Opinion | The Strange Decline of the Pax Americana
www.nytimes.com
The problem isn’t weakness at the top. It’s the enemy within.

…Yet it seems safe to say that the world no longer trusts U.S. promises, and perhaps no longer fears U.S. threats, the way it used to. The problem, however, isn’t Biden; it’s the party that reflexively attacks him for anything that goes wrong.

Right now America is a superpower without a fully functioning government. Specifically, the House of Representatives has no speaker, so it can’t pass legislation, including bills funding the government and providing aid to U.S. allies. The House is paralyzed because Republican extremists, who have refused to acknowledge Biden’s legitimacy and promoted chaos rather than participating in governance, have turned these tactics on their own party. At this point it’s hard to see how anyone can become speaker without Democratic votes — but even less extreme Republicans refuse to reach across the aisle.

And even if Republicans do somehow manage to elect a speaker, it seems all too likely that whoever gets the job will have to promise the hard right that he will betray Ukraine.

Given this political reality, how much can any nation trust U.S. assurances of support? How can we expect foreign enemies of democracy to fear America when they know that there are powerful forces here that share their disdain?

  • Jeremy [Iowa]English
    11·
    1 year ago

    Fun fact, under First Past the Post voting, supporting a third party is the absolute worst thing you can do.

    Oh?

    It’s called the spoiler effect, and it often results in the absolute worst candidate winning an election.

    If you support a third party that is loosely aligned with one of the major parties, you can end up in a situation where candidate A gets 40%, and your third party candidate, whose platform is closest to A, gets an astounding 15%, and they both lose to Candidate B, the most hated of both A voters and Third Party voters because B got 45%.

    I note you predicate this theory on the flawed assumption that a third party … is loosely aligned with one of the major parties.

    Which third parties in the United States would you say are loosely aligned with either the Democrats or the Republicans? Beyond the DSA, there’s… nada, and even the DSA is a stretch.

    The classic example is the 1992 presidential election, where Clinton won with 43% of the vote.

    The 2000 election is another example where Bush won* with 307 votes, far less than the 97488 votes that Ralph Nader got,

    Oh? So the fault of this is on the voter for choosing to support a candidate in alignment with their values - one who represents their interests - in an honest use of the vote, rather than the candidate failing to win over the voters?

    Do you believe there’s nothing a given candidate could do to, say, win over a given set of voters? No reflection and analysis to be done on why voters are voting a specific way - say, what policies are repelling them, what policies might attract them, etc? The voter is the only one able to act differently?

    You seem to entirely invert responsibility.

    The point being, you cannot have a third party until you change the voting system to actually support third parties. And that means a cardinal voting system, such as STAR (my current favorite)

    This is an outright lie; a third party can be supported by simply attaining votes. There is no real mechanism or barrier beyond the lies and propaganda you’re sharing here which discourages people from voting honestly.