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doux-amer · 2 years ago

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My favorite books of 2022 in no particular order (well, book cover aesthetics so that this post won’t look lopsided visually)!

Babel, Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution by R.F. Kuang

I go back and forth on how I feel about this book. I do think there is merit to the argument that it’s incredibly didactic and it doesn’t trust its readers as much as it should (but then again, you look at the world around us so maybe the heavyhandedness is necessary)—BUT I also liked it despite the things that made me ambivalent about it and I firmly believe it’s THE book of 2022. It’s the most important book of the year and more than any other novel I’ve read recently, it speaks to the truth and the times. Even if it’s not revelatory to you because, well, the subject matter is your lived experience, you feel seen and R.F. Kuang puts what you know into words so elegantly.

If you love words, if you’re fascinated by translation, and you love history, strikes, and searing critique about racism, colonialism and imperialism, etc., read this. R.F. Kuang is brilliant. Wow. What a dazzling, whip-smart mind and strong command of prose. The term “dark academia” is bandied around a lot, but this is what it should be. A disquieting look at the rot and the heartbreak that comes with loving a place that will eat you whole.

Plus, you have to read it for Ramy. I’m begging you. And if you don’t weep over the simple beauty and tragedy of [redacted] at the end of the novel, you have no soul! Just saying!

Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan

If you love Mad Max: Fury Road, which you should, you need to read this. There are hundreds of entertaining and insightful interviews with cast and crew and you get an intimate look at every step of the production over the two decades it took to get made. When you watch MM:FR, you have no idea how it got made. Once you read this, that feeling will only deepen because HOW THE HELL did this get made and how did they all survive and not lose their minds?

Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters

What a banger of a debut! Super provocative (not an exaggeration as you can tell by the strong reactions to it), romping good fun, and lots of heart even if everything that unfolds makes you channel Marie Kondo and exclaim, “I love mess!” Just look at the summary. It’s soap opera-y, and you know what, we should have queer drama like that too, all while carefully examining gender, motherhood, sex, family, etc.

A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles

This is my favorite book of the year. There’s apparently a theme between this and my 2020 favorite, Piranesi, and to a lesser extent, if you really want to stretch it, my 2021 favorites. They’re about people stuck in one place in one way or another; in the case of A Gentleman in Moscow and Piranesi, literally trapped in one place. But it’s not depressing! I put this novel off for years because I thought it’d be your usual overhyped literary fiction fare that isn’t anything special and is, rather, staid and bland, but it’s SO fun and it’s funny. I love protagonists who are silly but are aware they are. Rostov is just so full of it, but he’s well-intentioned, aware of his shortcomings, and willing to learn. I wanted to be whisked far, far away and I was with Amor Towles’s witty, sparkling prose and his lovingly and intricately crafted world. This is about a man sentenced to house arrest for life in a hotel! You stick with him through decades as Russia, and by extension the world, changes dramatically beyond the doors of the hotel. They’re exciting, turbulent times and you’d think you’d be more interested in what’s going on out there, but no, the world inside is much larger and richer than you’d imagine it to be. A comfort read that I’ll return to over and over again.

Honorable mentions:

Atonement by Ian McEwan - beautiful, but I watched the movie before right before reading it and it’s the rare movie that is surprisingly a very faithful adaptation so I wasn’t as invested in it

Beautiful Country by Qian Julie Wang - the prose is mediocre, but I can’t tell if that’s due to the inexperience of the writer or the deliberate decision to write from her child self’s perspective. Nonetheless an important read! I also kind of feel it goes into sad immigrant story territory, but it’s a disservice to reduce it to that when this dismantles the myth of the American dream thoroughly. It also gave me a doorway to a Chinatown and New York I’ve seen or only heard glimpses of but never saw (for clarity, I’m a native New Yorker who’s Asian American and I grew up with immigrant friends, relatives, classmates, and acquaintances who struggled financially, but this was beyond that; Qian highlights that difference within the immigrant/first to second gen community well)

Tanqueray by Stephanie Johnson - if you read the HONY posts, you know you’re in for a wild ride. Is it the best written book ever? No. But it’s the most fun one I read last year and Ms. Stephanie has the BEST voice. This is the rare book that made me want to listen to the audiobook and I’ll have to do it sometime. She twirls and rewinds the clock and you can envision New York in all its splendid, dirty glory back then.

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irnbraw · 4 years ago

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On the Need to Preserve Freely Spoken Words in Scotland

Scotland is slowly boiling to death - like the proverbial frog in the pan of simmering water. Our civic life is already damaged to such an extent that Scotland seems more like Northern Ireland than the rest of the UK now. To which we can now also see the methodical disassembling of facts, history, free-speech and freedoms of person, belief and action.

The SNP is fundamentally illiberal. (See all the preceding pages of this blog). It, like all cultish entities, has a Dogma to which ALL must be sacrificed. Truth, facts, friends, even family. Nothing is more sacred than Dogma so public ethics, accountability, transparency, honesty - any and all can be safely and comfortably dispensed with if Dogma is furthered and the transcending goal of Dogma is advanced.

Into this vortex of lies have wandered a number of persons who are not a perfect fit. They are those who have failed to have their own moral compass overwritten. Certain people who, when they encounter corruptions or abuses of power at the highest levels do not look the other way - or mutter to themselves something about ‘the end justifying the means’.

This is alas rare - but therefore significant. One such instance is when avowed separatist, ‘progressive’, a scion of the Scottish nationalist cause - someone at the core of that maelstrom: Robin McAlpine - saw and experienced at first hand the kind of corrosive corruption that the SNP is now disintegrating Scotland with, he spoke up.

McAlpine was Director of “Common Weal” a social issues ‘think tank’, dedicated to the progressives’ view of a separate Scotland. But he is that no longer. For when he stopped in his tracks and lamented the detrimental impact of secretive, conspiratorial nationalist power (by penning a 3,000 word article)* he was invited to step down.

Given the direction in which Scotland currently drifts, aided by Covid and an overly sentimentalist and un-critical population, I believe the essay that caused the former Director’s downfall may not long survive. Therefore, I have copied and pasted it here.

Not much is now, in reality, safe in the hands of Big Tech. The clarion warnings of Rand, Huxley, Orwell and Bradbury have already been rendered moot by our illiberal and autocratic governments combined with the mob mentality of ‘wokeism’. So even reprinting here is no guarantee of anything. But we must all make an effort, and this small bit is my contribution to preserving words freely spoken in Scotland - while that is still a thing.

- Here is the Article -

(link to the original blog-post is above)*

THIS TIME almost exactly two years ago I sat in a cafe close to Holyrood in a state of what I can only call shock. The enormity of what I’d just heard was sinking in; over the preceding nearly three hours I’d been introduced to all the gory detail of the plot against Alex Salmond. The last two years has at times been surreal for me as a result.

To explain what I am going to write next I need to tell you something about my fundamental beliefs. I have worked close to the power of government my whole life. I have studied and read widely on power. I am also a strong believer in social change.

Everything I have seen has driven me to the same conclusion; nothing is more important than integrity in public life. That may seem anachronistic to some (given modern political culture) and not particularly left-wing. But the positive change I want cannot be built on anything but the firmest of foundations; when corruption or misuse of power creeps into those foundations, nothing good can be built on them.

Some on the right of politics are anti-state and for them a discredited public realm has its uses. For the left, nothing good ever, ever comes from it.

There is no doubt in my mind that there was and is a coordinated plan of action created by a powerful group of people, developed and executed in secret but using public resources, all with the sole purpose of forcing a perceived opponent out of public life in Scotland.

I then have no doubt that when this plan was at risk of collapsing and exposing those who perpetrated it, they instigated a wide-ranging cover up. My suspicion is that it was not initially the intention to seek to jail Salmond, and that this was a result of an escalation to distract attention as part of the cover-up operation. Yet that is the direction in which this plan proceeded, nonetheless.

There is no greater abuse of power than to use it arbitrarily to remove someone’s liberty. This is absolutely not the ‘rough and tumble’ of politics. It has no place in Scotland. None.

At this stage I need to make some more things clear. This is no longer anything to do with Alex Salmond, his reputation, his career or his future. He was investigated thoroughly, tried in a court of law and acquitted of all charges. It is worth adding that he was not acquitted because his actions were ‘dodgy’ yet failed to meet the threshold of criminality but because the jury believed his defence that none of them happened.

It is not about contentious political issues such as independence or the Gender Reform Act. It is not about crucial social and cultural debates such as the Me Too movement. I am open that I believe Nicola Sturgeon has run a poor administration and has repeatedly misled the independence movement in a way that has harmed our chances of independence. But it’s not about that either.

Nor am I any kind of Alex Salmond fan-boy. This is not about a personal squabble or some ‘psychodrama’. It certainly isn’t some spurious debate about ‘civic’ versus ‘populist’ nationalism. The sheer volume of dust being thrown up to obscure what this is really about is in itself telling.

So you must clear your mind of all of these issues and focus on the sole and single issue this is about; are there people in a position of power in Scotland who misused that power in a manner which makes them unfit to hold office or employment? (If this gives you difficulty, perhaps remove the names and think in terms of ‘Politician A’ and ‘Civil Servant B’.)

In what follows I will try, carefully and without emotive language, to take you through how I reached my conclusions. I will seek very hard to only state as fact things that are public record, and to make absolutely clear where I am introducing my own opinion and analysis.

(There are far, far too many references to include throughout as this relates to thousands of disclosed government papers available here. Gordon Dangerfield has gone through many of those forensically on his blog here. I know there are strong views about Wings Over Scotland but that is the best place to find a number of documents which are redacted elsewhere. I have never at any point had access to nor specific knowledge of material not in the public domain but have broad awareness of what it is believed to indicate.)

But yes, I am of the decided view that people in a position of power in Scotland misused that power in a manner which is not acceptable. I believe that it started when a complaints procedure was created and designed to target a specific individual and pushed through over strong objections from the UK civil service.

In a position of power, you should never create laws or procedures for a purpose related to the pursuit of an individual; it represents a gross misuse of those powers.

I am of the decided view that the same people merged this process with the ‘grooming’ of complainants against the same individual, and on this a ruling of the Court of Session strongly suggests I am correct.

There are then too many details concerning the fundamentally improper manner in which this complaints process was subsequently pursued to cover here, but it is all documented and will reach the public domain eventually. This too was a gross abuse of power.

It seems that at this point, those behind these actions became aware of their risk of exposure as a result of legal arguments they had become aware of, and I believe this is when the cover-up began.

The first crucial element of this cover-up was for the most senior of government politicians to arrange a meeting to discuss sensitive government business at her house, seemingly deliberately doing so with the express intent of excluding civil servants from documenting this meeting and then subsequently, when caught, to knowingly and repeatedly to mislead parliament about that meeting. I believe this is confirmed by existing information in the public domain.

I then believe that, aware their position was coming into substantial jeopardy, the participants in this operation sought to move the focus away from their actions by escalating the matter to a criminal one by reporting information to the police, information they had access to for at least six months previously but did not act on (done against the wishes of the complainants).

... seeking to jail someone for political expediency is something I did not believe I would see in Scotland in my lifetime. Pause must be taken here to take in the enormity of this ...

At this point we have moved into the territory of the kind of behaviour we seldom see in western Europe. Certainly, seeking to jail someone for political expediency is something I did not believe I would see in Scotland in my lifetime. Pause must be taken here to take in the enormity of this.

As part of that process, I believe that a leak of information which is probably criminal in nature was carried out from within the office of the politician and on this the investigation of the Information Commissioner’s Office strongly suggests I am correct. I do not believe that it is feasible this happened without the authorisation of the politician (though I am aware of no hard evidence for this).

The affair now moves into two strands. The first involves continued efforts to cover up what has happened through the repeated failure to produce documents, even in the face of a Court Warrant, and in this a judge at the Court of Session concurs (on fact, not motive). This appears to be, on the face of it, contempt of court.

This also involves what I believe appears to be pressure exerted on Government lawyers to misrepresent facts in court up to the point where they threatened to resign (this latter point is public record).

The Scottish Government continued this behaviour in the face of at least one (and probably more) legal opinion that it would be ruled against but only admitted fault when more damaging material appeared to be about to be exposed. The ruling on the part of the Judge in this case was damning and the award made was extraordinarily harsh on the Scottish Government.

From there the cover-up, I believe, is fairly apparent, ranging from refusing to reveal legal advice to doing everything possible to avoid document disclosure to creating the remit of inquiries deliberately designed to prevent proper investigation of what has happened to repeatedly evasive and factually incorrect evidence given to a Parliamentary Committee.

The second strand involved the criminal case, and while there was some crossover of participants this was pursued largely by the apparatus of the political party of which the politician is a member. Much less of this evidence is currently publicly available, so I will restrict myself to saying that staff of that party appeared to have sought to maximise the number of complaints and put pressure on the police.

These two strands recombine during the resultant criminal trial, where there may be a case to be made that the repeated refusal to produce relevant documents represents an attempt to pervert the course of justice and contribute to the imprisonment of a man by withholding evidence relevant to his defence.

Perhaps the pinnacle of this for me is the testimony of Woman H, by far the most serious of the charges presented (attempted rape). Here the prosecution led no properly admissible evidence that she was even in the building where the alleged attempted rape took place. The defence led multiple pieces of evidence including reliable eye-witness testimony that she was never there.

The circumstances around this testimony are deeply concerning and it seems to be clear perjury. I can’t comment any more, but for me it sums up this whole sorry affair.

I haven’t even mentioned what I find to be the difficult-to-understand decision by the Crown Office and Prosecutor Fiscal Service to bring this case to court, nor its (for me) subsequent chilling pursuit of supporters of the man tried. I also have some concerns about what I know of the actions of the police. The role of some publicly-funded agencies and the publicly-funded BBC in the aftermath only contribute to my unease.

There is so much more, so much that will come out and this will be worse still than what you’ve seen so far.

There is so much more, so much that will come out and this will be worse still than what you’ve seen so far. The damage I believe this is likely to do to confidence in the conduct of public life in Scotland is substantial.

That the politician is Nicola Sturgeon, the man Alex Salmond, the civil servants a group surrounding Leslie Evans and the party officials a group surrounding Peter Murrell (husband of Sturgeon) should play no part in affecting the details I have set out above.

I have never in my life called for someone to resign. If they should be fired, they should be fired; but resignation should be a matter of honour, so calling for it seems futile to me. But I can see no circumstances in which it should be acceptable for Nicola Sturgeon to remain in office. Any one of half a dozen the above acts perpetrated by a member of Boris Johnson’s cabinet would have the SNP demanding their head.

From there it seems to me to be a question only of how many of the civil servants and paid officials of the SNP should be sacked for misconduct. Some of the civil servants seem to me clearly to need to face contempt of court proceedings and there are a number of people involved who seem to me at least terribly close to ‘conspiracy to pervert the course of justice’ territory.

I want only to finish with a few thoughts on the ramifications of all of this, firstly for public life in Scotland.

I have made no secret of my growing concern about the state of democracy in Scotland nor the way public officials perform their duties. There seems to me now to be a messianic cult of impunity among far too many senior officials. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that this has rattled my confidence in the health of Scotland as a nation right now.

There must be reform of governance in Scotland and a root and branch review of the civil service and its agencies. I struggle to understand how the Lord Advocate is still in post (what exactly is the ‘correct’ number of malicious prosecutions he can admit to in any given year?) and his existence as an active member of Cabinet is clearly contrary to EU law (enshrined in domestic law) that the Executive (government) and judiciary (legal system) are independent of each other.

If this rattles the confidence of the public in Scotland then I can hardly blame them, and I can’t see what the option is other than (finally) honesty, full disclosure and reform.

Talk of continuity in government during the Covid crisis is neither here nor there. If continuity means failure to ensure integrity, we have a bigger problem. Surely someone else can do a press conference every morning and no-one is asking health officials to resign. The vast majority of the SNP’s politicians are good and honest people who had nothing whatsoever to do with this; there will be no problem forming a strong working government.

Finally, the cause of independence. I have said over and over to the small group of people whom I’ve spoken to about this that harm was inevitable from the moment the ‘original sin’ of this affair took place.

In the last week there has been much chatter from people who support independence of the sort ‘but she’s so popular, can’t we turn a blind eye to this, at least for a while?’. I of course have sympathy for the many grassroots activists I so admire and who have been let down by this, but I have two responses.

The first is simple; directly before the Watergate scandal Richard Nixon had approval ratings of 68 per cent, substantially better than Nicola Sturgeon’s – and this whole affair has remarkable parallels with Watergate.

This will out eventually. I wish dearly that Nicola Sturgeon had found a dignified excuse to fall on her sword long before now and it might actually have been possible to avoid this (for now, if not for the history books). But she didn’t. Every part of this traces back to her, her team, her husband and her close confidants. If you’re angry about this (you should be) that’s where to direct it.

We sure as hell can’t afford this to dominate the 2021 Holyrood election and there is a very real risk it will.

But to return right back to the beginning, while I have sympathy to those wishing we could ‘turn a blind eye’, in the end that is the Ted Cruz/Mitch McConnell position – and how is that working out for them?

It is almost explicitly to say that you are content for a new Scotland to be born from corruption, so long as it is born. But I can’t tell you how much of a mistake that is – there is no redemption for us from such a stance. Our future, our nation must be born from honesty and integrity or you should want no part of it. I certainly don’t.

‘Just this one corrupt conspiracy and no more, we promise’ can’t be acceptable

‘Just this one corrupt conspiracy and no more, we promise’ can’t be acceptable, can’t be how we carry ourselves into the future. Whatever price we pay for this we must pay, and we must then atone and rebuild. We can still win an election if we start right now.

I wish I had an alternative for you. I wish, I so deeply wish, this had never happened. None of it. Even now I wish I didn’t feel I need to write these things. But I do feel I need to, for my own conscience if nothing else. My silence would leave me feeling complicit and I can’t live with that. I would have written the same even for a leader I admired and supported.

And I have already lived for these two years with the knowledge of this wound deep into things I care very much about – Scotland, its future as an independent nation and its ability to be a much better place than one where a fifth of the people live in poverty.

We have been dragged here and whether it is now, during the election or in the months after when we should be moving purposely towards independence, this is all going to pour into the public domain like it or not.

And because it will poison all it touches, those responsible must remove themselves or be removed and rapidly be distanced from the cause of independence and Scotland’s public realm.

#SNP #Nicola Sturgeon #Corruption #Scotland #Common Weal #Alex Salmond #conspiracy #Robin McAlpine

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theliberaltony · 7 years ago

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

micah (Micah Cohen, politics editor): Greetings, friends and colleagues, and thank you for joining this later-in-the-week-than-usual politics chat! We’re doing it a bit late because we wanted to see how the Super Tuesday of the 2018 primary season played out. And so the question we’re interrogating today is:

What have we learned about how the 2020 Democratic presidential primary might play out based on the 2018 primaries?

Sound good?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor):

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Great.

micah: OK, so let’s break this up into two parts …

First up: candidates.

What have we learned about the type of candidate Democrats want?

(Also, something to weigh during this whole chat: How sound is this entire exercise of looking at 2018 congressional primaries for clues about the 2020 presidential primary?)

perry: To start broadly, what I took from Tuesday (and the primaries more generally this year) is that Democrats are anti-President Trump but not behaving in the anti-party establishment way that the GOP did in 2010, 2014 and 2016. The party establishment candidates (for example, Dianne Feinstein, Robert Menendez, Gavin Newsom) won. Left-leaning voters in California managed to coalesce around Democratic candidates enough to get at least one into the general election in the House districts that Democrats think they can flip (that’s how it looks now, in any case).

In short, Democratic voters are open to party-backed candidates.

julia_azari: Perry is right, though I would also note the many anti-Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stories that came out of California and other places.

It’s less obvious to me that a plurality, much less a majority of Democratic voters, are swayed by their suspicion of the party. But these things can burn slowly. And a vocal minority can really gunk things up for a party, especially if the more establishment parts fail to coordinate. Which is what happened for Republicans in 2016.

perry: Right. Some Democratic activists kind of hate the party. But they still listen to the party.

micah: Wait, isn’t that a little strong?

perry: Which part do you think is wrong, Micah?

micah: Not wrong, but I guess I’m trying to get a sense of degrees.

Clearly, there are anti-establishment forces in the Democratic Party.

But they’re 40 percent weaker than in the GOP?

10 percent weaker?

You know what I mean?

julia_azari: I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

I would argue that in the Democratic Party, those anti-establishment forces are more challenging to combine with a compelling policy/ideological/team-based message than in the GOP.

So, anti-establishment sentiment in the Republican Party was easily paired up with anti-Obama feelings (tea party) and anti-immigration feelings (Trump)?

What’s the comparison for anti-establishment Dems? Single-payer? Campaign finance reform?

micah: Ah, I see. That makes sense. But aren’t they still weaker than in the GOP?

perry: I would say closer to 40 percent weaker. Kevin de León is a pretty good candidate. He is very qualified. And yet Feinstein came in 30 percentage points ahead of him in Tuesday’s primary despite not being a particularly good fit for California, which casts itself as the “state of resistance.”

The big difference is that de León does not have a Fox News/Breitbart apparatus attacking Feinstein like a Republican would have.

julia_azari: Perry, it seems like we somewhat disagree on the big picture of how strong these forces are in the Democratic Party, but the media point is a really critical one.

micah: The closest a tea-party-like Democratic challenge has come (and please spare me the emails about how the tea party analogy doesn’t work — I know it’s imperfect) was in Illinois’s 3rd District maybe?

perry: Right. And the incumbent in that race was fairly to the right of the Democratic Party.

Tuesday’s results are bad for people like Howard Schultz, if the outgoing Starbucks chairman decides that he wants to try to run a campaign to take over the Democratic Party the way Trump did the Republican Party.

micah: Yeah.

But, Julia, you think those anti-establishment forces are even weaker than Perry does?

perry: I feel like I’m saying they are pretty weak in the first place.

micah: Yeah, that’s why I’m confused.

Julia thinks they’re stronger maybe?

julia_azari: No, I’m saying I think we are in danger of underestimating them based on what’s still a pretty small number of observations.

micah: That’s fair.

julia_azari: Trump didn’t happen overnight. Not to toot my own horn, but my piece on Trump and Paul Ryan illustrates how these kinds of forces built up over decades in the Republican Party.

micah:

perry: I think that’s right. I might consider, say, Bernie Sanders, more part of the Democratic Party at this point, in that he does lots of party stuff and the party kind of accepts him. Sanders, even though he is technically an independent, has moved toward the party, and the party has moved toward him.

julia_azari: The fact that the DCCC — rather than ideology or policy — has become a point of argument in Democratic circles and in stories about the primaries illustrates the legitimacy problems that parties now face. Who the f even knew what the DCCC was in 2006?

(Full disclosure/self-promotion: I am writing a book about party weakness right now, which emphasizes very long-term and slow-moving processes, including the erosion of party legitimacy.)

perry: So I think Julia and I disagree. It’s a very small sample size. But if I were Joe Biden, I would be happy with how well Feinstein did. And that the party elders did get their candidates in some of these House races.

julia_azari: If I were Joe Biden, I would be focused on the credibility of Feinstein’s challenger, so, yeah, we disagree — though I also admit that we’re extrapolating from not much data.

perry: Feinstein has moved to the left. She was famously for the death penalty but now is not, for example. But figures in the party, like Obama, were willing to embrace Feinstein even if she is to the right of where the energy of the party is right now.

She could have been treated like Bob Bennett or Richard Lugar but was not.

julia_azari: Those are good comparisons too. I certainly don’t want to suggest that the situations are identical. But to resonate, anti-establishment Dems need a message that is also about policy and ideas, not just being pissed at the DCCC and the Democratic National Committee. But at the same time, frustration with those institutions is a real phenomenon.

micah: OK, so we disagree a little about how establishmenty/anti-establishmenty a candidate Democrats might want in 2020.

Let’s talk other candidate characteristics.

There’s been a ton of talk about women doing really well.

From ex-FiveThirtyEighter Allison McCann (though, really, once a FiveThirtyEighter, always a FiveThirtyEighter — whether you like it or not):

perry: It’s totally different to nominate a female candidate for a House race than to nominate a woman to run for president after Hillary Clinton just lost.

micah: Case in point:

micah: Isn’t there research showing that voters are more likely to vote for women for legislative offices than for executive offices?

julia_azari: Here is a study that finds that media coverage is more gendered for those offices.

perry: 2018 is shaping up as the year of female Democratic candidates. But 2020 is about picking one person. And I wonder if Democrats start looking strategically in a way that likely discriminates against female and non-white candidates. I.e., Democrats will be asking, “Who can win Obama-Trump white voters in Wisconsin?” That’s why The New York Times is writing about the mayor of South Bend maybe running for president. (What I’m saying is that I doubt The Times would write a story about a black mayor of a smallish city considering a presidential run, since Cory Booker, Kamala Harris, Eric Holder and Deval Patrick are rumored candidates. There is a bit of a media search going on for a white male candidate who is not from the coasts.)

julia_azari: People LOVE Pete Buttigieg.

perry: In other words, there will be lots more Democratic women running for president in 2020 than in 2016, just because there is no Clinton this time. She screened out lots of male and female candidates. But I’m not sure I take from 2018 that the Democrats are more likely to nominate a woman.

julia_azari: It depends somewhat on the way people interpret the 2016 loss.

Democrats could read that loss as, “People aren’t ready to vote for a woman, and we need to be ‘safe.'” (My rant about using the word “safe” that way is redacted for now.)

Or you could interpret the dynamics as fundamentally about status quo or not — and see Clinton for the unique figure she is, one who has been in the public eye for decades.

perry: But not really the way people interpret the 2016 loss, right? The consultants/donors, etc., have a big influence on who gets to the front of the line in the nomination process, and we know they are more male and white than the party overall. Some of them have concluded that it is about winning Obama-Trump voters.

micah: I guess that’s likely right, but won’t there be a hunger for a woman nominee among Democratic primary voters? Isn’t that what we’re seeing in these primaries?

perry: We could debate this for a while, but I think Conor Lamb is viewed more as a model for 2020 than Stacey Abrams among the people who matter in the Democratic Party.

julia_azari: I mean, not to be blunt, but that’s what we see in society.

micah: According to our count, woman have won ~70 percent of Democratic primaries against at least one man with no incumbent on the ballot.

julia_azari: There’s a real fever among left-leaning writers, etc., to recommend moving away from identity politics post-2016. I worry that the effect is to put white voters back at the center and neglect groups that have historically, well, been neglected.

Still, I think that there will be demand for a woman to run against Trump within the Democratic Party. Let me try to get my thoughts together about women on presidential tickets.

It is a short story of non-success. But women have been brought onto tickets at times of electoral distress. (Remember the brief Ted Cruz-Carly Fiorina ticket from 2016?)

micah: Oh what a moment that was.

julia_azari: In 1984, Democrats were facing a popular incumbent in Ronald Reagan. And they picked Geraldine Ferraro as the vice-presidential nominee to shake things up and draw attention — which she did.

In 2008, Sarah Palin was supposed to, I guess, create conservative excitement for the McCain ticket in a year when Republicans were very likely to do badly.

Hillary Clinton inevitability as president was a late-breaking narrative; otherwise, savvy observers had to know that after two terms of a Democratic president and a tepid economy, 2016 was an uphill battle for Democrats.

micah: But will 2020 be considered a time of “electoral distress” for Democrats? Won’t it be the opposite?

julia_azari: I am getting there, Micah.

micah: Sorry

julia_azari: It’s OK. I meant to warn everyone about the Hamlet-style soliloquy.

micah: lol

julia_azari: So 2020. There will be a surface narrative that what’s needed is a woman to take down Trump. But a very cynical reading of this evidence suggests that the most likely scenario for nominating a woman is a sacrificial lamb scenario, in which the party seeks these optics but is really pessimistic about its chances. Trump is an unpopular president, but incumbency is powerful.

I hope I’m wrong about this deeply cynical take.

micah: Cynicism has a good batting average in U.S. politics.

perry: I think the women winning this year are also fairly liberal, so that’s more what I take from these primaries: The party is open to liberal candidates. Abrams in Georgia, for example.

In other words, I do not expect a Democratic Leadership Council-style attempt to recenter the party during the 2020 primary.

julia_azari: Yeah, that’s a good takeaway.

perry: So I imagine it will be hard for the Steve Bullocks of the world (Bullock is the Democratic governor of Montana) — the kind of people who I expect will argue that Democrats are too left.

micah: Totally agree. You can imagine a scenario in which the party, as you both said, “moderates” (heavy scare quotes) on identity — white male — but not at all on ideology.

julia_azari: Yeah. As I pointed out on Tuesday in the live blog, support for LGBT rights doesn’t make one a radical among Democrats anymore, and the party is fairly uniformly pro-choice, though it means different things to different people. Left of the Affordable Care Act is probably the only way to run on health care. Younger voters are concerned about student debt.

micah: Any other candidate traits you’ve noticed before we move to issues/platforms?

perry: I haven’t studied this and don’t have data to back it up, but I feel like there is a generational thing going on. It seems like, Feinstein aside, the crop of Democrats winning this year is fairly young. That might be a bad sign for Biden/Sanders — the party is nominating lots of women/minorities and looking for fresher faces. (Biden is 75; Sanders is 76.)

julia_azari: Yeah. There were signs of that back in the fall — some party-building.

perry: I’m having a hard time, based on what I’m seeing now, seeing Democrats uniting around a person who is almost 80 years old.

Like, the ideal candidate might be someone who is anti-establishment and left like Sanders but not Sanders — someone who really speaks about #MeToo and Black Lives Matter and Dreamers in an articulate way. Lamb and Abrams are both strong speakers, fairly young, dynamic people.

julia_azari: My only other demographic observation is that the party seems poised to really highlight LGBT candidates. We’ll likely look back on this as a period when that really shifted in terms of representation. (Danica Roem’s national profile is an example of this.)

micah: OK, policy time!

Any thoughts about the platform that the 2020 Democratic primary will be fought over? We’ve gotten into it a little already.

perry: I don’t think the Democrats have a big divide on economic issues. The whole party is moving left, and the fight will be over, say, single-payer versus a huge expansion of Medicaid and Medicare.

And voters won’t know the difference.

julia_azari: Yeah, there’s likely to be some tortured language in the platform about single-payer.

perry: Most of these primaries have shown little in the way of policy differences.

julia_azari: I expect lots of symbolic agreement on diversity and immigration and upward mobility. The differences to be worked out in governing won’t be easy, but uniting under an electoral banner probably will be pretty straightforward.

perry: I do think there is a divide not on positions but on emphasis around, say, gun control, policing, abortion, immigration. Some of the Democratic candidates in these primaries have not been as loud and proudly liberal on these issues. I don’t think, say, Biden will say he is pro-life, but will he defend and back Planned Parenthood as strongly as Kirsten Gillibrand might?

I doubt it.

There is a core tension among Democrats over identity policy (how liberal to be on these issues) and identity in terms of the electoral coalition (is the goal to win more women, minorities, people who stayed home in 2016 or to win more Obama-Trump voters, who are mostly white).

That is a tension they are desperate to smooth over. And can’t.

micah: Do you all this Medicare-for-all will be a rallying cry or a litmus test?

perry : Medicare-for-all will be a litmus test for the most left candidates (so, say, Elizabeth Warren, Harris, Sanders), but I think Biden can avoid that and be fine.

micah: Like, to your point, Perry, I wonder if Democrats will focus on health care over, say, immigration because it plays across those divides (women/non-white voters vs. Obama-Trump voters).

perry: In the primary, they will all have the same position on health care, so I suspect there will be some incentive to be left on immigration or some other issue as a way to differentiate yourself.

Remember that Clinton sharply attacked Sanders in 2016 from the left over gun policy.

julia_azari: I’m honestly not sure how these things will play out.

The Democrats tend to have a bunch of issues that are broadly popular but have very concentrated opposition — gay rights, gun control. If the “win back Trump voters” sentiment is strong, who knows what priorities will be emphasized?

perry: This Seth Masket piece is good at capturing the Democratic divides. Like, abolishing ICE (the federal government’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) is a live issue now. I don’t know how that would work, but which Democratic 2020 candidate is going to be like, “Hey, actually, we need ICE.”

julia_azari: I can’t see too many Democratic candidates saying, “Hey, we need ICE.” But I can see people suggesting that this is a “distraction” from “jobs.”

perry: And I can see that answer not lasting for 24 months (the 2020 campaign cycle).

micah: That piece from Masket (friend of the site) is interesting: “The language may be buried within discussions about interest groups, but deciding which groups to prioritize is a strongly ideological one.”

julia_azari: I wrote a response, but it’s a little academic.

One question I posed in that piece is how the fights between the parties will affect the fights within them. Historically, they’ve mirrored very closely. But now that the parties are pretty uniform in their basic ideologies, I think that might change.

micah: OK, final thoughts …

julia_azari: I think the Democratic Party is in the fairly early stages of a pretty big transition — from a patchwork group-based party to a more clearly ideological one.

This means there are a lot of directions it could go in 2020, and it’s not clear to me how the power dynamics will work in determining who gets to shape that direction.

perry: It’s easy for a party to unite in a midterm against the other party’s incumbent president. The trouble is figuring out the rest: 2018 is just so different from 2020.

I left 2014 having watched the Republicans finally figure out how to control their nomination processes and avoid having too many people who couldn’t win the general on their tickets. Then, they nominated Trump.

Democrats have figured out a populist message that works for a more diverse slate of candidates. But I don’t know if that will survive 20 candidates in 2019 and 2020 presidential debates — with the press and Trump trying to hype up their fissures.

#IFTTT #Politics – FiveThirtyEight #politics #538 #A FiveThirtyEight Chat

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boomtick · 8 years ago

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beneath the cut: a really long post about whether or not the friendship I was in was abusive or just toxic... idk... this is just for my own sanity checking!

so to be fully honest I am not totally sure if the friendship that’s been in question recently was actually abusive, or if it just had some abusive elements... I mostly question this because when I addressed that it is really unhealthy with the person, they listened and respected that I was taking a lot of distance. like, I still don’t know if I want to continue it; I’m not personally someone who likes to give an unhealthy situation a second chance (because I have done that before and it has been Bad of course, in other situations as well as in this one).

tonight feels really peaceful and I’m happy about that, but I have to remember that it feels peaceful in part bc the person I’m kind of on the rocks with is not at home, and because I am about to tell my roommates that I want to move out.

I feel a little bit dishonest in the whole thing, because I think probably I should have told them sooner that I was leaving, but we are already having people look at the place, so I think it will be all right. like, it kind of has to be...

back to the friendship, though, I don’t think it’s wrong to pull away from something that is actively bringing up old trauma. I have mixed feelings about whether or not I owe anyone an explanation (e.g. “hi, I have been distant for so long because several of your behaviors remind me of my abusive ex and I am quick to process those kinds of instinctive feelings, so, I will be over here”) for being distant, but in this case I know that if I don’t give an explanation, I’ll be considered a bad friend.

I like... don’t know what to do really because if we didn’t live together I would just give it some space and see what we were both feeling. but we do live together and tbh whether or not we decide to try and stay friends after I move is going to be part of the Discussion...

it is true that the best apology is changed behavior, but I am not sure how much has changed and how much is temporary... like, if I were to be this distant forever, would they still want to be friends with me? is our friendship only going to remain a friendship because we are supposed to live together for another year? this is one of those things that I CAN do, I COULD do, but I don’t want to do. I don’t want to do it... and if there is one thing I learned from my household fallout, it’s that there is no point in holding on to relationships that you no longer want to be in.

also, like, the fact remains that I still don’t feel like I can bring people over to this house -- there are two people in particular who I am like “I would bring you over, BUT...” and yeah. it just really feels like I don’t truly live here. and part of that is on me -- but part of that is me seeing how my roommates respond to guests, which is, they aren’t polite afterward!! and they would get jealous if I went to hang out with other friends. not to the point of telling me I couldn’t, but like “even though we talk daily, I’m jealous that you got dinner with a friend” - ok but ??? like I spend time Very consciously with people and when I feel that I am being taken for granted in any way I pull back like I’ve touched a hot stove, lol...

plus, I have to remember that there was a period of time when every argument we had felt like the ones I used to have with my abusive ex. like I would literally look at my phone and be like “this feels just like [name redacted]”... and I haven’t felt that way since I was, like, actively being abused. like reassuring this person that I wasn’t mad took so much time... and convincing them that I still loved them... and stuff... idk. I feel strange about it because I was willing to do it at the time but at some point was like “this is so tiring!” so I recognize that I shouldn’t have even said it was okay to do that in the first place but... it’s also a manipulative behavior that they shouldn’t have done I feel...

there is one more thing I want to say, which is, my behavior in this situation is also becoming a problem. like I am not being emotionally available and I’m being really really communicatively distant (though I am... reaching out a LOT more than I used to). I have taken space without specifying that I’m going to for... weeks now... and like tbh I am not being the best friend. and if I’m not being a good friend, I think it’s only fair to admit to it... like I can recognize my behaviors... and they are the same behaviors I exhibited when my abusive relationship was about to end. (and when any relationship I’m in is ending tbh) I need to be honest and direct that I don’t want to be in this friendship right now.

I got this I got this I got this. I think... yeah. I got this. maybe? god, who knows, I have to have it.

#chitchat chitchat #like if u read pls?

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democratsunited-blog · 7 years ago

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Are There Clues About The 2020 Democratic Primary In 2018’s Contests?

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=3125

Are There Clues About The 2020 Democratic Primary In 2018’s Contests?

Welcome to FiveThirtyEight’s weekly politics chat. The transcript below has been lightly edited.

What have we learned about how the 2020 Democratic presidential primary might play out based on the 2018 primaries?

Sound good?

julia_azari (Julia Azari, political science professor at Marquette University and FiveThirtyEight contributor): 👍🏽

perry (Perry Bacon Jr., senior writer): Great.

micah: OK, so let’s break this up into two parts …

First up: candidates.

What have we learned about the type of candidate Democrats want?

(Also, something to weigh during this whole chat: How sound is this entire exercise of looking at 2018 congressional primaries for clues about the 2020 presidential primary?)

In short, Democratic voters are open to party-backed candidates.

julia_azari: Perry is right, though I would also note the many anti-Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee stories that came out of California and other places.

perry: Right. Some Democratic activists kind of hate the party. But they still listen to the party.

micah: Wait, isn’t that a little strong?

perry: Which part do you think is wrong, Micah?

micah: Not wrong, but I guess I’m trying to get a sense of degrees.

Clearly, there are anti-establishment forces in the Democratic Party.

But they’re 40 percent weaker than in the GOP?

10 percent weaker?

You know what I mean?

julia_azari: I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

I would argue that in the Democratic Party, those anti-establishment forces are more challenging to combine with a compelling policy/ideological/team-based message than in the GOP.

So, anti-establishment sentiment in the Republican Party was easily paired up with anti-Obama feelings (tea party) and anti-immigration feelings (Trump)?

What’s the comparison for anti-establishment Dems? Single-payer? Campaign finance reform?

micah: Ah, I see. That makes sense. But aren’t they still weaker than in the GOP?

The big difference is that de León does not have a Fox News/Breitbart apparatus attacking Feinstein like a Republican would have.

julia_azari: Perry, it seems like we somewhat disagree on the big picture of how strong these forces are in the Democratic Party, but the media point is a really critical one.

perry: Right. And the incumbent in that race was fairly to the right of the Democratic Party.

micah: Yeah.

But, Julia, you think those anti-establishment forces are even weaker than Perry does?

perry: I feel like I’m saying they are pretty weak in the first place.

micah: Yeah, that’s why I’m confused.

Julia thinks they’re stronger maybe?

💪

julia_azari: No, I’m saying I think we are in danger of underestimating them based on what’s still a pretty small number of observations.

micah: That’s fair.

julia_azari: Trump didn’t happen overnight. Not to toot my own horn, but my piece on Trump and Paul Ryan illustrates how these kinds of forces built up over decades in the Republican Party.

micah: 🎺

(Full disclosure/self-promotion: I am writing a book about party weakness right now, which emphasizes very long-term and slow-moving processes, including the erosion of party legitimacy.)

julia_azari: If I were Joe Biden, I would be focused on the credibility of Feinstein’s challenger, so, yeah, we disagree — though I also admit that we’re extrapolating from not much data.

She could have been treated like Bob Bennett or Richard Lugar but was not.

micah: OK, so we disagree a little about how establishmenty/anti-establishmenty a candidate Democrats might want in 2020.

Let’s talk other candidate characteristics.

There’s been a ton of talk about women doing really well.

From ex-FiveThirtyEighter Allison McCann (though, really, once a FiveThirtyEighter, always a FiveThirtyEighter — whether you like it or not):

perry: It’s totally different to nominate a female candidate for a House race than to nominate a woman to run for president after Hillary Clinton just lost.

micah: Case in point:

micah: Isn’t there research showing that voters are more likely to vote for women for legislative offices than for executive offices?

julia_azari: Here is a study that finds that media coverage is more gendered for those offices.

julia_azari: People LOVE Pete Buttigieg.

julia_azari: It depends somewhat on the way people interpret the 2016 loss.

Democrats could read that loss as, “People aren’t ready to vote for a woman, and we need to be ‘safe.’” (My rant about using the word “safe” that way is redacted for now.)