I don’t know, I’ve been reading a lot of Slow Boring and Nate Silver, and to me this just really doesn’t seem to remotely describe how the Trump coalition works. Beginning with the idea that there are powerful party elites whose opinion Trump has to care about, rather than the other way around.
Like, the fact that Trump moderated the entire party on abortion and entitlement cuts seems like pretty strong evidence against that idea, as well. Or, Trump’s recent demand that the US Senate should confirm his appointees via recess appointments, similarly really does not strike me as Trump caring about what party elites think.
My model is more like, both Trump and party elites care about what their base thinks, and Trump can mobilize the base better (but not perfectly) than the party elites can, so Trump has a stronger position in that power dynamic. And isn’t that how he won the 2016 primary in the first place? He ran as a populist, so of course party elites did not want him to win, since the whole point of populist candidates is that they’re less beholden to elites. But he won, so now those elites mostly have to acquiesce.
All that said, to get back to the Jones Act thing: if Trump somehow wanted it repealed, that would have to happen via an act of Congress, so at that point he would obviously need votes in the US House and Senate. But that could in principle (though not necessarily in practice) happen on a bipartisan vote, too.
EDIT: And re: the importance of party elites, that’s also kind of counter to the thesis that today’s US political parties are very weak. Slow Boring has a couple articles on this topic, like this one (not paywalled), all based on the book “The Hollow Parties”.
Trump’s recent demand that the US Senate should confirm his appointees via recess appointments, similarly really does not strike me as Trump caring about what party elites think.
Trump made that demand and John Thune became Senate majority leader without making a clear promise to appoint all candidates via recess appointments.
Elites already managed to prevent the pro-antitrust, pro-Snowden pardon appointment of Matt Gaetz and replace him with a more conventional Republican that’s less likely to go after corporate power and other elite interests.
I know that Trump doesn’t have control of the legislature or anything, but I guess I’m still not quite understanding how all this is supposed to relate to the Jones Act question. Do you think if (big if) Trump wanted the Jones Act repealed, it would not be possible to find a (potentially bipartisan) majority of votes for this in the House and the Senate? (Let’s leave the filibuster aside for a moment.) This is not like e.g. cutting entitlement programs; the interest groups defending the Jones Act are just not that powerful.
This is an otherwise valuable discussion that I’d rather not have on LW, for the standard reasons; it seems a bit to close to the partisan side of the policy/partisanship political discussion divide. I recognize I wrote a comment in reaction to yours (shame on me), and so you were fully within your rights to respond, but I’d rather stop it here.
Fwiw I feel a bit confused about whether this conversation is bad. (locally, it seemed fine so far, and the main reason it might not be fine is that politics attracts more politics which attracts people-into-politics)
In my ideal world, LW talks about politics, but always in a kind of practical, gearsy modeling way that has internalized the lessons of the LessWrong Political Prerequisites sequence.
Maybe we should make political threads require you to log in and/or have at least 1 karma to see them.
This discussion felt fine to me, though I’m not sure to which extent anyone got convinced of anything, so it might have been fine but not necessarily worthwhile, or something. Anyway, I’m also in favor of people being able to disengage from conversations without that becoming a meta discussion of its own, so… *shrugs*.
I do agree that it’s easy to have discussions about politics become bad, even on LW.
I don’t know, I’ve been reading a lot of Slow Boring and Nate Silver, and to me this just really doesn’t seem to remotely describe how the Trump coalition works. Beginning with the idea that there are powerful party elites whose opinion Trump has to care about, rather than the other way around.
Like, the fact that Trump moderated the entire party on abortion and entitlement cuts seems like pretty strong evidence against that idea, as well. Or, Trump’s recent demand that the US Senate should confirm his appointees via recess appointments, similarly really does not strike me as Trump caring about what party elites think.
My model is more like, both Trump and party elites care about what their base thinks, and Trump can mobilize the base better (but not perfectly) than the party elites can, so Trump has a stronger position in that power dynamic. And isn’t that how he won the 2016 primary in the first place? He ran as a populist, so of course party elites did not want him to win, since the whole point of populist candidates is that they’re less beholden to elites. But he won, so now those elites mostly have to acquiesce.
All that said, to get back to the Jones Act thing: if Trump somehow wanted it repealed, that would have to happen via an act of Congress, so at that point he would obviously need votes in the US House and Senate. But that could in principle (though not necessarily in practice) happen on a bipartisan vote, too.
EDIT: And re: the importance of party elites, that’s also kind of counter to the thesis that today’s US political parties are very weak. Slow Boring has a couple articles on this topic, like this one (not paywalled), all based on the book “The Hollow Parties”.
Trump made that demand and John Thune became Senate majority leader without making a clear promise to appoint all candidates via recess appointments.
Elites already managed to prevent the pro-antitrust, pro-Snowden pardon appointment of Matt Gaetz and replace him with a more conventional Republican that’s less likely to go after corporate power and other elite interests.
I know that Trump doesn’t have control of the legislature or anything, but I guess I’m still not quite understanding how all this is supposed to relate to the Jones Act question. Do you think if (big if) Trump wanted the Jones Act repealed, it would not be possible to find a (potentially bipartisan) majority of votes for this in the House and the Senate? (Let’s leave the filibuster aside for a moment.) This is not like e.g. cutting entitlement programs; the interest groups defending the Jones Act are just not that powerful.
This is an otherwise valuable discussion that I’d rather not have on LW, for the standard reasons; it seems a bit to close to the partisan side of the policy/partisanship political discussion divide. I recognize I wrote a comment in reaction to yours (shame on me), and so you were fully within your rights to respond, but I’d rather stop it here.
Fwiw I feel a bit confused about whether this conversation is bad. (locally, it seemed fine so far, and the main reason it might not be fine is that politics attracts more politics which attracts people-into-politics)
In my ideal world, LW talks about politics, but always in a kind of practical, gearsy modeling way that has internalized the lessons of the LessWrong Political Prerequisites sequence.
Maybe we should make political threads require you to log in and/or have at least 1 karma to see them.
This discussion felt fine to me, though I’m not sure to which extent anyone got convinced of anything, so it might have been fine but not necessarily worthwhile, or something. Anyway, I’m also in favor of people being able to disengage from conversations without that becoming a meta discussion of its own, so… *shrugs*.
I do agree that it’s easy to have discussions about politics become bad, even on LW.