While the omicron variant has been spreading exponentially and Joe Manchin has been giving the Democrats heartburn, I have been busy, like Diogenes rolling his tub up and down the road, arranging on my shelves a chronological display of all the books I have published with all of their variants – hardcover, softcover, new editions, translations, and the like. That did not take me very long, so I thought I would say a few words about the Manchin debacle.
I am not angry with Manchin, any more than I am angry with
the omicron variant or with Parkinson’s disease or with my ancient and
reliable printer, which has just unaccountably stopped functioning. Manchin, coming from a state that voted for
Trump by something like 37 points, gave the Democrats control of the Senate. So
all of the federal judges that Biden has appointed – more than any president in
the first year since Reagan – and the infrastructure bill and all the other
things that have been accomplished this first year are due to his willingness
to vote with the Democrats. The people I am angry with are all the lazy Democrats
in Maine and North Carolina who could not be bothered to come out to vote and
thereby unseat Susan Collins or Thom Tillis. The people I am angry with are all
the poor people who voted for Republicans, the women of reproductive age who
voted for Republicans, the diabetes sufferers paying thousands of dollars for
insulin who voted for Republicans, in short, the tens of millions of people in
this country who persistently vote against their own interest because of
prejudice or white anxiety or
evangelical stupidity.
In five days it will be Christmas so I must ask what I can
hope for, other than a piece of coal in my stocking. Here are my hopes: I hope
that the virus peaks in January and declines rapidly to manageable levels; I
hope that the inflation is short-lived; I hope that when the Supreme Court
overturns Roe v. Wade women will rise up in anger in red states when they
discover that laws banning abortion have been sitting on the books just waiting
for that overturning; I hope that the Democrats hold the house and pick up two
more seats in the Senate; I hope that in 2023 the District of Columbia becomes
a state and provides two more Democratic senators; I hope that Elizabeth Warren
and Cory Booker have mild cases of the virus and recover completely; and I hope
the Tiger miraculously recovers his full capacity and takes the golf world by
storm.
But if that is too much to hope for, then I will just hope
that I am still here a year from now griping and blogging and hoping.
66 comments:
Great wishes, and I, and I am sure many of your readers, join you in making them, with, perhaps, two exceptions – the last two. Not sure why you wish that Warren and Booker become victims of the omicron virus, with mild symptoms and recover. Why not wish that neither becomes infected at all, unless there is something they did which you believe deserves a mild punishment? And I had no idea that you were such a golf fan.
A disturbing report on CNN today. I never would have thought it possible to occur in the U.S, during my lifetime. However, analysts who have studied the risk factors which make it more likely that a foreign country will descend into civil war have concluded that those same factors indicate that the U.S. is currently at high risk.
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/12/20/us-civil-war-study-barbara-walter-intvu-intl-ovn-vpx.cnn
Another,
Because Booker and Warren both have Covid.
s. wallerstein,
OK. I missed that.
s. wallerstein,
I read in the news that the "leftist"* Boric defeated the conservative Kast in Chile's presidential election.
I am forever reminded of Lucy Parsons' remark (paraphrased): "Never be deceived that the rich will permit you to vote away their wealth."
* comments in a thread by Ben Norton here
Eric,
Boric began his political career as a radical. libertarian socialistic student leader ten years ago during the huge student protests in 2011.
He was elected to Congress in 2013 and since then, he has drifted towards the center, which in Chilean politics means he's closer to Bernie Sanders than to Obama. He beat the Communist candidate, Daniel Jadue, in a primary in July. Jadue was to his left, which indicates that voters prefer a moderate progressive to a more radical one. During the campaign Boric sought and got the support of more centrist politicians and voters, horrified by Kast's ultra-conservative attitudes: that enabled him to win with a huge majority. I don't believe that someone as radical as Jadue would have beaten Kast.
As for Boric's criticisms of Nicaragua, Venezuela and to a lesser extent Cuba, I share them. Nicaragua is now a dictatorship of the Ortega family with little in common with the original Sandinista project (I spent some time in Nicaragua in 1984 supporting the Sandinistas) and Venezuela is a disaster, a failed state with serious human rights violations.
Would I prefer Boric to be more radical in pressing anti-neoliberal reforms? Yes, but then he wouldn't have gotten elected. In any case, both houses of Congress are more or less tied, so Boric can't do all that much. Certainly, for the millions or at least hundreds of thousands of Chileans who filled the street celebrating Boric's victory last night, Boric is someone to cheer on and promises a better life for them and the country in general.
I'm always a bit curious as to how WE know what "their own interests" are. Clearly some very big assumptions are being made here.
And given all that anger, why not be angry at Manchin too?
s. wallerstein,
Venezuela is a failed state? As with Cuba, given the US and its allies imposing crushing sanctions and an economic embargo, what would you expect?
I went to the Norton thread and it seems puzzling. The guy who is on the left and was just elected president in a full democracy is fired on for being critical of three authoritarian regimes. China seems to be reverting to Stalinism and is doing a slo-mo, rather brutal genocide on the Uyghurs (among others). So-called "left populism" has royally screwed up Venezuela and Ortega has acted in ways that Orban and Trump could only dream of doing.
Professor Wolff might have added Green Party, Jacobin types who would never vote for a Democrat to his list.
Humm, just had a good sized earthquake (6.2). I see on the USGS map that there was earlier, smaller one this morning nearby (4.4). Both are on the San Andreas fault and near where it hits the Juan de Fuca plate. There was also a 4.4 on the JdF/ Pacific boundary further north and now a series of 2.x a few minutes ago inland near the coast. Eight earthquakes in a few minutes - good times.
The last major Juan de Fuca slip was 320 years ago, was somewhere in the 9 range and operates historically on a 3 - 400 year cycle. When that happens, everything west of the I-5 is toast.
If the omicron or another variant spreads very fast and extremely widely while generally causing de minimis, or no, symptoms yet provides robust immunity against the SARS-COVID-2 class, that would be about the best thing you could hope for. It could lead to a rapid end to the pandemic, whether the rich countries continue to hoard vaccines or not and whether people who have access to vaccines accept them or refuse them.
Manchin—While dishing out hate against "lazy Democrats," spare a thought for Biden, who continues to allow Manchin, Sinema, & their lot to play this game; Schumer & the Senate Democratic caucus, who put Manchin into the leadership; Pelosi & House Democrats, who caved on tying the infrastructure bill votes to the relief/stimulus bill votes; and the DSCC, DNC, and their corporate donors, who prop up candidates like Manchin and crush any candidates within (or outside) the Democratic Party that are more progressive.
And it's not just Manchin. He's getting the focus of attention now, but if it weren't him, there are plenty of other Senate Democrats who would stand in the way.
I will repeat it since it cannot be said enough: Democratic candidates are not owed any votes. If they cannot inspire people to vote for them by showing people how they will use government to improve their lives, they don't deserve to get their votes. (This social media meme pretty much sums it all up.)
(I know that I am not going to change any minds here. It is my OCD that has me continuing to engage in these discussions.)
Cuba, after 60 years of sanctions, is a functional society with, for example, a decent healthcare and educational system. Cuba has no oil.
Venezuela, after 5 years (I don't recall when the sanctions began) of sanctions, is a mess and they have oil. There are literally millions of Venezuelans fleeing the country, many of them walking from Venezuela to Chile. I know several of them here in Chile and they do not come from the Venezuelan super-rich.
So due to mismanagement and corruption, the Venezuelan economy is collapsing in spite of it being an oil producer. Sure, the sanctions play a role, but as I said, Cuba, a country with much less mismanagement and much less corruption, is a functional society in spite of the sanctions.
In the 2017 election rightwing billionaire Sebastian Piñera was elected because, among other lies, he accused his opponent, Alejandro Guillier, a left of center ex-TV anchor man, of leading Chile towards "Chilezuela", that is, another Venezuela. That is the image that most Chileans have a Venezuela after talking to the many Venezuelan refugees which have come here. From that reason Gabriel Boric is very emphatic in pointing out that his politics have nothing to do with those of Maduro in Venezuela.
RPW is now being asked by some to expand his list of those to be angry at. Where will it end? When I first immigrated into the US I was quite shocked to feel the high level of anger in this country. And it has gotten worse these last 60 years.
Perhaps Manchin is just a stalking horse. Very convenient for the majority of elected democrats, who in all likelihood don't want this legislation passed.
If they really wanted to get it done, it would get done.
James, the 1950s were also pretty angry and the currently ascendant Leninist Right took its present form back then.
Nader, actively campaigning in a swing state, made the 12/12/00 judicial coup possible so why not a more complete list?
(Earthquakes now up to 17.)
Apropos Eric, this Onion article remains apt: https://www.theonion.com/democrats-sick-of-being-blamed-for-cowardice-on-issues-1847675639
And in response to Eric's linked Venn diagram, see also here: https://fakenous.net/?p=1956 which most Americans understand more or less intuitively.
To even have a chance of motivating voter turnout sufficient to get anything done besides maybe appointing some more federal judges and handing out pork to red states, the Democratic establishment is going to need to actually commit to improving working people's lives and take affirmative steps to make good on those commitments.
But instead of doing something that might actually motivate turnout, like cancelling student loan interest payments or forgiving student loans, the Democrats fixate on horrible regressive policies like SALT deductions. And so here we are speculating on what will persuade some old white dude in West Virginia to vote with the Democrats instead of taking concrete steps to make our country a better place to live in.
aaall, I wasn't, just to be clear, claiming that the US only began to become an excessively angry place in the 1960s. It's just that that's when I began to experience it as being so. As to the rise of the reactionary authoritarian right, I actually did hear Goldwater give a speech in New Haven way back then, though not quite in the '50s.
Having expressed my bewilderment, that people are actually validating anger, let me express another bewilderment which will, I fear, provoke more of it as well as a few more history lessons: I never understand why so many people fail to explore what Nader's political purpose/purposes were in 2000. It seemed to me, then and now, that he was actually attempting to shift the ground of political debate. And given that a Presidential election is almost the only thing that gets lots of Americans thinking at all about politics, it seems pretty obvious why he would choose to try that then. As to the futility of such an attempt? In retrospect, maybe so. But look at how that other seemingly quixotic attempt by an individual to shift the American political ground has succeeded. I'm pointing to Trump, though I'm definitely not praising him. It would doubtless take a whole lot more and more intelligent political analysis than I can muster to explain why it was that Nader failed and Trump succeeded.
But I have gone on too long. I'm going to return to trying to understand what the Hohlenstein-Stadel figurine might mean for the evolution of the human mind.
R, the Venn diagram is ridiculous and an excellent example of the delusional and destructive impulses of the so-called far left in the US. Student loans should be forgiven to a certain level but that is a niche issue. SALT limits were done by the Republicans to hurt blue states. Taxes in states like Texas are structured to sock it to lower income folks.
"...the Democratic establishment is going to need to actually commit to improving working people's lives and take affirmative steps to make good on those commitments."
Which is what the Infrastructure Bill and BBB are designed to do. Just a suggestion: Take a look at the composition of the Congress after the 1932, 1934, 1936, and 1964 elections before you default to Green Lanternism. Obama had a deeply flawed majority as well as a deeply flawed theory of American politics. Neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism aren't going to be undone without three terms and solid majorities.
Passing NAFTA in 1994 gave the Republicans an opportunity they took full advantage of. We have a deeply flawed Constitution which seems to be a suicide pact after all.
Now 24 earthquakes and aftershocks.
James, given the structure of our elections, one will never move the needle in a general election. Changes can only be effected in primaries, which is what folks like Bernie and AOC have done. (It took 2 -3 years of a deep depression and Hoover sending Doug to beat up veterans to get Roosevelt elected.)
Trump/Bannon, etc. saw a fat hog to cut in what had become a deeply degenerate American Conservatism and Republican Party. While he didn't expect to win the General, the grifters saw the clown show the Rep. primaries had become and saw an opportunity. Then the dog actually caught the car...
Nader/Stein designed their campaigns to hurt the Dems and help the Right. They may be merely stupid and delusional or something far darker but they were definitely not all that interested in improving our politics.
(Of course, it doesn't help that too many Dems use dummies to run their campaigns. I'm somewhat bitter about Florida 2000 because I had a conversation with a person high up in the Gore campaign and pointed out that (for reasons) Nader was going to be a problem in Florida and was assured that they had matters in hand. They could have blunted things but ... Ditto the Clinton campaign which was deeply flawed.)
(28 and counting)
Regardless of how you typify the Trump case, aaall, it seems to me that he and those around hime did in fact "move the needle in a general election" as well as in the primaries.
As to Nader's intentions, it seems to me that to look at it from a decidedly partisan, Democratic point of view, which I think you do, trivialises the whole thing. As I think it was Eric said, Democrats aren't owed anyone's vote.
Looking at the world a little bit more largely, it's quite amazing to see how so many established political parties have faded from the scene in recent years. If in Europe, why not here?
On another matter, how close are you to the earthquakes? Have any tsunami warnings been issued following that big one you mentioned?
Chile will go the way of Argentina
James Wilson
There's a crucial difference between Trump and Nader. Trump captured the Republican nomination through the primaries and ran as a major party candidate. Nader never tried to win the Democratic nomination. He was third-party from the word go. That is we was so destructive. Bernie took the Trump route four years before Trump did; while he didn't win, he certainly succeeded in moving the Democratic party to the left.
So, David, to be actively third party is illegitimate? Again, it seems to me, these criticisms of Nader could only come from a party partisan. Aren't you interested in contemplating what his actual political purposes might have been? I'm not saying you have to agree with him. But surely it's worth while trying to understand him and those who supported him rather than simply dwelling on his/their repudiation of the Democratic Party as if that were impermissible? (And yes, I am recalling that RPW wrote something about all this some time ago, focussing, as I remember it, on the need for political judgement. Still, political judgement has to do with political goals, I suppose.)
Had Trump run in the general as a third party candidate it would have been comic fodder for the late night shows. It was his performance in the nationally televised debate when his "opponents" were empty suits. There is a difference between "moving the needle" and seizing an opening. Trump tapped into what Thurmond, Goldwater, Wallace, and Nixon demonstrated - that there was a persistent nativist/racially motivated voter block. Thirty years of neo-liberalism and neo-conservatism had rotted the core and created an opening for some combination of populism/nativism/fascism.
Most voters have lives and are out of necessity low information voters. They believe that Republicans are good for the economy, businessmen create jobs, know how to run things, and that (thanks to The Apprentice) Trump was a super successful businessman.
There's a reason he ran in the Republican primary and not the Democratic primary or as a third party candidate in the general. Predators are successful to the extent that they are able to sense weakness and take advantage of opportunities - Republican weakness, a greedy media, and lots of suckers (hey, they're literally going to jail and dying for the guy).
Re: "Democrats aren't owed anybody's vote." This is a consumerist theory of politics. In a FPTP, presidential system with too small of a legislature it leads to bad things. If the choice is a Manchin or a McConnell...BTW, there simply can't be a viable third party in a FPTP system like ours. One will either be irrelevant or a spoiler.
Perhaps it's because I grew up in a different political system, aaall, that I find I look on your assertion that "there can't be a viable third party in a FPTP system like ours" with some disbelief. I'm well aware of differences among political systems. But your assertion ignores the fact that in the UK the Labour Party intruded into a FPTP system dominated by the Liberal and the Conservative parties and came to displace the former. To be sure, there were circumstances which made that possible. And to be sure, the FPTP system presented problems for the rise of Labour. But rise they did. (And now Labour is possibly--probably--in radical decline, as may be the entire British system.)
aaall - the Venn diagram is a toungue in cheek view into how 8ndependrnt voters view both parties generally, not just the "so called far left." Spend some time with libertarians or small-c conservatives and they'll express a similar sentiment.
Student loan forgiveness is a "niche issue" to the extent that relief will impact a subset of Americans and their families. But to the extent Democrats are interested in "turning out the vote", especially the young vote and the vote for their undecided boomer parents and grandparents who genuinely feel guilty about saddling the next generation with debt-slavery, it's a good bet. It's also exemplary of the issues the democrats could be fighting for to get votes, instead of pushing for bland bipartisan mass spending bills to transfer yet more wealth to contractors and business interests.
Relatedly, and in response to your reference to the infrastructure bill and BBB, note that basically every important social element of BBB was excised from the corporate-friendly infrastructure bill by design and over the objections of the lefties in the legislature precisely because it contained everything appealing to republicans and nothing overly objectionable. And now there's no leverage left to pass BBB, which still doesn't even try to tackle universal healthcare or the student loan crisis or a plethora of campaign priorities Mr. Green Lantern Biden talked about.
But hey, we're pushing for SALT deductions because they were capped by Trump! Hooray! Except that all the SALT deductions do is make it easy and attractive for coastal elite boomers and their landed offspring to perpetuate the affordable housing crisis in California and New York while doing nothing for the working people in those states who see no benefit from removing the caps and don't give a shit one way or the other about it.
Capitalism rests on the exploitation of the working class, and the Democratic Party is captured by America's capitalist overlords.
James, I guess we should define viable. To me a party is viable if it can elect folks to state and national office. Parties can wax and wane but in the US in this timeline, a third party can only be irrelevant or a spoiler. A third party can't even change the conversation because our media seems to be able to only do horse race and access "journalism." Since we seem to be re-running the 1850s, the most we can hope for is that the Reps implode like the Whigs and a another party arises. You might want to read a little about Nader and I can't get that Animal Farm - like pic of Stein, Flynn, and Putin out of my mind.
The UK is interesting in an unhappy way. The Conservatives got ~44% of the vote and won ~56% of the seats in parliament. This does not seem healthy. After the 2019 elections I scanned the individual races and saw cases in which the Conservative won (FPTP) but the combined Lib-Dem/Green added to the Labour candidate would have elected the Labour candidate and others in which the combined Labour/Green vote added to the Lib-Dem would have elected the Lib-Dem. Tactical voting is hard to pull off.
With the regional parties and three center-left to left parties the UK seems a mess. However it's interesting that Parliament has 650 members while the US with ~five times the population has 435 House seats. Besides giving DC statehood (and PR if they want it) we need to add about 300 House seats and regularize re-redistricting.
R, perhaps you will explain how raising taxes on the middle class will solve the housing crisis? Elites? A CHP officer and a teacher as a couple will pull down ~$170 - 200 K. Down south and down the block from me an electrician bought his house for $26,000 - today every house on the block is over a million. SALT can be scaled better. Republicans deliberately screwed over folks in blue states whose middle and upper class citizens actually pay taxes. Taxes in red states skew higher towards the bottom deciles. The 2017 tax cut was a counter cyclical giveaway to the folks at the top.
I
Oops, s/b "pro-cyclical."
You’re qualifying your position a bit, aaall. But if we’re going to allow viability as a criterion we should also raise the issue of within which time frame. And then that will bring up the question as to whether in a longer rather than a shorter time frame might we try to do things to alter the viabilities. That was the calculation that the Labour unions made over a century ago after decades of the Liberal Party exploiting the labour vote but denying working-class people (in those days men) any substantial role in the Liberal party. Those who decided to break away and form a Labour Party knew quite well that they wouldn’t win much Parliamentary representation, much less power, for quite some time. But they, looking at things in the longer term decided it was worth the risk. (They failed to foresee, I think, that erstwhile Liberals would slowly but surely come to dominate within Labour., but that’s another story.)
As to the disproportion between votes and seats in Parliament, that’s a very old story, I’m afraid. Still, it surely isn’t as disproportionate as is the US Senate in relation to votes.
I see we also might disagree on the nature of the British parties. I don’t see three center-left to left parties, I see three right or centre-right parties. I wish there was a left or even centre-left one, but that too is a thing of the past. Luckily we don’t have a presidential system (though Prime Ministers like Blair, Cameron, and Johnson imagine they are of that ilk) so it’s still possible to vote for an acceptable candidate in some constituencies, though the current Labour Party is eliminating what remains of its left at a rapid pace—I smile a little bitterly when I hear newscasters bemoan the fact that only acceptable candidates were allowed to run in Hong Kong.
not only earthquakes have cycles.
The distribution of income in the United States has just ended such a cycle. Between the top 1%, the top 10% and the bottom 50%, it has almost returned to 1940 levels. One remembers, shortly after that came Pearl Harbor.
(1940, 50% =13,5, 10% =49,2, 1% =21,7)
(2020, 50% =13,3, 10% =45,5, 1% =18,8)
https://wid.world/country/usa/
But no matter how you put the cycles and whether they exist at all, the overall trend is as clear as the winter morning outside the window I am looking through.
(And believe it or not, in the German parliament they are fighting right now over which party has to sit next to the fascists).
James Wilson,
l am a "party partisan" in that I support the most realistic efforts to get a leftward agenda adopted in this country. With Michael Harrington, I want to be at the left wing of the possible. Because of the political structure of this country, that means supporting the nominees of the Democratic Party. The place to challenge the establishment is in the primaries, not through a third party that can only be a spoiler. Both Nader and Sanders lost, but Sanders accomplished something--he moved the Democrats to the left. Nader elected W, who gave us Roberts and Alito and the War in Iraq.
David Palmeter,
You're an attorney and so I imagine that you've thought a lot about the question of responsibility in human affairs.
Can you really claim in good faith that "Nader elected W." Certainly, his campaign in Florida was a factor in W's election, but certainly not the only factor.
Three generals sound the alarm that members of the U.S. military may support an insurrection in 2024:
https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2021/12/20/retired-generals-wapo-op-ep-2024-insurrection-anderson-ebof-vpx.cnn
s. wallerstein,
In law there is something called the “but for” test, used to determine liability, e.g., but for the parents leaving the handgun in an unlocked drawer in their bedroom, the students at Oxford H.S. would not have died; but for the driver running the red light, there would not have been a collision and Mrs. Smith would still be alive; etc.
What David is saying is, all things being equal, but for Nader running as a third- party candidate, Gore would have received enough of the votes which went to Nader to defeat Bush in Florida, and but for Bush winning Florida, Gore would have won the electoral college. Obviously, a critical element in this analysis is the “all things being equal” qualification, that the only change would be Nader not running for President.
s. wallerstein
Yes, I believe I can claim in good faith that Nader elected W. Nader won more than 90,000 votes in Florida. Bush won by fewer than 1,000. If Nader hadn't run, some of the 90,000 probably wouldn't have voted, but those who did vote certainly would have voted overwhelmingly for Gore and he would have one.
You raise the problem multiple causes, and it's true that if Gore hadn't lost other states he wouldn't have needed Florida. But he did need Florida, and Nader prevented him from winning it.
An analogy might be to a football team that lost a game by a single point. They wouldn't have lost if the kicker hadn't missed the field goal, or the receiver hadn't dropped the pass, or the runner hadn't fumbled the ball away. But all of these events did occur, and the angry coach isn't going to tell the fumbling runner not to blame himself because the field goal was missed. The runner is to blame along with all the others.
It's like saying that Neville Chamberlain caused World War 2. For sure, his behavior in Munich was a factor, but just one factor among scores of factors.
s. wallerstein,
The difference between Neville Chamberlain and Ralph Nader is this: Had Chamberlain not given Hitler the green light by agreeing that Germany could annex the Sudetenland, Hitler would have either done it anyway, or would have found some other country to invade. Chamberlain had no power to insure that all things would be equal. Taking Chamberlain and the Sudetenland out of the equation would probably not have changed anything.
But the chain of causation in Nader’s case was different. It is foreseeable that had Nader not run, enough of the voters in Florida who voted for him would still have voted, but the only candidate whose views sufficiently echoed Nader’s views was Gore, and therefore they would have voted for him. Therefore, taking Nader out of the equation would have changed the outcome. There is no comparable circumstance, such as Hitler’s still invading the Sudetenland or some other country – unless the Nader supporters in Florida just decided not to vote at all, an unlikely decision.
I'll chime in only to say that what happened at Munich did not cause WW2. If Britain and France had taken a much harder line vs Hitler two or three years earlier, that might or might not have made a difference in the end (I think prob not, given Hitler's longstanding intentions), but in any case by 1938 it was too late for deterrence to work, and if he hadn't been given the Sudetenland he likely wd have taken it forcibly (as he did with the rest of Czechoslovakia later).
One thing Munich did do is give Britain more time to rearm, and Britain's arms and aircraft factories put the time to fairly good use. Britain was better prepared militarily to face Hitler in late '39 and 1940 than it would have been a year earlier.
Causation in law and metaphysics - good discussion to start the morning!
I don't really have a dog in this fight, but my initial feeling is that the "but for" test illustrates the saying, "Seek simplicity and mistrust it." (Feynman, IIRC...?)
Let's say there were a few major factors (for simplicity, the following three) contributing to outcome "W" (Bush's victory):
(B) A significant number of people, x, voted for Bush.
(N) A significant number of people, y, voted for Nader (and their second choice would've been Gore).
(D) A significant number of people, z, declined to vote (and their second choice would've been Gore).
Let "a significant number" in each case be an abbreviated way of indicating that the victory would've gone to Gore "but for" this number. (Treat the overall scenario as a thought-experiment for the sake of discussion; I'm not necessarily claiming it's an entirely accurate rendering of what happened.)
The question as I see it would be: In assigning responsibility for W, in what way may we single out N to the exclusion of B and D?
(As an aside, a less touchy analogy: Suppose that I perish five years too early "due to poor health," i.e. that I could've added five years to my life either by quitting smoking, or by exercising more often, or by eating less junk food. Does it make sense to isolate any single one of these as my crucial misstep, in a way that doesn't apply (or applies less) to the others?)
There's got to be a huge literature on this sort of thing. Being barely acquainted with it, my initial take is that we'd mainly want to take the following into consideration (going back to the case of W): Which of W's prior, causally overdetermining conditions - B, N, or D - would have been easiest to prevent from obtaining? This perhaps dodges the whole "ultimate responsibility" question (which may be insoluble) and allows us to focus more constructively on preventing similar outcomes in the future. (It might be, e.g., that third-party voters are less difficult to win over to "our side" than either Republican voters or non-voters; so, the upshot of "blame Nader" might be to focus our energy mainly on persuading third-party voters to vote for the left-most of any realistically electable candidate - energy that might otherwise be wasted on arguing with Republicans.)
Most people seem to assume that Nader voters would have voted for Gore if Nader had not been a candidate.
That does not seem so plausible to me. I believe many of them simply would not have voted if the only options had been Gore and Bush.
If I had lived in Florida at the time, I might have voted for Nader. I never would have voted for Gore or Bush. Post 2000 election, I would have been less likely to have voted for Nader, but I and many others only learned the lesson of the 2000 election in Florida by living it through it.
s. wallerstein
The reason so many people believe Gore would have carried Florida had Nader not run is because of the large number of votes Nader received and Bush's narrow margin over Gore. I don't think anyone believes that Gore would have received all of Nader's 90,000 votes. Many people would have stayed home, no doubt. But how many? If only 10% of them voted for Gore and the other 90% stayed home, Gore would have won handily.
Those who, like you, saw no difference between Gore and Bush gave us Roberts and Alito and the war in Irag as well as tax cuts for the super rich. It can't be contended seriously that this would have happened under Gore.
Michael,
I take it you are suggesting that had Gore, for example, campaigned more effectively in Florida, more of the voters in category B would have voted for him, making up for the deficit caused by Nader’s candidacy. Therefore, we cannot claim that Nader was the “but for” cause of Gore’s defeat. The problem with this analysis is that it involves speculation that had Gore campaigned more effectively, he would have received sufficiently more votes from the B category. The inference that had Nader not run, many of his supporters in Florida would have voted for Gore is less speculative, since the analysis involves people who actually voted.
By the way, this phenomenon does not only happen to Democrats. Had Ross Perot not run in 1992, Bush probably would have defeated Clinton. Third-party candidates are often spoilers for one of the other major parties.
Correction:
Should have written that if Gore had run a better campaign, more voters in category D would have voted for him.
David Palmeter,
I didn't say that I saw no difference between Gore and Bush in 2000, just that I would not have voted for either of them and in fact, I didn't. I don't live in Florida and I did not vote in the 2000 election.
According to you, I'm to blame for the Iraq War, which, by the way, I protested against in a march here in Santiago de Chile.
I'm sure that you too are to blame for many things, although I doubt that you're big enough to admit them here publicly. There's a saying that the left seeks heretics, while the right seeks converts. So, being a good liberal, you single me out for blame instead of praising me for coming around with time to supporting the lesser of two evils Democrat. That attitude, by the way, is one reason that people like myself are so turned off by Democrats like you.
@LFC. I think it's clear that this is right, that one way or another Hitler would have seized Czechoslovakia. Ceding him the Sudeten mountains at Munich just made his invasion a piece of cake, since those mountains were Czechoslovakia's natural defense. (BTW, I refuse to use "Sudetenland", as it's just a Nazi invention that there was a "Land" that was especially tied to Germany. Ethnic Germans were a large demographic throughout Bohemia and Moravia.). So, if the mountainous area had not been ceded, Hitler would have had to use real troops, and might have met real resistance, which of course he would have easily overcome. But the costs might have impelled him to delay the invasion of Poland, and the carnage might have strengthened the resolve in Britain and France about resisting.
AA, sorry, that's not really what I was getting at - I threw in a few disclaimers to say I was laying out more of a philosophical thought-experiment than a serious factual analysis. (One more disclaimer - I was a teenager when all this happened, haha.)
I'm mainly hoping to get some clarity on our "but for" reasoning in general. This article does it in a vastly more interesting and informed way: Causation in the Law (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
The quote I misattributed to Feynman is actually Whitehead's, by the way.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
s. wallerstein
I didn't single you out. I replied to your post. I wasn't accusing you of anything. I was accusing anyone who did what you said you would do if you had had the chance. I did not say you were to blame for the war in Iraq. Again, I said that those who voted as you indicated you would have voted had you been a resident of Florida gave us, among other things, the war in Iraq. I see that as an indisputable fact. Without Bush and his manufactured weapons of mass destruction, there would have been no Iraq war.
The lesser of two evils may be evil, but it's also lesser, and if the choice is confined as a practical matter to the two, I go for the lesser.
And why this?--"I doubt that you're big enough to admit them here publicly." Why the lurch to ad hominem?
“just what the left needs: another presidential candidate.”
Actually, not quite on topic (whatever the topic now is—and by the way, I’m one of those who put some of the blame for WW Two on those who were maneuvering to get Hitler to attack Russia rather than anywhere else) but for those with an interest in France.
Well, it’s a different place. But maybe it points up that alternatives to the FPTP system also have their problems:
https://tocqueville21.com/art-goldhammer/taubira-envisages-a-presidential-run/
"Those who, like you, saw no difference between Gore and Bush gave us Roberts and Alito and the war in Irag as well as tax cuts for the super rich. It can't be contended seriously that this would have happened under Gore."
David Palmeter,
Those are your words above and since you addressed them specifically by name to me, I took the "you" to refer to me and to be ad hominem. I hit back, that's all.
Yes, I did say that: You didn't DO anything, but others did what you said you'd have done in their place, and indeed I did criticize that. I did not personally attack you in any way. I attacked the political position you justified. Big difference. To be clear: I don't believe that you are evil; I believe that you are mistaken.
David Palmeter,
There are more diplomatic ways to express yourself.
I bet that you voted for LBJ in 1964. I was too young to vote then. What if I claimed that all those who voted for LBJ are responsible for My Lai? I wouldn't do that and I don't believe that either, but let's both avoid that kind of rhetoric in the future.
s. wallerstein
Indeed I did vote for LBJ in 1964. The alternative was Barry Goldwater. To me LBJ is a tragic figure. His Great Society programs and efforts for civil rights and voting rights were more than admirable; his management of the Viet Nam war was deplorable.
More of this caca.
Continuing to criticize Nader voters. This is just silly.
Stop blaming voters and candidates you did not prefer for an election result you did not like.
Again, Democrats are not owed anyone's vote; and Gore was not owed the votes of Florida voters who preferred Nader.
Moreover, where is the logic in criticizing Nader voters when a much larger number of Democrats voted for Bush? These were not Democratic voters who intended to vote for Gore but were confused by faulty ballots. They were self-described Democrats who told exit pollsters that they had just voted for Bush. Nationally they accounted for something like 10% of voters who otherwise considered themselves Democrats. Acording to Tim Wise, these Bush-voting Democrats numbered over 300,000 in Florida—compared to Nader's total take (self-identified Greens, Dems, independents, GOP, etc) of 97,000.
So the fault, if there is any, lies with the candidate and the candidate's party apparatus.
Let's remember that Gore, who refused to campaign with Bill Clinton and chose instead to campaign with...Mr Wall Street himself, Robert Rubin, lost his home state of Tennessee 51% to 47%, after having represented the state in the House & Senate for 16 years before becoming vice president. If Gore had prevailed in Tennessee, he would have defeated Bush with Tennessee's 11 Electoral College votes. (Nader got less than 1% of the vote in Tennessee, so don't even try it.)
Nader elected W, who gave us Roberts and Alito and the War in Iraq.
It's so convenient to forget that Al Gore was no dove on Iraq and Saddam Hussein. As a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and vice-presidential candidate, Gore in the 1992 campaign had attacked George H. W. Bush for being too soft(!) on Hussein leading up to the first Gulf War. At the same time, Gore said that he supported Bush's actions against Iraq during that war. Later, in the months before the 2002 invasion of Iraq, Gore still favored the US actively engaging to overthrow Saddam Hussein. Where he differed from Bush was in saying that before rushing back into Iraq the US should stabilize the situation in Afghanistan and continue to pursue Al Qaeda, while building a larger coalition of allies to take on Saddam Hussein (and help shoulder the cost) and developing a plan for nation-building in Iraq after the end of hostilities, should Congress agree to overthrow Hussein.
Al Gore in 2002:
We have a goal of regime change in Iraq; we have had for a number of years. We also have a clear goal of victory in the war against terror.
In the case of Iraq, it would be difficult to go it alone but it's theoretically possible to achieve our goals in Iraq unilaterally.
Nevertheless, by contrast, the war against terrorism manifestly requires a multilateral approach. It is impossible to succeed against terrorism unless we have secured the continuing, sustained cooperation of many nations....
I believe that the resolution that the president has asked Congress to pass is much too broad in the authorities it grants and needs to be narrowed severely.
The president should be authorized to take action to deal with Saddam Hussein as being in material breach of the terms of the truce and therefore a continuing threat to the security of the region. To this should be added that his continued pursuit of weapons of mass destruction is potentially a threat to the vital interests of the United States.
But Congress should also urge the president to make every effort to obtain a fresh demand from the Security Council for prompt, unconditional compliance by Iraq within a definite period of time. If the council will not provide such language, then other choices remain open.
And don't get me started on Gore's vice presidential nominee, Joe Lieberman, for whom you Nader-haters apparently voted. Lieberman had been hankering for a military asssault on Iraq even before Gore chose him for the ticket. Lieberman continued to support Bush's Iraq war effort during his own presidential campaign in 2003.
I guarantee you we would not have seen anything like the above had Nader been elected. He ran on a platform of cutting the military budget by a third and bringing all US military personnel home within his first year in office.
One more thing. According to the Florida Division of Elections, Democratic Party registrations increased by more than 20,000 in the state leading up to the 2000 election while "minor party" registrations fell by more than 13,000. So, if anything, it's arguably more likely that Gore and the Democrats "robbed" Nader and the Greens of votes in Florida than the other way around.
This is interesting:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150211121603/http://hereinstead.com/Ralph-Nader-As-Mad-Bomber.html
As is the collection linked at the bottom of the article. Also it seems that a Republican group took out ads for Ralph and Republicans in Montana recently forked out $100K to get the Greens on the Montana ballot.
s.w. happy summer! There's a difference between 1964 and 2000 in that the alternative to LBJ was Goldwater. While the specifics couldn't have been known (Gore would have had to deal with a Republican Congress), what was clear was that nothing good was going to happen with Republican control of two and possibly all three branches. Also polling showed that Nader was potentially hurting Gore, at which point Nader doubled down in swing states.
The problem with heightening the contradictions as a strategy is that it doesn't work.
"But if we’re going to allow viability as a criterion we should also raise the issue of within which time frame."
Absolutely and the Labour Party makes that case. If a party is going to arise (or collapse) it usually happens quickly. In 1850 there was a Whig president. The party collapsed in 1856. With Labour, the new party - formed in 1900 - won two seats out of the gate, twenty odd in in the next (1906) election and forty in the next (1910). I propose that that record defines "viable." On the other hand the US Green Party sort of sputters around with two spikes (2000 and 2016) that go nowhere. That record (and other factors) should raise eyebrows, not hopes.
(For the record, I did not vote for Nader in 2000. Nor did I live in Florida. I used to think like you Nader scapegoaters.)
Eric,
Sorry, you don’t get off that easily.
Gore, as one of the two principal candidates for President, would understand that if Democrats in some states did not vote for him, that the blame for that could be laid at his feet. Whatever that vote would be, there was nothing more he could have done to persuade those Democrats to vote for him. For whatever reason, they preferred the Republican Bush over their own party’s candidate.
Nader’s decision to run had no legitimate justification. When he ran there were three things he knew, beyond doubt: (1) Of the two major party candidates, Gore’s proposals and policies were more like his than Bush’s; (2) those who supported him appreciated the same difference, and if he were not running, would support Gore over Bush; (3) that he, Nader, had a snowball’s chance in hell of defeating either Gore or Bush. Therefore, regardless how well or poorly Gore’s campaign was, Nader would have known, without doubt, that his candidacy was going to hurt the only principal candidate whose principles and policies were more like his. Given what did occur, even with Gore’s loss in Tennessee, Nader was the “but for” cause of Gore’s defeat in Florida, resulting in Bush’s election, and this is true beyond any doubt.
In fact, Ross Perot as a third-party candidate made more sense than Nader running as third-party candidate. Perot had significant support among voters in both parties. Nader had absolutely not support among Republican voters.
Eric, the Florida Greens nearly tripled their registration between 1998 and 2000. We should also recall that then governor Jeb Bush did a bogus registration purge that targeted Democrats and took ~100K off the roles.
Then there were all those elderly Jewish voters who voted for Pat Buchanan in Palm Beach (butterfly ballot).
There were factors in Florida that could have changed the outcome and ralpjie was one of them.
BTW, what Florida showed Republicans was that our ridiculous system for electing a president was game-able. The Brooks Brothers riot and Bush v. Gore were elements in a successful coup. That one was bloodless but Jan.6 showed they aren't limited to that.
This is getting ridiculous.
Nader, as far as I can see, is and was a well-intentioned person who made a mistake in running for president in 2000. Neither Nader nor those who voted for him in Florida could have imagined in their wildest dreams what would occur.
We all make mistakes. I used the example of those who voted for LBJ, the supposed peace candidate, in 1964. It's always possible that Goldwater, a man with military experience, could have realized before LBJ (if he ever did) that Viet Nam was a trap and would not have escalated the war as LBJ did. No one knows what Goldwater would have done.
How about those who voted for FDR in 1944? Are they responsible that he died in office and that Truman became president and dropped atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Maybe FDR would not have used atomic weapons. We have no idea.
However, a certain group of liberals (I'm not a liberal) use the 2000 election as a fetish to attack those who seek a 4th party alternative and above all, to make a sanctimonious show of moral superiority with respect to those who voted for Nader or those who didn't vote.
This is getting absurd. When I was younger, I never would have spent so much time apologizing, in this case, for not voting in 2000 and justifying myself when faced with this liberal barrage. It's liberal guilt tripping and it's a real turn-off. Far from convincing anyone, liberal guilt tripping leads most people on the radical left to stop listening.
s. wallerstein
"What about..." is a change of the subject; it does not address the issue presented.
I believe that your seeing a 1944 vote for Roosevelt and a 1964 vote for LBJ as the equal of a 2000 vote for Nader is a serious error. This is going on too long, but briefly no one could have predicted that FDR would die within a year or know that there even was an atomic bomb; no one could have predicted that Viet Nam would develop the way it did and that LBJ would react the way he did. Many could have predicted that, from the perspective of the left, Bush would have been far worse than Gore.
aaall, I stand corrected on Florida's minor party registrations. (That's what I get for quickly looking up numbers when I am in the middle of something else.)
Minor party registrations rose from 130,638 at the end of oct 1998 to 189,714 at the end of oct 2000.
I'll never apologize for voting for Nader. What Gore would or would not have done is an open question, in spite of all the clairvoyants on this thread. If anything I'm still waiting for all the Gore voters to apologize for stealing the election from Nader.
And if they wanted to they could have simply taken Nader's voters away from him: "This guy Nader has lots of great ideas. Consider them ours now and vote for us". Would have been a total BS lie that every major party politician tells but skip that for now. What did they do? Triangulation: you can't vote for Nader you have to vote for us (and accept the crap sandwich we decide to give you and be happy with it). The other guys are much worse. Blah Blah Blah...
A quibble perhaps but it was obvious that FDR wasn't well by 1944 and folks on the inside knew he was dying. That is the major reason Wallace was replaced by Truman. Truman. of course, used the bomb. Would FDR or Wallace or Dewey have made the same decision is unknowable and in a sense irrelevant, bombing or invasion it was going to be terrible (my brother was in the Pacific Theater and he was glad there was no invasion).
The counter-factual breaks down completely when domestic politics and foreign policy are considered as all three were internationalists and would have continued liberal policies (please, oh please let us not start a Wallace thread). Movement conservatism as an ideology was still a gleam in the eyes of a handful of Liberty League irredentists in 1944 while it had captured the Reps by 2000. In 1944 the liberal/progressive types vs. Taft and conservatives was unsettled (1946 is when the poison started creeping in).
SrVidaBuena,
Thank you for sticking to your naïve principles, which helped give us Supreme Court Justices Samuel Alito and John Roberts, and their memorable votes in Citizens United and Heller. Of course you will grouse from time to time about how corporate money controls our elections and how the profusion of guns results in senseless deaths, but what the hell. Keep up the good work.
@ Warren Goldfarb 11:26 a.m.
Those are interesting points -- thanks.
Always nice to "see" you here.
P.s. I must confess I don't think I knew about the Sudeten mountains.
Btw, George Kennan, who was then in the U.S. Foreign Service and arrived in Prague the day the
Munich agreement was announced, wrote in the first vol. of his Memoirs of seeing "crowds of people weeping" in the streets of Prague. (Kennan, Memoirs 1925-1950, pp.87-88, as quoted in Menand, The Free World, p.14. See also Kennan, From Prague After Munich)
P.p.s. There's a pretty good account of the Munich agreement and this whole episode in James Joll, Europe Since 1870 (1973), pp. 368ff. The book, notwithstanding its age, is a solid survey (and Joll was a good historian).
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