Is it possible to hijack a political party?

Great Debates
21

Well, they are far to the right of you, EC. But, that doesn’t say much. :wink:

OK. IMHO, the visible far left crowd these days is out of the mainstream on:

Abortion.
Taxes.
Defense.
Affirimative Action.
Gay Marriage.
The Courts.

Those are just a few off the top of my head. Now, I know what you’re thinking: Most people are pro-choice. Most people are against the war in Iraq now. Yes, pro-choice is a mainstream position, but not partial birth abortion and lack of parental consent. Yes, the war in Iraq has become unpopular but most American’s still cringe when they see the Cindy Sheehan crew spitting out hate at Bush, Isreal and the US military in general.

That’s what makes this even more telling. Even issues that should be winners for the Democrats become losers when they are championed by the loony fringes and taken to extremes.

The Republicans are on the correct side of most of these issues. However, even the ones that they are not such as Abortion and Iraq they have a moderate and reasonable approach. Due to public opinion the troop levels will come down in Iraq and as a result the casualty rates will drop. This will happen within a year, I’m guessing. Abortion has been basically abandoned by the right. Republicans have controlled all three branches of government for some time now and they haven’t tried any sweeping changes on abortion. They are taking a very moderate approach as to not piss of the electorate, which is exactly what they should be doing.

22

Captain Amazing

Certainly Genealogy isn’t the most important factor. However, I’d like to point out that the word 'Aristocracy ’ means “Rule by the Best”. I’d say that the smartest people rule simply by virtue of being the smartest. It’s very easy to outsmart people less intelligent than oneself. Aristocracy doesn’t necessarily imply a hereditary succession. Not to mention that oftentimes children get shafted in the line of succession if they are say, the fourth son, and the children of that fourth son trickle on down the chain back into the pool of the lower classes.

However, I’d like to say that the motivations of David Rockefeller and George HW Bush are likely far from those of what most Republicans posting on this board see as being republican values. Though, I am not sure what party Rockefeller belongs to. Also, I’d like to point out that Bush, Clinton and Rockefeller probably have far more kinship to one another than they would with the average person on the street.

People oftentimes discount Illuminati conspiracy theories, but they are completely logical. I’m not going into some kind of superhuman level either, I am pointing to people like David Rockefeller, Eric Rothschild and George HW Bush as being at this level. They go to meetings of organizations such as the Bilderberg group or the Council on Foreign Relations and they make real decisions that affect the future of geopolitics. Allen & Company is an investment banking firm that handles the personal investments of some of the richest people in the world. They have a retreat in Sun Valley Idaho every summer. To think that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are not having discussions about personal investments and how to steer the future of the tech industry at such conferences where both are in attendance would be ignorance.

Erek

23

Norquist is a libertarian, not a neoconservative.

And the neoconservatives didn’t hide the fact they wanted Saddam Hussein gone. If “you didn’t hear about it before 9/11”, it’s because you weren’t paying attention. The organization “Project for a New American Century” wrote a letter to Clinton in 1998 urging that he overthrow Sadaam. Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan wrote an editorial in the New York Times in '98 that started with the sentence “Saddam Hussein must go”, and ended

I could find you quotes by neoconservatives as far back as the first Gulf War who advocated removing Hussein. They didn’t make a secret of it.

24

Point taken, so long as we agree there are a lot of neoconservatives in positions of influence in the Bush Admin.

The neoconservatives never hid their goals, I agree, but the Bush Admin and the Republican Party didn’t campaign for President on the basis of “Let’s invade Iraq.” They didn’t campaign on the basis of “Let’s be Israel’s bitch.” The neocon agenda has become the Republican agenda, not because there was ever any popular consensus among the Pubbies on their issues, but because they influenced the elected officials in the White House to support those issues. Sounds like a most excellent hijack to me.

25

It almost happenned in the 1980s with the U.K.'s Labour Party. There was a hard-left group called Militant Tendency led by Derek Hatton which tried to take over.

26

You’re off by 3 years and it was the “conservative” Democrats that left the Democratic Party over the passage of the Civil Rights Act. If passage of the Act is dumping the South, I am glad it was dumped.

27

“Disenfranchised” how? They could still get involved and elect delegates, couldn’t they?

28

What you are describing is also known as the “white overclass.” See the OP in this thread: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=190376 In Up From Conservatism, a later book by the same author, Michael Lind, he emphasizes that this is not a conspiracy theory. Rather, when a large class of influential people have a chance to act in their own class interests, they do, even if there is no conscious conspiracy; it’s more a matter of most of them, on their own initiative, pulling in roughly the same direction. But the effect is the same.

29

I certainly don’t think of it as a conspiracy in that I don’t hold any pre-judgement that they have some malevolent intent. However, I find that some of the best material I have found on these groups is from Conspiracy webpages. I once asked Google who the Illuminati was, and I ended up reading some conspiracy web sites. One in particular was a timeline of WW3. I went and verified information contained within it later, and it really set me on the right path toward finding out specifically who the individuals that rule us are. This is how I discovered the Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations etc… It hasn’t much crossed my path where there is an analysis of such power relationships outside of the radical conspiracy theorists who automatically assume that it is evil.

I tend to hold my freemason membership tightly to my chest because I don’t like to be caught unaware by someone who has a hostile attitude based on ignorance toward the masons. I have yet to encounter a hostile attitude toward this organization from anyone who actually knows what they are talking about interestingly enough.

It’s kind of interesting that by Lind’s standards I am a fledgeling member of the White Overclass. However, one thing I have seen in my adult experience is a breakdown of many of the cultural norms. The advent of the internet has thrown everyone for a loop. I am old enough that I was born on the apex of the generational rift caused by the internet. I find that people older than me often have an adversarial relationship with their technology whereas people younger than me just kind of accept it as a part of their lives. We got our first family computer when I was 9. Of those cultural norms that people think is a big deal, which really hasn’t been a big deal for me at all is the length of my hair which goes past my shoulders. This has held me back from getting some stuffy jobs, but I’ve found that by and large it’s a good way to seperate jobs I would hate from jobs I would like right away, and so I weed people out just as they weed me out. Other than as an employeed I have not found it to hold me back socially, I do not find doors that will not open because of my hair.

I think we are seeing a breakdown of those class structures right before our eyes on a daily basis, with the rife confusion as to what being “left or right” even means now. Some democrats from Queens just crossed party lines to endorse Bloomberg for mayor of NYC for instance. I believe that this will apply to the white overclass as well as countries begin to inject their own overclass as globalism increases. My wife’s roomate in college was some kind of Hindu royalty and had a gigantic entourage everywhere she went. The bin Laden’s and the Saudi Royal Family have a lot of cross cultural mixing with the American white overclass. I believe that as national boundaries erode in the coming years we will see race become less of an issue.

All of these factors will lead to the hijacking of political parties left and right. The idea of political parties seems to be breaking down completely, and I see only an increasing shift as the power structures become more dynamic. Race of course being a factor only because the classes are defined by families. It will be interesting to see what sort of power structures form as individuals start entering the global marketplace in greater numbers as internet saturation starts to achieve the critical mass globally that it reached in America nationally at the end of the 90s.

Erek

30

:confused:

:confused: Class membership and political partisan or ideological affiliation are two different things. Both parties have mass support from all classes, although the overclass predominates in leadership positions.

I doubt that . . . parties, or at least party labels, serve a valuable function from the voter’s POV. In any case, what kind of “power structure” could supplant the political party without becoming its functional equivalent?

31

BrainGlutton

I would see it being supplanted with a single party, or that it will evolve into something that may as well be a single party system, if people are switching affiliations as it becomes most convenient.

Erek

32

With no party labels, how do busy voters decide who to vote for?

33

Research?

Erek

34

If they are too busy to research who they are voting for, then they shouldn’t be voting. They can take time out of their busy schedule to google a few names and at the very least read up on their campaign websites. I did that, and I knew more about my votes than most people did. I voted across party lines as well.

Erek

35

:rolleyes: Ya wanna bring back literacy tests, too? Maybe property qualifications?

36

No, just personal responsibility.

Erek

37

Personal responsibility is relevant to personal lives. It is not relevant to voting. We allow completely irresponsible people to vote if they wish, and that’s as it should be – because they too have to live with the outcome.

38

Not almost - It did happen in the 1980s; partly as a reaction to the above, the Labour Party was steered in a rightward direction and rebranded as ‘New Labour’.

39

So people voting based upon party lines as though it was a sporting event appeals to you?

Why is it that every time you propose a certain idea, people answer it for you as though you propose there should be a policy to enact it?

Of course personal responsibility has something to do with voting. I am tired of hearing “don’t blame me I voted for the other guy” or if you didn’t vote for the other guy, quoting some pundit for his side saying where the other side is fucking them up. The two party system we have in this country is more interested about playing an adversarial relationship between one another than it is about actually fixing the problems endemic in the system. It’s a constant culture of blame used to marginalize one group or another, and it’s perpetuated by ignorant irresponsible people voting. Sure we should ALLOW everyone to vote, but we should definitely do everything we can to discourage the ignorant from voting, because all it does is cock up the system.

Anyone who thinks that their vote has any meaning and doesn’t stay engaged in the process between big games, shouldn’t vote pure and simple. It has nothing to do with public policy, it has to do with how we as individuals take RESPONSIBILITY for shaping our culture. We don’t need to enact suffrage laws to get people who don’t know what’s up to stop voting, we just need private citizens to enact campaigns countering such lunacy as Puff Daddy’s vote or die campaign. Voting isn’t an Entertainment Tonight Poll where everyone’s voice should be heard. If you can’t be bothered to google the candidates, then you shouldn’t be bothered to vote, and we shouldn’t guilt the ignorant into voting when they don’t have any clue what’s going on as it is.

It always disturbs me when people think that voting is so sacrosanct that we shouldn’t discourage people who don’t know the issue not to vote about it.

For instance:

Me: There is a new ballot up for tort reform. What do you think about Tort reform?
Average Citizen: What is tort reform?
Me: It has to do with the ability of one person to sue another. You can find a link on wikipedia.
Average Citizen: I can’t I’m watching the new Britney Spears video right now.
Me: If you don’t look it up, I’d advise you to avoid ballot number 826 at the polls.
Average Citizen: Voting is my constitutional right! You have no right to tell me how to vote!

See how that would mess up the system? An uninformed vote is an anti-vote, it cancels out the vote of an informed person that voted the other way. Encouraging the ignorant to vote only ensures the success of those that take their livings from exploiting the corruption inherent in the system.

Me personally, I oftentimes wonder why I even bother caring about whether or not the system works. I’m perfectly capable of exploiting the anarchy under which we currently live, so why should I want it to be more logical? I don’t understand what drives me to even care. The United States Government is eroding faith in it constantly. Most people I know think voting doesn’t even matter, that they don’t even have a voice. That’s because they are too busy fighting against the ignorant anti-votes for it to matter.

All I’m advocating is increasing signal by decreasing noise.

Erek