Has U.S. Democracy Been Trumped?

[Chas_P]

The RNC has become an anti-democracy organization attempting to install a theocratic oligarchy.

I'm intrigued by this thinking. If I get your drift you are saying that the country is being taken over by a few Jesus freaks with a lot of money. Who are they? I need to know whom to fear. Please elaborate. Thank you so much.

[kenberg]

I'm intrigued by this thinking. If I get your drift you are saying that the country is being taken over by a few Jesus freaks with a lot of money. Who are they? I need to know whom to fear. Please elaborate. Thank you so much.

 

I have to ask. Would you care to give your views on the world? Or life in general?

 

You are persistent with sarcasm applied to the views of others, and one can infer at least some of your thinking from the sarcasm, but how you view life, what you think is important, any regrets or pleasures, these are all a mystery.

 

Sarcasm gets boring.

[Winstonm]

Isn't Thomas Piketty required reading or is that one of the banned books?

[kenberg]

Isn't The Thomas Piketty required reading or is that one of the banned books?

 

I'll make use of this question for an observation.

 

Some books are banned books, or probably some are still banned. Some books are required reading.

Most mooks, the vast majority, are neither banned nor required reading.

When I was young, Lady Chatterly's Lover was a banned book.

 

In 1952, when I was in eighth grade, I read Thorne Smith's The Glorious Pool. He also wrote The Passionate Witch, so you can probably guess at the general subject matter. I discussed it some with a female classmate.

Also, I read One Two Three Infinity by George Gamow. The Wikipedia describes the content as "The book explores a wide range of fundamental concepts in mathematics and science, written at a level understandable by middle school students up through "intelligent layman" adults."

Neither of these books was banned, I bought them at the drugstore where I used to buy Superman comics.

Neither of these books was required reading, and I imagine parents would have protested making them so.

 

I think that the distinction, banned versus not required, is important.

I read various books and saw various movies when I was young. Some were upsetting, some were interesting, some were both interesting and upsetting. Moulin Rouge was an upsetting movie from 1952. Toulouse-Lautrec is shown as both physically and psychologically crippled. The physical problems are partially genetic, his parents being closely related, and partially by a fall. Socially he is not at all understood by his parents. He becomes involved with a woman of the streets, she explains a bit about her early life, saying that she was 13 years old before she learned that the whole world didn't smell like it did where she grew up. This was a lot for 13 year old me to take in. The movie was neither banned nor required, I saw it on my own, and I dealt with the portrayal on my own. Nobody told me what I was supposed to think about it.

 

Kids need to learn about the world. And they will, regardless of adult preferences, but deciding not to require a 13-year-old to read a book or see a play or a movie is not the same as banning that book or play or movie. In 1953 I was a high school freshman and the play I Am A Camera was banned in St. Paul after one performance. I argued with my teacher, I said that it should not have been banned (although I had not seen it), he approved of the ban. Neither of us claimed that I should have been required to see it.

 

 

Anyway: Some books are banned, some are required reading, most are neither required nor banned.

[y66]

[y66]

It’s funny listening to the same people who let the president get away with trying to overthrow the government call anyone ‘soft on crime,’ but that’s how it goes.

[y66]

Health care is the top issue for Democratic voters in the fall, with 74% saying it is very important to their vote. Just 44% of Republican voters say the same. https://pewrsr.ch/3iAsI9j

 

[y66]

Pentagon spending accounts for nearly half of all federal discretionary spending.

 

https://quincyinst.org/report/pathways-to-pentagon-spending-reductions-removing-the-obstacles/

 

Don't tell me what you value; show me your budget, and I'll tell you what you value.

[y66]

From Putin and Xi Exposed the Great Illusion of Capitalism by John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge at Bloomberg:

 

A book published in 1919 on “The Economic Consequences of the Peace” isn’t the obvious starting place for understanding the economic consequences of the current war in Ukraine. But it’s worth taking a little time to read John Maynard Keynes’s famous description of the leisurely life of an upper-middle-class Londoner in 1913 — just before the Great War changed everything:

 

The inhabitant of London [in 1913] could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, in such quantity as he might see fit, and reasonably expect their early delivery upon his doorstep; he could at the same moment and by the same means adventure his wealth in the natural resources and new enterprises of any quarter of the world, and share, without exertion or even trouble, in their prospective fruits and advantages.

Keynes then describes how this Londoner could speculate on the markets and travel wherever he wanted without a passport or the bother of changing currency (the gold standard meant that his money was good everywhere). And then the famous economist delivers his coup de grace by going inside the privileged Londoner’s head:

 

[The Londoner] regarded this state of affairs as normal, certain and permanent, except in the direction of further improvement, and any deviation from it as aberrant, scandalous and avoidable. The projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries, of monopolies, restrictions and exclusion, which were to play the serpent to this paradise, were little more than the amusements of his daily newspaper, and appeared to exercise almost no influence at all on the ordinary course of social and economic life, the internationalization of which was nearly complete in practice.

Keynes’s cosmopolitan Briton, completely unaware that the first great age of globalization was about to be shot to pieces at the Somme, is the urban equivalent of the cavorting toffs in “Gosford Park,” Robert Altman’s movie about a weekend in a grand country house just before the outbreak of war. One of us possesses a photograph of the Bullingdon, Oxford’s poshest dining club, in 1913: The future rulers of the world stare out at us with frozen arrogance. Within a year most of them were in the trenches.

 

Foppish aristocrats weren’t the only ones who were complacent. Intellectuals agreed. Norman Angell’s “The Great Illusion,” the Edwardian bestseller published in 1909, argued that war was impossible given the interconnectedness of the world. The great businesses of Europe and the U.S. operated on the same assumption. The first great age of globalization, which started in the 1860s and was underpinned by British power and coordinated by British statecraft, had left the commercial classes free to make money — businesspeople then faced far fewer barriers than their modern equivalents when it came to moving money, goods or people around the world.

 

It’s easy to mock the shortsightedness of the West’s ruling class in 1913 — for not seeing how the rise of Germany and the complex web of alliances between the Great Powers could turn an assassination in Sarajevo into a global conflict. Clio, the muse of history, is always wise after the event, but future generations could well ask the same question about us: How could they not know?

 

Keynes’s Londoner, lounging in his bed, had at least this excuse: The end of his age of globalization came with little warning. In our case, globalization has been under sustained attack for two decades, with serious assaults in 2001 (when two planes, hitherto symbols of modernity, slammed into the World Trade Center); 2008 (when Lehman Brothers collapsed and the global financial system went into cardiac arrest); and 2016 (when the British voted to leave the world’s largest free-trade zone and Americans elected a nativist TV personality as president). The “decoupling” of the global economy into Chinese and Western portions has been gathering pace for some time. And the biggest drama before Ukraine was a virus that froze supply chains and forced the world into hibernation.

 

And yet, at the beginning of 2022, many of us shared the assumptions of Keynes’s Londoner. We ordered exotic goods in the confident expectation that Amazon would deliver them to our doors the next day. We invested in emerging-market stocks, purchased Bitcoin, and chatted with people on the other side of the world via Zoom. Many of us dismissed Covid-19 as a temporary suspension of our global lifestyle. Vladimir Putin’s “projects and politics of militarism” seemed like diversions in the loonier regions of the Twittersphere.

 

Now that we have been shaken awake, most of our attention is on the bloodshed in Ukraine, and rightly so. But just as World War I mattered for reasons beyond the slaughter of millions of human beings, this conflict could mark a lasting change in the way the world economy works — and the way we all live our lives, however far we are from the carnage in Eastern Europe. The “inevitable” integration of the world economy has slowed, and the various serpents in our paradise — from ethnic rivalries to angry autocracies to a generalized fury with the rich — are slithering where they will.

 

That doesn’t mean that globalization is an unalloyed good. By its nature, economic liberalism exaggerates the downsides of capitalism as well as the upsides: Inequality increases, companies sever their local roots, losers fall further behind, and — without global regulations — environmental problems multiply. Yet liberalism has also dragged more than a billion people out of poverty in the past three decades and, in many cases, promoted political freedom along with economic freedom. The alternatives, historically speaking, have been wretched. Right now, the outcome that we have been sliding toward seems one in which an autocratic East gradually divides from — and then potentially accelerates past — a democratic but divided West.

 

From this perspective, the answer to globalization’s woes isn’t to abandon economic liberalism, but to redesign it. And the coming weeks offer a golden opportunity to redesign the global economic order.

[y66]

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/25/opinion/madeleine-albright-secretary-of-state.html

 

In her searing 2018 book, “Fascism: A Warning,” Madeleine [Albright] described Mr. Trump as the first U.S. president in the modern era “whose statements and actions are so at odds with democratic ideals.” She observed that his assault on democratic norms and institutions was “catnip” for autocrats like Mr. Putin. After the insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021, and Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn a free and fair election, Madeleine imagined Abraham Lincoln weeping. “My family came to America after fleeing a coup, so I know that freedom is fragile,” she wrote. “But I never thought I would see such an assault on democracy be cheered on from the Oval Office.” With the Republican Party recently declaring the insurrection and events that led to it to be “legitimate political discourse,” and some of the party’s most powerful media allies pushing Kremlin talking points on Fox News and elsewhere, it’s clear that the threat to our democracy that so alarmed Madeleine remains an urgent crisis.

 

The fundamental truth that Madeleine understood and that informed her views on all these challenges is that America’s strength flows not just from our military or economic might but from our core values. Back in 1995, Madeleine told me a story that still inspires me. To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, she visited parts of the Czech Republic that had been liberated by American troops in 1945. Many people waved American flags as she passed, and to her surprise, some had just 48 stars. They had to be decades old. It turned out that American G.I.s had handed out the flags a half-century earlier. Czech families said they had kept them hidden all through the years of Soviet domination, passing them down from generation to generation as the embodiment of their hope for a better, freer future.

 

Madeleine knew exactly what that meant. Even at the end of her life, she treasured her first glimpse of the Statue of Liberty, sailing into New York Harbor in 1948 as an 11-year-old refugee on a ship called the S.S. America. She would have been thrilled by President Biden’s announcement on Thursday that the United States will welcome up to 100,000 refugees fleeing Ukraine, and she would encourage us to do more to respond to this unfolding humanitarian nightmare. She would warn, as she did in her book, about the “self-centered moral numbness that allows Fascism to thrive,” and urge us to keep pushing the envelope for freedom, human rights and democracy. We should listen.

[kenberg]

I guess we have to note the Biden statement “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.

 

And for God's sake, or for everyone's sake, I wish he hadn't said it.

 

There are times when our leaders, including leaders that generally reflect my hopes and views, say some really stupid things.

[Winstonm]

Now me, I'm thinking we should try to negotiate with Putin - with our best negotiator, Sgt. Aldo Raine. I hear he speaks a little Russian....or maybe it's Italian.

[kenberg]

Sgt. Aldo Raine??

I had to look him up, I gather he was a character in Inglorious Basterds, a movie that I thought was even more ridiculous than Kill Bill.

Perhaps that's what Biden has in mind but I hope not, and really don't think so.

Biden was just trying to sound tough.

The least of the problems is that various spokespeople will have to tie themselves in knots trying to explain why “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” doesn't really mean why it clearly does mean.

A more significant problem is that Biden sounds like a loose cannon speaking of a very serious problem.

And a still more significant problem is that any effort within the Putin administration to try to curtail his power will be significantly hampered. Nobody there wants to look like they are doing Biden's bidding.

And then there is the danger that some of the more extreme parts of the Putin administration could look at this and say "Ok, game on. Let's see whose operatives can remove which country's leader from power".

Biden was doing very well in working with the international community to make it clear that the cost to Russia of its invasion of Ukraine would be very costly.

Is it really that hard for a president to understand that he should not make off-the-cuff remarks about how another country's leader cannot remain in power?

[Winstonm]

Sgt. Aldo Raine??

I had to look him up, I gather he was a character in Inglorious Basterds, a movie that I thought was even more ridiculous than Kill Bill.

Perhaps that's what Biden has in mind but I hope not, and really don't think so.

Biden was just trying to sound tough.

The least of the problems is that various spokespeople will have to tie themselves in knots trying to explain why “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power” doesn't really mean why it clearly does mean.

A more significant problem is that Biden sounds like a loose cannon speaking of a very serious problem.

And a still more significant problem is that any effort within the Putin administration to try to curtail his power will be significantly hampered. Nobody there wants to look like they are doing Biden's bidding.

And then there is the danger that some of the more extreme parts of the Putin administration could look at this and say "Ok, game on. Let's see whose operatives can remove which country's leader from power".

Biden was doing very well in working with the international community to make it clear that the cost to Russia of its invasion of Ukraine would be very costly.

Is it really that hard for a president to understand that he should not make off-the-cuff remarks about how another country's leader cannot remain in power?

 

Be serious-nothing is more ridiculous than Kill Bill

 

Still, as careful as Biden has been it seems odd that he would all of a sudden stop. Have you considered that the words were chosen carefully to send a message to those around Putin that they needed to think regime change. Autocrats like Putin aren’t surrounded by buddies and they are most susceptible to an attack from within so putting that idea out in the open may not be as crazy or off-the-cuff as it seems. It may have been a calculated risk in order to send a message to those surrounding Putin.

[kenberg]

Be serious-nothing is more ridiculous than Kill Bill

 

Still, as careful as Biden has been it seems odd that he would all of a sudden stop. Have you considered that the words were chosen carefully to send a message to those around Putin that they needed to think regime change. Autocrats like Putin aren't surrounded by buddies and they are most susceptible to an attack from within so putting that idea out in the open may not be as crazy or off-the-cuff as it seems. It may have been a calculated risk in order to send a message to those surrounding Putin.

 

I think it is very difficult to be careful 24 hours a day. I couldn't do it.

 

I do not think this was calculated at all. I think it was spontaneous. Far more than once I have acknowledged that something I said was crazy. I get to do this, for presidents it is (much) harder.

 

i once started a Friday lecture in a MWF class by saying "You might imagine that on Wednesday I said XXX. You might even have it in your notes that I said XXX. But I could not possibly have said XXX because XXX is absolutely false. So please delete from your minds and your notes any indication that I once said XXX".

It was my own declaration of "Fake News".

 

Unfortunately, it is much harder for a president to undo errors.

[johnu]

I guess we have to note the Biden statement “For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power”.

 

And for God's sake, or for everyone's sake, I wish he hadn't said it.

 

There are times when our leaders, including leaders that generally reflect my hopes and views, say some really stupid things.

 

Yes, shame on Biden, he accidentally told the truth, which is something just about every leader in the free world is undoubtedly thinking. In the US, a majority of the country was thinking the same thing about Trump for 4 years.

 

Edit: I'm sure that everybody in Russia who believes in democracy is also thinking the same thing.

[y66]

The president isn't Jack Reacher. There are a gazillion reasons why his comments were counter productive. Perhaps his wife will start leaving notes in his shoes to remind him not to put them in his mouth.

[johnu]

The president isn't Jack Reacher. There are a gazillion reasons why his comments were counter productive. Perhaps his wife will start leaving notes in his shoes to remind him not to put them in his mouth.

 

Counter productive? Maybe, or maybe not. I think not.

 

Was Putin being productive when he (his spokesman) wouldn't rule out the use of nuclear weapons in Ukraine??? IMHO, the West (and Obama) made a huge mistake in not doing more to prevent Russia from invading Crimea. Now, after 4 years of having a puppet Manchurian President in the US, and basically no consequences for continued foreign interference and outright aggression, Putin must think he is the Guardian of the Galaxy. Putin is past the appeasement stage.

[pilowsky]

The irony of Putin complaining about the President of another country suggesting that there ought to be regime change in Russia at the same time as he is actually invading another country and shooting its citizens in an attempt to bring about regime change is mind-boggling.

 

Imagine for a moment if America invaded Iraq and Russia suggested that Bush ought to be removed from power.

[y66]

Meanwhile, on the subject of thugs who have not remained in power:

 

WASHINGTON—A federal judge ruled that a law professor who advised then-President Donald Trump on blocking the 2020 election result must turn over emails to congressional investigators, saying both he and Mr. Trump “more likely than not” committed a felony in their efforts.

 

John Eastman had sought to block the release of the emails to the House select committee probing the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. In rejecting his lawsuit, Judge David O. Carter of the Central District of California cited the crime-fraud exception, which removes protections for documents written in furtherance of crime.

 

“Based on the evidence, the Court finds that it is more likely than not that President Trump and Dr. Eastman dishonestly conspired to obstruct the Joint Session of Congress” the day of the riot, ruled Judge Carter.

 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/jan-6-committee-seeks-to-talk-to-virginia-thomas-11648486335?mod=latest_headlines

[Winstonm]

Meanwhile, on the subject of thugs who have not remained in power:

 

 

 

I prefer this report to the WSJ:

 

A federal judge said in a ruling Monday that then-President Donald Trump "more likely than not" committed federal crimes in trying to obstruct the congressional count of electoral college votes on Jan. 6, 2021 — an assertion that is likely to increase public pressure on the Justice Department to investigate the former commander-in-chief.

my emphasis

To all the trolls casting about for a reply, let me give you a head start:

WhatAbout ___________________.

 

[y66]

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cacd.841840/gov.uscourts.cacd.841840.260.0.pdf

 

Dr. Eastman and President Trump launched a campaign to overturn a democratic election, an action unprecedented in American history. Their campaign was not confined to the ivory tower—it was a coup in search of a legal theory. The plan spurred violent attacks on the seat of our nation’s government, led to the deaths of several law enforcement officers, and deepened public distrust in our political process.

 

More than a year after the attack on our Capitol, the public is still searching for accountability. This case cannot provide it. The Court is tasked only with deciding a dispute over a handful of emails. This is not a criminal prosecution; this is not even a civil liability suit.

 

At most, this case is a warning about the dangers of “legal theories” gone wrong, the powerful abusing public platforms, and desperation to win at all costs. If Dr. Eastman and President Trump’s plan had worked, it would have permanently ended the peaceful transition of power, undermining American democracy and the Constitution. If the country does not commit to investigating and pursuing accountability for those responsible, the Court fears January 6 will repeat itself.

 

With this limited mandate, the Court finds the following ten documents privileged: 4553; 4793; 4794; 4828; 5097; 5101; 5113; 5412; 5424; 5719.

 

The Court ORDERS Dr. Eastman to disclose the other one hundred and one documents to the House Select Committee.

[johnu]

The irony of Putin complaining about the President of another country suggesting that there ought to be regime change in Russia at the same time as he is actually invading another country and shooting its citizens in an attempt to bring about regime change is mind-boggling.

 

Talking of irony, Putin and the Kremlin actively interfered in the 2016 and 2020 elections in the US, in 2016 by actively hacking DNC emails and a vast fake social media campaign, with an even larger fake social media campaign in 2020.

[pilowsky]

Talking of irony, Putin and the Kremlin actively interfered in the 2016 and 2020 elections in the US, in 2016 by actively hacking DNC emails and a vast fake social media campaign, with an even larger fake social media campaign in 2020.

 

I'm still trying to get my head around the concept of a "fake social media campaign".

What other type of social media campaign is there?

What are the electoral consequences of attempts by great powers to intervene in a partisan manner in another country's elections? Great powers frequently deploy partisan electoral interventions as a major foreign policy tool. For example, the U.S. and the USSR/Russia have intervened in one of every nine competitive national level executive elections between 1946 and 2000. However, scant scholarly research has been conducted about their effects on the election results in the target. I argue that such interventions usually significantly increase the electoral chances of the aided candidate and that overt interventions are more effective than covert interventions. I then test these hypotheses utilizing a new, original dataset of all U.S. and USSR/Russian partisan electoral interventions between 1946 and 2000. I find strong support for both arguments. (International Studies Quarterly;60(2), pp. 189-202)

You can read the whole article here.

Levin also wrote a 300 page book in 2020 that includes a rather comprehensive analysis of the effect of Russian interference on the Clinton campaign - he appears to conclude that it caused the Trump win. No surprise there.

[johnu]

I'm still trying to get my head around the concept of a "fake social media campaign".

What other type of social media campaign is there?

 

There are real grassroots social media campaigns based on actual facts. Then there were the 2016 and 2020 Russian bot/Fox Propaganda Channel campaigns to rile up the QOP base and spread misinformation by promoting controversial alternative facts.