I seriously doubt any President has ever had the authority to pardon anybody convicted of a state crime.
That’s the good news. Forgot about that.
But we must remember if he gets to office, he’s planning on giving himself much more power.
Assume that the average spread of political leaning is similar to a bell curve. Most people are relatively centrist and only a few are particularly hardcore on any demagoguery. Your average person understands things like say, sometimes you need to be more strict on people and other times you need to be more accepting. Only a hardliner thinks that it’s all one way, with no nuance. For every situation, there’s only one answer to that problem.
On the Democratic side, the party is all of the people left of the middle line.
To the right of the line, you’ve got a division between the crazies and the normal reasonable people. They’ve nicely separated and identified themselves as The Crazy and The Normal.
Within a full-scale party, the crazies are the largest voice because they’re crazy folk. They don’t understand nuance and complexity. They understanding whining, threatening self-harm, crying for compassion, and so on. They’re all in on raising a ruckus and trying to get their one-view-of-the-world-way.
The squeaky wheel gets the grease.
In a full-spectrum party, even though the crazies are a minority, they still end up getting their way more often then not, throw a wrench into the system on anything not “pure” enough, and try to push short-sighted, non-realistic policy that will end up getting rolled back the next time the other team gets into power. They don’t accomplish anything but pyrrhic victories.
A party of normal people is going to put out long-lasting, reasoned, tempered, practical legislation that everyone but a crazy person will realize is what’s needed.
Universal health care, infrastructure, etc. are all legislation that can be passed and continue to exist if you could ever get the crazies out of the equation and, instead, put normal people in on both sides. Normal people don’t get lost in party rivalry and trying to roll things back just to spite their own face. Normal people check the numbers and, if the numbers look better since the policy passed, then they shrug and concern themselves with other things.
So which are you? Are you really closer to the crazies of your own party? Are you in the minority? Or are you in the big group of normal people who’d really rather just do things properly? Because you know where to go to be certain that, that’s the only type of person to be found.
If you buy into the notion that there is a reasonable opposition party on the Right within which there are just a few nutjobs skewing to the extreme, I might agree with you. But that’s a pleasant fiction – one in which I note you often engage, against all actual evidence to the contrary.
Get back to me if/when Republicans are ever restored to a reasonable party that believes in small ‘D’ democracy, and we’ll have a meaningful discussion on this point.
That may have been a reasonable assumption at one time, but definitely not since 2016. The rise of tribalism in the electorate has converted the curve to bimodal. Pretending this hasn’t happened will make any political predictions worthless.
Also for any reasonable person - the democratic party is right there. They’re both more moderate on policy and they don’t believe in overthrowing our system of government.
One of the biggest surprises with Trump is how few people switched to democratic candidates like Biden and H.C. who obviously center-right voters are going to disagree with on a lot but clearly aren’t insane like Trump.
- Then there is no “No Labels” party since, as you say, everyone is inextricably bound to their party of birth. Or, does that not match the reality that we can observe?
- But, yes, hive mind mentality pushed by the extremists does tend to move people out of the middle and probably towards a somewhat more bi-modal system. But, likewise, I’ve seen an argument that we should let Russia have Ukraine because, after all, they’re just going to win in the end. I’m not, personally, big on the idea that we should let the bad guys win because they’ve got an advertising agency out telling people that they’ll win in the long run. Let’s say that “people” will lose to the extremists. That’s people. You’re “you”. Are you really arguing that you’d rather be part of “people”?
I didn’t say everyone. Bimodal means most people are in one camp or the other, not 100% of everyone. And I never said anything about people being tied to “their party of birth”. Assuming that phrase has any kind of real meaning, since everyone is free to choose to belong or not belong to any party they want.
As far as the No Labels being a party, they’re still nascent since they haven’t participated in any election yet. And I have doubts about them even existing as a party long term, where long term means “past the 2024 election”. But all that’s irrelevant to your comment.
“No Labels” is such a “think of it in five minutes” name that I hope some PR firm walked away with a huge chunk of Republican moola.
Huh, Joe Lieberman is part of No Labels as well. They’re really collecting a motley crew.
The original “GOP Label Filed Off” name was rejected as too on-the-nose.
It’s like a political version of Ocean’s Eleven.
Bi-modal means that there are two peaks not one. Those peaks can be very near to the middle and probably are.
But, minus the crazy folk, it would be a bell curve and it should be.
Unless you can find some argument that the bi-modal system is better then I don’t see the point of raising it as a justification against shutting that system down.
If there’s a system of apartheid, for example, that is dominating the country then it’s probably going to win and continue next year. It has until today and that’s pretty good evidence that it will continue. But should you be on the side of that continuance? Let’s imagine that there’s no downside to opposing it. You’re not going to go to jail. You can still vote for whoever you want in 12 months. All you have to do is say, “I’m going to support the people who oppose a flawed system. I’m going to ask others to do the same and, if, in 12 months we take a head count and we’re in the majority then we’re going to take this ballgame into the election.”
There’s zero negative repercussions. All you have to do is say, honestly, what the best way is to have our country become a better place: Behave like rational, reasonable human beings and work shit out like adults, not spoilt children.
What is the downside to this?
Obviously the downside of your plan is if the 45% that vote for maga republicans actually are the crazies, then convincing everyone else that the remaining choices are the sane moderate party and the crazy democratic party would split the 55% who don’t want to let maga Republicans take over.
Let’s say that I said, “Trump’s legal problem is that he invented the false electors scheme. His talking about the riot and his first amendment rights, that’s just a distraction.”
And then you reply back, “First amendment rights don’t aren’t a defense because of A,B, and C and you can say otherwise all you want and you’re not going to convince me.”
If you’re not going to be honest about what I said and respond to what I said then what response do you really want me to give you?
I’m very clearly and unambiguously saying, “Let’s get a headcount and then decide whether we’re factually and provably doomed before the election period and then decide which direction to go.” Again, we’re talking about the party of adults. Adults can change course because we’re, by definition, not the loons who don’t believe logical courses of action.
Are you so afraid of just getting a headcount? We do live in a country with polling. We don’t have to vote to know how numerous we are. We simply have to say what we want when someone asks. Be honest. That is all that I am asking.
I disagree. Trump brought a whole bunch of people to the Republican Party who generally didn’t vote or only voted occasionally previously. And that bunch, the MAGAts, as they’re often called around here, were generally much more radical than the typical Republican voter. That moved the rightwing peak much further to the right and gave us the bimodal paradigm we have now. Once Trump is no longer on the ballot, many will probably go back to not voting.
BTW, Trump also brought out an even bigger group of non-voters in 2020 who were mainly there to vote against him. Which resulted in the largest number of voters in US history.
Minus the crazy folk, it would be the current Democratic party.
The role that this party is claiming to play is the role that the Democrats are already playing. We don’t need another party to do the same thing as the Democrats are already doing.
It’s OK. You’re allowed to start calling yourself a Democrat. You don’t have to stay in the same party you were born into.
I very much support systems like ranked choice or proportional representation where getting a headcount of the ideological groups won’t just make my side lose the election but we don’t have those systems so it’s a moot point
Until we institute instant runoffs in the general election I will give no attention (or vote) to a 3rd party candidate,
Then don’t vote for people who won’t support instant runoff.