“A power-mad president possessed of radical theories of executive authority and convinced of his own royal prerogative has given de facto control of most of the federal govt to one of the richest men on the planet…whose…interests are tangled up in those of rival govts and foreign autocracies”
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
what was your double-0 number?
i think that might be a step too far.
by Saturday. relocate out of the country you've lived in and expected to live in for some time, by Saturday. or else "the military would step in"?
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
“So many of these things are so wildly illegal that I think they’re playing a quantity game and assuming the system can’t react to all this illegality at once”
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
grand things. they wrote them on parchments.
like most of our systems, we didn't intentionally create them, they emerged inchoately from incidents and pressures and the degree of vetocracy and status quo bias in our politics has prevented us from reforming into anything sensible.
yes. i like the piece's characterization of them, "best viewed not as civil society organizations but as features of the US electoral system".
really there is little time for anything else.
sort of, there are various privately chartered publicly regulated things that call themselves national committees or state caucuses or whatever. but “The Democratic Party” or “The Republican Party” are things quite challenging to characterize, ontologically speaking.
(just a guess, but the stock market did really well, and that was disproportionately due to tech firms this quantile significantly owns.)
thank you for reading! and good to know you! i’m still writing some if you are interested, drafts.interfluidity.com/archive.html
what if we all… that explains everything!
a party needs to party. really. you wanna be loud and visible and don’t wanna be depressed? throw parties.
Loading quoted Bluesky post...
the democratic party has fuzzy boundaries. he calls himself an independent but caucuses with the democrats and participates in their primary elections. 1/
US parties are blobby, indeterminate things is the point of the original post this comments on. 2/
but despite there are people perceived to be disproportionately influential within those vague coalitions. donors, the Obamas, the Clintons, people like Jim Clyburn at a state level. 3/
a lot of Sanders supporters perceive those “insiders” as having been opposed to Sanders’ success in the Democratic primary process, exercising that disproportionate influence to ensure his loss. /fin
have they declassified yet who shot JR?
fair enough! i’m not really interested in litigating Jeremy Corbyn. from a US leftish perspective I think that “discipline” leaves a bad taste, but that could well be projecting our Bernie Sanders experience on the UK. 1/
the point is that exercises of discipline by leadership in a two party system can leave factions effectively disenfranchised. 2/
there are only two choices, two sets of insiders (most organizations however notionally democratic have entrenched insiders) fully control them, the dissatisfied have nowhere else to go. /fin
in many multiparty democracies executive power does emanate from legislative power, do they function much better? “the perils of presidentialism” argument is now somewhat disputed by more recent experience in the Latin America from which it arose. 1/
the most common indictment of too-many-parties democracy is Israel, where splinter parties often become kingmakers, but many multiparty democracies are designed (sometimes elegantly, sometimes less) to favor 4-8ish parties, and disfavor very small parties. 2/
(my own tentative views are that parliamentary systems are probably cleaner than presidential systems, but presidential systems can work if the electoral system favors less partisan, less ideological presidents, and that voting systems should be built to favor 4-8 not-tiny parties.) /fin
okay. the point stands. there’d have been little reason to lock him out if he didn’t remain popular or potentially popular. whatever the reason — whether impeccable justification or pretext — if a significant public disagrees, in a two party world there’s no recourse.