Question for the OP - how much money is there in Australian politics?
Here in the US it can cost $1 million or even more just to run for congress. The elected officials themselves arent really paid that well but make a ton of money from contributions. Often the contributors want them to vote a certain way and they often get it. Also for example, a well connected politicians can get government funded projects for their home districts.
So the money plays a huge factor.
The Balkanization is real, but there are real political reasons for it. Beginning in the 60s with the Civil Rights era and the Southern Strategy, but really exacerbating in the 70s and 80s, American politics became subsumed in the idea of ‘identity.’ It wasn’t that issues were completely unimportant, but it was really more that a party label came to represent who you were and the parties basically encouraged this division. If you are black in America as an example, you are a Democrat. Obviously, this isn’t 100% true, but it’s so true that it’s not worth discussing-the issues are unimportant, it’s simply part of being black in America. If you are a white Evangelical, you are Republican-again, the issues are unimportant, being Evangelical basically signs you up for the Republican party. If you’re atheist, you’re Democrat. If you’re a rural, blue collar male, you’re Republican. If you’re a wealthy, college educated, urban professional-Democrat. There are still groups that are unaffiliated or divided, but there aren’t many of them. So the sorting happens quite naturally. If I’m a farmer, I’m around other farmers and the people I associate most with are farmers and since farmers are Republican, then everyone I’m around is a Republican. If I’m a college professor, I mostly hang out with other college professors and since college professors are Democrats, the only people I talk to are Democrats.
What happens is that you actually end up with a class divide. It basically fleshes out like this the super rich are Republicans, the super poor are Democrats, the moderately rich are Democrats and the moderately poor are Republicans. What simplistically happened with Trump is that the moderately poor have mostly been disengaged from politics and in 2016 for a number of reasons (and I think that economics was a big part of it) they decided not to be disengaged anymore and were able to overrun the moderately wealthy by sheer numbers. What you have now is largely a class war between the moderately wealthy and moderately poor and there is a great deal of classism involved in the rhetoric and arguments.
The bottom line though is that in the US, you don’t have to talk about political parties, because we can look at your job, your race and your address and know with pretty reasonable certainty exactly what political party you’re part of.
Personally, I think that the collapse of mainline Protestantism was what destroyed the glue that kept things kinda working. It used to be that mainline Protestants wrapped up both the moderately wealthy and moderately poor into a single grouping of ‘the middle’ where they were forced to interact at least once a week and listened to the same guy up front and had to pretend to like each other and they at least ostensibly had the same ideals and that led to a moderation. The rise of Evangelicalism basically stripped off the moderately poor and the rise of ‘unaffiliated-ness’ in its various forms stripped off many of the moderately wealthy. There’s still a mainline middle, but it’s in intensive care and too busy fighting for survival to lead many crusades against polarization. It has also unfortunately done a better job of maintaining the moderately wealthy, so even it has largely shifted into the Democratic camp. Anyway, I’m digressing.
One million is chump change.
Pritzker gives campaign another $20 million, bringing him to $146.5 million in self-funding
That’s $146.5 million of his own money.
I think a lot of the party emphasis in the US is a consequence of first-past-the-post elections for every position.
So rather than build coalitions of smaller parties centered around certain interests, you end up with two parties who broadly represent the two sides of the spectrum. The Democrats are the US’s left wing, with an emphasis on more progressive policies, equality, and social justice. The Republicans are the US’s right wing, with a traditional emphasis on the status quo, pro-business policies, and a strong military.
One major sticking point between the parties that causes friction is the perceived role of the government. The Republicans tend to have the belief that it’s a necessary evil at the best of times, and that strong efforts to rein it in and prevent it from sticking its tendrils into the business of the commercial world and people’s personal lives are necessary. Democrats view the government as the single biggest agent for change- the government has the money and the legitimate power to make stuff happen. As you can imagine, these two are rarely compatible- each side sees the other as deliberately working against their agendas.
Now all that above was probably more or less true through the late 1990s. Then something weird happened to the Republican party, which AFAIK was the “Contract with America” and increased party discipline combined with (loony) far-right elements like the Tea Party taking the party by the short and curlies and taking everything to the insane extreme. Rather than seeking to limit the expansion of government and maintain the status quo, these elements actively seek to roll back the clock in a lot of ways. Combine that with the fact that most of them are fairly ignorant and wistfully reminisce about a past that either never was, or was the product of a specific time and place, and think that it was the normal state of things, rather than a historical aberration due to the US’s post WWII economic position. They literally don’t realize that no amount of political shenanigans or policy will bring that back- too many other countries can manufacture stuff of reasonable quality and cheaper than we can. Or that coal mining as a going concern has its days numbered due to environmental and economic forces, for example.
There’s also a real friction point between the Democrats and Republicans on what I’d call the battle between compassion and order/responsibility. The Democrats tend toward a compassion-driven public policy and platform- their usual MO is that when push comes to shove, compassion wins out over strict adherence to the laws or fiscal responsibility, especially on immigration or other social issues. Basically they’d rather make someone’s life better than worry about budgets or the law. A lot of the Republican types are the opposite- they don’t see undocumented immigrants who need help, they see illegal aliens who are breaking our laws and driving wages down.
I guess to me, the biggest issue is that the Republicans have let the inmates start running the asylum- the moderates and middle-right aren’t running the party; they’re typically called RINOs (“Republicans In Name Only”) because they’re not so far to the right as the others. Instead, the far, far right types are now running things. Trump is more of a symptom of that than a cause, for example.
Canada also has the first past the post elections without leading to the kind of polarization seen in the US. Of course, the Conservative party here is also a fact-free zone. One thing they did was to muzzle scientists in government who were not allowed to speak or publish without government permission when the Conservatives were in power. They also canceled the “long-form” census in which a small proportion of the respondents were asked detailed questions on things like ethnicity and language. Apparently, they just didn’t want to know those things about the citizenry. Still, they don’t routinely lie about everything and a rational discussion is still possible.
My experience traveling and living in the US is that while Dopers may be more interested in politics, we tend to be less black-and-white about it than a loooooot of the Americans who are. Which is basically what kam’s asking about, “are things really so polarized?”
Doesn’t sound much different than the US really. The Supreme Court justices are not appointed by party affiliation, and their party affiliation is not public information, unless the Justices themselves have made it so.
In Alabama we don’t register with a political party to vote either. You can join a political party if you want to, or not, whatever. You don’t even have to register with a party to vote in that party’s primary. You just have to declare which ballot you want when you walk into the polling center.
I can’t imagine most people pick friends, business acquaintances, or partners by their politlcal leanings, though of course there is always somebody.
In this case the “always somebody” is more than half the country. If you look at any of the links, Americans are increasingly sorting where they and work by political affiliation.
That’s a governor’s race though. The campaign money tracking site OpenSecrets put the cost of the average House seat at around $1.6 million in 2012, 2014 (and it appeared to be on the same track in 2016):
That’s how it works here in Texas as well; I went and voted in the Republican primary with the express intent of trying to choose the least odious Republicans (specifically my incumbent state representative Jason Villalba, instead of batshit crazy tea partier Lisa Luby Ryan), although my plan is to vote Democrat next month. I did the same thing in 2016 when Trump started to become prominent as well.
I will say that even though the SCOTUS justices aren’t officially appointed by party affiliation, it’s pretty clear that most of them were appointed to lesser Federal judiciary posts under the administrations of one party or the other. So it’s kind of a wink and a nod kind of thing that their political affiliations aren’t in play, I feel.
Nah. The right wing members of my family live in the San Francisco Bay Area, as urban as you can get and the heart of liberalism.
Anecdotal evidence doesn’t disprove a “very likely.” Just look at the voting patterns. Urban areas are overwhelmingly blue and rural areas are overwhelmingly red. And this has intensified over time.
You just disproved your point: in the heart of liberalism.
Reading the posts tells you all you need to know. The hard left demonizes those that disagree and can’t see that there are a great many out there that simply disagree with some of the left’s platform, but support other bits.
The hard right does exactly the same.
The hard ends, both left and right, scream loud and exacerbate the impression of a divide, while those more central back away from the conversation.
In my experience, as a right of center voter, those on the left more often scream at me that I’m a horrible person for disagreeing with them then defriend me, while those on the right tell me I’m wrong for disagreeing with them, then we have a beer together.
YMMV.
Yes. This is the source of the recent divisions, not all, but most. It was a miscalculation by the Clinton campaign to ignore these areas, not even visit, and then call the people there deplorable. Hopefully the lesson has been learned, but I see no indications from the Democratic party, yet.
The media also resides in the urban areas and any news story from the vast open areas is of the personal interest sort only, the so very cute stories of the hillbillies, and little about the issues faced, because they are seen to not matter. Even the very blue states have huge areas that lean red. A county by county map of voting shows this very clearly. Blue in the cities, red outside, almost everywhere.
It’s also the white-minority divide. Especially in the South.
Huh?
Also in jewish families re: Zionist / non-Zionist stance. The jewish half of my family has some members that are literally on non-speaking terms with others over this.
I have a few Republican extended-cousins that de-friended me on social media when I challenged their racist / misogynist postings and won’t talk to me in person beyond a simple hello at family gatherings.
The growth of social media has definitely helped polarize American politics a lot more than it used to be. It’s now very easy to curate your social media experience so that you spend most of your time only hearing from people who already agree with you. I suspect this is more of a problem in America than in other countries because Americans still seem to have an exceptionally large presence on the Internet. I don’t think I have any close friends on Facebook who are Aussie, but I bet you have at least some American ones.
Several people have mention racial tension as a factor in these divisions, but one that I didn’t see mentioned: over the last few years some very strident anti-white racism has started to spring up among the “social justice warrior” arm of the Democrats.
They seem to think that they are somehow making up for historical racism against nonwhites by encouraging a new form of racism against whites.
Those on the left don’t seem to take it very seriously and very rarely challenge these “fucking white men” types of comments in my observation, but I think many white voters are paying attention and resentful of this.
She was right.
They never would have voted for her anyway.