The truth is, fundamentally, politics is merely an extension of human nature - it’s all about shoving an outcome down your opponents’ throat that you know they find unacceptable. (Not you as in you personally, but as in in general.)
Politics is peaceful warfare just like warfare is violent politics. It’s about two people wrestling for control of the same gun, and the winner gets to empty the magazine in the loser’s face. The only difference is that Democrats and Republicans are finally being honest and upfront about it.
There is a certain amount of rationality to this viewpoint. Money is power, and some kinds of power are a zero sum game. Does it matter to me whether someone else has a billion pounds if my own wealth is unchanged? Yes, if they use their billions to influence the government to pass policies that make me worse off, or block policies that would make me better off. Yes, if they buy up all of scare resource Y thus raising the price out of my reach.
That was a completely zero content post. Liberals believe in platform character, accomplishments, they just want to support the weak against the strong rather than the other way around. Also, when was the last time that a conservative old-fashioned or otherwise actually showed any significant character, record or accomplishment. Republicans assert that they are the party of character, and of personal responsibility and their followers believe it because that is what they are told. Just the same way that they believe that they are the party of economic growth and balanced budgets despite the fact that by just about every measure imaginable statistics show the opposite.
Getting back to the OP:
most of the hand wringing amon Democrats is due to the fact that by all rights there should be no contest between a mostly centrist mainstream political party and a gang of racist conspiracy theorists. It isn’t so much that they are winning, its that they are even still in the game.
Unfortunately this may not be the dying last stand of a party on its last legs. The change in strategy caught the Democrats flat footed. To use a sports analogy, it was back and forth street level basketball game, when the Dems put in a fresh starter by the name of Obama and took they took the lead. Suddenly realizing that they were in trouble some of Republicans started using football tactics, they picked up the ball and ran with it stiff arming anyone who got in their way. The hapless Dems started looking around for someone to call a foul and the player to be booed off the court, but the fans of the other team just cheered all the more. The rules of the game had changed. So the question is what do they do, do they try to convince the Republicans that its really better to play the old way? keep trying to turn the onlookers against them? Do they hope that thy have sufficient skill to win the game still playing by the rules, or do they start playing football as well, and just have the whole thing devolve into a melee.
The one area where the battle of the bulge metaphor is accurate is in the culture war. Since the turn of the 20th century, there has been a general steady march towards tolerance and equality. We aren’t there yet, but we have come a very long way. The rise of the white nationalists is a last ditch effort to swim upstream against the current, but they can only do so for so long before they too are swept downstream.
[quote=“Sam_Stone, post:75, topic:945477”]Given that Pride refuses to allow gay Republicans and in Canada gay Conservatives or gay police organizations to march with them, I assume they are indistinguishable from any other left-wing group these days.
Pride has made it clear that people on the right are not welcome.[/quote]
If I may be allowed a short hijack, I think this is an important point. I’m gay and left-wing, and I’ve spoken out to other gay and leftwing people about this trend of excluding groups such as (for example) the police. I understand the history of the Stonewall Riots, and all the current controversies, but overall it’s short-sighted bandwagonism, and I just wanted you to know that lots of us despise it and are speaking out against it.
The reason I bring it up is that most posters in this thread are talking about two monoliths that don’t exist. It’s more of a Venn diagram with a smaller and small slice of overlap as the two sides polarize, but the belief that either pole is a unified Them is both inaccurate and feeds into the strategy of whichever group decides to fearmonger and otherize in their quest to win.
I would say that demographically, Democrats are winning. Tactically, Republicans are winning, because they are willing and able to game the system in a way that Democrats don’t seem to be. As long as elections are held, it’s a race to see who benefits. My prediction is that neither side wins, but the current take-no-prisoners Republican strategy will gum up the works sufficiently to destroy democracy, as it becomes easier to get things accomplished through individual executive orders, as well as through bribery, corruption, and graft, than via legislation and judicial rulings.
That’s funny, there is a gay Republican organization (The Log Cabin Republicans) who are in the party. The first openly gay cabinet-level appointee was Ric Grennel, who was appointed Director of National Intelligence by Trump, and later ambassador to Germany. I don’t know a single Republican who cared, and a few who thought it was great. Also, in the last few years Republican support for gay marriage has risen to well over 50%.
The biggest reason many Republicans are not supporting the gay movement is because it is now associated with the hard left. The Log Cabin Republicans wanted to march with Pride, and were refused.
Sure, there are a lot of anti-gay Republicans. And quite a few anti gay Democrats. But that’s all the more reason to invite Republicans. By excluding them, you make support for gay rights a partisan issue, and then you lose people who could have been allies. That’s just stupid.
There is a tension on the Democratic side between activists who want to build a large coalition of intersectional groups tor political purposes, and the groups themselves who would benefit from a more inclusive position.
Republicans are better at this. They welcome Democrats who agree with them on a specific issue, even if they disagree with others. Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Bret Weinstein, Sam Harris and even freaking Noam Chomsky have been welcomed by Republicans because they all share a common belief in free speech. They agree on almost nothing else, but so long as the subject remains free expression they get heavy support from the right… On the other side, most of them will tell you they’ve been essentially excommunicated by the left.
The left’s intersectional demands prevent allies from supporting any of them if they are unwilling to support all of it. The right doesn’t care.
First I thought that this reply was ok, but then I remember how unhinged one party has gone, one should never forget that nowadays one party is trying their damnedest to continue to include into their tent people that dismisses democracy and rejects evidence when they are on the losing side in an election.
The majority of those who believe that voter fraud delivered the White House to Biden identify as either Republicans or Republican-leaning, according to the Monmouth poll. Sixty-three percent of GOP voters and Republican-leaning voters say that Biden was not legitimately elected president.
My two guesses are CEO’s or Wall Street bankers. The vast majority of CEO’s are smart, focused, very talented, extremely knowledgeable and incredibly hard-working individuals who’ve worked their way to the top of the ladder through achievement. Many CEO’s at big companies are overpaid, in my opinion, but it is a position where the rule of scarcity applies. A good CEO contributes enormously to the company he runs, and if that’s the Ratcatcher King you’re talking about, while I think he may not deserve as many rats as he receives, he certainly deserves an outsize share of them.
Wall Street bankers are the people who coordinate money and enable the rat traps to get built. There’s a lot of activity that goes on that goes on on Wall Street that is purely about making money with no outside benefit. That’s a feature of markets because they enable speculation. However, the fundamental feature of markets is that they allocate capital to where it can be most effectively invested. Do you want better rat traps in the future? Their development is going to require funding. That funding might come from an individual willing to take a risk. Or it might come from a pool of a lot of small investors whose money is coordinated by someone seeking to find the best rat trap for them to fund. That money coordinator who’s enabling the funding of the better rat traps? He’s part of the system for catching more rats. And he enables more rats to be caught than the guys with the pointy sticks and therefore deserves more rats than they do.
If my guesses are wrong on who is the Ratcatcher King villain in the analogy, please let me know.
Mitt Romney, John McCain, George W. Bush, Bob Dole, George H. W. Bush and Ronald Reagan.
The question is whether Trumpian asshole politics are the future of the Republican Party, or an aberration. I suppose the secondary question is if Trumpian politics are its future, can the Republican Party remain a competitive electoral force, or will it turn into a right-wing rump party avoided by mainstream voters? And if so, what happens to the Democratic Party? Will it be able to accommodate an anti-Trumpian centre-right and a hard left-wing, or will it have its own schism?
Looking at the other side, you’re describing the Democratic Party as a
.
That’s a pretty good description of Bidenism. Are the liberals on this board happy with Bidenism as the future of the Democratic Party? You’ll get infrastructure improvements and incremental social change. You won’t get the Green New Deal or any societal shake-up. Is that your goal for the Democratic Party? If so, I’m standing by my description of you as an:
All that is tokenism and meaningless. The party platform is explicit anti gay rights. That some non zero number of gay people might be okay with this tells us nothing more than the fact that some non zero number of slaves were okay with slavery.
Yes - there’s no room in the big tent for bigots. Opposing gay marriage is bigoted, full stop. Just like opposing interracial marriage is bigoted. There’s no non bigoted way to oppose either of these.
You’re never going to persuade parents not to help out their children. Never. You’ve got 3 bn years of evolution working against you.
It would take some very draconian laws to stop people purchasing opportunities to develop their, or their kids’, talents and skills. Most people don’t want to live in a society that restricts freedom to that degree. The best we can do is provide everyone with good opportunities to develop, by eg providing free schooling. Obviously this is something that still has plenty of scope for improvement. I think both sides agree that education needs to be improved, even if they disagree about the best way to fix it.
What percentage of the US population do you think hold bigoted views on some subject or other? 70%, 80%, 90%? If you throw all those people out, you don’t have a big tent anymore, and you certainly don’t have a coalition capable of winning elections.
The point of coalition building is to offer each group something they want, without any deal breakers. You don’t need them to agree with you on every part of your platform or have the exact same moral views you do on every issue. You don’t need everyone to support gay marriage, you just need them to tolerate it being legal.
I wouldn’t put the burden primarily on parents. It should be up to the schools to not, for example, put a less intelligent kid in an honors program just because Daddy is rich and made a big donation to the school, while neglecting to provide an opportunity for another more intelligent kid just because their father is poor. On a larger scale this would mean equalizing school funding so that kids in poor areas aren’t denied opportunities they might benefit from.
Ideally this is the case. In reality what happens is people like Donald Trump secure credit based on their name and connections, not based on their skill as a business person. He’s the most egregious example, but for the most part the wealthy got their wealth based on their name and connections / being born into the right family, not due to their talent at business. The exceptions are notable, and huge names we all know. People who actually did build their businesses from the ground up. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, Harland Sanders (to use a non-tech example from an earlier era) and so on. I know most liberals would tax those people just as heavily, but I personally distinguish between them and people like Trump, and believe the latter should be taxed at a higher rate than the former. Admittedly there’s no practical way to make that distinction in tax law, but on a moral basis the distinction (to me at least) is obvious.
You could make admission to the program based solely on test results, though most reforms currently seem to be going in the opposite direction, towards subjective measures that rich parents can more easily game.
But are you also going to ban private schools? Ban parents hiring tutors? Ban afterschool activities because not all parents can afford them? Ban them from recommending their kids to their friends and acquaintances when they are looking for jobs? Ban them from leaving their kids money in their wills, or helping out with a mortgage deposit when they want to buy their first house? Etc, etc, etc. It’s just impractical. The best you can do is try and even things up by providing a decent level of opportunities for everyone. Equalising school funding would just be the start.