I’ll be doing an upcoming piece on the Mythical Median Voter, but for now I just want to kind of lay out some thoughts.
For the uninitiated, most of our conventional political narratives take as a foundational assumption a concept from political science called Median Voter Theorem. It’s one of the first big ideas that came out of the postwar movement in political science towards quantification and empiricism. It basically says that if you plot the distribution of all voters on a left-right spectrum, then the best way to win an election is to appeal to the median voter, since the median is by definition where at least half of support is on either side.
This is where the classic “race to the center” strategy originates from. Since American politicians first have to win their party’s median voters in the primary, both major party candidates emerge from their primaries at some distance from the general election’s median voters, and therefore have to race each other to that median position.
Basically, I think there are two problems with Median Voter Theorem: (1) it’s vulnerable to a lot of lazy & hazy thinking, like conflating the national electorate with individual races, or primaries with general electorates, or conflating the median with the center, and (2) it obscures the reason why voters are so afraid of either major-party coalition gaining a durable edge over the other.
As to the latter point, I think it’s the most revelatory about the current filibuster abolition debate, because over the current era of filibuster escalation, Senate leadership has consolidated its power over the Senate agenda1. This consolidation means that the big decisions are not actually made by the median Senator who gives the majority its 50th/51st vote, but by a leader elected by the median Senators of their own party. Since parties are actually governing like the median partisan instead of the publicly-glorified median voter, voters assume that they’ll continue governing like median partisans absent the filibuster. This all gets shorthanded as “both sides will ram their agendas down each other’s throats”, which makes superficial sense to most people.
But it’s really just another narrative, one which obscures the fact that we don’t actually know how parties would govern absent the filibuster. And there’s a pretty convincing counter-argument that leadership would focus more on crafting legislation that could get the median Senator’s vote2.Yglesias’ recent push on Secret Congress got me thinking: Do we need to - and if so, how would we - revise our model of the filibuster under the Secret Congress model?
My basic filibuster model is that in a country where the Senate tends to homeostatically stay within a 55-45 split in either direction, a 60-vote supermajority requirement locks off most contentious issues. If ignoring said issues was never harmful to the national interest, then we might hypothetically be okay, but as the rise of China, climate change, and what I’ll call the “Big Four Cost Crises” - health care, child care, college, and housing - show us, those situations just tend to deteriorate, and in the process demand ever more extreme solutions, which in turn are ever less likely to pass the filibuster.
I don’t actually think that the existence of Secret Congress changes this assessment. To the extent that Yglesias fields it merely as a theory of political strategy, it still doesn’t remotely offer a “viably complete” alternative to filibuster abolition. By this, I mean that even if the strategy is implemented as well as humanly possible by progressives, the scope of issues that it can plausibly succeed with is too small to correct the course of history from our current Darkest Timeline to a brighter one all on its own. There simply are too many major challenges whose entire policy solution spaces are hopelessly polarized, and too few One Wierd Tricks that could actually make it through Secret Congress.
That all, of course, depends on your assessment of how dark our current timeline really is. But that sort of stuff is exactly what we’re here to discuss, right?I’m really curious how the Silent Cyber War is going to be covered in history books a century from now. In some ways, it resembles the espionage battles that raged in the Cold War - superpowers locked in nuclear MAD seeing no choice but to compete clandestinely using small numbers of highly specialized forces. And to be sure, the Silent Cyber War overlaps in some very fundamental ways with what’s already being called Cold War II.
However, what’s most interesting to me is the inverted Wag The Dog dynamic. For those who don’t remember, this was a late-90’s satire about a president ginning up a fake war to distract from a brewing scandal and win re-election. What’s crazy now, is that we see ourselves in the exact opposite scenario! What happens when world leaders hold an international war without bragging about it to their publics?
The Silent Cyber War will probably rage on for a while. There’s too much at stake - the next century or so of global hegemony. For all the hype about the East’s supposed economic leverage (IE their share of the US national debt), they can’t actually use it against the West, so cyber is their only option left to undermine a West that hopelessly outguns them. Likewise, the West is paralyzed by legacies of domestic illiberalism and flawed democracy, so cyber is the only option to mount anything resembling an effective deterrent.
But at some point, someone’s going to make a mistake.An interesting strategy in Israel’s ever-dysfunctional electoral system was used to defeat Netanyahu: The anti-Bibi coalition encouraged voters to spread their votes to smaller parties, in order to get those parties over the thresholds for representation and sap seats away from Bibi’s coalition3.
The strategy paid off, obviously, and it’s far from novel in the world of multiparty politics, but there are a couple things I’d like to note.
First, it demonstrates the important role of iteration when we’re making deterministic statements about electoral systems like with Duverger’s (or Dave-rger’s!) Law. Just because we can say that zero-sum systems tend towards a certain outcome, doesn’t mean that statement should be mistaken for “this outcome always happens immediately”4. And America’s taken a lot of detours through other factional and party arrangements before it arrived at today’s polarized, deadlocked two-party system - something I hope to write more on soon. But the detours don’t change the fact that we’re here now, and we’re here largely because our zero-sum systems have played themselves out against our peculiar cultural backdrop.
Anyways, the point is, it took Bibi’s foes multiple elections to pull this strategy together, because coalition-building happens in real life and among real politicians who are used to being opponents, not allies.
Second, I think the coalition’s strategy carries in it the seeds of change for Israeli politics. Specifically, in pumping up minor parties’ vote shares, particularly those of Islamist parties like Mansour Abbas’, it may give some of them the necessary spark to build future power bases. Let’s watch this one going forward!I love Pod Save America resurrecting criticism of the Green Lantern Theory of presidential politics. It basically says that presidents can use The Bully Pulpit to force their will upon the country, if only they try hard enough - just like the Green Lantern has to focus his/her “will” to get things done. And while that’s a simple enough way to distill some major historical events so schoolchildren can understand them, it’s also not at all how things actually worked.
But it is a great example of how narratives work. They take a slice of historical truth - FDR, LBJ, etc. - and extrapolate and metastasize until people are applying them in completely wrong contexts, and getting confused as fuck about why their pet theories aren’t working out for them.
In particular, it’s helpful to sound the alarm of caution that this highlights to us. It’s incredibly easy to get disappointed by our pet theories, but remain too stuck in the tunnel vision that keeps us from understanding what’s wrong with those theories.This whole Ellie Kemper thing was horrifically stupid.
Look, I’m from St. Louis. And I’m White, so I’m obviously going to have a certain blinkered perspective.
The VP Parade/Fair/Ball was a thing that went on for quite a long time, unacceptably so. Its origins lie in a gross anachronism of White dominance and fetishization of exoticized “orientalism”. I have no doubt that the KKK were involved in its upper echelons at various points, and may have even dominated its leadership shockingly late into the modern era. I also have no doubt that as overt KKK-style racism fell in and out of fashion, most of the VP committee’s membership likely retreated into the more covert and institutional racism that has dogged the left since Civil Rights. Knowing my hometown, a lot of those people were probably the sorts of Trump voters enthusiastically holding comical boat parades last year. They’re people whom most of you, and I myself, strongly dislike, to put it mildly.
But calling Kemper the “KKK Prom Queen” or whatever the fuck, is just unfair. I won’t defend the privilege she was clearly raised in - privilege that mirrors my own, given that her private high school was just down the road from my own - and I won’t defend the racist St. Louis history that created it - the White pool mob riots, the White flight, ethnic Catholics’ buy-in to White supremacy, etc. I’ve hated that racism my entire life, because it was the same racism that cleaves the heart of our city in two, and left me stranded in soulless, sanitized, and all-but-legally-segregated suburbs for far too long.
But we shouldn’t be misdirecting that hate at some kid who was just caught up in the sick gears of those hateful institutions. Kemper didn’t take an active role in doing the same shameful and disgusting things as another famous St. Louisan, Dana Loesch5, to prop up the diseased culture she was raised in. She just went about her life.
Detest the White female privilege that allowed her to obliviously carry on for so long - I certainly detest the elements of my own White male privilege that granted me the same. But don’t attack someone who’s either a quiet leftist in good standing, a quiet or apathetic moderate/centrist, or at least one of the few rightists who refrained from being as obnoxiously spiteful as the rest were for the past 4 years, simply on some biography snippet for which you have zero fucking context, not even a hazy White-privilege-blinkered one such as my own. THIS is what makes people hate the modern left.
I think the filibuster has played a significant role as an incentive shaping this, but that’s a discussion for a whole ‘nother article.
Democrats are arguably already doing this with Joe Manchin, because the leadership’s strategy appears to be “let’s pretend the filibuster doesn’t exist, in order to highlight how it’s blocking our agenda”. I think it’s also pretty reasonable to posit that Republicans wouldn’t legislate extremely either: moderate Democrats love compromise, and face more electoral cross-pressures (think Manchin) than hard-right Republicans, so as soon as the hard right starts its usual schtick of making insane demands, Republican leadership would happily bring on moderate Democrats.
The more parties meet the threshold, the fewer seats larger parties actually get. For instance, if there are 3 parties over a 5% threshold, and the largest has 40% of the overall vote, but there are 5 parties just sitting at 4%, then out of 100 seats, the largest gets 40% against the remaining 80% of votes for parties over the threshold, so a bare 50-seat majority. But if those 5 parties each just barely make it over 5%, then the largest party gets 40% out of a total of 100% for parties over the threshold, so 40 seats.
This happens a lot when arguing with people who don’t really understand what Duverger/Dave are saying.
Basically, Dana was an intern at the local Fox News Radio station who built a national media career off of being a mouthpiece for the NRA’s Trump-era culture war campaign. She was the crazy chick in that really scary propaganda ad the NRA put out a few years back accusing Democrats of trying to destroy civilization.