Sounds a lot like China. Plus bio weapons.
First, you’re welcome. Second, yes, “extreme conservative”. The fact that you reject some of the lunatic Republican positions on social policy, masking, vaccines, etc. doesn’t change the fact that you’re extreme on economic policy at the very least.
I don’t want to digress here on the very extensive discussion already going on in the other thread about you, but despite your denials you give the impression of a very strong believer in the minimum possible taxes and blind faith in free enterprise to solve all our problems and enable all our progress with no need for any regulation. One gets the impression that we’d be living in a perfect Utopia if only free enterprise was allowed completely free reign and government were to just shut up and go away.
Let me just cite one example. The other thread digressed into a considerable discussion about the cost and accessibility of encyclopedias back in the day, and the wonders of the internet in making vast amounts of knowledge available to virtually everyone today. But the internet originated as a government-funded project, initially for military purposes, and later for academic purposes. Were it not for taxpayer money and government research funding, we’d likely have something very different today, and probably much more oriented to corporate profit than to public good.
Furthermore, the recognition that the internet should become a public resource, and much of the effort to make it so, came from the liberal side of the government, specifically Al Gore. And the Republican contribution? Fierce opposition to net neutrality laws, fueled by the corporate interests that finance Republican politicians’ campaigns, because those corporate interests are on an endless quest to monetize the internet as much as possible, and to hell with the public interest, with fairness, and with equal access. Additionally, we’ve had broadband ISPs try to throttle certain types of traffic to improve apparent bandwidth without actually spending any money to actually upgrade their systems, and for the same reason try to impose extremely restrictive monthly data caps, until regulatory agencies told them to stop. Free enterprise at its best – just the kind you seem to fully endorse.
Just one example from among tens of thousands of conservative policy failures.
Features, not failures.
This is the oldest stalest cracker in the barrel.
You vote R but this is not the reason.
Hm. So weirdly specific and uniform among your kind.
Dissolve the Senate. That’s as close to the galactic empire as I want to get. Keep the House, make the terms longer (maybe 4 years, and hold a single national election every 4 years along with that, the whole House and the Presidency all up for grabs at the same time), and make representation strictly in proportion to population. Make it easier for people to participate in elections, and make it so that each individual’s vote counts the same. Abolishing the electoral college would be preferred, but of a lesser priority with electors being proportioned (like the House, and absent a Senate) to each state’s population size.
Because “the people”, for all their flaws, didn’t elect Trump—they didn’t even elect Bush in 2000. The electoral college did (sort of, maybe, with some help from a Republican Secretary of State in FL and the Supreme Court in 2000).
So, frankly, I think we’d do just fine with representative democracy in America. If only we had a truly representative democracy. Then maybe we could get the federal government to pass legislation swatting down these “totally not racist” bills looking to suppress votes being passed by Republican legislatures that have succeeded in holding onto power even as their states go purple and blue through gerrymandering. Which a functional Congress, acting on majority vote alone, might have something to say about as well.
All of this would be awesome. It’s appalling that we still don’t have equal representation.
But that’s the reality: we don’t have a representative democracy, and we’re probably not going to have one.
I know people are assuming that we’re just going through a phase, but we’re about to encounter the very kinds of forces that have ended nation-states and civilizations: sudden, extreme shifts in climate, in tandem with an aging economic and political system that doesn’t enable the kinds of changes we need in order to adapt to the fast-changing situation.
Why did Western Rome collapse? Centuries of corruption, climate change, and increasing challenges to its hegemony.
These forces also contributed to the Thirty Years War, which devastated Europe and pretty much spelled the beginning of Spain’s decline as a global power.
Hypothetically, I wouldn’t necessarily have a problem with leaning on the generals during a transitional period in which we scrap the current constitution in favor of drafting a new one. Obviously easier said than done.
Eh, I certainly don’t think we’re going through a phase. Unless that phase has been going on for 200+ years. Because it’s not like there was some golden time in this nation’s past where we had a more representative democracy. I mean, you can rule out most of the first hundred years by virtue of slavery alone, and then wipe out the next hundred thanks to de jure racial discrimination. And that’s not even touching on property restrictions in voting, gender discrimination, state legislatures selecting Senators, etc., etc.
I mean, for it to be a “phase” rather than the norm, there’d have to have been other, presumably less bad, phases, right?
It’s frustrating (at best) because I do feel like we were climbing up in a positive direction in terms of equality and civil rights, and now we’ve slid back down to, what, the 40’s? With a chance of incoming authoritarianism, of course.
You give Reagan (and Bush I and Bush II) too much credit. If it’s a backslide, it’s to the 80s at worst. Perhaps even just to the twenty-aughts.
We have two movements occurring at the same time: a revolution and a counter-revolution. The revolution is, exactly as you suggest, a reformation that is pro civil rights and equality. This is a demographically diverse, largely urban and even suburban movement. OTOH, we have a counter revolution, one that is experiencing perceived relative dislocation and deprivation. These two visions of America’s future – liberal, inclusive, pluralistic democracy on one hand and ethno-nationalist illiberal democracy on the other – are competing against each other. They’re in a death struggle. The problem is, not enough liberal democrats realize it. But the illiberal democrats absolutely do, and they view the next 1-4 years as their last opportunity to determine their own fate.
1491, maybe?
We have never been a fully egalitarian society, and maybe never will be. The question, however, is are we going up or down that scale.
A good argument could be made that over the last several decades, we have made a significant amount of progress in that regard. By the same argument, we can see that we’ve lost considerable ground over the last few years and stand to lose much more in the future.
And yes, a substantial part of that is because of unequal representation, allowing an ever shrinking political minority to gain in political power. As a group loses followers, the more radical gain more influence in that group. The “reasonable” conservatives have already left the party, been forced out, or been marginalized as RINO’s.
In a truly reprehensive democracy, such a party would also lose power over the government, and either crumble away, or change its policies to be more in line with what people want. In our system, the Republicans don’t need to do that, and can hold onto power through gamesmanship and gaslighting, rather than good governorship.
The constitution has this baked in. The Senate was designed specifically to ensure that the minority would have power over the majority. It cannot be fixed so long as the current constitution is in play. Short of revolution, civil war, or a fall of civilization, in increasing order of probability, that will never change.
I think that this is a big reason why people want to go to the Moon or to Mars. It’s not what is there, but what is not there. There is no legacy that we all have to hold to, no suicide pact we need to subscribe to. A new land, with new governorship could avoid the mistakes our founding fathers made.
I was thinking of the Jim Crow laws. Maybe we’re back to the '50s?
This is good point. There are a number of people out there who see their quality of life declining, the future of their children to more bleak than that of their own.
But, they blame the wrong people for their coal mining jobs disappearing, or their factory jobs going away. The reason for this is not due to economic policy of either party, but due to technological progress which makes everyone’s life, in the aggregate, better. The progressive movement accepts these changes, and works to adapt society to them. The party of regressive claims that accepting these changes is implementing them, and focuses the ire of their followers on those who actually want to help them.
Remember the soundbite of Clinton saying that we were going to lose a lot of coal mining jobs? That wasn’t her saying that that would be due to policies she would implement, it wasn’t because she disliked coal miners or coal mining, it was an acceptance of the reality of the situation, and was followed by proposed solutions. But that soundbite got played over and over to piss off the base, to set the blame on her, rather than on their own inability to accept change and adapt.
And I still think you’re giving Reagan and the like too much credit if you think we’re dialing all the way back to Jim Crow. If there’s something you think is reemerging now, that you think ceased to exist circa 1964, I suspect you are mistaken. I mean, “totally not racist” laws that happened to make it harder for minorities to vote, for instance, never really went away. The one thing that I see getting progressively worse, in new and horrifying ways, is gun control (or the absence of it).
ETA:
And this, as a jumping off point, is where I might be willing to give a fair hearing to a thread about how this message board does NOT need “liberals.” Because as it happens, the democratic party is undergoing its own inner strife (has been) between “moderates” (neoliberals) and its more progressive members. The progressive movement does indeed work to adapt society to help solve the problems facing actual people. The rest of the party is, unfortunately, too much like the conservatives, too eager to insist that “more capitalism!” is the answer to all our ills.
I dunno, I’d say that the moderates are the conservatives that are needed to balance the progressives.
The Conservatives are crazy selfish fucks who would rather see others suffer than have everyone prosper.
But, not all progressive ideas are good ideas, and often do need to be tempered by a dose of reality. I’d probably be on the conservative side of many of these debates were it not for the conservative currently side being full of a bunch of disingenuous pieces of shit that I wish to not associate with.
As I said upthread, I’d much rather have a debate about how to implement a UHC or social safety net than debate about whether or not we should even do this. I’d almost certainly differ in my position with you on how to implement some of these ideas, and that, I think, would be a valuable debate, where we can find a workable compromise.
But it’s always derailed by shitheads that don’t even want the debate to occur in the first place. My ideal would be for the Republican party to implode, and for the Democratic party to split into a progressive and moderate faction, and move forward in a considered fashion, but actually move forward, rather than be held and even dragged back by the right wing reactionaries who call themselves conservative.
That would be an interesting and productive discussion, too - but as you say, there’d be people out there who are all “No, let the peasants starve to death and die of easily treatable diseases because muh taxes shouldn’t be used to help the poors”.
I am 100% in favour of my taxes being spent on universal healthcare so anyone - be they homeless druggie or rich captain of industry - has access to healthcare if they need it. I genuinely do not care at all why those people are there - whether it’s because they made bad choices and got addicted to drugs, whether it’s because they didn’t do a jot of exercise for 20 years and turned into Jabba The Hutt, whether they smoked a packet of cigarettes every day for 30 years, or whether they just got unlucky and got hit by a car crossing the street. If you need healthcare for any reason, it should be available free (although rich people should be encouraged to use a private system) and I am more than happy to see my tax money spent on making that a reality.
On one hand, I don’t believe in absolute equality. I believe that every society has elites, and I have no problem with that. The problem comes when the elites have all of the benefits of society’s advancements while others have uneven access to those benefits. Not everyone is entitled to a 4000-ft house but everyone’s entitled to basic, safe, comfortable abodes. Not everyone is entitled to plastic surgery but everyone’s entitled to treatment of potentially serious conditions at costs that don’t threaten their financial futures.
This sentence assumes facts not in evidence.
Sorry.
The states aren’t going to agree to that and that’s necessary.