>Any resemblance to actual persons or policy proposals, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
I do think you did a good job of making both parties a funhouse pastiche. It's obviously implied which is which, but there's just enough jarring noise to elicit confusion and thought. Better yet, all these policy positions actually have been credibly made from both sides in our contemporaneous Earth!
It's also interesting to consider how each and every voter is potentially the Olivia Hart for any given election, with increasing probability-mass as scope decreases. I'm not aware of an exactly symmetrical scenario like this coming up - I guess Florida Hanging Chads was the closest historically - but there's at least a theoretical model where each vote is a tiebreaker. Even if the odds on any individual vote are very slim, and that doesn't even require pondering the faithless-electors dilemma. I think that's the best answer to the freshman-level nihilistic take that "my vote doesn't matter, so I won't bother": a Pascal's Wager. No matter how small the odds, would __anyone__ want to be in a position like this? (Even retroactively, like at the Pearly Gates or whatever?) To paraphrase the Midwestern saying, "Have exactly the government you deserve."
Either way, I'd definitely vote for the Matt Yglesias stand-in without thinking too hard, if this were our 2024. (That __was__ purely coincidental, yes?)
Thanks! I attempted to draw on a number of real-world arguments and positions (the originalist argument on abortion rights came from a guest on the Fifth Column podcast), while consciously moving the needle in a direction to try to make the dilemma more interesting for people closer to myself politically.
The one billion Americans reference is definitely deliberate, although I would not go so far as to attribute most policy positions there to our fellow Slow Boring Substacker. That's interesting that you favored team Red, I kept tweaking the balance as I went as the people I had asked for feedback were still team Blue at the end of it.
(oops, I hit the heart button accidentally and ~never like individual comments, I hope that doesn't bias anything or imply I don't nonformally like reply-comments)
Well, that's the rub with a FPTP effectively-two-parties-only system...one must vote for the candidate more closely aligned in values, and that's very rarely a 100% match. I'm vaguely center-right if you had to pin me on a political compass, and having arrived there after being kicked out of the progressive left, there's definitely some lingering bitterness and animosity. The whole Elon Musk meme "I didn't change, the Democrats moved left!" Or dress it up as classical liberalism, popularism, whatever. At the end of the day, as much as I admire Team Blue's idealism, it crashes hard against my model of the world...both what's politically practical, and what the actual median voter is like. (I do admit to getting a disproportionate number of these blanks filled in by, yes, Slow Boring.) The incremental politics of the possible - because even Marxists like Freddie deBoer admit that there's no shame in improving and succeeding within the current system while trying to forge the new.
So, Team Red it is - and if the actual Republican Party on our Earth ever tacked back to this relative level of sanity, I think we'd be in way way better shape. Regardless of who's in office.
(The climate change position there is also, AFAICT, much closer to existing expert scientific consensus, e.g. IPCC. x-risk matters *a lot* more to me than social issues, so that alone is a huge selling point. The first step in enacting meaningful change is not lying about what's going on, nor stoking fear and panic.)
>Any resemblance to actual persons or policy proposals, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
I do think you did a good job of making both parties a funhouse pastiche. It's obviously implied which is which, but there's just enough jarring noise to elicit confusion and thought. Better yet, all these policy positions actually have been credibly made from both sides in our contemporaneous Earth!
It's also interesting to consider how each and every voter is potentially the Olivia Hart for any given election, with increasing probability-mass as scope decreases. I'm not aware of an exactly symmetrical scenario like this coming up - I guess Florida Hanging Chads was the closest historically - but there's at least a theoretical model where each vote is a tiebreaker. Even if the odds on any individual vote are very slim, and that doesn't even require pondering the faithless-electors dilemma. I think that's the best answer to the freshman-level nihilistic take that "my vote doesn't matter, so I won't bother": a Pascal's Wager. No matter how small the odds, would __anyone__ want to be in a position like this? (Even retroactively, like at the Pearly Gates or whatever?) To paraphrase the Midwestern saying, "Have exactly the government you deserve."
Either way, I'd definitely vote for the Matt Yglesias stand-in without thinking too hard, if this were our 2024. (That __was__ purely coincidental, yes?)
Thanks! I attempted to draw on a number of real-world arguments and positions (the originalist argument on abortion rights came from a guest on the Fifth Column podcast), while consciously moving the needle in a direction to try to make the dilemma more interesting for people closer to myself politically.
The one billion Americans reference is definitely deliberate, although I would not go so far as to attribute most policy positions there to our fellow Slow Boring Substacker. That's interesting that you favored team Red, I kept tweaking the balance as I went as the people I had asked for feedback were still team Blue at the end of it.
(oops, I hit the heart button accidentally and ~never like individual comments, I hope that doesn't bias anything or imply I don't nonformally like reply-comments)
Well, that's the rub with a FPTP effectively-two-parties-only system...one must vote for the candidate more closely aligned in values, and that's very rarely a 100% match. I'm vaguely center-right if you had to pin me on a political compass, and having arrived there after being kicked out of the progressive left, there's definitely some lingering bitterness and animosity. The whole Elon Musk meme "I didn't change, the Democrats moved left!" Or dress it up as classical liberalism, popularism, whatever. At the end of the day, as much as I admire Team Blue's idealism, it crashes hard against my model of the world...both what's politically practical, and what the actual median voter is like. (I do admit to getting a disproportionate number of these blanks filled in by, yes, Slow Boring.) The incremental politics of the possible - because even Marxists like Freddie deBoer admit that there's no shame in improving and succeeding within the current system while trying to forge the new.
So, Team Red it is - and if the actual Republican Party on our Earth ever tacked back to this relative level of sanity, I think we'd be in way way better shape. Regardless of who's in office.
(The climate change position there is also, AFAICT, much closer to existing expert scientific consensus, e.g. IPCC. x-risk matters *a lot* more to me than social issues, so that alone is a huge selling point. The first step in enacting meaningful change is not lying about what's going on, nor stoking fear and panic.)
AAAAACK! You left us hanging!
It's a clever story, though.