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Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
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12 Nov, 4 tweets, 1 min read
This guy is an honorable man. Kudos to him for standing up to the autogolpists.

bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
This guy too.

cnbc.com/2020/11/11/tru…
It sounds like a trivial and obvious thing to simply carry out the law. But when many thousands of very scary, very crazy people are screaming for your head, and the President of the United States is trying to bully you into knuckling under, it's scary and it's hard. For anyone.
At the end of the day, a civilization depends on people like this to stand up and do what's right and follow the law even in the face of howling, screeching chaos. Without people like this, the world is just a bunch of mobs with clubs.

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More from @Noahpinion

Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Nov
While I don't have a position on @Peter_Turchin's theories overall, I do think that the idea of reducing immigration in order to raise wages makes no sense. Data shows immigration has little effect on wages, and skilled immigration actually raises wages.

theatlantic.com/magazine/archi…
If @Peter_Turchin wanted to make an anti-immigration argument, his "elite overproduction" thesis would be a more natural fit. He might argue that skilled immigration is displacing educated native-born Americans from the elite positions they had expected to inherit...
In fact, I think there is something to that argument. And I think it's a low-key, little-discussed reason why Dems will probably allow Trump's cuts in legal skilled immigration to stand...

Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
13 Nov
1/A few thoughts on the autogolpe...

Trump's first strategy for autogolpe was "Stop the count!!!". It failed.
❌

His second strategy was to sue to have votes thrown out. That is in the process of failing.
❌

So what are his remaining strategies? I can think of three...
2/One strategy is trying to persuade electors to be "faithless electors".

That's doomed to failure, since electors are very hard to persuade to flip, Biden's lead is quite large, and many states have laws against faithless electors.
❌
3/Another strategy, of course, is to do the traditional state-of-emergency, tanks-in-the-streets sort of thing.

But even if Trump were brave enough to do that, there's no way that would succeed. The military won't have it.
❌

Read 12 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
9 Nov
Remember, even though the autogolpe is currently failing, it could still succeed. Trump's people are trying to persuade Republican state legislatures in states Biden won to pick the wrong electors, thus stealing the election for Trump.
This would almost certainly be illegal, by the way.

snopes.com/fact-check/leg…
Also, FWIW, Pennsylvania's state legislature has already promised not to try it.

pittsburgh.cbslocal.com/2020/11/07/pa-…
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
8 Nov
President Biden is going to be a lot more hawkish on China than a lot of people realize.

uk.reuters.com/article/us-usa…
Biden has called Xi Jinping a "thug", and has called the Uighur repression "genocide"! Image
Biden's approach to confronting China - build up alliances and strengthen the U.S. technologically and economically -- seems extremely reasonable and smart. ImageImageImageImage
Read 4 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
6 Nov
Stacey Abrams is amazing.

DEMOCRACY is something worth fighting for.
The point of democracy is not to elect Democrats.

It's to give everyone a voice, however small.

It's to give everyone a fair and equal stake in the system.

And most of all, it's to create a modus vivendi. A way people with opposing views can live together.
Electoral democracy - by which I mean secret-ballot majority rule - is not a perfect system, which for example is why we have courts to protect minority rights.

But it's a crucial bulwark against the possibility of the few ruling over the many.

Read 6 tweets
Noah Smith 🐇 Profile picture
4 Nov
1/Regardless of the election outcome, Trump's inroads with Hispanic voters kills the idea that the Democrats are the Inevitable Party of the Demographic Future.

amazon.com/Emerging-Democ…
2/This idea was always based on the false belief that future ethnic voting patterns would be similar to past patterns -- that "Latinos vote like such-and-such" was a stable property of the Universe that would remain constant through the decades.
3/Ignoring the lessons of history, some Democrats believed that Hispanics would always be a reliable 70-30 voting bloc, so that all Democrats had to do was sit and wait for their numbers to swell, and the GOP would vanish like morning mist.
Read 13 tweets

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