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From TFA: "Democratic regression is particularly visible among the G-20 countries". This is the money-shot. I went back after I speculated that the big deal w

From TFA: "Democratic regression is particularly visible among the G-20 countries". This is the money-shot. I went back after I speculated that the big deal would be if existing, strongly "democratic" countries were sliding and found this quote. Strong democracies are sliding which is a much bigger deal than young, weak democracies doing so. I'm in the US (so this comment is US-centric). As with so much else over the past 6 months, the tension between federal powers and state powers is being thrown into relief. In particular, the popular idea that democracy is good/right has long been suspect: https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fathers-constitutional-convention https://www.history.com/news/electoral-college-founding-fath... . This is the effect of the Internet and of the "Long Tail": the monetization/politicization of the "long tail" is in segmenting and then aggregating bits of the long tail into larger and larger groups of marginalized members of the population. With poor communication, "the fringe" is only a fringe locally; with near-infinite communication, the fringe is everyone: FB and the various tailored news feeds drape a comfortable bubble over us and cause us to see our view as (manifestly) the only view (since it's our only view, it must be the only view). As a "Republican", I point the finger at Republicans, a political group which has been a 10x political operation. Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. And Republicans have played the state/local-politics game very, very well. As others have noted, democracy is a game best played locally but our pervasive communications systems are forcing it to be played globally and this is happening quickly enough that our political systems haven't come to grips with it yet.

atomi 6y ago
You are so on the nose. Politics is now global and constituencies that were never exposed to other political realities and were protected by local politicking are now facing a political shock. The chickens are certainly coming home to roost.
- api 6y ago
  I recall having this kind of thought when the whole Russian election meddling thing started to get talked about. This is a phase of globalization. Politics is now global. If you're a large country and especially a superpower, everyone in the world has a stake in the outcome of your elections and political process. This means we should expect more and more foreign "meddling" in elections as well as direct meddling in the political process through foreign lobbying/bribery and covert methods. Maybe what we're seeing is the beginning of the accretion process of a true global government. Eventually the people will realize that since politics is global political awareness must be as well. Campaigns could globalize. Then we're a few steps away from global political parties and then global government.
  - metiscus 6y ago
    Look at the talk given by Yuri Bezmenov, this type of thing has been ongoing for a very long time.
    - malandrew 6y ago
      Any in particular that you would recommend as a place to start?
      - CoffeeDregs 6y ago
        Agreed with sibling. References would be great (I'd love to view them).
        metiscus 6y ago
        https://youtu.be/KLdDmeyMJls https://youtu.be/KLdDmeyMJls That's my main reference.
  - mistermann 6y ago
    Indeed there is most likely some foreign influence in Western beliefs, but in the process perhaps we shouldn't overlook the broader reality of things which is that domestic organizations of various flavors allegedly have a long track record of actively persuading us to believe certain things. And then on top of that there's the complex nature of the human mind's perception of reality, how it forms beliefs based on a torrent of conflicting information, etc, and then the tricky problem that these phenomena are near-impossible to detect by the person who owns the mind.
  - mattlutze 6y ago
    National politics has been global for as long as we've had international trade. The way in which we experience that has changed though, and perhaps more of us now are able to see the extra-national players in any particular field.
  - maxerickson 6y ago
dfxm12 6y ago
Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. For most values of "we", sure. There are a few who are benefitting immensely from this at the expense of the rest of us, though. I'm not sure how to get your average voter interested in understanding things like intersectionality while conservative propaganda feeds into their basest predilections.
- rbecker 6y ago
  Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions? It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set. It should not surprise you that the people whose group self-interests are proclaimed illegitimate by a social theory (more than just illegitimate - the cause of the suffering of all the other groups!), would not agree with that theory.
  - dragonwriter 6y ago
    > Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions? > It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set. That is not a conclusion of intersectionality. That is, to the extent it is a component of the anti-racism movement, much older than intersectionality and operates on a level logically orthogonal to intersectionality. It's basically the discrimination + position of power view of racism combined with the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive but racism is strongly negative. (I get that this is confusing because right-wing critics of the movement keep taking the names of individual elements of theory embraced by segments of the left and attaching everything they disagree with by everyone on the left [and then, every generally-seen-as-bad movement in history whether it relates to either the particular element or the left] and attaching it rhetorically to that element, and the mass media—including the center-right corporate media attacked by the right as leftist—covers the right-wing attacks more than the theory itself, so that those attacks shape the understanding of the terms by people outside of either strongly-interested camp.)
efavdb 6y ago
The idea that long range communications enables echo chambers etc is compelling. However, I'm intrigued by the point that similar cycles have occurred elsewhere before the internet, e.g., in eastern europe in its transition to communism which was preceded by a coalescence into different camps on far right and left, and an absence of a political center. [caveat, I don't know much about this history. it's just my understanding from some recent readings].
js2 6y ago
The GOP cannot win free and fair elections unless its willing to moderate its views and accept non-white and conservatives into the party. The GOP knows this. Barry Goldwater foresaw what welcoming the religious right into the party would do, and the GOP commissioned its own study (which it promptly ignored) about how to attract Black voters. This has been terrible for both parties, the GOP obviously because through its own gerrymandering it’s beholden to extremists. And for the Democrats who assume Black votes and haven’t been forced to implement meaningful change since the Civil Rights Movement. So we’re stuck with a party that has only a minority of votes retaining power through anti-democratic means. The answer to me is more democracy, not less. I hope for a Democratic blow out in November, want to see the Supreme Court expanded, and hope to see legislative change to expand voting rights, overturn Citizens United and pass campaign finance legislation, and start using non-partisan commissions to establish voting districts. I also want to see a national popular vote for presidents. And we have to reform the Supreme Court... term limits, a rotating bench, something. The Democrats do not have all the answers, but the opposition party has to be interested in democracy and the good of America.
- Fauntleroy 6y ago
  There are a lot of lovely ideas here, but I'm shocked Ranked Choice Voting isn't among them. Sticking with First-Past-The-Post will keep us stuck in the two party system—it simply has to go if we're ever going to have more than two parties (or better yet: true independent candidates!).
  - andrekandre 6y ago
    link for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
- krapp 6y ago
  As far as I'm concerned the Republicans signed their death warrant when they decided to respond to Obama's election by ginning up the narrative of a "cold civil war" and "grassroots" right-wing reactionary movements like the Tea Party, implying Obama was such a danger to the country that an uprising would be imminent if not inevitable, were he allowed to remain in power. I believe what they wanted was to repeat the Southern Strategy by fanning the fuel of racism, xenophobia and right-wing hatred among their white base (an obvious tack to take with Obama) but the Republicans underestimated just how extreme that base had become since the Goldwater days and how unhinged the presence of a black "leftist" in the White House made them. The Tea Party, being a Republican Party proxy movement, wasn't anywhere near as radical enough as its purpose was maintaining the Republican status quo, and for all the Tea Party's talk of "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" and such in their campaign ads, wasn't going to give the right the blood in the streets that they wanted. Thus, we ended up with the reactionary movement against both the left and the mainstream right in Trumpist populism, the rise of the alt-right and embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and the start of open violence by right-wing militias against black and leftist "agitators." Barring some effective, widespread counter-Conservative movement to return the party to sanity and core non-crazy-racist principles (which doesn't appear to exist) the Republicans have no alternative now but to ride the Trump train all the way to the end, or else split and form another party.
ShamelessC 6y ago
It's pretty refreshing to see a republican admitting their party has dialed politics to 11. I agree that a discussion over the merits of democracy is currently taking place. I _don't_ think merely questioning the electoral college counts as suspicion of democracy itself. I know many argue that the problem with the electoral college is in fact that it is _less_ democratic by some definition of the word.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  The electoral college is undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw. The Senate is also undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw. The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy. That difference is why we have the electoral college and the Senate.
  - coffeefirst 6y ago
    Fair, but the Senate was designed as a moderating influence to hedge against mob rule. That may be a good idea, but today it's also a joke.
    - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
      Why is it a joke? Or, why do you think it's more of a joke than mob rule is?
      - dfxm12 6y ago
        Because congress represents lobbyist interest and not the interests of their constituents. It's not a democracy, it's not a republic. It's an oligarchy or corporatocracy. That's the joke. It's just that the mob is the few people who have most of the money.
      - lordnacho 6y ago
        A mob at least doesn't pretend to care about whomever it's bullying. The senate whose majority represents a minority has to make all sorts of contortions to act like they're doing the right thing, because they have to both justify what they're doing and their right to do it. I think the US founding fathers somehow thought the senate would be populated by people who could put some sort of "good of the nation" ahead of their own interests.
clairity 6y ago
the circumspection over democracy is as much a consequence of elitism as it is political wrangling. as a member of the (extra-)educated class, the failure to convince the ignorant masses of our superior ideas and policies lies squarely at our feet. we fail to realize that education and intelligence are differences we magnify in our egos and thrust upon others, without regard to circumstance nor environment. we know better, so why don't they listen to us, their betters? wedging happens all around. it's most insidious when blinded by (self-)righteousness. clumsy terms like cancel culture and wokeness try to describe/mock this sort of tribalism, but the underlying impetuses those terms describe is a significant contributor to division as well.
- pfraze 6y ago
  Well, look at the economic reality of rural America. They've been on the losing end of policy for the last 30-50 years. They don't want handouts that lead them to subsist as an underclass; they want a thriving economic base which they can pride themselves on. In the absence of that, the country has self-sorted into an urban/rural divide where almost all the economic activity occurs in cities. "Elites" have failed to appeal to other classes because their only message has been "leave your way of life and join the elites." That's not a bad impulse, but I think we've explored that option as much as we can by now. I can't say I can prescribe any great solution here, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring manufacturing back.
  - clairity 6y ago
    an interesting economic parallel is that the intellectualization of vast swaths of the economy led to the creation and exploitation of immaterial wealth (to the benefit of urbanites), things like culture and derivatives, rather than material wealth, like food and housing. we even went as far as to vilify the material over the immaterial. in this way, the rural/urban shift can be understood as an extraction of esteem as much as wealth.
  - dkn775 6y ago
    As a country boy who had to come to the “big city” and leave my hometown behind, I really miss the way of life in the country. Additionally, I come back home occasionally and get this feeling that I’m superior to the lowly bumpkins, even though they know more about engines and tools than I know about statistics. It’s crazy that the wealth gained in the city (which often feels digital, service based, non-physical in nature) imposes this viewpoint. It is what is real and yours that is truly valuable in my opinion.

atomi 6y ago

You are so on the nose. Politics is now global and constituencies that were never exposed to other political realities and were protected by local politicking are now facing a political shock. The chickens are certainly coming home to roost.

api 6y ago
I recall having this kind of thought when the whole Russian election meddling thing started to get talked about. This is a phase of globalization. Politics is now global. If you're a large country and especially a superpower, everyone in the world has a stake in the outcome of your elections and political process. This means we should expect more and more foreign "meddling" in elections as well as direct meddling in the political process through foreign lobbying/bribery and covert methods. Maybe what we're seeing is the beginning of the accretion process of a true global government. Eventually the people will realize that since politics is global political awareness must be as well. Campaigns could globalize. Then we're a few steps away from global political parties and then global government.
- metiscus 6y ago
  Look at the talk given by Yuri Bezmenov, this type of thing has been ongoing for a very long time.
  - malandrew 6y ago
    Any in particular that you would recommend as a place to start?
    - CoffeeDregs 6y ago
      Agreed with sibling. References would be great (I'd love to view them).
      - metiscus 6y ago
        https://youtu.be/KLdDmeyMJls https://youtu.be/KLdDmeyMJls That's my main reference.
- mistermann 6y ago
  Indeed there is most likely some foreign influence in Western beliefs, but in the process perhaps we shouldn't overlook the broader reality of things which is that domestic organizations of various flavors allegedly have a long track record of actively persuading us to believe certain things. And then on top of that there's the complex nature of the human mind's perception of reality, how it forms beliefs based on a torrent of conflicting information, etc, and then the tricky problem that these phenomena are near-impossible to detect by the person who owns the mind.
- mattlutze 6y ago
  National politics has been global for as long as we've had international trade. The way in which we experience that has changed though, and perhaps more of us now are able to see the extra-national players in any particular field.
- maxerickson 6y ago

dfxm12 6y ago

Wedge issues have come home to roost and we're much worse off for it. For most values of "we", sure. There are a few who are benefitting immensely from this at the expense of the rest of us, though. I'm not sure how to get your average voter interested in understanding things like intersectionality while conservative propaganda feeds into their basest predilections.

rbecker 6y ago
Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions? It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set. It should not surprise you that the people whose group self-interests are proclaimed illegitimate by a social theory (more than just illegitimate - the cause of the suffering of all the other groups!), would not agree with that theory.
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > Do you mean understanding intersectionality, or agreeing with its conclusions? > It effectively tells one set of people they are justified in organizing together and lobbying for their group self-interests, while denying that justification to another set. That is not a conclusion of intersectionality. That is, to the extent it is a component of the anti-racism movement, much older than intersectionality and operates on a level logically orthogonal to intersectionality. It's basically the discrimination + position of power view of racism combined with the idea that group organizing is neutral or blandly positive but racism is strongly negative. (I get that this is confusing because right-wing critics of the movement keep taking the names of individual elements of theory embraced by segments of the left and attaching everything they disagree with by everyone on the left [and then, every generally-seen-as-bad movement in history whether it relates to either the particular element or the left] and attaching it rhetorically to that element, and the mass media—including the center-right corporate media attacked by the right as leftist—covers the right-wing attacks more than the theory itself, so that those attacks shape the understanding of the terms by people outside of either strongly-interested camp.)

efavdb 6y ago

The idea that long range communications enables echo chambers etc is compelling. However, I'm intrigued by the point that similar cycles have occurred elsewhere before the internet, e.g., in eastern europe in its transition to communism which was preceded by a coalescence into different camps on far right and left, and an absence of a political center. [caveat, I don't know much about this history. it's just my understanding from some recent readings].

js2 6y ago

The GOP cannot win free and fair elections unless its willing to moderate its views and accept non-white and conservatives into the party. The GOP knows this. Barry Goldwater foresaw what welcoming the religious right into the party would do, and the GOP commissioned its own study (which it promptly ignored) about how to attract Black voters. This has been terrible for both parties, the GOP obviously because through its own gerrymandering it’s beholden to extremists. And for the Democrats who assume Black votes and haven’t been forced to implement meaningful change since the Civil Rights Movement. So we’re stuck with a party that has only a minority of votes retaining power through anti-democratic means. The answer to me is more democracy, not less. I hope for a Democratic blow out in November, want to see the Supreme Court expanded, and hope to see legislative change to expand voting rights, overturn Citizens United and pass campaign finance legislation, and start using non-partisan commissions to establish voting districts. I also want to see a national popular vote for presidents. And we have to reform the Supreme Court... term limits, a rotating bench, something. The Democrats do not have all the answers, but the opposition party has to be interested in democracy and the good of America.

Fauntleroy 6y ago
There are a lot of lovely ideas here, but I'm shocked Ranked Choice Voting isn't among them. Sticking with First-Past-The-Post will keep us stuck in the two party system—it simply has to go if we're ever going to have more than two parties (or better yet: true independent candidates!).
- andrekandre 6y ago
  link for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting
krapp 6y ago
As far as I'm concerned the Republicans signed their death warrant when they decided to respond to Obama's election by ginning up the narrative of a "cold civil war" and "grassroots" right-wing reactionary movements like the Tea Party, implying Obama was such a danger to the country that an uprising would be imminent if not inevitable, were he allowed to remain in power. I believe what they wanted was to repeat the Southern Strategy by fanning the fuel of racism, xenophobia and right-wing hatred among their white base (an obvious tack to take with Obama) but the Republicans underestimated just how extreme that base had become since the Goldwater days and how unhinged the presence of a black "leftist" in the White House made them. The Tea Party, being a Republican Party proxy movement, wasn't anywhere near as radical enough as its purpose was maintaining the Republican status quo, and for all the Tea Party's talk of "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" and such in their campaign ads, wasn't going to give the right the blood in the streets that they wanted. Thus, we ended up with the reactionary movement against both the left and the mainstream right in Trumpist populism, the rise of the alt-right and embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and the start of open violence by right-wing militias against black and leftist "agitators." Barring some effective, widespread counter-Conservative movement to return the party to sanity and core non-crazy-racist principles (which doesn't appear to exist) the Republicans have no alternative now but to ride the Trump train all the way to the end, or else split and form another party.

ShamelessC 6y ago

It's pretty refreshing to see a republican admitting their party has dialed politics to 11. I agree that a discussion over the merits of democracy is currently taking place. I _don't_ think merely questioning the electoral college counts as suspicion of democracy itself. I know many argue that the problem with the electoral college is in fact that it is _less_ democratic by some definition of the word.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
The electoral college is undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw. The Senate is also undemocratic. I admit that. I deny that it is a flaw. The intent was to create a republic, not a democracy. That difference is why we have the electoral college and the Senate.
- coffeefirst 6y ago
  Fair, but the Senate was designed as a moderating influence to hedge against mob rule. That may be a good idea, but today it's also a joke.
  - AnimalMuppet 6y ago
    Why is it a joke? Or, why do you think it's more of a joke than mob rule is?
    - dfxm12 6y ago
      Because congress represents lobbyist interest and not the interests of their constituents. It's not a democracy, it's not a republic. It's an oligarchy or corporatocracy. That's the joke. It's just that the mob is the few people who have most of the money.
    - lordnacho 6y ago
      A mob at least doesn't pretend to care about whomever it's bullying. The senate whose majority represents a minority has to make all sorts of contortions to act like they're doing the right thing, because they have to both justify what they're doing and their right to do it. I think the US founding fathers somehow thought the senate would be populated by people who could put some sort of "good of the nation" ahead of their own interests.

clairity 6y ago

the circumspection over democracy is as much a consequence of elitism as it is political wrangling. as a member of the (extra-)educated class, the failure to convince the ignorant masses of our superior ideas and policies lies squarely at our feet. we fail to realize that education and intelligence are differences we magnify in our egos and thrust upon others, without regard to circumstance nor environment. we know better, so why don't they listen to us, their betters? wedging happens all around. it's most insidious when blinded by (self-)righteousness. clumsy terms like cancel culture and wokeness try to describe/mock this sort of tribalism, but the underlying impetuses those terms describe is a significant contributor to division as well.

pfraze 6y ago
Well, look at the economic reality of rural America. They've been on the losing end of policy for the last 30-50 years. They don't want handouts that lead them to subsist as an underclass; they want a thriving economic base which they can pride themselves on. In the absence of that, the country has self-sorted into an urban/rural divide where almost all the economic activity occurs in cities. "Elites" have failed to appeal to other classes because their only message has been "leave your way of life and join the elites." That's not a bad impulse, but I think we've explored that option as much as we can by now. I can't say I can prescribe any great solution here, but it certainly wouldn't hurt to bring manufacturing back.
- clairity 6y ago
  an interesting economic parallel is that the intellectualization of vast swaths of the economy led to the creation and exploitation of immaterial wealth (to the benefit of urbanites), things like culture and derivatives, rather than material wealth, like food and housing. we even went as far as to vilify the material over the immaterial. in this way, the rural/urban shift can be understood as an extraction of esteem as much as wealth.
- dkn775 6y ago
  As a country boy who had to come to the “big city” and leave my hometown behind, I really miss the way of life in the country. Additionally, I come back home occasionally and get this feeling that I’m superior to the lowly bumpkins, even though they know more about engines and tools than I know about statistics. It’s crazy that the wealth gained in the city (which often feels digital, service based, non-physical in nature) imposes this viewpoint. It is what is real and yours that is truly valuable in my opinion.