A book of mine, dealing with (among other things) what the Hohenzollerns were doing in the Weimar Republic, will be released in a few days' time by the Pen and Sword imprint in Yorkshire. Researching the Hohenzollern chapter naturally forced me to trace the timeline of Thälmann's electioneering.
I learned, depressingly enough, that although Thälmann's policies as presidential candidate were in every respect far stupider in 1932 than they had been even in 1925, they won him far more votes. What implications this dispiriting datum has for the American election, I would not like to say. For the same reasons as Kilometres Davis, in 2024 I consume as little news as possible.
Robert Reich is cautiously optimistic but is concerned about JD Vance and his backers. But should Harris win, and that’s becoming more of a certainty, there’s still a long way to go to restore equality.
If Trump wins I’m betting that inside 12 months Vance will have successfully invoked section 4 of the 25th Amendment and had Trump removed for incapacity and installed himself as president, at which point US democracy dies at the hands of Musk, Thiel, Bezos et al. The question then becomes: how will the military respond to the resistance?
The problem with invoking the 25th amendment is it requires a 2/3 majority of congress to fully implement it. Will the Democrats prefer a Vance presidency to an incapacitated Trump? I don't know.
Yes, but as I understand it, Congress weighs in only if the president rejects the VP’s (plus a majority of cabinet members) declaration of POTUS’s inability to continue in office. Trump would never go quietly, of course. But in another year or two, as Trump’s clear mental disintegration progresses, maybe two-thirds of Congress would agree to support a declaration. If Trump wins next week, I find it difficult not to believe that Vance will end up as president. Hundreds of millions of dollars - if not billions - are being spent on achieving a vision of the US as an oligarchs’ paradise. You can see the machinery in motion. From Musk’s pro-Trump twitter storms and million-dollar voter bribes, to Bezos’s WaPo editorial directive and Thiel’s tens of millions invested in Vance, they and numerous other billionaires aim to further roll back US democracy usurp the power of the people. Harris needs a resounding win to stem this incipient fascist tide.
Speaking of Thälmann, I'm a fan of the 3 Arrows philosophy. It originated among German social democrats who opposed the Fascism of Hitler, the Communism of Thälmann, and the Reactionism of von Papen.
I mostly agree John. There are a number of other permutations which take account of what the numbers are in the Congress, but that doesn't significantly change the overall grimness. The high probability of the end of US democracy is terrifying, and I am struggling to think of how Australia could respond to protect ourselves from the consequences. Meanwhile I will start to disentangle myself from Kindle.
Isn’t there plenty of scope for him to govern unconstitutionally and fail without Supreme Court pushback? Trad Conservatives pushed to breaking point, the senate, events, bad tactics (a massive factor imho)
I've given up on Trad conservatives, and I assume Trump will have the Senate this time around, and therefore forever. Eventually, there will be enough mistakes to bring him down, but democracy will have to be rebuilt from scratch
Thanks for this John. I was considering doing my own with Iran Israel but there's only so much mental harm going can inflict on yourself for one day before popcorn brain sets in. You write with great clarity of purpose and you should put that fact in your pocket and let it drive you onwards. All the best. Take a dip when you get the chance to get near some water, beautiful day today.
I'm happy to say, I was between the flags at Maroochydore Beach before coming back to write this up. I can at least preserve my mental health, even if much else turns out to be futile
Even notwithstanding that I think the model should not be used to generate probabilistic predictions in its current form, it has a couple of what appear to be errors which make the predictions it does generate less accurate, which I have fixed:
1. The ‘Harris Presidency fails’ node appears to account for situations where Harris is not sabotaged but cannot deliver as a non-MAGA candidate, and so MAGA win the next election. This outcome should be possible if the Republicans try to sabotage her but can’t, but because of the logic of the decision tree it is actually *better* for Harris if the Republicans try to sabotage her than if they don’t, because if they don’t then she can never fail!
2. The probability of a popular uprising is the same whether Trump does something unconstitutional or starts a coup. This seems unlikely to me – in a case where Trump starts a coup then Harris is the legitimate President and can order the army to quash it, whereas in a case where Trump does something unconstitutional then the army would be torn between two nominally equally legitimate branches of government, for example. Regardless of whether you agree with my thinking here, it is incorrect model logic to *force* them to take the same probability
Thanks for this. As I think you’ve said elsewhere, this is meant more as a reality check (particularly, but not only, for those downplaying the risk) than a way of deriving (for example) betting odds
On your point 1, “Harris presidency fails” is supposed to include “failing to deliver” I agree on point 2.
I think this is a brilliant exercise in putting numbers to an otherwise complex argument to help the essential insight come out. Unless they’re being done as a purely academic exercise, decision models need to have a ‘point’ to them, which drives decisions you make in the creation of that model. I think the ‘point’ of your model is to flag that the risk of democratic collapse is much higher than people think, to which purpose it is probably fairly well suited. However, a lay reader might not understand this, and assume that the ‘point’ of the model is to offer an estimate of the actual probability of the end of US democracy. The model is not well suited to offer this sort of conclusion, for two main reasons:
1. The biggest weakness in the model, to my mind, is that it cannot account for a *range* of outcomes, which matters a lot in this situation. For example, one term in the model is ‘Trump governs unconstitutionally’. This is assigned a 90% probability. But there’s many different ways in which Trump might govern unconstitutionally; he might literally declare himself dictator for life, or he might breach some technical regulation that nobody cares about, like Obama did with NLRB v. Noel Canning. This in turn changes the probability that the Supreme Court are able to stop him, and that a popular uprising is successful. Similarly, the magnitude of a Harris win / Democratic sweep of Congress will greatly alter the probability (and probability of success) of a Trump coup, and there are many bad outcomes even in your ‘democracy survives’ endpoints which should be considered, like a civil war ending in a defeat for Trump.
2. Conceptually, I am surprised that the model doesn’t use a Bayesian approach. Frequentist approaches are extremely prone to over-updating on the modeller’s personal biases in predicting these sorts of situations, and I have identified a few areas where I think you may have let some bias creep in (is it really true that if the Harris Presidency fails there is a 100% chance that a MAGA candidate wins? And that that MAGA candidate brings about the end of democracy with 100% probability?). A Bayesian approach is highly protective against these sorts of biases.
For these reasons I think a Bayesian Discrete Event Simulation would probably be the minimum level of complexity which would be suitable for assigning actual probabilities to the end of democracy in America. Of the two conceptual alterations I propose, I think a simple Bayesian approach would most radically impact conclusions; I think this approach would be very unlikely to find the risk of the end of democracy is >2% - which to be clear I regard as a substantial and meaningful risk, but significantly lower (and more accurate) than your 52%
Another question is how long it will be before some of the states attempt to secede from the Union if democracy dies, and which states will be more likely to attempt this.
California, naturally overnight. Texas I think believes it could, but probably couldn't. You'd get a lot of libertarian compounds throughout the Midwest who'd like their own slice of pie which would complicate things. I think those places that are harder to police and less populous, Wyoming for example, would need to settle up quick with whatever corridor for trade they can afford to sever and complicate or reinforce. I think flight inland is perhaps an unrealistic scenario as no doubt there are plans even now for scenarios should cities and state become isolated. Its just whether anyone is privy to them that matters. I wouldn't want to be Canada or Mexico is all I'm saying.
Another way of looking at the decay of democracy in the USA is through the lens of the campaign. This is supposed to be a learning process, like all democracy. The electorate learns about the character and policies of the candidates and parties, who in turn – and to a lesser extent – learn about the feelings and ideas of the electors. Suppose the actual campaign had resembled this ideal even modestly, as in the last Australian and British elections. Harris would have started modestly, as a relatively unknown candidate, and steadily increased her support from her and Walz’ decency, professionalism, and limited but popular policy proposals. On the other side, Trump’s descent into unhinged fascism should have led to shrinking support and Harris coasting to victory. What we saw was very different; a sudden early boom in Harris’ support, driven by relief from Democratic frustration at Biden’s age; then stasis, in spite of Trump’s many gaffes: and recently, a Harris lead shrinking below what she needs to overcome the GOP bias in the electoral college. Trump’s MAGA supporters have not given an inch, and apparently revel in his appalling spiral.
It is hard to be rationally hopeful. The Prussian monarchy was saved by not one but two “Miracles of the House of Brandenburg”, in 1759 and 1761, though posterity may not have felt very grateful. The pollsters may have got their likely voter models all wrong, if young women vote en masse for Harris. It is even possible that polls have become generally worthless in a society that gets its information and disinformation online within partisan bubbles. A majority of Americans believe the USA to be in a recession, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes and payslips.
What about Trump and republicans win presidency and congress, Supreme Court doesn’t uphold the constitution, but incompetency and infighting among the right wing leads to the inertial situation where democracy survives for now?
It looks like so called ‘American democracy’ fails whoever wins in my reckoning. The calibre of the two political candidates is substandard. It seems to me American democracy has been put on the auction table and up for grabs by the highest bidder. The neocons in Washington call Russia a gas station with weapons. Well I call America an armed asylum controlled by wealthy, amoral plutocrats. BRICS signifies the agonising, slow process from a unipolar world to a multipolar world.
America is on the decline, economically, socially, politically, culturally, spiritually and ethically. It has lost its moral compass and the other 75% to 85% of the world’s population are finally coming to terms with this reality. The western nations comprise 15% to 25% of the world’s population, they can no longer pull the economic and political strings in this world.
The only glaring error is the premise that democracy exists currently. The electoral system in the US, with First Past The Post voting, winner-take-all states and the Electoral College falls so far short of what a modern democracy should look like.
There are other control points in the case of a Trump victory. One of these is Congress, another is the Cabinet, and probably the most important, the Federal Reserve. The Fed Chief has enormous power that it not easily countered by the president. Congress has the power of impeachment and removal from office. The Cabinet can, under the 25th Amendment, remove Trump and put Vance in power.
One option to add that is super unlikely would be electoral college tie. Which likely means the US devolves into a cluster fuck if that happens. Firstly there be contestations state by state prior to elector votes, attempts including swaying. Then eventually if the elctors dedlock they'd punt the presidential election to the house which is voted on by congressmen by state and whoever gets the majority of states win. So this could deadlock both overall and within states as well as but is likely a Trump victory. The vice president is decided by the majority of senators, so who knows based on the map everything could deadlock and Vance could be vice president and then due to deadlocking be acting president.
This is a unlikely, silly, probably irrelevant post but it sort of highlights just how a lot of political processes in the US are very janky.
A book of mine, dealing with (among other things) what the Hohenzollerns were doing in the Weimar Republic, will be released in a few days' time by the Pen and Sword imprint in Yorkshire. Researching the Hohenzollern chapter naturally forced me to trace the timeline of Thälmann's electioneering.
I learned, depressingly enough, that although Thälmann's policies as presidential candidate were in every respect far stupider in 1932 than they had been even in 1925, they won him far more votes. What implications this dispiriting datum has for the American election, I would not like to say. For the same reasons as Kilometres Davis, in 2024 I consume as little news as possible.
Robert Reich is cautiously optimistic but is concerned about JD Vance and his backers. But should Harris win, and that’s becoming more of a certainty, there’s still a long way to go to restore equality.
If Trump wins I’m betting that inside 12 months Vance will have successfully invoked section 4 of the 25th Amendment and had Trump removed for incapacity and installed himself as president, at which point US democracy dies at the hands of Musk, Thiel, Bezos et al. The question then becomes: how will the military respond to the resistance?
The problem with invoking the 25th amendment is it requires a 2/3 majority of congress to fully implement it. Will the Democrats prefer a Vance presidency to an incapacitated Trump? I don't know.
Yes, but as I understand it, Congress weighs in only if the president rejects the VP’s (plus a majority of cabinet members) declaration of POTUS’s inability to continue in office. Trump would never go quietly, of course. But in another year or two, as Trump’s clear mental disintegration progresses, maybe two-thirds of Congress would agree to support a declaration. If Trump wins next week, I find it difficult not to believe that Vance will end up as president. Hundreds of millions of dollars - if not billions - are being spent on achieving a vision of the US as an oligarchs’ paradise. You can see the machinery in motion. From Musk’s pro-Trump twitter storms and million-dollar voter bribes, to Bezos’s WaPo editorial directive and Thiel’s tens of millions invested in Vance, they and numerous other billionaires aim to further roll back US democracy usurp the power of the people. Harris needs a resounding win to stem this incipient fascist tide.
Speaking of Thälmann, I'm a fan of the 3 Arrows philosophy. It originated among German social democrats who opposed the Fascism of Hitler, the Communism of Thälmann, and the Reactionism of von Papen.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Arrows
I mostly agree John. There are a number of other permutations which take account of what the numbers are in the Congress, but that doesn't significantly change the overall grimness. The high probability of the end of US democracy is terrifying, and I am struggling to think of how Australia could respond to protect ourselves from the consequences. Meanwhile I will start to disentangle myself from Kindle.
Isn’t there plenty of scope for him to govern unconstitutionally and fail without Supreme Court pushback? Trad Conservatives pushed to breaking point, the senate, events, bad tactics (a massive factor imho)
I've given up on Trad conservatives, and I assume Trump will have the Senate this time around, and therefore forever. Eventually, there will be enough mistakes to bring him down, but democracy will have to be rebuilt from scratch
Trump had a majority in the Senate (and the House) in 2016 and failed to coordinate them enough to achieve his goals.
Thanks for this John. I was considering doing my own with Iran Israel but there's only so much mental harm going can inflict on yourself for one day before popcorn brain sets in. You write with great clarity of purpose and you should put that fact in your pocket and let it drive you onwards. All the best. Take a dip when you get the chance to get near some water, beautiful day today.
I'm happy to say, I was between the flags at Maroochydore Beach before coming back to write this up. I can at least preserve my mental health, even if much else turns out to be futile
> By replacing my probabilities at the decision nodes with your own, you can come up with your own numbers
To help people do this, I have replicated your analysis in a downloadable Excel spreadsheet, available here:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/rdx6q31vv1rspf5nuhlro/Democratic-Collapse.xlsx?rlkey=8h040zwdizobr0ugz4mptumtl&st=568jtovv&dl=0
I have used the excellent ‘Simple Decision Tree’ online tool to organise my thoughts here, credit to the team behind this https://sourceforge.net/projects/decisiontree/
Even notwithstanding that I think the model should not be used to generate probabilistic predictions in its current form, it has a couple of what appear to be errors which make the predictions it does generate less accurate, which I have fixed:
1. The ‘Harris Presidency fails’ node appears to account for situations where Harris is not sabotaged but cannot deliver as a non-MAGA candidate, and so MAGA win the next election. This outcome should be possible if the Republicans try to sabotage her but can’t, but because of the logic of the decision tree it is actually *better* for Harris if the Republicans try to sabotage her than if they don’t, because if they don’t then she can never fail!
2. The probability of a popular uprising is the same whether Trump does something unconstitutional or starts a coup. This seems unlikely to me – in a case where Trump starts a coup then Harris is the legitimate President and can order the army to quash it, whereas in a case where Trump does something unconstitutional then the army would be torn between two nominally equally legitimate branches of government, for example. Regardless of whether you agree with my thinking here, it is incorrect model logic to *force* them to take the same probability
Thanks for this. As I think you’ve said elsewhere, this is meant more as a reality check (particularly, but not only, for those downplaying the risk) than a way of deriving (for example) betting odds
On your point 1, “Harris presidency fails” is supposed to include “failing to deliver” I agree on point 2.
I think this is a brilliant exercise in putting numbers to an otherwise complex argument to help the essential insight come out. Unless they’re being done as a purely academic exercise, decision models need to have a ‘point’ to them, which drives decisions you make in the creation of that model. I think the ‘point’ of your model is to flag that the risk of democratic collapse is much higher than people think, to which purpose it is probably fairly well suited. However, a lay reader might not understand this, and assume that the ‘point’ of the model is to offer an estimate of the actual probability of the end of US democracy. The model is not well suited to offer this sort of conclusion, for two main reasons:
1. The biggest weakness in the model, to my mind, is that it cannot account for a *range* of outcomes, which matters a lot in this situation. For example, one term in the model is ‘Trump governs unconstitutionally’. This is assigned a 90% probability. But there’s many different ways in which Trump might govern unconstitutionally; he might literally declare himself dictator for life, or he might breach some technical regulation that nobody cares about, like Obama did with NLRB v. Noel Canning. This in turn changes the probability that the Supreme Court are able to stop him, and that a popular uprising is successful. Similarly, the magnitude of a Harris win / Democratic sweep of Congress will greatly alter the probability (and probability of success) of a Trump coup, and there are many bad outcomes even in your ‘democracy survives’ endpoints which should be considered, like a civil war ending in a defeat for Trump.
2. Conceptually, I am surprised that the model doesn’t use a Bayesian approach. Frequentist approaches are extremely prone to over-updating on the modeller’s personal biases in predicting these sorts of situations, and I have identified a few areas where I think you may have let some bias creep in (is it really true that if the Harris Presidency fails there is a 100% chance that a MAGA candidate wins? And that that MAGA candidate brings about the end of democracy with 100% probability?). A Bayesian approach is highly protective against these sorts of biases.
For these reasons I think a Bayesian Discrete Event Simulation would probably be the minimum level of complexity which would be suitable for assigning actual probabilities to the end of democracy in America. Of the two conceptual alterations I propose, I think a simple Bayesian approach would most radically impact conclusions; I think this approach would be very unlikely to find the risk of the end of democracy is >2% - which to be clear I regard as a substantial and meaningful risk, but significantly lower (and more accurate) than your 52%
Another question is how long it will be before some of the states attempt to secede from the Union if democracy dies, and which states will be more likely to attempt this.
California, naturally overnight. Texas I think believes it could, but probably couldn't. You'd get a lot of libertarian compounds throughout the Midwest who'd like their own slice of pie which would complicate things. I think those places that are harder to police and less populous, Wyoming for example, would need to settle up quick with whatever corridor for trade they can afford to sever and complicate or reinforce. I think flight inland is perhaps an unrealistic scenario as no doubt there are plans even now for scenarios should cities and state become isolated. Its just whether anyone is privy to them that matters. I wouldn't want to be Canada or Mexico is all I'm saying.
Another way of looking at the decay of democracy in the USA is through the lens of the campaign. This is supposed to be a learning process, like all democracy. The electorate learns about the character and policies of the candidates and parties, who in turn – and to a lesser extent – learn about the feelings and ideas of the electors. Suppose the actual campaign had resembled this ideal even modestly, as in the last Australian and British elections. Harris would have started modestly, as a relatively unknown candidate, and steadily increased her support from her and Walz’ decency, professionalism, and limited but popular policy proposals. On the other side, Trump’s descent into unhinged fascism should have led to shrinking support and Harris coasting to victory. What we saw was very different; a sudden early boom in Harris’ support, driven by relief from Democratic frustration at Biden’s age; then stasis, in spite of Trump’s many gaffes: and recently, a Harris lead shrinking below what she needs to overcome the GOP bias in the electoral college. Trump’s MAGA supporters have not given an inch, and apparently revel in his appalling spiral.
It is hard to be rationally hopeful. The Prussian monarchy was saved by not one but two “Miracles of the House of Brandenburg”, in 1759 and 1761, though posterity may not have felt very grateful. The pollsters may have got their likely voter models all wrong, if young women vote en masse for Harris. It is even possible that polls have become generally worthless in a society that gets its information and disinformation online within partisan bubbles. A majority of Americans believe the USA to be in a recession, contrary to the evidence of their own eyes and payslips.
What about Trump and republicans win presidency and congress, Supreme Court doesn’t uphold the constitution, but incompetency and infighting among the right wing leads to the inertial situation where democracy survives for now?
It looks like so called ‘American democracy’ fails whoever wins in my reckoning. The calibre of the two political candidates is substandard. It seems to me American democracy has been put on the auction table and up for grabs by the highest bidder. The neocons in Washington call Russia a gas station with weapons. Well I call America an armed asylum controlled by wealthy, amoral plutocrats. BRICS signifies the agonising, slow process from a unipolar world to a multipolar world.
America is on the decline, economically, socially, politically, culturally, spiritually and ethically. It has lost its moral compass and the other 75% to 85% of the world’s population are finally coming to terms with this reality. The western nations comprise 15% to 25% of the world’s population, they can no longer pull the economic and political strings in this world.
Massive false equivalence here: Herr Hitler is bad, but the Social Democrats aren't much chop either.
I specifically asked for no comments like this. Please don't comment further on my Substack.
I don't see either sabotage or ineffective governance as being the end of US democracy
The only glaring error is the premise that democracy exists currently. The electoral system in the US, with First Past The Post voting, winner-take-all states and the Electoral College falls so far short of what a modern democracy should look like.
There are other control points in the case of a Trump victory. One of these is Congress, another is the Cabinet, and probably the most important, the Federal Reserve. The Fed Chief has enormous power that it not easily countered by the president. Congress has the power of impeachment and removal from office. The Cabinet can, under the 25th Amendment, remove Trump and put Vance in power.
One option to add that is super unlikely would be electoral college tie. Which likely means the US devolves into a cluster fuck if that happens. Firstly there be contestations state by state prior to elector votes, attempts including swaying. Then eventually if the elctors dedlock they'd punt the presidential election to the house which is voted on by congressmen by state and whoever gets the majority of states win. So this could deadlock both overall and within states as well as but is likely a Trump victory. The vice president is decided by the majority of senators, so who knows based on the map everything could deadlock and Vance could be vice president and then due to deadlocking be acting president.
This is a unlikely, silly, probably irrelevant post but it sort of highlights just how a lot of political processes in the US are very janky.