To your point, people do know they are being lied to and taken for a ride. That's why Bush/Cheney exited with approval ratings similar to syphilis. Bernie Sanders has been amongst the most popular politicians in America for years. Is it a surprise that a woman (HRC) with less charisma than Dukakis or John Kerry lost to a television performance artist who is beloved by the "Deaths of Despair" crowd and WWE fans?
As someone who has lived in both Canada and the USA and is a non-white male, who is ethnically ambiguous, your description is not the America I know. True, most Americans are affable (even when abroad and more so than Canadians), but they are not well informed nor are they cognizant on the details of why and how they have a lower average standard of living than Canada or Western Europe. (ref. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-of-life)
As far back as Tocqueville, Americas were described as pragmatic. However, I don't think that is true in a complex world, where even the president and his courtiers are woefully uninformed (and often wrong) about economics and history. Ask any American if they know what Operation Condor was or how many coups, attempted foreign state overthrows, or rigged foreign elections America has undertaken since WW2? That's not on the nightly news nor ever discussed in their joke of a K12 education system.
I'd push back on where people get their news. In Republican circles it is church, community, and usually closed networks. Yes, people can watch FOX or whatever rubbish, but it is self-enforcing peer-to-peer networks that control behavior, My friends (a Dutch and Surinamese couple) worked as chemical engineers in Oklahoma. Neither were Americans, but the locals decided that a Trump 2000 sign would do well on their front lawn without their approval.
Also, liberals aren't progressives. The former opposed MLKjr in the 60s, they supported Gulf War 1, the Iraq invasion, and for years condemned Snowden, despite court cases showing he was correct about the existence of unconstitutional global surveillance system. Biden was a weak candidate in 2020 and incompetent in 2024. Yet, how many educated and so-called informed liberals continued to support him to the end?
The divide IMO is not politics per se, but class, one's economic stability within the current system, and one's opinion on the plutocracy. That's why Jeb Bush and CEO clowns like Howard Schultz (Starbucks' CEO) got axed early.
You frame your observations as contradicting mine but I don't really see why. I mentioned cluelessness about the wider world. I didn't discuss class divides but quite agree.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. In retrospect, I think you are correct, in that the frame that you have provided is not contradictory, just different than mine.
True, you didn't discuss class. In my opinion, people self-sort and the differences between upper middle class whites and blacks, say in suburban Detroit, are not profound versus that group and low income minorities living within Detroit. I think economic issues are a stronger predictor of people's perspectives than sundry culture war boilerplate.
I'm not sure your answer really resolves the paradox, Dan. If the vast majority of Americans are moderate, middle-of-the-road Ds & Rs, much as they always have been, then why have they stopped talking politics with each other? They used to talk politics. If they are largely in agreement, and only moderately in disagreement where they do disagree, what's that harm in chatting?
I recall reading not long ago about two polls, one taken in the 1960s and the other in the 2010s, asking the same two questions. (I'm sure the polls asked more than these two questions, but these are the two that are relevant).
1. If your son / daughter wanted to marry a person of the another race, would you approve?
2. If you son / daughter wanted to marry a person of another political party, would you approve?
In the 1960s, around 90% of parents would not approve of an interracial marriage, but would approve of an inter-party marriage. In the 2010s, the numbers were reversed: around 90% of parents would approve of an interracial marriage but not an inter-party marriage. (I believe the Democrat parents were even more intolerant of inter-party marriages than Republican parents.) This suggests to me that the current political divide is greater than your observations show.
My guess is that Americans have stopped talking to strangers about politics because (i) it is futile, and (ii) they don't want to be bamboozled by zealots who have more (mis)information than they do.
One might turn the hairy eyeball to Canada, where "everything is broken" is this mantra with conservative writers, when Canada is in fact ahead of every G7 member BUT America, economically, and growing, (it's now clear) TOO fast. When your big problem is that everybody wants in, clearly, things are not that broken. (Also, there was the stellar pandemic performance.)
Reading the National Post, one might think that not just are things broken, but they're at the boarded-up-storefronts, honest merchants cowering from crime, late stage of "Atlas Shrugged", with the junkies menacing all from dark alleys. (My brother writes to me about fearing the Calgary C-train for "guys sharpening steak knives" that I just can't see, myself.)
One small complaint, comparing the briefly-popular radical hashtags on Twitter in 2020 with American conservatives, is to compare Twitter activists that don't have to stand for election, with Republicans who could proudly run for re-election on openly fascist platforms. Democratic *politicians* did not arm-wave about defunding the bastards. One can always find a similarly-extreme activist on any side. But if you compare *party* *platforms" .... there's actually no comparison.
1. Per capita GDP has been falling in Canada ever since the pandemic.
2. A majority of young people believe they will never be able to afford their own home (with considerable justification).
3. It is generally recognized that health care is collapsing in every province, regardless of which party is in power.
4. University graduation rates are now more gender-skewed than at any time since the 1970s. But today the OVER-represented gender still gets the advantage of every public program to increase their numbers further, so the trend of shutting out men will only keep increasing.
5. The federal government alone spends over $50billion per year on interest payments on the debt. This is what I like to call our Basic Income Program for Bay street banks and investors - a larger program than any other federal department.
6. Our military is an international joke, and we have no plan to build it back up to come close to satisfying our NATO commitments, even as the world becomes every more in danger of descending into another broad conflagration.
7. The federal public sector has increased by over 25% in the past few years, while services have continued to decline. (The government also spends an additional $20billion per year on outside consulting.) This is unsustainable.
8. Immigration is 100% higher than the record-high level Stephen Harper put it at in his final year in power. Non-citizen residents are at an all-time high, increasing demand on all of our infrastructure and housing stock...
9. We have by far the most corrupt government in Canadian history - even refusing to follow a Parliamentary order to turn over documents that would expose more of their corruption. (Even Nixon handed over the White House recordings when directed to do so.)
Great examples of “declinism”, which Mr. Gardner’s readers can look up on their own. For fun, though, what the heck, I’ll try answers:
Difficult for “per capita” everything to not fall when you have the highest immigration rate ever. That darn denominator!
What I believed in 1983, with interest rates hitting 19%. I was wrong.
Again, fast growth stresses services that are hard to grow.
I’m sorry you are sad about the gender ratio; but Canada still leads the G7 for “most educated work force”, and a massively skewed gender ratio in 1950 did not inhibit growth during that decade.
We’re still leading the G7 except for the USA. Every nation took on massive debt during the pandemic. Compare to UK debts.
We have not been attacked in 200 years, so at least the coasts are safe.
Debt was also described as “unsustainable” until it was needed to bail out the banks in 2009, was used, and, umm, sustained.
You’re describing immigration as an inherently bad thing. Growth without infrastructure is, but growth WITH infrastructure is…Amazon, for instance … and other great successes.
I would suggest you read some Canadian history about ‘The Family Compact’ and ‘The genesis of the railroad’, if you want to read about some real corruption in Canadian History.
1. "per capita" is the only meaningful way to measure a country's prosperity. Otherwise China and India would be whooping Canada's butt! And yes, it is in some measure a function of out-of-control immigration under Trudeau. But Canada's labour productivity - the amount of output per hour of input - is also about 50% lower than America's. Because capital accumulation and business investment have been lousy for decades. Because taxes and regulations strangle initiative. Why risk anything when the government takes away your gains, and everyone bad-mouths you for being successful?
2. The proportion of income needed to own a home today is approximately double what it was in the 1980s, Roy. Then it was around 30%, now it is around 60%. The working class - whom it sounds like you never meet - have to commute hours from the suburbs...
3. Canada hasn't experience "fast growth" in decades - except for fast growth in immigration under Trudeau. It is moronic to invite millions more people into Canada before we have built the schools, hospitals, roads, houses, etc. to accommodate them. We haven't, Roy, we haven't - and that is WHY everything feels broken in Canada. You are proving my point.
4. The systematic discrimination against males in education is an evil all on its own, regardless of its economic impact. The fact you don't see that is revealing of a moral deficiency in you, Roy.
5. America has a much higher capacity to meet its debt obligations (see point 1 above). So comparisons are tricky. Besides, the fact that most other countries are making the same mistakes as Canada is not proof that Canada is not broken. That's what you originally claimed; now you admit that Canada IS broken, just not more broken than some others. <eye roll>
6. Dan did an article a while back arguing that "our coasts are safe" isn't a valid argument anymore with modern warfare. Canada wasn't at risk of invasion in WWII or the Korean War, either, but we thought it was our duty to save the world from Nazism and communism, and maybe it still is? Do our part and all. Or maybe those suckers south of the border will do all of the heavy lifting forever, while being berated for it.
7. I didn't agree with bailing out the banks in 2009, and that was an American thing, anyway. Canada merely provided liquidity, which was recovered. You don't have to have a doctorate degree in high finance to understand that throwing $50billion a year at the Bay street billionaires is not a healthy government program. Even Jean Chretien and Paul Martin understood that much.
8. All I said was that uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable. You infer from this that I believe immigration is inherently a bad thing. That is not what I believe at all. It reveals much about you that you make such a negative and invalid inference, though. You think that anyone who disagrees with you is not only wrong, they must be morally deficient. Because you are a saint whose views on public policy are beyond reproach. That is very typical progressive inference-making. It's also very childish and tribal.
9. Again, it doesn't advance your thesis that Canada is not broken today to argue that Canada was also broken in the very distant past. The family compact and the railroad were certainly blemishes in Canadian politics, but at least things got done that are still valuable today. The $billions in disbursements from Trudeau's green slush fund have accomplished precisely nothing, except made Liberal insiders fantastically rich in very short order. Same with most of the pandemic procurements. I would suggest you take out a subscription to Blacklock's Reporter if you want to read about some real corruption in today's Ottawa - roughly five examples every week day.
I agree with your take. Which is why I favor experimenting more with sortition (selecting participants in political debates at random, somewhat like for jury duty). That could diminish the hold of extremists in some key political discussions. I don’t know if you have seen that Adam Mastroianni just published his Ideological Turing Test experiments (
https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory/note/p-150284807?r=23z3ln&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action ) which suggest that Americans may actually know pretty well what the other side is thinking (democrats masquerade successfully as republicans and vice versa). This in turn suggests that Americans have real disagreements on some fundamental values and that may explain why a whole bunch of reasonable non MAGA people will end up voting for Trump. He and his party, no matter how demented it gets, is closer to their values than democrats. People may not have strict ideologies but they have values.
Yeah, I don't get the point of that Mastroianni piece.
Nobody has suggested Democrats and Republicans are complete mysteries to each other, or that there aren't real disagreements about important issues. All that's been suggested is that how extreme Democrats and Republicans are, on issues they are well known to have feelings about, is quite exaggerated by the other camp. And I don't know what that study changes about that.
He is criticizing the types of studies you cite to support your argument. He had an hypothesis that people are not as clueless about the other side as implied by these surveys and he tested it. I am not sure either what those results mean in the broader scheme of things, and neither is he. That is the way scientists think (I know I am one). At least he is trying something different. I am not one to dismiss it out of hand.
Yeah I got that. And I'm not dismissing it out of hand. I'm simply not grasping how what he has done contradicts the other results. Maybe I'm a little thick but I'm not getting it.
• The “Donald Trump and fascism” Wikipedia page was created on September 21, 2024, the same day The Guardian published a 4,000 word essay titled, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” — and which is cited as a source in the Wikipedia article
• Contributions from just two editors comprise 91.2% of the “Donald Trump and Fascism” article’s content, suggesting a tightly coordinated effort to control the narrative
• While the “Trumpism” Wikipedia page argues that Trumpism “has significant authoritarian leanings,” describing it as “far-right,” “national-populist,” and “neo-nationalist,” it relies on a source that argues exactly the opposite
• One of the next major citations to the “Trumpism” article that claims that the movement displays “significant authoritarian leaning” is sourced to sociologist Richard Hanmann who was eulogized in 2021 as “a committed leftist, an anti-imperialist, and a true activist-scholar”
Read the full investigation from @AshleyRindsberg on Pirate Wires.
Zowie. Two people are arguably biased. Time to turn the lights off.
Or… maybe those who think this is biased — and I don’t much care for it — could go and edit it. Because that’s how Wikipedia works. You can edit it. And if you disagree with someone else, you can talk about the disagreement and see if you can find a mutually agreed way to reconcile your views.
Seems like a more productive use of your time than yanking my chain. But it’s your free time…
There's only so many times you can use the "Zowie, two people..." defense before it becomes unconvincing, Dan. And to repeat, the fact that wikipedia is "in theory" correctable does not negate that it is biased.
Grant, need I remind you it was *always* unconvincing according to you. And once again... the denominator you absolutely refuse to acknowledge is almost seven million. Seven million articles in Wikipedia. Seven. Million.
But, hey, if a critic with an obvious axe to grind finds one article he can portray as biased on an obscure conservative website, that obviously far outweighs seven million articles in the largest encyclopedia ever created by human beings. And no, of course, you wouldn't just think to yourself, "huh, I think that can be improved" and improve it yourself, because that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as nattering righteously at me.
Your observation reminds me of Susan Sontag's quote about normies reading Reader's Digest:
''Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?''
Apparently you can't. Otherwise you would not feel butthurt over someone critiquing you on the epistemological stupidity of the entire article you wrote .
Whiny self absorbed white boy who thinks he's special in the noggin when he's dumb as fuck-syndrome.
Using your own ridiculous word....an "average American" can always distort his or her "averageness" anytime they want for the most part too....as "average" is defined by your own use of the word
So, no...an "average American" can totally choose to be a fascist policy supporting voter when they relate to others in the public sphere with a smile in the voting booth and a (R) vote, using your own word "average".
I appreciate reading this. I have some extremist republicans of the type you write about in my family, and it’s far too easy to extrapolate to all conservatives/right wingers.
I’ve honestly given up on the idea that either side can “reconcile.” It’s clear there are many forces at play in the extremism of American politics (some of which were pointed out in this Substack article) and that some of these forces have been at play for a very long time. While I hope for the best, it seems like the best will not win this battle.
FWIW, my observations are very different from yours, Dan. I owned a B&B in Stratford in the 2010s, and at least 40% of my guests were Americans, mostly from the Detroit and Buffalo areas. They came to Stratford for the theatre, of course. The two most popular topics around my 8-person communal breakfast table every morning were (1) theatre, and (2) politics. Often those topics were connected, since plays typically have a political / cultural aspect and the artistic director and program writers would try to make the plays they performed "relevant" to a contemporary audience. During the Trump presidency, it was de rigeuer to present the villain of the play as a Trump-like figure. The fact that politics was such a popular topic of discussion was an annoyance to many of my colleagues in the B&B association in Stratford who disliked talking about politics. Anyway, the point is that my American guests were rarely shy about expressing their political views, or talking more broadly about the cultural controversies raging in America.
My guests, the Shakespeare theatre crowd, are not representative of Americans generally. They tended to be better educated, more cultured, more upper-middle-class, and therefore more "liberal" (in the American sense). Also, they had this idea that Canada is a great bastion of "liberalism," where they would be among fellow-travelers. I suspect they didn't expect to meet much resistance to their "liberal" views, so they spoke freely.
Meeting and talking to strangers in an airport, or at a bar, might not be representative, either. In that context, you might find it more difficult to elicit a political conversation, because nobody ever knows where that might lead, and there is no point in risking any unpleasantness.
Maybe read the piece again. There’s nothing here that contradicts what I wrote. On the last point, I didn’t say I had a hard time eliciting a conversation about politics. I said politics wouldn’t come up unless I brought it up.
Finally, an injection of sanity…
I don’t always agree with Dan Gardner, but this is logical, timely and intellectually comforting.
Fabulous observations. Thanks so much for the attempt to put some solid ground under the rolling cacophony.
Behold! Well written and thoughtful. Thank you for sharing your perspective.
To your point, people do know they are being lied to and taken for a ride. That's why Bush/Cheney exited with approval ratings similar to syphilis. Bernie Sanders has been amongst the most popular politicians in America for years. Is it a surprise that a woman (HRC) with less charisma than Dukakis or John Kerry lost to a television performance artist who is beloved by the "Deaths of Despair" crowd and WWE fans?
As someone who has lived in both Canada and the USA and is a non-white male, who is ethnically ambiguous, your description is not the America I know. True, most Americans are affable (even when abroad and more so than Canadians), but they are not well informed nor are they cognizant on the details of why and how they have a lower average standard of living than Canada or Western Europe. (ref. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/rankings/quality-of-life)
As far back as Tocqueville, Americas were described as pragmatic. However, I don't think that is true in a complex world, where even the president and his courtiers are woefully uninformed (and often wrong) about economics and history. Ask any American if they know what Operation Condor was or how many coups, attempted foreign state overthrows, or rigged foreign elections America has undertaken since WW2? That's not on the nightly news nor ever discussed in their joke of a K12 education system.
I'd push back on where people get their news. In Republican circles it is church, community, and usually closed networks. Yes, people can watch FOX or whatever rubbish, but it is self-enforcing peer-to-peer networks that control behavior, My friends (a Dutch and Surinamese couple) worked as chemical engineers in Oklahoma. Neither were Americans, but the locals decided that a Trump 2000 sign would do well on their front lawn without their approval.
Also, liberals aren't progressives. The former opposed MLKjr in the 60s, they supported Gulf War 1, the Iraq invasion, and for years condemned Snowden, despite court cases showing he was correct about the existence of unconstitutional global surveillance system. Biden was a weak candidate in 2020 and incompetent in 2024. Yet, how many educated and so-called informed liberals continued to support him to the end?
The divide IMO is not politics per se, but class, one's economic stability within the current system, and one's opinion on the plutocracy. That's why Jeb Bush and CEO clowns like Howard Schultz (Starbucks' CEO) got axed early.
You frame your observations as contradicting mine but I don't really see why. I mentioned cluelessness about the wider world. I didn't discuss class divides but quite agree.
Thank you for taking the time to reply. In retrospect, I think you are correct, in that the frame that you have provided is not contradictory, just different than mine.
True, you didn't discuss class. In my opinion, people self-sort and the differences between upper middle class whites and blacks, say in suburban Detroit, are not profound versus that group and low income minorities living within Detroit. I think economic issues are a stronger predictor of people's perspectives than sundry culture war boilerplate.
I'm not sure your answer really resolves the paradox, Dan. If the vast majority of Americans are moderate, middle-of-the-road Ds & Rs, much as they always have been, then why have they stopped talking politics with each other? They used to talk politics. If they are largely in agreement, and only moderately in disagreement where they do disagree, what's that harm in chatting?
I recall reading not long ago about two polls, one taken in the 1960s and the other in the 2010s, asking the same two questions. (I'm sure the polls asked more than these two questions, but these are the two that are relevant).
1. If your son / daughter wanted to marry a person of the another race, would you approve?
2. If you son / daughter wanted to marry a person of another political party, would you approve?
In the 1960s, around 90% of parents would not approve of an interracial marriage, but would approve of an inter-party marriage. In the 2010s, the numbers were reversed: around 90% of parents would approve of an interracial marriage but not an inter-party marriage. (I believe the Democrat parents were even more intolerant of inter-party marriages than Republican parents.) This suggests to me that the current political divide is greater than your observations show.
My guess is that Americans have stopped talking to strangers about politics because (i) it is futile, and (ii) they don't want to be bamboozled by zealots who have more (mis)information than they do.
One might turn the hairy eyeball to Canada, where "everything is broken" is this mantra with conservative writers, when Canada is in fact ahead of every G7 member BUT America, economically, and growing, (it's now clear) TOO fast. When your big problem is that everybody wants in, clearly, things are not that broken. (Also, there was the stellar pandemic performance.)
Reading the National Post, one might think that not just are things broken, but they're at the boarded-up-storefronts, honest merchants cowering from crime, late stage of "Atlas Shrugged", with the junkies menacing all from dark alleys. (My brother writes to me about fearing the Calgary C-train for "guys sharpening steak knives" that I just can't see, myself.)
One small complaint, comparing the briefly-popular radical hashtags on Twitter in 2020 with American conservatives, is to compare Twitter activists that don't have to stand for election, with Republicans who could proudly run for re-election on openly fascist platforms. Democratic *politicians* did not arm-wave about defunding the bastards. One can always find a similarly-extreme activist on any side. But if you compare *party* *platforms" .... there's actually no comparison.
Oh, my. Where to begin, Roy?
1. Per capita GDP has been falling in Canada ever since the pandemic.
2. A majority of young people believe they will never be able to afford their own home (with considerable justification).
3. It is generally recognized that health care is collapsing in every province, regardless of which party is in power.
4. University graduation rates are now more gender-skewed than at any time since the 1970s. But today the OVER-represented gender still gets the advantage of every public program to increase their numbers further, so the trend of shutting out men will only keep increasing.
5. The federal government alone spends over $50billion per year on interest payments on the debt. This is what I like to call our Basic Income Program for Bay street banks and investors - a larger program than any other federal department.
6. Our military is an international joke, and we have no plan to build it back up to come close to satisfying our NATO commitments, even as the world becomes every more in danger of descending into another broad conflagration.
7. The federal public sector has increased by over 25% in the past few years, while services have continued to decline. (The government also spends an additional $20billion per year on outside consulting.) This is unsustainable.
8. Immigration is 100% higher than the record-high level Stephen Harper put it at in his final year in power. Non-citizen residents are at an all-time high, increasing demand on all of our infrastructure and housing stock...
9. We have by far the most corrupt government in Canadian history - even refusing to follow a Parliamentary order to turn over documents that would expose more of their corruption. (Even Nixon handed over the White House recordings when directed to do so.)
I could go on.
Great examples of “declinism”, which Mr. Gardner’s readers can look up on their own. For fun, though, what the heck, I’ll try answers:
Difficult for “per capita” everything to not fall when you have the highest immigration rate ever. That darn denominator!
What I believed in 1983, with interest rates hitting 19%. I was wrong.
Again, fast growth stresses services that are hard to grow.
I’m sorry you are sad about the gender ratio; but Canada still leads the G7 for “most educated work force”, and a massively skewed gender ratio in 1950 did not inhibit growth during that decade.
We’re still leading the G7 except for the USA. Every nation took on massive debt during the pandemic. Compare to UK debts.
We have not been attacked in 200 years, so at least the coasts are safe.
Debt was also described as “unsustainable” until it was needed to bail out the banks in 2009, was used, and, umm, sustained.
You’re describing immigration as an inherently bad thing. Growth without infrastructure is, but growth WITH infrastructure is…Amazon, for instance … and other great successes.
I would suggest you read some Canadian history about ‘The Family Compact’ and ‘The genesis of the railroad’, if you want to read about some real corruption in Canadian History.
Great examples of denialism, Roy.
1. "per capita" is the only meaningful way to measure a country's prosperity. Otherwise China and India would be whooping Canada's butt! And yes, it is in some measure a function of out-of-control immigration under Trudeau. But Canada's labour productivity - the amount of output per hour of input - is also about 50% lower than America's. Because capital accumulation and business investment have been lousy for decades. Because taxes and regulations strangle initiative. Why risk anything when the government takes away your gains, and everyone bad-mouths you for being successful?
2. The proportion of income needed to own a home today is approximately double what it was in the 1980s, Roy. Then it was around 30%, now it is around 60%. The working class - whom it sounds like you never meet - have to commute hours from the suburbs...
3. Canada hasn't experience "fast growth" in decades - except for fast growth in immigration under Trudeau. It is moronic to invite millions more people into Canada before we have built the schools, hospitals, roads, houses, etc. to accommodate them. We haven't, Roy, we haven't - and that is WHY everything feels broken in Canada. You are proving my point.
4. The systematic discrimination against males in education is an evil all on its own, regardless of its economic impact. The fact you don't see that is revealing of a moral deficiency in you, Roy.
5. America has a much higher capacity to meet its debt obligations (see point 1 above). So comparisons are tricky. Besides, the fact that most other countries are making the same mistakes as Canada is not proof that Canada is not broken. That's what you originally claimed; now you admit that Canada IS broken, just not more broken than some others. <eye roll>
6. Dan did an article a while back arguing that "our coasts are safe" isn't a valid argument anymore with modern warfare. Canada wasn't at risk of invasion in WWII or the Korean War, either, but we thought it was our duty to save the world from Nazism and communism, and maybe it still is? Do our part and all. Or maybe those suckers south of the border will do all of the heavy lifting forever, while being berated for it.
7. I didn't agree with bailing out the banks in 2009, and that was an American thing, anyway. Canada merely provided liquidity, which was recovered. You don't have to have a doctorate degree in high finance to understand that throwing $50billion a year at the Bay street billionaires is not a healthy government program. Even Jean Chretien and Paul Martin understood that much.
8. All I said was that uncontrolled immigration is unsustainable. You infer from this that I believe immigration is inherently a bad thing. That is not what I believe at all. It reveals much about you that you make such a negative and invalid inference, though. You think that anyone who disagrees with you is not only wrong, they must be morally deficient. Because you are a saint whose views on public policy are beyond reproach. That is very typical progressive inference-making. It's also very childish and tribal.
9. Again, it doesn't advance your thesis that Canada is not broken today to argue that Canada was also broken in the very distant past. The family compact and the railroad were certainly blemishes in Canadian politics, but at least things got done that are still valuable today. The $billions in disbursements from Trudeau's green slush fund have accomplished precisely nothing, except made Liberal insiders fantastically rich in very short order. Same with most of the pandemic procurements. I would suggest you take out a subscription to Blacklock's Reporter if you want to read about some real corruption in today's Ottawa - roughly five examples every week day.
I could go on....
I agree with your take. Which is why I favor experimenting more with sortition (selecting participants in political debates at random, somewhat like for jury duty). That could diminish the hold of extremists in some key political discussions. I don’t know if you have seen that Adam Mastroianni just published his Ideological Turing Test experiments (
https://substack.com/@experimentalhistory/note/p-150284807?r=23z3ln&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action ) which suggest that Americans may actually know pretty well what the other side is thinking (democrats masquerade successfully as republicans and vice versa). This in turn suggests that Americans have real disagreements on some fundamental values and that may explain why a whole bunch of reasonable non MAGA people will end up voting for Trump. He and his party, no matter how demented it gets, is closer to their values than democrats. People may not have strict ideologies but they have values.
Yeah, I don't get the point of that Mastroianni piece.
Nobody has suggested Democrats and Republicans are complete mysteries to each other, or that there aren't real disagreements about important issues. All that's been suggested is that how extreme Democrats and Republicans are, on issues they are well known to have feelings about, is quite exaggerated by the other camp. And I don't know what that study changes about that.
He is criticizing the types of studies you cite to support your argument. He had an hypothesis that people are not as clueless about the other side as implied by these surveys and he tested it. I am not sure either what those results mean in the broader scheme of things, and neither is he. That is the way scientists think (I know I am one). At least he is trying something different. I am not one to dismiss it out of hand.
Yeah I got that. And I'm not dismissing it out of hand. I'm simply not grasping how what he has done contradicts the other results. Maybe I'm a little thick but I'm not getting it.
• The “Donald Trump and fascism” Wikipedia page was created on September 21, 2024, the same day The Guardian published a 4,000 word essay titled, “Is Donald Trump a Fascist?” — and which is cited as a source in the Wikipedia article
• Contributions from just two editors comprise 91.2% of the “Donald Trump and Fascism” article’s content, suggesting a tightly coordinated effort to control the narrative
• While the “Trumpism” Wikipedia page argues that Trumpism “has significant authoritarian leanings,” describing it as “far-right,” “national-populist,” and “neo-nationalist,” it relies on a source that argues exactly the opposite
• One of the next major citations to the “Trumpism” article that claims that the movement displays “significant authoritarian leaning” is sourced to sociologist Richard Hanmann who was eulogized in 2021 as “a committed leftist, an anti-imperialist, and a true activist-scholar”
Read the full investigation from @AshleyRindsberg on Pirate Wires.
Zowie. Two people are arguably biased. Time to turn the lights off.
Or… maybe those who think this is biased — and I don’t much care for it — could go and edit it. Because that’s how Wikipedia works. You can edit it. And if you disagree with someone else, you can talk about the disagreement and see if you can find a mutually agreed way to reconcile your views.
Seems like a more productive use of your time than yanking my chain. But it’s your free time…
There's only so many times you can use the "Zowie, two people..." defense before it becomes unconvincing, Dan. And to repeat, the fact that wikipedia is "in theory" correctable does not negate that it is biased.
Grant, need I remind you it was *always* unconvincing according to you. And once again... the denominator you absolutely refuse to acknowledge is almost seven million. Seven million articles in Wikipedia. Seven. Million.
But, hey, if a critic with an obvious axe to grind finds one article he can portray as biased on an obscure conservative website, that obviously far outweighs seven million articles in the largest encyclopedia ever created by human beings. And no, of course, you wouldn't just think to yourself, "huh, I think that can be improved" and improve it yourself, because that wouldn't be nearly as much fun as nattering righteously at me.
Yeah it’s all mostly noise. I’ve driven around over half the country now and it’s all pretty normal.
Your observation reminds me of Susan Sontag's quote about normies reading Reader's Digest:
''Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader's Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or The New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?''
https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-communism.html
Apparently you can't. Otherwise you would not feel butthurt over someone critiquing you on the epistemological stupidity of the entire article you wrote .
Whiny self absorbed white boy who thinks he's special in the noggin when he's dumb as fuck-syndrome.
Speak to a therapist, friend. You have issues.
Wasteland of fucking words.
There's no "Average American"
Only median American voter.
Using your own ridiculous word....an "average American" can always distort his or her "averageness" anytime they want for the most part too....as "average" is defined by your own use of the word
So, no...an "average American" can totally choose to be a fascist policy supporting voter when they relate to others in the public sphere with a smile in the voting booth and a (R) vote, using your own word "average".
You want to make a critical comment? I’ll listen. You want to do the verbal equivalent of spitting on me, there’s the door.
The world has more than enough nastiness, friend. Let’s not add to the stockpile.
Says the self absorbed rectum sniffer.
Appreciate the view from the other side of the medicine line.
I appreciate reading this. I have some extremist republicans of the type you write about in my family, and it’s far too easy to extrapolate to all conservatives/right wingers.
I’ve honestly given up on the idea that either side can “reconcile.” It’s clear there are many forces at play in the extremism of American politics (some of which were pointed out in this Substack article) and that some of these forces have been at play for a very long time. While I hope for the best, it seems like the best will not win this battle.
FWIW, my observations are very different from yours, Dan. I owned a B&B in Stratford in the 2010s, and at least 40% of my guests were Americans, mostly from the Detroit and Buffalo areas. They came to Stratford for the theatre, of course. The two most popular topics around my 8-person communal breakfast table every morning were (1) theatre, and (2) politics. Often those topics were connected, since plays typically have a political / cultural aspect and the artistic director and program writers would try to make the plays they performed "relevant" to a contemporary audience. During the Trump presidency, it was de rigeuer to present the villain of the play as a Trump-like figure. The fact that politics was such a popular topic of discussion was an annoyance to many of my colleagues in the B&B association in Stratford who disliked talking about politics. Anyway, the point is that my American guests were rarely shy about expressing their political views, or talking more broadly about the cultural controversies raging in America.
My guests, the Shakespeare theatre crowd, are not representative of Americans generally. They tended to be better educated, more cultured, more upper-middle-class, and therefore more "liberal" (in the American sense). Also, they had this idea that Canada is a great bastion of "liberalism," where they would be among fellow-travelers. I suspect they didn't expect to meet much resistance to their "liberal" views, so they spoke freely.
Meeting and talking to strangers in an airport, or at a bar, might not be representative, either. In that context, you might find it more difficult to elicit a political conversation, because nobody ever knows where that might lead, and there is no point in risking any unpleasantness.
Maybe read the piece again. There’s nothing here that contradicts what I wrote. On the last point, I didn’t say I had a hard time eliciting a conversation about politics. I said politics wouldn’t come up unless I brought it up.