Weekly Roundup 9/16/21
Just a heads up, I’ve got a big few weeks coming up — birthdays and a trip to Maine. We’ll come back strong in October, though!
Materialism Is Overrated. Democrats love to focus on materialist concerns for the electorate: “bread and butter” issues that supposedly get voters highly motivated to vote for the left.
But we often ignore that this comes at the risk of legitimizing a central thrust of modern right-wing philosophy: that the left is an intellectually and morally bankrupt enterprise to leverage sheer proletarian numbers to “buy votes”. In a nutshell, it’s that stupid, smug “two wolves and a sheep” aphorism.
It’s probably OK to “buy” a few votes here and there with sops to popular modern social democracy policies, but we should also never lose sight of our ideology, and never reduce the electorate to a welfare math problem the same way the right does.
DUH: For the recall fetishists out there who insist that California Democrats’ effort to fix their state’s ass-backwards recall system is “anti-democracy”, there’s still a pretty obvious way to improve it: Ranked Choice!
You can tell who’s actually playing in good faith here, because most Republicans would probably prefer to come up with a dozen excuses about how RCV is imperfect and “Aren’t CA Democrats The Real Problem?”, than to actually admit that this is a good idea. It’s rank partisanship, yo.
For the record, I have mixed feelings on recalls.
They’re a great idea in theory - letting legislative chambers police their own is obviously unworkable, as we’ve seen in the current Congress, which by all rights should have refused to seat the insurrectionist Reps. The people should always be able to revoke consent from their representatives.
But in practice, they tend to be messy, like California’s system. And moreover, you don’t really see them in parliamentary democracies, because parliamentary democracies have a much more robust “reset button”: snap elections!
It seems like when people complain about “politicians” and demand recall mechanisms, it’s more that they’re upset with incumbency effects in general than they are with the lack of a specific accountability mechanism. Snap elections manage this inchoate dissatisfaction this far better than one-off recalls.
The big challenge here is just that recalls are a focal point for anger and mobilization. People get really passionate and worked up about them. And it’s really easy to demagogue opposition to recalls as being “anti-democracy”.
These are just a couple quick hits. More to come! FYI guys, right now I’m struggling to right-size the workload vs. quality level for posts here. There’s a big backlog of topics to work through, but I keep having even small articles balloon into really big ones, due to the nature of this medium. Thanks for your forbearance while I figure this all out!