Personalist regimes always suffer from this, but then on top of that we have a personalist regime built on a man who is not just ignorant and malign, he is properly non compos mentis. Pretending he's capable of holding public office and giving orders at all is a kind of mass delusion.
When my colleague David Bier at a Senate hearing yesterday defended his statement that DHS has promoted ethnic cleansing, some conservatives reacted with anger. But Stephen Miller's deportation plan does indeed fit the description of ethnic cleansing, argues Kyle Varner at @theunpopulist.net. /1
Deep in their bones they are anti-American, opposed to the very idea of a nation explicitly dedicated to liberty and equality and the rule of law and electoral democracy. Not just failing to live up to that creed, we've always had a lot of that of course. But affirmatively, ideologically against it.
Stephen Miller complaining about the UK finally eliminating heredity nobility from their legislature is a perfect encapsulation of how perverse it is to have these people in charge during the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
There's always been some overlap and cooperation between the two, particularly on launch vehicles. Practically inevitable to a degree. But it's true enough, and a good thing, that astronauts and science missions are for peaceful civilian purposes, they're not just the military in a trench coat.
The whole point of NASA, why it was created as its own agency, is that it's about the peaceful civilian space program as something separate and distinct from the military and weaponization.
He's bemoaning the end of something which has been explicitly prohibited by our Constitution for more than two centuries.
New: It's the first collab between @boltsmag.org & @51st.news.
Need I say more? OK, fine, it's about ranked-choice voting coming to DC:
Overt racism can't satisfy the edgelord itch when it's become so normalized politicians can say it and face no rebuke, so the far-right podbros have upped the ante on explicit "repeal the 19th Amendment" sorts of talk. They were always very misogynistic, of course, but it has become more of a thing.
Gnosticism in this sense refers to secret, hidden knowledge. Nothing is less secret and hidden than the package of beliefs which were a dominant intellectual current in the late 19th and first half of the 20th centuries, culminating in the most notorious regime and the biggest war in human history.
I wrote it about on Substack too: centerforballotfreedom.substack.com/p/watch-borg...
Looking for a great political show? Watch Borgen on @netflix.com. It’s a fascinating look at how a multi-party democracy works in Denmark—with bargaining, compromise, and coalition-building to actually solve problems. A striking contrast to America’s two-party dysfunction.
Trump winning on a plurality of the vote is the status quo system.
This is the point of why we should haven't an electoral system where a plurality wins all.
Fusion is the big reason, yes. Alabama's 20% party retention threshold is a high outlier, iirc the highest in the country. But for sure, you'd have to adjust some rules like that to make it practical.
RCV (in its single-winner form) doesn't do anything to produce a more multi-party system. It takes some kind of proportional representation, and also fusion voting gets you partway there with fusion parties.
The American two-party system is bad and a big part of how we got here and we aren't getting out of this mess until we blow it up.
I know I’m a goddamn broken record, I really do, but Congress had a way to change that, it worked for decades, and the Supreme Court blew it up in the 1980s in a way that was impossible for Congress to fix. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
It's not some tactical maneuver, it's not secret negotiations to extract concessions, it's not because they conclude some nominee is actually pretty reasonable and qualified. They do it because they literally don't care and aren't even paying attention, and have been taught this is thing you do.
*taps sign again*
*taps sign*
The reason they do this is even dumber than you think.
You cannot tell voters (accurately) this is a fascist regime that is hell bent on destroying us - let alone rely on it (as Dems are) as your GOTV while also voting yourselves to enable the regime.
She's ostensibly running as anti-ICE Democrat, not MAGA. But still absurd. Especially since if you really want, you don't have to run in the district you live in. MN-01 is an R+6 seat, marginally competitive in a blue wave.
I don't know if this race will end up being competitive, but mathematically: all it would take would be for white people in Mississippi to vote Republican at the same ~ 70 to 75% as white people in Georgia, instead of their usual ~ 80 to 85%.
Apropos of this exchange, Kyle Varner lays out @theunpopulist.net why ethnic cleansing is absolutely the right term for what they're doing.
Libertarians routinely get all 50 states even though they only get 1 or 2%. Greens come close. Cost is real but doable. It's just US third parties are truly tiny (LP's biggest and they've got a few thousand active members), and that's more because they can't win even when they do get on the ballot.
I've done that work getting parties and candidates on the ballot. The laws do suck, they're indefensibly bad and a huge outlier compared to any other democracy. But... I don't think they ultimately make that much difference. They're effect, not cause, of why the US has such a two-party system.
That’s got to be a pretty unusual circumstance generally, for any nation, democracy or not. Wars often become unpopular, they rarely start unpopular.
This is certainly true in the modern polling era, but it's probably true for all of American history. Hard to think of any other major conflict which lacked majority popular support when it began.
