federal government warning states to be prepared and noting that most attacks had failed and there was no reason to believe the elections would not be reliable.
You're absolutely right, Russia very likely did spent time and money attempting to influence the 2016 election, very few would doubt that. What I have issue with is the erasure of the fact that media outlets and mainstream Democrats were absolutely and without a doubt pushing the narrative that Russia "stole" or "hacked" the election, which is very different from attempting to influence.
That piece I posted, of which there are hundreds of similar ones easily perusable quotes:
"[Donald Trump] it turns out, is no more the duly elected president of the United States than I am the world’s most decorated ballerina."
Do you see the issue there? It was a mainstream opinion at the time to believe that despite misguided Americans legally voting him into power, the election was fraudulent and Donald Trump was not the legal president.
I truly believe if the Democrats had exercised more tact in their accusations 4 years prior, we wouldn't have seen the horrific events at the capital by domestic terrorists peddling essentially the same conspiracy theory which had been forced down their throats by centre-left media.
You’re going to claim authoritative representation of American mainstream opinion based on a blog post by a Canadian author who lives in Europe?
More importantly, you’re conflating two very different situations: saying that the Russians _interfered_ with the election is a factual position and random people who are not in power complaining about it or saying that the legitimately elected candidate doesn’t speak for them is very different than the current President baselessly claiming fraud and trying to use his office to get legitimate votes thrown out or request that fake ones be manufactured. Trying to equate the two is simply dishonest.
Here are a lot more representative articles that aren't from a Huffpost opinion piece by a "novelist and photographer"
Clinton says Comey's letter, Russian hackers cost her the election [0]
Russian hackers, Donald Trump, and the 2016 election, explained [1]
Russia and its influence on the presidential election [2]
The Perfect Weapon: How Russian Cyberpower Invaded the U.S. [3]
CIA concludes Russia interfered to help Trump win election, say reports [4]
These are consistently and specifically about Russian hacking of Clinton's email servers and about their actions targeting voting infrastructure. They moderate, rather than amplify, any blunt or clickbait language like "Russia hacked the election." There were not widespread claims that the election was outright stolen, and certainly not from the leader of the party. Merely claims that without Russian influence, people would have cast their votes differently.
Remember that Clinton conceded the next day and said outright that "we must accept this result." [5]
There is no one to blame for the big lie that the right wing has swallowed and run with except for the leadership that has fed them those lies over and over and over for years.
There's a big difference between partisans doing that, and an actual president claiming the election is stolen for months, asking his supporters to march on the Capitol to deny the rights of voters to have their vote confirmed, calling state officials to ask them to "find votes", etc.
You said it, they brought all of that to courts, which means it was entirely supported by the full establishment of the party, not just a fringe part of it.
The fact you can't even see the major difference makes me think you are clearly looking at just one side.
I think that's an apples-to-oranges comparison (no pun intended).
It would be fairer to compare the Democrats' allegations about Russia to the Republicans' allegations about China, i.e. accusations that Biden is anywhere between a useful-idiot-for to an outright-puppet-of the CCP.
AFAIK the Democrat position has been that, for both elections, the voting/counting mechanisms have withstood targetted attacks by state actors, and in both cases gave overall tallies which correspond to the electorate's choices, within an acceptable margin of error (I'm stopping at the tallies, to avoid the separate debate regarding the electoral college versus the popular vote).
Some Democrats also allege foreign interference with the electorate's choices, through widespread misinformation and propaganda. As an extreme example, fewer people may have voted for Trump if Russian troll farms weren't claiming that Clinton harvests child organs (or whatever Q-adjacent bullshit was spreading around Facebook at the time). It's perfectly consistent to make that claim, whilst also claiming that those lie-induced Trump votes were subsequently collated and counted correctly towards the totals.
AFAIK the Republican-led investigation found the Democrats' position to be essentially correct, that there were targetted attacks on infrastructure, and misinformation/propaganda attacks nudging the electorate towards Trump. No evidence of collusion was found, i.e. that Trump was working for foreign adversaries, or foreign adversaries were working for Trump, or they were coordinating ahead of time. That would (of course) have been even worse, but the lack of (evidence of) such collusion doesn't make the idea of foreign adversaries weaponising US voters for their own ends any more palatable.
In short, choosing positions/policies/rhetoric that is useful to adversaries is not itself criminal; it could simply be naivety or coincidence. Yet knowing that a candidate's positions/policies/rhetoric is useful to adversaries would be pertinent information for voters.
You can look at the retraction itself [0] and it says nothing close to "it wasn't based in reality."
What it says is that Trump's actual words were that the state official would "find things that are gonna be unbelievable" and that "[w]hen the right answer comes out, you’ll be praised."
The specific words were a misquote, but there is no doubt from the call itself that Trump was pressuring state officials into supporting his big lie.
Trump did plenty of dumb stuff. It bothers me when people misquote him so bad they are practically lie about it because it makes people doubt all of the bad things he really did.
Did Trump do something improper by calling the Governor and pressuring them? Yea. Was it so bad as directly tell them to "find votes"? No.
I agree with you, but you have to recognize that one is just an escalation of the other. Both are terrible, even if Trump being worse. Trump would not have been possible if discourse had not already broken down.
We created a culture where this devolution of discourse was acceptable, and so fewer voters found Trump's rhetoric unacceptable - partially because they heard more and more extreme rhetoric coming from the other side - whether on social media, MSM, or even some far left wing political leaders.
Incidents like when the Bernie Sanders campaign worker SHOT a US GOP senator. ...the reporting on that was extremely asymmetric between GOP and Dem news media.
These sorts of escalations, and the MSM pandering to their base, creates a cycle of hyperbole and misinformation.
We really need to think about how we can get out of this mess and bring the rational majority back to a central forum of discourse.
The (Republican) Senate committee found that there were in fact extensive ties between Russian intelligence and the Trump campaign, and that Russia actively attacked state election infrastructure. And the (Republican) special counsel found that they actively propagandized over social media, and hacked into Democratic campaign and candidate emails, which ended up being the anti-Clinton story leading up to the election.
It's tired and disingenuous at this point to claim that "the left" made this up.
All of that is true! But as I posted above, I don't take any issue with the fact that there was Russian interference in the election, I take issue with mainstream Democrats and media companies jumping to the conclusion that this meant the election was fraudulent.
> Many elected Republicans are still lying about the election results.
So we have voter IDs and secure voting? Did you miss the part about lack of confidence in voting? If we don’t have voter IDs how is the right lying? Or are you just trying to reaffirm the narrative?
Because having voter IDs is not the only or even the main thing that the right — a very vocal minority of the right, by the way — had an issue with. There were a lot of conflated FUD about
The funny thing is that Trump’s own appointed people, including Krebs who we cite here a lot, but also Barr and others admitted that there was not nearly enough evidence of fraud to overturn any election result in any state.
And even funnier is how FOX and NewsMax debunked themselves and now chase the My Pillow CEO and others off their show for suggesting there was voting machine fraud — because they got cease and desist letters and warnings.
The irony for me was Texas suing the other states and then West floating a trial baloon to secede from the union (great form, West!) because they accused the other states of vote manipulation... this from a state that works hard to close HUNDREDS of poll places in Democratic areas ahead of the election to keep the state voting Republican, in blatant violation of the Voting Rights Act (neutered by the supreme court). And no one sues Texas in federal court for that.
For Republicans, mail-in ballots were the end-run around their extensive efforts to close polling places and require voting IDs and other ways to tip the balance in their party’s favor. If people can just vote from home then all that effort to drive an hour and stand in a long line will be unnecessary! So they aren’t being totally honest about their FUD being nonpartisan either.
I just want to be clear – I said it is a small, vocal minority on the right. Most of "the right" rejected the MAGA conspiracy theories and stopped supporting the FUD. As I have pointed out, even a lot of the mainstream right-wing media has started to "deplatform" people who continue speaking about this "problem". The Supreme court and other courts have thrown out 98% of all the cases, after applying rules of standing and evidence [1].
After all that money came in to campaign promising to "fight for every LEGAL vote to be counted", Giuliani never even applied to the supreme court. A lot of it seems to have been about taking in massive amounts of money (up to 1 billion dollars) from faithful Trump voters via the campaigns. Giuliani distanced himself from Sidney Powell who actually wanted to go to the supreme court, seemingly in order to not share the large sums of cash coming in from MAGA supporters.
Also, I am not "a dem". You assume too much.
And btw, many people on the right, including social conservatives and fiscal conservatives, are also very critical of the Republican leadership. Here is far more information about why[2].
Again, if you’re focusing on the lawsuits you’ve missed the point. Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online? Knowing that, and today’s extreme cancel culture can you explain why you’re not seeing more people talk about this? Even here on HN these posts have support, until dems downvote it beyond the upvotes. There’s that bias!
Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it. Some have given up out of desperation but pointing to lack of media culture and deplatforming does nothing but support the claims and issues i’m pointing out.
> Are you aware there is an extreme left bias online?
Evidence please.
I am aware that 'left bias' is a consistent lie perpetuated by right-wing media, which contradicts at least twenty years of research on the subject, e.g.
So you watch the votes and downvotes come in? Before the downvote parade I had near 10 upvotes, net result after dems, -20. Clearly this is a conspiracy.
> Meanwhile in actual face to face conversations people can’t stop talking about it.
So instead your sampling bias is correct? Where is your evidence?
We don't have voter ID checks at the actual polling place for casting your vote, but we have signature checks and comparisons of who purported to vote with who is actually registered to vote at that polling place, and there are checks and verification involved in getting to that point.
This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate.
The allegations still being made about election fraud by some Republicans have nothing to do with people double voting or voting as someone else. They are that election workers slipped in extra pre-filled ballots, or that they ran Biden ballots through the tabulating machines multiple times, or that the machines were programmed to switch votes, or that there are statistical anomalies in the vote totals or counting that could only be there due to fraud.
Every one of these is based on one or more of the following kinds of things:
1. There is simply no way, they say, Trump could possible have gotten less votes than Biden. There must have been fraud. (Variation: Trump got more votes in 2020 than Obama got in 2008 or Clinton got in 2016, so how could he lose? Completely ignoring that voter turnout was a lot higher in 2020)
2. Someone seeing something and misunderstanding it. E.g., one of the prominent claims of running ballots through the tabulating machine multiple times was actually an election worker before the count started running a test ballot through multiple times.
That's part of the standard pre-election test and setup procedure that the manufacturer's instruction call for before each election. The person who saw it happening was a volunteer who had skipped the training session where they covered that.
3. Taking things out of context. E.g., surveillance video purporting to show extra ballots being sneaked in to a counting area overnight, where we see someone pull boxes out from under a table and remove a bunch of ballots and start counting them.
We do indeed see that. But if you obtain the whole video instead of that short clip, you see that those boxes contain the ballots that were being counted when it was time for the counters to take a break. They put the uncounted ballots in their standard ballot storage lock boxes, put the boxes under the table, took their break, came back, retrieved the ballots from the boxes, and resumed counting. All completely normal.
4. Ignoring the recounts. The machines alleged to have switched Trump votes leave a paper trail. The hand recounts from the places where this switching is alleged to have occurred match the machine count.
5. Misunderstanding statistics. E.g., claims that first digit distributions of candidate totals across districts or counties not following Benford's law is proof of fraud. The mistake here is that Benford's law only applies to certain kinds of samplings of certain kinds of distributions. The distribution of population and of votes across districts or counties in most areas is not the right kind for this.
6. Ignoring that in-person election day votes are counted in many areas before mail-in ballots are counted. (Indeed, in some Republican controlled states, they have passed laws preventing election officials from starting to count mail-in ballots until the polls close).
Combine this with COVID in many "rural red, urban blue" states, where in-person urban voting often means long crowded lines at polling places, and you had a much higher percentage of urban voters going to mail-in voting than is usual. On top of that, Democrats on average were more likely to take COVID seriously, further shifting mail-in votes to be more likely to be from Democrats.
Result: in effect those states ended up counting Republican ballots first, then Democrat ballots. And so of course Trump was ahead in the evening, and then Biden got most of the later counted mail-in ballots, which mostly came from the large urban areas.
None of that has anything whatsoever to do with voter ID.
Well this is a first, a dem telling the republicans how they feel.
> This is sufficient to catch any double voting or voting as someone else that occurs at sufficient scale to be above the normal error rate.
Most of the country doesn’t believe this. Regardless of what you believe, being on the other side nobody on the right will believe you. You stand to benefit most from this.
> Well this is a first, a dem telling the republicans how they feel.
Could you please point out where the parent claims to be a Democrat? I don't see it anywhere in what they've said, or in the past few days of their comment history.
> Most of the country doesn’t believe this.
I'm not sure about "most", but it's certainly a significant fraction; presumably caused by Trump's refusal to admit defeat.
> Regardless of what you believe, being on the other side nobody on the right will believe you. You stand to benefit most from this.
What do you mean by "other side"? The Democrats? I would again ask where you got the idea that the parent is a Democrat; I don't see it in their posts.
I think you may be mixing up cause and effect. Your claim seems to be that people on the right will not believe what the parent poster says, because the parent poster is a Democrat. However, your response is evidence of the inverse: that people on the right will believe the parent poster is a Democrat, because of what the parent poster says.
This mistake is troubling, since it admits a circular argument: Democrats aren't believed, and those who aren't believed are Democrats. Like all circular arguments, this is self-consistent whilst being completely detached from reality (the content of any claims, evidence, etc. are irrelevant; that self-justifying loop will work for anything).
> Could you please point out where the parent claims to be a Democrat? I don't see it anywhere in what they've said, or in the past few days of their comment history.
Yes, reread their comment, apply context, it should be apparent.
> I'm not sure about "most", but it's certainly a significant fraction; presumably caused by Trump's refusal to admit defeat.
Why do you think Trump has anything to do with it? He doesn't. Really people couldn't care less about Trump. The system is flawed regardless.
> This mistake is troubling, since it admits a circular argument: Democrats aren't believed, and those who aren't believed are Democrats. Like all circular arguments, this is self-consistent whilst being completely detached from reality (the content of any claims, evidence, etc. are irrelevant; that self-justifying loop will work for anything).
Hmmm, yup we have a divide in this country, mostly caused by dems refusal to accept and admit the right are people with opinions, ideas and feelings as well. Right doesn't believe left, left doesn't believe right. So, divide we have!
> reread their comment, apply context, it should be apparent.
I did. It was not apparent; hence why I asked.
> Why do you think Trump has anything to do with it?
If we're still talking about "it" being a significant fraction of the US public being distrustful of the election process/results, then Trump's main relevance is the combination of:
- His holding of the most powerful office in the world for four years
- His direct attacks on the election process/results, e.g.
- The attacks on the election process/results by other Repulican politicians, either using Trump's example to seize or cling-to power, or to curry Trump's favour, or to avoid Trump's wrath (either direct, or indirect like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempts_to_overturn_the_2020_... ), e.g.
Notice this started before Trump was elected? The rest of your comment is trying to support your belief this is somehow about Trump, therefore ignored.
Both the left and the right engage in suppression of free speech in different ways.
I mean when McCarthyism, Hoover’s FBI and COINTELPRO were repressing leftists left and right, sabotaging political campaigns and careers, this was considered a national security issue.
I mean, until Bernie Sanders, no politician openly called themselves a socialist. This is recent.
Are there any open atheists in US politics? Just curious
Without exception, all of the most talented individuals I’ve met wanted to be seen and interacted with as individuals. It’s Sally the engineer, not a nameless member of women-in-technology. Or Clinton the engineer, not a recent SWE graduate of an HBCU.
Protectionist thinking is off-putting to many when it strays over some imaginary line to where I act as if I must be the champion for an underrepresented group because they think I think they are less capable. When I join with them to help, it’s generally welcome; when an influential person speaks as if that help is charitable (rather than equitable), it puts off some people.
> Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare
problem with this line is that those in power now in America aren't solving any of these issues. they engage in window dressing and have been doing so since at least Clinton. they are left-INO. What US considers center left actually is right. Unless a new progressive party is formed (AOC, Sanders etc) and this party manages then to become a serious contender and accepted in mainstream, US politics will remain what it is: a farce.
edit: Right Marcuseanism - Herbert Marcuse’s “Repressive Tolerance” is often cited as the progenitor of the censorious left, but its real ideological heirs are now on the right: https://outsidertheory.com/right-marcuseanism/ (I shared this yesterday and it's a shame it hasn't gotten more traction considering it goes much deeper into the problem than any (justified) rant on master/slave branches and Tech/github's hypocrisy)
The ACA isn't single-payer healthcare (and didn't really bring down the cost of healthcare much if at all[0]), so I think by the standards of the left in other countries, it is window dressing.
We're not talking about the left in other countries, we're talking about the left in the United States. Within that context, the ACA is a progressive piece of legislation. You can just agree to the point rather than move the goalposts.
The ACA was considered a Republican-friendly approach to health care prior to it becoming a partisan issue (More or less the same approach was introduced by Romney in Utah). It's not particularly progressive, either in comparison to other countries or past attempts in the U.S., and is only really considered such because it turned into a blue team vs. red team issue.
> The ACA was considered a Republican-friendly approach to health care prior to it becoming a partisan issue
That's...misleading. Sure, the broad outline of a policy like the ACA first emerged as a joint Republican/insurance industry idea for national reform after the failure of the Clinton healthcare plan when it looked like there might still be enough demand for some national reform that they could use a strategy, and yes something broadly similar was pushed successfully by Republican Governor Romney at the state level (in Massachusetts, not Utah.) But even the national Republican party had moved right since then, under Bush, they had toyed with mandatory purchase of specifically HDHP/HSA plans, rather than traditional insurance, before deciding that health reform wasn't something that even needed to be on the agenda at all.)
Something like the ACA as a state-run program had none of the Constitutional problems the ACA has as a federal program. Then again, pretty much every elected American politician only believes in federalism when it suits their agenda.
I think you may also find that what's considered a Republican-friendly compromise in Massachusetts in 2006 - where Romney was actually governor - may be different from where the party of Trump and McConnell find policy to be Republican friendly.
Sorry, I was wrong on the location. I don't think that opposition to the ACA began with Trump though (witness the resistance getting it through in the first place). Republicans opinion of it did a nearly complete 180 almost immediately after Obama started advocating for it - far too short a time for the Republican party ideology to change.
Is it too short a time for Massachusetts Republicans to make different compromises than the national party in federal legislation, though? Let's not pretend that a Republican in Massachusetts, California, Illinois, or New York is in the same situation as a Republican in Alabama. Nor is a Democrat in any mostly red state going to have as much leverage as in Massachusetts.
I was a vocal supporter of the ACA when it passed. Then I had to actually use it. It's garbage. I still couldn't afford health care, and then at the end of each year I got punished for it. The ACA is a failure.
Its only component that is even slightly progressive are the subsidies for some lower income people to get insured. From a conceptual and philosophical level, it is quite conservative and has its origins from moderate conservative state government administrations. The only reason people think they can call it progressive with a straight face is because the republican party, in their quest to oppose anything and everything that comes from the left, decided it was a bad idea the moment the democratic party used it as a compromise to get a few blue dog democrats on board.
Does the US even have a chance of people passing single payer? I imagine we'll see people lighting themselves on fire in front of Congress before that happens.
Glad you mentioned the Paris Agreement. How about we ratify the agreement so it becomes a treaty otherwise post 2024, it may go out the window again.
As far as window dressing goes, we see this from both parties. They talk and vote radical when they are out of power. When they are in power, everything is status quo.
Dodd-Frank has been fairly successful, but the rest of those are emblematic of the window dressing approach.
The ACA is incredibly complex, widely variable in implementation, and didn't actually help healthcare costs. Repealing Don't Ask was a symbolic step. Actual change in LGBT rights came from the Supreme Court. The Paris Agreement is the ultimate window dressing; it allows every country involved to point to it and say they're taking action on climate change, without requiring literally any changes.
These are all classic Democratic Party moves. They take on the appearance of doing something while kicking the issue down the road a few years for someone else to deal with.
If we'd believe the slanted tone of the post you're responding to I suppose we should at least take solace in only one of Americas two parties having all the right answers.
> Sure, the left talks about rhetoric, but it also fights for higher wages, civil liberties, healthcare, affirmative action, investment in education, workers' rights, and voting rights.
And the right pursues many of these things as well, albeit in very different and sometimes polarizing ways. But we should not pretend that leftist policies are not just as polarizing.
The word "pursue" is doing a hell of a lot of work in your idea of the American right "pursuing voting rights." They're pursuing them like a hunting dog pursues a kill.
What are some examples of the right (and I mean more than a single lonely senator) fighting for higher wages, healthcare, affirmative action, workers' rights, and voting rights?
Trump’s China tariffs were supposed to increase wages. Trump also pushed down prescription prices, and I believe some sort of price transparency in healthcare. Not sure how well it worked tho.
As to worker rights - both sides are equally happy to throw them under the bus.
> but focusing on it as reasons to "walk away from the left" (which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW)
Wasn’t it black moderates that powered centrist Biden to the nomination? Bernie and Warren’s failure to gain any significant traction with the black electorate sunk their progressive candidacies.
But that's because many Democrats aren't all that progressive. Being progressive doesn't mean focusing on rhetoric. It mostly means certain views on the economy that many black Democrats disagree with at this time. Sanders in particular isn't considered all that "woke", and still primary voters shifted to Biden.
I'm not sure any data regarding Biden specifically is worth much in terms of future assessment because such a huge amount of it would be tied to Obama's enduring massive popularity amongst all democrat demographics along with being the nostalgic "return to normal" option. There really isn't anywhere to go with that beyond Biden (unless they convince Michelle Obama to run?). Iirc a substantial number of Biden voters had Sanders as their 2nd preference too?
The new options they presented flopped pretty badly. It's hard to look at Harris on the basis of her performance in the 2020 primary as being an especially strong frontrunner but it's even harder to think up of any alternatives who will be in strong enough of a position to displace her.
Biden won because many of us blacks, especially in South Carolina voted for the candidate that we thought would most likely win over whites. Warren and Bernie were seen as too progressive and the reward for that would be 4 more years of Trump.
I don't think it was specifically because of Trump - Bernie didn't poll well with Blacks in 2016 either, even before Trump was the presumptive nominee and was considered a joke candidate.
Bernie when compared with other dems in the primary will always lose out on the "white electability" test. Doesn't matter whether it's 2016 or 2020. My top comment was explaining one of the reasons Bernie was never going to do well, and the abyss that the black community was staring into.
> which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW
It’s pretty hard to measure such a statement, but I noticed that Trump won 8% of the black vote in 2020 and 6% in 2016. [0] And it seems Romney won 6% in 2012. [1]
It’s not smart to extrapolate some trend from these three data points, but I don’t think its accurate to dismiss claims that this isn’t happening. Comically, dismissing the claims of a literal black person walking away from the left speaking of others in vis community is sort of like what the author is saying happens with people patronizing black persons and making decisions for them (eg, “it’s not happening” and “master offends you”).
I am not dismissing any claims, but having a >90% party allegiance based on ethnicity is such an extreme situation, that ascribing reversions to one aspect of the left (which, true enough, the right wants to focus on), is just projection and also an exaggeration. I saw a recent interview with David Shor [1], who said that the conservative/progressive split in the US (based on self-identification, IIRC) is about 60/40 across all ethnicities, but that many vote based on reasons other than ideology. But now we're seeing a trend across the board, where people's votes increasingly align more with ideology. So many conservative blacks vote Democrat, and might be shifting away because of a general emphasis on ideology.
That actually makes perfect sense of the "walking away" talk, though. It was extreme and unusual in the first place that ardent conservatives would vote for the same political party as socialist activists based solely on race or identity. That was really weird, actually, and an end to that kind of thing is just "reversion to the mean" of people voting for what they actually believe in.
Sure, but they were attributing it to a very specific cause rather than general ideological disagreement, not to mention that the number of black people walking away from the Democratic party is not large, certainly compared to the level of support.
I don't consider myself informed enough about this subject to detract from your assertions, but confining myself to the stats you presented, the trend of 6(2012), 6(2016) and 8(2020) seems to bolster the 'status quo' claim, that Black Americans are NOT leaving the left (Dems), rather than undermine it, does it not?
I could be missing something here for sure. Like I mentioned am not well versed in American race politics nor in statistics.
1) A lot of black people don't identify as black on government forms. Whether it is for the census, some voter form I might not be aware of, a vaccine enrollment, or on a standardized test in the private sector. Out of previously substantiated fear of worse treatment or discrimination, but an inability to tell which contexts and future contexts. There won’t be data on this.
2) A lot (maybe most?) of black people don't live in states where their vote really matters for the Presidency or the Senate. Population centers, California, New York. While there is also a cultural pride in leveraging the earned ability to vote (and sustained ability at the individual level, as felons have their rights removed in many states). So there are additional deterrents in wasting it on non-consensus views of that state.
3) The way I saw the data collected about % of black people voting seemed to be based surveys, and not really cross referencing all voter data with the census. Feel free to correct my understanding and I would like to read more about that.
Surely the point is that if you cite one person, you can claim anything? Whether that's of the left or the right. You have to look a little closer to see whether that's a common or a fringe view and among what group of people.
These numbers require more context to be meaningful. First, this was for his second term, which typically sees an increase in support. Second, Biden was instrumental in quite a few policies over the years that were generally bad for black Americans, and he was extremely critical of the BLM and police reform (de-fund) movements. Third, the percentage of black Americans which don't live in poverty has increased, and middle class black Americans are more likely to be fiscally conservative for the same reasons that all middle class Americans are more likely to be fiscal conservatives than those who live below the poverty line.
The right was also extremely critical of BLM (calling them terrorists) and de-fund. But not all black people defend those anyway. The wealth argument seems much more plausible to me.
>Saying that the left spends too much effort on rhetoric might be valid criticism, but focusing on it as reasons to "walk away from the left" (which not too many black Americans are doing, BTW) is disingenuous.
That depends whether you distinguish between the Left and the Democratic Party. Most minority voters remain firm Democrats, although fewer than in 2016. Many/most minorities I've met, including myself, are completely disenchanted with "the Left" as an activist bloc that tries to take over or derail the Party. That bloc is simply two or three times as strict about "culture war" issues - which I agree with you are ultimately nigh-meaningless, but alas - as about the "kitchen table" issues where most people actually agree with them.
In short, you can be a racial or ethnic minority who wants universal healthcare, a new voting rights bill, and to strengthen workers' unions, but then you dissent from the "Left" agenda on one culture-war issue, one that theoretically applies to your group but which you were never consulted about, and bam, the Left hates you and wants you gone.
"Everyone get in line, we have to stop Trump" only worked while Trump was in office. It's hard to tell people we all need to get behind whichever street protest is marching downtown now, with Biden in office willingly signing surprisingly progressive bills like the stimulus.
> I agree with you are ultimately nigh-meaningless
I didn't say they're meaningless. Sadly, I'm one of those noisy, crazy woke, anti-free-speech neo-Marxists, but that doesn't mean I don't care more about minimum wage and healthcare. The culture war is very important to me, but other things are even more important/urgent.
> and bam, the Left hates you and wants you gone.
Nope. When such large groups are concerned, of course you'll find people who'd want to ostracize you one way or the other, so the choice of what the "Left" is to you is ultimately on you. If that's what you focus on, an aspect of the left that you don't like but which has been a part of it for a hundred years, then you're just looking for excuses.
>Nope. When such large groups are concerned, of course you'll find people who'd want to ostracize you one way or the other, so the choice of what the "Left" is to you is ultimately on you. If that's what you focus on, an aspect of the left that you don't like but which has been a part of it for a hundred years, then you're just looking for excuses.
Funny thing: you're dismissing my case here without even bothering to find out what the object-level example was going to be! You skipped the part where I explicitly specified that I'm talking about a culture-war issue that applies specifically and in depth to my minority group, too, not some opportunity to pontificate on other people's problems.
Then maybe you understand why "shut up and get in line so we can purge another bunch of you like we did with the Doctor's Plot and the Polish cadre in 1968" is an unpersuasive case. Address my issues and listen to my demands, or you don't get my support. Simple as that. I have other options.
At some point America's popular culture will internalize that the wage gap was a myth and etc and appreciate that the left has been peddling pseudoscience for ages in the name of intellectual vanity.
Too many generations lost being the lefts rosemary kennedy.
In what way is the wage gap a myth? You can argue that the wage gap isn't primarily due to absolute discrimination, but that the wage gap exists is an objective fact.
The ‘myth’ of the wage gap is that it’s an aggregate number. It is sometimes/often presented as women make 73% of the wages of men for doing the same work.
It isn’t true for the same work though. When you do apples to apples comparisons of equivalent positions the gap frequently closes to almost nothing.
The wage gap is better phrased as ‘women, on average, do jobs that pay only 73% as much as men’. Which, in my opinion, is actually a far worse and harder to solve problem. Paying women the same as their male counterparts is easy. That’s why there isn’t really much of a gap in same profession comparisons. Getting women into more lucrative careers or getting Society to pay more for traditionally women dominated industries is much much harder.
To your question: The wage gap ‘myth’ is the misinterpretation of the statistic to say that women are paid much less for the same work.
The observed differences is due to choices like having babies and choosing different career paths, but for the same job it's objectively illegal to pay female workers less.
The feminists argue by taking the average of all wages, and of course women produce less economic value overall when they're still the primary caregiver in most societies.
The real crime is because the value generated by primary caregivers is not in dollars changing hands, and thus not taxable, no government has any interest in honestly measuring that value. The value of a primary caregiver is massive and it's criminal that we as a civlization have demonized women and men who choose to fill that role.
