1/Politics thread time.

To me, the most important aspect of the 2018 midterms wasn't even about partisan control, but about democracy and voting rights. That's the real battle.

2/The good news: It's now an issue that everyone's talking about, and that everyone cares about.

https://t.co/ipQ7Y0JCnG
3/More good news: Florida's proposition to give felons voting rights won. But it didn't just win - it won with substantial support from Republican voters.

That suggests there is still SOME grassroots support for democracy that transcends partisanship.

https://t.co/jHHieSkzTg
4/Yet more good news: Michigan made it easier to vote. Again, by plebiscite, showing broad support for voting rights as an issue.

https://t.co/ffEwTP2SPq
5/OK, now the bad news.

We seem to have accepted electoral dysfunction in Florida as a permanent thing. The 2000 election has never really ended.

https://t.co/auFaCR7WvH
6/Even worse news: What Brian Kemp did in Georgia was REALLY bad.

https://t.co/Bed8VRpopn
7/Kemp's success at engineering a victory for himself, through voter roll purges and other techniques of vote suppression, bodes ill for future elections, especially presidential elections.

The big worry is that it functioned as a trial balloon.
8/The worst news, of course, is Trump's continued lies about illegal votes - basically de-legitimizing democracy itself in the eyes of his base.

https://t.co/qcPP0wGGDR
9/The struggle over voting rights is important not just because democracy itself is important, but also because it tells us something about the future of race and partisanship in America.
10/After the 2012 election, the GOP had a big debate about whether to reach out to Hispanic voters or take a hard anti-immigration line - which would effectively represent a strategy of using xenophobia to try to win a bigger share of the white vote.
11/That debate was resolved when Trump won the 2015 primary.

The GOP abandoned hope of winning over nonwhite voters, and went with the "Sailer Strategy": https://t.co/jBH0K4JUv4
12/But since whites are a shrinking % of the electorate, the Sailer Strategy implicitly requires increasing vote suppression, gerrymandering, etc. to reduce the electoral power of nonwhite voters.
13/It was clear from the moment Trump beat Rubio and Jeb that electioneering would be increasingly important for the GOP electoral strategy going forward.

Which is why voting rights have become such a central issue.
14/Therefore, the voting rights issue isn't just about democracy.

It's about breaking the Sailer Strategy, and putting to bed the idea that electioneering can make nonwhite voters disappear.
15/Of course, the Sailer Strategy will probably be broken in time anyway by the desertion of Millennial and Gen Z white voters, simply because Trumpism is so horrible.

https://t.co/p3vGgC3A1D
16/But ensuring voting rights for all is the most important thing we can do to prevent our country from degenerating into a faux-democratic hell of ethnic bloc voting, racial division, spiraling distrust, and dirty electoral tricks.

(end)

More from Noah Smith

This thread demonstrates that a lot of academic writing that *looks* like utter nonsense is merely scholars dressing up a useful but mundane point with a ton of unnecessary jargon.


My theory is that the jargon creates an artificial barrier to entry. https://t.co/MqLyyppdHl

If one must spend years marinating one's brain in jargon to be perceived as an expert on a topic, it protects the status and earning power of people who study relatively easy topics.

In econ, a similar thing is accomplished by what recent Nobel prize winner Paul Romer calls "mathiness": https://t.co/DBCRRc8Mir

But mathiness and jargon are not quite the same...

Jargon usually doesn't force you to change the substance of your central point.

Mathiness often does. By forcing you to write your model in a way that's mathematically tractable (easy to work with), mathiness often impoverishes your understanding of how the world really works.

has written about this problem:
"Competitive wokeness", like "virtue signaling" and "preference falsification", seems to be something people on the right say in order to pretend that people on the left don't really believe what they claim to believe.


Basically we have a whole bunch of ways of saying "You can't possibly believe that!!". Which helps us avoid the terrifying fact that yes, people generally do believe it.

Of course, "believe" doesn't mean what it means in econ class. It means that people get a warm feeling from asserting something, even if they don't know what it means. "God is omnipotent", etc.

A lot of times we believe extreme things, simply because asserting those things all together in a group gives us a warm feeling of having an army on our side.

It's not competitive wokeness. It's COOPERATIVE wokeness.

"Virtue signaling" isn't fake or pretend. It's real.

"Virtue", when it comes right down to it, means membership on a team.

Sometimes, to prove you're on a team, it helps to say something people on the other team could never bring themselves to say.
Today's @bopinion post is about how poor countries started catching up to rich ones.

It looks like decolonization just took a few decades to start

Basic econ theory says poor countries should grow faster than rich ones.

But for much of the Industrial Revolution, the opposite happened.
https://t.co/JjjVtWzz5c

Why? Probably because the first countries to discover industrial technologies used them to conquer the others!

But then colonial empires went away. And yet still, for the next 30 years or so, poor countries fell further behind rich ones.
https://t.co/hilDvv0IQV

Why??

Possible reasons:
1. Bad institutions (dictators, communism, autarkic trade regimes)
2. Civil wars
3. Lack of education

But then, starting in the 80s (for China) and the 90s (for India and Indonesia), some of the biggest poor countries got their acts together and started to catch up!


Global inequality began to fall.

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