Month: December 2017

Vox on minor parties, pro and con

I’m generally positive about minor parties.  However, they will not solve all political problems, as I described in On American political parties held captive by their interest groups and ideologies on my own blog.  One of the problems I did not mention appeared in a video I used in a comment on Republicans Will Have to Make a Choice here at Booman Tribune.

“I await a third party movement.”

I’ll let Ezra Klein of Vox answer that for me.

Here is Third parties are the underpants gnomes of American politics.

Could a third party fix the hellscape of fail that is the United States Congress? Ezra Klein explains.

My summary was “No, although that’s not really what I think you’re after.” My response could have been more pointed.  I could have done for liberals what Pizza Man Cain wants a third party for conservatives, never mind three already exist did for conservatives, pointing out that the Green Party already exists and he could join them.  He could also join the Working Families Party, which exists in the state which he resides.  Because of that state’s fusion ballot, he can actually have an influence on one or the other major party through cross endorsing.  That’s better than in California, where the primary system effectively excludes minor party candidates from the general election ballot for nearly all offices other than President.  It’s also a way to fill in step 2 of the Underpants Gnomes’ business plan.

That’s the con argument.  Follow over the jump for the pro.
For the pro argument, watch Vox’s How to break the two-party hold on American politics as it explains how proportional representation can solve gerrymandering and help minor parties.

Replacing our current system with proportional representation will make more room for the wide range of views in US politics.

Matthew Yglesias expands on this video in The real fix for gerrymandering is proportional representation.

Creating majority-minority districts to ensure racial representation can look a lot like “packing” Democratic voters into lopsided seats. Aiming at fair fights sounds nice but will end up violating communities of interest. Aiming for partisan fairness will necessarily involve some odd squiggles, since neighborhood-level partisanship can be very disparate.

So I asked this scholar: “What about proportional representation?”

She said that when she teaches redistricting law, she does proportional representation last because it solves all the problems and the point of the class is for the students to work through the different complexities and legal doctrines governing the American system. That seems smart as a pedagogical approach, but as an agenda for political reform, solving all the problems is a good idea.

This is a solution that would address several issues I’ve explored on my blog, redistricting/gerrymandering, Duverger’s Law, and minor parties.  It would make the first essentially irrelevant, it would eliminate the conditions for the second (single-member districts with first past the post winners), and would allow people to cast votes for minor parties without “wasting their vote.”*  It’s also a really radical solution by U.S. standards, but a Crazy Eddie like me might just approve of a radical solution to preserve and improve democracy.

As for the result, it might look like this, which could better reflect America’s political diversity.

*I disagree with this characterization.  To me, the person who wastes a vote is the one who stays home.  At least people voting for the Libertarians, Greens, or Constitution Party are making a point.

Modified from Ezra Klein of Vox explains how third parties are the Underpants Gnomes of U.S. politics and Vox explains how proportional representation can solve gerrymandering and help minor parties at Crazy Eddie’s Motie News.

Trump is Having His John Dean Moment

You’ve probably already heard the news that former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn is pleading guilty to two charges of making false statements to FBI officers. Here’s what he’s not getting charged with:

Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating former White House national security adviser Mike Flynn’s alleged role in a plan to forcibly remove a Muslim cleric living in the U.S. and deliver him to Turkey in return for millions of dollars, according to people familiar with the investigation.

Under the alleged proposal, Mr. Flynn and his son, Michael Flynn Jr., were to be paid as much as $15 million for delivering Fethullah Gulen to the Turkish government, according to people with knowledge of discussions Mr. Flynn had with Turkish representatives. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has pressed the U.S. to extradite him, views the cleric as a political enemy.

He’s also not getting charged with a long list of other things, including lying on his security clearance forms, failing to register as an agent of a foreign government, violating the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, etc. His son is not being charged with anything either– at least not yet.

I’m already seeing the right complain that Flynn isn’t being charged with lying about a crime. That’s a dubious argument, but it’s at least somewhat accurate. He’s charged with lying about conversations he had with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak on December 22nd, 2016 and on December 29th, 2016.

In the first set of conversations, Flynn apparently asked that Russia either delay or defeat a resolution in the United Nations Security Council. Flynn lied to the FBI about whether Russia ever described their response to this request to him, claiming that they did not.

In the second set of conversations, Flynn requested and received assurances that Russia would not respond strongly to President Obama’s announcement that he was placing new sanctions on Russia in retaliation for their meddling in our election. He dishonestly claimed not to remember that Russia had made these assurances to him.

In return for pleading guilty to these charges, Flynn will be expected to cooperate with the investigation. If he doesn’t do so satisfactorily those other charges, including the kidnapping charge which also implicates his son, could be reintroduced.

Since he is only pleading to relatively minor offenses and ones that are easily proven, it will be impossible to claim that he’s suffering a monstrous injustice. This makes a pardon unlikely, and it also makes it hard to attack the Special Counsel or to justify firing him.

It also makes look Trump look bad for trying repeatedly to shut down both the FBI and the congressional investigations. In order to build an obstruction of justice charge against the president that will stick and have bipartisan resonance, it’s absolutely necessary that there be an underlying crime. Flynn has now pled guilty to crimes, and he’ll testify about other crimes.

Not since John Dean decided to cooperate with the Watergate investigation has a president had worse news than this. It is quite unlikely that Flynn will provide evidence only against Trump’s underlings. He will provide evidence that implicates Trump and probably his sons and son-in-law, too. Without that kind of testimony, Flynn never could have gotten off so lightly.

Amber Rudd Argues US-UK Relations Are Vital After Brexit

Amber Rudd’s urgent question on Donald Trump – Summary and verdict

Amber Rudd, the home secretary, handled that UQ rather well. The government’s intention has been to de-escalate the public row with President Trump, without withdrawing the criticism expressed yesterday, by stressing that UK-US relations go beyond individuals. That is the approach Justine Greening took on the Today programme (see 9.10am), that was the line coming out of the lobby briefing (see 11.57am ), and that was the argument Rudd adopted.

But, even though Rudd did not really go any further in criticising Trump than Number 10 yesterday, she expressed her disapproval with conviction. Theresa May always sounds nervous saying anything remotely disobliging about Trump, but Rudd sounded as though she meant it. She also dropped hints to MPs that she, personally, would like to go further.

…
Many MPs said the visit should be cancelled altogether. In response, Rudd repeatedly used the same formula. She said:

    An invitation for the visit has been extended and accepted, but the dates and the precise arrangements have yet to be agreed.

More below thr fold …

Rudd suggested that Trump should give up Twitter. In response to a question from the Tory MP Peter Bone, who suggested the “world would be a better place” if Trump deleted his Twitter account, Rudd replied:

    It’s interesting to note [Bone’s] advice regarding Twitter accounts – I’m sure many of us might share his view.

And when the Tory MP Tim Loughton said that if Twitter was serious about fighting hate crime online, Rudd replied:

    I am sure that the chief executive of Twitter will have heard the interesting suggestions from [Loughton] and we will leave it to them to decide what action to take.

Some MPs suggested Twitter and social media were bad for democracy. The most striking interventions on this theme came from Yvette Cooper, the Labour chair of the Commons home affairs committee, and Philip Hollobone, a Conservative. Cooper said:

    Britain First gets is succour from spreading its poison and its extremism online. That is how it works and the president of the United States has just given it a rocket boost in promoting hatred in our communities. Online is where the new battle for democracy is being fought and the prime minister has rightly challenged Putin’s Russia for what she described as “seeking to weaponise information, to plant fake stories, in an attempt to sow discord” … We know from the plaque behind us [commemorating Jo Cox] and from our own history where the spread of extremism leads.

And Hollobone said:

    For politicians, tweeting encourages the transmission of half-formed ideas, instead of listening to the developed arguments of others. It prompts a culture of instant reaction instead of considered thought. And it provokes people to immediate outrage instead of pauseful reflection.

Back-lash of hate in the U.K. …

Europe: A Brave Judeo-Christian Continent

Haaretz Opinion – The Hebrew neo-Nazis  [cached]

Israel has no moral right to judge U.S. President Donald Trump over his forgiving remarks about the neo-Nazis in his country. First, Israel wasn’t really shocked by what he said. After all, it is willing to accept anything from anyone who supports the Israeli occupation. That’s axiomatic at this point. Whether it’s a Hungarian fascist or an American neo-Nazi, as long as they support the occupation – even if they secretly hate Jews – they are considered friends of Israel and moral people.

The best of the “friends of Israel” today are fascists and evangelicals, xenophobes and Islamophobes. What’s most important is that they support the occupation. It’s only opponents of the occupation who are anti-Semites, and we will mount a special effort to combat them. We will forgive everyone else.

But there is also another reason for Israelis’ silence. It recalls the Yiddish saying about betrayal of one’s own guilt – that the thief thinks his hat is on fire. Neo-Nazis? We have a lot of our own “Made in Israel,” Hebrew equivalents of neo-Nazis, and the opposition to them in Israel is less than to neo-Nazis in the United States. A resolute counter-demonstration was organized by liberals in the face of the march in Charlottesville. What about here?

The sacred symmetry that Trump tried to create between attacker and attacked, between assailant and defender, between incitement and protest, between justice and evil – that was invented in Israel. Here we have the occupier and the occupied, a violent and at times even murderous right wing and a left wing that has never murdered, but they are deemed comparable.

Any assault by settlement thugs on Palestinian farmers on their own land is deemed a “clash.” Any Palestinian protest against the violence of the occupier is considered a “disturbance of the peace.” It’s a symmetrical brawl between the two peoples’ shepherds. After all, there are good and bad people among the settlers – just as Trump said with regard to his “alt-right.”

More below the fold …

Israel and the Jews, Two Separate Entities to Europe’s Radical Right | Haaretz – Dec. 2010 |

There is today a movement in Europe, identified by political scientist Cas Mudde as the populist radical right, which is growing in power and influence right across the continent. This movement most explicitly targets “the political class”, the established media, globalisation, the EU as a supranational body, immigrants, Muslims and Roma, but has a complicated relationship to European Jewry and to Israel.

It is spreading further, it seems, than its counterparts of the early 20th century – to which some of these modern parties are linked through a national socialist history and to which the whole movement is linked via populism, an old-new ideology which pits a virtuous people against dangerous “others.”

Similarly, parties such as the Dutch Party for Freedom and the Danish People’s Party belong to a new populist right, albeit one which lacks a national socialist past. Miroslav Mares of the Department of Political Science at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic says that this new populist right can be categorised as national liberal, with liberalism only for “whites” or traditional Europeans within “Fortress Europe.”

As socialism presented a conceptual framework for racist policies during the last century, neo-liberalism is a socially accepted ideological vehicle for today, and the adoption of some of its concepts partly explains the success of national socialist parties such as the Sweden Democrats.

For example, Mudde writes that liberal ideas, notably free speech and gay rights, were not adopted by radical populists until they became useful tools for attacking Muslims. The same goes for some parties’ recent emphasis on a Judeo-Christian culture, rather than a Christian, secular or Völkisch-pagan Leitkultur (defining culture).

The movement not only takes the form of political parties which occupy seats in several European parliaments, but also that of a zeitgeist, one that permeates areas of the so-called mainstream.