It's going to get a lot worse before it gets better

Politics & Elections
101

These people are centrist and/or independent. They are not going to vote for anything too far to the right or left. With the Republicans having a very narrow majority you need their votes. I don’t think this says anything about anyone’s leadership.

As above, the only thing that’s changed is that in a less polarized situation the people at the extremes would be more willing to say to themselves “hey, I want something more extreme but I recognize that there aren’t enough votes to get that, so I’ll settle for something more moderate as better than nothing”. Now, you have the more extreme people going for broke.

You see it on both sides of the aisle. The Democrats got one major piece of liberal legislation passed under Obama, and that was only because they had huge majorities at the time.

102

I don’t know about sailing through, but I think they’d be doing better. Maybe?

A standard Republican wouldn’t have sub-40% approval ratings in a booming economy, wouldn’t have the specter of Russia hanging over him, and would have probably been able to help, rather than hinder the legislative process.

On the other hand, all their healthcare bills were deeply unpopular, so it’s not clear to me that passing one of those would actually have been helpful, electorally.

And it’s too early to say whether the tax bill will get there. I’m inclined to think that it will in some form. But if it doesn’t, well. If the Republican party is unable to pass a big tax cut for billionaires, that’s when you should really worry about their cohesiveness.

103

The problem with a big tent become obvious once you let everybody who’s inside actually have a voice.

Then it starts to look a lot more like a rugby scrum. IOW lots of sweat and grunting but very little motion. Add one insane cheerleader in the White House and a different but equally insane set of cheerleaders over at Faux, et al, and it makes for must-see TV.

104

There were always problems with maverick congresspersons on both sides, but the centers held. Now there is no center. The leaderships of both parties cobbled together something that both could live with. McConnell decided to destroy that tradition.

105

I don’t see how. It would be the same deeply unpopular bills with the same holdouts. Trump is not the negotiator he made himself out to be but nobody could sell the shit the GOP is trying to pass. They have problems passing legislation because their policies are absolute shit not because the president is a buffoon.

106

I disagree. They were just one vote shy several times with healthcare, and Trump appeared to be actively sabotaging the whole process. With an actual statesman at the helm, or even someone who understands what the policy compromises to be made are, could they have gotten that one more vote?

Well, yes, but shitty policies have become law plenty of times in the past, sometimes because they were shepherded by competent politicians.

Like I said, I don’t think that their laws would be sailing through, but would a non-moron in the Presidency have been enough to nudge them over the finish line? I think it might have.

107

Why would a non moron be championing the healthcare bill though? that was a lose/lose situation and you could absolutely say that the bill not passing was the least harmful result for the GOP.

108

There are plenty from all sides of the political spectrum who wish to fit the Constitution to their paradigm. Don’t harp on the right while ignoring the left.

It still boils down to large groups not singing from the same sheet of ideological music. In history we know this often results in war. But there are other peaceful solutions like secession and partition. And before the civil war is brought up, just because the U.S. handled the last secession by war doesn’t mean they all have to be handled that way.

109

The respective threats to the constituion of the dems and repubs are not comparable. You can’t boil down the situation if you cannot recognize that in 2017.

110

Sounds subjective, which is a natural result of diversity. Nothing wrong with that.

But maybe diverse people of like mind should have their safe spaces. Peaceful secession and partition can do that.

I don’t have a problem with YesCalfornia.org

111

Given that partitioning the USA is not going to happen, perhaps we should be working on how to converge our attitudes and live together, rather than pinning our hopes on a relief valve that will never be triggerable, much less triggered.

112

Sounds conformist. But it does work when the state is willing to deal out punishment for violations of the ‘culture’. The government of China doesn’t like diversity either.

113

Not really. Nice job of black and white thinking though. You will learn you will do much better here if you can construct a post that’s more than a tit for tat sentence.

As you point out, there is an upper limit to how much diversity of opinion can live under one roof happily. Given that we cannot split, we therefore must live together.

So at the limit we can either be diverse enough so everybody is unhappy, or our more extreme members can realize they’re being played and return to more typical ideas of US civilizational values.

Or we can stay just as we are, with tolerable but less than ideal levels of total unhappiness.
My point simply is it does no good to promote false solutions. Nor is it helpful to cheerlead for greater extremism as leading to a “successful” split when there will can never be a split, successful or otherwise. That’s actually choosing to cheerlead your followers off a cliff. Or at least into a dead end.

Which doesn’t help them and certainly doesn’t help the rest of us that have to watch the silliness.

114

…And who will clean up the mess that gets left behind.

115

I don’t consider this a given.

The great weight of history destroys this false premise.

Nations have formed, separated, merged and, disappeared all throughout history.
My apologies, but I just don’t have the hubris to declare the U.S. an ‘eternal’ state.

116

OK. Not eternal. But not splitting up during your or my lifetime.

I’ll also point out that the more complex the economy and the government the harder splitting is. Look at all the challenges the Brits are dealing with in Brexit and that’s a teensy baby step compared to one or more states seceding from the USA.

The fact lots of smaller simpler countries have in centuries past split & recombined says increasingly little about the USA as we drive ever further into the 21st Century. Certainly recent history has shown it’s easier to split an artificial temporary confection like the former Czechoslovakia than a more deeply mixed place like Iraq. Despite the fact Iraq itself is a pretty artificial construct; just one with a hundred more years of existence than the Czechoslovaks had.

Despite all the noise about red states and blue states, the USA is much more purple once you actually look at the detailed data not the high level gloss. It’s only when you declare that a 51/49 state is all one color that we see the apparent unanimity. That unanimity is of course an illusion.

To be sure, violence can create facts on the ground more quickly than can negotiations. But also at much greater cost to the survivors both in terms of economics and of politics. To say nothing of the costs to the non-survivors. I would hope there are no Americans deluding themselves that guerilla warfare on our land would work even half as well in the 21st Century as it did in the 19th.

117

I can think of a few things our current administration could do to hasten the demise of the US. In our lifetime too.

118

Any claims of partitioning the United States along “red/blue” lines are a fantasy, just on simple geography.

Look at the various maps on this page. Starting with this one, any proposed borders are already pretty complex, with a large “red” area which is contiguous, but nonetheless has a pretty complicated border with the “blue” areas, which exist as a series of enclaves. Imagine trying to “build walls” between all of those areas.

And, of course, a number of the 2016 “red” states were blue as recently as 2012–that’s how Trump won, by breaching the “blue wall”. And, although almost all U.S. states allocate their electoral votes by “winner-take-all”, many states–include states that were crucial to Trump’s victory–were won by very narrow margins.

We can start to see this better by looking at a map of red and blue counties, rather than states. Ah-ha! Why, Trump carried practically the whole country, except for just a few scattered enclaves of liberal snowflakes! Heck, they can all just move to [del]Russia[/del] uh, Sweden.

But of course many of those blue areas, being cities, have way more actual people than a lot of those vast empty red spaces. If you tried to partition the country that way, not only would the mostly urban blue areas be reduced to isolated enclaves, but those rural red areas would be cut off from the places that form the natural markets for their agricultural or mining products; and that (naturally enough) form the nodes of their communications and transportation networks.

We can also see how unworkable such a partition would be by looking at a county-level “cartogram”, in which the sizes and shapes of the areas are distorted to give an idea of their relative populations. Now, the red counties are looking rather squeezed in many places, and there are some quite large “blue blobs”. Finally, although we talk about a candidate “winning” a county, showing counties as “winner take all” isn’t necessary any more accurate than showing states that way. Hence the last map, combined a county-level cartogram with different shades of red, purple, and blue: Some bright red strings (which in the real world may be quite large, but also mostly pretty empty), some pretty large and vividly blue big cities, and a whole lot of reddish-purple, purplish-red, purplish-blue, and bluish-purple. How the hell are we going to partition that?

119

Well, yes. Starting a war that causes some other country to do the USA great and possibly fatal damage is always possible. But it’s pretty clear that GulfTiger isn’t hinting and hoping about that.

Thank you for taking the time to dig up the cites to prove the ideas I was generally speaking of.

The various echo chambers might wish to secede from each other. The various physical neighborhoods? Fugeddaboudit. The economy? It is to laugh.

120

Isn’t the problem with getting stuff through the Senate that, with rare exceptions like this tax bill, because of the filibuster, you need 60 votes, and the minority party will filibuster everything? So even if you do get your whole caucus on board, your legislative agenda is still going to die?