We are not a serious country because, as a democracy, we do not have serious voters. Autocracies like China and Russia have many disadvantages compared to us, but in the present historical moment, they are nowhere near as stupid as we are. One trembles for the future.
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See Katherine Boyle, The Case for American Seriousness:
https://www.thefp.com/p/the-case-for-american-seriousness?s=r
I was thinking about that yesterday. I think a vegetable could have a serious run if he/it had the Party backing and funding.
@David Foster – I will have to finish that article tonight. I do believe in the will – amazing things have been done just from an individual having will….and focus.
I have been noticing over the past several months that Hinderaker seems to be on the edge of a nervous breakdown.
I’m pretty sure we could go through the last few hundred years and find countless examples of people decrying a system of government (democracy) that rests on the opinions and votes of boorish Homer Simpsons as opposed to the better focused autocracies. Hinderaker in his despair is veering ever so close to Thomas “China for a Day” Friedman.
To Bill point, I think we’re going to have a partial test of that over the next few months with Kamala. I say partial because she had alot of backing in the 2020 cycle and the more people got to know her, the worse she did.
ina democracy.
David… thanks for the link, it’s a great re-frame by Boyle.
I understand that she’s trying to start something and she’s limited by what she can say in a 1,200 word polemic. I expect this is going to get a lot of play in the next few weeks (and it should) However there are two things that jump out that invite caution in how much her experience as an entrepreneur is relevant and also her use of the term “will” which is unfortunate
In an interview, Katherine Boyle said: “The biggest criticism I got from the (American Seriousness) piece, and other times I’ve written about seriousness, is that it doesn’t leave room for frivolity, play or the unseriousness that makes us deeply human. And I empathize with that sentiment, but I don’t think the opposite of seriousness is humor: the opposite of seriousness is irony.”
My thoughts here:
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/68140.html
We are not a serious country because, as a democracy, we do not have serious voters.
I find the ceaseless complaints about the voters from the usual suspects of the political establishment asinine, self-serving, and tedious. I have no doubt that the real problem these folks have with the electorate is that there has been too much and too successful opposition to enable them to enact all of their preferred policies and make the demon Trump go away.
I wouldn’t normally lump John Hinderaker into that category, but if he thinks the problem is with the voters, I’d like to sell him a stake in my fancy bridge in New York.
First, I can’t but notice that his blog now requires me to enable Cloudflare to read it. That’s because of the endless attacks from the left upon anyone who disagrees with them. Hinderaker is effectively being censored. Rinse and repeat this tactic, thousands of times, and the voters of the country have been denied the perspective of serious people who have noticed something has gone wrong.
That’s very significant, but it’s not the fault of the voters. It’s the fault of the American political establishment which allows it to happen, for the obvious reason that it is leftist-dominated and wants the left to retain power. And I’ll note that the voters have still yet multiple times voted to give political power to the putative non-leftist political party, only to find nothing gets done about it.
Who does Hinderaker seriously suggest serious voters vote for so that the country can get serious again? And if he hasn’t noticed the above, why should I take him seriously?
“Autocracies like China and Russia have many disadvantages compared to us, but in the present historical moment, they are nowhere near as stupid as we are.”
Is just pain dumb and very transparently wrong, not what I usually associate with Hinderaker.
Russia is fast approaching 500,000 soldiers dead in their little adventure in Ukraine, their economy is in freefall. China’s unemployment rate is probably around 40%. We have some problems but reality needs to assert itself over rhetoric at some point.
To be sure, far too many of our voters vote based on which side is offering them the best bribe rather than what is best for the country. I would be very interested to hear how this “No tax on tips” is anything more than a pure pander to tipped workers. Why should income from tips be different from any other income?
“Russia is fast approaching 500,000 soldiers dead in their little adventure in Ukraine, their economy is in freefall”
lol stupid citizens indeed!
I generally agree with the various sentiments regarding John Hinderaker. I put him in the same category as others like Jim Geraghty that started out extremely negative on Trump and turned into at best lukewarm supporters, basically because they finally recognize that empowering any Democrat at this time is a full-on disaster. In both cases their dislike of Trump’s popularity among those who “aren’t are kind” is pretty palpable. (In his Morning Jolt yesterday Geraghty just had to get a one-liner in about Trump and debates even though nothing else in the post had anything to do with Trump, implying that he was trying to duck out them when more even-handed observers like Ann Althouse are quite convinced that it’s Harris’s team who are trying to change the rules and get Trump to walk away from them.)
@MCS, the ‘tax on tips’ thing is a bit more complicated that just how income is earned (as an aside, you can make the same argument around cap gains taxes and other income distinctions in the tax code). Congress passed and the IRS just recently put into effect new reporting requirements for tip income that are more onerous and require withholding of not only income but also OSDAI taxes from tips, and I believe in some cases require employers to impute or estimate tip income. The government finds it easier to collect a million dollars in taxes one dollar at a time from a million low-wage earners instead of finding a way to get wealthier people to fork over the same amount of money.
https://www.thetaxadviser.com/news/2023/feb/proposed-tip-tracking-program-aims-to-improve-tip-reporting-compliance.html
Xennady: “…something has gone wrong. That’s very significant, but it’s not the fault of the voters.”
In principle, in a “democracy” the voters (us!) have the power to correct any issue. If we voters don’t collectively take the necessary steps, then the issue is indeed the collective fault of we voters.
Real democracy requires skin in the game. Classic example was the Ancient Athenians who voted to invade Sicily … and then all the voters went down to the ships and sailed for Sicily (and their own deaths). Ersatz democracy, such as we have today, involves voters putting burdens on other people.
The root of the problem was the well-intentioned move towards universal suffrage. That put voting power into the hands of people with no skin in the game — and has brought us to the current disaster. Unfortunately, the only solution will be the Coming Economic Collapse. We can no longer “vote” our way out of this.
Gavin…how would you define ‘skin in the game’…
–total assets?
–income?
–number of kids?
–other?
Neville Shute, in his novel “In the Wet”, proposed an alternate voting system in which military service and child rearing, among other things I can’t remember, entitled voters to more votes.
Who does Hinderaker seriously suggest serious voters vote for so that the country can get serious again? And if he hasn’t noticed the above, why should I take him seriously?
He is a partially recovered Never Trumper.
Christopher B,
So, unlimited tax free income as long as you call it a tip. Sounds good to me, where do I sign up to convert my salary to a tip? I didn’t like having to make quarterly payments when I was self employed either. The entire Internal Revenue Code is an insane labyrinth but the way to fix it isn’t by just making various pressure groups exempt to win votes. Not that that hasn’t been happening for as long as the code has existed.
I hope nobody here was credulous enough to believe that those 87,000 IRS agents were going to go after a few dozen billionaires.
As panders go, it’s better than most. There are a lot more people that make tips than most of those favored by their own private carve out and a lot more votes.
Lack of interest in voting and politics by a broad swatch of the citizenry is a good sign, usually.
In good times, when things are going well, it’s best to not muck around with government. Put your time, money, and mind-share into personal matters.
If times turn bad, THEN voter participation rates increase.
The problem is the time lag. At some point, you can get a cliff edge effect and you lose democratic systems of correction all together. We’re close.
I’d predict that this election cycle we’ll see a lot of people turn out to vote. The system is causing real, day-to-day pain and the voters can’t ignore that something is wrong.
In principle, in a “democracy” the voters (us!) have the power to correct any issue. If we voters don’t collectively take the necessary steps, then the issue is indeed the collective fault of we voters.
We have been betrayed. I recall late in the last century I worked at a steel mill. At one point the company wasn’t following the contract- costing myself and others a potentially significant amount of money- and the union refused to do anything about it. I complained to our union rep and I was told that if the company wants to screw you and the union wants to screw you, you’re screwed.
That’s the situation we the voters have been in for decades. Both political parties have been conspiring against the public, for their own gain. And they have worked very hard to ensure the actual will of the people never matters much if at all. Examples are legion, but I’ll note that the very same Mike K I see in this thread once suggested that the US should have simply rolled into Iraq and picked a Sunni general to take over- and then left. That would have been Bush living up to his campaign promise against nation building. Actual events were not.
From the left, I note that Rachel Maddow was shrieking every night on MSNBC for years that Iraq was an illegal war and should end, etc, etc. But then when Trump proposed ending the illegal US occupation of Syria, suddenly she was shrieking that departing was the worst idea ever.
I would presume that there are plenty of voters who remember that and who honestly opposed the Iraq War and aren’t too pleased about the forever wars of the present regime. Perhaps that’s why Tulsi Gabbard endorsed Trump. From my own point of view, I’m pretty tired of watching Wall Street connive to enrich itself by all manner of corruption, including the use of the armed might of the state to force people to accept their experimental medical treatments. That’s why I’m not as peeved as I’d have expected to have RFK jr involved in the Trump campaign.
So who should Tulsi Gabbard been voting for to end the forever war in the middle east? Who should I have been voting for to stop Wall Street from turning the country into a continent-sized latifundia?
We can no longer “vote” our way out of this.
We didn’t vote our way into it, either. I think every large city controlled by democrats is buried under vote fraud- enough to ensure that every blue state affected can never vote their way out of it, for certain. The GOP is plainly complicit or perhaps indifferent, depending on the race. Certainly the 2020 election was stolen and I find it not credible that GOP would as poorly as it did in 2022 without massive fraud. In my evaluation this goes back many years, certainly enough to change the political course of the country.
I suppose the bottom line now is that it doesn’t matter, anymore than it matters by which exact course the Titanic sailed to meet the iceberg.
…Geraghty just had to get a one-liner in about Trump and debates even though nothing else in the post had anything to do with Trump, implying that he was trying to duck out them…
If you’ve been alive the last ten years or so and you somehow think Donald Trump is trying to get out of debates, then you are a profoundly stupid individual.
I can’t stress that enough. There is no excuse for idiocy that deep and that dumb. None.
Jim Geraghty especially has no excuse, because he has been getting paid to write about American politics for many years. I presume he has been getting paid, at least.
I’m embarrassed for him- and for me, because I used to read what he wrote.
Now if Geraghty is writing nonsense simply to please his nevertrump employer, then he is an even worse idiot. I recall him as a good writer with (I think) good contacts who had interesting things to say.
That is, a good candidate to start a substack or an X account and make bank as his own boss. Think Bari Weiss.
Instead, he’s either a pathetic shill lying to his audience to keep his job or a moron who doesn’t understand what’s happening in American politics.
This will likely be the last time I ever think about Jim Geraghty.
David F: “how would you define ‘skin in the game’…”
That is a very good question — one that deserves a lot of thought and discussion.
I would start from making a better definition of citizenship. Anything which is given away freely is valued at … nothing. Instead of someone automatically becoming a “citizen” through the accident of the place of birth, citizenship should have to be earned personally by each individual.
That then raises the question of the status of those people born in the US who fail to earn citizenship. They obviously cannot be left stateless, but nor can they be permitted to vote in genuine democratic elections. Wards of the State?
How does someone earn citizenship? I would lean towards providing lots of different avenues, all based on the concept that the individual has demonstrated that he or she has made a positive contribution to the country and has committed to being a good citizen. There will be no place for “dual citizens” in this model — make your choice and live with it.
Then at each election, those who have earned citizenship would have to demonstrate that, in the preceding year, he or she was a net tax-payer. Citizens who are government employees who therefore not be eligible to vote that year, nor would citizens then dependent on government-provided Social Security. There would have to be special provisions (along with special responsibilities) for serving military and police. Because of the absolute importance of children for a sustainable society, married citizen women with children under the age of 18 would be allowed to vote based on their husbands being net tax-payers. We would probably also want some blanket exclusions — such as citizens who are lawyers being disqualified from voting.
It is easy to see why in earlier, simpler times, the criteria for voting citizenship were reduced to something easily quantifiable — male, above a certain age, owning land of a certain minimum value. But those kinds of simple criteria would not work in today’s society.
well national review has long been a hollow shell, looking at minnesota, are we sure that walz was legitimately elected in 2022, what was the fault in jensen, he answers his own question
Referring back to the piece that David linked/a> to in an earlier comment regarding “serious” (which I would recommend to everyone), I have a few comments of my own.
First Bari Weiss performs a great public service with The Free Press by creating different frameworks for approaching public issues and this piece she commissioned is a good example, drawing upon the “builder” meme. Another is an earlier piece by Niall Ferguson drawing an analogy between 2024 America and late-era Soviet Union.
A few suggestions though
The piece could use some professional editing as the writer (Katherine Boyle) wanders from lamenting the lack of seriousness in public policy to forever wars to COIVD lockdowns, and then starts going on about building things. Her points would make a great book but lack the sharpness needed in a 1300-word piece. I expected better out of a former reporter. Which leads to…
She likes to, as Mark Steyn would say, talk “butch” in portraying the Silicon Valley entrepreneur as a heroic archetype; “fire in the eyes”, “grit”, “…belief that God or the universe has bestowed upon you an immense task that no one else can accomplish but you” I have been hearing for the past 20 years this business equivalent of the western masterplot with the sheriff who rides into town to clean it up. Tt seems to miss the mark, but I’m sure this time it will work because she’s just so done earnest and is on a mission from God. She’s got a point in this but she needs to stop getting high on her own supply, maybe that’s stems from her masters degree in public advocacy.
Finally, she likes to use the word “will. ” I like that term as well, I use it with mentees and employees all the time. However in a larger social sense it has, well, a lot of historical baggage; say from Nietzsche and his use of will and “superman” to later in the 20th Century with “Triumph of the Will” Then there’s this winner:
“We do not need aging institutions to pave the way for American dynamism. But we need American will. And this will comes from ordinary, extraordinary people…”
I bet that statement sounds better in the original German. You know I have been hearing a lot of stuff just like this but from people on the Left saying that we could just get so much more done if we ditched “aging institutions. ” When combined with her heroic depiction of entrepreneurs ummm… she might want to tone it down.
She might want to also consider that we need to build the right things, building more schools is not going to solve the problems with education or her defense of “the companies leading our electrification revolution”; I guess I should roll-over and allow more “building” of things that use gobs of public money and wreck our energy sector. That’s all implementation stuff and I bet she’s a big picture person because she’s… well… “serious”
Given all of that, I still recommend reading it
yes the lockdowns which the UN and particularly the WHO championed, was what set youth back, the bureaucracy is all about stymying infrastructure investment and so and so on,
‘when all you have are nail, you need a hammer,
The Tea Party arose because of the lack of serious people in DC. The rise of someone like Trump was predicted by Codevilla in 2010 because we lacked any serious people in DC.
Our problem isn’t the voters. It’s the incompetence and gross corruption/dishonesty of both establishment parties, the news media, our universities, the judiciary and the bureaucracy. We have come to rely on supposed “experts” and they have failed miserably.
I have been a fan of Powerline since it began. Hinderaker and Johnson avoided the “Ahab obsession with Orange Whale” disease that afflicted Mirengoff, but barely.
I cannot understand anyone who claims to be an agnostic on the theft of the 2020 election. That issue is fundamental to the survival of the republic. If you claim not to be sure, go look at the evidence and the arguments! How can anyone claim to be a political pundit and avoid that question?
Anyone with a working brain knows it was stolen. The evidence is overwhelming. How many one in a thousand miracles does it take before it becomes clear that we aren’t dealing with Democrat miracles? Especially when the statistical argument is buttressed by lots of evidence of illegalities.
Perhaps the voters wouldn’t be so “unserious” if the learned pundits had told them the truth about the theft of the republic and the imposition of Big Brother.
The Tea Party arose because of the lack of serious people in DC.
On my long-neglected blog I addressed the subject with references to Langston Hughes (his poem “Harlem” speaks of universal reactions to despair) and to Animal Farm, branding the Tea Party as the Glue Factory Moment. Technically two moments, backlashes to the TARP bailouts and the unprecedented level of spending to be wrought by Obamanomics.
“If the glue factory van was a faint blip during the TARP debate, it was coming around the corner now. No way could the American economy survive this kind of fiscal insanity for long. Obama, Reid and Pelosi upped the ante too fast. Americans could see Armageddon from their house.”
https://alankhenderson.blogspot.com/2010/11/#6906272712595515742
Two Points:
First. At one point it wouldn’t have been a case of proving an election stolen, the mere lack of copious, flagrant proof that it wasn’t would have been enough to send the overseers back from whence they came in disgrace.
Second. Mr. Henderson gives Obama, et. al. far too much credit for our economic straights. It started long before Obama failed at his first “organizing” job and was aided by, when not instigated by the Republicans, at every stage along the way. It was never a case of profligate waste and graft, or not, just who was to receive the biggest part.
well there were other enablers take Bill Clinton that pushed Cloward and Piven’s various strategems in the 90s, with revisions of the CRA, Gretchen Morgenstern among a select view really zeroed on that, as well as directives from MiniLov under Reno and co, the Bush administration did their part, even they try to side track some of the accesses,
I’m sure these people feel they are deadly serious:
https://nypost.com/2024/09/01/us-news/black-californians-warn-newsom-of-impact-on-harris-after-slavery-reparation-bills-nixed/
MCS: “… Mr. Henderson gives Obama, et. al. far too much credit for our economic straits. It started long before Obama failed at his first “organizing” job …”
Long before! Lincoln set the then-young USA on a wrong path. Wilson screwed up royally, as did FDR. But there was hope of getting back onto a better path until the 1970s, with Nixon’s founding of the Environmental Protection Agency. From that spun the tidal wave of laws, regulations, and litigation which drove the de-industrialization off-shoring of US productive industry, leaving the burden of an unsustainable Trade Deficit, a shortage of tax revenue, and an unrepayable National Debt. Now the Political Class has a mess which it is incapable of solving, regardless of who today’s players may be.
But reality will triumph in the end — worse luck for all of us!