Listen, noob, I’ve been here since 2002. 
Well, wrt my understanding, I understand several things concerning this OP and what you are saying. Thing the first…if you are, indeed in a minority, it’s going to be more than one down vote, depending on how civil the crowd is, and how large the gap is between opinions. When we are talking about contentious politics, I’m fairly sure that is going to be more than one down vote, regardless of which side is in the minority and which is in the majority. I also understand that mobs can rail road posters out. Hell, even here I’ve seen it happen to even long time posters, and that’s with our mods being, IMHO anyway, pretty freaking good overall, especially considering they are basically volunteers doing this on their own time and for nothing more than, perhaps, mugs. 
(which is probably just an SDMB myth in any case).
Thing the third, you didn’t make a compelling case…to me at least, and FWTIS (probably not much). I don’t have a dog in this fight. You and I have butted heads in the past, but I don’t have any personal animus towards you. Contrary to what you might believe, I’ve butted heads with HD in the past, but I don’t have a ton against the guy either. Looking at just what you quoted, I’m not seeing it the way you are…certainly not to the extent that mod intervention would be either necessary or, frankly, expected. I think your own personal animus towards HD and probably past interactions with him or past issues is clouding your view on this, but I also concede that people read things differently, and what riles folks is not always the same. Gods know, I have gotten riled in the past by stuff someone said that I don’t think they intended for me to read the way I did.
Thing the forth, my asshole status. Well, all I can say there is if there was a vote, I’d be unsurprised if it came back with just one vote (presumably yours :p). I’d guess you’d get a large, non-zero response to that one. Hell, my wife and many of my cow-orkers would undoubtedly agree with your assessment.
This board is clique-ish enough as is. The last thing we need is the ability to downvote unpopular posts. The LAST.
None of us would like for our posts to go unread. We have different reasons for making them, but all of those reasons are based on someone reading them. So of course HD wouldn’t like it if this forum were set up in a way that resulted in his posts going unread.
We also don’t need a “like” function, but if we had one, I’d hit it thrice for this post.
Appeal to popularity or needing to be validated by the majority mob is a poor way to run a site. Regardless of the political slant of a place.
Good to see to the usual martyrs out in full force again. With Bricker leaving I was concerned.
Of course we all want attention. Why else would we post if not to engage other people? Speaking for myself, I have found it extremely instructive to post on Reddit where you get clear feedback as to whether your post is good, bad, or nobody gives a shit. (Spoiler: Nobody gives a shit about my posts, political or otherwise, except this one time when I hijacked a comment thread about a dirty joke and ended up in the top 50 of /r/BestOfReddit and ending up being a Reddit legend. This is not to tout my posting prowess, but rather to suggest nobody can really predict what will get people engaged. Generally the lack of engagement has been an uncomfortable yet illuminating experience.)
But again for the fifty-leventh time, I have to point out that HD’s anxiety is not about being silenced or ignored or suppressed or unread, but rather the possibility of being seen without approval or artificial signal boosting. It’s bonkers that he has admitted this in so many words, that he enjoys trolling people free of impediments, yet he still enjoys more or less free rein on a board that ostensibly still has a “don’t be a jerk” rule. And yet again I want to point out that his persecution hypothesis is easily empirically testable, but he won’t do it because he prefers to see himself as a victim.
Unsurprising to see you checking in to claim victimhood status. I’ll challenge you like I challenged everybody else, make a burner on Reddit to demonstrate how you’re persecuted. You won’t do it because you’re too invested in your own persecution myth. Bye.
You annoy me for some reason, it’s probably the whole Enlightened Centrist thing, but in some weird way I also think you’re kind of OK. So we’ve got that going for us at least.
I also agree with the learned gentleman.
Well, I have learned some things with this post. Mainly that I’m unquestionably right and we’d be better off if board management implemented all my suggestions immediately, but there are also some other peripheral dissenting matters that don’t rate a serious mention and should be ignored if not outright penalized.
Hmmm. Perception is reality. I reject your reality and substitute my own.
Still better than everywhere else.
I’m betting I’d prefer your reality over my own. How much does your reality substitution service cost?
Beer?
Cosigned.
And before we were told to stop talking about it, **Elmwood **agreed with me that non-“woke” Democrats like us also face plenty of opprobrium and would also get drummed out pretty quickly if it were majority rule. Elmwood’s thesis is that this has led to a lot of problems with message boards more broadly: they end up being arguments between the entire right and the far left, with very few centrists or center-left types being as stubborn as I am in the face of politically correct attackers.
No, he can’t be both. If he’s a decent guy in real life, he wouldn’t be a “dishonest, cowardly, bloodthirsty troll” on a message board. Any pretense at being decent in his real life would be just that. That doesn’t mean that he doesn’t have friends and family with whom he is a decent guy, it just means that underneath it all, he isn’t a decent guy.
I rarely agree with HD on anything but I’ve never thought he was a troll, and I think he’s the least trollish among our right wing posters.
Also, down-voting would be a terrible idea for this board, and it would kill the activity in a lot of the forums. Down-voting leads to cliques and hive mind behavior.