I composed today's headline while reading William A. Galston's WSJ column. He wonders: Are There Five Parties in America’s Future?. (WSJ gifted link)
(And Betteridge's Law of Headlines might not apply!)
Last week’s local elections yielded massive losses for Britain’s Labour Party. The more significant result was what many analysts believe is the impending crack-up of Britain’s two-party system.
For most of the 19th century, the Liberal and Conservative parties battled for dominance. For most of the 20th century and into the 21st, Labour and the Conservatives did the same, with the Liberal Party (now the Liberal Democrats) located between them ideologically. Britain’s district-based, first-past-the-post electoral system kept the Liberal Democrats’ parliamentary seat total well below its share of the national popular vote.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Never mind the Limeys! What about us?
Despite tensions within both major parties, the traditional two-party duopoly has remained intact—so far. But it is possible to imagine scenarios that could change this. Even if Mr. Trump’s job-approval doesn’t improve, the dominant MAGA faction of the Republican Party may well select a 2028 presidential nominee cut from the same cloth. Fearing certain defeat, traditional conservatives could revolt. If Democrats nominate a traditional center-left candidate, impatient young leftists could rally around the DSA as an alternative in the general election.
Our two-party system has cracked before—in the 1850s, 1892, 1912, 1924, 1948, 1968 and 1992. Last year, a respected survey research firm X-rayed the electorate and found five potential parties lurking beneath the skin of our politics—MAGA supporters, traditional conservatives, the moderate left, socialists and a market-oriented, socially liberal party of the center.
I would guess that candidates from the "Traditional Conservative Party" and the "Market-Oriented Socially Liberal Party" might say things that would appeal to me. They would also say things that would make me grit my teeth, hold my nose, and roll my eyes.
The Quote Investigator discusses the various ways Groucho Marx worded his version of today's anti-social headline, and its possible precursor.
Also of note:
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Look out below! Deirdre Nansen McCloksey has demographic thoughts: World Population Will Fall.
Have you noticed that we keep finding new social problems? Every year. Before the second half of the 19th century, people didn’t use the phrase or have the idea.
The problem with problem-talk is that it results in more intervention by the state. So the state gets bigger. In Brazil, insult comedians are viewed as a social problem. Bring in our brilliant masters in the US Congress or the Brazilian Parliament. Make a law. Put the comedians in jail.
My fear is that we will repeat the terrible damage to humanity from our earlier great fear of over-population. An unscientific article in Science magazine in 1968 by Garrett Hardin, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” recommended compulsory sterilization of women. An even more unscientific book in 1968 by Paul R. Ehrlich, The Population Bomb, then panicked the entire world, leading, for example, to the Chinese one-child policy. The science of both men was biology, not history or economics or demography or political science.
Deirdre is apparently in favor of government treating people as responsible adults, capable of making their own decisions. Unfortunately, I fear that would make a relatively tiny political party.
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Paying off the kidnappers. Does that sound like a good idea to you? Inside Higher Ed has the latest example: Instructure Pays Ransom to Canvas Hackers.
Instructure has paid a ransom to a gang of cybercriminals that have twice hacked the company’s learning management system, Canvas, over the past week and a half.
According to an update published by the education-technology company Monday night, the deal means that the hackers have returned the compromised data of some 275 million users across more than 8,800 institutions.
The company—whose LMS ["Learning Management System"] is used to deliver courses by 41 percent of higher education institutions in North America—said it “received digital confirmation of data destruction (shred logs)” and assurance “that no Instructure customers will be extorted as a result of this incident, publicly or otherwise.” It added that the agreement “covers all impacted Instructure customers” and that individual customers have “no need” to engage with ShinyHunters, the extortionist group that has breached and temporarily disabled Canvas twice so far this month.
Among the higher education institutions using Canvas: the University Near Here. No indication of whether Instructure will pass through the ransom costs to institutions, but I wouldn't expect them to publicize that.
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I'm pretty sure George Orwell did not see this specific thing coming. National Review's language columnist, Bryan A. Garner, reviews Trash Talk from the Oval Office. (NR gifted link)
There was a time, not so long ago, when the president of the United States could be counted on to embarrass the republic only through inept decisions or lofty platitudes. Now, presidential disgrace is also linguistic, rhetorical, even psychological. With Donald Trump, the vulgar torrent became the message. The method was bluster, the attitude an amoral indifference to truth, the idiom a kind of gutter demotic that dragged every exchange down to the level of the pro-wrestling ring or the casino floor. For a people once taught to regard the presidency as a moral tribune, this wasn’t just a comedown. It was a national intoxication in which intoxication itself became the new sobriety.
The first and most obvious mark of this coarse dispensation lies in its diction. Political language once at least gestured toward civility of tone. Though its meanings could be evasive, its grammar was usually correct. Trump’s breakthrough was to treat coarseness not as a liability but as a credential of authenticity. The profanity, the name-calling, the brawling with “losers” and “morons,” the yells about “animals” and “vermin” became ritual displays of his supposed proximity to the national id. What would have been a gaffe for any other politician he turned into a virtue by claiming persecution from the “politically correct.” The man who bragged of his genius for “the best words” could rarely manage a paragraph without syntactic collapse. Yet this triumphant incoherence passed as sincerity, the errors and misspellings paraded as badges of manly candor against effete literati who couldn’t “connect with real people.”
From Orwell's famous 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language:
[I]t is clear that the decline of a language must ultimately have political and economic causes: it is not due simply to the bad influence of this or that individual writer. But an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.
Orwell thought (or hoped) that the trend was "reversible". Well, maybe, but to quote a different famous writer: "Isn't it pretty to think so?"
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