We have some genuine good news tonight—though it was a close call:
Voters in Brazil on Sunday ousted President Jair Bolsonaro after just one term and elected the leftist former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to replace him, election officials said, a rebuke to Mr. Bolsonaro’s far-right movement and his divisive four years in office.
....He won 50.90 percent of the votes, versus Mr. Bolsonaro’s 49.10 percent with 99.98 percent of the vote counted Sunday night.
Lula seemingly had a bigger early lead than this, but apparently it withered away as the election neared. That's not very heartening, but at least he still won.
So let's see. Brexit was 52-48. Trump 2016 was a 46-48 squeaker. Lula 2022 clocked in at 51-49. I remember the year 2000 when the United States officially became a 50-50 nation, and we've stayed that way ever since. I guess now we're a 50-50 world.
Except in China, of course. I hear that Xi Jinping won his third term by a resounding margin. Popular guy!
We are not a 50-50 nation. Biden won the popular vote 51.3% - 46.9%. Even Brazil seems to have more sense to rely on popular vote rather than our electoral vote nonsense. And they seem to count their votes without much trouble, and fast.
Brazil does 100% electronic voting.
Hey wait, I missed this. Kevin is wrong. In 2016, Trump LOST by 46% to 48% for Clinton. The popular vote is the only Minority that Trump appreciates.
Tsk. 2016 was 48% Hillary, 46% Trump, not vice versa.
Imagine if Russia hadn't invaded Ukraine and instead bent all it's resources to crush Lula?
I'm seeing ads saying Biden is spending too much money helping Ukraine and not on helping US. I wonder where that PAC got its money....
And guess which party is currently blocking the transfer of asset forfeiture from seized oligarch property to aid Ukraine? So clearly it's not just an issue of the US spending too much aid money, but that Ukraine is the recipient.
Since the Republican Party started calling itself the "Reds", they've apparently decided to go all the way.
Well, I knew Elon would ruin Twitter but I didn’t expect it to happen this quickly. Now the question is: does he take Tesla, Space X and Spacelink down with it? The Lula victory suggests the answer is yes, the time of the right wing blowhards is over.
Starlink, that shoulda been.
This assertion is going to age about as well as Gothmog in Return of the King saying the age of men is over.
So far, so good.
Isn’t Ted Cruz proof that the age of men is over.
He is definitely proof, yet again, that Ivy League educations are over rated.
+!
Twitter was already pretty shitty. I'm not sure it's any worse.
Good point.
Well, and the thing is, based on my experience, their algorithm will generally try to show you only Tweets you want to see. And it's very easy to mute and/or block unwelcome users. So I'm not sure even an upsurge in right wing agitprop will really do all that much to worsen the experience of the average person using that site.
I may stop using them just on principle, though. We'll see. I think allowing Trump back on the site (if that's what Musk decides) is indefensible from an ethical standpoint, even though such a move might well help Democrats. I also have to say I dislike Musk a little bit more every time I hear about him. His recent Tweet on the Paul Pelosi matter was jaw-droppingly disgusting. Musk is a vile pig IMHO.
Yeah, and if you think about how people think about the WSJ post-Murdoch acquisition (right wing rag) vs how they thought about it before Murdoch (fantastic newspaper), it's possible that's how things will go for Twitter. Fun place to follow a bunch of witty writers vs. the new improved 4 Chan.
I read this morning that Musk is planning to charge Twits $20/mo. That's more than I pay for access to NYT, WaPo, and the local paper. Plus, I get real information and long-form news.
Yet another example of a right-wing vendor I can't boycott because I never used it in the first place.
I listened to a podcast the other day with retired general Stan McChrystal and the conversation turned inevitably towards the rise of authoritarianism, which he said they has been tracking globally for the past 20 years. The expectation seems to be that we have another decade before this passes.
Would love to know more from subject matter experts on why we're seeing this everywhere. Is it the uncertainty created a global economy and social recruitment of discontents who are feeling left behind? Too much change, too fast?
This would be an interesting topic for Kevin to take on.
It's because change is hitting humans too fast and Russia is really good at setting people off.
My theory is that the entire Republican Party is a symptom of mass future shock.
J. M. Keynes took on this very subject nearly a hundred years ago:
From "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren" (1930)
Social conservatives are left near hysterical at the thought they may not be able to capitalize on scarcity, genuine or artificially created.
The right-wing surge seems to be ebbing. Bolsonaro lost, Trump lost, Netanyahu lost, the Tories will be crushed in the next election (do your duty, King Charles, and force it!), and Putin has destroyed his entire country. China is going autocratic at just the time when its growth has stalled, and their neighbors all hate them. They're looking less like the rival superpower and more like a one-off spurt when they finally industrialized, just like Japan. Even the theocrats in Iran are in trouble. People look at Hong Kong and what's happening in Ukraine, and see how much they really want liberal democracy.
Don't forget those referenda in Ukraine about joining Russia. 98% YES in most regions and a stunning 99.23% in one of them.
Nothing 50 - 50 there! (Because Putin won't allow it.)
Always found it curious that authoritarians think a totally nonsensical 99% YES vote is more convincing than just claiming a remotely possible 75 or 80%. Don't know if it's their egos or just that they are so unfamiliar with the way real elections go.
The numbers are intentionally obvious fabrigated (i.e. the fabrication is always obvious), and the intention is to demonstrate that they fabricate as much as they want and the population must accept it.
This!
They don’t have to care and they’re letting you know it.
I think they're attempting erase the appearance that even the slightest degree of internal dissent or disagreement might exist, and they're likely calculating (correctly or not) that most of the people aren't sophisticated enough to perceive the implausibility of the results.
I suspect that even Donald Trump on his worst day couldn't be so dumb as to believe he could fool people with that kind of b.s.
And I'm pretty sure Putin is WAY smarter than The Donald.
I wasn't referring specifically to the situation in Eastern Ukraine, but rather to the claim about "authoritarians." Moreover, I used the modifier "most"— and that could mean as little as 51%. My direct experience living in a totalitarian country is that residents of democracies underestimate the effectiveness of censorship and state monopolization of the news. A lot of people (no, not an overwhelming majority, but I suspect more than half) in such countries genuinely don't have a firm grip on reality: how could they? State-owned media won't give them the truth. Also, the vote siding with the government (no matter issue) in many cases likely does win by a giant landslide, because voters fear the consequences of a "no" vote.
They may also think their vote can never be truly secret and the authorities may use it against them.
Exactly. It's not so much the margin that is questionable (although in some cases it probably is). Rather, it's the fact that the process isn't fair, and there's no legitimate ballot secrecy.
I think you misunderestimate both of them. I think both of them are dumb enough and vain enough to believe virtually every flattering lie told to them by the sycophants with which they surround themselves.
I thought I had read somewhere that security forces were interfering with the voter turnout in an area where Lula is Particularly popular. So, Lula actually would have won by more.
I've obsessed over this phenomenon. Why on earth are our elections so closely divided? A tempting hypothesis is that the two parties naturally establish their ideological positions to approach a center point in public opinion, which is more or less fixed. But this doesn't add up because public opinion is not necessarily based on what is true -- it's based on what they believe is true. Nor is it based on the entirety of available information -- it's based on the portion of that body of information that's been presented to them.
Most voting-age Americans get these inputs from media, whether it's radio, TV, or social media. So I propose that this nearly 50:50 split is created BY media. Whichever party seems to be slightly up, media tend to push back on that party more than on the "underdog" because of their belief that it's their proper role. Add to that the fact that commercial media depend on advertising revenue as their very lifeblood, and the closer the two parties are in polling during election season, the more they will spend on political advertising in their desperate bid to eke out a win, and the more their donors will shower money on them to get that result.
This does not have to be some kind of explicit media conspiracy, but an instinctive bias, supercharged by the financial incentives to maximize advertising revenue. My conclusion: our razor-thin electoral margins are a result of media bias, but not an ideological bias but a bias in favor of keeping the electoral balance as close to 50:50 as possible. And it's what keeps us from ever achieving any kind of stable good government.
It's the media bias, but not the one anyone thinks.
I’m convinced it’s biological.
My theory is that each party realizes that any excess percentage in their results is wasted, so they trim their platform and rhetoric to be more extreme yet just centrist enough to get that 50%+1 required to take everything. They may add in a small margin just in case, but this strategy allows them to each cater to their extremist wing.
I think you’re on the right track.
I think the secret is that for some reason (media manipulation?), Americans prefer divided government. Voters change their mind about what direction they want government to go every few years. The opposition party is always gaining seats in Congress as a check to the Presidency. Crazy!
I think the secret is that for some reason (media manipulation?), Americans prefer divided government
That doesn't seem plausible as the principal explanation. Even if a given American prefers divided government, what's the mechanism whereby he or he is reliably informed of who to vote for to achieve this result?
Also, it's pretty well known that the percentage of people who regularly go back and forth between the two parties is modest. It's probably only about 15% of the electorate. That implies there are fairly equal shares (low 40s, percentage-wise) of American who almost always vote either GOP or Democrat exclusively. Such people—and in the aggregate they account for something like 4 out of 5 voters—clearly aren't doing any "divided government" calculus. They're just voting as they always do!
I think the fairly equal division of the electorate in recent cycles flows from the efforts of the parties themselves: they've gotten very skilled at maximizing their vote shares: this involves large-scale catering to their bases but doing so in a manner that's just "moderate" enough (in the case of both Republicans and Democrats) not to alienate an excessive portion of the electorate.
Republicans and Democrats are like the Central Power vs. the Allies in the First World War. Neither side can gain an advantage*, and both sides are (appearances to the contrary) sufficiently risk averse to avoid gambles that might make inroads (say, the GOP embracing modest gun control reforms, or Democrats calling for stringent border enforcement), but at the cost of alienating base voters and activists.
*In sheer voter numbers, that is: the GOP to my eyes looks like it may be on the verge of cementing its political dominance for the foreseeable future, but that's much more a matter of ruthlessness (up to and including a willingness to subvert the constitution) combined with favorable geographic distribution (given our Madisonian constitution) than it is a matter of appealing to a greater number of Americans. Democrats, of course, usually eke out a small advantage on that score.
Not sure it's what people prefer so much as what the constitution provides.
We have a Senate that allocates Wyoming 1 senator :300,000 citizens and California 1 : 20,000,000
>Why on earth are our elections so closely divided? A tempting hypothesis is that the two parties naturally establish their ideological positions to approach a center point in public opinion, which is more or less fixed.
It is very very strange. I remember morons who said Bush and Gore were the same. But I don't know anyone but the looniest of tunes who say Biden and Tangerine Palpatine are the same. Yet still our elections come down to 10k votes in a few states. How is that possible????
I don't know anyone who thinks Trump and Biden are the same, or thought Gore and Bush were for that matter. But I do know a lot of people who think their lives don't change much based on who wins any given election. But these are mostly middle-class voters who don't get tax breaks from one party of any sort of subsidies from the other.
"How is that possible????"
The Electoral College. Purely by population divide, the US is not a 50/50 nation. It only appears that way because the EC skews things to reward land distribution over people.
If you could magically distribute the entire US population so that only 10 people live in each red and purple state, with 6/10 of those voting consistently for the Republican candidate, and everyone else is distributed in the remaining blue states, with everyone in those states voting for the Democratic candidate, you would still get a Republican president even if only a few dozen people out of 330 million voted for the Republican.
The Electoral College. Purely by population divide, the US is not a 50/50 nation. It only appears that way because the EC skews things to reward land distribution over people.
It's not only a matter of the Electoral College. The national popular vote (in presidential and congressional races) likewise tends to be very evenly divided. Both parties tend to get within spitting distance of 50% of the two-party vote. In 1964 the popular vote was 61-39 in favor of Johnson. That's unimaginable today. Even as late as 1996, Bill Clinton managed to best Dole by nearly ten percentage points. That just doesn't happen these days. We see similar vote breakdowns in the national House races. The country isn't literally 50-50. But it's pretty damn close.
That's the main reason, obviously, why Trump, despite presiding over a national disaster and the sharpest economic decline since the 1930s, wasn't a surefire bet to lose: either major party candidate has a floor of something like 47% of the two party vote. Just having a "D" or "R" next to your name puts you within, well, spitting distance, of the White House. That's why crazy scenarios like Alex Jones or Bill O'Reilly becoming president are no longer crazy. If you can get the nomination, you've got a very solid shot. (Hell, if we were in a recession in 2024, I strongly suspect Alex Jones would be at least a modest favorite to beat Biden).
There was reporting that the Brazilian Trump had used the police to block Brazilians in pro-Lula neighborhoods from being able to vote -- https://bityl.co/FN7B
Looking at the results by state in Brazil, I was fascinated by the clear North-South divide, with Lula clearly dominating most of the North and Bolsonaro the South. It didn't seem to reflect the rural-city division I expected, with Bolsonaro even winning the most densely populated states like Rio de Janeiro and São Pauolo by pretty large margins.
I clearly know next to nothing about Brazilian politics, but does anyone else here know a little more who could explain this?
Climate.
The North is a lot poorer and Blacker than the south.
Ahh, that could be it. For someone like me with little knowledge of Brazil, it certainly makes sense!
The Amazon rainforest is also in Northern Brazil, and given how eager Bolsonaro has been to destroy it, it is not surprising Brazilians in that region would be the most opposed to him.
Yes, I think it is the wealth effect. As people get richer, their hearts harden. As ignorant people get richer, they have more influence. For example, Elon Musk...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/31/elon-musk-twitter-trump-tesla-longtermism
"Musk, despite his wealth, good fortune and global influence, is not a serious person – but he is toying with dangerous ideas"
More on the social wealth effect, from Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-wealth-reduces-compassion/
"But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings. This leads us towards being more self-focused. Another reason has to do with our attitudes towards greed. Like Gordon Gekko, upper-class people may be more likely to endorse the idea that “greed is good.” Piff and his colleagues found that wealthier people are more likely to agree with statements that greed is justified, beneficial, and morally defensible. These attitudes ended up predicting participants’ likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior.
"Given the growing income inequality in the United States, the relationship between wealth and compassion has important implications. Those who hold most of the power in this country, political and otherwise, tend to come from privileged backgrounds. If social class influences how much we care about others, then the most powerful among us may be the least likely to make decisions that help the needy and the poor. They may also be the most likely to engage in unethical behavior."
It seems to me that this is a topic unlikely to receive much funding support from wealthy individuals.
Lula's victory will not make Brazilian politics any less toxic, any more than Biden's (or Obama's, or Clinton's) made American politics any less toxic. Politicians hold office everywhere, but power nowhere. Power is held by propaganda machines, which formerly worked through political parties and today partly through parties and partly through "social media". Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk have to worry about each other; neither one of them has to worry about elected officials with statutorily-defined responsibilities.
Except Musk is already having to face down the EU over content moderation. And the EU would like nothing more than to give an American tech company the boot because their own can't compete.
In the first round almost 9 million votes went to the third and fourth place finisher, both who lean left and distanced themselves from Bolsanaro. In the second round the third place finisher supported Lula and while the fourth place guy was tactiturn but his ideology was closer to Lula. YET Bolsanaro got close to 6-7 million of those votes. It is as if 75% of Bernie supporters voted for Trump. Not sure what else to say so I wish someone explained how such a switch occurred.
Oh, that's easy - spite. Just like the legions of Bernie Bros who refused to vote for Clinton.
More Bernie bros voted Clinton than Pumas voted Obama.
In a 50/50 world the margin of victory might start coming down to the increased death rate among the anti-vaxed. Of course that will only encourage them to say that the election was stolen from them.
While still too close, I've read there was rather largescale voter suppression efforts, without which, the margin would have been larger. Though, again, still too close.