Your comparison to Europe is instructive. Abortion, same sex marriage, etc., all were accomplished democratically in European countries. That has made them not only durable, but has legitimized the results in the eyes of people who opposed them.
In the US, the left took a wrong turn and decided to use the Civil Rights movement as the default way of achieving social change. But that has meant decades of decisions where elites (whether Republican or Democrat, Supreme Court Justices are elites) shoved social change down the throats of the public. In reality, Black civil rights was a *sui generis* problem caused by unique historical circumstances that warranted an atomic bomb response from the Supreme Court. But repeatedly going nuclear on issue after issue—issues that were not unique and which other countries handled democratically—through the Supreme Court tore at the social fabric.
I blame, in part, the presidential system. And the United States is not unique among countries with presidential systems in how court systems intervene more in shaping policy via judicial review due to the inflexibility of their legislative branches.
Even as a U.S. citizen, I've heard on multiple occasions about court decisions from Central and South America. Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia are examples of high profile Supreme Court decisions striking down existing statute law because their legislature are chronically unable to do so. The U.S. just has the most extreme example because our current constitution sets an absurdly high (compared to other countries' processes) threshold for amendments (while allowing a half-baked, never-used "Option B" called the "Convention of the States").
Only in a few parliamentary systems (namely Israel, South Africa, India) are you more likely to hear about court systems which exercise judicial review directly against existing statute law. For the most part, parliamentary systems seem to assume more responsibility over statute legislation. The presidential system's insistence on strict (albeit often rhetorical) separation of powers is a mistake.
The US presidential and two party system is inherently broken.
There are only two solutions to any problem, the right one and the wrong one depending on which side you are on. Political solutions needs compromise, the US political system makes that difficult.
Yeah, in my view, the Supreme Court as policymakers came about because our system makes it impossible to govern. When Sandra Day O'Connor, a former legislator, dominated the Court, its opinions were designed to be consensus-based. The justices were more compelled than legislators to give reasons for why they came out a certain way. Once the policymaking became hyperpartisan, you just got these right wing results, and the Court is justifiably not trusted by Americans.
I don't think this answer really explains much. The Supreme Court was making decisions like this hundreds of years ago. Every school kid learns about things like Dred Scott. Marbury v Madison, Miranda v Arizona, Brown v Board of Education and many others.
Kids in most other nations don't learn about court cases like that in high school, from what I can tell. Almost from its beginning the Supreme Court of the US has had an outsized influenced compared to most other countries.
As another poster said, maybe that's just down to the presidential system.
I think that's right - non-Americans don't study court cases as schoolchildren because, in their countries, court cases just aren't that important. The U.S., almost uniquely, has allowed the Supreme Court to be the most powerful of the three branches of government, having veto power over the other two. It is a quasi-monarchical institution - not that it is necessarily a bad thing to have one branch of government that is undemocratic by design. But if you have that situation, you need a Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate respected by all, at the helm. I thought John Roberts could also serve that role but now it doesn't look that way. The Dobbs decision will prove to be very unpopular.
Our legislature has slowly and surely frittered away its power because its incumbents want to keep their jobs. That has left us with basically nothing but the courts to resolve disputes and generate law.
Former representative David Jolly has talked about that in numerous occasions, notably with regard to wanting to work on immigration bills back in the Obama years. If I'm remembering him correctly, he was stopped by his colleagues, including Paul Ryan, who wanted to keep their hands clean come election time.
Even when they do, like a moderate abortion law which a majority of Americans support, it's still no possible to make that a law even though it should be a slam dunk.
One thing this brought to mind is how much I wish conservatives had a better media outlet to voice their arguments than Fox News. The conservative instinct to say, "wait a minute, is this giant social/economic change really a good idea?" is often a healthy thing for liberals to have nearby. We need conservatives the same way Mulder needs Scully. But it helps nothing if people with different political instincts are also working under a different set of facts.
I think we can blame O'Sullivan's Law for the Fox News thing.
It is something along the lines of "Any organization that is not explicitly conservative will turn liberal over time"...and that certainly seems to be true in my conservative eyes.
It's led to even the supposedly centrist news orgs being notably liberal/progressive.
*Glares angrily at NPR*
And so at this point, for the most part, we simply don't believe what most of the media says, unless it is trivial or clearly not a political issue.
I'm not going to go thru and give an extensive list of examples, but put on a 'I am a moderate conservative' hat on the next few times you visit the website. Or listen to it.
So, because I've thought about this more than once, I'm genuinely curious to have you ELI5. the only y thing I can tell is either "I object to your editorial choices because they don't validate my values daily," or "I object to being reminded of this aspect of our culture, and think it deserves approbation rather than what feels like celebration."
If it's neither of those, I'd appreciate hearing it.
I consider myself a conservative (albeit with several heterodox views mostly on the economic and environmental side of things), and I hang out in pretty liberal online spaces by choice, because I like to debate and think. So I don't feel like I get (or need) to have my views validated.
My main gripes about NPR are centered around the fact that I think that -National- Public Radio should be pretty balanced in the views it represents.
And I think it does an alright job being balanced on the economic side of things, it seems very liberal on the cultural front. Especially since Trump, and especially especially since summer 2020.
It seems like it might be kind of balanced culturally...if you live in a very blue large urban area...but I'm from Alabama, in Alabama. And even though I'm an atheist and not -that- culturally conservative, it is very annoying.
Thanks for replying. I'm still curious about the details. Like, listen for a week and get back to me with your more cogent concerns.
I ask because I have my own objections to NPR's tone at times, but I also recognize that what I find culturally relevant or interesting is rarely what other folks find relevant or interesting.
Thank you Noah, for once again providing balanced and enlightening coverage of some complicated and messy issues. (Have you ever thought of running for office? No, you’re too smart.) Being from Texas now living in California I am so tired of hearing about “red state- blue state” as if people know everything about me based on the place of my birth. This offends me more than the gender stereotypes I have encountered so much of my life.
1. You're missing decentralization as a guiding principle for keeping the peace. We are going to have crappy federal institutions and a serious risk of civil conflict as long as every federal election result is viewed as an existential threat by >1/3 of the country (whether or not that view is correct)! If we want to not have that existential threat anymore, we need to lower the stakes: we need a settlement that credibly reassures Californians that nobody is coming for our abortions *and* reassures Mississippians that nobody is coming for their guns. We need, that is, a grand bargain that keeps the feds securely out of the culture war, and some of the bigger and more politically diverse states may have to make their own bargains that devolve power further. Our values and worldviews have become too different to reconcile otherwise.
2. Speaking of abortions, one really dangerous civil conflict scenario you haven't mentioned is
-- Republicans get a trifecta in the 2024 elections without technically cheating (no fake electors, "independent" state legislatures or similar) but without getting a popular majority either, due to their structural advantages. David Shor has been pointing out that this is a likely scenario. I think it's more likely than a steal.
-- They pass a nationwide abortion ban that is clearly unpopular, because they can, and their base won't let them pass up the chance.
-- The enforcement mechanisms for that ban become increasingly draconian, reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act. We know Republicans are going in this direction because the state laws being proposed are already there: restrictions on freedom of movement, speech bans, constant surveillance, etc.
-- The majority is outraged, but because of Republican minoritarian capture of federal institutions, we can't do anything about it within the existing system.
This, at minimum, would likely lead to levels of violence similar to the '70s stuff chronicled in _Days of Rage_. The last time we had a divide this passionate was over slavery, and now *both* sides explicitly see themselves as the heirs of the anti-slavery cause.
3. I don't see how you put our institutions back on a peaceable path without doing *something* about the Supreme Court. The pretense of its nonpartisan nature is gone forever; nobody can credibly commit to restore it and trying to keep up the charade is worse than useless. Having a blatantly partisan, culture-warring institution's balance of control determined by a combination of strategically timed retirements and randomly timed deaths is already egregiously unfair in what is supposed to be a democracy; Mitch McConnell's shameless game of Calvinball made the unfairness even worse.
Packing the court is a bad solution because it's not a stable equilibrium and invites retribution. But a move to fixed terms, or a jurisdictional reform, or both would at least regularize the process and shift the stakes. It seems wonky but it's no wonkier than fixing the Electoral Count Act.
Would this really be likely? Many Republicans running in moderate or liberal constituencies are not hardline on abortion and even among the Republican Party there is far more nuance on abortion than we may see on media headlines.
You're describing a scenario which would happen if we got a congress full of Alabama Republicans, not moderate Republicans who won on small edges in their constituencies due to resentment of the Biden administration.
To my knowledge, there are no openly pro-choice House Republicans left, either currently serving or running to try and flip swing seats, and the only ones in the Senate are Collins and Murkowski.
Certainly many of the more moderate R-represented electorates will have strong pro-choice majorities, and indeed I expect the total number of Congressional districts with strong pro-choice majorities to be well above 217 even with gerrymandering. I'll bet many of the more moderate R reps would personally oppose a nationwide ban, too. But this scenario assumes that those reps will mostly vote for such a ban anyway out of fear that the fanatical base will primary them otherwise. I'd love to be wrong about that, but after the votes around impeachment and the 1/6 committee, I sadly doubt I'll lose money betting against Republican Congresspeople standing up to the primary-voting fanatics.
Good article. I know many left-coded individuals do not like this idea but the solution is simply the federalism of the American system.
The US needs to allow the separate states to work through their issues. As the map you have posted shows, there are large rural swathes of America which have zero interest or attraction to the Democrat Party. Likewise, there are enclaves where the Republicans are despised.
On extremely contentious issues we need to let the states work out their own internal disputes. That is how peace and stability are maintained.
Forcing national policies should be reserved for issues that are truly national in scope.
It’s not a good thing, but it wasn’t a plot to kill a justice, ppl plotting to kill ppl don’t generally turn up at their house then call the cops on themselves, it was a cry for help from an ill man who would have been much better off not knowing about politics
What is dangerous about this incident is Trump has made it a part of his speech which you can only listen to as a call for violence from Trump
Jan 6th was much closer to being effective and even allowing for the fact the judges in Hitlers trial were basically acting like his defence counsel, what’s happened since in America from the right wing legal and political establishment is terrifying and much worse than any reaction of the government during Weimar
My main hope is that smart ppl in the west are planning for a world where the US is not on the side of the democracy’s, awful as it sounds if I was non-US NATO I would be planning for the build of their own nuclear weapons programs that isn’t totally reliant on the French (Le Pen/Melenchon etc) and Australia needs to plan for a world where they’re not protected by ANZUS and the US nuclear umbrella
I don't think it has been long enough to accurately call 1/6's coup attempt "ineffective." It may very well result in a coup, just on a longer timescale than its conspirators intended.
There is no doubt in my mind that if one state can swing the next election and that state has a Trumpist SoS or it’s Pennsylvania or Wisconsin where the gerrymandered state assembly has a GOP majority despite getting less than 50% of the votes then they’ll send alienate electors
I won't say "no doubt," but I do think there's somewhere between a 65% and 75% chance they'll pull such a stunt and succeed if there's a GQP congressional majority.
Americans' views of abortion are "nuanced" because they really no nothing about it, or are mightily confused by decades of profoundly dishonest forced birther propaganda, or believe ridiculous things they hear in church about how much their god loves and values zygotes, embryos, fetuses and even the "already born" when, of course, the evidence is completely to the contrary.
Of course, this is true of many other hot button issues: Ignorance and completely irrational prejudice makes it impossible to discuss, let alone implement, policy ideas based on, say, evidence and logic. The recent hysteria about transgender women in sports is completely emblematic of this: Lia Thomas wins a few NCAA races that almost no one would otherwise care about and, suddenly, the moral universe is risk of complete collapse. Not much to do about any of this but SMH.
Yes. You guys need to convince white people in rural US that rich non-white people moving in and making life difficult for their kids and grandkids by jacking up the price of homes and making it impossible to go to top unis, those crazy leftists in the West trying to change their world - attacking their religion and traditions - are toothless so their legacy and history will be preserved.
In short, Blue states need to celebrate the cultures of the Red states somehow. Basically, you need a Democratic presidential candidate who is from a Red state. The Democrats need to have more white folks at the leadership level just for the 2024 election who will then make way in time.
You guys probably need two white men as President and Vice-President for a term.
With respect, Dems running a white guy prez + VP combo won't convince rural white people that our legacy and history will be preserved.
Joe Biden was kind of cast as the 'moderate' non-threatening old white guy, and he turned around and tried to implement some -very- progressive policies.
As long as The Groups are around, and trying to do the things that The Groups like to do, and no important Dem pols are telling them to f*** off...any white guys with a (D) by their name will just be seen as a Quisling.
Yeah? You're probably right. I don't know how those folks think. I just hope for the sake of progressives, you guys figure it out! The rest of the world is counting on you guys to rally somehow before November!
Neat. I would love to move there as a Westernized Indian with a Westernized Chinese fiancee but we just don't want to get shot so I don't think we're gonna move. It's quite nice here in China albeit life is quite hard for non-white, non-Chinese people here.
It's a bit long, man. Don't have time during office hours to go through it all. However, I can see it working out that way altho I would think people would eventually want high-skilled visa holders to come from a range of countries but yeah many brown people are keen and will pay an arm and a leg to go to the West.
Regarding adapting to the local culture, it really depends. A lot of South Asian women grow up with a conservative upbringing but they eventually adapt when they make local girlfriends. However, many don't and continue to stay true to their home culture as they envisage returning home, retiring early and living comfortably. It all depends on how close they are to their parents and how traditional their older folks are.
Increasingly, however, Indian millenials and Gen Zs are growing up American without even meaning to because of the pervasive influence of Western pop culture and the fact that English is the common language for urbanites in a nation with 22 official languages.
Stacey Abraham’s complaint was that voter suppression had stopped ppl voting, the exact thing you bring up 2 paragraphs after both-sidering acceptance of elections
"I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election," Abrams said, according to NPR. "But to watch an elected official who claims to represent the people in this state baldly pin his hopes for election on suppression of the people's democratic right to vote has been truly appalling."
I think the real issue in the case of a Civil War is to what extent and what side does Canada take. Obviously, Canada's agricultural production is almost as big as red America's so in turn blue America can rely on Canada instead of red America.
I'm the dude who speaks of civil war in the present tense.
America's Civil War II won't stay civil for long. It'll draw in outside actors, both state and non-state. Foreign states want to protect their hard-target and soft-target investments in the U.S., and have diaspora populations that can act as scouts when federal and local governments are unable to carry out any state capacity.
Non-state groups (think ISIS, Hezbollah, Latin American drug cartels) that have both militant and state capacity functions will also play a role.
Modern civil wars, after World War II, go on for decades, not years. (See Lebanon, Sri Lanka and El Salvador for example). Expect a generation of children to be born amid war and absorb all of the fears and anxieties of their elder generations.
Noah, have you thought about drafting a constitutional amendment that could actually pass 38 states by addressing worries each side has about the other side's respect for institutions? Maybe alongside a conservative blogger from The Dispatch or National Review?
Here's a rough 2-for-2 example, which I came up with on the spot, and don't feel strongly about:
-no expansion of SCOTUS (Democratic concession)
-new states admitted via 2/3 Senate supermajority, so obviously the Senate is being preserved too (Democratic concession re: DC, Puerto Rico)
-Voting Rights Act provisions restored and expanded, with pre-clearance everywhere; ex-cons can vote; college students choose where they vote; federal government automatically provides every citizen with voting-acceptable ID (Republican concession)
-no more electors; each state assigns its electoral votes to the winner of the state's popular vote, with no governor/legislature/VP interventions; secretary of state interventions to counter voter fraud according to criteria in the amendment, supervised only by courts (Republican concession).
In my opinion, an equal number of concessions from each party makes the rhetoric of compromise easier.
I get the "no more electors" idea, but I don't get why would you enforce the "winner takes all" principle on electoral votes. Why shouldn't a state be free to allocate its electoral votes by other principles, such as proportionality?
Looking at the U.S. from half a world away, I have the impression that the "winner takes all" principle is a major driver of polarization. What about introducing some proportionality instead? In the current system, you have a lot of de-facto one-party states, where the political minority does not even have to bother voting.
If states have a choice of proportional or winner takers all, they will all choose winner takes all because if they don't, the other side will and they'll never win anything ever again. So it's a meaningless 'choice'.
I think one of the most major electoral reforms that should be undertaken is the census should be an opportunity to redraw state boundaries, rather than House districts.
There's nothing inherently magical or special about state boundaries as such.
A more socially cohesive political geography exists in the U.S. -- the metropolitan statistical area, and its larger sibling the consolidated statistical area. The latter is when two MSAs touch, generally their exurbs, and have substantial commuting links. The Bay Area has this, with San Joaquin Valley counties sending workers to Silicon Valley. Stockton, an MSA in its own right, sends commuters to both the Bay Area and Sacramento.
We would still have the same federal system and states would retain their powers.
There are basically two bounds -- the few-state proposal and the 50-state proposal. Each of these I also assume that territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, etc., have full statehood status, so the population is slightly higher than the 50-state US population, but doesn't affect calculations too much.
The few state proposal would start with making New York City's CSA the baseline state population, so each state would have about 24M-25M resident. So about half of New Jersey and much of southern Connecticut , plus some of northeast Pennsylvania would be in this New York City state, but the rest of New York's current state would be in some other state entity, like New England or the Great Lakes for western New York.
This also means California, Texas and Florida have to be partitioned in some fashion. The other consequence is that if you live roughly from coastal Washington state and Oregon to Minnesota, as well as Alaska, you'd now be living in one massive state. It's like a western Canadian province with a whole lotta land and very few cities. It's a nightmare to administer and political polarization would be heightened here.
The upshot of the few states plan is that we'd condense from 50 states to ... 14, roughly about what the founding fathers had for the 13 colonies.
The alternative is to keep 50 states just as they are now. That would mean dividing the population into about 7 million equally sized state units at existing population levels.
This does mean a unit like L.A. County (10 million) would have to be partitioned, and New York City's MSA would become a different arrangement of four states (like Brooklyn to Suffolk County would be a state, Manhattan could be coupled with New Jersey, etc.) The Miami MSA might gain the US Caribbean islands but be partitioned from the rest of Florida.
Ideally, this would mean the state boundaries would be redrawn in sparsely populated areas to keep cities anchored. It's a tough trick to pull off in New York or L.A. County, where there is a continuous carpet of residential and commercial development. In the case of L.A. County, though, most likely Mulholland Drive would form a state boundary and the county could be cut north-south through the sparsely populated Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains.
Proportional voting might reduce polarization. However, it could actually make the amendment harder to pass, by threatening each state's dominant party's chances of retaining power at the state level.
This is because many states have state elections at the same time as presidential elections. If voter turnout from the minority party increases relative to voter turnout from the dominant party, and if straight-ticket voting holds, then the chances for state-level upsets must increase.
Due to this threat, I expect proportional voting would not be popular with politicians from each state's dominant party.
One person one vote is a concession from the republicans, huh?
And you don't even say to make DC and Puerto Rico states, you give us a 2/3 vote option that is as dead as anything else requiring republicans to compromise and call it good.
Considering they already ignore the 14th and 15th amendements without much complaint anymore, I find it difficult to imagine why we'd expect them to finally accede to these.
Your comparison to Europe is instructive. Abortion, same sex marriage, etc., all were accomplished democratically in European countries. That has made them not only durable, but has legitimized the results in the eyes of people who opposed them.
In the US, the left took a wrong turn and decided to use the Civil Rights movement as the default way of achieving social change. But that has meant decades of decisions where elites (whether Republican or Democrat, Supreme Court Justices are elites) shoved social change down the throats of the public. In reality, Black civil rights was a *sui generis* problem caused by unique historical circumstances that warranted an atomic bomb response from the Supreme Court. But repeatedly going nuclear on issue after issue—issues that were not unique and which other countries handled democratically—through the Supreme Court tore at the social fabric.
As someone who has lived outside of the US for decades at this point, the American fixation on courts above legislatures is kind of baffling.
I mean, there is an Australian Supreme Court and it does rule on stuff but still.....
Noah lived in Japan for a while but I'm willing to bet he can't name a single judge on their Supreme Court. Or even a single case it has decided.
It is hard not to feel like the American reliance on courts is a sign of something gone wrong with the whole system somewhere.
Surely there must be a lot of books or articles out there on this?
I blame, in part, the presidential system. And the United States is not unique among countries with presidential systems in how court systems intervene more in shaping policy via judicial review due to the inflexibility of their legislative branches.
Even as a U.S. citizen, I've heard on multiple occasions about court decisions from Central and South America. Brazil, Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia are examples of high profile Supreme Court decisions striking down existing statute law because their legislature are chronically unable to do so. The U.S. just has the most extreme example because our current constitution sets an absurdly high (compared to other countries' processes) threshold for amendments (while allowing a half-baked, never-used "Option B" called the "Convention of the States").
Only in a few parliamentary systems (namely Israel, South Africa, India) are you more likely to hear about court systems which exercise judicial review directly against existing statute law. For the most part, parliamentary systems seem to assume more responsibility over statute legislation. The presidential system's insistence on strict (albeit often rhetorical) separation of powers is a mistake.
The US presidential and two party system is inherently broken.
There are only two solutions to any problem, the right one and the wrong one depending on which side you are on. Political solutions needs compromise, the US political system makes that difficult.
Yeah, in my view, the Supreme Court as policymakers came about because our system makes it impossible to govern. When Sandra Day O'Connor, a former legislator, dominated the Court, its opinions were designed to be consensus-based. The justices were more compelled than legislators to give reasons for why they came out a certain way. Once the policymaking became hyperpartisan, you just got these right wing results, and the Court is justifiably not trusted by Americans.
I don't think this answer really explains much. The Supreme Court was making decisions like this hundreds of years ago. Every school kid learns about things like Dred Scott. Marbury v Madison, Miranda v Arizona, Brown v Board of Education and many others.
Kids in most other nations don't learn about court cases like that in high school, from what I can tell. Almost from its beginning the Supreme Court of the US has had an outsized influenced compared to most other countries.
As another poster said, maybe that's just down to the presidential system.
I think that's right - non-Americans don't study court cases as schoolchildren because, in their countries, court cases just aren't that important. The U.S., almost uniquely, has allowed the Supreme Court to be the most powerful of the three branches of government, having veto power over the other two. It is a quasi-monarchical institution - not that it is necessarily a bad thing to have one branch of government that is undemocratic by design. But if you have that situation, you need a Sandra Day O'Connor, a moderate respected by all, at the helm. I thought John Roberts could also serve that role but now it doesn't look that way. The Dobbs decision will prove to be very unpopular.
Lest anyone thing that’s unusual, the decision striking down school prayer remains unpopular decades later.
Our legislature has slowly and surely frittered away its power because its incumbents want to keep their jobs. That has left us with basically nothing but the courts to resolve disputes and generate law.
Former representative David Jolly has talked about that in numerous occasions, notably with regard to wanting to work on immigration bills back in the Obama years. If I'm remembering him correctly, he was stopped by his colleagues, including Paul Ryan, who wanted to keep their hands clean come election time.
Great point. I frequently ponder that if one party actually led on amazing, popular, effective policies, they’d have the 60 votes they need already.
Even when they do, like a moderate abortion law which a majority of Americans support, it's still no possible to make that a law even though it should be a slam dunk.
Why did Democrats support a moderate abortion law? Last I checked it was a codification of Roe, and potentially even broader than that.
What are those policies then?
Beautiful article.
One thing this brought to mind is how much I wish conservatives had a better media outlet to voice their arguments than Fox News. The conservative instinct to say, "wait a minute, is this giant social/economic change really a good idea?" is often a healthy thing for liberals to have nearby. We need conservatives the same way Mulder needs Scully. But it helps nothing if people with different political instincts are also working under a different set of facts.
I think we can blame O'Sullivan's Law for the Fox News thing.
It is something along the lines of "Any organization that is not explicitly conservative will turn liberal over time"...and that certainly seems to be true in my conservative eyes.
It's led to even the supposedly centrist news orgs being notably liberal/progressive.
*Glares angrily at NPR*
And so at this point, for the most part, we simply don't believe what most of the media says, unless it is trivial or clearly not a political issue.
I have no clue how to fix it.
I'm very curious what you find progressive about NPR's reporting.
Choice of articles and perspectives, mostly.
I'm not going to go thru and give an extensive list of examples, but put on a 'I am a moderate conservative' hat on the next few times you visit the website. Or listen to it.
So, because I've thought about this more than once, I'm genuinely curious to have you ELI5. the only y thing I can tell is either "I object to your editorial choices because they don't validate my values daily," or "I object to being reminded of this aspect of our culture, and think it deserves approbation rather than what feels like celebration."
If it's neither of those, I'd appreciate hearing it.
Okay, I will make an attempt.
I consider myself a conservative (albeit with several heterodox views mostly on the economic and environmental side of things), and I hang out in pretty liberal online spaces by choice, because I like to debate and think. So I don't feel like I get (or need) to have my views validated.
My main gripes about NPR are centered around the fact that I think that -National- Public Radio should be pretty balanced in the views it represents.
And I think it does an alright job being balanced on the economic side of things, it seems very liberal on the cultural front. Especially since Trump, and especially especially since summer 2020.
It seems like it might be kind of balanced culturally...if you live in a very blue large urban area...but I'm from Alabama, in Alabama. And even though I'm an atheist and not -that- culturally conservative, it is very annoying.
Thanks for replying. I'm still curious about the details. Like, listen for a week and get back to me with your more cogent concerns.
I ask because I have my own objections to NPR's tone at times, but I also recognize that what I find culturally relevant or interesting is rarely what other folks find relevant or interesting.
Thank you Noah, for once again providing balanced and enlightening coverage of some complicated and messy issues. (Have you ever thought of running for office? No, you’re too smart.) Being from Texas now living in California I am so tired of hearing about “red state- blue state” as if people know everything about me based on the place of my birth. This offends me more than the gender stereotypes I have encountered so much of my life.
Nice one. Those with nuanced views absolutely have to be louder.
So, a few things:
1. You're missing decentralization as a guiding principle for keeping the peace. We are going to have crappy federal institutions and a serious risk of civil conflict as long as every federal election result is viewed as an existential threat by >1/3 of the country (whether or not that view is correct)! If we want to not have that existential threat anymore, we need to lower the stakes: we need a settlement that credibly reassures Californians that nobody is coming for our abortions *and* reassures Mississippians that nobody is coming for their guns. We need, that is, a grand bargain that keeps the feds securely out of the culture war, and some of the bigger and more politically diverse states may have to make their own bargains that devolve power further. Our values and worldviews have become too different to reconcile otherwise.
2. Speaking of abortions, one really dangerous civil conflict scenario you haven't mentioned is
-- Republicans get a trifecta in the 2024 elections without technically cheating (no fake electors, "independent" state legislatures or similar) but without getting a popular majority either, due to their structural advantages. David Shor has been pointing out that this is a likely scenario. I think it's more likely than a steal.
-- They pass a nationwide abortion ban that is clearly unpopular, because they can, and their base won't let them pass up the chance.
-- The enforcement mechanisms for that ban become increasingly draconian, reminiscent of the Fugitive Slave Act. We know Republicans are going in this direction because the state laws being proposed are already there: restrictions on freedom of movement, speech bans, constant surveillance, etc.
-- The majority is outraged, but because of Republican minoritarian capture of federal institutions, we can't do anything about it within the existing system.
This, at minimum, would likely lead to levels of violence similar to the '70s stuff chronicled in _Days of Rage_. The last time we had a divide this passionate was over slavery, and now *both* sides explicitly see themselves as the heirs of the anti-slavery cause.
3. I don't see how you put our institutions back on a peaceable path without doing *something* about the Supreme Court. The pretense of its nonpartisan nature is gone forever; nobody can credibly commit to restore it and trying to keep up the charade is worse than useless. Having a blatantly partisan, culture-warring institution's balance of control determined by a combination of strategically timed retirements and randomly timed deaths is already egregiously unfair in what is supposed to be a democracy; Mitch McConnell's shameless game of Calvinball made the unfairness even worse.
Packing the court is a bad solution because it's not a stable equilibrium and invites retribution. But a move to fixed terms, or a jurisdictional reform, or both would at least regularize the process and shift the stakes. It seems wonky but it's no wonkier than fixing the Electoral Count Act.
Would this really be likely? Many Republicans running in moderate or liberal constituencies are not hardline on abortion and even among the Republican Party there is far more nuance on abortion than we may see on media headlines.
You're describing a scenario which would happen if we got a congress full of Alabama Republicans, not moderate Republicans who won on small edges in their constituencies due to resentment of the Biden administration.
To my knowledge, there are no openly pro-choice House Republicans left, either currently serving or running to try and flip swing seats, and the only ones in the Senate are Collins and Murkowski.
Certainly many of the more moderate R-represented electorates will have strong pro-choice majorities, and indeed I expect the total number of Congressional districts with strong pro-choice majorities to be well above 217 even with gerrymandering. I'll bet many of the more moderate R reps would personally oppose a nationwide ban, too. But this scenario assumes that those reps will mostly vote for such a ban anyway out of fear that the fanatical base will primary them otherwise. I'd love to be wrong about that, but after the votes around impeachment and the 1/6 committee, I sadly doubt I'll lose money betting against Republican Congresspeople standing up to the primary-voting fanatics.
Happy 4th Noah!
Good article. I know many left-coded individuals do not like this idea but the solution is simply the federalism of the American system.
The US needs to allow the separate states to work through their issues. As the map you have posted shows, there are large rural swathes of America which have zero interest or attraction to the Democrat Party. Likewise, there are enclaves where the Republicans are despised.
On extremely contentious issues we need to let the states work out their own internal disputes. That is how peace and stability are maintained.
Forcing national policies should be reserved for issues that are truly national in scope.
And there wasn’t a plot to assassinate a Supreme Court justice, a mentally ill man went to Kavanaughs house and then called the cops in
It was about as effective of a plot as 1/6 was effective of a coup attempt. Which is to say utterly hopeless, but still worrying.
It’s not a good thing, but it wasn’t a plot to kill a justice, ppl plotting to kill ppl don’t generally turn up at their house then call the cops on themselves, it was a cry for help from an ill man who would have been much better off not knowing about politics
What is dangerous about this incident is Trump has made it a part of his speech which you can only listen to as a call for violence from Trump
Yes, a coup attempt is much more dangerous than an assassination plot. (Unless it's Archduke Francis Ferdinand of course)
How would you rate January 6th vs. Beer Hall Putsch in terms of effectiveness?
Beer Hall Putsch much more effective as a psyop.
Jan 6th was much closer to being effective and even allowing for the fact the judges in Hitlers trial were basically acting like his defence counsel, what’s happened since in America from the right wing legal and political establishment is terrifying and much worse than any reaction of the government during Weimar
My main hope is that smart ppl in the west are planning for a world where the US is not on the side of the democracy’s, awful as it sounds if I was non-US NATO I would be planning for the build of their own nuclear weapons programs that isn’t totally reliant on the French (Le Pen/Melenchon etc) and Australia needs to plan for a world where they’re not protected by ANZUS and the US nuclear umbrella
The UK has nukes even if they are dependent on US origin delivery systems.
UK has its own nukes!
I don't think it has been long enough to accurately call 1/6's coup attempt "ineffective." It may very well result in a coup, just on a longer timescale than its conspirators intended.
I think dry run is a better description
Could be!
There is no doubt in my mind that if one state can swing the next election and that state has a Trumpist SoS or it’s Pennsylvania or Wisconsin where the gerrymandered state assembly has a GOP majority despite getting less than 50% of the votes then they’ll send alienate electors
I won't say "no doubt," but I do think there's somewhere between a 65% and 75% chance they'll pull such a stunt and succeed if there's a GQP congressional majority.
Americans' views of abortion are "nuanced" because they really no nothing about it, or are mightily confused by decades of profoundly dishonest forced birther propaganda, or believe ridiculous things they hear in church about how much their god loves and values zygotes, embryos, fetuses and even the "already born" when, of course, the evidence is completely to the contrary.
Of course, this is true of many other hot button issues: Ignorance and completely irrational prejudice makes it impossible to discuss, let alone implement, policy ideas based on, say, evidence and logic. The recent hysteria about transgender women in sports is completely emblematic of this: Lia Thomas wins a few NCAA races that almost no one would otherwise care about and, suddenly, the moral universe is risk of complete collapse. Not much to do about any of this but SMH.
Yes. You guys need to convince white people in rural US that rich non-white people moving in and making life difficult for their kids and grandkids by jacking up the price of homes and making it impossible to go to top unis, those crazy leftists in the West trying to change their world - attacking their religion and traditions - are toothless so their legacy and history will be preserved.
In short, Blue states need to celebrate the cultures of the Red states somehow. Basically, you need a Democratic presidential candidate who is from a Red state. The Democrats need to have more white folks at the leadership level just for the 2024 election who will then make way in time.
You guys probably need two white men as President and Vice-President for a term.
With respect, Dems running a white guy prez + VP combo won't convince rural white people that our legacy and history will be preserved.
Joe Biden was kind of cast as the 'moderate' non-threatening old white guy, and he turned around and tried to implement some -very- progressive policies.
As long as The Groups are around, and trying to do the things that The Groups like to do, and no important Dem pols are telling them to f*** off...any white guys with a (D) by their name will just be seen as a Quisling.
Yeah? You're probably right. I don't know how those folks think. I just hope for the sake of progressives, you guys figure it out! The rest of the world is counting on you guys to rally somehow before November!
Neat. I would love to move there as a Westernized Indian with a Westernized Chinese fiancee but we just don't want to get shot so I don't think we're gonna move. It's quite nice here in China albeit life is quite hard for non-white, non-Chinese people here.
It's a bit long, man. Don't have time during office hours to go through it all. However, I can see it working out that way altho I would think people would eventually want high-skilled visa holders to come from a range of countries but yeah many brown people are keen and will pay an arm and a leg to go to the West.
Regarding adapting to the local culture, it really depends. A lot of South Asian women grow up with a conservative upbringing but they eventually adapt when they make local girlfriends. However, many don't and continue to stay true to their home culture as they envisage returning home, retiring early and living comfortably. It all depends on how close they are to their parents and how traditional their older folks are.
Increasingly, however, Indian millenials and Gen Zs are growing up American without even meaning to because of the pervasive influence of Western pop culture and the fact that English is the common language for urbanites in a nation with 22 official languages.
Stacey Abraham’s complaint was that voter suppression had stopped ppl voting, the exact thing you bring up 2 paragraphs after both-sidering acceptance of elections
It is good to complain about vote suppression. It is bad to deny the legitimacy of elections and say you didn't really lose.
And I say this as someone who is in general a huge Stacey Abrams fan.
But she didn’t say that, this is what she said
"I acknowledge that former Secretary of State Brian Kemp will be certified as the victor in the 2018 gubernatorial election," Abrams said, according to NPR. "But to watch an elected official who claims to represent the people in this state baldly pin his hopes for election on suppression of the people's democratic right to vote has been truly appalling."
She clarified that this was "not a speech of concession".
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/18/935734198/trump-hasnt-conceded-georgia-neither-did-stacey-abrams-what-changed
What, in your mind is the meaningful difference between her statement and a "concession"? What difference do you think she's drawing?
How flagrant would voter suppression have to be for the "loser" to get your approval for saying it was illegitimate?
I think the real issue in the case of a Civil War is to what extent and what side does Canada take. Obviously, Canada's agricultural production is almost as big as red America's so in turn blue America can rely on Canada instead of red America.
I'm the dude who speaks of civil war in the present tense.
America's Civil War II won't stay civil for long. It'll draw in outside actors, both state and non-state. Foreign states want to protect their hard-target and soft-target investments in the U.S., and have diaspora populations that can act as scouts when federal and local governments are unable to carry out any state capacity.
Non-state groups (think ISIS, Hezbollah, Latin American drug cartels) that have both militant and state capacity functions will also play a role.
Modern civil wars, after World War II, go on for decades, not years. (See Lebanon, Sri Lanka and El Salvador for example). Expect a generation of children to be born amid war and absorb all of the fears and anxieties of their elder generations.
Happy 4th, Noah. Keep up the good work! 💚 🥃
Buckle up + think about the unexpected.
And yes, I'm of the view that Jan 6 was a dress rehearsal.
Good read. Thanks
great work!
Wow,. Extraordinary newsletter today.
I'm trying to make sense of my reading
Noah, have you thought about drafting a constitutional amendment that could actually pass 38 states by addressing worries each side has about the other side's respect for institutions? Maybe alongside a conservative blogger from The Dispatch or National Review?
Here's a rough 2-for-2 example, which I came up with on the spot, and don't feel strongly about:
-no expansion of SCOTUS (Democratic concession)
-new states admitted via 2/3 Senate supermajority, so obviously the Senate is being preserved too (Democratic concession re: DC, Puerto Rico)
-Voting Rights Act provisions restored and expanded, with pre-clearance everywhere; ex-cons can vote; college students choose where they vote; federal government automatically provides every citizen with voting-acceptable ID (Republican concession)
-no more electors; each state assigns its electoral votes to the winner of the state's popular vote, with no governor/legislature/VP interventions; secretary of state interventions to counter voter fraud according to criteria in the amendment, supervised only by courts (Republican concession).
In my opinion, an equal number of concessions from each party makes the rhetoric of compromise easier.
I get the "no more electors" idea, but I don't get why would you enforce the "winner takes all" principle on electoral votes. Why shouldn't a state be free to allocate its electoral votes by other principles, such as proportionality?
Looking at the U.S. from half a world away, I have the impression that the "winner takes all" principle is a major driver of polarization. What about introducing some proportionality instead? In the current system, you have a lot of de-facto one-party states, where the political minority does not even have to bother voting.
If states have a choice of proportional or winner takers all, they will all choose winner takes all because if they don't, the other side will and they'll never win anything ever again. So it's a meaningless 'choice'.
In case of legislatures, you are probably right. But many states have ballot initiatives that could bypass the legislatures.
MJ legalization was mostly done behind the backs of the state representatives as well, using direct democracy.
I think one of the most major electoral reforms that should be undertaken is the census should be an opportunity to redraw state boundaries, rather than House districts.
There's nothing inherently magical or special about state boundaries as such.
A more socially cohesive political geography exists in the U.S. -- the metropolitan statistical area, and its larger sibling the consolidated statistical area. The latter is when two MSAs touch, generally their exurbs, and have substantial commuting links. The Bay Area has this, with San Joaquin Valley counties sending workers to Silicon Valley. Stockton, an MSA in its own right, sends commuters to both the Bay Area and Sacramento.
We would still have the same federal system and states would retain their powers.
There are basically two bounds -- the few-state proposal and the 50-state proposal. Each of these I also assume that territories like Puerto Rico, Guam, etc., have full statehood status, so the population is slightly higher than the 50-state US population, but doesn't affect calculations too much.
The few state proposal would start with making New York City's CSA the baseline state population, so each state would have about 24M-25M resident. So about half of New Jersey and much of southern Connecticut , plus some of northeast Pennsylvania would be in this New York City state, but the rest of New York's current state would be in some other state entity, like New England or the Great Lakes for western New York.
This also means California, Texas and Florida have to be partitioned in some fashion. The other consequence is that if you live roughly from coastal Washington state and Oregon to Minnesota, as well as Alaska, you'd now be living in one massive state. It's like a western Canadian province with a whole lotta land and very few cities. It's a nightmare to administer and political polarization would be heightened here.
The upshot of the few states plan is that we'd condense from 50 states to ... 14, roughly about what the founding fathers had for the 13 colonies.
The alternative is to keep 50 states just as they are now. That would mean dividing the population into about 7 million equally sized state units at existing population levels.
This does mean a unit like L.A. County (10 million) would have to be partitioned, and New York City's MSA would become a different arrangement of four states (like Brooklyn to Suffolk County would be a state, Manhattan could be coupled with New Jersey, etc.) The Miami MSA might gain the US Caribbean islands but be partitioned from the rest of Florida.
Ideally, this would mean the state boundaries would be redrawn in sparsely populated areas to keep cities anchored. It's a tough trick to pull off in New York or L.A. County, where there is a continuous carpet of residential and commercial development. In the case of L.A. County, though, most likely Mulholland Drive would form a state boundary and the county could be cut north-south through the sparsely populated Santa Monica and San Gabriel mountains.
you would have to draw the borders well enough to fit in ethnic and racial populations like the black belt in Dixie and the LDS around Utah/Idaho
Proportional voting might reduce polarization. However, it could actually make the amendment harder to pass, by threatening each state's dominant party's chances of retaining power at the state level.
This is because many states have state elections at the same time as presidential elections. If voter turnout from the minority party increases relative to voter turnout from the dominant party, and if straight-ticket voting holds, then the chances for state-level upsets must increase.
Due to this threat, I expect proportional voting would not be popular with politicians from each state's dominant party.
One person one vote is a concession from the republicans, huh?
And you don't even say to make DC and Puerto Rico states, you give us a 2/3 vote option that is as dead as anything else requiring republicans to compromise and call it good.
Considering they already ignore the 14th and 15th amendements without much complaint anymore, I find it difficult to imagine why we'd expect them to finally accede to these.