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I’m in a bit of a unique position to answer this, I suppose, as I also note on my companion answer to the corresponding conservative question. I’m a never-Trumper and I believe in careful, measured, restrained, deliberate progress. My more liberal friends are convinced I’m a conservative, but most conservatives seem convinced I’m somewhere left of Karl Marx.I grew up a short distance away from the birthplace of the Republican Party, which was a liberal and highly progressive party when it was created, I might point out. I had immediate family in the Grange, a progressive Republican organization of farmers for most of its history. I was probably in college before I met a Democrat.But, by the time I was old enough to be aware of politics, most people around me listened to WTMJ and Charlie Sykes and Republicanism had turned conservative and reactionary. The Tea Party was highly active and successful in my hometown and school district. My home county broke 60–30 for Trump.How did an area of LaFollette progressive farmers barely 100 years ago become what it is today?Progressivism started failing them. Them, specifically.And this is largely what I think liberals have tended to fail to consider.I understand that I’m likely to be a bit stereotypical here in lumping liberals in with city people. There are liberals in the rural areas, sure. Most of them will have already realized a lot of what I’m writing.But for the most part, most of the outspoken liberals out there are not rural folks. The ones that dominate the Democratic Party are typically from urban areas.This is, as I have looked into the history of things, an artifact of the 20th century. There were formerly progressive wings in both major parties. But into the 20th century, the Republican Party tended to move more and more rural rather than just North. Republicans had always tended to be more pro-capital through the late 19th Century, while labor was more of a Democratic Party plank. There was a pro-labor progressive movement that for a brief time really held sway over the Republican Party with leaders such as Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert “Fighting Bob” LaFollette, and William Howard Taft.Rural organizations like the Grange were the progressive pro-labor force in the agricultural regions like the Midwest.As the Republican Party lost its progressive wing in the early 20th century into intraparty fighting between the more measured Roosevelt progressives and the more radical LaFollette Republicans, the conservative pro-capital wing regained control of the Republican Party with party leadership such as Warren Harding and Herbert Hoover.Woodrow Wilson solidified a pro-labor progressive contingent within the Democratic Party when the Republican coalition fell apart in 1912. This was primarily aimed at unionization, which in turn tended to more heavily favor the increasing industrialization and urbanization of the country. By the time that Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to office, Republicans were increasingly becoming the party of the rural areas and the Northeast and Democrats were increasingly becoming the party of the cities.That split was torn open by the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and other progressive reforms of the late 1960’s. The conservative “Dixiecrats” of the rural South finally abandoned party loyalty for ideological loyalty and switched sides when conservative leadership within the Republican Party worked out a deal to provide them with continued seniority, starting with Strom Thurmond.This urban-rural divide has continued to accelerate to today, evident in electoral maps such as these from the 2016 national election:That looks like a huge sea of red.Adjusted for population, it looks more like this:I don’t bring this up to get into a debate about the electoral college, only to point out that urban-rural divide.1. It’s not about ideology or even partisanship, it’s about the “rural consciousness.”If you haven’t read Katherine Cramer’s outstanding work in The Politics of Resentment, you really really should. As I read it, I was stunned at how well she described my hometown and the people in it. I don’t know if one of the test groups she had was actually in my town, but it might as well have been. It was eerily familiar.Cramer discovered that rural people very much have their own social identity, and they feel that it is both under attack and worthy of preservation.And that is not unjustified. The politics are dominated by the increasingly concentrated populations of the urban areas. Without geographical representation like the electoral college or what liberals point out is an unfair weighting of the rural vote, there is a fear, one that is often realized, that the city folk will simply come in, invade them, and impose their city-minded views on them.When you hear rural people wanting “deregulation” and complaining about “overreach,” they’re just latching on to terms that describe what they experience. I can’t tell you how many farmers or rural county executives I know that are pissed to hell at the state because it seems like every year, there’s some new unfunded mandate or regulation or new tax. There may be and usually are very good reasons for these things, but they aren’t explained to my people. It’s just another edict from Madison and Milwaukee.They have lower tax bases and lower economies of scale because of the lack of population density. Progressive policies often fail to take that into account, and raise revenue by raising statewide property taxes. This massively disproportionately hits rural people, who tend to be land rich and money poor. Land is a great asset, but it’s not a liquid one. So, when we’re barely breaking even most years and two shitty seasons away from complete insolvency and China and California and giant agricorps are dumping cheap milk and pork into the system, we’re kind of fucked when you start demanding another thousand bucks a year from us.Minnesota is trying something that might help in the form of a tax credit for agricultural land when school districts want to pass a referendum, so that farmers that are disproportionately impacted by property tax hikes don’t get hit as hard. This is a good idea, and a way to try to help show that progressive policies don’t have to end up breaking them.2. You can be pretentious AF at times.Mal: You backed out of a deal last time. Left us hanging.Jayne: Hurt our feelings.Mal: You recall why that took place?Badger: Had a problem with your attitude, is why. Felt you was… what’s the word…?Jayne: Pretentious? [Mal gives Jayne a dirty look]Badger: Exactly! You think you’re better’n other people!Mal: Just the ones I’m better than.Firefly, “Shindig”My people consider liberals to be smug elitists that look down on them, and both sides are not unjustified.Look at what you see on TV representing my people. The positive end of that stick is the naivety of Parks and Rec. What do we more commonly see ourselves portrayed as? Called on national television?Rednecks. Inbred hicks. Toothless hillbillies. Racists and homophobes clinging to guns and Bibles. (Yeah, I know, if you take Obama’s entire quote in context, it’s speaking precisely to this problem, but that sound bite was all my people heard.)Look, this isn’t entirely your fault, liberals. I grew up with Jew jokes and black jokes and rampant homophobia. A family member who was a coach once yelled to one of his kids, “Run like a Mexican with a TV on his shoulder!” I’m not kidding. It’s that bad.I don’t want to make excuses for any of that.But here’s why context matters: we didn’t have any of those people in our community, with the exception of homosexual people, though we certainly didn’t know any of those. Homosexuality was one of those things that was pointedly ignored. I had a great aunt and an uncle who lived with “a friend” for all of my life. My family still won’t acknowledge the truth of it.It wasn’t really until I got to college and grew up that I began to realize with some horror why that is, in fact, really that bad. It’s not unjustified to look at those back home who don’t understand that and probably never will with some degree of that horror. The liberal disdain for it is not wholly undeserved.I’ve tried to explain it to my people. Most of them won’t listen. You can look at the comments I receive from certain people when I’ve written about white privilege as exhibit A. I get basically the same trying to explain it to people back home.When I used to try to explain it to them, I was considered one of them smug, pretentious elitists who got a degree and thinks I’m better than them right now. It took time for me to learn how to have those conversations in a way that helped them realize the real harm those things cause.What liberals tend to fail to realize is that it’s a lack of experience with those groups of people.Liberals tend to make a moral judgment about these people because of these things. These people, in their view, must believe these things because they are terrible, immoral people. They believe that these people must be irredeemable because who doesn’t know that such things are wrong today?That’s not it. It’s a lack of realness to them. The only place that most of these minority communities exist to them is on television, which is never set where they are. It’s set in the cities, far away from them. They don’t see their reality represented back to them with any fairness.My family has had to learn hard why black jokes aren’t cool after my sister married a black man from Chicago.It was suddenly real to them.An increasing Hispanic population in my home area working a lot of the dairy jobs has created an interesting split. The people who interact with them constantly like the dairy farms that hire them have done a 180 on Mexican jokes and anti-Hispanic rhetoric. People who don’t interact with that community regularly are still set in their old ways. And it’s causing a lot of friction, not just between the Hispanic community and the bigoted population, but between the two white communities.My people are pretty welcoming to people they actually know. When something happens, we’ll all pitch in to the fundraiser or grab chainsaws to get a tree off someone’s house after a bad storm. Doesn’t matter who you are, or what you look like, or what your sexual orientation or non-binary gender is.But this isn’t reported. This isn’t what makes it to portrayals of my people on television. Nobody makes a nationally-broadcast-over-aerial television show out of rural Wisconsin that depicts the positives of rural life, as it really is.Even on cable, every show I’ve ever watched doesn’t honor the rural consciousness. It treats us as a joke or an exaggeration at best. At worst, we are a land of serial killers and deplorables and poor people.And if we weren’t hanging on by a raggedy thread, maybe we could take it. Maybe. But we are.My people feel humiliated by you.And ultimately, humiliation is the root of all terrorism.There are some serious fences to mend here, and it’s going to take a lot of effort to rebuild some measure of trust. That’s made a lot harder by something I’ll discuss later.3. Marketing MattersThere’s little to no difference between marketing and propaganda. I literally used commercials to teach propaganda to my high school students.You can say that Republicans are propaganda masters all you want. It’s marketing. And they’re damned good at it.Say what you want about their policies, Republicans have long been waaaaaaaaaaaaay the hell better at selling their policies, especially to rural America.Matthew Bates isn’t wrong about why they have an advantage here: a win for them is to do nothing. Their whole schtick is “do absolutely nothing new and do a lot less of what you’re already doing” and they’ve sold it incredibly well. Whether it’s catchy bits like Reagan’s “welfare queen” or the line “government is the problem,” Republicans have been doing an excellent job of selling the idea that government is not an instrument of the people for doing good for society.They’ve successfully gotten a significant chunk of people to believe that the Constitution doesn’t actually say in multiple places that the purpose of government and of taxation is for the general welfare, or at a minimum, redefined what that means to “rich people gonna rich and that’s the way it should be.”They’ve sold a philosophy that what’s good for the golden goose is good for the rest of you regular ganders and made people think that’s morally correct.They’ve mastered oversimplification of complex issues for the average person.Their actual mascot should really be this guy:Oh, think, my friends, how can any Medicare system ever hope to compete with a gold parachute for a health insurance CEO? Remember, my friends, what a handful of enterprising entrepreneurs did to the famous, fabled walls of socialism! Oh, Venezuela’s price controls come a tumblin’ down!They are incredibly effective atCreating a “problem,”Selling a “solution” which they can conveniently offer at a discount price,Profiting wildly from that solution; andLeaving the whole thing in shambles behind them for someone else to clean up.And most of all, they are fantastic at convincing people that the alternative to getting screwed over by them is somehow worse.Why do rural people eat this up? Because it seizes on something that feels pretty damned real to them: government is constantly putting more burdens on them and they don’t feel like they’re getting what they pay for. Democrats have done a bang up job promoting mass transit and electric cars and all sorts of things… that they will never see. In the meanwhile, their hospitals are closing and their schools are shrinking and losing good teachers and the buses don’t go past their place and their roads are falling to shit and their health insurance keeps going up. It sure seems like Democrats are helping the city people and not them.If you drove a Tesla out to my people, they’d laugh their asses off at you. It seems like a completely impractical car to them. It’s too nice to get it dirty and has waaaay too many bells and whistles.And that’s what they see AOC telling them to buy.Liberals are goddamned horrible at marketing their policies to my people.This is especially true in the era of Trump. Liberals have been essentially running on a platform of “well, we’re better than that shit-filled dumpster fire, right?”That isn’t good enough.You want progress? You have to sell it, to them.These policies are undeniably good for a lot of people who haven’t bought into them.Universal health care would absolutely be good for a lot of people who aren’t currently voting for Democrats or on board with more liberal policies. Many of them are paying out of control premiums and deductibles and going into medical bankruptcy. Rural hospitals are going under or cutting back essential services, all of which makes it that much harder on those people. A universal health insurance system that could ensure that rural people can still get adequate care at a lower cost than they currently pay is undeniably good for them.I constantly see liberals who just wave this away.They simply refuse to market anything, because they think it’s obvious and only an idiot would not understand that. (And again: that just plays into the pretentiousness problem.)No. That’s not enough. Liberals have to sell it.And yeah, they have the extra disadvantage that they have to play to win when all Republicans have to do is play not to lose. Doing something is a lot harder than doing nothing. And it’s easier to scare people into sticking with a shitty thing that they know than a scary thing that they don’t.Republican policies right now are repackaging their own warm piss in unwashed bleach bottles with hastily scrawled “leminaid” in Sharpie on a taped-on piece of ripped off notebook paper.But seriously, if you can’t beat that, you’re clearly in need a better marketing firm.If you want change, you have to sell it.No, no. Stop. I can hear your complaint already.4. Your bitching about conservatives not playing in good faith is a waste of time.Doctor: It's not fair? Oh, I didn't realize that it was not fair! Well, you know what? My TARDIS doesn't work properly and I don't have my own personal tailor.Doctor Who, “The Zygon Inversion”I can hear fifty liberals reading this far who already just audibly sighed or got angry because they’re pissed at the fact that it’s a massively uphill battle. You’re going to bitch about the electoral college and gerrymandering and voter ID and all the ways that liberals are being deprived of a fair shake in government and conservatives are not engaging in good faith.I’ll be the first right there to tell you that all of that is true.And none of it matters.No, it doesn’t.You know what wasn’t fair? Decades of getting kicked in the teeth as global trade and automation and debt traps pounded rural economies based on agriculture and manufacturing while progressive policies promised help that never came.My people aren’t going to play in good faith because they see no reason to and they have no incentive to trust liberals in their book. Playing dirty is getting them what they want. Compromising never did.At least conservatives are honest about the fact that my people are on their own and can’t expect meaningful assistance from the government. That tracks with their experience. Progressives spent decades overpromising and underdelivering. At least when they elect Republicans, they get what they pay for. If you’re going to get kicked in ass, might as well get lower taxes out of it.As P.J. O’Rourke once noted: “The Democrats are the party that says government will make you smarter, taller, richer, and remove the crabgrass on your lawn. The Republicans are the party that says government doesn't work and then they get elected and prove it.”I’m not saying you need to take the low road and get in the mud. As my people say, “if you wrestle with a pig in the sty, all that happens is you get dirty and the pig likes it.”I’m saying you need to quit being surprised, have a plan for that, and be better at controlling the messaging around it. Bernie’s socialism shtick is screwing y’all over. It’s the same liberal strategy that’s gotten you where you are: promise a metric shit ton that’s going to be imposed on us whether we like it or not and we all get to live with the catastrophic failure if it implodes.5. Not everything unjust is racist and not everything that is racist is intentionally racist.Words matter. What words we use matters.I tried to tell liberals this when they compared Mitt Romney to Hitler and Mussolini. I was told to go away.And here we are: my people won’t listen to you anymore because everything is racist. Everything is over the top, or at least so they feel.And I get that criticism. I understand that criticism from both sides.There is a ton of injustice in this country and a solid 70% of it is continued trauma and inertia from slavery and its successors. Being anything not white in this country does put you at an inherent, automatic disadvantage compared to the advantage of being white.Some of that has to do with actual racism, and some of that has to do with the disadvantages of poverty, which largely exist because of prior actual racism and there’s a lot of catch-up to do.But when everything becomes a matter of outrageous injustice, it does start to become less meaningful. When the outrage is constant, it starts to become background noise. When everything is racist, eventually nothing really is to conservatives.Appropriately challenging racism and injustice is tough. It’s hard to see something that is deeply upsetting and not want to just yell in rage at it. I get that. I do it myself a lot. It’s rarely successful.I feel statements are very effective. Putting a human face on an injustice is very effective. “This is how what you just said was hurtful to me” can be very effective. (Don’t try this online. Most of the time, you’re dealing with trolls who don’t give a shit. But in person, this can be very effective.)Most conservatives and most of my people aren’t being racist on purpose, and that’s why they actually get offended when you call them that. They honestly don’t know why what they just said or did was racist or otherwise unjust. They have a very, very simplified view of what that means.It’s not even that they don’t understand things like microaggressions. They just don’t have the same context for it. They understand trauma, but very differently. They understand disadvantage, but very differently.Take a calming breath. Respond in kindness. Explain how what was said is hurtful and why. Most of my people are not intentionally hurtful. They’re not trying to be racist. They literally just don’t understand why what they did or said was hurtful.6. People do switch sides if they have a good reason, so quit writing off my people as a lost cause.Honestly, this one bothers me the most. I can’t tell you how many liberals who are thoroughly convinced that every Trump supporter and every Republican is a lost cause and will never, ever change.One of your own standard bearers changed sides: Elizabeth Warren. She was a Republican and a die-hard conservative, not that long ago. She was 47 when she switched sides, after she spent a long time dealing with bankruptcies and foreclosures as a lawyer and then through having her grad assistants research that. She was convinced of the Republican line before then, that people failed the consumer game because they were bad at it and made bad choices and scammed the system.She found that people in bankruptcy were often a lot different than the irresponsible deadbeats she’d believed them to be. Eventually, she saw how corporate America had been trapping people into debt cycles for a long time, and that’s how we got the Liz Warren we see today.There are a lot of Obama-Trump voters; people who voted for “hope and change” and then turned around and voted for Trump.And perhaps this shouldn’t be entirely surprising.There were a lot of people, especially the rural voters where I’m from, who voted for Obama thought they were going to get “hope and change.”And they got shit on with the recovery from the 2008 financial collapse. They didn’t get the bailouts or the assistance. They didn’t get their jobs back. They didn’t see most of the recovery. Their industries, their towns, all remained in ruin. God bless David Wong over at Cracked, who fucking nailed it with this piece. And it was written before Trump was elected, so that should tell you that it wasn’t just some liberal soul-searching afterwards. It was a warning.Farm bankruptcies were already rising under Obama as small dairies and crop farmers went under more and more, due in large part to predatory debt traps and then a freeze on credit. The CFPB helped a little, which is why you’re seeing these skyrocket under Trump’s massive deregulation push.But my people felt betrayed by eight years of Obama. They saw their health insurance get more expensive and all the growth in the stock market sure didn’t seem to help them.So, when Hillary ran effectively as Obama’s third term, they were willing to throw their lot in with Trump, who they believed knew the secret sauce to being rich and was going to somehow share it with everyone. They really thought that he was going to somehow strongarm China into playing better and everything else. Many of them still do. They think they’re going to get the change that they were promised under Obama.And believe me, plenty of them feel just as betrayed and ready to burn the whole thing to the ground because they feel just as betrayed by both sides. Some of them are sticking with Trump even though they know he’s burning everything to the ground because at least then they’ll have the government off their backs. If everything’s going to shit either way, might as well go for the one who is going to get rid of all of those pesky regulations about why they can’t drain off the back willows and get a few extra acres.My people are not ideologues, for the most part. They don’t actually care about “small government” conservatism or the “nanny state.” Those are just convenient things they’re repeating as stand-ins for what they really want.They generally just want the basics: a fair shake in life, reasonable rules that make sense, and general security.They want Roosevelt’s square deal.They want to quit being punished for working hard when it does feel like some others are gaming the system.They want a path to retirement.They want to be able to try their hand at a business.They want to send their kids to a good school.They want to live in a safe neighborhood.They want to drive on decent roads.They want a hospital that isn’t hundreds of miles away and that won’t bankrupt them.They want laws and regulations that are logical and not overly burdensome, and most of all: something that they have some say over.They want to put food on the table.They want basic dignity and respect.They want what progressives want to give them. And they’ll gladly pay their taxes if they think they’re actually going to get it.Sell them on how your policies will give them that, and seriously, you can make progressives out of lifelong Republicans.

Oh, good God, how long do you have?Do you want just Supreme Court blockbusters that are well-known, or do you want subtle cases in arbitration and administrative law that are virtually unknown outside of specific legal areas but that have a massive influence on how state and federal government is run? Are circuit court opinions all right? State court? I mean, we could really be here a while depending on how broadly you want to go.Here’s just some highlights from law school. I could go on like this for days. Months. I am not being facetious here. I promise I’m not going to just dump my law school outlines. That could get really long. Just my Constitutional Law outline was 40 pages.Constitutional Law - PowersJudicial ReviewMarbury v. Madison, 5 U.S. 137 (1803). Establishes the concept of judicial review as part of the United States judicial powers.Martin v. Hunter’s Lessee, 14 U.S. 304 (1816). Extends judicial review to being able to overrule state decisions if they conflict with the Federal Constitution.Enumerated PowersNecessary and Proper ClauseMcCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819). Defines the scope of the Necessary and Proper Clause of the Constitution to essentially turbocharge all enumerated Federal powers. “Let the end be legitimate, let it be within the scope of the Constitution, and all means which are appropriate, which are plainly adapted to that end, which are not prohibited, but consist with the letter and spirit of the Constitution, are constitutional.”The Commerce ClauseGibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1 (1824). The Federal government has the plenary power under the Commerce Clause to regulate “channels of commerce,” including waterways, roads, and railroads.Lochner v. New York, 198 U.S. 45 (1905), decides that the freedom to contract is a fundamental right that the Federal government may not infringe upon by petty regulations like prohibiting bakeries from forcing bakers to work more than 60 hours a week or 10 hours a day.Hammer v. Dagenhart, (I’m getting lazy and I’m going to stop putting in the Bluebook cites,) (1918) key case of the “Lochner Era,” where the Court viewed itself as a sort of super-legislature and overrode Congress frequently where they didn’t think Congress made good policy. The Court decided that manufacturing is not “commerce” and struck down child labor laws.Carter v. Carter Coal (1936), decides manufacturing and labor rights are local issues, strikes down labor laws as an invalid exercise of the tax and spend clause.West Coast Hotel v. Parrish (1937), generally accepted as the end of the Lochner Era. Upheld a minimum wage requirement in Washington.Wickard v. Filburn (1942), upholds New Deal price controls on wheat, establishes the concept that economic activity can be viewed in the aggregate to see if there is a “substantial impact” on interstate commerce, which gives Congress the power to regulate activity under the Commerce Clause. The Court will not strike down another Congressional act based on the Commerce Clause for more than fifty years.Heart of Atlanta v. United States (1964), held that the movement of people is always considered commerce; upholds nondiscrimination laws barring segregation.Katzenbach v. McClung (1964), holds that refusing to serve black people at a restaurant has a substantial effect on interstate commerce because it’s connected to interstate commerce through interstate interactions - suppliers bring in things from out of state. Viewed in the aggregate, this has a substantial effect on interstate commerce and so Congress can regulate it.Lopez v. United States (1994), strikes down federal gun-free school zones because Congress did not sufficiently research or articulate how guns in schools are related to commerce. First time the Court strikes down a law passed pursuant to the Commerce Clause since before Filburn.United States v. Morrison (2000), after Lopez, Congress does a LOT of fact-finding when making laws pursuant to the commerce clause. Makes a ton of factual findings when passing the Violence Against Women Act about how violence against women impacts commerce in the aggregate; women who aren’t safe don’t buy things, have jobs, and so forth. The Court looks at it and goes, “ehhhhhhhh… ok, new rule - if it’s not inherently economic activity, then you can’t aggregate it.” They decide that individual violence against women isn’t economic activity, so it can’t be aggregated, and therefore, can’t be regulated under the Commerce Clause.Gonzales v. Raich (2005), decides that things that could end up in the marketplace (any commodity and the manufacture or growing of such commodity) is economic activity, can be regulated, and upholds the use of the Controlled Substances Act to slap a California grandmother growing small amounts of marijuana in her basement for personal use with a Federal crime.Sibelius v. NFIB (2012) Part I: The Attack of the Roberts Court, holds that non-participation in the market is not commerce and can’t be regulated; people cannot be forced into the marketplace.The Tax and Spend ClauseSouth Dakota v. Dole (1987) held that it’s perfectly fine to spend federal funds to dictate policy to the States, so long as it’s an unambiguous national interest (here, preventing drunk driving accidents on the federal interstate highway system,) and it’s not coercive (can’t compel the state to adopt the policy). Withholding federal highway funds from any state that didn’t raise the drinking age to 21 was not coercive enough.Sibelius v. NFIB, Part II: The Revenge of the Tax and Spend Clause; Roberts decides that the mandatory ACA Medicare expansion was coercive because it would have taken away all Medicare funding from any non-complying state, but also holds that the individual mandate was OK under the tax and spend clause, because the penalty for not having health insurance was a tax, collected by the IRS, and spent on paying off the assholes who show up at the ER without insurance and no money that the rest of us pay for through our premiums.Treaty PowersMissouri v. Holland (1920). Height of the Lochner Era, mass extinction-level hunting of migratory birds going on. The Court keeps striking down all sorts of Federal regulations on migratory birds under the Commerce Clause; birds and hunting are not commerce according to the Court. But, Woodrow Wilson got Canada to sign on to a treaty regarding migratory birds in 1916. The Court finds that valid, and regulations passed pursuant to that treaty are valid under the Necessary and Proper Clause.Executive AuthorityYoungstown Sheet and Tube (1952); Truman’s attempt to seize steel mills and nationalize the steel industry failed because Congress told him no, you can’t do that. Special concurrence by Justice Jackson establishes various “zones” of presidential powers.Constitutional Law - LibertiesFundamental Rights - Substantive Due ProcessBarron v. Baltimore (1833), decides that the Federal Constitution and particularly the Bill of Rights doesn’t apply to the states unless it explicitly says so. States and municipalities can seize property without compensation to their hearts’ delights.Lochner v. New York (1905) - decides that there is a fundamental right to contract, and that the more important a right is that is infringed upon, the more the Court should insist upon a close fit between the means of governmental intrusion and the ends.Palko v. Connecticut (1937) establishes that to find a fundamental right, it must be “deeply rooted in the traditional conscience,” and “essential to our notions of ordered liberty.” Fundamental if no potential system of justice would be complete without it.United States v. Carolene Products (1938), “magic footnote four” establishes the idea that infringement upon certain rights should be granted a higher level of scrutiny, significantly clarifies the notion laid out in Lochner.Duncan v. Louisiana (1968) refines Palko, must be necessary specifically to American scheme of justice. Starts the road of “incorporation,” which applies the Constitution to the States through the 14th Amendment. Starts with “strong selective” incorporation, generally assuming that the Bill of Rights applies, but still only on a case-by-case basis.Meyer v. Nebraska (1923), fundamental right to parent your children as you see fit, no legitimate end in prohibiting teaching of German language.Buck v. Bell (1927), Oliver Wendell Holmes decides that forced sterilization of mentally ill patients is just fine because, and I quote, “three generations of imbeciles is enough.” This has never been overruled.Skinner v. Oklahoma ex rel Williamson (1942), strikes down forced sterilization of prison inmates and establishes the concept of bodily autonomy and integrity for the first time in U.S. jurisprudence. Recognizes that there may be fundamental rights to marriage and procreation.Rochin v. California (1952), strikes down conviction for drugs after police forcibly pumped the man’s stomach to retrieve them; upholds idea of bodily integrity.Griswold v. Connecticut (1965), finds a fundamental right to personal medical privacy under the “penumbra” of the Bill of Rights; strikes down Connecticut statute prohibiting contraception or aiding someone in obtaining it. Establishes the idea that government does not belong in the bedroom, sets the stage for a huge abortion fight that will last at least the next 55 years.Loving v. Virginia (1967); holds that marriage is a fundamental right and strikes down anti-miscegenation laws nationwide.Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), finds that the right to choose whether to procreate or not is fundamental, covering married people using contraception only in this case. Applies strict scrutiny; while preventing adultery is a legitimate governmental interest, it is not served here. If the right to sexual privacy is to mean anything, the Court reasons, it must be an individual one.Roe v. Wade (1973). Probably the biggest landmark decision affecting U.S. politics as a matter of fundamental rights ever. The Court applied the lines of cases stretching back to the beginning of fundamental rights, bodily integrity, sexual and medical privacy, and found that the right to an abortion falls under these rights. The Court holds that a fetus is not a person by definition of the Constitution.Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) found that there was no specific right to engage in sodomy in the Constitution.Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) ditches the rigid trimester framework that Roe came up with in favor of the “undue burden standard” and drawing the line when government can fully regulate or ban abortion at viability (then generally accepted at 24 weeks.)Also established a framework for when to overrule precedence, requiring balancing four factors: 1) how unworkable the previous standard has become, 2) the amount of reliance on the previous decision there has been, 3) whether the previous decision has been undermined or evolved, and 4) factual developments since the previous decision. This has a great deal of impact on our politics by providing lawmakers the criteria needed to undermine prior decisions and develop a factual basis to overrule prior cases.Lawrence v. Texas (2003), while there is no specific right to homosexual sodomy in the Constitution, consensual sex in the privacy of one’s own home is a fundamental right and discrimination against homosexuals is not a legitimate state interest.Obergefell v. Hodges (2015); extended fundamental right to marry found in Loving to same-sex marriages.Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstadt (2016); struck down admitting privileges and other various TRAP laws as violating the undue burden standard laid out in Casey; reaffirmed Casey and Roe’s essential holdings.Equal ProtectionFrontiero v. Richardson (1973). Laid out the criteria for finding suspect classifications under the Equal Protection Clause. Suspect classifications get strict scrutiny. These are politically protected classes of people.Korematsu v. United States (1944). One of the most infamous decisions of the 20th century; established national security as a compelling state interest, allows facially racial discrimination. (Overruled since.)Brown v. Board of Education (1954), struck down racially segregated schools as a matter of equal protection. Overruled Plessy v Ferguson (1896) that upheld Jim Crow laws as “separate but equal”.Fisher v. University of Texas (2013, 2016), upheld affirmative action programs on a narrow basis, so long as race is only one factor among others and there is no other race-neutral alternative to achieve diversity.Also, states themselves can prohibit affirmative action programs after Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (2014). This is affecting US politics on a state level as legislatures are pushing to ban affirmative action programs.Voting RightsBaker v. Carr (1962). Allowed the Court to intervene in redistricting at all; it had generally been viewed as a political question outside of judicial review prior to this.This case literally broke two justices. Justice Frankfurter had a stroke because of it and was forced to retire, and led to a psychological breakdown of Justice Whittaker, who never recovered and retired from the Court without a decision on Carr.Reynolds v. Sims (1964), established the “one person, one vote” principle.Kramer v. Union Free School District (1969), the right to vote is a fundamental right and requires strict scrutiny review. This is still impacting politics today as various politicians try to find ways around it, notably felon disenfranchisement.Nixon and his cabinet were furious about this decision and it was a piece of the reason for the War on Drugs; if they couldn’t simply undo the voting rights act and couldn’t restore Jim Crow, they’d basically have to find a way to criminalize being black. The War on Drugs specifically targeted drugs favored by the black community with greater enforcement. This is still a problem today.Bush v. Gore (2000), held that the right to a uniform process outweighed the individual’s right to have their vote counted because the electoral college operated on a deadline. This decision gave the election to George W. Bush.Evenwel v. Abbot (2015), after a naked attempt by Texas to reduce the influence of districts with a high population of non-citizen immigrants, the Court decided that districts should be drawn based on total population, not just eligible voters. The Court noted that this was explicitly debated and considered in the drafting of the Constitution and the people who wrote it explicitly went with total population.This is currently impacting the 2020 Census as the Trump Administration has been actively trying to get a citizenship question on the census for the first time in 70+ years for the purpose of trying to get undocumented immigrants not to answer the census, thus undercounting the number of people in those areas and decreasing representation for those districts.Free SpeechNew York Times v. United States (1971), ruling that even where the government has a compelling interest to restrict speech as a prior restraint (prevent someone from speaking,) it can’t be a pretense and the Court will really look at whether that compelling interest is real or not.Buckley v. Valeo (1976), held that money is the same as speech and struck down spending limits by campaigns. Upheld individual contribution limits.Central Hudson Gas and Electric v. Public Service Commission (1980). Held that commercial speech (advertising) is able to be regulated by law with a lesser degree of scrutiny.Texas v. Johnson (1989), burning the U.S. flag is protected by the First Amendment, and conservatives have been fucking pissed about this ruling ever since, including proposing actual constitutional amendments to overrule the Court.Citizens United v. FEC (2009). Struck down corporate contribution limits to campaigns, allows disclaimer and disclosure requirements, but severely weakened the FEC’s ability to regulate electioneering. Allows corporations to donate unlimited amounts of money to campaigns.McCutcheon v. FEC (2014), struck down aggregate limits on contributions as impermissible abridgement of First Amendment rights. People can now donate up to the individual limits to every candidate they want, and if you’re the Koch Brothers, you can now use corporations to get around individual limits.This also severely restricted the definition of quid-pro-quo corruption to require basically an explicit bribe-for-performance.Free PressBranzburg v. Hayes (1972), can try to protect your sources all you want, but if a grand jury calls you up, reporters get no special exemption. If they ask you and you refuse, that’s contempt.Florida Star v. B.J.F. (1989); you can publish information gathered illegally by others so long as you didn’t gather it illegally yourself. And you can publish public records all you’d like.So, if someone wants to send a copy of the Mueller Report on over to the Times…Freedom of Religion and Establishment ClauseReynolds v. United States (1878), the government has no right to compel you to believe anything or punish your religious beliefs. Congress cannot do anything about your “mere opinion.”Santa Fe Independent School District v. Doe (2000), a prayer before sporting events, even if the students are the ones who brought it up and led it, is an impermissible government endorsement of religion.Again, conservatives have been losing their shit about this every since, and it’s become something of a hidden litmus test for Supreme Court nominees for conservatives ever since, even though the case was decided with a conservative-dominated Court.Burwell v. Hobby Lobby (2014), held that closely held corporations (such as a family-owned business,) have religious free exercise rights.This has been a political hot button lately with the ACA.ArbitrationYou have no idea how much these cases affect everything you do, including your politics.Southland Corp. v. Keating (1984). The Federal Arbitration Act pre-empts damned near everything. State laws trying to get around it are null and void.Mitsubishi Motors Corp. v. Soler Chrysler-Plymouth, Inc. (1987), even if you have a statutory claim that would let you bring a case in open court, if you signed an arbitration agreement, say, in the process of buying car, you get stuck in arbitration.Buckeye Check Cashing (2006). Even if the entire contract is illegal, the arbitrator gets to decide whether or not it’s valid.Hall Street v. Mattel (2008). The only grounds to get an arbitration award vacated is in the FAA, and it more or less requires “manifest disregard” of the law. The arbitrator can make “silly, even improvident” findings of fact or conclusions of law, but as long as the arbitrator doesn’t say, “Well, I know that law says that, but I’m ignoring it!” you are stuck with whatever the arbitrator decides.AT&T Mobility v. Concepcion (2014); even if a company is cheating millions of people out of small amounts of money such that they make billions of dollars and nobody would bother going to arbitration individually over $30 when if they lose, they could be forced to pay for the entire arbitration, class action waivers in “adhesion contracts,” (think, clicking “I agree” on your phone to literally anything,) class action waivers are enforceable.Administrative LawChevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council (1984). Courts should defer to an agency’s interpretation of a statute if it’s at all ambiguous and so long as it’s not arbitrary and capricious.The conservative-dominated Supreme Court developed this deference during the Reagan Administration. During the Obama Administration, when the President starting using agency action because Congress preferred to sit on its hands and do jack shit nothing just to spite him, suddenly the still-conservative-dominated Supreme Court had a change of heart, as will be discussed momentarily.Ironically, folks irritated with the sudden lack of deference to the executive should be hoping for the Court to continue that lack of deference right now.Citizens to Preserve Overton Park v. Volpe (1971). Agencies can change course or undertake rulemaking actions, so long as they aren’t arbitrary and capricious.The Trump administration can’t seem to either hire a lawyer that understands this or just plain won’t listen to them, which is why a metric shit ton of their attempts to create or undo various administrative agency rules keep getting rejected by the courts.Bowles v. Seminole Rock and Sand Co. (1945). Courts should defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own regulations if there’s a dispute over it.Auer v. Robbins (1987). Courts should really, really defer to an agency’s interpretation of its own rules if there’s a dispute over it.Kisor v. Wilkie (2019). Not yet decided, but conservatives who suddenly got really itchy all over about agency deference under Obama and liberals who suddenly got really itchy all over about agency deference under Trump are suddenly really hoping that the Supreme Court will ditch Seminole Rock and Auer and stop letting agencies have their way.Criminal Law and ProcedureMapp v. Ohio (1961) established the exclusionary rule; if police violate your constitutional rights, the evidence they gain from that can be excluded.This impacts our politics still today, because in the push to be “tough on crime” and for “law and order,” especially in a post-9/11 world, police are more and more frequently using tools that massively invade on personal privacy. Add to it that we now basically carry much of our essential information, our “papers” if you will, on a little slab in our pockets.Miranda v. Arizona (1966). This was an enormous shift in how police had to treat suspects, and it still affects our politics today.TortsYou think civil suits can’t affect public policy? Think again! Products liability has had a huge impact on our politics over the years.MacPherson v. Buick (1916). A wheel fell off a guy’s car, and for the first time, the court allowed the victim to sue the manufacturer and not just the retailer, for a manufacturing defect rather than just faulty installation.Leichtamer v. AMC (Ohio 1982). While the manufacturers aren’t on the hook to design totally crash-proof cars, unreasonably dangerous product designs or defective designs can still make them liable even where the victims were idiots.Knitz v. Minster Machine Co. (Ohio 1982). Safety features shouldn’t be optional add-ons. *Ahem, cough, Boeing, cough, cough.*New York Times v. Sullivan (1964). This case raises the bar for recovery for public figures; they have to show that a false statement was published with “actual malice.” This is the reason that Trump doesn’t actually sue anyone for defamation.Liebeck v. McDonald's Restaurants (1994). This is the infamous “hot coffee” case. Stella Liebeck was a) not driving, b) in a car that had pulled into a parking stall, c) did not suffer little tiny burns from some spilled coffee, but third degree burns over pretty much her entire downstairs region, d) after McDonald’s had been repeatedly cited for storing their coffee as much as 30 degrees above the maximum safe limit and settled literally hundreds of cases where people had suffered serious burns from this practice, and e) Liebeck was only trying to get McDonald’s to cover her medical bills after they offered her $800 to just go away.It was the jury that imposed a 2.5 million fine on the company as punitive damages for actions that “shocked the conscience.” That number is equivalent to two days’ worth of coffee sales to the corporation.Business lobbies have been trying to make this into a frivolous case ever since by reducing it to “woman burned with hot coffee, duh.” This case has been the front case for 25 years by these pro-business lobbies to enact tort reform to try to block suits like this, even though it was completely legitimate.It is still repeatedly brought up by politicians trying to make cases sound frivolous by comparing a case to Liebeck’s.I could go on like this forever. We haven’t even touched on contract law, civil procedure, or secured transactions. These are just highlights. There are literally thousands of cases, big and small, that continue to have large impacts on our national and local level politics.You read all the way this far, and deserve a reward. Here’s a kitten.Thanks for the A2A.Mostly Standard Addendum and Disclaimer: read this before you comment.I welcome rational, reasoned debate on the merits with reliable, credible sources.But coming on here and calling me names, pissing and moaning about how biased I am, et cetera and so forth, will result in a swift one-way frogmarch out the airlock. Doing the same to others will result in the same treatment.Essentially, act like an adult and don’t be a dick about it.Getting cute with me about my commenting rules and how my answer doesn’t follow my rules and blah, blah, whine, blah is getting old. I’m ornery enough today to not put up with it. Stay on topic or you’ll get to watch the debate from the outside.If you want to argue and you’re not sure how to not be a dick about it, just post a picture of a cute baby animal instead, all right? Your displeasure and disagreement will be duly noted. Pinkie swear.I’m done with warnings. If you have to consider whether or not you’re over the line, the answer is most likely yes. I’ll just delete your comment and probably block you, and frankly, I won’t lose a minute of sleep over it.Debate responsibly.

Original Wording of the Question: What are your thoughts on Pathfinder 2.0?Complex but optimistic. It’s kind of about time. To understand where I’m coming from with it I think it’s best I unpack a bit of the history of the game and a few of my observations with it. Then I’ll detail why the need is there for a 2.0, and share some tidbits about what direction it seems to be taking, based on information I’ve gotten from Paizo’s blog and the spinoff game “Starfinder.”BackgroundFor those not in the know, Pathfinder is a tabletop RPG created by Paizo Publishing. Basically, it’s Dungeons & Dragons’s one and only real competitor, created in response to 4th Edition D&D’s massive departure from the paradigms and rules set by 3rd Edition and 3.5. Lots of third-party publishers, Paizo included, had authored a great deal of content for 3rd edition, adventures and rules supplements included, and were quite miffed that their backlog of materials would no longer be compatible. More than that, whereas 3rd edition was developed sort of as a “platform” that could be used to make games other than Dungeons & Dragons, 4th edition D&D was much more rigid, useful exclusively for, well, 4th edition D&D, and almost nothing else.So, Paizo decided to exercise the Open Game License to its absolute fullest and publish their own version of the game, one that would address the many weaknesses that had been exposed over 3rd edition D&D’s years but maintain its core rules and backwards compatibility with other materials. Sometimes nicknamed “D&D 3.75,” it introduced numerous quality of life improvements to the rules and re-architected character classes from the ground up to each have a comparable sense of playability and options during play.Perhaps one of the most emblematic examples of this was the Pathfinder version of the Sorcerer, which introduced an option to pick a magical bloodline. While this concept was vaguely suggested in 3rd edition’s text, Pathfinder saw fit to make it a tangible option that directly impacted a character’s powers, spells, and play style, making it a much more distinct and interesting class. It’s an idea so good that Wizards eventually stole it wholesale for 5th edition D&D, except where they presented only two options for Sorcerers, the Pathfinder core book presented ten. Other classes had similarly expanded options, which has become one of the game’s hallmarks, but there is much to be said about its general rule and bookkeeping improvements compared to previous iterations of 3rd edition D&D as well.With these improvements being what they were and with 4th edition being alienating for both players and third-party publishers alike, Pathfinder’s popularity blew up to the point that it essentially overtook Dungeons & Dragons as the go-to fantasy roleplaying game for at least five years, from its initial publication in 2009 to at least 2014, when Wizards of the Coast published 5th edition D&D. In all frankness I’d say it’s been on top even longer than that, in that 5th edition was, until relatively recently, very slow to gain momentum. Buoying this success was a characteristically high standard of quality on Paizo’s part, with their core rulebooks presenting a great deal of “bang for the buck” in and of themselves, their supplementary rulebooks showing similar value and great quality control, and their adventure path series representing some of the best pre-published adventures and campaigns in the business.A Path DivergedIt’s worth noting that as time went on Pathfinder went from being essentially a mod of 3rd edition D&D to completely superseding it, with the popularity of its own supplements making obsolete all of the (relatively awful) third party materials that it was designed to preserve.Some of the books introduced new character classes that found widespread adoption, with the Inquisitor, Gunslinger, and Alchemist in particular becoming popular mainstays alongside the core classes. Most books introduced new options called “Archetypes,” a sort of overlay you could use to replace specific sets of class features and re-flavor a character class to your liking — similar to “kits” from 2nd edition AD&D. This became a primary means by which Pathfinder players customized their characters, and a means by which Paizo could introduce new options by expanding what the old classes did rather than by needlessly making new ones.As adventures were published new systems emerged: overland exploration, military engagements, and kingdom-building, to name a few, all fully detailed. One of the most popular of these is the “Downtime” system, which offers a robust but simple series of resources, interactions, and re-training options that players can use in-between adventures to make the most of their hard-earned capital. This is in addition to all the spells, equipment, races, and other optional rules that made their way into the mainstream of the game. Instrumental in the adoption of these rules was Paizo’s embracing the Open Game License, which permitted resources like the Pathfinder SRD — essentially a full wiki of all the rules from everything they’ve published ever — to propagate freely.There’s also something to be said for shifts in the internal pipeline at Paizo, represented most through “Pathfinder Unchained,” a rule supplement containing a few “patches” designed to address lingering inequities and to streamline the play experience. These included a revised system for tracking actions during combat, a revised system for tracking poisons and negative conditions, a new stamina system, and, perhaps most significantly, the inception of the “Quick Monster Creation” rules. This started as a quick shorthand system but became Paizo’s preferred method for creating stat blocks for monsters and NPCs, to the point that they now use it exclusively.In short, Pathfinder has grown and evolved as it was played, transforming from what was originally a sort of mod for D&D into what is essentially its own game with its own following and conventions.Room For New PavementBut, here’s the thing — all the supplemental rules that I’ve described, while popular, dare I say even definitive additions, are not part of the core game. Downtime isn’t in the Game Mastery book or the Players’ Handbook; Quick Monster Creation isn’t in any of the Beastiaries; Gunslinger and Inquisitor aren’t core classes; the new-and-improved action economy is in no way taken into account in any stat block since it isn’t a baseline feature, so nobody uses it; and even though you can find most or all this on the SRD that’s a lot of digging for a new player or Game Master to do.Maybe the most significant example of “stuff that could stand to have been taken into account the first time around” is the archetypes system. Everybody uses them! But they’re also a colossal pain in the ass to use, requiring players to flip back and forth between their selected archetype and their character class in order to see what features to substitute at what level, sometimes picking through with a set of fine tweezers to make sure all the bookkeeping is correct. Some archetypes are easy substitutions, replacing only one or two levels worth of abilities, but some are significant alternate feature progressions, making character progression a pedantic pain in the ass. Asmoedus help you if you take two Archetypes, which yes, is possible if they don’t overlap in which features they replace. It just seems like this is a feature that could be more cleanly integrated somehow if it had been accounted for from the beginning, as is the case with many of the features that the game has evolved.Kinks in the RoadFinally, there is something to be said for problems that have gone unaddressed, or even ones that have been amplified over the years.Pathfinder’s other nickname is “Mathfinder,” owing to the numerous redundant systems for enhancing a character. While none of the math involved is inherently difficult, per se, the sheer amount of small circumstantial bonuses, buffs, and enhancements, both to combat statistics and to the stats behind the combat statistics, can cause Pathfinder to become a bit of a slog. It’s not bad for a while, but after around level 10 the game gets close to being unplayable due the frequency with which players have to refactor pedantic recalculations. It’s not unusual for one player to be stuck going, “strength, plus… song, plus… smite, plus… weapon focus, plus… enhancement, plus… morale, plus…” on and on for a couple of minutes at a time while everybody checks their phones. While some might cite the detail as being gratifying, it doesn’t really increase the tactical complexity of the game. In some sense it leaves players feeling punished for improvising rather than resorting to a prescribed “formula” of abilities and buffs, in that improvised actions tend to show a stark difference in optimization and cause the session to slow down.Meanwhile Pathfinder definitely inherited a few balance flaws from 3rd edition. Power creep is more consistent across all classes but also still present in the game’s overall progression, with the above slate of modifiers growing dramatically every few levels as the players add redundant stat bonuses. Each of them grows with relative linearity, but cumulatively they tend to grow on a very steep upward curve. As a direct consequence Challenge Rating is more accurate than it was with 3rd edition, but still increasingly unreliable as the game goes on and the power creep becomes less predictable — I once had a level 12 character, not a group, but a character, take down a CR 20 monster.Finally, for all the fact that character build options are celebrated as part of Pathfinder’s core appeal, there are notable shortcomings there as well. Classes each have a large variety of choices, but only a handful for each class are viable. The logic as to why is consistent, at least, but not intuitive unless you’ve played in several long-running games and understand what tends to be important during an adventure versus abilities that constitute cool “flavor” but ultimately aren’t practical and therefore are a waste. Compounding this is the issue of “feat tax,” wherein you have to pick one or several prerequisite feats that you don’t care about or never use in order to unlock a feat that you actually want. This means you’re at around level 8 or 10 before your intended play style begins to look like what it’s supposed to be, if it ever does.All of the above are at this point well-understood problems with the game, ranging from “missing stair steps” that people have simply learned to jump over to hugely stifling design flaws — most of them inherited from 3rd edition rather than added over time. One or several of the above problems are often cited by those who’ve moved over to 5th edition D&D, which is considerably more elegant in terms of its working rule set. While my experiences at GenCon 2017 tell me that Paizo is by no means in trouble over players migrating from one system to another, it also tells me something that third parties like Kobold Press are increasingly moving towards supporting 5th edition D&D instead of Pathfinder rather than alongside Pathfinder, indicating that there’s a change in the wind. Many agree that these trends may necessitate Paizo addressing Pathfinder’s flaws in order to remain competitive.There are some who are concerned that addressing these issues might result in reducing Pathfinder’s complexity or depth, especially given that 5th edition still doesn’t offer nearly the same range of build options and has never explicitly provided the same range of tactical options. However, I’d argue that there are numerous games that don’t have these issues but which are comparable to Pathfinder in tactical complexity anyway, including Warhammer 40k’s Dark Heresy. It goes to show that Pathfinder doesn’t need to keep these problems in order to still be Pathfinder, and they arguably shouldn’t.The Path Forward: My Predictions, Expectations, and Information that I’ve GleanedFor all of these reasons I think the time’s ripe for Pathfinder to have a new edition. Since it was first published there’s a lot of concepts that have been embraced by the community as “new essentials” that could stand to be integrated cleanly into the base game instead of being buried in supplements, and there’s a lot of old conventions that aren’t so much outdated as they were just bad, clunky, or careless design in the first place. With there now being a healthy pile of past rules additions to pull in as well as an increasing demand for rules that are cleaner and more consistently fun, it seems to me like they’ve got the perfect mix sitting in front of them.With regards to what I expect Paizo’s changes in Pathfinder 2.0 to entail, I’ve got a pretty good idea where they’re going with it. The two sources that you should pay attention to are “Pathfinder Unchained,” the aforementioned rules variant, as well as “Starfinder,” the space-based spinoff to Pathfinder released in 2017 — which notably implemented a lot of “Unchained” rules variants as part of the base game.Of note, Paizo has confirmed that the revised action economy (three actions per turn, for everyone) is the new norm, and that the Downtime system is factored directly into the core rules. While no word has been given as to which character classes may have been added to core yet, I expect that the Inquisitor at minimum will be, as it is very popular.Flanking, and Flatfooted are both known to be the same condition, applying a simple +2 bonus to attacks, and many circumstantial combat bonuses are revised in a similar fashion. This is a change notably present in Starfinder, where modifier bloat is significantly reduced. One of the other techniques from Starfinder I expect them to use is to reduce the number of Attack Bonus and Armor Class modifiers that are available through magic or other means — Starfinder has no spells and very few abilities that do so, meaning that your attacks and defenses are mainly affected by choices that you make during combat rather than build optimization. To that effect, shields seemingly present a hit point buffer rather than an Armor Class bonus, but I’ve yet to fully confirm that.Based on changes in Starfinder I also expect that attacks of opportunity will be reduced substantially, such that they won’t factor into Combat Maneuvers like Trip and Dirty Trick. One way or another simplification of Combat Maneuvers will make its way into the game, with many of them using the Acrobatics or Athletics skill instead of the clunky “Combat Maneuver Bonus” stat. The revised disease/poison/condition system from Starfinder and Unchained, which uses a series of “condition tracks,” is also very likely to be part of the new base game. It is notable that spellcasting seems like it will be more sophisticated rather than less. Namely, “Verbal” and “Somatic” spellcasting components apparently apply to different types of actions required in order to complete a spell; details are yet to come as to how precisely this works, if indeed it ends up in the base game.Other changes that I’m aware of include a large-scale shift in character class structure. Whereas Starfinder keeps relatively the same structure as Pathfinder had, Pathfinder 2.0 seems to have condensed all abilities in the progresssion to different sets of Feats. “Class Feats,” that is, Feats associated with a specific class, seem to be the means of introducing and advancing specific class features, and are given out every other level. “Skill Feats” are a re-branding of the Pathfinder Unchained “Skill Unlocks,” which add new functionality and perks to using specific skills when you have a certain number of ranks in them. “General Feats” seem to be pretty much what you expect — the universal Feats that are available to everybody, Skill Feats included. While more varieties of Feats may exist they have not yet been named, but one thing that’s certain is that Paizo is putting significantly greater emphasis on their classification, awarding Feats of specific types at specific levels in each class progression in order to ensure that players get a good variety of them and don’t see them as “competing.” Mention has been made that they are attempting to address “Feat tax” by eliminating most prerequisites and simply tying viable Feat choices to character level.Finally, there are some “quality of life” changes that are occurring in this version. Skills are getting a new pass; to what extent remains to be seen, but it’s likely the Knowledge skills are condensed a great deal — who needs “Knowledge: Nobility” and “Knowledge: Local” when you have “Society?” Perception is notably no longer a skill, as everybody always invested points in it anyway. Instead, Perception is a lot like Concentration or Initiative; everybody has a Perception value, and some classes will raise it as part of their progression. “Hit dice” are likely to be phased out in favor of a flat hit point progression, similar to that which Paizo adopted for Starfinder. I don’t presently know if the Starfinder Stamina system is being adopted, but it’s probable that it will be, as it is largely successful at fixing the “16 minute work-day,” wherein each individual encounter causes the party to do a full rest. It also bears mention on the game master’s side of the table that Quick Monster Creation is the norm for Starfinder, and likely will be the norm for Pathfinder 2.0 as well. In fact, if the Alien Archive is any indication you can expect a lot more emphasis on it, with templates and grafts being the main way of composing new monsters.ConclusionSpeaking from my experiences from Starfinder and what I’ve been able to glean about the Playtest from reading Paizo’s blog, the game more or less plays in a way you’re already familiar with. What changes have occurred in terms of combat modifiers are the likes that you could list on a Game Master’s screen, and the new action economy makes more tactical options viable much sooner. I predict that the behavior in-game will be a bit more complex, but the math and bookkeeping are less cumbersome, making for a game that feels very true to what Pathfinder is but considerably more playable. If Starfinder is any indication to go by — and so far it sure sounds like it — a good fight at level 1 will be more tactically sophisticated than a fight at level 5 in 5th edition D&D.I’ll look forward to seeing where the new rules end up, but I like what I’m hearing so far and expect most Pathfinder fans will enjoy it once the new-edition knee-jerk and speculation subsides.