October links: too many

GOPers learn to negotiate. The GOPers in Congress learned and managed to fund the government. No shutdown. Trump was out of the loop.

Lying scummy politics. A scummy, lying trick in a campaign ad. Chris Collins, indicted for insider trading, gives a completely false translation of his opponent's words.

A lying scientist. Cornell

Trump outrageous again. I think it's part of his plan. In love with NK dictator.

Revision of a critique on conservatism. Maybe it is a lot of paranoia. This is a very good read--maybe the most important in several months.

Dangers in US-China relations. Link.

Coerced sex is legal. If done by police.

Russia investigation update. A Trump operative considered using phony accounts. Buried in this article: sentencing for Manafort and Flynn. Does that mean the investigation is almost over? I'm guessing yes. You don't sentence your informants until they have fulfilled their side of the bargain.

Famous for 15 minutes. A mom screws up against #metoo. Funny.

California voter registration. Always curious about this black hole.

Climate change links.

Anti-democracy. Georgia puts voter applications on hold.

Antifa and Nazis are still fighting, but I lost the link.

Image: aip.org

Short: Liberalism is respect, resistance, conflict, and hope

This is a review of a book that tries to tease out the basics of liberal democracy. I won't read the book because the review explains the ideas well enough, and I can already start applying them. So how do these four basic ideas work to undergird liberalism?

• Out of respect for people, none are arbitrarily excluded from the rights and protections that others have.
• Power tends to tyrannize, so it must be checked (resisted) through individual rights, checks and balances in government and society, and the right of the people to decide on laws.
• Conflict is inevitable, since people desire conflicting goals. But the conflict is channeled through liberal practices of competition, discussion, debate, and voting.
• Hope is the belief that change will generally be for the better, so the system shouldn't be frozen at a particular point, but should be allowed to adjust and change. (This is the least developed of the ideas in the review, so I've interpolated, or guessed.)

I was surprised at how well this list of four aspects explains liberal democracy. It really is a surprisingly full and satisfying explication. Who would have thought it would boil down so compactly? Amazing.

Image: milleniumpost.in

Strange trip into the arcane world of Dark Enlightenment

Just in case this political movement goes anywhere, I want to document for posterity (OK, for my small readership) the existence of a strange subculture in conservatism. Here's how it started: I followed up on the usage of the term "the Cathedral" in a comment from a hopeless conservative troll on Bernstein's blog.

The inventor of the term is an off-putting, wordy blogger, Moldbug. (I'm not sure what to make of that name.) The Cathedral is a term of derision for a bureaucracy that is greedy for control over ever larger portions of people's lives. It's coined by an atheist who hates both Church and modern liberal State.

The term strikes me as an apt comparison, so it's not a surprise that other people have taken it up. The points of similarity include propaganda, collecting tithes or taxes to support a large clerical class, complex tenets, censorship of ideas not conforming to those tenets, control of large academic and educational arms, and probably some I've missed. The term "Cathedral" refers specifically to the nexus of academia, the elite press, policy think tanks, and their influence/control over education, voting blocks, the legislative agenda, and public opinion.

Derbyshire, (yes, him) applauds the Moldbug concept of the world. It turns out that he is an adherent of a peculiar strain of political thought called dark enlightenment. Here is just a taste of their tenets:

- A realization that liberty is incompatible with democracy, and that democracy leads to mediocrity.

- A concern with bio-politics, oriented to a particular people’s biological and demographic imperatives.

- A rejection of egalitarianism.

With tenets like that, this political group has limited growth possibilities. It seems to me to be an offshoot of conservativism that has gone extreme--to a complete black/white, good/evil view of politics. And in the good/evil balance, democracy is evil. Also evil: the American revolutionaries, the Declaration of Independence, our separation from Great Britain, the acceptance of the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis, and the acceptance of human equality.

The thesis is a marvel of logic and logical jumps. I've only skimmed much of it, but I've noted a few flaws:

• Toryism is good, and Whigs (the democratic impulse) is bad. 
• Toryism leads to order, which is preferable to chaos, which is the outcome from democracy. 
• Problem: Does Toryism always lead to order? Does democracy always lead to chaos? 
• Problem: Is something good always 100% good? Not in my experience. 
• Problem: Can anything good come from something labeled evil? Strangely (or not), yes.

The author seems aware of the possibility of faulty reasoning, so he states that his assignment of 'order' as 'good' is a preference. However, he seems unaware of the problems of black/white reasoning. Nonetheless, his discussion of the influence of academia and the other side of the American revolution are definitely worth reading, or at least skimming. And luckily, it is not dry droning. Metaphors are taken from Star Trek and The Matrix movie. Do you want the red pill or the blue pill?

As I said before, I see no way that these ideas will catch on in a big way. I've seen the term 'Cathedral' used several times, so do look for it. It will be extremely ironic if 'Cathedral' catches on considering the other baggage the term carries. If I ever hear Sarah Palin use it, or a member of Congress, I'll have a special private chuckle.

Next time you vote, savor it. Moldbug and Derbyshire (and this teacher) don't believe you should vote unless you're white, Anglo-Saxon, and own an estate.

The T-shirts for the good side are ready

Image: zazzle.com

Extras. Moldbug's manifesto is in four parts that are poorly linked. Use Google to find all four. Finally, some fun. A list of terms that they make fun of.

The consequences of political overreach

In an earlier post, I wrote about how political parties have become aggregates of "intense policy demanders" (an idea that isn't mine originally, but sounds like a good description of the current situation). This post is about a corollary to that thesis. The information also comes from a news outlet, this time NPR.

According to the NPR piece (worth its 11 minutes), the US is in a cycle of political overreach and backlash. This is how it works:

• The electorate becomes distinctly unhappy with the way the government is working.
• They vote one party (the one held less to blame) into power in a wave election.
• The winning party mistakes its election for a mandate. Or maybe it willfully misreads the election as a mandate.
• The newly powerful party listens to its "intense policy demanders" (we can call them screamers) and enacts or tries to enact too extreme a program.
• The electorate becomes distinctly unhappy with that party, and the cycle repeats, but with the former "in" party now out.

The problem is political overreach. The electorate wants moderate, well-functioning government without drama, but the party is pushed by (or full of) screamers. The agenda of these screamers provokes electoral repudiation.

One final point in the report. The swings in election results are speeding up. There was an electoral change favoring Republicans in 1994. The Republicans became stronger through 5 more elections until the pendulum started swinging back in 2006 towards the Democrats. In 2010, just 2 elections later, the pendulum swung again back towards the Republicans. We don't know yet whether the 2012 election will bring greater strength to the Republicans, or another shift in the pendulum.

The pendulum is changing directions so frequently because of obstruction. To remove obstruction, you need undivided government, but that also opens the door to the screamers in the party in power. Until one party or the other figures out how to restrain its screamers, we are trapped in this Catch -22. 

If one of the parties could stake out the middle ground, it could hold onto power for quite a while, unless boredom is part of the reason for the electoral turnovers (and that's a possibility).

The Dilemma of Political Parties

Ezra Klein had great column a few weeks ago. I don't name-drop on columnists because I'm not impressed by names, and I certainly don't want to become one of the hundreds of bloggers who constantly comment on what other bloggers say.

But this column--it was a wonderful explanation of how political parties are ruining governance at this sorry time in our history. I'll quote what he says because it's completely clear and readable:

Parties no longer compete to win elections by giving voters the policies voters want. Rather, as coalitions of intense policy demanders, they have their own agendas and aim to get voters to go along. [quoting a paper]

...So the basic work of political parties is figuring out precisely how much of their agenda they need to sacrifice on the altar of electability.

...Parties must still... respond to voter wishes, but they wish to cede as little policy to voter preferences as possible [quoting again]

Klein shows how this applies to the current crop of Republican candidates, or leftovers as I've called them:

[The Republican party] members sense that this election might end with Republicans controlling the House, the Senate and the presidency. In that event, Republicans could get away with quite a lot. So they don’t want to blow it. What a shame it would be to have wasted this opportunity on a centrist candidate who will just end up compromising with Senate Democrats and looking to burnish his image with independents. On the other hand, it would be even worse to blow the opportunity on an extremist candidate who will scare voters into reelecting President Obama.

Definitely read the column. But the follow-up to this thesis is the practical question--how do we make our political parties answerable to more of us, not just to the "intense policy demanders?" If I ever read about that, I'll let you know.

Update 1/5/12. I heard a piece on NPR that is a corollary to Ezra's post. If politicians, when in office, are responding to their most intense supporters, we get a pendulum effect of throwing one set of partisans out, and electing the other set, and then having to throw them out. My post on the topic here.