No hypotheticals - this one actually happened, and the resulting undemocratic government was seen as legitimate and retained power. (To be clear, democracy once lost can be regained, but it was unambiguously lost.)
In your assessment, are the attributes (a significant number of the plausibly impactful ones, not just one or two insignificant ones that happen to match) of that event highly similar to the event at the US Capitol in 2021?
These are serious white supremacists. Simmons summarized the party's platform when he stated: North Carolina is a WHITE MAN'S STATE and WHITE MEN will rule it, and they will crush the party of Negro domination beneath a majority so overwhelming that no other party will ever dare to attempt to establish negro rule here. They form organizations called the "White Government Union" and such.
There is a trumped-up issue of black men raping white women: Many newspapers published pictures and stories implying that African-American men were sexually attacking white women in the city. A suffragist said in a speech that, of all the threats farm wives face, there was none greater than "the black rapist", due to the failure of white men to protect them. She advocated that white men should resort to vigilante justice ... "if it needs lynching to protect woman's dearest possession from the ravening human beasts – then I say lynch, a thousand times a week if necessary."
Then, In response to Felton's speech and the danger it imposed upon black men, 32-year-old Alexander Manly wrote an editorial, refuting it and asserting that white women have consensual sex with black men. And: Within 48 hours, white supremacists, aided by newspapers across the South, used Manly's words – though reprinting incendiary distortions of them – as a championing catalyst for their cause. Waddell, and other orators, began inciting white citizens with sexualized images of black men, insinuating black men's uncontrollable lust for white women, running newspaper stories and delivering speeches of "black beasts" who threatened to deflower white women.
On deplatforming: Prior to this editorial, The Daily Record had been considered "a very creditable colored paper" throughout the state, that had attracted subscriptions and advertising from blacks and whites alike. However, after the editorial, white advertisers withdrew their support from the paper, crippling its income. His landlord, M. J. Heyer, then evicted him. For his own safety, Manly was forced to relocate his press in the middle of the night. ... He had planned to move to Love and Charity Hall (aka Ruth Hall), on South Seventh Street, but it declined to take him as a tenant because his presence would have greatly increased the building's insurance rate.
Then there's a rally of 300 "Red Shirts", with Waddell giving a speech ending thus: We will never surrender to a ragged raffle of Negroes, even if we have to choke the Cape Fear River with carcasses. A few days later, there's an event with 8000 attendees, with several speakers: Waddell followed by accusing blacks of "insolence", "arrogance", which he claimed was overshadowed only by their "criminality" [etc....] Once again, he concluded his speech assuring them that white men would banish blacks, and their traitorous white allies, even if they had to fill the Cape Fear River with enough black dead bodies to block its passage to the sea.
Followed by violence: Waddell's speech so inspired the crowd that the Red Shirts left the convention and started terrorizing black citizens and their white allies, in the eastern part of the state, right away. They destroyed property, ambushed citizens with weapon fire, and kidnapped people from their homes and whipped them at night, with the goal of terrorizing them to the point where Republican sympathizers would be too afraid to vote, or even register to do so.
On November 1, 1898, Dowling led a parade of 1,000 men, mounted on horses, for ten miles, through the black neighborhoods ... The next day, Dowling led a "White Man's Rally". Every "able-bodied" white man was armed. Escorted by Chief Marshal Roger Moore, a parade of men began downtown, again marched through black neighborhoods – firing into black homes and a black school on Campbell Square – and ended at Hilton Park where a 1,000 people greeted them with a picnic and free barbecue.
Leading up to the election, these gatherings became daily occurrences; the white newspapers announced the time and place of meetings. Free food and liquor were provided for the vigilantes...
Eventually: The day before the election, Waddell excited a large crowd at Thalian Hall when he told them: "You are Anglo-Saxons. You are armed and prepared and you will do your duty ... Go to the polls tomorrow, and if you find the negro out voting, tell him to leave the polls and if he refuses, kill him, shoot him down in his tracks. We shall win tomorrow if we have to do it with guns."
To the election: Most blacks and many Republicans did not vote in the November 8 election ... as Red Shirts had blocked every road leading in and out of the city, and drove potential black voters away with gunfire.
The governor came by to try to calm things down. However, when his train arrived, Red Shirts swarmed his train car and tried to lynch him.
When the day was over, Democrats won 6,000 votes, overall, which was sizable given that the Fusion Party won 5,000 votes just two years prior. Likely due to the intimidation tactics plus fraud (cited article "M. F. Dowling Swears To it" says he, in a deposition, confessed to: stuffing the election board with Democrat party members, improperly erasing hundreds of Republicans from the registration lists, instructing election officers "how to deposit Republican ballots so they could be replaced", and more).
They publish a "White Declaration of Independence", part of which demanded for Manly and his press to leave the city. Manly had already shut his press down and left town when he was alerted, by a white friend, that the Red Shirts were going to lynch him that night. ...
Waddell's "Committee of Twenty-Five" summoned the Committee of Colored Citizens (CCC), a group of 32 prominent black citizens, to the courthouse at 6:00 pm. They told the CCC of their ultimatum, instructing them to direct the rest of the city's black citizens to fall in line. When the black men asked to reason with them, and pleaded that they could not control what Manly did, or what any other black person would do, Waddell responded that the "time had passed for words."
They give a member of the CCC a deadline for a written response to deliver in person. He put it in Waddell's mailbox.
When Waddell and the Committee did not receive a response by 7:30 a.m. on November 10 (it is unclear when Waddell checked his mailbox), about 45 minutes later, he gathered about 500 white businessmen and veterans to the Wilmington's armory. After heavily arming themselves with rifles and the Gatling gun, Waddell then led the group to the two-story publishing office of The Daily Record. They broke into Manly's building, vandalized the premises, doused the wood floors with kerosene, set the building on fire, and gutted the remains. At the same time, black newspapers all over the state were also being destroyed. ...
Following the fire, the mob of white vigilantes swelled to about 2,000 men. A rumor circulated that some blacks had fired on a small group of white men a mile away from the printing office. White men then went into black Wilmington neighborhoods, destroying black businesses and property and assaulting black inhabitants ...
The governor calls in the Wilmington Light Infantry and the federal Naval Reserves, taking them into Brooklyn to quell the "riot". They intimidated both black and white crowds with rapid-fire weapons, shooting and killing several black men. ...
As the violence spread, Waddell led a group to the Republican Mayor, Silas P. Wright. Waddell forced Wright, the board of aldermen, and the police chief to resign at gunpoint. The mob installed a new city council that elected Waddell to take over as mayor by 4 p.m. that day.
Waddell later wrote an article for Collier's Weekly, denying everything bad (to hilarity). We wrecked the [newspaper] house. I believe that the fire which occurred was purely accidental; it certainly was unintentional on our part ..., Since this trouble many negroes have come to me and said they are glad I have taken charge ... , There was no intimidation used in the establishment of the present city government. The old government had become satisfied of their inefficiency and utterly helpless imbecility, and believed if they did not resign they would be run out of town ... , etc.
The success of the coup: Subsequent to Waddell's usurping power, he and his team were re-elected in March 1899 to city offices. Waddell would hold the mayorship until 1905. Four of those involved became Governor of the state, one became a senator, etc.
Also: Although individuals of both races pointed to Democrat-backed violence as the driver behind the incident, the national narrative largely cast black men as aggressors, legitimizing the coup as a direct result of black aggression. For example, The Atlanta Constitution justified the violence as a rational defense of white honor, and a necessary response against the "criminal element of the blacks", furthering stereotypes of black violence. DARVO, always DARVO.
There's a lot of interesting stuff in there. Now, I've only given a brief glance at a couple of secondary sources, and since it seems there is an alternate narrative, it would be responsible to do further research before taking it 100% seriously. Still, assuming it's true... One takeaway: fake news riling up a mob into violence is not new. (With a population of 25,000, it's likely there was at least one real case of a black man attempting to rape a white woman, but it seems some newspapers blew it way out of proportion.) Another takeaway: there were many explicit calls to violence—"lynching", creating "dead bodies"—and many occasions of actual violence, which escalated from one to the next.
This is a very easy exercise: instead of cowering while letting other people take risks in his name, President Trump walks over to the Capitol. With him at the head of the column, many more people storm the building (the Capitol police likely don't put up a fight because nobody told them to fight the President), they occupy the building and take representatives hostage. At this point in time there is no longer a democracy in the US. What happens after that is anybody's guess; by my lights, probably the military leaders don't the President, their troops mostly follow their orders, they retake the Capitol, restore power to Congress, and install Pence as President, followed by democracy being restored not long after by a quick 25th amendment or impeachment and removal. But it would be plausible that some number of the military's leaders choose to back the President instead, or that an insufficient number of the troops follow their orders, resulting in either a successful coup or a protracted civil war.
The only thing that saved us from this was Trump's cowardice.
This is a legitimately good description of an arguably plausible (but still plausible!) scenario. But I must note that democracy is not lost in this scenario...unless you'd like to explain:
> At this point in time there is no longer a democracy in the US.
If we were to attach a debugger and step through the code, what state (variables and their values) would represent a valid scenario of democracy no longer existing in the United States? Or I suppose we could just look at the implementation of IsDemocracy(), assuming the designer of this shitty simulation is reasonably organized.
> The only thing that saved us from this was Trump's cowardice.
Well, that and other things that you haven't considered.
I don't say these things because I think these morons are righteous, or Trump is a good president, or because I think this event is insignificant, but the opposite: I think this scenario is extremely significant - so significant that I suggest we discuss it with the same rigorous precision that is usually reserved only for discussing topics like computer programming. I think a decent argument could be made that the welfare of the country inside of which we write computer code should command at least as much respect during conversations (even if begrudged) as we enthusiastically heap upon coding arguments.
But of course, this is just my opinion. And to be fair, if shit really does ever hit the fan, most everyone in this forum is well off enough to get the hell out of dodge to some other country that hasn't gone down the drain, where we can start the process all over again.
It looks like you've been using this site primarily for political battle. That's not what HN is for, and it destroys what it is for, so we ban accounts that do it (regardless of their politics). Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stop doing this.
> All: I know this is a little late, but those of you posting ideological flamewar comments to this thread are breaking the site guidelines. We're trying to avoid hellfire here, and we're banning accounts that feed it. Please don't feed it.
> HN is not for all types of discussion. It is specifically for curious conversation. Here's a test you can apply: curiosity is equally open to what's true, false, or interesting about anything. If your position is that your side is right about everything while the opposing side is wrong about everything, you have left the spectrum of curiosity gratification and are functioning in the spectrum of political battle. Those do not overlap.
My ongoing issue, the "axe I grind", the "dead horse I beat" (refer to my history), is this very thing: the constant and obvious degradation of the quality of discourse on HN when it comes to Culture War topics. Most specifically: the homogeneous culture of refusal to even consider what is actually true. Not only is there little interest in what is true, but the very notion seems to be considered highly inappropriate for discussion, and anyone who dares mention it is considered an immoral heretic.
This trait has been sweeping through Western culture for years, if not decades - like a virus of the mind. HN was an outlier for quite some time, but as you know the infection has spread to here, and is flourishing.
From my perspective, there are at least two noteworthy issues in play:
1. The orderliness of HN forums.
2. The orderliness of the USA, and in turn the entire planet.
I imagine you may be less concerned about #2 than I am, but I happen to subscribe to the theory that "with great power, comes great responsibility". What if there was an approach that could plausibly "solve" (to a worthwhile degree) #1, and possibly also contribute to the solving of #2?
And if no one does anything different, where is the world going to be 5, 10, 20 years from now? Where would the world be today if it wasn't for the actions of a few key individuals at key points in history?
I don't see how it helps the orderliness of the planet to post in a disorderly way to HN. It's not so hard to stick to the site guidelines if you choose to.
I don't want to ban you but we really need you to post more thoughtfully (or put it this way: only post when you're able to post thoughtfully) and err on the side of respecting others.
> I don't see how it helps the orderliness of the planet to post in a disorderly way to HN.
I think it is plausible that if rational, computer programming types could regain the ability to discuss culture war topics at a level of discourse that has some regard for what is actually true (as opposed to mistaking one's ideological/heuristic opinion for fact, and losing one's temper when someone dares to ask "is that true?"), perhaps:
a) you wouldn't have to pass out so many warnings
b) we here at HN could perhaps bring some rationality to these issues, and perhaps come up with some solutions
c) if (b) succeeds, perhaps other communities could learn too
> It's not so hard to stick to the site guidelines if you choose to.
I assume it is this one that you believe I have violated: "Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological battle. It tramples curiosity."
Am I "pushing an ideology" when I ask someone if their ideological and rarely factual (but stated factually) comment is actually true? To me, engaging in "political or ideological battle" is pushing(!) an opposing political/ideological idea. I may at times point out an opposing idea, but I do not do it on ideological grounds, I do it on epistemological grounds.
> I don't want to ban you but we really need you to post more thoughtfully (or put it this way: only post when you're able to post thoughtfully) and err on the side of respecting others.
Dang, have you read any of the conversations I have been involved in, have you read the comments of the people whom I have engaged in discussion with? I simply cannot wrap my head around how it is I who should be posting more "thoughtfully", or need to "respect others". Go read for yourself! Compare what I say to others, and compare what they say to me. Compare the quality of the content of other's posts to what I say in response. Peruse the historic voting on my comments (90%+ of my comments get precisely "-1" - isn't that a coincidence!), versus the thoughtfulness/respectfulness of the comments.
On culture war topics, this place has become not much better than what you'd find in /r/politics.
Where is the thoughtfulness? Where is the concern for, or curiosity about, what is true?
If you have actually perused my history, and this is your take on the relative behavior here, that I, the one who is exerting effort to discuss these topics in an evidence-based manner, am the one you shall pick out of the crowd to be given a warning, then I will be absolutely shocked.
> Aside: Asking for a hypothetical that doesn’t involve hypotheticals seems… off.
Comments like this on a computer programming forum, where one would expect logic (and an understanding of the importance of dependencies) to prevail, also seems "off".
I wonder, what might explain this apparent paradox, and the substantial quantities of it that can be found right here on HN? Does academia have any prior knowledge and study into this general phenomenon? Which domain would we search within to find answers to questions like this?
Enough democratic members of congress are killed that the election doesn’t become certified. The remaining members elect a new republican speaker of the house. The constitution declares that if no winner to the Presidential election is declared the speaker of the house becomes President on Jan 20th. The speaker of the house doesn’t have to be a member of congress so the remaining republicans could have voted Trump speaker, keeping him in office another 4 years.
That has a pretty healthy dose of speculation in it, but provided this is consistent with the entirety of formal procedures, it's not bad.
Except this part:
> And that is how democracy dies in America.
Where does that part come in? Assuming your scenario did transpire, is there something in the procedures where elections are no longer held on a go forward basis? It seems unlikely to me, but I'm no expert on the matter - so, I ask you.
This is an obviously impossible burden to load on someone, and I think you know that. If democracy is legitimately lost in America, it will happen via a series of events that we today cannot conceive of.
It is more useful to think events like the Capitol incident as causing long-lasting damage to democracy, and there is a non-negligible possibility that societal schisms will widen, as opposed to heal. What that will look like in the future is anybody's guess.
> t is more useful to think events like the Capitol incident as causing long-lasting damage to democracy, and there is a non-negligible possibility that societal schisms will widen, as opposed to heal. What that will look like in the future is anybody's guess.
What are you willing to give up politically to heal societal schisms?
I wonder if one of the big issues is that lately control of government is so flip floppy that no one gives up anything because they figure they'll have control soon enough. From the mid 30s to late 70s, Democrats had full control of congress for all but 4 years. The national Republican party had to change A LOT in that time to be relevant. Since HW Bush the longest period has been I dunno, 4 years? 6 years?
How about that one side stops peddling conspiracy theories and following every idiot that promises them what they want to hear in terms of gun rights, abortion and immigration.
Compromise = fact based middle ground between reasonable people. When one side consistently treats politics like winner-takes-all and lies out of their asses to get to power and to stay in power then the burden to compromise would be on them.
So the answer is, you want to win rather than heal political schisms. Which is a perfectly fine answer! But that's the approach the other side has taken also, and well here we are.
Politics isn't about rationality or facts or what one side thinks is "reasonable." Nobody approaches the Israel/Palestine conflict by asking "well who has the more rational argument here?" That would be silly. Politics is about power, and appeasing (or not) different factions.
Politics is all about facts and rationality, if it isn't then it will quickly cause your country of choice to slide down into the gutter of irrelevance. The essence of politics in democratic countries is people trying to self-govern with some kind of optimum outcome for the largest number of people involved.
And the Israel/Palestine conflict would improve lots if people started using facts rather than 'might makes right'.
Politics is only about power in some parts of the world, in other parts of the world people are actually trying to get along with each other.
The parts of the world you’re talking about are mostly ethnostates, tied together by deep cultural, linguistic, and historical bonds. Those things create the basic framework from which people can have rational, fact-based discussions.
The US doesn’t have that. My wife says we’re a “credo country” but it’s not clear to me we share much in the way of credo anymore either. Senator Ed Markey says the constitution, the closest thing we have to a social contract, is “racist, sexist, and homophobic.” What does someone in Kansas have in common with Ed Markey? A superficial consumer and television culture? What binds them together when they disagree intensely on policy?
Where I live is not exactly a country tied together in that way. And yet, we have plenty of immigrants, first and second generation in politics. We also have the backlash against that, roughly equivalent to the position the Republican party in the USA takes.
But that doesn't mean that the USA needs to have a fact-free Republican party, it could easily change if it really wanted to, at the expense of not being in power for a couple of decades. It's the difference between John McCain and Donald Trump, the one a principled politician who believed lots of things that I would not subscribe to but who was fundamentally a decent human being. Trump is not a decent human being, never was and never will be and his legacy has the power to utterly divide and destroy the United States.
Coalition governments are a lot safer in that that respect because they take away the insane power of the small fraction that decides who is king in the USA. There also is a real problem with the president having as much power as they do.
I see the USA - as one of the oldest democracies - as deeply flawed, with a thin critical path to fixing itself. If it doesn't then one day maybe sooner, maybe later, it will fall apart in either two or maybe even three countries (2x coastal, mid). That will cause a lot of grief so better to avoid that fate, which will require some major overhauling of the constitution and some power removed from the states.
Time will tell, for all my friends alive in the USA right now I sincerely hope that this can be postponed long enough that the country can first heal from the last attempt at splitting it.
> But that doesn't mean that the USA needs to have a fact-free Republican party, it could easily change if it really wanted to, at the expense of not being in power for a couple of decades.
If Democrats held power for a couple of decades, the country would be unrecognizable. Take, for example, the issue of religion. Americans are the most religious developed country by far—comparable to Iran. This drives Democrats crazy, and through the period during which they controlled the Supreme Court based on FDR’s appointments, they turned America into one of the most secular countries in the world in terms of the law. European countries far less religious than the US have far more public accommodation for things like religious instruction in schools. Imagine going into Poland or Hungary and declaring that Christianity has to be removed from schools, like in France. It doesn’t matter what you think of these policies. What do you think the societal reaction would be to that?
Or take abortion. Most of Europe’s abortion laws (in most countries, prohibiting abortions after 10-14 weeks absent some exigent circumstance) would be unconstitutional in the US under Roe. (Even Sweden’s 18 week limit would be unconstitutional.) Imagine, again, going into Poland and telling them that they have to have the same abortion laws as the Netherlands. (Even France is too conservative for this hypothetical.) Again, forget what you think of the policy. How would that play out as a matter of social and political dynamics?
> It's the difference between John McCain and Donald Trump, the one a principled politician who believed lots of things that I would not subscribe to but who was fundamentally a decent human being. Trump is not a decent human being, never was and never will be and his legacy has the power to utterly divide and destroy the United States.
I agree that McCain was a decent person and Trump is a very bad person. But apart from that, McCain wasn’t selling what Americans actually wanted. The Republican base is socially conservative, economically moderate, and wants the party to push back in cultural change. (Again, let’s keep in mind that America is conservative like Poland, not liberal like France.) McCain didn’t fight for any of those things. Trump, for all of his faults, was willing to do that. It’s unfortunate that he’s such a bad, undisciplined person, but there is a reason he got the second highest vote total of any President in history.
> Coalition governments are a lot safer in that that respect because they take away the insane power of the small fraction that decides who is king in the USA. There also is a real problem with the president having as much power as they do.
I agree Presidential systems are bad and encourage cults of personality.
> I see the USA - as one of the oldest democracies - as deeply flawed, with a thin critical path to fixing itself. If it doesn't then one day maybe sooner, maybe later, it will fall apart in either two or maybe even three countries (2x coastal, mid). That will cause a lot of grief so better to avoid that fate, which will require some major overhauling of the constitution and some power removed from the states. Time will tell, for all my friends alive in the USA right now I sincerely hope that this can be postponed long enough that the country can first heal from the last attempt at splitting it.
People say they don’t want the US to split, but nobody actually wants to do anything to prevent that. To circle back to my example, imagine your country is half Poland and half France and each side ends up governing about half the time. How would that turn out? Democrats don’t moderate themselves (on social and religious issues—the party self moderates on economic issues to keep its coalition together) because they’re convinced that they’re just one or two elections away from “demographic destiny.” And even if that’s true, France governing Poland by a permanent 53-47 margin isn’t going to lead to a happy unified country.
> If Democrats held power for a couple of decades, the country would be unrecognizable. Take, for example, the issue of religion. Americans are the most religious developed country by far—comparable to Iran. This drives Democrats crazy, and through the period during which they controlled the Supreme Court based on FDR’s appointments, they turned America into one of the most secular countries in the world in terms of the law. European countries far less religious than the US have far more public accommodation for things like religious instruction in schools. Imagine going into Poland or Hungary and declaring that Christianity has to be removed from schools, like in France. It doesn’t matter what you think of these policies. What do you think the societal reaction would be to that?
This isn't factual. Italy for example is more religious than the US. Germany, France and the UK are comparable to the US (each have ~25-28% nonreligious, compared to 25% in the US). Poland, to use your example, is 85% Christian and 8% nonreligious. Hungary is 20% nonreligious, and close to 75% Christian (60% Catholic).
The comparatively religious countries are approximately as secular. The US isn't unique here.
Also, it's worth noting that the constitutions of Poland and Hungary establish national religions. The Polish constitution specifically protects religious education in public schools, and the Hungarian constitution defines life to begin at conception.
The US on the other hand doesn't have that. The establishment clause doesn't have those carve outs. And as to your claim that the FDR court made the US particularly secular, I don't see that. Public funding for religious education had already been well established to be unconstitutional (with the majority of states having banned it explicitly in the 1800s). It's difficult to tell how common religious education in the style of McCollum was during the early 20th century, but I can't find anything to suggest that it was the norm in public schools.
> If Democrats held power for a couple of decades, the country would be unrecognizable.
You haven't described what, in particular, Democrats would do. What anti-religion policy do you suggest democrats would do if they held power for several decades (and, presuming that democrats were able to hold power for several decades, would this be any different than other similarly secular nations?)
The best example I can think of requires conflating Abortion policy as anti-religion policy, which it isn't, in the same way that legalizing gay marriage isn't anti-religious.
Americans are far more ardent practitioners of religion: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/05/01/with-high-l.... In terms of people who pray daily, the US is over 50%, comparable to Bangladesh (a country where the dominant religion requires praying five times a day!). Germany is around 10%. Even Poland is only at 30%. Think of the laws in Poland. Abortion is mostly illegal. Same sex marriage is illegal. How would Poles react if the European Court of Human Rights overturned abortion laws in Poland?
As to what Democrats would do—we already have examples. FDR-appointed Supreme Courts interpreted the Establishment Clause to create a “wall of separation” prohibiting, for example, things like optional religious instruction in public schools, or public support of religious schools. These things are quite common in Europe.
Abortion is another example. While European countries left abortion to voters (with comparably religious countries like Poland still prohibiting it) the Supreme Court created a constitutional abortion right so broad it rendered illegal many limits and compromises voters even in liberal counties like France have embraced. Voters in France only recently liberalized waiting periods, and those are still required in Germany. In the US, those have been unconstitutional for decades.
Going forward, I would expect major changes to include extremely divisive measures such as mass amnesty (which Biden just stated will be a top priority). Also entrenchment of public unions, and federal bailouts of blue state public pension funds.
On the legal side, I’d expect a war on religious exemptions. Countries like Germany have moved slowly on areas like adoption by same-sex couples. In the US, meanwhile, there is a movement to push out religious-affiliated adoption agencies that cannot, consistent with their faith, place children with same-sex couples. In another example, Democratic activist organizations are pushing the Department of Education to pull accreditation of religious schools that teach traditional views of marriage. By contrast in many European countries, religious schools are eligible to receive tax dollars from school vouchers.
I’d also expect another major battleground to be the discrimination laws. Liberals deem “race blind” approaches like those taken in France to be “racist.” In 2014, to liberal Justices voted to overturn a Michigan law that prohibited schools from giving preferences to certain students based on race. These sorts of preferences are unpopular with the public (including with racial minorities) but championed by progressive educators. I’d expect the Supreme Court’s existing standards on discrimination, which embody traditional “race blind” approaches, to be a target if Democrats ever won a Supreme Court majority.
No, that graph shows that Americans are far more Protestant. Weekly church attendance by Christians in Poland and the US are both 41% (actually another source shows ~55% attendance in Poland), given that Poland has comparatively more Christians, weekly attendance overall is higher too. Catholicism places a greater emphasis on weekly mass as compared to the informal daily prayer more common in protestant, and specifically in US Evangelical, Christianity. I'll admit that Hungary is less, their church attendance is lower.
> As to what Democrats would do—we already have examples. FDR-appointed Supreme Courts interpreted the Establishment Clause to create a “wall of separation” prohibiting, for example, things like optional religious instruction in public schools, or public support of religious schools. These things are quite common in Europe.
I made a major edit to my prior comment, which I'll summarize here: the two nations you cite have constitutional callouts for state sponsorship of religion and state religious education. So this comparison isn't apt. The constitutional axioms in the US and Poland or Hungary are totally different. They aren't secular nations, and the things you describe aren't common in secular nations in Europe.
And there was understanding that the establishment clause banned state support of public schools in the 19th century. McCollumn wasn't a particular leftward shift, it was an enshrinement of longstanding practice.
> Abortion is another example.
What changes would you expect to Abortion policy? I'd expect to see things continue roughly in line with Roe. Again, your contention was changes. I'm asking about changes.
> mass amnesty
Polling suggests that between 80 and 90% of Americans support a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants in the US. This number has been relatively consistent over the past 10 years. Search "over a period of time" on this page: https://news.gallup.com/poll/1660/immigration.aspx (there's, admittedly, weird effects based on the specific question, but the gist is clear).
> Also entrenchment of public unions
I've seen very limited (and only very particularly targeted) support of public unions from the left. Consider that police unions are not particularly loved at the moment.
> Liberals deem “race blind” approaches like those taken in France to be “racist.”
Only contextually. I'd expect, for example, that a race blind application process in France would be less (or, at least, differently) racially biased than a race blind application process in the US.
> Countries like Germany have moved slowly on areas like adoption by same-sex couples.
This seems to be a matter of it being perfectly legal (with some issues around surrogacy), but bias/conservative sentiment among bureaucrats in charge of administering the process that leads to it being slow. Still bad, but it doesn't appear to prevent a gay couple from adopting. And of course, France and the UK are already well ahead of us.
The crux of this line of argumentation (and your general lines of argumentation when we have similar discussions) seem to be that we should take Poland and Hungary, and other ex-soviet nations as examples of how the US should legislate. I don't get that. Do you think there's anyone in the US, Republican or Democrat, who thinks "yes, our jurisprudence and social norms should be modeled on two ex-Soviet states one of which is so unstable that it had its constitution rewritten a decade ago, and the other had a constitutional crisis in 2015 and has been called a "failed" democracy as a result?"
I don't understand why you keep pointing to those nations as good examples of anything. Like, when you describe things this way, my takeaway is "the us would continue to be socially moderate among western european nations, and more liberal than eastern european ones". That's, well, yes. And sure, there's some particular cases where the US is exceptional: guns (I note you didn't mention these), abortion, church taxes. But so what?
> No, that graph shows that Americans are far more Protestant.
Weekly church attendance in the U.S. is far higher than in Western Europe: https://www.pewforum.org/2018/06/13/how-religious-commitment.... The U.S. is at 36%. (That ranges from 21% in Vermont to 53% in Utah.) According to Pew, Germany is at 10%. France is at 12%. The U.S. is much closer to Turkey or Iran in religiosity by that measure than to Western Europe.
> They aren't secular nations, and the things you describe aren't common in secular nations in Europe.
The U.S. isn't a "secular nation" either. The "Establishment Clause" prohibits Congress from establishing a national church, just like Article 137 of the Weimar Constitution in Germany (which is still in effect). At the time the Establishment Clause was written, and for decades after, a number of states, like Massachusetts, had established state churches! Public schools in the U.S. were invented to teach religion, and did so for 150 years until FDR-appointed Justices enshrined a "wall of separation" notion into the constitution.
To use the school example, the enforced secularism in the US is comparable to France, and to the left of the UK, Spain, Germany, or Italy. But the US is vastly more religious than any of those countries. There is a major impedance mismatch between our society and our laws, that was created by the Supreme Court. (57% of Americans still oppose that Supreme Court decision banning school prayer, all of these decades later.)
> And there was understanding that the establishment clause banned state support of public schools in the 19th century. McCollumn wasn't a particular leftward shift, it was an enshrinement of longstanding practice.
McCollum was a dramatic departure. Justice Story made clear in 1830 that the constitution was not understood to prohibit non-preferential government support of religion: https://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/amendI_re.... What happens in say Germany, where Muslim children can get Islamic instruction in schools, and Catholic children can get Catholic instruction in schools, is squarely within what is allowable under an original understanding of the Establishment Clause.
> Abortion is another example.
What changes would you expect to Abortion policy? I'd expect to see things continue roughly in line with Roe.
Roe is already a significant departure from American and European public opinion (under 30% of people in the U.S. support generally legal abortion in the second trimester and beyond, which is mandatory under Roe, most people support various restrictions and waiting periods which are impermissible under Roe). I would anticipate further efforts to strike down popular restrictions such as parental consent rules, which are not atypical in Europe.
> I've seen very limited (and only very particularly targeted) support of public unions from the left. Consider that police unions are not particularly loved at the moment.
Biden, thanks to Jill Biden, is hugely supportive of teachers unions. Democrats have advocated for shutting down charter schools, which are broadly popular.
> The crux of this line of argumentation (and your general lines of argumentation when we have similar discussions) seem to be that we should take Poland and Hungary, and other ex-soviet nations as examples of how the US should legislate. I don't get that.
No, you miss the point entirely. I'm not talking about how the U.S. should or should not legislate. I'm talking about how Democrats have and want to legislate in the U.S., by comparison to European countries that have similarly high levels of religiosity to the U.S. This isn't a discussion of policy, but of the polarized political dynamics in the U.S. My point is that, particularly due to the Supreme Court taking various decisions on social issues away from the electorate, the laws in the U.S. with respect to churches, abortion, etc., are much further to the left compared to other highly religious countries.
The point is to try and understand how that is driving political polarization in the U.S. Hence the hypothetical about what if we applied French-style secularism to a country as religious as Poland. How would we expect Poles to react? And does that give us any insight into the current situation in the US?
> Weekly church attendance in the U.S. is far higher than in Western Europe
Yes, but we were talking about western Europe, like Poland and Hungary.
> The U.S. isn't a "secular nation" either. The "Establishment Clause" prohibits Congress from establishing a national church, just like Article 137 of the Weimar Constitution in Germany
Yes, but we were talking about Poland and Hungary, not Germany. Poland and Hungary's constitutions establish national religious law. I would consider Germany to be secular, like the US, as opposed to Poland or Hungary, which are not.
> Justice Story made clear in 1830 that the constitution was not understood to prohibit non-preferential government support of religion
However, throughout the later 1800s, a majority of states (and nearly the nation as a whole) passed Blaine amendments, banning the use of public funds for private religious schools. Now this might have been driven in part by anti-catholic sentiment, but no, I don't think you can claim that the court adopting an interpretation that most states already had adopted was a "dramatic departure". Perhaps legally, but not in terms of popular support/understanding.
> particularly due to the Supreme Court taking various decisions on social issues away from the electorate, the laws in the U.S. with respect to churches, abortion, etc.
Right, and this is unambiguously a good thing. Laws shouldn't be based on religious ethics.
> And does that give us any insight into the current situation in the US?
Honestly, I don't see how it does. Trump's brand of populism isn't particularly religious. His appeal to the religious right wasn't much beyond "I'll appoint conservative judges". It's much more nationalist than religious (and I'll grant you that those two things are often intertwined, but that seems to be more because conservatives are often the ones stoking nationalist sentiment, and also they're usually more religious, I don't think religion necessitates nationalism).
> I’m trying to figure out if anyone actually want to heal societal schisms? And the measure of that is what folks are willing to compromise on?
...you reply:
> How about that one side stops peddling conspiracy theories and following every idiot that promises them what they want to hear in terms of gun rights, abortion and immigration.
...which involves no compromise on your part.
> Compromise = fact based middle ground between reasonable people.
> When one side consistently treats politics like winner-takes-all and lies out of their asses to get to power and to stay in power then the burden to compromise would be on them.
Perhaps, if this was an accurate description of reality.
But for the sake of discussion, let's say that this characterization is indeed correct - if you could influence Democratic party strategy, and behavior of their followers, would your recommendation be to stick with the same general approach of the last decade, including generous deployment of misleading rhetoric like:
> How about that one side stops peddling conspiracy theories and following every idiot that promises them what they want to hear in terms of gun rights, abortion and immigration.
(Which also may run afoul of your "[fact based] middle ground between [reasonable people]" statement above.)
I don't agree. Healing societal schisms is about reestablishing a vision of politics where you argue by saying "here's why this is the best policy" or "here's why this is the most ethical policy", rather than "my movement is very strong and you'd better not get in our way". Making compromises is an important part of effective governance, but it won't by itself heal anything.
What do you think we should compromise on? (Asking because curious, and from the long thread that followed this it seemed like you'd actually have an opinion).
I think compromising on immigration would have the biggest effect on defusing tensions.
I think Biden is doing an admirable job keeping a lid on the reprisal/deprogramming talk. The media should follow his lead. Obama's administration fought a bunch of gratuitious fights, like suing nuns. I anticipate Biden will keep people on a tighter leash, just as a longtime legislator who is going to be thinking harder about the fights he wants to pick.
