I looked a bit at what Charles Koch has been saying recently, and this doesn't look like a change of opinion; it looks like a change of tactics. He's de-emphasizing the partisan tug-o-war stuff, which looks less promising now than it did during (for example) the early days of the Tea Party, and focusing on the less fought-over parts. It's a reasonable approach if he wants to get things done, but not the about-face the headline suggests.
I'm not sure if I'm being overly cynical - but isn't this just a tactic to consolidate the gains he managed to win by discouraging the other side from using his methods? Similar to how challengers decry bureaucracy, but once they become incumbents, wield it as a cudgel to swat down upstarts.
We saw this in the Portland mayoral race. The only on-ballot challenger to the incumbent used political tactics that overcame what would normally be exclusionary credentials. It was so successful, I was taken aback by it.
At one point I had a chance to speak with the candidate by phone, and I spoke about my concerns about the divisive rhetoric.
The candidate said it was only something they had to do to "fire up my base" and that they would not govern in the way they had campaigned.
Hearing that sent a chill down my spine and I voted against this person.
> At one point I had a chance to speak with the candidate by phone, and I spoke about my concerns about the divisive rhetoric.
> The candidate said it was only something they had to do to "fire up my base" and that they would not govern in the way they had campaigned.
Now I'm currently, what sort of power do you hold that would cause a politician to speak to you in private and not try and pass the same indirection and lies they would most constituents?
I donated a three-figure amount to a US Senator’s re-election campaign, and received a personal thank-you phone call from them several months later. It was an open-ended conversation and I would have had the same opportunity OP described had I not been so flabbergasted.
I hold no special power they could likely have been aware of.
I got an sms message from her campaign asking if they could count on my vote.
I replied “stop” to all political SMS except this one.
The worker and I shared a few exchanges about specific rhetoric their candidate had used. I let them know I had voted for the candidate during the primary but would not in the general.
The person offered me a 10 minute call with the candidate, and I took it.
I do not know why the candidate would say this.
Possibly they calculated I was unlikely to repeat this, or if I did it would not break through to affect votes (it was very late in the game).
Oregon is a two party consent call recording state, perhaps they calculated I was not recording or would not share it if I was.
My conclusion is that like Donald Trump, this person is a narcissist. It goes with the rhetoric and even double speak.
But I am very curious about their campaign manager. I have considered asking them for a phone call to discuss the candidates campaign, and to try and sort out what the manager had done versus what came from the candidate.
> In Oregon it is legal to record telephone conversations with the consent of at least one party, but recording in-person conversations requires the consent of all parties except for in certain circumstances, such as when all parties reasonably should have known they were being recorded. Illegal recording is a misdemeanor that can also give rise to civil damages.
OR Rev Stat § 165.540 (definition & penalty), § 133.739 (civil damages)
What were the political tactics used? I'm not familiar with the race and didn't see anything on my first search. That's some political-drama-level honesty from the candidate.
> When you have a two-party system, you get binary outcomes - ie. divisiveness.
The two-party system problem seems to be a consequence of "first-past-the-post" voting.
For example, some posters in reddit's /r/conservative were very insistent in attacking libertarian voters, pinning on them the responsibility of Trump's election loss. Their rationale was that they felt libertarian voters threw their vote away by voting on a candidate who had no chances of winning, thus robbing their candidate of support that they felt he would otherwise have if no libertarian candidate ran for president.
Consequently, they argued that the only rational approach to the elections would be if all like-minded voters concentrated their vote on not-so-good-but-popular somewhat like-minded candidate so that they could have at least a chance of electing someone who, even though might not be the best candidate in the voter's opinion, was closer to support some of their views.
The divisiveness is a consequence of the primary system, not the two-party system. The primary system is very new, only here since 1972, but the fact is that 1) the power to nominate candidates should have never been handed to the voters, and 2) now that it has been, it is impossible to revoke. The "strategic" aspect of nominating a candidate closer to the center, to capture as much of the political spectrum as possible, is impossible to coordinate with individual voters but very easy to execute by party insiders.
Without primaries, Barack Obama would have never been President but Donald Trump wouldn't have been either.
Both sides -- the ones that arise naturally from winner takes all voting systems -- are stuck. If they are less partisan than the opposing side, they risk losing ground. If current partisanness trends continue progress is stopped and potential sympathetic voters are turned off of your platform.
There will be winners who can navigate the hyperpartisan environment (or even thrive in the environment) and losers who cannot or who do not have enough of a grasp of the situation to make the correct decision. An outside observer can determine how fast two bodies are moving away from each other but, from the perspective of the moving body, it can be a lot less clear who is moving and what the relative speeds are.
>In July 2015 Charles Koch and his brother were praised by President Obama and Anthony Van Jones for their bipartisan efforts to reform the criminal justice system.[67][68] For roughly a decade Koch has been advocating for several reforms within the prison system, including the reduction of recidivist criminals, easing the employment process for rehabilitated persons, and the defense of private property from asset forfeiture.[68][69] Aligning with groups such as the ACLU, the Center for American Progress, Families Against Mandatory Minimums, the Coalition for Public Safety, and the MacArthur Foundation, Koch believes the current system has unfairly targeted low-income and minority communities all while wasting substantial government resources.[68][70]
>In February 2016, Koch penned an opinion piece in The Washington Post, where he said he agreed with presidential candidate Bernie Sanders about the unfairness of corporate welfare and mass incarceration in the United States.[71]
>In June 2019, the Charles Koch Foundation announced the foundation of anti-war think tank Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, cosponsored by George Soros' Open Society Foundation.[72] He is a board member at the Mercatus Center, a market-oriented research think tank at George Mason University.[73]
On one hand you have "penned an opinion piece in The Washington Post" and on the other you have pouring of tens / hundreds of millions of dollars into climate change denial (and setting up network of fellow billionaires who poured their money into same causes).
Koch is an honest libertarian, so his Deregulate All The Things efforts are accompanied by things like this.
But.
If you look at where he's been putting his money into supporting candidates, they are overwhelmingly Republicans that align with the former to the exclusion of nearly everything else.
It would have been very VERY easy for Koch to have got bipartisan support for serious criminal justice reform if he had wanted to, but that would have used up political capital (Republicans generally prefer to be the 'tough on crime' candidate) he otherwise used to support his economic interests instead.
That's the main problem I have with libertarians: They lend their wholehearted and deep pocketed support to Republicans on business issues and opposing 'big government', but fail to call them out on social issues (you know, the whole 'equality before the law' thing), and practically never lend equivalent support to Democrats where they would be aligned, just lip-service. It's hypocritical.
Having to date focused largely on feathering his nest, he now wants to put a bit of 'compassionate conservatism' shine on his image and legacy. I'm not inclined to let him gloss over the awful things he's accomplished.
Koch is either a massive failure if he really cares about things like the prison industrial complex and entirely failed to make even the smallest change despite billions of dollars, or he's just a massive liar. One option seems much more likely than the other given his large GOP support
There is no shortage of D candidates that would like to end the War on (Some) Drugs, for example. Libertarians are very much on board with Decriminalize All the Things.
Curtailing domestic warrantless surveillance is another issue that many liberal candidates support.
Libertarians generally dislike military spending as much as they dislike social security, so progressive candidates that would shrink the DOD ought to be a good fit.
Any particular D candidate that I could suggest will also have positions that Libertarians don't agree with, which is part of my point. Disagreeing with conservative stances on non-fiscal/regulatory issues doesn't stop them from supporting those candidates, but the converse practically always stops them from supporting Ds.
It's almost as if they don't actually care about individual freedom and liberty at all, but just about their freedom to make a buck without anyone getting in the way of them exploiting workers, polluting the environment, etc.
His brother funded both the New York dinosaur and Smithsonian human evolution exhibits, both of them excellently done, and featuring evolution front and center.
I note, however, that the Smithsonian put their climate change exhibit immediately outside of their human origins exhibit with his name. I've always wondered if that was some kind of dig.
As I posted last time this came up, the problem to him is that the Tea Party they backed went out of their control. They wanted a nice biddable anti-government party. They got chaos.
They've not come to Jesus on global warming, they're upset they lost.
The web of deceit surrounding the Republican Party at this point is undeniable unless you have chosen to abandon reality entirely at the point it chafes your opinion.
Isn't it interesting that Trump had control of the reins of power for four years but was never able to actually prosecute Hillary for anything? This should be your clue that there wasn't any "there" there.
I think you're going to be surprised and dismayed at what happens now that the shoe is on the other foot.
What exactly is the big nefarious power in the background whipping the liberal mob into a frenzy?
I get that you want to come off as an enlightened centrist here but you’re gonna have to be specific. What’s the liberal Koch brothers and what’s the liberal Tea Party?
The funny thing is that "whipping the liberal mob into a frenzy" is a literal thing that happened this year that resulted in riots, looting, civil unrest and a full on "autonomous zone" in Seattle.
To my knowledge, the only real harm the Tea Party accomplished was rolling back environmental/emissions regulations.
So you don't think those riots, looting, civl unrest etc had anything to do with the militarization of police and the lack of accountability of law enforcement and public officials in general? Not a response to the George Floyd incident or the countless other incidents that are shockingly similar? Just a random media driven mob out there protesting things that don't actually reflect reality?
Because that is what a "whipped up mob" is. Not angry citizens demanding responsible and accountable law enforcement and action toward that end from their elected officials and unelected police forces.
The problem is that the Libertarianism/free-market policies simply don't work. They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security and a reasonable quality of life.
At some point, continuing to advocate those policies in the face of their outcomes becomes negligence at best.
I agree about the negligence, but additionally it's dishonest to talk about libertarian free market policies (for or against) without acknowledging the central bank and its current mission of grossly inflating the currency supply to force most everybody to work continuously. If the middle and lower classes could benefit from increasing productivity with reduced consumer prices, and were allowed to build wealth by saving currency instead of having it eroded away and existing hand to mouth, then they'd have a fighting chance to wield some market power. As it is, they're stuck on the rent treadmill that extracts wealth upwards.
Can you say a little more or link some resources giving a solid link between central banking, inflation, and forcing people to work continuously?
It's an interesting premise and I, like others, dislike the notion that I'll have to work on a treadmill for most of my life. But I don't see the 1-3% inflation rate as more than a sort of incentive to invest in equities (which I also resent), rather than a means of keeping the lower classes away from the fruits of increased productivity.
It's wrong, of course; deflation is not a paradise and even countries which have been pushed into negative interest rates (Switzerland) you still have to work.
Figuring out how the inflation rate is even calculated involves reading through a ~100 page manual. And while the formula are pretty simple, the consequences are actually pretty confusing (eg, if the basket is re-weighted to what people are buying, how feasible is it for inflation to increase faster than wages even if price levels on most goods increase faster than inflation? Are those items naturally removed from the index?). On the other hand, the M2 monetary aggregate is actually simple - and can be used to find a rough estimate of what % of "the money" an asset entitles somebody to.
If you bought a block of gold in, say, 1990, and use the BLS inflation rate it claims you've made substantial real returns over the last 30 years which seems extremely fishy for owning a pet rock. If you calculate what % of the M2 money supply it entitles you to on the other hand its value is about the same. Slightly less, if my figures are right. Seems much more reasonable, the economy should be gaining value faster than a block of metal.
Basically the sort of people who say complain about central banks and inflation are usually the sort of people who can't understand why everyone is so excited about the inflation rate. The issue is availability of assets which are what is needed to retire or live with a sense of financial security (it is 2020, productivity is off the charts - by the numbers people shouldn't need to work full time to live comfortably). M2 deflator instead of inflation also explains circumstantial stuff like why there was a large unhappy population who voted in Trump, or why the population seems to be a bit tense about money despite apparent real growth.
The biggest contributor to income inequality and biggest burden on the masses, is the rise in rental rates, produced by rising land use restrictions, particularly in high productivity coastal metropolitan zones (New York, San Francisco and San Jose):
> They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security and a reasonable quality of life.
But that's not a goal of Libertarianism. If anything, it if that problem were addressed, it would be an indication of Libertarianism's failure to meet its Social Darwinist objectives.
The statistical evidence shows that the US has become dramatically more social democratic since the 1960s, so any problems that have emerged can be attributed to social democracy, not libertarianism.
See the effect of public sector unions and collective bargaining on public education:
Annual spending growth (inflation adjusted) on various components of social welfare spending (1972 - 2011):
>Pensions and retirement: 4.4%
>Healthcare: 5.7%
>Welfare: 4.1%
Annual economic growth over the time frame:
>2.7%
I have to reiterate that this is annual growth. Many people have turned around and said "4% over 40 years is nothing", missing the fact that it's not 4% over 40 years. It's 4.8% every year, over a span of 40 years.
This represents a massive shift to social democracy.
And the shift has been associated with plummeting labour productivity growth, plummeting wage growth, a slowdown in life expectancy gains, and an explosion in single parenthood:
More generally, there's a negative correlation between government spending levels as a percentage of GDP, and economic growth rates. Your implication, that society is better off with high levels of taxation, is not supported by the science on the matter.
The evidence strongly suggests economic development is most rapidly achieved through adoption of pro-market policies.
The last 30 years has seen the largest most rapid reduction in the global poverty rate in human history, and almost all the decline in poverty was due to economic development, which economists have concluded was massively facilitated by the spread of market institutions like property rights:
There is no reason to assume that this relationship between pro-market policies and high rates of economic growth stops existing for advanced economies.
We see indications of it manifesting across the developed world, like the superior performance of Hong Kong and Singapore relative to other developed economies, or Iceland relative to other Nordic countries, or in cross-European studies correlating low tax rates with high economic growth rates.
Economic growth is the primary source of all improvements in quality of life, so we should have policies that maximize it. It is how an advanced economy comes to be that way.
Distributing property to individuals is what gets that growth though, rather than property rights. Property rights are meaningless when only a couple people own most property.
Growth has stagnated because we've stopped taking land away from its owners to give it to new upstarts, and strong unions which redistributed power and thus wealth back to labour have been neutered by the rich.
A simple counter example: despite having very low taxes, Ireland is not an economic powerhouse; just a hideaway for money. Same thing with Delaware
No, if mandated redistribution was what got growth, countries with more redistribution would have more rapid growth. The opposite is the case.
It is the profit-motivated investment that emerges when people are secure in their right to their private property that expands capital, and with it per capita productivity.
Increases in per capita productivity result in decreases in consumer prices, which translates to broad-based real wage increases as purchasing power increases. Through its effect on consumer prices, productivity growth distributes wealth more effectively than any other mechanism.
>>A simple counter example: despite having very low taxes, Ireland is not an economic powerhouse; just a hideaway for money.
Ireland was one of the poorest countries in Western Europe 40 years and has massively closed the gap with its peers since then.
Apples and oranges here, the US is not a developing nation. The single largest contributor to the decrease in global poverty you cite is a communist country.
A communist nation that realized that the communist way of state ownership and central planning doesn't work and implemented private ownership and a market-based, capitalistic approach to their economy.
Cuba would be an example otherwise? Despite having the nearby superpower trying their hardest to destroy Cuba, their communist system continues to work fine
Cuba is an abysmal failure. People have their occupations set by the government, depend on meager monthly state rations, and have almost no disposal income for consumer purchases.
That's why people flee Cuba for the US and not the other way around.
Cuba was in much better shape than Haiti on the eve of the Cuban revolution. It is only due to its natural advantages and its starting position in 1959 that it is still doing somewhat well relative to very low-income countries like Haiti, despite the damage done by communism and US sanctions.
>Although corruption was rife under Batista, Cuba did flourish economically during his regime. Wages rose significantly;[119] according to the International Labour Organization, the average industrial salary in Cuba was the world's eighth-highest in 1958, and the average agricultural wage was higher than in developed nations such as Denmark, West Germany, Belgium, and France.[119][120] Although a third of the population still lived in poverty, Cuba was one of the five most developed countries in Latin America by the end of the Batista era,[121] with 56% of the population living in cities.[122]
>In the 1950s, Cuba's gross domestic product (GDP) per capita was roughly equal to that of contemporary Italy, and significantly higher than that of countries such as Japan, although Cuba's GDP per capita was still only a sixth as large as that of the United States.[119][123] According to the United Nations at the time, "one feature of the Cuban social structure [was] a large middle class".[123] Labour rights were also favourable – an eight-hour day had been established in 1933, long before most other countries, and Cuban workers were entitled to a months's paid holiday, nine days' sick leave with pay, and six weeks' holiday before and after childbirth.[124]
>Cuba also had Latin America's highest per capita consumption rates of meat, vegetables, cereals, automobiles, telephones and radios during this period.[120][124][125]:186 Cuba had the fifth-highest number of televisions per capita in the world, and the world's eighth-highest number of radio stations (160). According to the United Nations, 58 different daily newspapers operated in Cuba during the late 1950s, more than any Latin American country save Brazil, Argentina and Mexico.[126] Havana was the world's fourth-most-expensive city at the time,[111] and had more cinemas than New York.[121] Cuba furthermore had the highest level of telephone penetration in Latin America, although many telephone users were still unconnected to switchboards.[122]
>Moreover, Cuba's health service was remarkably developed. By the late 1950s, it had one of the highest numbers of doctors per capita – more than in the United Kingdom at that time – and the third-lowest adult mortality rate in the world. According to the World Health Organization, the island had the lowest infant mortality rate in Latin America, and the 13th-lowest in the world – better than in contemporary France, Belgium, West Germany, Israel, Japan, Austria, Italy, Spain, and Portugal.[120][127][128] Additionally, Cuba's education spending in the 1950s was the highest in Latin America, relative to GDP.[120] Cuba had the fourth-highest literacy rate in the region, at almost 80% according to the United Nations – higher than that of Spain at the time.[126][127][128]
The association between quality-of-life metrics, like wages, and per capita GDP, doesn't disappear when an economy becomes developed.
And China is a highly market-based country, which saw a massive decline in poverty after its pro-market reforms that ended many state subsidies and recognized private property rights, as the Atlantic article I provided above explains.
What is your means for gauging what "works"? To where do you point as your evidence? I ask, mainly because the notion that "libertarian" policies (of both left and right varieties) have been tried in the modern era is a pretty big stretch, to me.
Not even the shallowest stuff people typically refer to, like marijuana decriminalization/legalization laws, qualify as "libertarian" policies. All the states that have legal weed also tax & regulate it heavily with specialized state controls, so we can't call it 'libertarian' in the least.
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding about what libertarianism is - not to worry, though, because that's pretty common and says nothing about you otherwise. Libertarianism is a radical political position to take; it does not fit neatly into today's political infrastructure. By suggesting it fails to address X, Y, or Z, you are simply projecting your own values onto a system which does not share them with you.
> They've failed to address the growing inability to normal people to have financial security
Libertarians have absolutely no interest in solving this problem. They are not trying to run peoples' lives, they are trying to relieve the people of the power that currently is wielded against them by the state and its cronies. The intent is to liberate people, so that they may be uninhibited in their pursuit of voluntary, peaceful interactions with others. What one chooses to do with this liberation is entirely up to them, and that's what being human is all about.
You are of course free to disagree all you want with these perspectives, but attacking libertarianism in the way you do isn't exactly fair.
No, lies and bullshit would require self reflection. Both of those things have always been things the well fed and well off let their children play pretend with while making sure they never have to figure out how to feed themselves.
I am 44. My entire life, speaking as someone who grew up conservative, libertarianism has either been about weed or drugs. And then about what degree of freedom one should have when arrested with either.
Ask a poor person or a minority what it is like to be arrested with either. Stop role playing nonsense and join the real world.
libertarianism has either been about weed or drugs
I'm not sure what libertarianism you've been looking at. Certainly stopping the war on drugs is one plank of the libertarian platform, but it's only one small piece.
Other issues include stopping America's eternal military actions, reining in public debt, stopping abuse of police power (some overlap with BLM here!), ensuring that civil liberties such as speech, voting, self-defense, and sanctity of private property are protected, and so forth. There's a LOT there (and so assuredly there's space for everybody to find disagreement). It's just wrong to claim that it's all about weed and drugs.
I'm not so sure how helpful this all is, to be honest. While I am sure almost all libertarian-leaning folks would agree with your policy positions, libertarianism is really a system of political thought - not a political party, nor a collection of specific policies.
Libertarians are really united more by their shared political axioms [0], rather than their specific policy views.
How much of that was spin and framing against the Democrats or did anyone seriously believe that they were in favour of mob violence?
New rule: if you don't condemn child rape every Monday morning then until you do it is assumed that you are in favour.
Tiny furors like the "who's wearing an American flag lapel pin" are is too often motivated by political opportunity rather than any real question of where the parties stand on topics. And yes, Democrats do it to Republicans as well, just generally not as frequently. Republicans seem to love their mostly meaningless and unsurprising performative doxologies.
>How much of that was spin and framing against the Democrats or did anyone seriously believe that they were in favour of mob violence?
Do you really think AOC et al are against it? I've seen so much left-wing justification of punching Nazis etc. that I'd be very surprised if there weren't at least a few Democratic politicians in agreement.
Ilhan Omar calls for complete dismantling of the Minneapolis police department around 1:30 in this vid: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aj3vdaC4F7c Yes, that's complete dismantling, none of this "redirect a bit of the funds" stuff which got retconned (watch the entire video for more examples). So I wouldn't put anything past her.
The Charles Koch was accused of "whipping up a mob" earlier in this thread, but whatever mob he "whipped up" was a very mild-mannered one which didn't light any fires. It seemed worthwhile to highlight the disparity.
I don't think this is a "tiny" furor. (As you illustrate, even if Democrats don't endorse violence, they are very willing to downplay it!) I recommend this video: https://twitter.com/mrctv/status/1297707698788728832
> Republicans seem to love their mostly meaningless and unsurprising performative doxologies.
You need to update your views for today's political scene. These conditions were true up til around 2008. Since then, the Democrats are now the party that engages in the performative doxologies.
Need I remind you of all that tone-deaf BLM kneeling crap in DC? Or how about the mask mandates? The face masks are the Democrats' "American flag lapel pin."
Liberals and conservatives will rarely condemn the violence of their pet terrorists. As far as violence is concerned, that's the problem with conservatives and liberals. They generally lend tacit support to violence against people they dislike. All with a wink, wink and a nudge, nudge.
That's why we end up with dead police who walk into ambushes, dead black guys who make the mistake of relaxing in their own apartments when lady cops burst in guns blazing, burned stores, dead little old ladies who go to bible studies while black, and dead walmart shoppers who made the mistake of being minority while looking for a San Antonio Spurs dart board at the wrong time.
Extremists are just dangerous people. We should really be bringing the hammer against all these groups wherever we find them, but again, they are protected by their patrons. So they walk the streets tatted and masked up waving around AR's because they know their benefactors will not allow our counter-terrorism units to do what military sense would demand in a sensible world.
There are enough career civil servants out there that believe in the fundamentals of their roles that they keep the machinery of civilization turning along. I don't disagree with the parent's remarks at all - failure to condemn violent acts really is a both sides problem right now.
Chaos leads to distracted government, which we've had 4 years of. Now we'll have at least 2 years of divided government. Government occupied elsewhere is always good for Koch's business. Chaos will do.
Not even that. The EPA, public lands, etc. might be on the ropes, but they're not dead yet. This looks to me more like the next salvo to make sure they go down, and stay down.
> The article would have been improved by giving some insight into what changed his mind.
The article would have been improved by at least proving he has changed his mind. Charles Koch is 85. There is a decent chance he is not going to live long enough to see another Republican administration. It would be in the best interest of maintaining some political influence and making some more change for him to change his public position like this. If he were 60, I would have expected him to wait 4–8 years for the next Republican administration instead.
I think you're being overly harsh on the Wall Street Journal. The headline is "Charles Koch _Says_ His Partisanship Was a Mistake".
There's a valid discussion to be had about whether Charles Koch is full of crap, but I don't think it's wrong for newspapers to report on what people with power say.
Journalists have to leave this kind of thing mostly implied for ethical reasons if nothing else.
The answer is clearly: because his research showed that this particular messaging (this story and the book) was the most advantageous to his political goals. If any part of it was literally meaningful then it would have the explanations you noticed were missing.
But you don't call out a Kock brother on his weak sauce image management in the WSJ, you just promote his book, do what you're told, and avoid making that kind of enemy.
He's got fairly conservative and finance friendly Democrats to influence right now and taking his money can't be too much of a public scandal.
They screwed up by putting themselves in this position where their only hope for a future is desperately trying to distance themselves from what they've done and who they are.
“Still, his political spending remains almost entirely partisan. Koch Industries’ PAC and employees donated $2.8 million in the 2020 campaign cycle to Republican candidates and $221,000 to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.“
It also conflates donations from employees with that of their employers. There's a big difference between a billionaire like Koch individually spending hundreds of millions of dollars to block climate change, and thousands of individual tech employees donating small amounts of money towards their favorite causes and politicians.
This is uncharitable. The comment was in response to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25105426, which specifically mentioned employee contributions: "Still, his political spending remains almost entirely partisan. Koch Industries’ PAC and employees donated $2.8 million in the 2020 campaign cycle to Republican candidates and $221,000 to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.". If Koch Industries employee donation bias is discussion worthy, so should be BigTech employee donation bias, which is even more strident.
Granted, the original article and the comment which cites it mixes PAC + employee. For the purposes of identifying political bias in an organization though, the employee donations are quite a bit more illuminating. PAC donations are more strategic investments in incumbents, thus tend so be roughly 50-50 in the current political landscape: "A company’s PAC donations have less to do with supporting a specific party than with accessing those in power. Corporate PACs donate the vast majority — 90 percent in the last midterm — of their money to incumbent candidates, who are much more likely to be elected than challengers. Tech companies are no different."
For completeness, here is Googles PAC + employee donation breakdown: 87% D, 13% R. On par with the partisanism of Koch Industries, which even Charles Koch decries as a mistake. I don't have the data to split KI PAC vs. KI employee donations.
Exactly, one is 2 individuals purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion and another is a subset of a particular upper class group purchasing policies in an undemocratic fashion.
It's like comparing the weight of a pound of bricks to a pound of feathers.
If bias in KI PAC + employee donations is discussion worthy, then BigTech employee donations bias is also discussion worthy. It's the same corrosive behavior, just with the polarity reversed.
This reminds me of George Wallace’s famous realization that his long term institutionalization of racism in Alabama was wrong when he was getting close to death’s door. It was kind of nice to hear, but lots of damage was done.
I found it interesting that Wallace didn't start out racist: he became racist when he discovered it would help him win elections. Before that he was a liberal.
The tragedy of Emmitt Till's murder wasn't just his death, but that it was representative of a corrupt and violent White Southerner culture that lasted despite the horror of what was done to him (and the loss of face the Deep South experienced when it was exposed). She spent 70 years standing by her lie. About 4 years into it, she was old enough to start making it right and didn't.
Further tragedy: the two men accused of his murder admitted in 1956 that they'd done it but since they'd already been acquitted they were immune from further prosecution.
Furthermore, a plaque memorializing his murder is constantly vandalized and stolen (three times in the last twelve years). The current one (if it is still there now a year later) was made bulletproof: https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2019/10/20/this-emmet...
According to Wikipedia she was 21. Emmett Till was 14. Also, the evidence that she recanted is shaky. She was 72 in 2008 when this allegedly happened. If she recanted in the presence of the interviewer, it wasn't on tape and she hasn't done it since.
I think if we try real hard we can figure out how. African American kids under ten can be super predators. A white woman at 21 can probably be responsible.
I am skeptical. I think people like Koch have been fanning the flames for a long time, only to now see that the monster rose up and threatens to eat them. They'd like to put the genie back in the bottle, but it's too late for that.
He's 85, his brother died recently, and he's very likely concerned about "legacy". According to Greenpeace, these assholes have poured $145,555,197 into groups that worked counter to climate policy changes being enacted (from 1997 to 2018). _Partisanship_ should be the least of his worries - he'll be remembered as a key figure who spurred inaction at the exact time that we should have been taking drastic action.
The Koch Brothers are also directly responsible for poisoning a generation of poor people who've had the unfortunate luck to live downwind from chemical factories owned by Koch Industries.
What's even more audacious is that all the money they gained from killing people, a lot of them from cancer, they pretend to be patrons of curing cancer funding cancer research.
It's very sad to see people so attached to their egos and external image. Instead of genuinely caring for what will the lives of others be like in the future, they only care about how they will read his name when he is not there. How petty is that, how meaningless? What meaning carries the pronunciation of a name in isolation?
Humanity will only progress once we deeply realize the reality of other minds, that we are made of the same stuff, that our conscious and identity is only pragmatically separated. You and me are the same stuff; helping myself and helping you are effectively the same thing. Helping my children (or your children) is the same as helping myself. I just can't see through their eyes, but they are all like a part of me, equally alive and thinking, that I just cannot access.
Once (and if) we realize this, then we can hope to go on longer than a few decades.
> What meaning carries the pronunciation of a name in isolation?
...And on the pedestal, these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
Shelley published Ozymandias more than 200 years ago. Humans are what they are.
For me, when the disagreement is about turning the planet into a hollow cinder for naked protection of wealth accrued in an unjust system and justified by Puritanical memes of free will and individualism, it's either a naughty word ascribing malice or one ascribing stupidity.
There is disagreement about the magnitude of things, but this is hyperboloic.
> for naked protection of wealth
An opinion on their motives.
> accrued in an unjust system
There's so much that can be discussed there. But simple, name one system that isn't unjust in some way. You can optimize for advancement though capitalism, or you can optimize for equality though communism, or some variation thereof. If you optimize too much for capitalism, the lower class are left out, if you optimize too much for communism, after a while everyone is lower than the lower class in what capitalism would result in. Different people will view the right balance differently, so "just" has no meaning here.
> it's either a naughty word ascribing malice or one ascribing stupidity
Or a bit of humility in assuming that you don't know every single thing there is to know about economics, sociology, political theory, and the motives of other individuals.
To be clear, I probably have similar views and beliefs to you on all these topics, but where we differ is in my willingness to put my views forth as fact and condemn others on limited evidence, public relations pieces put out by them and others, and my views on soft sciences that are still very much being worked on and in flux. Thinking someone else is an asshole is not an excuse for adopting bad behavior youself.
>There is disagreement about the magnitude of things, but this is hyperboloic (sic)
It's not hyperbolic. The Earth's new homeostasis after an unchecked greenhouse effect has run its course looks like Venus. If the effect is not stopped the question is not whether this will happen but how long it will take. Quite a while, certainly, but the environment will become inimical to humans much sooner.
The claim isn't that the Koch brothers deny climate change, but that they funded climate "skeptic" think tanks. They knew full well what they were doing.
It highlights the very important point that activist groups will quite often ignore viable solutions. This is usually because they wish to keep on being activists and keep on continuing the fight.
Thus it brings into question anything they claim and all claims should be treated with skepticism.
Have you seen how big the Chernobyl exclusion zone is? are to move your family there?
Have you paid any attention to the after effects at Fukushima? Do you care to realize that we are pushing radiation with unknown effects into the largest body of water (and one of the greatest repositories of life) on Earth? That the effects will likely reverberate for a 1000 years or more?
What is your solution to the problem of accumulating Nuclear waste?
Has it occurred to you that life has succeeded on the planet primarily by a fantastical luck of getting dosed with EXACTLY the right amount of radiation, carefully controlled by an atmosphere that literal took a millennia of millennia in order to develop? That fucking with that balance by inviting disastrous and unknown consequences into that careful envelope might turn some people off?
No. You must be right.. just a bunch of loony activists that are clinging desperately to the activist identity.
How shallow and unconsidered an opinion. Did it make you feel as smug as it sounded when you typed it out?
> Has it occurred to you that life has succeeded on the planet primarily by a fantastical luck of getting dosed with EXACTLY the right amount of radiation, carefully controlled by an atmosphere that literal took a millennia of millennia in order to develop?
Well, no. We aren't in some mystical radiation balance with nature.
Heritable point mutations are primarily driven by DNA polymerase errors and repair failures, not by radiation damage. Ultraviolet light is good at causing thymidine cross-linking, which can give rise to cancers, but this is irrelevant to heritable change. Likewise, higher energy particles can cut DNA, but compared to crossing over events during chromosomal assortment this has approximately no bearing on heritable change.
I gather all of that evidence was collected from Martian samples? Maybe Venus? Was it derived from DNA developed on the Moon?
What does make Earth just right for you to have developed in order to be aware, gain such knowledge, share such knowledge?
Untold eons of carefully controlled radiant energy emitted by our blessed Sun.
The Sun and its ilk are massive emitters of radiant energy. Light is a form of radiation. Heat is a form of radiation. The universe is full of lifeless rocks either burnt by the sun or left out in the cold. In fact, all the ones we know of exist in this state except this one.
I am not advocating some “mystical radiation balance with nature” so much as pointing out that “life” (as we know it) is playing the long game on controlling radiant energy doses. When we muck about with that by playing our dumb little short game without consideration for the consequences we invite disaster upon ourselves. All of this discussion about global warming is pointless if we leave large swathes of the planet uninhabitable by humans.
The atmosphere does a reasonably good job protecting us from the ravages of open space. One of the positive (for us) results of the particular make-up of that atmosphere is to foster life. Absent that protection (or if we were to act to circumvent it) life struggles to find a foothold. Can't think of anywhere life flourishes other than here.
Places that lack this protection tend to get burnt to a crisp or freeze. Lack of energy is a problem. Too much energy is a problem. The wrong KIND of energy is a problem.
What we call "radioactive material" that is the effluent by-product of nuclear fission is all the wrong kind of energy. I won't recount all the reasons why, but the fact that it is the least likely source of scrambling heritable traits in DNA is actually kind of low on the list (especially given the speed with which it scrambles DNA in living entities).
I am suggesting we shouldn't act to circumvent the protection we have been graciously afforded by the atmosphere. Fucking about with fissile material inside the atmosphere and on the surface is stupid and short sighted.
There is nothing mystical about any of this, it is pure science.
The current trajectory of temperature increase is at least 4~5°C (rather optimistic) in 2100, which would mean that a pretty wide area surrounding the equator will, year-round or for significant parts of the year, have a wet-bulb temperature at or above 35°C. It is the limit at which human life (and mammal life in general) is entirely impossible, due to over-heating.
That unlivable area will include most of India, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil, etc. Hong-Kong and Taiwan, whether you consider them as part of China or not, will anyway not be livable anymore by then. What do you think will happen when India, a country of 1.3B armed with nuclear weapons, realize it literally has to move somewhere else for survival? Do you think all these people will agree to die in silence, peacefully so as to not inconvenience you?
On top of that grim outlook, agriculture has only been possible relatively recently in human history. Until about 10,000 years ago the climate was not stable enough to reliably grow crops, year after year. That stability is probably already gone. Note that the issue for agriculture (and forests, etc.) is less the actual temperature and more the rain/weather patterns (and evaporation, that links back to temperature).
There is absolutely no guarantee that we will be able to adapt our crops fast enough for agriculture to keep up, especially if there is too much instability around the globe. Without stable crops the number of people that can survive on Earth is not very large. China has recently launched a 'Clean Plate' campaign against food waste. As you can imagine it's not because food is plentiful... but because of excess rain, causing crop failures.
Radioactivity is scary and dangerous in high enough dose. Chernobyl and Fukushima are horrible disasters that should have been avoided, but sadly weren't. But compared to the threat of global warming, risks from nuclear power plants are small, known and manageable. To say it differently, rice from Fukushima may be dangerous, but it's still safer than certain death from lack of rice.
I'm not saying we should be building nuclear power plants everywhere, at all. In any case there's not enough U235 at hand to fill the energy needs of mankind. But I would much prefer we spend fewer resources on closing existing nuclear power plants, and more resources on tackling global warming (looking at my home country, France, and our lignite addicted neighbor, Germany).
I have come to the unfortunate conclusion that "lack of rice" (and lack of clean water) is going to be a major issue whether we build out nuclear or not. I think humanity is in for a dark couple hundred years. The window hasn't closed, but we are hard pressed dealing with all the wrong fights and time is losing.
The less "1000 year tail of disaster" opportunities we can have available when things start to unravel the better. I am less afraid of us killing each other over rice and water than I am of us forcing those that come in the aftermath to deal with our effluence for 50+ generations.
How do you make cement (and by extension concrete)? Limestone calcination: CaCO3 → CaO + CO2
The world concrete production is a larger source of GHG than the entire world fleet of trucks used for goods transportation, with some margin. And that's only accounting CO2 emitted by the chemical reaction itself, not even accounting for the production of the energy necessary for the reaction, that often comes from natural gas.
That CO2 is not being displaced by nuclear power plants, solar panels, wind turbines or batteries in fancy cars. It's being replaced by not using concrete anymore. My point is that GHG emissions go way way further than just electricity production or gasoline to power cars or planes: it's chemistry (fertilizers, concrete, etc) and metallurgy.
I don't hear much about it, not least because I think it's a very hard problem: right now, using less concrete means less constructions. There aren't enough trees, and they don't grow quickly enough, to do everything using wood, although that could be a partial solution. But the construction sector employs A LOT of people. So the path to less concrete is a path to fewer jobs, and a shrinking economy...
There are a whole host of issues that stem from industrialization that are complex and require organized and disciplined action in order to contain. Cohesive action by the entire community of industrial nations is just not on the table at this point without some absolutely massive dislocation of economics or political power. Force is going to be required for change or desperation is going to force compliance. I can only assume based on history that this will all come to force of arms before any other rational solution (systemic enough that it will a difference) is pursued.
I just don't see any road forward without a horrifying body count. It is not impossible to avert that future, it just seems vanishingly improbable.
Look at the current wave of government collapses and civil wars that are exacerbated by the current crisis (ethiopia, peru, bolivia, argentina, zambia, etc.). It will be way worse.
Then think about places that are relatively safe, ie Europe, and relatively easy to migrate from the ME and Africa to. That's 500+M people trying to make their way over. That spells serious unrest in Europe too. And that's not even talking about Vietnam's sand mining catastrophe.
I am highly skeptical of them. It was not my intent to defend them.
I do not consider nuclear energy a viable alternative to the hydrocarbon economy. I have considered it and I have dismissed it. You will not change my mind unless you can produce it off planet. I have dismissed it as a non-viable option (apparently the "non-viable" part is inconceivable to you.) This dismissal is not tied to my need to coddle and protect my identity as an activist.
"It highlights the very important point that activist groups will quite often ignore viable solutions. This is usually because they wish to keep on being activists and keep on continuing the fight."
This line dismisses .. pretty much anyone advocating for change. "I proposed a solution that works for me. They don't like it. They must wish to protect the identity." Pure poppycock.
Not really. Maybe you shouldn't lead with an absolute that you can't possibly claim to know.
> This line dismisses .. pretty much anyone advocating for change. "I proposed a solution that works for me. They don't like it. They must wish to protect the identity." Pure poppycock.
I never claimed that applied for anyone that is advocating for change.
In this case the nuclear power solution could be a viable solution (I don't care for your expertise on the subject). They have rejected a viable solution that could get us X% of the way there. Therefore that tells me they aren't interested in an actual solution. That in tells me they wish to be advocates rather than solving an issue. Therefore anything they tell me is suspect.
Actually, what you wrote was "..activist groups will quite often ignore viable solutions. This is usually because they wish to keep on being activists and keep on continuing the fight."
You surmise in the text that the rejection of nuclear is just out of hand because solving the problem would end the fight. This is what you stated.
Nuclear may be a viable solution to the energy problem. Whether it is a viable solution to the humans altering the planet irrevocably so they can't inhabit it safely anymore problem is open to a bit more conjecture.
There is plenty of energy readily available on the planet without the necessity of continuing to burn off a billion years of carbon capture or splitting atoms, imho.
> Actually, what you wrote was "..activist groups will quite often ignore viable solutions. This is usually because they wish to keep on being activists and keep on continuing the fight."
You surmise in the text that the rejection of nuclear is just out of hand because solving the problem would end the fight. This is what you stated.
No. Note the words "often" and "usually" appear. Therefore not always.
Doses of radioactive elements from high atmosphere Nuclear weapons testing persist in trace amounts in all living things on Earth today. Dispersal of radioactive elements would be faster and point source radioactivity thereby reduced by that due to the nature of the medium into which it was released and the very short duration of the release.
Fukushima because it lacks these characteristics.
Blow up all the shit you want.. nuclear energy (when it fails, and every failure is too often) is way more disruptive then nuclear weapons. Evidence? See Nagasaki today vs Pripyat today.
I don't generally think we should be splitting atoms on the surface of the planet. It has lots of dirty side effects that far outlast our capacity to grapple with the consequences. Humans on the whole are not prepared at this point to think in terms of decades, let alone plan for events that have consequences counted in Milennia.
It changes my evaluation of the claim, which is sourced by Greenpeace.
In the long run I have no doubt that Greenpeace will have caused more damage than the Koch family. We could have clean energy right now if it weren’t for the decades of nuclear fear mongering, and the Koch family isn’t even opposed to nuclear.
Is this a troll? Comparing a single point on greenpiece's agenda to literally hundreds of millions of dollars Koch dollars to climate change deniers as a whole are simply incomparable.
Just in case this is somehow contestable, let me highlight a few points
* Climate change deniers oppose solutions that don't involve oil/gas/coal - this means nuclear power
* Koch funding > greenpiece funding
* greenpeice didn't start nuclear fear mongering, pro-oil lobbyists did - AKA climate change deniers.
Greenpeace's annual budget for activism (as opposed to fundraising, which eats roughly 1/3 of their budget) is on the order of $200 million. That's more than the lifetime spending of the Koch brothers, and Greenpeace does that volume every year. They're not some scrappy little actor, they're one of the single largest lobbying groups in the entire world.
Their expenditures for all their "program services" (their various activism campaigns) was $27.4M in 2019 and $26.3M in 2018. If the Koch Bros. spend about $200M a year on activism, they're actually substantially outspending Greenpeace. Which, well, is to be expected: Greenpeace is a non-profit that's very often taking positions opposing major corporations.
(Greenpeace is actually a collection of quasi-independent groups around the world, but since the Koch's activism is primarily focused in the US, it makes sense to compare them to Greenpeace USA.)
Nuclear energy is still dangerous. For example, it is still not safe against possible natural disasters (Fukushima), as well as from possible terrorist attacks. Imagine a 9/11 type of accident with a nuclear plant as its target. Potential danger is still extremely high, even if the chances of it are very small. We still cannot correctly estimate the risks of nuclear energy, after all these years.
It's also, like, 4x more expensive per kWh (probably 2x more expensive with variability taken into account) than wind or solar and is uninsurable without a government backstop.
I really wonder why people are so keen on it. It made sense to build them 40 years ago to deal with global warming. Today it's only financially viable if it's massively subsidized compared to wind/solar.
What is it that makes that extra cost so worthwhile?
The impression I get is that people are still hung up on nuclear not getting widely adopted decades ago when it was the best option. So they're still trying to make that argument now despite there being better options because they feel wronged.
Or that we do not believe that full renewable grids are viable yet. Every single non-carbon solution (solar, wind, tidal) I have heard hand-waves away baseload and storage as something that will be solved soon(tm) by liberal application of technology(tm).
Either by magical storage solutions or massive continental / intercontinental "smart" grids that are politically unviable (No country will give up energy security by relying on a source hundres / thousands of miles away).
I would rather we start on something we know works now. Perfect is the enemy of good enough and cost is not a critical factor if you believe climate change is an existential crisis to civilisation / great filter.
I would rather have future generations be in a situation where all they have to have to deal with is decommissioning those plants.
There's a variety of non magical storage solutions which are already being used (pumped water storage, molten salt) but demand shifting and overproduction will probably handle the majority of the variability. Thermal storage heaters will make a comeback, industrial users will vary when they consume electricity and car chargers will be programmed to listen to the price and charge when prices are low/free/negative.
A market driven response combined with upgrading grid infrastructure and finer grained pricing will be more than enough and will be cheaper than binge building nuke plants.
Meanwhile we can gradually ramp down usage of natural gas as markets adapt to the new reality.
We are just going to have to disagree on the wide-spread viability of the storage mechanisms and political / market reaction-time here.
However I hope I at least demonstrated that it is not always a case of "So they're still trying to make that argument now despite there being better options because they feel wronged."
Well, the idea of an energy source that never fails, is abundant and reliable has some allure. Solar and wind seem capricious in comparison.
Nevertheless, nuclear has some big issues: try to switch to it now and it will take decades for the power plants to be build. Expensive as well and leaves a lot of toxic and radioactive waste.
The biggest thing it has going for it is constant power without fossil fuels. The grid needs backing power. I've seen a lot of other efforts at this, but (correct me if I'm wrong) there are still none that work, scale, and are affordable.
The grid needs consistent power that is transferrable and responsive to load.
Point sources like nuclear plants add baseload, but are not flexible in supply.
A more resilient grid will have much more interconnection between sources and sinks and much more dynamic control and feedback loops.
Solar power is currently the cheapest form of new power available, it is limited by the hours of daylight.
Wind power is weather limited, but offshore wind power can provide relatively constant generation.
Batteries and equivalent energy storage (eg pumped hydro) provide the short term grid stability requirements that are currently provided by gas-powered peak plants, but with much faster response time and much cheaper capex and opex costs.
As rooftop solar and household battery (including stationary vehicles) expand, dynamic usage will also capture a lot of the energy market from large baseload generation.
All of these are affordable now, work, and, with investment in the grid/network, scale.
I should have phrased that differently; my understanding is that the problem isn't whether renewable energy is relatively affordable, it's whether it beats natural gas plants, and that so far the generation part does but the storage does not--the reason Germany's removal of nuclear energy resulted in an increase in fossil fuel use.
Like others have mentioned, it's an empty rebranding. His super-PAC is still dumping money into the Georgia Senate race to help Perdue and Loeffler's re-election.
> Mr. Koch is now trying to work together with Democrats and liberals on issues such as immigration, criminal-justice reform and limiting U.S. intervention abroad, where he thinks common ground can be found. He has partnered with organizations including the LeBron James Family Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union and even a handful of Democratic state legislative campaigns. In 2019, he renamed the Koch network of about 700 donors as Stand Together.
> Still, his political spending remains almost entirely partisan. Koch Industries’ PAC and employees donated $2.8 million in the 2020 campaign cycle to Republican candidates and $221,000 to Democratic candidates, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
- Parts of both the right and the left would rather not repeat the experience they have had over the last few years. While part of me thinks that the Koch businesses did pretty well during the Trump administration, the relative chaos of his presidency likely didn't let them do a lot of -effective- lobbying.
- Speaking of businesses. Koch Industries historically has had Petroleum and Paper as their Cash Cows. With all of the attention on global warming, as well as their track record on lobbying, Yes I would absolutely agree they are trying to play nice.
- That said, I did find it interesting to note that Koch Industries has fully acquired Infor as of this year. For those unfamiliar, it's a player in the ERP scene and based on the people that I've worked with from there and their stories, probably a pretty good product in that space. So -maybe- they are in fact seeing the writing on the wall and trying to move to more sustainable markets. we shall see.
Mr. Koch just doesn't want people to desecrate his family grave when he finally bites the dust. I don't buy it for a second that he has truly changed. He will die rich while the rest of us try to clean up the mess he and his brother created.
Koch has spent a fortune on destabilizing public infrastructure in midwest cities. If he "believed in people", he could show it by not tearing down public transit systems which disenfranchises poorer people.
Id say it is. It's the local government chosen by the people deciding the infrastructure, rather than big car and oil companies controlled by a small group of oligarchs
Maybe it's a more complex matter? How about if people at the bottom were not continuously smacked by rich libertarian assholes and had a chance of having freedom of leisure, education, movement & all that good stuff that can make a citizen, who then is able to participate in decision making progress instead of being treated as animals for being poor? Feels bottom-up to me.
He spent hubdreds of millions of dollar doing the exact opposite. You know what they say, put your money where your mouth is. He's lying in plain sight.
As the article points out the Koch's themselves, running a 100+ billion dollar empire, were quite happy buying themselves into the highest echelons of power, spreading their beliefs from the top down
Mr. Koch and his late brother David seeded the political landscape with conservative and libertarian ideas, then built an infrastructure to nurture them. Koch-aligned ventures fund more than 1,000 faculty members at more than 200 universities, helped bankroll think tanks such as the Cato Institute and the American Enterprise Institute, and supported the American Legislative Exchange Council (a nonpartisan organization of similarly minded state legislators) to write bills that were introduced and championed by Republican state lawmakers across the country.
You know what would really decentralise the country and create a bottom-up utopia? If no single entity had the resources the Kochs has. But in the world of the Kochs privately funded authoritarianism does not count.
That's true, but not a bad thing. We reward charitable donations for a good reason. Ideally, he'd have given away his fortune as he made it (and lived in a world where that wasn't risky), but we live in a world where it seems responsible to save millions or billions and grow them, then dedicate it something as you realize you can't take it with you.
The US seems to be in the middle of another realignment, like in the 60s. The Democratic party is consolidating its support from the big corporations, while the Republican party is making inroads with the working class.
Not just that, but the Republican party is openly populist right now. I think the Democrats are about to experience a significant amount of turmoil as the progressives try to take full control of the party. Maybe the conservatives in the Democratic party will join with the conservatives from the Republican party. Not sure how it will play out, but both parties seem to be evolving rapidly and both have big internal divides.
> Maybe the conservatives in the Democratic party will join with the conservatives from the Republican party
And go where? As you've said, the Republican party is openly populist. If anything the Republican conservatives will look to the Democratic party, which seems to have become the conservative option. I consider myself a Libertarian and I'm considering voting straight national ticket Democrat for the next decade due to what the Republican party has become. Putting party above country is simply unforgivable.
a solid 35-40% of the Democratic Party is explicitly anti-corporate, remember occupy wall-street and the success of Bernie Sanders? Remember Warren calling for breaking up big tech? Even Biden and Obama frequently deployed (light) anti-corporate rhetoric in their campaigns and presidency.
Trump is a billionaire and a defender of the corporate class. His entire administration consists of ex-corporate wall-street types folks and/or zealot yes-men. You may be right that the "inroads with the working class" are being made, but only in the form of the working class being convinced that their interests are the same as the corporate classes interests... though even that analysis may be wrong considering that Biden won by convincing voters in the rust and sun belt to vote for him.
And Gabbard [0, 1], and Yang [2] (the cited individual incidents do not necessarily constitute proof of candidate suppression in and of themselves, but are indicative of broader patterns throughout the primary process).
Sure do. Debbie Wasserman Schultz was fired over it. They also dismantled the superdelegate system. Changes were made. The media was still heavily biased against Bernie before the pandemic; probably due to half of their commercials being for drug and insurance companies.
I'm just looking forward to a period of relative stability the next four years. #MakePoliticsBoringAgain
The relative stability you want in the next four year, if it comes, will come at the cost of something even worse after.
If you want not to have Trumps anymore, you need to get rid of the factors that lead to Trump happening, and that's not going to be done calmly given the opposition of the DNC and other established interests.
As a non-american, the best shot you had of establishing long-term stability was Bernie Sanders. The way things are going, the Democrats will continue alienating themselves from more and more of their base and the Republicans will continue ramping up fear and instability.
Bernie's numbers were huge and dominating with people under 40. It will take a decade or two, but, i think Gen Z and Millenials will finally usher in more progressive change in the Democratic party.
I share your hope. That being said, my cynicism says that a decade or two might be too late, and that the Democratic party might try to exploit the ratchet effect to neuter any left wing candidate, as is the interest of their donors.
I don't think politics will reset just like that. Schultz was sacrificed at the altar to calm the public. The superdelegate system, too. The political establishments (Dem and Rep) have been given a taste of how much their constituencies resent them. If they want to maintain power, primaries can only become less democratic going forward.
I'm worried that insurgent candidate like those in 'the squad' were only allowed to succeed as an olive branch to the left-populists for the purposes of maintaining a coherent anti-trump coalition.
The Republicans ran a reasonably clean primary in 2016, and got Trump, a demagogue completely dismissive of the party's interests, who catered to his base, and only helped the Republicans in circumstances of mutual interests. I don't think the party's leadership will be willing to risk something like that again, if the behavior of the Bush-era cabinet appointees he had is any indicator.
>I'm worried that insurgent candidate like those in 'the squad' were only allowed to succeed as an olive branch to the left-populists for the purposes of maintaining a coherent anti-trump coalition.
I don't buy that but happy to be proven wrong. I was following AOC's race closely before she won her election (any before anyone had heard of her). They went out of their way to work with and endorse her competitor. It was AOC's hustle and innovative techniques that made up for her huge money disadvantage (~300k at the end of the election vs ~3mil) as well as the fact that her rival was appointed the seat through a loophole (and so never really learned how to run a campaign) that resulted in her win.
The opposition spent 10+ million trying to unseat her since then.
I really do hope you're right about that. My understanding is that the squad came up with without the consent of the party establishment by running an exceptional ground game during their primaries, in districts that were safe blue, and had politicians who'd become too comfortable where they were at.
They were an unknown threat before.
Caruso-Cabrera did raise quite a bit of money to unseat AOC, but most of the endorsements I can find seem to be from conservative organizations looking to score some kind of moral victory against the Justice Dems. My estimate is that a political novice with (some) name recognition tried to take her down of her own accord, and AOC's pissed off enough corporations and conservatives that she incidentally (or deliberately) walked into a money pit in doing so.
I may have missed it, but I haven't seen anything to indicate that the DNC has spun up its machinery to truly run a full-throated opposition opp against her.
I'd have to do more research on the rest of them, but I don't believe the squad's faced the kind of push-back that the party's capable of yet.
The DNC doesn't have full throated machinery to win. They are specialized in losing and conceding ground. Their "machinery" is a huge number of corporations grifting a profit. They have lots of funds, but they also have lots of pockets to grease just to get some ads out or promote a few tweets or pay an army of strategic consultants that are paid massive salaries despite only having lost races.
Trump's pivotal point was Super Tuesday where the Republican moderate vote was split between 8 choices: he was able to build an insurmountable lead.
Much like marijuana legislation finally passing now, i think it will take the previous generation to die off before we start seeing more democratic progressive candidates like AOC. Bernie's numbers were Yuge and dominating with people under 40. Give it another decade or so: if gen Z shares values with gen X and Millenials, which is yet to be seen, i think the AOC type candidates will make inroads in many places in the Democratic party.
As someone in Gen Z in the western world, the left in Gen Z seems to be more dominant and a lot more to the left - as in, I have many friends that saw Bernie as a "harm reduction" candidate.
That being said, this is only one datapoint, and I also know other people that are far to the right.
You mean the white working class. And no one in their right mind thinks that the Republican party is less corporatist than the Democratic party. With the CARES Act, the Trump administration fought to keep secret which businesses received money. Come to find out, multinational and conglomerate entities like Ruth Chris' Steakhouse received funds.
According to polls, Trump had been making inroads into black and Latino communities as well, with approval rising from 2016 to 2020 from 5% to 9% in black communities and rising from 28% to 44% in Latino communities.
That is still considered a landslide in the world of politics. Despite the attempts by conservatives to see some light at the tunnel, the conservative ideology will always be a rump party in communities of color.
I made no comments regarding whether it is a landslide or not. I am pointing out that your correction of the GP comment that "the Republican party is making inroads into the working class" should be "to the white working class". I feel that increases of 80% and 57% are significant enough to count as making inroads. Other data includes Vietnamese support increasing from 32% to 48%, handily beating the 36% Biden support. Approval from 44%~48% of a community may not be the majority, but complacent attitudes such as yours is the way that such percentages continue to increase.
The USA needs a law that limits individuals to only donating something like $5,000 per person to any political campaign entity such as PACs, Super PACs, and political campaigns. Companies should not be able to contribute anything, only citizens. CA Props should also have this limit. Otherwise, the USA will be defacto ruled by whichever entities are able to contribute the most to campaigns and advertising for politicians. If the Koch brothers are allowed to put up 1,000 billboards for their candidate, but I can only afford to put up 1 billboard for a candidate, then politicians will only serve wealthy individuals and companies that contribute the most financially to their campaigns. The result will be that the government will not adequately protect ordinary citizens or the environment, which, in my opinion, is already happening.
The USA had exactly such laws, before they were struck down in the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in the landmark case Citizens United. The reasoning was that the right to free speech was protected at all scales and all categories absolutely, and thusvspending any amount on any political speech like buying ads was protected. The only way for such a law to pass now would be to either have the Supreme Court overturn this decision (unlikely, its still recent) or to change the constitution to specify political speech spending as unprotected by the right to free speech, which is even less likely given the supermajority needed, the natural conflict of interests with the entire existing political class, and thr sacredness with which the American people view the constitution, and that part of the document specifically.
I personally think Citizens United is the worst thing to ever happen to democracy, but I fear a revolution after a prolonged slide into deep oligarchy might be the only way it ever changes.
Except that studies show that (at least above some relatively low threshold), money spent on a campaign doesn't correlate with election success. There's no point in throwing out the First Amendment (and possibly the most important aspect of it at that) for something that's not going to make any difference.
If I contribute $2000 to a party or a politician, and Charles Koch contributes $2M, which one of us is going to get the ear of our representative when we call?
In my case, some intern will dutifully take my call. In Charles Koch's case, he will have that congressperson's direct phone line. When he goes to Washington, they'll have a sit down meal together. Hell, if he wanted it, he could have asked for and received a cabinet position or an ambassadorship.
That isn't just free speech -- that is derailing democracy. By limiting contribution amounts, it will make the elected less beholden to big donors.
such a rule would be very difficult to make. let's say that there is a NGO that advocates for the rights of illegal immigrants. can a fundraiser donate more than $5,000 to that NGO? if not, I doubt that many NGOs would survive, so let's assume so. if that NGO wants to endorse Biden, are they allowed? if not, can they hint that people should vote against the candidate who wants to build a wall? If they are allowed to endorse Biden and they want to place an ad on TV, the production and placement could cost itself over $5,000
I think for the NGO to accept donations of greater than $5,000 from an individual, the NGO would have to agree not participate in political campaigning in any way.
Elections are in the public interest and therefore should be publicly funded -- exclusively.
Each registered candidate with more than a certain number of signatures of support should be given a budget of money and pre-paid airtime on all major networks by the FEC, and that's it. Once it's out, it's out. All other contributions (including in-kind) to political campaigns are tantamount to bribery and should just be illegal.
"Should" is a very easy word to throw out. Yeah, elections should be all those things. The problem is the follow up questions of "how?", "what would the unintended consequences be?" and "can we enforce this objectively when the situation gets murky?".
It seems all but impossible to stop billionaires like Koch waging public relations campaigns. If nothing else they'll just buy entire media companies (c.f. Bezos and the Washington Post) and jump in to the fray Fox News style.
It is pretty likely that no-money-in-politics rules would be weaponised against smaller donators. I'm sure there are a bunch of wealthy people who would love nothing more than legal tools to shut down donation-driven groups like the Black Lives Matter website.
Not impossible at all. This is a solved problem in much of Europe. Read about France’s election process. The problem is that elected officials in the US don’t have much incentive to represent the will of their constituency — only their donors. And their donors do not want campaign finance reform because it eliminates their influence. This is not a logistics issue, it’s a corruption issue.
How do you think Europe/France solves for the Bezos-WaPo "problem" whereby wealthy individuals can convert money into political influence indirectly by controlling media companies?
The media laws make it harder to spout propaganda, and the media regulators don't allow these people to buy media, and also well funded public media organisations.
Is it possible? Yes. That's exactly how countries with a post-beta implementation of democracy are doing things and it works well enough (it's never perfect). The only unknown is a migration path for the USA, so many with disproportionate power in the current system would fight that change tooth and nail.
It's pretty straightforward to spot billion dollar ad campaigns. The FCC has carried out its duty to regulate airtime for the better part of a century.
> Elections are in the public interest and therefore should be publicly funded -- exclusively.
So me, as a private citizen, should be outlawed from making a sign on my front yard in support of a candidate with my own money? Should I be prevented from making my own website in support of issues and candidates I care about? Can I create YouTube videos with my own money to support issues and candidates I care about with my own money? This is supporting a candidate with funds outside of the public funds -- clearly illegal under your proposal! At what point is it no longer individuals expressing their own opinions in public?
Parties are allowed donations, but they can't spend more than x on election campaigns, no matter where the money is coming from.
Time on public TV is kind-of regulated.
TV ads are not really a thing, mostly billboards and print.
Can be circumvented though, since it requires parties to declare spendings correctly (and labelled correctly). "Oh, those fancy pens that look like merch? For work if course!" "We didn't rent this venue, a party-friend did"
Difficult to enforce with all the possible loopholes.
> What about completely anonymous donations? If the receiver doesn't know who is giving the money, how could it act as a bribe?
It would be pretty hard to set things up so that donations were not only anonymous, but non-verifiable (as in, it should be impossible for a donor to prove to a recipient that they were the one who donated). This attribute in voting systems is part of 'coercion resistance' (as in, if you can't prove how you voted even when you want to, there is no point in trying to coerce you into voting a particular way). In a payments system, we can call it 'corruption resistance'.
I can’t think of anything in the public interest that shouldn’t be publicly funded. I would go so far as to say that’s the only class of thing that should be publicly funded. Did you have something in mind?
Re: completely anonymous donations, you mean, like Bitcoin? Generally any legitimate business has to report where it’s money came from - even if just for tax purposes - otherwise it’s a whole new crime. Remember, under my model, all contributions would be banned. Then, candidates would have to compete on platforms instead of fundraising.
It's an interesting question. Celebrity endorsements in the USA are big money. E.g. Kim kardashian supposedly charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for a single instagram endorsement.
His argument that people should be empowered to engage with the democratic process is ridiculous... Just because we want people to engage, doesn't mean that billionaires should have orders of magnitude more influence when they do "engage" than other people do.
How do you decide how much wealth someone can have? If you say let's do it democratically who's involved in that democratic decision? The people who's wealth is going to be ... eh, uncontrolled? And is it undemocratic if they decide they don't want that? Isn't it possible that we're actually doing what you want - stopping people from having undemocratic control over wealth but we just put the line over how much in a different place then you seemingly want to?
This last round of elections showed how money doesn't buy elections as easily as you'd think. Democrats massively over-spent Republicans, and what did it get them? A narrow Biden win, a smaller lead in the house, and a smaller gap in the Senate. Bloomberg's image and as businessman and politician is pretty strong, but for all his spending, the only votes he won in the primary were form American Samoa.
I feel the same way. I am a voluntarist so I do not think forced wealth redistribution is the answer. But it’s clear to me that there are ways we can move to different businesses structures and property norms so that massive wealth has a tendency to be distributed throughout the population rather than concentrating in few hands.
It’s a challenge, for sure. And some proposed solutions may cause more harm that good. But it’s absurd to me the level of wealth inequality we have today. That there are individual humans worth over a billion dollars while so many even in developed nations are hungry and overworked.
More cooperatively owned firms and less intellectual property control are two voluntarist ways we can reduce this inequality.
This isn’t true. To take the US tax system as an example it’s much more progressive than the flat tax starter you’re describing, where all income is taxed at the same rate. This does not stop inequality.
> In 2016, the bottom 50 percent of taxpayers—those with adjusted gross incomes (AGI) below $40,078—earned 11.6 percent of total AGI. However, this group of taxpayers paid just 3 percent of all income taxes in 2016.
> In contrast, the top 1 percent of all taxpayers (taxpayers with AGI of $480,804 and above), earned 19.7 percent of all AGI in 2016, and paid 37.3 percent of all federal income taxes. The top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined, who paid 30.5 percent of all income taxes.
In a 2007 interview, Buffett explained that he took a survey of his employees and compared their tax rates to his. All told, he found that while he paid a total tax rate of 17.7%, the average tax rate for people in his office was 32.9%.
....
So why is it that Buffett himself doesn't pay more tax? It's because the bulk of his income comes from dividends and long-term capital gains, which are taxed at a much lower rate than ordinary income.
Supposedly if dividends and capital gains were taxed at the same rate as personal income, capital would just go to countries where it's taxed at a lower rate. Supposedly.
I don't think everyone paying the same income tax is what people usually advocate for, but everyone actually paying the full share of the tax.
I think a flat 20% above a certain rate is probably the most 'fair', but what needs to change is remove most loopholes that exist now. So everyone above a certain income level pays the same proportion of their income.
Of course the tax base ends up really top heavy, if you earn most of the income, you pay most of the tax. That seems fair to me.
> it’s much more progressive than the flat tax starter you’re describing
No, "flat tax" is not what I'm describing or advocating.
Did you know that Warren Buffet paid a total tax rate of 17.7%, whilst the average tax rate for ordinary American office workers in his office was 32.9%?
Nope. Marginal propensity to spend kills that out of the gate. Poor people save a much smaller proportion of their income than rich people, on average. Since rich people are rich (meaning that percentage is out of a bigger pie than the poor person's), and their savings rates are higher than poor people, you just multiply that out and see that rich people will get richer much faster than poor people.
This doesn't take into account taxes, however, which means that we're assuming a 0% flat tax rate. But, you see, what happens is that if you start imposing a positive taxation rate, then all that changes in the preceding argument is the definition of who is "rich" and who is "poor." The general trend is all that matters.
One actual limitation to point out is that this argument doesn't take investment into account. Over long enough time periods, all major asset classes have a positive expected return, so, it doesn't matter precisely what people invest in. What does matter is how much they have to invest, and how long "long enough" time periods are.
IIRC, for the stock market, "long enough" means 15 years or so. Since this is much shorter than a single human lifetime, you see that all someone who is rich enough to invest has to do is just keep shovelling money into their brokerage account, and it will pay off eventually.
Poor people don't even get to that point. The hows and whys of that are myriad, so I won't even get into that. Just imagine that, instead of calling them "poor people," we call them "economically fragile" people. Then, what you start to realize is that a small bump in the road, like, say, an unexpected car repair, can really devastate an economically fragile person's finances.
And, because economically fragile people don't have a lot of money coming in, their expenses are pretty low. That means that even if they follow standard personal finance advice and try to accumulate a 6 month emergency fund, a car repair costs what a car repair costs, so it's going to eat a much larger chunk of that emergency fund for the economically fragile person than the non-economically fragile person.
Oh, and, because economic fragility is relative (meaning if you, and everybody else have 1 quatloo each and I have 10 quatloos, I'm still as "rich" overall as if everybody had 10 quatloos each, and I had 100), that means starting poor and getting rich takes a long, long time, and may not ever happen.
TL;DR: A completely flat tax rate for all citizens implies that the rich will get richer, and the poor will stay fairly poor.
What really riles me about taxation is that generally people who work longer/harder/smarter to increase their net worth get taxed far more than those who increase it because they have a spare 50k they put into the stock market.
For a just society we should tax working far less than taxing capital and dividend gains, not the opposite.
From "Wall Street" (1987) [a work of fiction which I have no reason to take at face value regarding precise statistics, but nevertheless]:
"The richest one percent of this country owns half the country's wealth: 5 trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds of it comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulation to widows and idiot sons and what I do -- stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. Ninety percent of the American people have little or no net worth. I create nothing; I own. We make the rules, Buddy, the news, war, peace, famine, upheaval; the cost of a paper clip. (picking one up) We pull the rabbit out of the hat while everybody else sits around their whole life wondering how we did it..."
As long as they aren't in a tax bracket over 100%, then, "work[ing] longer / harder / smarter," in fact does result in increasing their net worth. What's the problem, then? That we are asking them to contribute to promoting the general welfare?
The problem is that when someone works longer/harder/smarter for 1k, they get more taken in tax than if someone gambles on the stock market and makes 1k. That's the wrong way round.
But they don’t pay tax at the same rate, because once they get wealthy they buy enough influence to tip the scales in their favor. Which is why I advocate for more collectively owned firms. Then wealth goes directly to the people rather than going to a rich CEO and shareholders and then the government and then eventually maybe the people.
It's possible, though, that this small proportion of wealth has a disproportionate effect on the political process, and then the political process has secondary effects on the wealth of non-billionaires.
To pick an extreme and unlikely hypothesis, it could be that if there weren't any billionaires corrupting politics, then the economy would be run in a better way which enabled everyone to become millionaires.
Since billionaires are a subset of those, then they cannot possibly control any more than 45%, so certainly less than half.
Can't find a source showing just billionaires, at the moment, but the first source suggests that the billionaires have a net worth on the order of 9 to 10 trillion; if billionaires control 10 trillion, and about 130 trillion is 45% of the wealth, then billionaires are in control of somewhere around 4% of global wealth.
As a rough calculation in sixty seconds, this does appear to support your assertion that billionaires control a small proportion of wealth. If you team them up with all the millionaires, they're up to almost 50%, but just the billionaires on their own; not so much.
His wealth is mostly stock, right? In fact most of the billionaires have their weight in stocks. In a theoretical situation where Bezos goes to unload all of his stocks to end world hunger, who would be there to buy it? Would the stock devalue the moment he starts selling it? It's complicated.
The Koch's political funding goes far beyond just this one PAC fyi. Their funneling of millions into the Federalist Society and its individual causes serving as just one example that has had an outsized negative influence on the health of American democracy.
As the article notes, Trump (who was not Koch-backed) won with very little spending compared to his big-money backed conventional GOP opponents. They decided to step back and spend less in 2016 as a result, since they didn’t support either Trump or Hillary.
More than amount, I'm impressed by the strategy, focus, and long term commitment. They've played 4D chess while my Democrats are amnesiacs still trying to grasp checkers.
Funding one side more than the other is not quite the same as contributing to partisanship. For example, he could be focused on funding more moderate candidates he thinks will build bridges.
I'm glad he's spending money to help fight climate change but it's gross how much the wealthy can influence elections and policy. If I have to choose, obviously I want that money to go toward making the world a better place for everyone, but I'd rather not have to choose at all.
Huh. So essentially, “I’m choosing to continue to act purely out of self-interest, but with a more well-resolved model of how the long-term societal effects of my actions could negatively affect me.”
Yep some philosophers described it as “freedom to” and “freedom from”. Without freedom from others doing some things that effect you, you might be dead or otherwise severely restricted
It's a basic feature of the growth-at-all-costs financier mindset. A complete and total misunderstanding of closed vs open systems, zero sum games, and "innovation".
> Despite Koch's calls for unity, his political contributions largely favored GOP candidates in the 2020 election cycle, with $2.8 million donated to Republicans and just $221,000 for Democratic candidates, the Journal reported.
I'm a registered Democrat and I voted for Biden, but the way the left seems to be incapable of considering the option of forgiving someone is very unattractive to me.
Some nice words he probably doesn't mean at the end of his life do nothing to repair the irreversible damage he has done to the environment. Nothing he ever says can wash the blood off the hands of a man who dedicated his life to preventing gun control, supporting the Iraq War and profiting from the military industrial complex. The only justice possible for a ghoul like Koch is the forfeiture of his assets and the blade of a guillotine.
Charles Koch deserves to die and I will celebrate when he does. I hope future generations will piss on his grave.
That you care more about some mean words on the Internet than the actions of a man like Koch suggests maybe "persuading" people like you is a waste of time.
Calling for extrajudicial murder is more than "mean words on the Internet". If you say things like that, you're not in a frame of mind which would allow you to objectively evaluate Koch's actions.
Hard to tell if this is Charles Koch actually deciding to become more of a philanthropist than a partisan in his old age, or just a veiled threat to the GOP that he's ready to jump ship in the event that the GOP remains the "party of Trump" after 2020. The latter isn't that wild an idea as the Democrats have slid into more Koch-friendly positions on virtually everything except deregulation over the past decade. They'd face a lot of resistance from Democrats who instinctually hate them, though.
It's important to understand this. His personal views slant strongly libertarian, but his political activism is almost entirely motivated by return on investment, not his ideology.
He will probably try to buy off both parties now. And no doubt he will be successful. His real mistake wasn’t partisanship but pouring money into organizations that distorted science like they did with climate change.
(Longtime HN lurker and FedSoc member/leader, although speaking for just myself here.)
The Federalist Society's entire annual convention was just broadcast online this past week,[0] and it's pretty typical of the Society's activities: hosting panels, debates, and speeches on the law featuring a wide breadth of views. If the Federalist Society is some kind of "conspiracy"—one that you can join today, for fifty bucks!—then so is pretty much every other civic organization in existence.
It isn't a conspiracy. It is the organization most at fault for mitch's anti-democratic actions regarding the supreme court that I honestly believe has the potential to completely undermine our government. The supreme court's move to a completely partisan institution is a huge step toward a populist dictatorship. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/film/supreme-revenge/
It depends pretty much entirely on how you define "conspiracy". Eg "conspiracy to commit murder" (or election fraud or something, more topically) doesn't require secrecy at all (except in order to be successful, maybe) while "conspiracy theory" (when it's not being abused to the point of meaninglessness to dismiss legitimate accusations) is specifically based on the implausability of many thousands of people not just keeping a secret, but concealing any evidence that there even is a secret.
Plenty of things are conspiracies in the "conspiracy to commit murder" sense, without being conspiracies in the "conspiracy theory" sense.
The supreme court partisanship is overstated. It's brought out all the time as though the sky is falling, but typically when the court is tilted, side-switching magically appears.
Roberts, Gorsuch, Kennedy, O'Connor and Souter all switched sides on major issues. Conservatives switch sides a lot more often, but perhaps because the court has been tilted towards Republican nominees.
Sure, but partisanship is getting much worse. The precedent has now been set to completely reject any nomination from the opposing party. That will lead to even more partisanship as nominating "moderates" no longer makes sense. We're in for a future of nothing but Alito's and Thomas's.
In the past that has been true. But if every confirmation from now on is as partisan as Alito and Thomas are(who as far as I'm aware almost never rule against republican causes) that will soon cease to be the case.
I don't see how Alito and Thomas show a trend here. Roberts joined after Thomas and Gorsuch joined after Alito, and both have a more independent record.
Among the Democrat appointees, Kagan has a more independent record than Sotomayor but came afterward.
I know there are counterexamples but my point is that there's not an obvious trend toward more partisan justices, or at least no evidence has been presented so far in this thread.
Partisanship in the nomination process, sure, but it remains to be seen if the more recent nominees will be impartial judges. After all, several court decisions have already not gone the way the gop wanted.
It does indeed remain to be seen—but those recent cases were completely ludicrous! That some semblance of logic remains does not help me sleep at night.
>typically when the court is tilted, side-switching magically appears
For people like me, I don't care what "side" a justice is on. The justices literally choose which cases they accept... Of course there will be some debate on them.
What I find absolutely horrid is that the courts are packed with nominees hand selected by a group of US senators who not only cannot represent the majority of the US population/citizenry, but are also actively antagonistic toward people's will to determine their own future (see obstructionism by McConnell during the Obama years).
"Packed" is a loaded term in the context of the courts. I assume you just mean there are a lot of Republican apointees.
Part of the job of the Senate is to represent the minority. They typically aren't the starting place for major legislation, but often slow down or heavily amend it.
You could argue that the minority should have no power at all, I suppose. Democrats used a similar argument to remove the judicial filibuster, which was a great idea right until they became the minority in the Senate.
That's really the big lesson that people never seem to learn about democracy: you'll be in the minority at some point, so get protections/obstacles in place while you're in the majority, or you'll regret it sooner than you think.
Minority in the Senate means something completely different from reality. Count how many people voted for D senators and how many people voted for R senators. Then count how many judicial appointments D presidents have made and how many R presidents have made (in the last 20 years).
The math is transparent.
The filibuster is just something the senate made up. It does not exist in the constitution, so it is not a true obstacle. The R senators would have gotten rid of it anyway. It doesn't even protect the Senate "minority".
And the Senate's job is to prevent people from determining their own future. It was championed by anti-democracy activists like Alexander Hamilton. I hope it no longer exists by the time I perish.
There are a lot of Republican appointees because the Republicans have been playing political hardball with judicial nominations for decades. The Democrats eliminated judicial filibusters because Republicans were attempting to prevent Obama from getting any judges on the bench in the two years the Democrats had the Senate. Then they lost the Senate and the Republicans simply stopped allowing Obama to get judges on the bench, creating a huge backlog which they could fill when Trump took the presidency. Then they eliminated the blue slip rule to further weaken any control the Democrats might have over the process. And they have expanded state courts, a.k.a "packed them". All of this has the same practical consequence: controlling policy outcomes you can't win through elections by nullifying them in the courts.
Sure, this is a lesson about democracy. It's a lesson about how to subvert democracy.
Are any of them advocating the seizure of the means of production for the workers? Abolish the state or private property? Devolve control into local worker's councils or other non-hierarchical means of decision-making?
The US, in general, does not have any non-conservative judiciary. Stare decisis by itself ensures that there is a strong conservative streak in the available pool of jurists. So yes, the Supreme court has center-left (Sotomayor), centrist (Breyer, Kagan), center-right(Roberts, Kavanaugh, Gorsuch), and reactionaries (Alito and Thomas), but nobody as far "left" as it has "right".
Historically, for example, William O. Douglas was about as left as the court has gotten, and he was more in favor of environmentalism and ending the Vietnam war than really aggressive left wing concepts.
The original claim was that thr Supreme Court has become highly partisan. The fact that justices switch sides and join with appointees of the opposite party is evidence against that claim.
Now you're bringing up a different claim, which is that the two major parties don't really represent a variety of ideas. That's a fine claim to make, but it doesn't contradict my point.
My point is that there is no "switch sides", because there are only 1.5 sides. Also, partisanship isn't the only force determining outcomes in the supreme court, it's just the most important one for many purposes.
The other major shift is actually more along the axis of social libertarian vs authoritarian, which is not as clearly divided as "republican vs democrat", especially considering the late RBG was clearly an authoritarian in some respects, despite being fairly left of center.
Taking any of this as evidence that the court is non-partisan is pretty incorrect: They're consistently partisan in clearly obvious ways, even controlling for other issues.
> Are any of them advocating the seizure of the means of production for the workers? Abolish the state or private property? Devolve control into local worker's councils or other non-hierarchical means of decision-making?
Are any of them arguing for an ethnostate? For shipping non-whites "back to where they came from"? For re-establishing anti-miscegenation laws?
Your perspective is absurd. Of course the court has a left wing. It's just not radical enough for your liking and, similarly, the court's right wing isn't radical enough for David Duke's liking.
Concentration camps and prison slavery not right wing enough for you? Just because it's commonplace here doesn't mean it's not extremely right wing. I don't think we need to get to full scale ethnic cleansing to be considered right wing. Voter disenfranchisement alone is something you rarely see outside of full on authoritarian dictatorships.
To be generous and read between the lines, the Supreme Court eventually comes around to opinions that agree with a majority of Americans.The idea of it as an apolitical organization is to ignore reality.
FedSoc has a well known reputation for being a nice civic organization for the legal profession and also endorsing the most radical right wing supreme court nominees. Without the broad acceptance by the legal community, it wouldn't be as effective.
While we might disagree over who's a "radical right wing" nominee, it's indisputable that the Federalist Society hasn't endorsed any nominee for any position.
" Law schools and the legal profession are currently strongly dominated by a form of orthodox liberal ideology which advocates a centralized and uniform society. While some members of the academic community have dissented from these views, by and large they are taught simultaneously with (and indeed as if they were) the law.
The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies is a group of conservatives and libertarians interested in the current state of the legal order. It is founded on the principles that the state exists to preserve freedom, that the separation of governmental powers is central to our Constitution, and that it is emphatically the province and duty of the judiciary to say what the law is, not what it should be. The Society seeks both to promote an awareness of these principles and to further their application through its activities.
This entails reordering priorities within the legal system to place a premium on individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law. It also requires restoring the recognition of the importance of these norms among lawyers, judges, law students and professors. In working to achieve these goals, the Society has created a conservative and libertarian intellectual network that extends to all levels of the legal community."
Conspiracies don't have to be spoken in hushed words in smoke-filled rooms to be conspiracies. Nothing about redlining, for instance, was particularly secret, but it was still a conspiracy.
> If the Federalist Society is some kind of "conspiracy"—one that you can join today, for fifty bucks!—then so is pretty much every other civic organization in existence.
The connotation of secrecy with the work "conspiracy" is only one definition. "Conspiracy" and "conspire" have the same root:
> A civil conspiracy or collusion is an agreement between two or more parties to deprive a third party of legal rights or deceive a third party to obtain an illegal objective.[1] A conspiracy may also refer to a group of people who make an agreement to form a partnership in which each member becomes the agent or partner of every other member and engage in planning or agreeing to commit some act.
> This is a list of political conspiracies. In a political context, a conspiracy refers to a group of people united in the goal of damaging, usurping, or overthrowing an established political power. Typically, the final goal is to gain power through a revolutionary coup d'état or through assassination. A conspiracy can also be used for infiltration of the governing system.
Can you give a brief synopsis about how the federalist society is a conspiracy against democracy? I thought it was about originalism which seems to me to be pro-democracy by maintaining proper separation of powers etc.
It's a hour of ranting against democracy. He didn't even hide the fact that he doesn't care that gay marriage or other issues were approved by voters; he would judicially end gay marriage in the name of "religious freedom." But this freedom only extends to particular forms of Christianity, as Alito is quite comfortable with restricting the religious practices of Muslims and Wiccans.
The Christian Body Temple finds it to be religious persecution for their members (many doctors) to be forced to treat fat people. Will Alito also uphold that?
> There is genuine work to be done reconciling gay marriage with the first amendment...
Why? Catholics (as an example) don't perform or internally honor Jewish (as an example) weddings, either, without it being any sort of First Amendment issue.
No, he means your freedom to marry whom you choose infringes upon his belief that marriage is between one man and one woman. American evangelicals were instrumental in spreading their hatred of homosexuality in Africa and helped create laws allowing the murder of men accused of homosexuality, this was less than a decade ago. Those people are still very much alive and active within the conservative world, they haven’t become more accepting.
First Amendment protects you from government. Catholics are not the government.
That’s why Catholic discussion of Jewish marriages is not a First Amendment issue, while Supreme Court Justice Alito advocating against gay marriage is.
Not at all. Allowing gay marriage doesn't prohibit your free exercise of religion. Don't approve of or believe in gay marriage? Don't marry someone of the same sex.
No religion has the right to demand of others that they respect its belief.
"You cannot, because my religion disapproves" is the religious first amendment version of "Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins".
This isn't my field, but afaik marriage is entirely a question of "registering with the state". Everything else is some sort of party or tribal celebration.
The Federalist Society finds, indoctrinates, and advances conservative lawyers and judges. That's not inherently anti-democratic though their level of success and influence on judges selection processes may be considered so. The problem is they also tend to be highly partisan (pro-Republican) which undermines the separation of powers.
Often their picks ignore their "originalist" approach when it would be counter to their desired outcome.
I'm no expert, this is from my general understanding and skimming Wikipedia.
The speech is an attack on science, expertise, and common sense. It’s a MAGA hat with a thin veneer of respectability.
It’s not clear to me to what extent such judges believe in this ideology, or whether they’re simply craven and exercising a will to power, but the Federalist Society has spent the past several decades working to place lawyers with fringe jurisprudence into the judiciary, and the Koch brothers wrote the checks.
I saw parts of the speech and it was crazy. This is why appointing judges for life makes zero sense to me. If I become a supreme court judge at 45 and live to 75, I have a full three decades to change the direction of the country forever. This is very very scary.
There should be a term limit for everyone in government like presidents do - mayors, congressmen, senators, judges...
The reason Supreme Court justices are appointed for life is so they are independent. That cuts both ways, protecting both people I agree with, and people I disagree with from having their verdicts influenced by outside forces. Sometimes this is inconvenient for me, but on the whole I prefer it over the alternative. The key is to hold the people who nominate and confirm these justices to account, since they are elected.
The issue with term limits is that it gives a potential perception of bias related to whatever they do when they leave.
An example of this is in agencies like the FTC, where people leave the regulator and end up in well paid jobs in the companies they are supposed to be regulating. Even if there was no bias in their decision making people point to it and it undermines confidence in the system.
Give them a term limit, and then send them back to their life appointment on the district courts (with a higher salary if you want to sweeten the deal a little).
> (with a higher salary if you want to sweeten the deal a little).
After being on the SC, they'd be set with high-paying speaking and book deals for life, along with deals as paid commentators on all sorts of issues and platforms.
They are meant to be appointing an independent judiciary applying precedent and law as written, not delegates whose votes are pledged to parties. Activists belong in Congress where the voters have some say.
I agree with Alito on his "the state treated houses of worship less favorably than it did casinos" point, and I don't think it's anti-science to say that.
To quote NYT: "Casinos were limited to 50 percent of their fire-code capacities, while houses of worship were subject to a flat 50-person limit."
It seems reasonable to me that both should be limited to a 50-person limit, or perhaps a people-per-area limit (although I do understand that Churches are higher risk because singing spreads the virus much more than silently sitting at a slot machine).
I believe for the last 30 years or so (after the late Antonin Scalia) 'conservative' judge is almost synonymous with originalist. I think you may be falling victim to correlation is not causation? IE there are no liberal originalists by definition (above). If I'm wrong, could you give me an example of a liberal originalist? I would be very happy to be wrong about this.
The correlation here is that conservative presidents pick justices who object to rulings like Roe v Wade. The mistaken 'cause' is that it is Conservatism that leads to this objection when in fact it could also be that originalists object to legislation from the bench.
Originalism is fine in theory when coupled with judicial restraint. However, in practice, it has become justification for big-C Conservative justices to actively impose their views, overriding the democratic legislative process.
We're not going to settle this in the comment section of HN, but I happen to agree with this opinion:
As the Warren and early Burger Courts faded into history, originalism drifted away from its critique of judicial activism. The political conservatives who had disliked the countermajoritarian output of the Warren and early Burger Courts developed a fondness for judicial activism once there was a conservative majority on the Supreme Court. Originalism was thus transformed from a shield against what its proponents saw as illegitimate liberal decisions striking down laws adopted by conservative lawmakers into a sword that could be wielded by conservatives to strike down laws adopted by liberal lawmakers.
Originalism coupled with judicial restraint could not invalidate affirmative action, campaign finance regulations, or gun control. Abandoning judicial restraint led to an "unbound" form of originalism that licensed conservative judicial activism, even as judicial conservatives continued to complain about liberal judicial activism in cases involving such matters as abortion, the death penalty, and gay rights.
Do you have a non-activist originalist argument for Alito's on-going stance against legal protection of gay marriage? In Obergefell v. Hodges he stated that the Due Process clause protects only rights "deeply rooted in this Nation's history and tradition". He's making up a justification to allow a minority of conservative opinion to prevent gay people from getting married. How isn't that activism?
I don't practice law but it seems obvious to me how one would make rulings about marriage laws before and during Obergefell v. Hodges. One of the central tenants of originalism is using words/language according to their original meanings (within reason). Since when have we understood marriage to include same sex? Long after these laws for marriage were put on the books in many cases.
So I turn it on you - I'm not an expert so help me understand - how is Obergefell v. Hodges not legislation from the bench when it changes the meaning of these laws unilaterally?
I never made any argument about whether or not Obergefell v. Hodges is activism. You should read the 5-4 decision yourself and decide whether or not you think it is.
My personal opinion is that I don't care whether others think it's (liberal) activism.
My beef is that Alito is also engaging in (conservative) activism but claiming he is not by hiding behind originalism. I won't belabor this point further because I've already cited a source that makes the argument better than I can.
Disclosure: I want our government to use every tool at its disposal to make the world a better place. Of course the constitution should be interpreted in line with modern values in order to extend rights and protections to people. The declaration:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
The preamble:
"We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America."
Those are our stated shared values. Those align with my values. Not allowing gay people to marry is contrary to those values.
That five judges found a constitutional justification to extend the right of marriage to all, I'm glad for. If people want to call that "activism" so be it. Now, Alito still wants to take that right away. Indeed, he wants to be able to express that view and not be called a bigot for it. I find it deplorable to try to hide that view behind a legal theory called originalism.
Any originalist argument against "Obergefell v. Hodges" could equally be applied to "Loving v. Virginia."
I'm not sure "originalist" means anything. The constitution, like all legal texts, contains contradictions between different principles. As logic students know, once you have contradictions in your principles, you can prove anything you want.
The role of a judge is to sort through these contradictions to decide which principles are more important than others, even though they are all mentioned in the constitution.
So I don't see how there is an objective concept of "originalist": you have to pick some principles over others. Which ones you pick are a lot more guided by your own ideology than by the words on paper.
It has meaning, but not what we see today. Interpreting the US Constitution as intended by its authors would probably have consequences like this:
- A much stronger view of the Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. That means no searches without a warrant, period. No general surveillance. No "drug exception". No "exigent circumstances" exception. Wiretapping, on a court order only. Which is where the US mostly was until the 1960s or so. This means going back to "We have you surrounded. Come out with your hands up".
- Much more use of jury trials. Anything that involves even a day in jail, or a fine over $20 (might allow for inflation adjustment) means a jury trial. No treating six months in jail as a "petty offense". Longer sentences for demanding a jury trial would be considered a major Fifth Amendment violation. And no "civil forfeitures".
- Religion is just another business. No tax break, no restrictions on lobbying, no exemptions from other neutral laws.
- Corporations are not "persons". The history of how corporations got constitutional rights is strange and interesting. See Southern Pacific Railroad vs. County of Santa Clara (1886). Until then, corporations did not have constitutional rights; only their employees did.
The even more blunt implication of good-faith originalism would be interpreting the 2nd amendment to allow the non-governmental ownership of nuclear weapons.
The original intent of the 2nd amendment was to allow a 'well regulated militia' to be adequately equipped to fight off an invading army, which in modern terms would mean that the 'well regulated militia' would need to be able to own tanks, fighter aircraft, warships, missiles, and nuclear warheads.
Contemporary originalists, however, both completely discard the mention of a 'well regulated militia' in the 2nd amendment and have re-interpreted the right to encompass only small arms.
Legal originalism is not an ideology predicated on good faith. It is a figleaf to misuse the opinions of the authors of the US constitution to defend the beliefs of contemporary conservatives.
> I'm not sure "originalist" means anything. The constitution, like all legal texts, contains contradictions between different principles.
Not just the Constitution, either. Other contemporary writings - the Federalist Papers, etc. - are often quote-mined to determine "intent". As you identify, these offer a lot of opportunities to pick and choose stuff in favor of whatever ideological decision you'd like to make.
Conservative judges have no problem with legislation from the bench when they're the ones doing it. Again, they pretend to use an impartial "originalist" principle when decision-making but cherry-pick the "original" texts they use or ignore them when they would lead to ruling in a way conservatives don't like.
How is it "originalist" to take the 2nd Amendment, which refers to "well regulated Militia," and using it to say there's a Constitutional right to owning a handgun for personal protection (without safety requirements like a trigger lock or safe)? It's not, yet that's what conservatives decided, specifically Scalia in his majority opinion in District of Columbia v. Heller.
How many of Scalia’s opinions have you actually read?
Humans are not perfect, and I think all judges can delude themselves with motivated reasoning at times, and all judges have some bad opinions, but having read many SCOTUS opinions, Scalia always struck me as one of the more logical and thoughtful members of the court.
>How is it "originalist" to take the 2nd Amendment, which refers to "well regulated Militia," and using it to say there's a Constitutional right to owning a handgun for personal protection...?
The relation between the operative clause and the prefatory clause is that, historically, kings had effectively destroyed the militia by forbidding the keeping or bearing of arms. Justice Scalia's opinion in Heller cites a great deal of evidence that the original public meaning of the phrase "the right to keep and bear arms" included keeping and bearing arms for individual self-defense.
How can one be an originalist and ignore half of the sentence, "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,"? A law requiring a trigger lock does not infringe on the forming of militia or maintaining the security of a free State.
Conservative judges, including Scalia, generally don't claim that all arms regulation is unconstitutional, they don't claim everyone has a right to own RPGs. I don't like where they draw the lines and don't think they have good reasoning for where they draw them.
Because grammatically (then or now), that part of the sentence doesn't limit the independent clause--"the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."
If the first amendment said, "A well read electorate, being necessary to a free state, the right the people to free speech, shall not be infringed," would you say it only covered political speech?
Practically, I don't see how it makes any difference. Handguns are used by every single armed forces in the world. Any militia would need them anyway. If I can't own a handgun, how could I serve in a militia?
> If the first amendment said, "A well read electorate, being necessary to a free state, the right the people to free speech, shall not be infringed," would you say it only covered political speech?
I would say the intent is much narrower than the actual text so while "a well read electorate" would call for more than just political speech, such a First Amendment would be allow more laws to restrict speech without being unconstitutional.
People in the armed forces don't own the weapons they use now. Today, the National Guard is basically the "Militia." Even if you think militia needs to include organizations not directed by governors, weapons can be owned by smaller political entities (towns, counties, etc.) or NGOs. In any case, weapons for a militia can be stored in an armory, not in every member's home or on their person all the time.
Yet again, even if some of the weapons were stored in the home, there's nothing unconstitutional about laws requiring trigger locks or other safety measures for their storage.
>I would say the intent is much narrower than the actual text
Justice Scalia rejected the notion of giving much importance to the intent of drafters. His objective was to interpret the text according to its original public meaning.
As Scalia noted in Heller, the Second Amendment "codified a pre-existing right"; it didn't grant a new right. And although "self-defense had little to do with the right’s codification", "it was the central component of the right itself".
>People in the armed forces don't own the weapons they use now.
That's exactly the system that the framers wanted to avoid. The citizen militia (with their own privately owned arms) was envisioned as an alternative to a standing army in times of peace.
>Today, the National Guard is basically the "Militia."
>there's nothing unconstitutional about laws requiring trigger locks or other safety measures for their storage.
The trigger-lock requirement wasn't limited to storage. It didn't have an exception to allow removing the trigger lock to use to the gun in self-defense or for carrying holstered on one's person. That's why it was ruled unconstitutional.
+1 to this, at the time of the constitution's signing the states were trending towards fragmentation into separate countries. New York and Massachusetts were on the brink of a hot war over westward territorial expansion.
The founders were obviously concerned with the need for a military to "maintain a free state", but I'd doubt that a centralized military would have been palatable at the time.
There was a mistrust of the Federal government at the time, and it was believed that state militias could act as a check against a Federal standing army which goes rogue.
We have bigger issues than gun control at a federal level.
The Army has nothing to with personal self-defense or protection of civil rights. Standing armies were the part of the motivation for the 2nd Amd.
There is plenty of 2nd Amd. scholarship that goes over all of this. Not saying you need to agree with the scholarship, but a lot of people have thought about his stuff and researched it deeply.
Gotchas statements re: "...well regulated...", cars are registered why not guns, restrict people to owning muskets, etc., are unhelpful.
> The Army has nothing to with personal self-defense or protection of civil rights
In the view of the theory underlying the second amendment, it is an existential threat to the latter which makes assuring that the State can meet it's internal and external security needs solely through small permanent cadres plus mobilization of the citizen militia of paramount importance.
> Standing armies were the part of the motivation for the 2nd Amd.
Preventing standing armies was, which is presumably why the statement was that having one (and also standing paramilitary forces for internal security, which was actually the abuse that was the biggest fear motivating fear of standing armies) rendered the second amendment irrelevant.
> Preventing standing armies was, which is presumably why the statement was that having one (and also standing paramilitary forces for internal security, which was actually the abuse that was the biggest fear motivating fear of standing armies) rendered the second amendment irrelevant.
Do you seriously think Scalia cared about protecting people's rights to bear arms beyond the text of the 2nd amendment? Again, what constitutes a true liberal originalist? These justices are not pursuing power but trying to interpret law - and they get accused of undermining democracy...
> Do you seriously think Scalia cared about protecting people's rights to bear arms beyond the text of the 2nd amendment?
Whatever rights to bear arms there are, they come from the 2nd Amendment. It is absurd to stretch an Amendment about "well regulated Militia" to mean D.C. can't require people to store a handgun with a trigger lock because it would impinge on their ability to use it for personal protection. Yet that's what Scalia in the majority decided.
> what constitutes a true liberal originalist?
You keep missing my point; if anyone was actually an originalist, some of their decisions would seem conservative, some would seem liberal, because they would just obediently be following what the text says. No judge actually does that and that alone, I'm only aware of conservative judges that claim they do. The term "originalist" was invented by conservatives so that's not surprising.
I am not saying all conservative judges make wrong decisions and liberal judges make right ones. I'm saying conservatives attack outcomes they don't like as not being "originalist" instead of being honest that it's an outcome they don't like. They're hypocrites.
But this is not really relevant to the original claim of the Federalist Society undermining democracy; I think it would go to far to say to be conservative is to be anti-democratic. If the Federalist Society is anti-democratic, it's more in their means than in their ends.
Let me push back one more time. If what you're saying is true, and no judge no matter how much integrity they have can be truly originalist - what do we do? Is our judicial system dead? Should we even try to pick originalists or give up on a third branch and let it be a super legislature? What comes of rule of law? Doesn't this seem like a problem?
What a dilemma you've conjured here: "Originalists" or a super legislature and a dead judicial system. There is clearly nothing between, either we pretend that text written in the 1700s is directly applicable to 2020 or democracy is dead?
Originalism is a modern invention. It was not even a philosophy of jurisprudence until approximately the 1970s.
Why does a legal system need to be 'originalist' to be valid? That seems like some pretty stiff kool-aid...
Via ye olde wikipedia:
'In the context of United States law, originalism is a concept regarding the interpretation of the Constitution that asserts that all statements in the constitution must be interpreted based on the original understanding "at the time it was adopted".'
This is the start of a very short road to bandying around conflicting subjective interpretations of what the original founders believed, rather than what's in the text of the constitution or the law. You can have rule of law without second-guessing the founders; if you get unintended consequences, update the law and/or constitution accordingly. It's meant to be a living document, right? In the meantime, protections for gay and transgender people based on equal rights laws is a feature, not a bug.
[on edit: To put an even finer point on it, Alito's arguing originalism because he doesn't like the text. That is fundamentally against the rule of law.]
The constitution was not originally intended to be a 'living' document; that theory came about in the progressive era as a way to change the meaning of the constitution without amending it.[1]
I meant living document in the prosaic sense, of document meant to be regularly updated. The amendment process is baked in from the start, so was clearly intended from the beginning.
You could look to the legal system in the United Kingdom, Canada or Australia, which has the same basic structure, without the bizarre political pageantry surrounding the appointment of apex court judges. In these countries judges are not considered “liberal” or “conservative,” at least not by the general public. Theories of judicial interpretation are treated as an obscure philosophical concept taught at law school, not a mainstream political issue that affects elections.
UK, Canada, and Australia all have radically different constitutions; very hard to compare any of them to the US Constitution. Broadly speaking, the UK one is more a body of law, the Canadian is a single document which the government can override, and I'm not too familiar with the Australian one, but it seems fairly limited compared with the others mentioned.
"Originalism" is not possible in practice because it would lead to absurd outcomes. It is reasonable to suspect that "originalism" is a construct in bad faith, to cover a preference for old bigotries and a less than coherent grab bag of right wing positions.
So you would adhere to the original language of property covenants forbidding sale to black people because that was the clear intent of the authors of those covenants? Hey, sanctity of contract!
And do not tell me those contracts were considered illegal at the time they were written.
Contracts can be invalidated (post-hoc) by laws, and both (contracts and laws) can be invalidated by constitutions. Such provisions (in the USA) would have been rendered unenforceable by the Fourteenth Amendment.
You should accept that the supreme court is a nakedly political body just like the other two branches. The idea of some impartial body of judges who can strike down laws or in the case of qualified immunity just make them up is absurd. Do you think that the fact that judges often split 5-4 along ideological lines is just a coincidence, or that conservatives put such a high importance on the court during the last election so they can elect an "originalist"? The garbage passed by Roberts about "balls and strikes" is insulting, and the fact that people blindly accept it is beyond me.
The essence of economic conservatism is about preserving power for those already in power, reducing opportunity. Of course it’s dressed up as libertarian freedom but that’s just the doublespeak. For example, in a laissez-faire, libertarian education system, kids who are born into wealth get a great education, kids who are not start adulthood with lots of disadvantages, which obviously conserves the status quo, and starves an economy by reducing its potential intellectual capital without benefit to the system as a whole. American prosperity is a direct result of our unusual democratic institutions that push in the direction of economic opportunity, through laws that enforce a more even economic playing field relative to other economies around the world, but it is always being attacked by monopoly oriented interests, and the inherited wealth class. This is the primary political axis of Democrat vs Republican.
It's an argument especially relevant to the startup community because great startups disrupt the economic status quo. Take away the system that enables that and you are left with top-down/autocratic economic systems. They have their benefits, efficient use of resources, so long as it benefits the regime, but over time, since autocratic regimes are optimized to keep people in power, they can't innovate as well. The highest profile example recently, was Jack Ma's attempted IPO that got shut down because he offended Xi in a speech. Loyalty to the top trumps all.
I read the new book Kochland last year. I was expecting an expose of an evil robber baron. Instead the author had a begrudging respect for the talents of the Kochs. As s privately held company they dont have to generate quarterly or annual reports for the shareholders. They can focus on long term projects. The company's value increased from a quarter billion dollars at Fred Sr.s passing to a third of a trillion now.
Now when he is done ruining the planet with pushing for fossil for decades, got billions on his bank accounts, god knows what else, he has had enough and he wants to be a good boy. I totally buy it.
When you ask yourself how the system is rigged this bad and why congress is so bought out and each policy a carefully chosen business strategy instead of in the interest of average citizens you don't have to look further than the excellent example of the koch brothers who, in their infinite desire for infinite profits, have rigged the legislature and executive branches to use as a crowbar on the wallets and rainy day funds of everyone.
"After using vast amounts of money to completely tear apart the civic fabric of this nation I think I may have done an oopsie" is not really going to cut it. The only real mistake here is that these guys weren't Ceausescued when America could have still been saved from them.
The worst part is that Democrats eat that shit up. I can't believe that we're going to get nothing done for another 4 years because Biden believes in a weaker executive branch.
Personally, I think the president has far too much power (especially in war-powers), but Biden will need to deploy a ton of executive orders to get anything done with the legislative branch he's about to get - and he won't do it because he (along with his party and Obama) believe in fair-play, norms and institutions. The issue is that their opponents don't.
Republicans will win back the house in 2024 in no small part due to Biden being precieved as having done nothing due to his reluctance to use executive orders to legislate from the oval office like his predecessor did.
The aged scorpion asked the frog for one final ride across the river
What he's asking for here is for Democrats to accept his lack of opposition to social liberalism, and bend themselves even further towards his fiscal conservatism.
> What he's asking for here is for Democrats to accept his lack of opposition to social liberalism, and bend themselves even further towards his fiscal conservatism.
Yes, exactly. The thing is, as a putative libertarian he ought to have been supporting socially liberal policies (and candidates) all along.
Merely offering a 'lack of opposition' isn't really any change at all, as he's never opposed it.
His partisanship was always circumstantial. I think he's renewing his position based on the increasing polarisation rather than actually "switching teams".
It's more like political divestment, as the costs of polarisation have increased.
His actual values - basic libertarianism like open borders and free trade and limited government - haven't changed at all. That's precisely why he never backed Trump, and instead continued plugging the values he espoused even as that drew fire from Republicans.
For instance: note that he donated a lot more to Rep candidates than to Dem candidates, but it was almost exclusively where the relevant contest involved a pro-markets versus anti-markets debate.
As Republicans have moved away from markets into populism, his spending is less and less partisan.
Big money has captured the leadership of both parties. He could have been more effective squashing the little man had he spread the wealth (of his donations) a bit more broadly. e.g. Mike Bloomberg.
> At 85, the libertarian tycoon who spent decades funding conservative causes says he wants a final act building bridges across political divides
Isn't that what all the republicans are saying now that their presidential candidate has lost? Now that they've lost a modicum of power, now is the time for partisanship and teamwork? Where was this spirit of cooperation before?
This seems like a good way to spend money on his interests, while pretending he's building bridges, and blaming the other side when anything goes wrong.
> > Isn't that what all the republicans are saying now that their presidential candidate has lost?
> FYI, the Koch network did not actively support Trump in either 2016 or 2020. So calling Trump as “their presidential candidate” could be misleading.
Sure, they didn't support Trump directly. But they really only supported GOP candidates, and whether those candidates in turn supported Trump doesn't seem to have ever been a factor. They certainly never explicitly supported any opposition to Trump, not even conservative opposition such as the Lincoln Project.
Yes, they didn’t actively support Trump opponents either.
Had a non-Trump candidate won the 2016 GOP primary, they would have backed him or her in the presidential race - they canceled their plans to do so when Trump won.
