Didn't Platner formerly wear Nazi tattoos? Even if he was great and morally reformed it's probably still bad from a strategic standpoint to platform him.
I'm coming around much more to this point of view after recent years.
The only place I'd really disagree is the idea that bad character mostly affects foreigners. I guess maybe *mostly* it does, but it certainly affects Americans a great deal, too. A lame-duck politician (especially) can do an enormous amount of damage without consequence; also, you say that an evil politician will pay, but *one thing an evil politician can do* (if a demagogue) *is manipulate the people to do what's bad for the country.*
For all these reasons, I care a lot more about character than I used to, and I always cared quite a bit.
The problem is that the system itself is bad, and it creates bad incentives for both politicians and voters. Each election, voters are pitted against one another for the honour of being represented. Not which representative will win, but whether or not they will have representation, period. A politician that enacts policies that go against my own interests doesn't represent me. In fact, they will have the power to do great harm.
Your analysis above is correct, selecting politicians who display good moral character are more likely to do good things. However, a politican who has good moral character, but believes that actions that do harm to me are good policy are, at least from my perspective, basically guaranteed to do bad things. In this instance, is a moral politician who bad policy preferable to a immoral politican with good policy? I think that's an unfair position to put voters in, in the first place. If we believe democracy to be legitimate, and properly express the voters views, then we need to give voters true options in the first place.
My goal is to design a new democratic system that works to improve the incentive structure of both politicians and voters, and my substack is devoted to explaining how that works, if that interests you.
If I voted in Maine, I would be happy to vote against Platner. But isn't there a bigger issue here? He won a democratic election. 72% of Maine voters did vote for him. And now that result is just being ignored. We didn't accept it when Trump tried to ignore the result of the 2020 general election. By far the worst blow against American democracy in my lifetime happened when the Democrats effectively cancelled the 2024 presidential primary. And now the Democrats are effectively undoing the results of another democratic election. Why are you not outraged by that?
Absolutely not, no!!!! A primary election is an election just like any other. To ignore its results is no different from ignoring the results of a general election. It is as deep a violation of democratic principles and rule of law as I can imagine.
>A primary election is an election just like any other.
It is not. There are (in most areas) no laws requiring that a party respect a primary or even hold one (things like jungle primaries are different, because those are legislated for). Anyway, in this case, Platner stepped down after a huge amount of social pressure on him. Which is what politics is basically about. The democrats didn't even have to knife him.
>It is as deep a violation of democratic principles and rule of law as I can imagine.
It's not a violation of the rule of law in any way. Violation of democratic principles? I can see that argument - the parties have held out a promise to their voters that they could choose the candidate, and then they reneged on it.
But I can also see the reverse argument. A full election allows someone to assume a position of power over many people, so it absolutely needs the consent of the governed. A primary election allows someone to *be a candidate* for a position of power. That’s not the same thing, so I put less weight on primary elections for democratic legitimacy.
I don't know the ins and outs of election law so I won't comment there.
The social pressure argument is your best one, it's maybe some weight, but it still feels wrong.
But lets be clear. The parties aren't entities that make decisions, they are labels that we (citizens) use to organize our participation in politics. Other countries have elections between three or more candidates or parties on a single day. We have split the process into two steps, a primary which starts with many candidates and narrows the field to two, and a general that selects between those two. But they are two steps in the same process of selecting a leader. Both are steps on a path that allows a person to assume a position of power, and both are essential for democratic legitimacy. If we treat a primary election as something political leaders can just undo at will, then the choice left to the people is between only two candidates, and that is not enough for democratic legitimacy. That is just a bipolar dictatorship. A primary election is at least as essential as a general election in allowing Americans to choose who will govern them.
>We have split the process into two steps, a primary which starts with many candidates and narrows the field to two, and a general that selects between those two
Who is this "we"? :-)
With a few exceptions, primaries exist only because the parties themselves decided to organise them. This is not a two-stage election system like France or California. It's the private preliminaries for a first-past-the-post election with multiple candidates. Which should be absolutely fine. But...
But the US is stuck in a two-party system, which is why the R and D party primaries seem like they're half of the way to getting elected. But that's not a legal feature, it's a side effect of having an entrenched two-party system with a first past-the-post system.
But it doesn't need to be that way; Alaska, for instance, doesn't have any primaries. California and Washington have legally mandated primaries, but no party primaries.
In what sense is the primary system as it exists in, say, Virginia, different from a two-stage election? Because this distinction sounds like it is just a way for you to try to make it ok for Democratic leaders to undo the results of democratic elections that they don't like, which, notably, is exactly what they often criticize Trump for.
The party isn't "ignoring" the results of the Maine primary. The party is under no obligation to support Platner and Platner is under no obligation to drop out of the race. If the party decides to withhold support to Platner (out of moral standards or because they believe he cannot win) and Platner in turn decides to leave the race, then that isn't a coup.
There's an enormous difference between nullifying an election and what happened in 2024, which is that:
a) Biden won the primary
b) Biden had a terrible debate
c) Biden was convinced to drop out due to a variety of factors stemming from the debate (bad polling, bad fundraising, pressure from various groups/people)
The former is a coup, the latter is one man ultimately deciding he won't be the nominee any longer. I'm not even sure what kind of alternative you'd like to see here. Make it impossible for a nominee to drop out once they've won the primary?
That is a gross mischaracterization of what happened in 2024. Biden was mentally incompetent long before the debate, very likely before the first primaries were underway. The circle around him, including Harris, not only failed in their constitutional duty to invoke the 25th Amendment, but also lied to the American people about it. Because of that lie, no real primary election was ever conducted. And when the lie was revealed, Harris simply took the nomination, without ever winning a primary election. The only sense in which that is not a coup is that it was the first stage of the election and she ultimately lost the second. What was the alternative? Not lying for one. Even after the lie was revealed, there should have been a quick primary.
I agree that he was mentally incompetent long before the debate, that key people in his admin lied about his mental state, and that the 25th amendment should've been invoked. I just don't see how that's relevant. It may have been the reason he dropped out, but it has no bearing on whether or not him dropping out was a coup or a nullification of an election.
Lying to the American people to prevent a legitimate election from occurring, and then installing a nominee without a primary election, how could that not be a coup? If you agree he was mentally incompetent, then in the senses that matter he wasn't the agent doing anything, the people around him were. He might as well have been dead. An election won by a dead or incompetent person is no election.
I feel like there are intensifiers doing a lot of work here (lying, installing, coup, mental incompetence) that reflect emotional stakes rather than actual choices and events.
There were multiple opinions about Biden's abilities that prevailed before he made his choice to drop out and they were all pretty defensible. I find it especially strange to count delegation of decisions as somehow disqualifying (isn't that sort of what we hire these presidents for? Picking people whose judgment they trust with important things?)
"Installing" a replacement is again a big part of what a party should be equipped to do. I personally think a huge problem with American parties is that they seem less capable these days of being trusted to do this for a number of reasons (a lack of incentive to pick and nurture good successors versus running the same guy into the ground!) We are selecting representatives to be part of an organization, sometimes to helm it, and if the parallel structure isn't great then what other expectation can we have?
Nobody is talking about delegation of decisions. I don't know where you are getting that from. What decisions do you think were delegated?
> "Installing" a replacement is again a big part of what a party should be equipped to do.
Excuse me? No! It is the job of the American people to narrow the candidates from the many who run in primaries to the one who ultimately holds the office. It is not the job of a party to do the larger part of that narrowing for us, especially not after the top officials of that party interfered with the normal first stage of the election by lying to us about the mental state of the presumptive nominee.
It is in fact an act of institutional respect to drop out and not cause more problems on the way out, and I'll think more highly of him in the future because he did.
Many good points here. I'm horrified at how so many on the left got this wrong until just a few days ago (though the more radical people on the left always opposed him). The moral red flags for me were:
1. Volunteering for the military (and specifically requesting infantry and to be sent to Iraq) *after* protesting against the war (showing that he believed it was wrong) because he wanted to "have an adventure and kill some people."
2. He bragged on Reddit about urinating on the corpse of a Taliban fighter.
3. He dropped out of a (GI Bill funded) degree program at GWU and ultimately joined Blackwater. He was enthusiastic enough about Blackwater to have a Blackwater fridge magnet and hat.
4. He bragged on Reddit about committing a war crime. In Ramadhi, he and his buddies were told not to use mortars in a civilian populated area. He made a video, laughing and cheering, of himself and his friends disobeying orders and rigging up a grenade launcher to work like a mortar.
It is hard to determine who is a good politician, but much easier to see who is bad. Low personal achievement, feuds with others, bad life desisions, conspiracism, politics based around resentment.
The voters wanted him, so he's not a cause, but a symptom. Perhaps there is a problem with a system that gives regular people a political voice? Much like the anti-kakistocracy whining of Hanania, this is thin on solutions. Anyone who is anti-populism has to contend with Bertholt Brecht's The Solution:
I think it’s often useful to characterize a lot of the political situations where character matters as providing a credence as to what direction they will go when you have options to cooperate or defect on important matters.
Didn't Platner formerly wear Nazi tattoos? Even if he was great and morally reformed it's probably still bad from a strategic standpoint to platform him.
I'm coming around much more to this point of view after recent years.
The only place I'd really disagree is the idea that bad character mostly affects foreigners. I guess maybe *mostly* it does, but it certainly affects Americans a great deal, too. A lame-duck politician (especially) can do an enormous amount of damage without consequence; also, you say that an evil politician will pay, but *one thing an evil politician can do* (if a demagogue) *is manipulate the people to do what's bad for the country.*
For all these reasons, I care a lot more about character than I used to, and I always cared quite a bit.
The problem is that the system itself is bad, and it creates bad incentives for both politicians and voters. Each election, voters are pitted against one another for the honour of being represented. Not which representative will win, but whether or not they will have representation, period. A politician that enacts policies that go against my own interests doesn't represent me. In fact, they will have the power to do great harm.
Your analysis above is correct, selecting politicians who display good moral character are more likely to do good things. However, a politican who has good moral character, but believes that actions that do harm to me are good policy are, at least from my perspective, basically guaranteed to do bad things. In this instance, is a moral politician who bad policy preferable to a immoral politican with good policy? I think that's an unfair position to put voters in, in the first place. If we believe democracy to be legitimate, and properly express the voters views, then we need to give voters true options in the first place.
My goal is to design a new democratic system that works to improve the incentive structure of both politicians and voters, and my substack is devoted to explaining how that works, if that interests you.
If I voted in Maine, I would be happy to vote against Platner. But isn't there a bigger issue here? He won a democratic election. 72% of Maine voters did vote for him. And now that result is just being ignored. We didn't accept it when Trump tried to ignore the result of the 2020 general election. By far the worst blow against American democracy in my lifetime happened when the Democrats effectively cancelled the 2024 presidential primary. And now the Democrats are effectively undoing the results of another democratic election. Why are you not outraged by that?
The Democratic party is a private organization that can put up candidates however it wants.
Absolutely not, no!!!! A primary election is an election just like any other. To ignore its results is no different from ignoring the results of a general election. It is as deep a violation of democratic principles and rule of law as I can imagine.
>A primary election is an election just like any other.
It is not. There are (in most areas) no laws requiring that a party respect a primary or even hold one (things like jungle primaries are different, because those are legislated for). Anyway, in this case, Platner stepped down after a huge amount of social pressure on him. Which is what politics is basically about. The democrats didn't even have to knife him.
>It is as deep a violation of democratic principles and rule of law as I can imagine.
It's not a violation of the rule of law in any way. Violation of democratic principles? I can see that argument - the parties have held out a promise to their voters that they could choose the candidate, and then they reneged on it.
But I can also see the reverse argument. A full election allows someone to assume a position of power over many people, so it absolutely needs the consent of the governed. A primary election allows someone to *be a candidate* for a position of power. That’s not the same thing, so I put less weight on primary elections for democratic legitimacy.
I don't know the ins and outs of election law so I won't comment there.
The social pressure argument is your best one, it's maybe some weight, but it still feels wrong.
But lets be clear. The parties aren't entities that make decisions, they are labels that we (citizens) use to organize our participation in politics. Other countries have elections between three or more candidates or parties on a single day. We have split the process into two steps, a primary which starts with many candidates and narrows the field to two, and a general that selects between those two. But they are two steps in the same process of selecting a leader. Both are steps on a path that allows a person to assume a position of power, and both are essential for democratic legitimacy. If we treat a primary election as something political leaders can just undo at will, then the choice left to the people is between only two candidates, and that is not enough for democratic legitimacy. That is just a bipolar dictatorship. A primary election is at least as essential as a general election in allowing Americans to choose who will govern them.
>We have split the process into two steps, a primary which starts with many candidates and narrows the field to two, and a general that selects between those two
Who is this "we"? :-)
With a few exceptions, primaries exist only because the parties themselves decided to organise them. This is not a two-stage election system like France or California. It's the private preliminaries for a first-past-the-post election with multiple candidates. Which should be absolutely fine. But...
But the US is stuck in a two-party system, which is why the R and D party primaries seem like they're half of the way to getting elected. But that's not a legal feature, it's a side effect of having an entrenched two-party system with a first past-the-post system.
But it doesn't need to be that way; Alaska, for instance, doesn't have any primaries. California and Washington have legally mandated primaries, but no party primaries.
"We" is the American people.
In what sense is the primary system as it exists in, say, Virginia, different from a two-stage election? Because this distinction sounds like it is just a way for you to try to make it ok for Democratic leaders to undo the results of democratic elections that they don't like, which, notably, is exactly what they often criticize Trump for.
The party isn't "ignoring" the results of the Maine primary. The party is under no obligation to support Platner and Platner is under no obligation to drop out of the race. If the party decides to withhold support to Platner (out of moral standards or because they believe he cannot win) and Platner in turn decides to leave the race, then that isn't a coup.
There's an enormous difference between nullifying an election and what happened in 2024, which is that:
a) Biden won the primary
b) Biden had a terrible debate
c) Biden was convinced to drop out due to a variety of factors stemming from the debate (bad polling, bad fundraising, pressure from various groups/people)
The former is a coup, the latter is one man ultimately deciding he won't be the nominee any longer. I'm not even sure what kind of alternative you'd like to see here. Make it impossible for a nominee to drop out once they've won the primary?
That is a gross mischaracterization of what happened in 2024. Biden was mentally incompetent long before the debate, very likely before the first primaries were underway. The circle around him, including Harris, not only failed in their constitutional duty to invoke the 25th Amendment, but also lied to the American people about it. Because of that lie, no real primary election was ever conducted. And when the lie was revealed, Harris simply took the nomination, without ever winning a primary election. The only sense in which that is not a coup is that it was the first stage of the election and she ultimately lost the second. What was the alternative? Not lying for one. Even after the lie was revealed, there should have been a quick primary.
I agree that he was mentally incompetent long before the debate, that key people in his admin lied about his mental state, and that the 25th amendment should've been invoked. I just don't see how that's relevant. It may have been the reason he dropped out, but it has no bearing on whether or not him dropping out was a coup or a nullification of an election.
Lying to the American people to prevent a legitimate election from occurring, and then installing a nominee without a primary election, how could that not be a coup? If you agree he was mentally incompetent, then in the senses that matter he wasn't the agent doing anything, the people around him were. He might as well have been dead. An election won by a dead or incompetent person is no election.
I feel like there are intensifiers doing a lot of work here (lying, installing, coup, mental incompetence) that reflect emotional stakes rather than actual choices and events.
There were multiple opinions about Biden's abilities that prevailed before he made his choice to drop out and they were all pretty defensible. I find it especially strange to count delegation of decisions as somehow disqualifying (isn't that sort of what we hire these presidents for? Picking people whose judgment they trust with important things?)
"Installing" a replacement is again a big part of what a party should be equipped to do. I personally think a huge problem with American parties is that they seem less capable these days of being trusted to do this for a number of reasons (a lack of incentive to pick and nurture good successors versus running the same guy into the ground!) We are selecting representatives to be part of an organization, sometimes to helm it, and if the parallel structure isn't great then what other expectation can we have?
Nobody is talking about delegation of decisions. I don't know where you are getting that from. What decisions do you think were delegated?
> "Installing" a replacement is again a big part of what a party should be equipped to do.
Excuse me? No! It is the job of the American people to narrow the candidates from the many who run in primaries to the one who ultimately holds the office. It is not the job of a party to do the larger part of that narrowing for us, especially not after the top officials of that party interfered with the normal first stage of the election by lying to us about the mental state of the presumptive nominee.
If he thought he could win he was free to stay in the race.
It is in fact an act of institutional respect to drop out and not cause more problems on the way out, and I'll think more highly of him in the future because he did.
Many good points here. I'm horrified at how so many on the left got this wrong until just a few days ago (though the more radical people on the left always opposed him). The moral red flags for me were:
1. Volunteering for the military (and specifically requesting infantry and to be sent to Iraq) *after* protesting against the war (showing that he believed it was wrong) because he wanted to "have an adventure and kill some people."
2. He bragged on Reddit about urinating on the corpse of a Taliban fighter.
3. He dropped out of a (GI Bill funded) degree program at GWU and ultimately joined Blackwater. He was enthusiastic enough about Blackwater to have a Blackwater fridge magnet and hat.
4. He bragged on Reddit about committing a war crime. In Ramadhi, he and his buddies were told not to use mortars in a civilian populated area. He made a video, laughing and cheering, of himself and his friends disobeying orders and rigging up a grenade launcher to work like a mortar.
It is hard to determine who is a good politician, but much easier to see who is bad. Low personal achievement, feuds with others, bad life desisions, conspiracism, politics based around resentment.
The voters wanted him, so he's not a cause, but a symptom. Perhaps there is a problem with a system that gives regular people a political voice? Much like the anti-kakistocracy whining of Hanania, this is thin on solutions. Anyone who is anti-populism has to contend with Bertholt Brecht's The Solution:
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
I think it’s often useful to characterize a lot of the political situations where character matters as providing a credence as to what direction they will go when you have options to cooperate or defect on important matters.
"But it’s not for the standard reason people think.
The most important facts about a candidate are what they will do politically."
Wait what do you think is the standard reason?