American Politics from 2019 on

[Tero]

Scraping a little deeper, Kasparov discovers that multicultural America is still there. Somewhere.

“It’s Not Trump,” a recent New York Times opinion headline proclaims, “It’s America.”

"It’s an incendiary take. For columnist Lydia Polgreen, it’s not enough that America has a terrible president (and I agree, he is terrible!)—America, Polgreen insists, is a terrible country.

“Trump has revealed a much older malady,” she writes. That affliction is America’s “unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking.”

"I grew up behind the Iron Curtain, witnessing the arbitrariness and cruelty of communist rule from childhood. Frankly, as a chess prodigy, I had it easier than most. Still, I can assure you that there were no US puppeteers forcing the Party’s hand. The imperfect freedom I know in America is vastly superior to what I saw in the USSR, and its zombie successor, the Russian Federation."

"There are kernels of truth hidden amid Polgreen’s distortions. Yes, the problem is not Trump alone. Yes—as I have written—the presidency has become too powerful and unrestrained. I embrace self-reflection; what I reject is self-flagellation."

"Anyone who makes blanket condemnations of the US (“America does not know how to exist in a world it does not control”) is more interested in appearing righteous than in winning back their country. If Americans want to reclaim their democracy, then they need to carve out a middle ground in their self-image between the ideologically-blinkered history of the 1619 Project and the state-sponsored whitewashing of Trump’s 1776 Commission."
"Finally, I’d like to challenge Polgreen’s central conceit: her rejection of America’s “unshakable faith in its ability to shape the world to its liking.”

"The United States was the first country founded on principles rather than ethnic or religious affiliation, or upon the hereditary right of kings. It remains unique today, painting a sharp contrast to Russia’s blood-and-soil nationalism or Iran’s Islamic Revolution."

"I wouldn’t call Americans’ belief in global democracy “unshakable,” as Polgreen does. Yet that commitment is there, and, I’d argue, a good thing to fight for. The United States is not perfect, but the idea of freedom is."

https://www.thenextmove.org/p/why-the-n ... ts-america

[Tero]

I'm chatting with some Finnish Americans about Vance and UFOs. They are sort of casual voters. The Trumpists there are still quite convinced Biden was shaking hands with invisible people and that he was completely senile by the debate. These are people who would not bother with serious debate or ever look at the trump Biden debate again. But the debate was what convinced them to show up to vote at all.

Recent immigrants are usually in good health and are just in America to make more money etc. politics is typically not on their mind. And even the current situation is better than Finland. "I got fined by the county for putting up a sign to my wedding reception."

[Tero]

Despite the fact that 50 Republicans are keeping Trump possible and he has declared himself king, Democrats are blamed:

Their most common reasons for disliking Democrats are viewing them as do-nothing (22% say this), saying they’re not standing up enough to Trump and the GOP (11%) or they’re too liberal (10%). Another 9% call them weak or spineless, with another 9% saying the party doesn’t care about people.

https://www.cnn.com/2026/04/03/politics ... s-midterms

So they are to stand up to Trump but not be liberal. Doing liberal things like democracy and abortion. And that vaccination.

[Tero]

Elsewhere someone questioned the motives and attitudes of democrats. I told them it was not so much democrats or republicans who decided the election, as so many voters hate both:

Democrats will vote for many things that will improve our lives. Harris actually had some ideas. The Republicans are the ones with the completely negative ideas about government. We lost a lot of science that was federally funded. The American exceptionality was partly due to gov’t spending on scinece.

But on to voters. The typical democrat is not what decides elections. The people that do not care much for politics are. Another negative block.

I’ve run across a great deal of people that just are not interested in politics. They have some general ideas about politics, and what they get from media they try to fit to their old ideas.
My guess about their standing is that they are not in the center. Nobody is. A few people have problems since their views on specific topics end up left and right.

My conclusion is that these casual voters are just left or just right of center. The just left group fails to vote democrat because there are few issues they can agree on with democrats. So they don’t vote. So a 2-3% group of no nothings decide the presidential election. If they show up.

[JimC]

I find it interesting to make comparisons between the US and the Australian political systems. We have a modified version of the Westminster system, but with some similarities to the US. Firstly, we have quite powerful political systems based on states, with their own elected representatives, as does the US. Our federal government has two houses - our lower house (the House of Representatives) corresponds to a certain extent to the US Congress. Our upper house is indeed called the Senate (as opposed to the British House of Lords), and has state based elections for our senators, similar to the US.

Of course, there are major differences. Firstly, elections are controlled by an independent Electoral Commission (rather than run by politicians for personal or party advantage), and voting is compulsory. Secondly, our head of state is a figurehead, the Governor General, and political power is headed by the Prime Minister, as in Britain.

[Brian Peacock]

We also have an independent Electoral Commission. However, because we don't have a written constitution its terms of reference are set by Parliament and subject to political revision.

[macdoc]

You do have a long standing body of common law and precedence in British Common Law.
Canada has a strong Electoral body that is very independent and has teeth.
Canada has creaky constitution made of fragments of the BNA act and various patches - it is hampered by the pre-independence orgins of two not entirely compatible legal systems in Upper and Lower Canada. Quebec is based on French contract law, the remaining provinces on British Common Law.
Pride and joy is the very modern Charter of RIghts and Freedoms.
https://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/csj-sjc/r ... ccrf-ccdl/
The country is legally bilingual and all legal documents must be in both languages.
In practice there are pockets of French speakers outside Quebec ...in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia for instance you have three strong cultures, a completely French speaking town, several English speaking towns and unusually, the largest Celtic speaking community outside the UK including a wholly Celtic speaking university

The whole nation is multicultural as a policy with mixed results regionally.
Quebec is legally French only and draconian laws enforcing it. Technically against the constitution but there is a mechanism for exceptions.

Canada came close to splitting up ....narrow victory for the stick together crowd...won't happen again...demographics are wrong. Albert makes noises about separating. Both have enough population and economic power in some sort of quasi independent economic union.
Alberta is Texas north. Quebec is a nation - culturally and lgal system different from English spaking Canada....Parisian French speakers can barely communicate ....400 years of divergence.
So far it works.
The dumpfs bluster has united Canadians.....that long time compact between the two countries is broken....might be a good thing.
Between the Charter, natural resources and a strong electoral system tho with only one lower house....it''ll survive the orange plague and thrive.
Bringing the country closer to Europe, Japan, China and India is no bad thing.

[Svartalf]

Actually, I never got how come Quebec law seems to be largely based on Napoleonic Code Law, which clearly happened a half century after Nouvelle France became an English possession.
and I knew Cape Breton had major Scottish heritage floating around, but do you mean there's an actual gaidhealteacht there?
For that matter, I didn't know there was a French pocket there... I knew there was some major French speaking in New Brunswick, but not in Nova Scotia.

[Brian Peacock]

You do have a long standing body of common law and precedence in British Common Law ...

That's true, but with no binding conditions on the executive to adhere to it. Functionally, what passes for the British Constitution has relied on the assumption that the govt of the day will act responsibly, with honour and decorum. Even if the Supreme Court determines a govt has broken a law or overridden other formal conditions on its action the only consequence is for the govt to go away and have a jolly good think about what it's done - which invariably involves only thinking about how to change the law to let them do whatever they've done already.

For example, the current executive is pushing forward with plans to remove the option of jury trials for people whose alleged offenses might result in sentences under 5 years if convicted - and they can only do this because the right to trial by jury is not constitutionally enshrined. Another example is the recent banning of defendants from being able to explain their motivation and reasoning to the court with regard to a number of named offences around demonstration, political protest, and direct action (chiefly because juries have been acquitting people arrested at climate and anti-war protests for offences like failure to comply with police, civil disobedience, or even allegations of criminal damage) because there's no constitutional obligation to allow defendant's to offer mitigating reasons for breaking the law.

With a mere parliamentary majority the govt can change the judicial system, restructure the electoral system, change constituency boundaries and revise the number of MPs, oblige the police to arrest and the courts to convict protestors under terrorism legislation, incarcerate people without trial, or as Bojo did even suspend parliament entirely (to avoid parliamentary scrutiny of the govt's plans in the run-up to Brexit).

A written constitution defines the relationship of the state to the citizenry along with the state's responsibilities to the population, and yet in our system the state and the govt are essentially one-and-the-same. Without a written constitution the govt of the day are free to pick-and-choose or play fast-and-loose with precedent and convention as they desire, which makes the British Constitution whatever the govt thinks it can get away with.