Since you are reading why nations fail I would like to recommend a pairing. How democracies die by Daniel Ziblatt and Steven Levitsky. The central thesis here is parties are the gatekeepers of democracies and when they put party before nation they erode the democracy that eventually fails. More often it’s a slow degrade than a sudden spectacular collapse. The erosion paves way for leaders that are more “spectacular” in every negative way than the last one. Makes you think if trump is the problem or merely a symptom. GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers. His presidency will lead to future leaders justifying behaving like him or worse and the “norm” Keeps degrading over time to the point where people are fed up and bring into power a person that they don’t fully understand and one who plays to their fears and portrays themself as their only solution. The book is amazing to read specially with the context of last 4 - 6 years of American politics.
>GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers.
Trump won the primary because he took positions that closely follow the article being discussed here, anti-war, anti-outsourcing (additionally he took an anti-immigration position) while all of the other 18 GOP candidates had the same pro-war, pro-free trade, pro-immigration positions that the party gatekeepers (big donors) favor.
I think Ziblatt and Levitsky don't like that voters agree more with Marc Andreessen and what Trump said in the campaign.
EDIT: People didn't elect Trump because they trust the gatekeepers and were tricked by them. They elected him because he was the only candidate who promised to do what the people wanted who was able to _go around_ the gatekeepers by financing his own campaign. We wouldn't be on the road to neo-Hitler if the gatekeepers allowed sane people with popular opinions into the major parties, but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars, raising wages, lowering corporate profits, and ending the cheap labor glut in ways that will seriously dent the fortunes and power of the gatekeepers.
> but that would mean ending the middle eastern wars
Do you want the terrorists to win? >:|
It is a remarkable bellweather of US politics that despite being a relatively peaceful polity the voting public have been unable to drag the country out of a permanent state of expensive and wasteful war. I think both Trump and Obama campaigned as pro-peace candidates so it is a presumably a popular position with voters.
US foreign policy is almost inexplicable when it comes to war. The death, destruction and raising a generation Middle Easterners with excellent motivation to hate America seems like a foolish long term strategy. It also doesn't look profitable.
> US foreign policy is almost inexplicable when it comes to war. The death, destruction and raising a generation Middle Easterners with excellent motivation to hate America seems like a foolish long term strategy. It also doesn't look profitable.
Not for the U.S., not for its citizens, but for a certain set of people the constant war is very profitable. And I think you'll find that those that profit from war have considerable influence over the foreign policy that keeps us in constant war.
War is profitable to energy sector (XLE), aerospace & defense (ITA, XAR). It is profitable to states where oil production is dominant (gulf states, some parts of the midwest). There are many oil billionaires in the states.
Donald Trump was not the only GOP candidate, and he was the candidate with the least internal party support.
>Trump used ideas of populism to persuade the average American throughout the election process.[139] In mid-September, the first two major candidates dropped out of the race.
Very convenient way for party insiders to justify coronation of their preferred candidates regardless of "benefit to the nation." This same line of "gatekeeper" reasoning is exactly what justifies polling locations being closed and reopened elsewhere without notifying voters, years-long revolving door media propaganda campaigns, and accusing everyone who disagrees of being a Russian asset. The Republicans and Democrats alike are guilty of such behavior.
I too believe Trump is a symptom, not from lack/failure of gatekeeping, but rather the act of gatekeeping itself. I think the general public is (subconsciously or not) aware that these party insiders view themselves as "gatekeepers" and are anxious to "stick it to them" even if it comes at their own demise. Whether or not you agree or disagree with them, the issue here is that their trust in what they viewed as democracy was already eroded. This is probably reflected through the terribly small number of working class voters who participate in the political process.
“ The Republicans and Democrats alike are guilty of such behavior.”
This isn’t a useful line of thinking. We can and should draw distinctions between the two parties. They aren’t the same. Pretending they are just muddies the waters.
>GOP put party win before a nation by agreeing to nominate an unfit individual for office. They failed as gatekeepers.
Why do we want corrupt politicians as "gatekeepers" to anything? The Democrats did a fine job "gatekeeping" Sanders from the 2016 and 2020 nomination, to what end?
By the way, nothing will ever get done in the US until the bitter partisanship ceases. Most of what both parties do is political theatre.
> The Democrats did a fine job "gatekeeping" Sanders from the 2016 and 2020 nomination, to what end?
I don't understand this perspective. Sanders lost because he lost primary elections. That happened because democrats didn't believe in him as a candidate. Many of us have been steadfast in our disbelief for years due only to listening to what he himself says about what he wants to do. Why discredit our opinions this way?
Sorry, but if you don't think the entire Democratic machine has been working against a Sanders win for 5 years, you haven't been doing enough research. I know you don't like him, and you are 100% entitled to dislike and vote against him - but to pretend that he lost only because he wasn't popular enough is pretty blind to how our democracy runs.
Not having enough support is the only reason he lost. The DNC didn't go in and tamper votes.
I've seen many sanders supporters get upset over things that they perceive as unfair like how candidates dropped out to stop splitting the vote.
Every single candidate has had complaints about being treated unfairly. People were calling joe's campaign dead in the water. Yang got upset enough that he called out networks in a very public manner.
And yea, Sanders wasn't supported by the establishment. But like we've seen with Trump, the establishment doesn't matter if the candidate has real support. Obama was a no name senator that beat the most establishment character ever because he had that support.
Sanders had a lot of problems as a candidate, and those are the real reasons that he lost rather than conspiracy theories about machinations by the elite.
Was "the democratic machine" casting ballots in the primaries? Were they controlling the minds of the people who did? The "republican machine" tried to stop Trump and failed, because at the end of the day people voted for Trump in the primaries. He was popular in a way that Sanders wasn't.
In the gatekeepers' perspective, it was to postpone discussions on policies that would be extremely difficult to implement well. If the Republicans had done their job as well like usual, we wouldn't end up in this awkward situation of having an unpresidential president, but here we are. Freedom has a funny way of getting what it wants, like water flowing downhill.
From the non-gatekeepers' perspective, the difficulty of policy implementation does not matter when the policies themselves are ineffective and only serve to maintain status quo financial structures, which benefit the wealthy often at the expense of the most vulnerable.
What specifically makes the president unpresidential as opposed to other presidents? Is it removals as a percentage of the estimated illegal immigrant population? The dramatic expansion of the power of the executive branch into the realm of national security? Number of U.S. citizens executed without trial? Those are all things which happened under previous presidencies.
> If the Republicans had done their job as well like usual
Is it really fair to argue that gatekeepers are effective if they failed to do what you view as their jobs? "If it wasn't for those meddling Republicans!"
My point was to illustrate that previous presidents have also done things which could be considered unpresidential depending on your opinion. Unless I'm missing some official definition of presidential, these are all things that you personally believe are unpresidential. I'm not saying I disagree with you, but things like "never takes the high road" sound a bit biased.
I agree that "presidential behavior" is a subjective term. Doesn't make it useless - just subjective.
Are you arguing the counter, that his personal behavior is in any way laudable? Do you think he's a good role model, and would want your children to emulate his behavior?
> Are you arguing the counter, that his personal behavior is in any way laudable? Do you think he's a good role model, and would want your children to emulate his behavior?
I don't have to think that he's a good role model to think that previous presidents have also violated human rights and eroded freedoms.
edmundsauto nailed it in the unpresidential comment.
I wasn't complaining about the gatekeepers failing, just trying to share their perspective for those who might not understand.
FWIW, I think the best outcome would have been to deny Trump at the gate, and instead find a candidate who could get those policies done without being a danger to democracy.
> FWIW, I think the best outcome would have been to deny Trump at the gate, and instead find a candidate who could get those policies done without being a danger to democracy.
The problem is that's anti-democratic because many of those gatekeepers are appointed rather than elected. At that point the gatekeepers may as well directly decide who the president is, because it has already been chosen regardless.
