American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

After the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, many Democrats argued that the issue would be the key to winning future elections. It was an alluring idea because it suggested that a central progressive policy goal — protecting abortion rights — doubled as a savvy political strategy.

But it hasn’t worked out. Instead, Republicans swept this year’s elections even as Democrats made the subject central to their campaigns and even as abortion-rights ballot initiatives passed in seven states. Today, the Democrats’ belief in the political potency of abortion looks like wishful thinking.

There was some reason to think the answer might be yes: Democrats did surprisingly well in the 2022 midterms, just months after Roe’s demise. But there were also reasons to be skeptical.

It was hard to find a single election where abortion seemed decisive. Although it might have helped flip a few House elections, the Democrats who won hadn’t emphasized the issue more than those who had lost. And not a single incumbent Republican governor or senator lost in 2022, despite attempts by Democratic candidates to focus on the issue.

NYT

[Tero]

Populists with money have done well. Lots of young men voted libertarian. Only Trump has grabbed a major party. And after 4 years of mostly failure (we hadd no inflation, so hard to measure the fsilure) he is still the outsider.
https://www.threads.net/@esa55jarvi/pos ... x4pyCUW87A

[Tero]

What's next? I don't know. But from my blog:

As far as the MAGA folk go, they will actually not learn much from the next 2 or 4 years. The government does a lot of invisible stuff for citizens. The benefits are not obvious. Think of it as the oxygen mask in the airplane. It's up there, probably. I have never seen one come down. But it will save your life if the air plane undergoes a number of dangerous events. And it can still fly you to the nearest airport.

Or you can compare the government to ecology. If you remove a species from a habitat, the effects will be seen a few steps up or down the food chain. We can't kill all mosquitos for example. The effects of the animals also relate to the vegetation. So the governmnet is like that. A complex invisible hand. Just like Capitalism is, on the "free" side.

Yes, I capitalized Capitalism. Sue me.

[Tero]

I created a meme.
https://www.threads.net/@esa55jarvi/pos ... H4Es7oCEGA

[Brian Peacock]

What's next? I don't know. But from my blog:

As far as the MAGA folk go, they will actually not learn much from the next 2 or 4 years. The government does a lot of invisible stuff for citizens. The benefits are not obvious. Think of it as the oxygen mask in the airplane. It's up there, probably. I have never seen one come down. But it will save your life if the air plane undergoes a number of dangerous events. And it can still fly you to the nearest airport.

Or you can compare the government to ecology. If you remove a species from a habitat, the effects will be seen a few steps up or down the food chain. We can't kill all mosquitos for example. The effects of the animals also relate to the vegetation. So the governmnet is like that. A complex invisible hand. Just like Capitalism is, on the "free" side.

Yes, I capitalized Capitalism. Sue me.

This guy agrees with you!

[aufbahrung]

Literally a oxygen mask in the face of the impending birdflu pandemic - a mask which isn't going to be there for most, won't be saving your life but you can be sure Trump will have his gold plated oxygen mask on standby.

[Tero]

Haha.

[Tero]

Elections and the angst that follows.

Elections are a perfect case study. In 2008, studies showed that John McCain’s supporters overestimated how unhappy they would be after Mr. Obama won the election. In 2016, when Mr. Trump beat Hillary Clinton, research revealed that although stress was high among her supporters on election night, their moods started to recover within a day or two. In surveys before and after, liberals reported being depressed only if asked directly about the 2016 election; they didn’t actually end up being more depressed over the next year. Across millions of tweets, negative sentiments about the 2016 election among Democratic voters took only about a week to return to the pre-election base line, and in blue states, there were no increases in Google searches for depression or antidepressant use.

Political defeat is an example of what psychologists call ambiguous loss. We may be mourning the death of our hopes and dreams, but it’s temporary. We forget that unlike people, plans can be resurrected. That was true for Trump supporters in 2020, and it’s true for Democrats now.

Pain and sorrow are never permanent. They evolve over time, and ideally they help us make sense, find meaning and fuel change. As the author and podcaster Nora McInerny put it, “We don’t move on from grief. We move forward with it.”

Ambiguous loss is not a funeral. It’s a reckoning. Like touching a hot stove, it hurts so we don’t miss its lessons. Feeling devastated about an election is a cue to figure out what went wrong election is a cue to figure out what went wrong so it doesn’t happen again. A sense of righteous indignation can energize us to stand up for our principles. Anxiety about what comes next can help jolt us out of complacency.

It’s unsettling to realize we have no power to predict the future, because it means we aren’t in control of our fate.

By Adam Grant

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/12/opin ... ction.html

Sorry adam, this is not 2016. This is much worse.

[Sean Hayden]

Thank you Tero. It’s like these people don’t see the real losses all around them. Things are different, at a deeper level too. That’s partly why all the usual talk (eg it’s the economy) is so frustrating. Yeah, okay, it’s the economy, but the people complaining about the economy—and importantly their kids—are different, and the assumptions about who they’ll be in the future given the right amount of education, for example, are flawed because they don’t account for the loss of say, literacy—some reports show decades of progress gone, just gone—or real journalism, or attention spans…

[Tero]

How to run an administrative state.
https://www.threads.net/@kltblom/post/D ... fZ-1fc-pDQ
And our struggles.
http://esapolitics.blogspot.com/2024/11 ... ew-of.html

[Tero]

Elsewhere:
(Quote of Bill Maher saying Democrats were too woke)

Response:
A: It’s not a long-term winning strategy for Democrats to campaign on shallow promises of shiny objects and tax cuts to appeal to the ignorati.

B: I agree. (Maher doesn’t think clearly when the topic is The Left; he starts from ‘they’re awful and ruining everything’ and then tries to make that fit whatever topic is at hand.) Anti-incumbency is powerful, and so is majority-minority anxiety. The demographic trends of the USA are freaking some people out, and MAGA offered a “simple solution” that lots of people weren’t willing or able to think analytically about.

C (sarcasm): I just watched the video and I’m convinced. Before the next election, I think the Democrats should definitely drop their support of immigrants eating people’s pets, after-birth abortions, and sex changes of children during school hours.

[Tero]

Free guns for everyone?

"99 Federal agencies is more than enough," Musk posted Tuesday night after Trump's announcement was made official. That suggests a massive culling of the hundreds of existing agencies, with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) and the Education Department already in focus.
Musk later amended his count even lower, overlooking how a government database shows there are 80 agencies that begin with the letter U alone.

Between them, Musk and Ramaswamy have also directly discussed eliminating high-profile areas like the Education Department, the FBI, and the Internal Revenue Service.

Ramaswamy promised the elimination of at least five larger agencies during his run for president last year. He also discussed cutting 90% of the staff at the Federal Reserve during that campaign.

But how deep the new heads of this new government efficiency effort will actually aim to cut — and whether they can actually bring any ideas to fruition as they "provide advice and guidance from outside of Government" — remains to be seen.
During his 2023 run for the White House, Ramaswamy pledged to fire 75% of federal employees and promised to abolish at least five well-known federal agencies — including the Department of Education, the FBI, the ATF, the IRS, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the USDA's Food and Nutrition Service.

https://news.yahoo.com/finance/news/wha ... 44052.html

[JimC]

How much of this will be real, and how much are empty noises to reassure MAGA morons that the Deep State will be no more, when it will really be just smoke and mirrors?

[Sean Hayden]

Yeah, I’ve read good arguments for why they can’t achieve their goals. But it’s more about where we’re going. The fact we aren’t there yet is nothing to get excited about.

[Brian Peacock]

Interesting that the world's second richest man, whose companies exist almost exclusively on govt contracts, who also directs the world's largest privately owned telecommunicatio infrastructure, and famously is a fan of "small government", is now to be an unelected member of the government with responsibility for scrutinising, revising and commissioning government contracts and procurements.

The interesting thing being that nobody seems to think there's anything untoward there.

How many more billionaires does the US government need before people start to wonder if they're living in a plutocracy?