Hypothetical: Trump loses in the 2020 election to the candidate of your choice, by a decent enough margin. He goes quietly into the night or has a stroke or whatever: as of January 2021, Trump is no longer a player on the American stage. The Dems manage to take both houses of Congress by whatever miracles necessary.
This sort of presumes you don’t support the R position, but I’m always happy to hear from people that do. If you want to imagine a non-Trump R future, by all means post it. The main thing is to discuss the practical path to making America functional again.
What does it take to reconcile? With each other (D/R polarization) and with the world (our relationship with the allies)? Will we get back to the old way of governing by compromise and then consensus, or is McConnellism the new normal?
I ask because a lot of people seem to think the country will magically reset if Trump is defeated, but I can’t get past the way we’ve neglected important cabinet positions and the civil service in general; the 60 million people who voted for him the first time; the really ugly racism we’ve seen on a large scale; the way we’ve pissed off our allies; the backsliding on our already pitiful efforts to mitigate environmental damage and climate change. My feeling is that nobody is politically courageous enough to lead, no one willing to do the work necessary to repair the damage, and there is an incessant demand for easy answers and entertainment among the public, and no appetite for even short-term sacrifices.
I’ve been living outside the US for 10 years, and even though I visit frequently and read US media, I don’t think I really understand what it’s like in America these days. What’s the way forward, following your best-case election scenario?
[ul]
[li]Pardon Edward Snowden, apologize to him and thank him on behalf of the American people.[/li][li]Make it harder for the US Gov to abuse the espionage act against whistleblowers[/li][li]Transition into a mixed healthcare system[/li][li]Create a pathway to citizenship for existing illegal immigrants[/li][li]Stop violating the constitution and human rights laws by punishing asylum seekers[/li][li]Join back into the Iran Nuclear Deal[/li][li]Join back into Paris Agreement[/li][li]Decrease military industrial complex funding and offset the cost of existing or new social programs[/li][li]Expand social security, combine the two trusts, change from CPI-W to CPI-E, and add an additional tax on people making 250k+, and tax capital gains and dividends as income over 250k (basically just pass Bernies SS expansion bill) [/li][li]Force background checks on firearms sells, and close the gunshow loophole[/li][li]Cut foreign military aid to israel’s right winged extremist regime.[/li][li]Pull out of any deals we have with Saudi Arabians that may in anyway be helping them genocide yemen.[/li][li]Disband the war on drugs, reduce/remove mandatory sentences, and drop all drug possession charges to misdemeanors.[/li][li]Release everyone sitting in jail for non-violent drug charges[/li][li]Legalize marijuana, mushrooms, and make Heroin legal for medical use (to weed addicts off, like they did in switzerland where it proved effective) [/li][li]Sue the living fuck out of pharma companies that pushed far too many opioids onto small communities, and crack down on Doctors over prescribing pain killers. [/li][/ul]
Just some things I thought of off the top of my head.
Edit: Also redo everything Trump undid, mainly in regards to EPA, environmental policies and regulations, etc… I would pass 3 regulations for every deregulation trump did. And I’d make sure they all target the rich.
You’re right that Trump is a symptom–though one that has become a malignant tumor on its own. The first step after Trump is to disabuse ourselves of this bullshit myth that the nation is “deeply divided.” That’s the narrative which the Republican Party hoisted on large swaths of the nation because it was the only way they could survive. This contrived narrative has served them well–and it has especially served Trump. It doesn’t help that the media keep mindlessly repeating it over and over again, until it has become a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Barack Obama, is it likely that those things would actually happen even under a D president and D congress? I think signing up for the Paris Agreement would be huge, but I don’t see any appetite among the Dems to do so, nor to change our relationships with the Middle East players. Maybe Iran, but they have to be willing to go back and I’m not sure they are.
I guess what I’m asking about is a realistic path given an unrealistic election result. I’m glad to hear that the polarization is exaggerated.
Imo centrists will be forced to realign themselves with the left, or will be voted out. At the moment centrists in the democratic party are essentially watered down GOP members. The fact we have Democrats voting 70% of the time with Trump and the GOP is just astonishing, and if theres one realistic path we could take that is voting them out.
We are living in a fork in the timeline that occurred on April 15, 1865. If we want a stable, multiracial democracy, then we have to make it back to the other timeline.
What does that mean as a practical matter? It means making sure every adult citizen can vote (looking at you, Florida). It means repairing once and for all the original sins of slavery, and if we cannot, then doing everything we can to shape our polity so it does not discriminate on the basis of household wealth. It means abolishing or minimizing antiquated institutions designed to protect agrarian interests, like the Senate. It means abandoning colonialism—including among other things making Puerto Rico a state. It means taking those actions necessary to ensure that the sons of the confederacy never again attack democracy to win their way to power.
The Cold War and the rise of Saudi Arabia have been a long diversion from 1945 to present. But the underlying current is the failure of Reconstruction. Time to set it right.
I’m not sure the US still has any allies. I think you have treaties with other nations, but I’m not convinced we’re still your allies, in light of the US’s clear policy of disfavouring democratic countries and improving relations with autocrats and dictators.
The United States formally declared Canada to be a threat to the national security of the United States. After you did that, how can you expect us to be your ally?
At best, we have treaty relations with you, which the US could unilaterally break off at any time.
From a practical standpoint, most of Trump’s big moves are executive orders. A new president can undo those by 12:30 on 1/20/21 with subsequent executive orders. Such bothers me at a ‘good governance’ level but there we go.
How do we actually fix things? Stop aiming at employment by sucking up to corporations and put in place things that relieve individual anxiety. Use the Affordable Care Act as an example. After being quite unpopular, it’s not consistently over 50% approval and the trend is strong. Why? Because it relieved anxiety on the part of some large subset of voters.
Try to repeat those things for people. Make them less concerned that they’re not cared for and considered disposable by their government. Ease healthcare anxiety. Ease housing anxiety. Ease debt anxiety. Once those things are in place defend them for 10 years or so to allow public opinion to get used to them and watch things settle in.
Formally, yes, nothing has changed. But there’s nobody who still trusts the US *electorate *not to do something bonecrushingly stupid and hateful on Election Day, and throw generations of world-building away. When Trump is gone, the Deplorables will remain.
Countries never really trust one another. Britain’s electorate is providing the world with a remarkable clown show right now, and I used to assume they were the most sober and boring electorate in the world.
In some ways, what’s happening to Britain is even more shocking than the slow-motion deterioration of American politics. The collapse of Britain’s political mainstream has been breathtakingly sudden, or at least it has seemed that way from here. Maybe we weren’t paying attention.
The only thing to do is to give parties back their power. Primaries makes it so the most extreme members of the party choose the candidates. This means candidates have to be extreme and have to avoid compromise that anger the extremists.
Only 51% voted for Brexit (and a much smaller one for UKIP), and only a minority voted for Trump. The ignorant minorities were always there (even in Canada, btw) and we always knew it, but we just didn’t recognize their size and perniciousness until they reached the top. We assumed that ignorance-fighting is one way, and that they’d gradually recede in strength as they came to realize their former error. I *think *we know better now, but maybe we don’t yet.
At least we’ve stopped hearing how it was “tyranny” any time Obama issued one. Or have we?
The damage this Resident has done has been widespread, certainly, and the responsible-image problem will be long lasting - but the actual damage has not really been all that deep or hard to reverse, even though some desperate families may never be reunited. Civilization, aka The Deep State, has so far kept him mostly under control. I’ll take that back if he starts a war with Iran, of course, as he already has nearly done.
The greater problem has been the Senate, where McConnell is, like Trump, more a symptom of the party’s rot than a cause of it. If the body stays under Reflexive Regressive control, without even residual recognition of its proper role in our system anymore, it will continue to hold us back even more strongly than under Obama or Clinton.
My solution is the exact opposite: Take as much power as possible away from the parties. The vast majority of the problems we’re seeing arise from the Republicans deliberately using their control over things like determining electoral districts to enhance their power at the expense of the Democrats.
It’s beyond ridiculous that the US allows partisan political committees to determine the fundamental rules of their own elections. At every level of government that the Dems can take control from the Reps, they must bite the bullet and re-write the rules to eliminate this sort of thing, and establish objective rules for how things should run. Eventually culminating in a Constitutional amendment enshrining this for all time*.
This will almost certainly take a couple of decades to do, but it has to be done.
The first thing, obviously, would be to identify what exactly HE broke. There’s a fair bit of stuff out there that predated him, or even Obama or Bush II that people are wanting to change.
The second thing would be to prioritize them.
The third would be to actually follow through on legislation/executive orders to actually accomplish them.
The problem with this idea is that currently Republicans control the Presidency and the Senate which are both immune to gerrymandering and the Democrats control the House which is where all the gerrymandering occurs at the federal level.