David Frum: What If the Allies Had Lost World War One?

[Ed Anger]

women shouldn't have the vote

[Eddie Teach]

You gonna begrudge Senora Spiess getting a new pair of shoes every couple years? 

[derspiess]

Shit, after her recent trip to NYC she owes me about 10 elections-worth of votes.

[Berkut]

This makes it slightly absurd to take the Frum position. 'The US had real democracy totally unlike the UK!

No, the Frum position is that if you had to pick a point in both their histories where you would say "This is the point after which we can reasonably say that the country in question is a democracy" then that point for the US happened far earlier than 1918, and that point for the UK was with 1918 Act.

Again, I think it is a debatable point, but hardly absurd.

If you had to nail me down, I would put that point for the US to be after the 15th Amendment, for the most part. That is when you say the radical change at one particular point similar to what we saw in the UK in 1918.

I think the best counter argument to that would be to say the point was 1918 for the UK, but 1920 for the US, since that is when the US saw full and formal women's suffrage. But that I think makes the common mistake of thinking that in the US women's suffrage was a binary thing, as it was in the UK. In reality the 1920 date was more of a formality, albeit a very important one. Women had (mostly) had the right to vote throughout the majority of the country already.

Well, at least, they did in Illinois'.

I pointed out that the US saw women's suffrage throughout the majority of the population, and you turn that into they had it in Illinois? Apparently this cannot be a non-emotive discussion.

[crazy canuck]

I think the problem is that Berkut gets to cherry pick amongst US states that have better sufferage coverage than Britain and ignore the ones that were worse.  Britain is a Unitary state and so you take the good with the bad.

[Berkut]

I think the problem is that Berkut gets to cherry pick amongst US states that have better sufferage coverage than Britain and ignore the ones that were worse.  Britain is a Unitary state and so you take the good with the bad.

I am not cherry picking anything, I am looking at the country as a whole. How is that a "problem", and how do I "get to" do that? The facts are not susceptible to my cherry picking or ignoring of anything, and of course specifically stating that some states had sufferage and others did not is hardly "ignoring" those that do not anymore than it is ignoring those that do.

It is incredible the lengths you will go to avoid a simple "Hey, looks like you were right..."

[Malthus]

This makes it slightly absurd to take the Frum position. 'The US had real democracy totally unlike the UK!

No, the Frum position is that if you had to pick a point in both their histories where you would say "This is the point after which we can reasonably say that the country in question is a democracy" then that point for the US happened far earlier than 1918, and that point for the UK was with 1918 Act.

Again, I think it is a debatable point, but hardly absurd.

If you had to nail me down, I would put that point for the US to be after the 15th Amendment, for the most part. That is when you say the radical change at one particular point similar to what we saw in the UK in 1918.

I think the best counter argument to that would be to say the point was 1918 for the UK, but 1920 for the US, since that is when the US saw full and formal women's suffrage. But that I think makes the common mistake of thinking that in the US women's suffrage was a binary thing, as it was in the UK. In reality the 1920 date was more of a formality, albeit a very important one. Women had (mostly) had the right to vote throughout the majority of the country already.

Well, at least, they did in Illinois'.

I pointed out that the US saw women's suffrage throughout the majority of the population, and you turn that into they had it in Illinois? Apparently this cannot be a non-emotive discussion.

The issue isn't simply women's sufferage though - it is also Jim Crow.

Britain's trajectory towards full sufferage is different from the US' - as you would expect, it being a unitary state. However, they are clearly more similar to each other than they are different.

Frum's balck-and-white distinction (and the one you are attempting to make) simply doesn't work. The differences between sufferage in the US and UK are far more 'differences of degree' than they are 'differences in kind'.

The crack about Illinois is 'about' your, uh, selectivity towards the evidence - the glass is always half-full when you look to the states, and half-empty when you look outside it. Rather endearing, really. 

[Berkut]

It was all about women's suffrage right up until the point that I proved that in fact women's suffrage in the US was further advanced than it was in the UK. Then suddenly that didn't matter anymore.

Of course. It was just Illinois, because *I* am being selective about the data.

[Valmy]

It was all about women's suffrage right up until the point that I proved that in fact women's suffrage in the US was further advanced than it was in the UK. Then suddenly that didn't matter anymore.

Wait was the discussion about the question of the UK being more democratic than the US? I thought the argument was that the UK was no democracy at all. And is being more democratic than the US in 1914 the ultimate determiner of something being a democracy or not? Otherwise I do not see the relevance of the US being slightly further along in any particular area.

[crazy canuck]

It is incredible the lengths you will go to avoid a simple "Hey, looks like you were right..."

Its funny, you seem to be doing exactly that.   Did you actually read the posts between yours?

[crazy canuck]

It was all about women's suffrage right up until the point that I proved that in fact women's suffrage in the US was further advanced than it was in the UK. Then suddenly that didn't matter anymore.

Wait was the discussion about the question of the UK being more democratic than the US? I thought the argument was that the UK was no democracy at all. And is being more democratic than the US in 1914 the ultimate determiner of something being a democracy or not? Otherwise I do not see the relevance of the US being slightly further along in any particular area.

[Malthus]

It was all about women's suffrage right up until the point that I proved that in fact women's suffrage in the US was further advanced than it was in the UK. Then suddenly that didn't matter anymore.

Wait was the discussion about the question of the UK being more democratic than the US? I thought the argument was that the UK was no democracy at all. And is being more democratic than the US in 1914 the ultimate determiner of something being a democracy or not? Otherwise I do not see the relevance of the US being slightly further along in any particular area.

You said it better than I did.

[Berkut]

It was all about women's suffrage right up until the point that I proved that in fact women's suffrage in the US was further advanced than it was in the UK. Then suddenly that didn't matter anymore.

Wait was the discussion about the question of the UK being more democratic than the US? I thought the argument was that the UK was no democracy at all. And is being more democratic than the US in 1914 the ultimate determiner of something being a democracy or not? Otherwise I do not see the relevance of the US being slightly further along in any particular area.

I didn't bring up that comparison, they did.

I was perfectly content to note that prior to 1918, 40% of men and no women in the UK were allowed to vote, and after the 1918 Act the number of people allowed to vote tripled. That suggests that that particular moment was a pretty reasonable point to decide as the cutover between "democracy" and "budding democracy".

*Others* than insisted that if that criteria was used, then the US could not be a democracy at that time either, based on our lack of knowledge about what exactly the status was for US citizens pre-WW1.

Now that it turns out that in actual fact voting rights in the US for everyone were vastly further along than they were in the UK at that time, suddenly the comparison doesn't matter anymore.

Which is fine with me - I am perfectly happy to go right back to the observation that in 1918 the UK tripled the number of voters allowed to vote, and that is a pretty radical change, making the argument that it is a definitional tipping point perfectly reasonable - and certainly not "absurd".

[crazy canuck]

It was all about women's suffrage right up until the point that I proved that in fact women's suffrage in the US was further advanced than it was in the UK. Then suddenly that didn't matter anymore.

Wait was the discussion about the question of the UK being more democratic than the US? I thought the argument was that the UK was no democracy at all. And is being more democratic than the US in 1914 the ultimate determiner of something being a democracy or not? Otherwise I do not see the relevance of the US being slightly further along in any particular area.

I didn't bring up that comparison, they did.

Berkut, that is exactly the claim Frum made that you have been defending.

*Others* than insisted that if that criteria was used, then the US could not be a democracy at that time either, based on our lack of knowledge about what exactly the status was for US citizens pre-WW1

I call bullshit.  Others insisted that we wouldn't say the US is not a democracy even though it was little better and it would be foolish to say Britain was not a democracy.

You are just making stuff up now.

[Caliga]

Fuck is all this shit now? 

I was hoping for some nice Turtledove-like plotlines when I opened this thread up.

"If Germany won WWII they would invent a time machine and go back in time and give the Confederates AK-47s and then Thomas Edison would president of the United Communist States of America lolololol"