#coalition politics

[eretzyisrael]

Source

The complete article by David Collier is here.

[pebblegalaxy]

Exploring Indian Prime Ministerial Evolution: From Nehru to the Nineties by James Manor – A Comprehensive Review #TBRChallenge #bookchatter #BookReview

“Nehru to the Nineties: The Changing Office of Prime Minister in India,” edited by James Manor, is a profound exploration of the evolution of India’s prime ministerial office, tracing its trajectory from the nation’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, through to the political dynamics of the 1990s. The collection of essays within the book, contributed by prominent scholars and political…

[townpostin]

New Jharkhand Cabinet: CM Soren Allocates Portfolios

Key Departments Redistributed Among 11 New Ministers Chief Minister Hemant Soren has swiftly assigned portfolios to the 11 newly inducted ministers in his cabinet, reshaping Jharkhand’s governance structure with significant changes in key departments. RANCHI – In a strategic move, Jharkhand Chief Minister Hemant Soren has redistributed ministerial portfolios following the inclusion of 11 new…

[signode-blog]

"Political Pundits Predict: Lok Sabha Elections 2024 in India Set to Shake NDA's Majority"

As the anticipation builds for the upcoming Lok Sabha Elections in 2024, political analysts and pundits are scrutinizing every indicator, from public sentiment to the betting trends in places like Phalodi Satta Bazar. While the outcome remains uncertain, one prevailing sentiment emerges: the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) might face challenges in securing a resounding victory. Contrary to…

[kesarijournal]

The INDIA Alliance: A Political Potpourri or a Recipe for Disaster?

The INDIA alliance, a coalition that’s as diverse as a college brochure cover. From the leftists to the centrists, from the regionalists to the nationalists, it’s a smorgasbord of ideologies that makes you wonder: Is this a political alliance or a social experiment gone awry?## The Centre-State TangoLet’s start with the Centre-State relationship, shall we? The INC wants “cooperative federalism,”…

[lesamis]

If you're up for it could you explain what is making the Germany government stuff so funny? I can find news articles about it (a coalition is dissolving? There's been tension for a while?) but they're all fairly serious. Thx!

ohhh, sure thing! i'll do my best!

i'll say upfront: this is a pretty serious thing to happen. our chancellor fired our minister of finance, Lindner, which definitively breaks up the governing coalition. germany will likely have snap elections at a moment in which far-right parties are polling extremely well. if news coverage about it seems like people are Worried, that's because, well, they are.

however. the reason it's funny is because our minister of finance was fired. ministers aren't really... ever fired. like, it's not a done thing. i'll fully admit i didn't even know it was an option until yesterday. and our minister of finance wasn't just anyone, he was one of the most mocked and hated figures in politics to germans who vote anywhere left of center.

the coalition that governed until yesterday was made up of the green party, the social democrats, and the neoliberal party (FDP). the FDP is infamous (and i mean, my parents already raised me to hate them for that) for playing kingmaker in coalition governments: they never get all that many votes, but they get just enough that whoever they agree to form a government with will probably succeed. they then tend to force extreme concessions from their coalition partners, because hey, if we walk off, you can't govern at all! so you better play along!

for the past three years, this behaviour has been extremely frustrating for germans who voted for greens or social democrats, because policy from their faction was constantly being blocked by the FDP and often by Lindner personally. the FDP received 11,5% of votes in 2021, but to many of us, it felt as if they were the only party who really had any say in the governing coalition. it made the green and social democratic coalition partners look spineless and passive.

and now, i invite you to imagine how on the day of the US election results, the day the whole world rolled their eyes at the sheer fucking stupidity and pointlessness of it all, at NINE IN THE EVENING, just as germans are getting ready to settle in to bed to dream of nightmare global politics -

the news suddenly breaks that our notoriously invisible chancellor just decided to fire Lindner for that exact behaviour. this chancellor comes out and says, on camera, to the entire sleepy nation, that acting the way Lindner did - blocking necessary policies, refusing to approve budgets unless his party's interests were met - was childish, selfish, irresponsible, and unfit for government, so, whoops, he had to go. shame. coalition over, i guess.

so, politically, that was a long-needed but never-expected moment of triumph for those of us who think the FDP is a clown show made up of human TESLA shares, and it came at a hysterically funny moment.

on a personal level, i can barely explain how uniquely hateable Lindner has always been. he's what would happen if a stock index graph came to life. he hates poor people with a relish; he mocks welfare recipients and would ax minimum wages in a second. he's everyone's business major roommate who shows up in boat shoes fresh off a yacht to discuss NFTs with you. throughout the entire time that he's used his rich boy policy blackmail strategy, he's been smug about it, and he was never taken to task for it, and millions of germans have been longing to throw rotten fruit in his face since 2017. and now we finally get to do it. via memes. on the day of trump's election win.

so that's why it's funny.

[mayasaura]

did you see te pati maori declared independence??

I DID NOT! Holy shit! Thanks for the news!

Okay, now reporting back from one research deep-dive, the recent context as I understand it is this:

Last November, a conservative right-wing Prime Minister, Christopher Luxon, assumed office. He's got a lot of less than stellar right-wing policies, and that includes making cuts to the Ministry of Social Development and opposing co-governance with the Waitangi Tribunal and other Māori leadership organisations over the administering of public services such as education, health, and infrastructure. He's been openly critical of Māori seats in Parliament, though he hasn't (yet) opposed them. Over the course of his administration, there's been an initiative to omit or cut mentions of the Treaty of Waitangi, the foundational document of New Zealand that forms the basis of arguments for Māori protections, from official language.

Which brings us to yesterday, May 30th. Budget Day. The day the new administration would announce their first budget and a day of mass action for supporters of te Pāti Māori protesting the treatment of Māori under the new government. I don't have any concrete numbers, but RNZ reports thousands of protestors, while the NZ Herald estimates "tens of thousands" turning out nation-wide, and a walking protest that delayed rush-hour traffic in Auckland for hours.

You may have already guessed that the budget was Bad. As I understand it, the budget effectively cut any kind of targeted funding for Māori health or education, and decreased funding for Māori cultural festivals and celebrations. And again, I cannot stress enough how much I am not an expert on this topic, so there's probably a lot more in there I don't know about.

In response to the new budget, Māori Party MP Rawiri Waititi issued a Declaration of Independence to the New Zealand Parliament, (video of his speech in link) with the support of his fellow te Pāti Māori co-leader Debbie Ngarewa-Packer.

There doesn't seem to be any concrete plan in place yet for the organisation of the new Māori parliament, but MPs Waititi and Ngarewa-Packer met with protestors to collect signatures for the Declaration, which they plan to bring to a hui taumata (meeting of congress) today, Friday, May 31st. The text of the Declaration can be found on te Pāti Māori website, in the form of a petition. You do not have to be Māori to sign, but I believe you do have to be kiwi.

[nonbinary-vents]

This has been an absolutely horrible couple weeks for the Jewish and Israeli community, so I want to throw in at least a tiny bit of hope in here. Amina Hassouna, the Bedouin girl who was severely hurt in Iran’s missile attacks, has been recovering well and seems to be in good condition! She is described as being ‘fully conscious’ and ‘communicating and smiling’. Two bomb shelters have been placed in Al-Fura, the town that she and her family are from, as well.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

The Pizzaburger Presidency

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

The corporate wing of the Democrats has objectively terrible political instincts, because the corporate wing of the Dems wants things that are very unpopular with the electorate (this is a trait they share with the Republican establishment).

Remember Hillary Clinton's unimaginably terrible campaign slogan, "America is already great?" In other words, "Vote for me if you believe that nothing needs to change":

https://twitter.com/HillaryClinton/status/758501814945869824

Biden picked up the "This is fine" messaging where Clinton left off, promising that "nothing would fundamentally change" if he became president:

https://www.salon.com/2019/06/19/joe-biden-to-rich-donors-nothing-would-fundamentally-change-if-hes-elected/

Biden didn't so much win that election as Trump lost it, by doing extremely unpopular things, including badly bungling the American covid response and killing about a million people.

Biden's 2020 election victory was a squeaker, and it was absolutely dependent on compromising with the party's left wing, embodied by the Warren and Sanders campaigns. The Unity Task Force promised – and delivered – key appointments and policies that represented serious and powerful change for the better:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/10/thanks-obama/#triangulation

Despite these excellent appointments and policies, the Biden administration has remained unpopular and is heading into the 2024 election with worryingly poor numbers. There is a lot of debate about why this might be. It's undeniable that every leader who has presided over a period of inflation, irrespective of political tendency, is facing extreme defenstration, from Rishi Sunak, the far-right prime minister of the UK, to the relentlessly centrist Justin Trudeau in Canada:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-three-barriers-biden-reelection/

It's also true that Biden has presided over a genocide, which he has been proudly and significantly complicit in. That Trump would have done the same or worse is beside the point. A political leader who does things that the voters deplore can't expect to become more popular, though perhaps they can pull off less unpopular:

https://www.hamiltonnolan.com/p/the-left-is-not-joe-bidens-problem

Biden may be attracting unfair blame for inflation, and totally fair blame for genocide, but in addition to those problems, there's this: Biden hasn't gotten credit for the actual good things he's done:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoflHnGrCpM

Writing in his newsletter, Matt Stoller offers an explanation for this lack of credit: the Biden White House almost never talks about any of these triumphs, even the bold, generational ones that will significantly alter the political landscape no matter who wins the next election:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/why-does-the-biden-white-house-hate

Biden's antitrust enforcers have gone after price-fixing in oil, food and rent – the three largest sources of voter cost-of-living concern. They've done more on these three kinds of crime than all of their predecessors over the past forty years, combined. And yet, Stoller finds example after example of White House press secretaries being lobbed softballs by the press and refusing to even try to swing at them. When asked about any of this stuff, the White House demurs, refusing to comment.

The reasons they give for this is that they don't want to mess up an active case while it's before the courts. But that's not how this works. Yes, misstatements about active cases can do serious damage, but not talking about cases extinguishes the political will needed to carry them out. That's why a competent press secretary excellent briefings and training, because they must talk about these cases.

Think for a moment about the fact that the US government is – at this very moment – trying to break up Google, the largest tech company in the history of the world, and there has been virtually no press about it. This is a gigantic story. It's literally the biggest business story ever. It's practically a secret.

Why doesn't the Biden admin want to talk about this very small number of very good things it's doing? To understand that, you have to understand the hollowness of "centrist" politics as practiced in the Democratic Party.

The Democrats, like all political parties, are a coalition. Now, there are lots of ways to keep a coalition together. Parties who detest one another can stay in coalition provided that each partner is getting something they want out of it – even if one partner is bitterly unhappy about everything else happening in the coalition. That's the present-day Democratic approach: arrest students, bomb Gaza, but promise to do something about abortion and a few other issues while gesturing with real and justified alarm at Trump's open fascism, and hope that the party's left turns out at the polls this fall.

Leaders who play this game can't announce that they are deliberately making a vital coalition partner miserable and furious. Instead, they insist that they are "compromising" and point to the fact that "everyone is equally unhappy" with the way things are going.

This school of politics – "Everyone is angry at me, therefore I am doing something right" – has a name, courtesy of Anat Shenker-Osorio: "Pizzaburger politics." Say half your family wants burgers for dinner and the other half wants pizza: make a pizzaburger and disappoint all of them, and declare yourself to be a politics genius:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/17/pizzaburgers/

But Biden's Pizzaburger Presidency doesn't disappoint everyone equally. Sure, Biden appointed some brilliant antitrust enforcers to begin the long project of smashing the corporate juggernauts built through forty years of Reaganomics (including the Reganomics of Bill Clinton and Obama). But his lifetime federal judicial appointments are drawn heavily from the corporate wing of the party's darlings, and those judges will spend the rest of their lives ruling against the kinds of enforcers Biden put in charge of the FTC and DoJ antitrust division:

https://www.thebignewsletter.com/p/judge-rules-for-microsoft-mergers

So that's one reason that Biden's comms team won't talk about his most successful and popular policies. But there's another reason: schismogenesis.

"Schismogenesis" is a anthropological concept describing how groups define themselves in opposition to their opponents (if they're for it, we're against it). Think of the liberals who became cheerleaders for the "intelligence community" (you know the CIA spies who organized murderous coups against a dozen Latin American democracies, and the FBI agents who tried to get MLK to kill himself) as soon as Trump and his allies began to rail against them:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/12/18/schizmogenesis/

Part of Trump's takeover of conservativism is a revival of "the paranoid style" of the American right – the conspiratorial, unhinged apocalyptic rhetoric that the movement's leaders are no longer capable of keeping a lid on:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/06/16/that-boy-aint-right/#dinos-rinos-and-dunnos

This stuff – the lizard-people/Bilderberg/blood libel/antisemitic/Great Replacement/race realist/gender critical whackadoodlery – was always in conservative rhetoric, but it was reserved for internal communications, a way to talk to low-information voters in private forums. It wasn't supposed to make it into your campaign ads:

https://www.statesman.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/05/27/texas-republicans-adopts-conservative-wish-list-for-the-2024-platform/73858798007/

Today's conservative vibe is all about saying the quiet part aloud. Historian Rick Perlstein calls this the "authoritarian ratchet": conservativism promises a return to a "prelapsarian" state, before the country lost its way:

https://prospect.org/politics/2024-05-29-my-political-depression-problem/

This is presented as imperative: unless we restore that mythical order, the country is doomed. We might just be the last generation of free Americans!

But that state never existed, and can never be recovered, but it doesn't matter. When conservatives lose a fight they declare to be existential (say, trans bathroom bans), they just pretend they never cared about it and move on to the next panic.

It's actually worse for them when they win. When the GOP repeals Roe, or takes the Presidency, the Senate and Congress, and still fails to restore that lost glory, then they have to find someone or something to blame. They turn on themselves, purging their ranks, promise ever-more-unhinged policies that will finally restore the state that never existed.

This is where schismogenesis comes in. If the GOP is making big, bold promises, then a shismogenesis-poisoned liberal will insist that the Dems must be "the party of normal." If the GOP's radical wing is taking the upper hand, then the Dems must be the party whose radical wing is marginalized (see also: UK Labour).

This is the trap of schismogenesis. It's possible for the things your opponents do to be wrong, but tactically sound (like promising the big changes that voters want). The difference you should seek to establish between yourself and your enemies isn't in promising to maintaining the status quo – it's in promising to make better, big muscular changes, and keeping those promises.

It's possible to acknowledge that an odious institution to do something good – like the CIA and FBI trying to wrongfoot Trump's most unhinged policies – without becoming a stan for that institution, and without abandoning your stance that the institution should either be root-and-branch reformed or abolished altogether.

The mere fact that your enemy uses a sound tactic to do something bad doesn't make that tactic invalid. As Naomi Klein writes in her magnificent Doppelganger, the right's genius is in co-opting progressive rhetoric and making it mean the opposite: think of their ownership of "fake news" or the equivalence of transphobia with feminism, of opposition to genocide with antisemitism:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/05/not-that-naomi/#if-the-naomi-be-klein-youre-doing-just-fine

Promising bold policies and then talking about them in plain language at every opportunity is something demagogues do, but having bold policies and talking about them doesn't make you a demagogue.

The reason demagogues talk that way is that it works. It captures the interest of potential followers, and keeps existing followers excited about the project.

Choosing not to do these things is political suicide. Good politics aren't boring. They're exciting. The fact that Republicans use eschatological rhetoric to motivate crazed insurrectionists who think they're the last hope for a good future doesn't change the fact that we are at a critical juncture for a survivable future.

If the GOP wins this coming election – or when Pierre Poilievre's petro-tories win the next Canadian election – they will do everything they can to set the planet on fire and render it permanently uninhabitable by humans and other animals. We are running out of time.

We can't afford to cede this ground to the right. Remember the clickbait wars? Low-quality websites and Facebook accounts got really good at ginning up misleading, compelling headlines that attracted a lot of monetizable clicks.

For a certain kind of online scolding centrist, the lesson from this era was that headlines should a) be boring and b) not leave out any salient fact. This is very bad headline-writing advice. While it claims to be in service to thoughtfulness and nuance, it misses out on the most important nuance of all: there's a difference between a misleading headline and a headline that calls out the most salient element of the story and then fleshes that out with more detail in the body of the article. If a headline completely summarizes the article, it's not a headline, it's an abstract.

Biden's comms team isn't bragging about the administration's accomplishments, because the senior partners in this coalition oppose those accomplishments. They don't want to win an election based on the promise to prosecute and anti-corporate revolution, because they are counter-revolutionaries.

The Democratic coalition has some irredeemably terrible elements. It also has elements that I would march into the sun for. The party itself is a very weak institution that's bad at resolving the tension between both groups:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/04/30/weak-institutions/

Pizzaburgers don't make anyone happy and they're not supposed to. They're a convenient cover for the winners of intraparty struggles to keep the losers from staying home on election day. I don't know how Biden can win this coming election, but I know how he can lose it: keep on reminding us that all the good things about his administration were undertaken reluctantly and could be jettisoned in a second Biden administration.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/29/sub-bushel-comms-strategy/#nothing-would-fundamentally-change

[gillianthecat]

300,000 in DC!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by ANSWER Coalition (@answercoalition)

Today, the people made history!

300,000 marched in Washington DC to demand an end to Biden and Israel's genocide against Gaza and demand freedom for Palestine!

[ramblingaro]

looking at the nbc exit poll demographic data and it’s not surprising but still a bit soul crushing to see that Black people, queer people, and Jewish people all had votes over 75% cast for Harris but Harris still lost, because the rest of the country did not back her in the same way, and almost every white demographic voted in favor of Trump. We cannot do this shit alone.

[dead-salmon]

400 STUNDEN DISKUSSION ÜBER EIN THEMA??

dude i wouldve fucking killed christian lindner right there

[pebblegalaxy]

Exploring Indian Prime Ministerial Evolution: From Nehru to the Nineties by James Manor – A Comprehensive Review #TBRChallenge #bookchatter #BookReview

“Nehru to the Nineties: The Changing Office of Prime Minister in India,” edited by James Manor, is a profound exploration of the evolution of India’s prime ministerial office, tracing its trajectory from the nation’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, through to the political dynamics of the 1990s. The collection of essays within the book, contributed by prominent scholars and political…

[inconclusionray]

It does matter who is in the white house. It fucking does. "Two state solution" versus "wipe them off the face of the earth." Not as much as we need on climate policy to be *sure* we'll survive, versus burn baby burn and we are surely cooked. Protect access to abortion versus dead pregnant parents and teens. Someone who CAN be persuaded left versus someone who will make it nigh impossible to protest. It fucking matters. Please ignore the polls, please ignore the vibes, please ignore everyone saying it doesn't matter: it matters. Does your one individual specific vote all by itself matter? Maybe not, but that's an American Individualist bullshit line of thought. Together, our voices do make a difference.

Vote. Please, please vote.

[kesarijournal]

The INDIA Alliance: A Political Potpourri or a Recipe for Disaster?

The INDIA alliance, a coalition that’s as diverse as a college brochure cover. From the leftists to the centrists, from the regionalists to the nationalists, it’s a smorgasbord of ideologies that makes you wonder: Is this a political alliance or a social experiment gone awry?## The Centre-State TangoLet’s start with the Centre-State relationship, shall we? The INC wants “cooperative federalism,”…

[secretpiratebread]

did the german coalition in power really have to start actively crumbling the day after the us elections