Mourning in America - Trump Year One: November '16 to

second "they" supposed to be "they're" xp

afaict HOOS is unceasingly cultivating disciples

How is this "the left"? The people I know pushing the faithless elector thing are all mainstream democrats. The lefties I know are rolling their eyes at people for seeking deus ex machina solutions.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive)

ok, if it's important for you to draw sharp distinctions between the democratic party and the left, substitute "mainstream democrats" if you like. my experience is that the differences on this issue aren't necessarily drawn around how far left you are, and i was using "left" as a big tent term. it wasn't the main point in any event. i'm profoundly disinterested in assigning blame for perceived "failures" that in reality make no difference to anyone.

this was the center, just like it's the center that's now screaming that the election was scripted in the kremlin. in their grief they seem determined to stamp out the last embers of public faith in democratic institutions at the precise moment all of them have been seized by fascists. i don't know what they think they doing. xp.

― difficult listening hour

well, it's either that or spend a great deal of effort trying to salvage basically unsalvageable institutions. come on, people, are we really going to spend the next four years doing nothing but complaining about the rump of the democratic party while trump gets to do whatever the fuck he wants?

who has said that?

most of us are saying that subverting the anachronistic but constitutionally empowered Electoral College plays into the general decay of institutions that would delight the Grover Norquists and Koch Brothers.

The people I know pushing the faithless elector thing are all mainstream democrats.

the people i know pushing the faithless elector thing are all people who have been (understandably) tremendously psychically damaged by this election, they aren't necessarily "mainstream democrats"

Our institutions are not "unsalvageable" at all, that's silly. I mean Trump may damage them a lot further, maybe they'll get there, but acting like they're already there is pathetic defeatism.

most of us are saying that subverting the anachronistic but constitutionally empowered Electoral College plays into the general decay of institutions that would delight the Grover Norquists and Koch Brothers.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 11:50 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is also extremely silly. Hillary lost the states she needed to win the electoral college by very small margins. There is really no reason why Democrats can't win in the electoral college. The system is irretrievably broken because we don't like the result.

i'm profoundly disinterested in assigning blame for perceived "failures" that in reality make no difference to anyone.

i don't know what to tell you. there are different political factions in this country and they have different ideas about what is happening and what to do about it. in my own experience the people who spent the last couple weeks crossing their fingers republicans would inexplicably vote themselves out of power have not been marxists. i think the next four years look worse for us if those are the sorts of schemes we can expect from our leaders.

spend a great deal of effort trying to salvage basically unsalvageable institutions

the creepingly general idea that america's institutions are "unsalvagable" is terrifying in this climate.

This is also extremely silly. Hillary lost the states she needed to win the electoral college by very small margins. There is really no reason why Democrats can't win in the electoral college. The system is irretrievably broken because we don't like the result.

Yes yes yes

I agree with that! 2016 was not 1984 or 1988.

OMB Director is an anti-Fed Bircher. Should go well.

If we want to eliminate the electoral college, then work to generate enthusiasm for an amendment. People still too psychically damaged by the election should get a hobby if they don't intend to help .

don't think abolishing the EC is going to do much, but enforcing the actual Constitution might. we're about to bestow the highest office in the land to a known con man who has disclosed nothing about his many businesses, investments, or debts, who has no real plan to divest himself of any of it, and who is already using the office for self-enrichment.

Our institutions are not "unsalvageable" at all, that's silly. I mean Trump may damage them a lot further, maybe they'll get there, but acting like they're already there is pathetic defeatism.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive)

defeatism! i'm proposing the opposite of defeatism. i'm proposing that we let go of the delusion that our institutions are going to save us. i'm proposing that we look at what happened in north carolina, look at the fact that we live in a country where a police officer can shoot a black man in the back anywhere, at any time, for any reason, and not have to answer to the law for it.

the american system was designed, in large part, to prevent a fascist demagogue from taking office. that system hasn't failed since 1828, and the last time it failed it led to civil war. fixing the problems requiring acknowledging the full extent of those problems.

Has the imperial presidency (and its attendant undeclared wars of the last 70 years, with the Forever War bill of Sept 2001 as the cherry on top) officially ascended to "institution"?

most of us are saying that subverting the anachronistic but constitutionally empowered Electoral College plays into the general decay of institutions that would delight the Grover Norquists and Koch Brothers.

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 11:50 AM (two minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is also extremely silly. Hillary lost the states she needed to win the electoral college by very small margins. There is really no reason why Democrats can't win in the electoral college. The system is irretrievably broken because we don't like the result.

― the last famous person you were surprised to discover was actually (man alive), Tuesday, December 20, 2016 11:53 AM (twenty-six minutes ago)

eh gotta split with you here -- the system is broken because the EC is dumb and fundamentally unjust

dlh otm upthread tho

don't think abolishing the EC is going to do much

uh, you're aware that all the republican presidents of the past 25 years have won precisely because the EC exists?

Dems gotta be willing to fight fire with fire if they want anything to happen. Obama played nice and reached across the aisle and look where he wound up, with Republican FBI Director James Comey. They need to confirm Garland NOW - I'm glad they're trying to respect our institutions but those institutions reward those who are nasty. They can no longer assume good intentions out of anyone in the GOP.

it's not just bad luck that it happened to hurt us the last two times it's been an issue. the EC as constructed specifically hurts the democrats, and it will continue to do so for as long as we remain a predominantly urban party

Dems could also improve their messaging to the "flyover states" which consistently vote against their own self-interest, I suppose

don't get me wrong the EC is dumb but we all knew the game going in. complaining about it afterwards is the sort of thing Trump would do.

well yeah not getting out the vote in states like WI/MI/PA is specifically clinton's fault for sure

electoral college is obv dumb and while it looks like we lost 00 and 16 because of it mostly due to unhappy accident, if the midwest keeps turning red we could be in a position where it's actually kinda fixed against us for an extended period.

but getting rid of it is not in the realm of the possible, especially not anytime soon. the only way I see it going away is if both dems and republicans feel like they're getting burned by it, like if the gop loses the next 2 elections in a row while winning the popular vote we could be in a place where *everyone* kinda resents the electoral college and small states / swing states might overlook the fact that they actually benefit from it.

EC is dumb and fundamentally unjust i agree but i'm skeptical of attempts to end it or undermine it by NPVIC, they seem somewhat futile when one party that happens to have overwhelming political power in both federal and state govts continues to benefit from it. i mean NPVIC is a start but what happens when red states don't care about it? what do you suggest doing about the EC?

iatee otm

yup, correct

I mean how about we petition to end the senate too, it's even more unjust!

You think the EC gives disproportionate power? Wyoming gets the same number of senators as California!

Next time we have congress we should really make DC a state. Maybe split California in two while we're at it.

yeah the electoral college gets things right most of the time anyway, whereas the senate (and even the house) are democratically unrepresentative 100% of the time

smashing the so-called leadership of the Democratic Party would work better, thankyaverymuch

http://i.imgur.com/mhfMarg.jpg

Can't top that today. I think we're done here.

reserved for moments when someone gets irritated because what went wrong during the 2016 U.S. election is being debated in the 2016 U.S. election thread

i found its applicability broader :(

lol

maybe, in some ways, we are all scheduled to be next week's leader of the discussion at the Thompson County Book Club

This is maybe a small point but nothing about asking electors to be faithless is subverting the Constitution - tho it may well be a futile expenditure of energy. For better or worse the intended model was that the electors would make individual decisions - that's what people elected them for. The Framers were hoping they could actually escape from political parties altogether and would have been surprised to find them enshrined by state law as part of the EC system. Obv the Constitution is a living document etc etc but while the EC not living up to the election-night expectations might provoke a political shitstorm it really would not be doing something outside of its institutional or constitutional bounds.

Can we close this thread? Too long and psychically damaging.

well yeah not getting out the vote in states like WI/MI/PA is specifically clinton's fault for sure

― k3vin k., Tuesday, December 20, 2016 12:33 PM (fifteen minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Losing Michigan by like 25% of a sold-out Detroit Tigers game is pretty inexcusable. Hell, the PA/MI/WI margin was one (1) Ohio State football game's worth of people.

It didn't take long for the Framers to figure out that the electors weren't being the independent critical thinkers the Constitution purportedly envisioned though

well now that we know the electors aren't going to defect on someone who is in clear violation of the Constitution it's probably a good time to have the discussion of why we need the EC anymore. even though it's somewhat fair and usually gets it right, a system that incentivizes candidates to campaign in and tailor their platform for 6-7 states, and effectively prevents 80% of the country's vote from "mattering" is kinda flawed, no?

everyone here agrees it's unfair

The counterargument you'll get from that though is that it will simply reverse the situation and candidates will campaign mostly in CA, NY, FL, TX and a few other urban enclaves, ignoring the rest of the country. It's an argument I don't happen to buy for a variety of reasons, but it's one opponents of eliminating the EC will make while relying heavily on "baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and Chevrolet" imagery that still sells.

electoral college is obv dumb and while it looks like we lost 00 and 16 because of it mostly due to unhappy accident, if the midwest keeps turning red we could be in a position where it's actually kinda fixed against us for an extended period.

but getting rid of it is not in the realm of the possible

― iatee

all right, let's hold it there.

one, "unhappy accident" is garbage, there has been a concerted effort by the republican party for the past 16 years to undermine democracy, suppress voter turnout, etc. not the main point, though.

two, we want to increase engagement in the democratic system? we just had an election where the two leading candidates were the most hated man in america and the most hated woman in america. the most hated man in america, a self-confessed serial sexual abuser, lost by several million votes and won the election.

and now people are saying "well maybe we shouldn't have a system where someone who loses the popular vote by several million votes doesn't wind up winning the election", and our response is to what, say, how naive, and start educating them about realpolitik?

how is this not the politics of futility in action? should we perhaps consider basing our politics first off in what is right, and using that appeal to galvanize involvement?

yeah, it's not going to be accomplished immediately, and if we set it out as an immediate objective you're going to generate tons of disillusion and failure, but this, i would say, makes a really great galvanizing long-term goal. it has an immediate and broad appeal to say that the president should be the person who wins the most votes. why on earth, when faced with people speaking out about what they want, is our first reaction to tell them why it's not _possible_?

there are no long-term goals.

Focusing on a hard to achieve long term goal is one thing. Doing that with no mechanism in mind for achieving it is another. The only remotely feasible way to change the electoral college is to win back enough state legislatures to pass NPV in states totaling 270 electoral votes (or the even harder road of winning back enough state legislatures to amend the constitution).

If you think you can use the electoral college as an issue to organize people to turn out in off-year elections to vote out republican state legislators, I'm all for it. What concerns me is vague ideas about what should change with no strategy.

BUT, caveat, you're talking about a massive effort to change what seems unfair to us "right now" because it just produced a result we don't like, when there's nothing stopping us from just fighting a better fight under the current rules, and when, if we do change the rules, the GOP will change their strategy to match anyway. Hillary Clinton's campaign practically acted as though national popular vote was already a reality and the electoral college was already gone.

I mean, yeah, maybe midterm campaigns could focus on that. Maybe prospective state legislators could campaign on promising to introduce "fair elections" legislation that would make sure presidential votes "reflect the will of the people" or something.

yeah, it's not going to be accomplished immediately, and if we set it out as an immediate objective you're going to generate tons of disillusion and failure, but this, i would say, makes a really great galvanizing long-term goal. it has an immediate and broad appeal to say that the president should be the person who wins the most votes. why on earth, when faced with people speaking out about what they want, is our first reaction to tell them why it's not _possible_?

because you have to get people who currently are winning elections off this system and states that greatly benefit from its existence on board, not just people who are pissed off and disillusioned