the advice I'm no longer giving Democrats about how to win LOL
I'm definitely feeling like even fewer people are reading what I have to say these days, on whatever platform, and I'm not sure what/whether to do [anything] about it ... for somebody who's been doing the online diary stuff since the late 1990s I don't think I've ever had fewer readers. But also not sure I need the stress of seeking additional readers right now. And definitely don't want to tailor what I'm writing to get more eyeballs right now, that's a job, and I currently have a day job that keeps me quite busy at times. And part of my current mental health care initiative is realizing the extent to which my job dominates my mental energy expenditures, and learning how to cope with that.
I absolutely don't want to play the algorithm game right now, if ever. But I still enjoy writing. So I keep writing.
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This year is a mid-term federal election year, and also a full-term state election year in Maryland and 35 other states.
The mid-term norm for the US is for the party controlling the White House to lose Congressional and state elections, sometimes quite badly, especially when the party controlling the White House also controls Congress, like the Democrats do this year.
The standard explanation for these typical mid-term wipeouts is that the party in power becomes disillusioned by the reality of governing, while the other party becomes irate at not being in power. The rare exceptions happen when the federal government is divided and the President is unusually popular, as in 2002 when GWB was riding 9/11, and 1998 when Clinton was riding the Dot Com Bubble while Republicans stupidly tried to impeach him for having sex with a White House intern (obviously we Americans care more about stock market returns than Presidental infidelity LOL).
President Biden is not popular, and his party controls the federal government, so there's no excuse for Democrats failing to drive the country in the right direction. Blame the filibuster or Senator Manchin if you want, but Democrats are in charge and it is their own failure to work together to solve our problems, so Democrats and independents are disillusioned while Republicans are pissed off. Democrats will likely lose both the House and the Senate this November, and at this point there's practically nothing they can do about it.
This isn't stopping a barrage of advice columns from worried Democrats who think "if only ..." ... they might hold on to at least the Senate (and maybe the House). Some of the advice columns from centrists think Democrats need to dump some of their less popular positions to make folks like them better. Some of the advice columns from liberals think Democrats need to refocus on new middle-class benefits such as lowering day care and prescription drug costs. But I truly think all of this advice is useless ... this is a mid-term election year, it's already April, it's too late. Democrats suck about the same as Republicans sucked four years ago.
We all suck, heh.
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Although the partisan people laboring year after year in their two-party trenches love their precious policy platforms or cultish leaders, neither major party consistently controls the federal government for long, because neither major party is truly trying to build a majoritarian coalition. Plus, the business cycle regularly punishes the party in power with recessions; recessions are ultimately unavoidable, although they can be delayed by massive fiscal and monetary stimuli. Swing voters don't put up with declining economic output. There was a recession in 2020, so they kicked out Trump. There will probably be another recession in 2024, so they'll kick out Biden.
And that's fine, that's sort of normal in a multi-party democracy, for no party to consistently win a majority at every level of government. Since the realignment of our two-party system in 1968 (when the Civil Rights Act flipped the South to Republicans), we haven't had a unified federal government for more than four years in a row. We've had divided government almost three times as often as unified government. We will return to divided government next year, I'd bet my pension on that LOL.
In the US we must view divided government as the norm, punctuated temporarily by short periods of unified government that will not last more than 2-4 years.
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As partisanship has increased in the US over the past 30 years, divided government has become more of a problem than it used to be. For example, we're seeing more federal government shutdowns and other kinds of kamikaze behaviors in Congress and the White House.
Political scientists measure partisanship by looking at how people belonging to different parties have different policy goals, but also by how people regard those who don't belong to their own party. Not only have the policy differences between the two parties increased over the past 20 years, but so has the amount of hatred people feel toward non-members.
Yet we continue to live in a federal system with separation of powers, in which divided government is the norm. Even during the brief periods of unified federal control, we've NEVER had ALL the states under the same party as the federal government (or under the same party as each other -- there's never been unifed control of all the states simultaneously).
Dear partisans of all parties -- for as long as the US has existed, we've never had one-party rule over the entire country. That simply doesn't happen here. So we either learn to live together, or we fight a Civil War and then learn to live together again afterward.
So ... what's the point of partisanship? You can keep voting straight-ticket Democrat or straight-ticket Republican (or Green or Libertarian) for the rest of your life, and party control of the US and its states will continue to flip back and forth.
I don't mean to sound nihilist about this, of course you should express your opinions and vote. I mean to sound realist about this -- you and your party cannot win all the time everywhere, so you have to be able to live with those who don't belong to your party. In our two-party federal system, your major party will be out of power or sharing power most of the time at the federal level, and will be sharing power among the states ALL of the time.
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But lately, a significant chunk of both Democrats and Republicans have been fretting that all of this is about to fall apart, because of growing authoritarianism on both sides. Democrats have been fretting that Republicans will steal the next presidential election, whereas Republicans have been fretting that Democrats did steal the last election. The reality is that the election was extremely close, at the Electoral College level, which makes it easy to imagine that a bit of fraud, or a bit less fraud, could have changed the outcome.
On the Democratic side, there's a nightmare that if Trump wins in 2024 we'll never have another election again, that he'll implement a Republican dictatorship. Even though most people don't like Trump!
It's difficult to get Democrats to admit that the only reason Trump won in 2016 is because people didn't like Hillary either. And if Trump does win again in 2024, it will be because people don't like Biden either.
But the reality is a closely divided country, not a country that's about to turn into a dictatorship.
The true nightmare, on both sides, is that their own side isn't in charge. That's true authoritarianism, on both sides, not being able to imagine or accept that your side isn't in charge.
What we've been losing in this country is the ability to accept loss. Sounds like a paradox when I write it like that.
If you identify with third parties, like I have mostly done over the past 25 years or so, then you're used to losing. But if you identify with a major party, then the increasing policy gap between the two major parties is leading to an increasing authoritarianism, because losing means SO MUCH MORE than it used to. Now, for Democrats, losing means no more abortions, for example. The Roe v. Wade compromise that had ruled for 50 years is about to collapse. There are other huge differences between the parties, on environmental regulation, on immigration, on affirmative action, on LGBT rights, on size of government subsidies, on taxing the wealthy.
As the policy gap has increased, the sense of alienation when your own party is not in control has increased, which leads to increasing authoritarianism. But our underlying Constitutional system has not changed. We have always elected Presidents via an Electoral College. We've always had two Senators per state. We've always had separation of powers, always had federalism. But as the policy gap has increased, so have the stakes of winning vs. losing, which is attracting ever larger floods of money into politics, ever larger amounts of activism, ever larger amounts of angst.
Not yet to 1850s levels of angst, when the country was about to tear itself apart over slavery. But only because there is no single issue like slavery today, instead we have several divisive issues that don't cut as easily across state lines.
Although the algorithms are working steadily and continuously to drive wedges between us, for the sake of drawing eyeballs to advertisements as we argue with each other, there are too many wedge issues to split us into two warring camps, including countless wedge issues within each major party.
-----
I'm not sure there's anything To Do about all this. Recognizing that you, personally, aren't in control of the outcome is important to the functioning of a healthy democracy. The point is that everybody has as much a say in the outcome as you do. So, you won't always be in the majority. The principle is majority rules, not you rule. And under a federal system with separation of powers, there is no single majority to rule, there are overlapping majorities in time and space. That's how the drafters of the Constitution set it up, and so far we're still following that Constitution, although we've become less willing to set aside our disagreements to update the Constitution for modern times ... making the Constitution feel more outmoded and brittle ...
I don't know what's going to happen next, and I'm definitely not in control, but a little less partisanship could help, a little more willingness to hang out with people unlike yourself, a little more willingness to accept that your cherished beliefs are not, and can never be, universally held. A little more willingness to accept that laws do not necessarily change behaviors, that governments cannot solve all of our problems, and that we're all 8 billion of us stuck on this planet together, trampling it as we scurry back and forth, earning our livelihoods and spending time with family & friends. Did we have fun while it lasted, LOL. Did we hold somebody's hand.
I absolutely don't want to play the algorithm game right now, if ever. But I still enjoy writing. So I keep writing.
-----
This year is a mid-term federal election year, and also a full-term state election year in Maryland and 35 other states.
The mid-term norm for the US is for the party controlling the White House to lose Congressional and state elections, sometimes quite badly, especially when the party controlling the White House also controls Congress, like the Democrats do this year.
The standard explanation for these typical mid-term wipeouts is that the party in power becomes disillusioned by the reality of governing, while the other party becomes irate at not being in power. The rare exceptions happen when the federal government is divided and the President is unusually popular, as in 2002 when GWB was riding 9/11, and 1998 when Clinton was riding the Dot Com Bubble while Republicans stupidly tried to impeach him for having sex with a White House intern (obviously we Americans care more about stock market returns than Presidental infidelity LOL).
President Biden is not popular, and his party controls the federal government, so there's no excuse for Democrats failing to drive the country in the right direction. Blame the filibuster or Senator Manchin if you want, but Democrats are in charge and it is their own failure to work together to solve our problems, so Democrats and independents are disillusioned while Republicans are pissed off. Democrats will likely lose both the House and the Senate this November, and at this point there's practically nothing they can do about it.
This isn't stopping a barrage of advice columns from worried Democrats who think "if only ..." ... they might hold on to at least the Senate (and maybe the House). Some of the advice columns from centrists think Democrats need to dump some of their less popular positions to make folks like them better. Some of the advice columns from liberals think Democrats need to refocus on new middle-class benefits such as lowering day care and prescription drug costs. But I truly think all of this advice is useless ... this is a mid-term election year, it's already April, it's too late. Democrats suck about the same as Republicans sucked four years ago.
We all suck, heh.
-----
Although the partisan people laboring year after year in their two-party trenches love their precious policy platforms or cultish leaders, neither major party consistently controls the federal government for long, because neither major party is truly trying to build a majoritarian coalition. Plus, the business cycle regularly punishes the party in power with recessions; recessions are ultimately unavoidable, although they can be delayed by massive fiscal and monetary stimuli. Swing voters don't put up with declining economic output. There was a recession in 2020, so they kicked out Trump. There will probably be another recession in 2024, so they'll kick out Biden.
And that's fine, that's sort of normal in a multi-party democracy, for no party to consistently win a majority at every level of government. Since the realignment of our two-party system in 1968 (when the Civil Rights Act flipped the South to Republicans), we haven't had a unified federal government for more than four years in a row. We've had divided government almost three times as often as unified government. We will return to divided government next year, I'd bet my pension on that LOL.
In the US we must view divided government as the norm, punctuated temporarily by short periods of unified government that will not last more than 2-4 years.
-----
As partisanship has increased in the US over the past 30 years, divided government has become more of a problem than it used to be. For example, we're seeing more federal government shutdowns and other kinds of kamikaze behaviors in Congress and the White House.
Political scientists measure partisanship by looking at how people belonging to different parties have different policy goals, but also by how people regard those who don't belong to their own party. Not only have the policy differences between the two parties increased over the past 20 years, but so has the amount of hatred people feel toward non-members.
Yet we continue to live in a federal system with separation of powers, in which divided government is the norm. Even during the brief periods of unified federal control, we've NEVER had ALL the states under the same party as the federal government (or under the same party as each other -- there's never been unifed control of all the states simultaneously).
Dear partisans of all parties -- for as long as the US has existed, we've never had one-party rule over the entire country. That simply doesn't happen here. So we either learn to live together, or we fight a Civil War and then learn to live together again afterward.
So ... what's the point of partisanship? You can keep voting straight-ticket Democrat or straight-ticket Republican (or Green or Libertarian) for the rest of your life, and party control of the US and its states will continue to flip back and forth.
I don't mean to sound nihilist about this, of course you should express your opinions and vote. I mean to sound realist about this -- you and your party cannot win all the time everywhere, so you have to be able to live with those who don't belong to your party. In our two-party federal system, your major party will be out of power or sharing power most of the time at the federal level, and will be sharing power among the states ALL of the time.
-----
But lately, a significant chunk of both Democrats and Republicans have been fretting that all of this is about to fall apart, because of growing authoritarianism on both sides. Democrats have been fretting that Republicans will steal the next presidential election, whereas Republicans have been fretting that Democrats did steal the last election. The reality is that the election was extremely close, at the Electoral College level, which makes it easy to imagine that a bit of fraud, or a bit less fraud, could have changed the outcome.
On the Democratic side, there's a nightmare that if Trump wins in 2024 we'll never have another election again, that he'll implement a Republican dictatorship. Even though most people don't like Trump!
It's difficult to get Democrats to admit that the only reason Trump won in 2016 is because people didn't like Hillary either. And if Trump does win again in 2024, it will be because people don't like Biden either.
But the reality is a closely divided country, not a country that's about to turn into a dictatorship.
The true nightmare, on both sides, is that their own side isn't in charge. That's true authoritarianism, on both sides, not being able to imagine or accept that your side isn't in charge.
What we've been losing in this country is the ability to accept loss. Sounds like a paradox when I write it like that.
If you identify with third parties, like I have mostly done over the past 25 years or so, then you're used to losing. But if you identify with a major party, then the increasing policy gap between the two major parties is leading to an increasing authoritarianism, because losing means SO MUCH MORE than it used to. Now, for Democrats, losing means no more abortions, for example. The Roe v. Wade compromise that had ruled for 50 years is about to collapse. There are other huge differences between the parties, on environmental regulation, on immigration, on affirmative action, on LGBT rights, on size of government subsidies, on taxing the wealthy.
As the policy gap has increased, the sense of alienation when your own party is not in control has increased, which leads to increasing authoritarianism. But our underlying Constitutional system has not changed. We have always elected Presidents via an Electoral College. We've always had two Senators per state. We've always had separation of powers, always had federalism. But as the policy gap has increased, so have the stakes of winning vs. losing, which is attracting ever larger floods of money into politics, ever larger amounts of activism, ever larger amounts of angst.
Not yet to 1850s levels of angst, when the country was about to tear itself apart over slavery. But only because there is no single issue like slavery today, instead we have several divisive issues that don't cut as easily across state lines.
Although the algorithms are working steadily and continuously to drive wedges between us, for the sake of drawing eyeballs to advertisements as we argue with each other, there are too many wedge issues to split us into two warring camps, including countless wedge issues within each major party.
-----
I'm not sure there's anything To Do about all this. Recognizing that you, personally, aren't in control of the outcome is important to the functioning of a healthy democracy. The point is that everybody has as much a say in the outcome as you do. So, you won't always be in the majority. The principle is majority rules, not you rule. And under a federal system with separation of powers, there is no single majority to rule, there are overlapping majorities in time and space. That's how the drafters of the Constitution set it up, and so far we're still following that Constitution, although we've become less willing to set aside our disagreements to update the Constitution for modern times ... making the Constitution feel more outmoded and brittle ...
I don't know what's going to happen next, and I'm definitely not in control, but a little less partisanship could help, a little more willingness to hang out with people unlike yourself, a little more willingness to accept that your cherished beliefs are not, and can never be, universally held. A little more willingness to accept that laws do not necessarily change behaviors, that governments cannot solve all of our problems, and that we're all 8 billion of us stuck on this planet together, trampling it as we scurry back and forth, earning our livelihoods and spending time with family & friends. Did we have fun while it lasted, LOL. Did we hold somebody's hand.