I’m quoting this because it is a very fair point for which I have an answer: The first thing is to recognize that in a democracy there is no such thing as “ the majority.” Instead, there are many and multiple overlapping majorities that can be assembled from different parts of the whole.
The question of “what constitutes a consensus which is sufficiently broad that it is appropriate to impose that consensus on even the dissenters?” is the fundamental question of democratic government. people in socially predominant groups get mad when their preferences are frustrated…
And often demand that any protection of dissenters given in any contextual be extended to their own views in all contexts. “Oh, a historically marginalized group is allowed to dissent from X unless strict scrutiny is satisfied? I must get whatever I want on everything unless strict scrutiny!”
A key problem is “when do we need supermajority protections” isn’t one size fits all. There’s no question of policy for which you can say, this is always amenable to a 50% referendum
So you always need to have some supermajority rules to protect the marginalized, and “the marginalized” is a socially/historically contingent set of categories, and oafish dipshits like Roberts and Alito will always demand that the predominant groups get protected as though they’re marginalized
Umm wait... wait, what?
“Oh so it’s not allowed for us Protestants to make Protestant proselytizing part of the public school curriculum because of the first amendment? Well then anything Protestants want to veto from the curriculum can’t be taught in public school, like that book with the gay characters.”
...but what if I live in Australia?
The fact that the non-voting population is so large only further emphasizes this point. Trump built a winning coalition by accessing infrequent voters but so did Obama.
the simpler answer to people being "so ignorant and wrong about everything they voted for trump" is political education. gop $250M+ anti-trans spend? silence. gop anti-immigrant incitement? look at our heinous border bill! the gop articulates views and people adopt them. do dems even have views atp?
Think you're misreading this. He's talking about the majority of Trump voters, not the majority of all voters. Multiple polls/surveys out there that show the majority of Trump voters aren't aware of the truth about the state of the economy under Biden or that crime in cities is going down, etc.
One thing a lot of Americans across the political spectrum have in common is anger at the wealthy. Most Democrats are at least thus far too scared of the rich to use that anger, but if they did, they could get soft Trump voters who were fooled into thinking he was anti-elite.
Is it that "most Democrats" are scared of the rich, or that the population has been so dumbed down and dissemination of current information (factual news) so corrupted that the general public is unaware of the degree of oppression the rich has extended over them and incomprehensible of consequences?
I don't think these things are mutually exclusive.
That's fair.
I live in magaland, and they don't hate the rich. They think they might be there one day. I imagine it was like the poor white southerners that fought for the rich elite to protect slavery.
I'm not talking about hard-core MAGAs though. I'm talking about the low information voters who voted for Trump because surely the businessman from TV who doesn't speak like your typical highly educated politician is just like them and can bring down prices.
Very important and why dems lose a lot of elections. There isn’t just a 1-dimensional axis of woke-to-conservative that everyone exists on and just votes for the party that’s closest to them on that line
Trump assembled one majority, but that does not preclude his opponents from assembling another. We often talk about elections as if we are baking a cake — with the outcome fixed and irreducible — but it is more akin to building a Lego model. The pieces can be arranged a different way.
I'm not willing to cede "majority" ground to a "plurality" candidate.
It's dismaying when reality clashes with our preferred image of the world.
Trump never assembled a majority; just a plurality that no one could/would unify to oppose.
I've been doing a lot of reading lately on the height of the Fugitive Slave Act era (for um, reasons) and one thing that stands out is how much of the reactionary / populist Know Nothing crowd ended up as staunch Unionist / Republican coalition members just a few years later.
That definitely made holding the coalition together and pursuing a more abolitionist or emancipationist tack tricky for Lincoln, but that's also the damned job.
The civil rights act was passed with a much more racist electorate.
Also the vast majority of people are not “progressive” “conservative” “socialist” or any other coherent ideology.
This is true. And also most people don’t have fully fixed political beliefs. You must lead them, not simply follow them as the Matt Yglesias popularists recommend.
I would like to think that once all our liberals and leftists and other and get organized, it will be really something.
It’s true that a well-organized and disciplined left coalition has never been defeated! But the reason why is somewhat unfortunate
The GOP is the kid who eats the instructions
We also could just throw out the entire system and start a new one. We literally can do ANYTHING we want if we just united and work towards a common purpose. It's crazy that we act as though we need any of this. The autocrats and billionaires are 100% dependent on us, not the other way around.
Except that elections themselves are not democratic and will never truly let citizens come to informed majorities about anything. Only sortition can give us that. www.bostonreview.net/articles/the...
Yessir. Nailed it! Trump assembled a coalition of his base plus anti-vax kooks, 2nd amendment fanatics and "protect the blue" fans (with overlap among the groups). There's nothing preventing a Democratic coalition that includes all the people Trump excludes or minimizes.
In that analogy, I would argue that the Democrats' biggest problem is that they largely insist on winning with a specific blueprint and are unwilling to cede anything more than a few minor bricks.
Yeah! It’s also worth noting Florida voted by close to a million more for raising the minimum wage to 15 bucks an hour than they voted for Trump in 2020. Progressive ideas on their own are popular
This concept of overlapping majorities is well-explained in @jsellenberg.bsky.social's How Not To Be Wrong
I think it's a fantasy that most people are conservative or centrist. Give them an alternative & see. Most people go along to get along with whichever group appears to have the most sway & power. (See old Italian guy's speech from the movie, Catch 22, "the fascists came, so we were fascists," etc)
*except in countries with compulsory voting, yes.
Majoritarianism was recognises as a problem from the beginning…
If we were a parliamentary democracy, we would understand that implicitly.
Maybe I'm not getting enough of the true picture, but the UK populace, for example, looks little more comprehending of the oppression they're under than does the US populace.
Yep, “kicking the fascists out of every platform and every position of power and every public space” is a battle for right now
Never minding what percentage actually voted. People mindlessly say the majority chose while so many are entirely disengaged.
A lot of those people wanted to vote, but were either prevented from doing so or their votes were not counted.
The disenfranchised in this country since Raegan’s years has always cast a shadow. So many folks who can’t abide a single tax, won’t serve on a jury, they are the party of “Whatever”. These are the folks of unfettered consumerizm.
Coalitions, as it were
‘Americans are not as progressive as we wish they were‘ The numbers Bernie, AOC etal pull in with their town halls belie media reports that Americans are not progressive. Talk basics without partisan bullschit and progressives have support from the voters. Elected Dems are holding them back.
The quoted skeet is also incorrect: if you present voters with choices issue by issue, their preferences line up better with Dem policy than Republican
Also he didn’t get a majority of voters
More eligible voters *didn't vote* in 2024 than voted for either party. Neither party is assembling majorities
21% of the population is not a majority.... he got 71 mil votes (supposedly) out of the 355-ish mil population..... One fifth of the people voted for him, and it's not a stretch to point out that some people who voted for him were hesitant about it... The **majority** of Americans dislike Trump.
Right? and you ever heard the good word about the... about the... abou
Wait! about humanitarian... ism?
That's a very important observation. It is also true that these majorities shift over time, largely due to changes in framing of the issues--not simply by media or politicians, but in local discourse. During the Depression, every sympathy shifted to "the common man" who wanted dignity and work.
Correct. You need coalitions and sometimes the people in your coalition may not agree with you on everything. But there’s a good chance they agree with you on a lot of things.
The problem is that MAGA and committed liberal democracy types are both shrinking minorities, and the broader middle is selfish, apolitical people who see BOTH of them as immature, dangerous cranks. For them, responsible adults act on self interest alone. They think ideology is for children.
They only care about themselves, their families and a narrow group of peers. Many are already drawn to the GOP because it asks less of them. Trump's politics are just background noise. They see Trump's cynicism as plain truth. They respect his negative style of leadership. He's America's Tiger Dad.
It is ultimately a branding issue. Trump united the right with "Make America Great Again". The Bolshevists overthrew a Tzar with "Peace. Land. Bread." You will never rule a country with a nuanced essay.
While first bombarding them with the lie that America was a disaster — both times telling them the growing economy didn’t exist, everything sucked, their lives were miserable because Dems made it so. People ignored facts, new benefits they were getting, growth and progress. That’s also the branding
I'm so tired of the take that "the majority of Americans voted for him." It's bullshit. Millions of people were prevented from voting or having their votes counted. The majority voted for Kamala.