Bear in mind that only a mere two years after Bush left office, Republicans gained 63 House seats in the 2010 midterms; the largest-ever gain of House seats in electoral history. Plus a gain of six Senate seats. And all it took was Obama and healthcare reform.
So I wouldn’t put too much faith in the notion that having Trump stay in power will destroy the Republican Party.
Bolding mine.
It’s not accurate to say the **only **reasons for the big swing were Obama and Obamacare. Lots of those seats were traditionally GOP-held seats that swung blue in the shock of the 2008 economic collapse, then reverted red two years later.
But you are right that GOP voters are pretty forgiving when their party screws them over. Just two years after GWB steered the ship into the rocks, they were right back in the fold.
I would love to return to a world in which I felt as though criticizing progressives was worth my time, but the fact is that the government and society are mostly influenced by the political right wing, which barely veils its authoritarian and antidemocratic tendencies at this point. Democrats have their problems, but the main one I see is that they’re losing elections. That bothers me. It bothers me that Democrats haven’t figured out how to connect with more Americans, but on the other hand, it troubles me more than more Americans haven’t figured out that unless you’re a theocrat or wealthy, the Democratic party is the party that is most likely protecting your well being, regardless of what you think to the contrary.
It’s not just the republicans who were to blame; it was independents who bought into the whole trope about Obama being a “socialist”.
What has worried me all along, and maybe the reason I am chicken little, is that American voters (we as a country) are just idiots. I’m sorry, but I just don’t know any other way to put it.
Two years into a recession that was obviously caused by corporate greed, and American voters essentially vote AGAINST healthcare reform and an AGAINST economic stimulus – because apparently debt is only a problem when you have a black guy running it up.
We keep voting for stupid, stupid people for stupid, stupid reasons, and we vote the smart ones off the island. I don’t just blame our education system either. We have Google - we have access to more information in a few minutes than the average human who has ever walked the earth has had access to in the average lifetime - maybe 20 lifetimes. A little bit of curiosity wouldn’t hurt. We deserve Trump, and we deserve all the shit he is going to do to this country. Not all of us individually, but collectively, hell yeah we do.
The “Information Highway” turns out to be a bunch of cul-de-sacs as it applies to political information.
A hundred years ago, junkies of Hearst newspapers would sit elbow-to-elbow with readers of Pulitzer newspapers, and there could be common agreement about basic facts.
Now we live in bubbles. We hear mainstream media talk of how damaging the Mueller Report is to Trump, while 83% of Fox Potatoes think it exonerates him. Bad actors like the Kremlin or the GOP can poison the Information Highway with lies. Google and social media can be hindrance rather than help: Type “Tell me about Elizabeth Warren” and your click-history may be examined before doing the search: Google wants to improve its ad revenue by feeding you the stories it thinks you want to click on.
Again, average IQ is 100. Take an IQ test and see how you do. Now think if you score a 115 or above you are in the top 15%. If you score a 130 you are in the top 2%. Now I am not sure what your IQ is but it’s probably at least 115. That means 85% of the population can’t think as well as you. But they can all vote.
Now you should begin to realize why talking smart and nuanced is not necessarily a winning strategy in a democracy. Appealing to emotion works. Communication that is simpler can be very effective. No one is reading a thesis or books in order to choose a candidate. I shouldn’t say no one. However, whatever the number is, it’s not large.
Well by that mark Pete Buttigieg will win in 2020 because being LGBT is more okay today than it was in 2016 and earlier. And affixing the “queer” label is what the hip kids do these days to be “coo” with the cool cats on the block. I’d argue there’s more LGBT and queer or questioning (don’t make me simplify this as I know next to nothing about gays or whatever) than black people or other ethnic and racial minorities combined. And those who are non-heterosexual and of a minority, be it ethnic or racial, will likely vote for an ally over an old man with a closet gay VP who’d probably burn a gay person if the law allowed him to.
People don’t vote for Trump because they’re stupid. I think they do it to see chaos that injures someone else more than them. Rural revenge. If it goes downhill they are better off relatively. It’s the only play they think they have. And if there is a fascist in the race, it will be a dog whistle to evey one of them. They all will be looking to the same solution, and the more they look, and find each other, the more electoral success that fascist with all those eyeballs will have.
We need electoral college, and gerrymander reform, and the census must be protected from Republican abuses.
Literacy tests for being able to vote worked out well (:rolleyes:). What’s the alternative to letting stupid people have a vote?
U.S.A. muddled through for almost two centuries with no President as grotesque as Trump. We need to combat the severity of the lying we see today, and the unprecedented belief in even the craziest of the lies.
No, I have no simple proposal on how to achieve that.
Some fellow Democrats on Facebook are just as screaming, teeth spitting aggressive as Trump supporters. I fear that this hate of the other side will become the political way in the United States.
If this “mean people” method worked for Trump, may it not work for other candidates?
Well, you yourself hinted at one area of possible action here:
This is a real problem. These companies purport to be sources of information, but of course they are actually merely sources of re-enforcement-of-existing-belief. Because that leads to higher revenues.
These companies are massively profitable (well, the big ones, anyway), yet escape regulation by posing as something they are not. Today we learned a bit about that profitability:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/cartercoudriet/2019/04/25/zuckerberg-ballmer-microsoft-facebook-earnings-billionaire/#2ba7e7cb3c23
It’s human nature to cling to a belief that we are fully rational. We dismiss the idea that a Google or Facebook algorithm, created to increase the wealth of Google and Facebook, could be influencing our perception of what’s true and what’s false.
But the fact is that Google and Facebook, to an extent no one wants to admit, is defining what’s true and what’s false. And they are virtually unregulated. Yes, they pay piddling little fines here and there—but that doesn’t impact their policies.
Damn it! So Barry only won—not once, but twice—because the GOP made critical errors nominating two different candidates with actual morals. Looks like they wised up after that.
One moment that I will never forget from McCain:
Trump does not have that kind of courage.
You realize that pure democracy was not something the wise founders desired. Well not only do we have more positions that are elected by the people we also have damn near free mass and global media. Without clawing back some of the concessions to more direct democracy you aren’t going to be able to counter increasingly sophisticated propaganda.
On the contrary, we need a greater degree of direct democracy including increasing the size of the House of Representatives, a method to approve constitutional amendments by national referendums, automatic voter registration, and the like. You mention high IQ people abovethread, but there’s no reason to think that those with above-average IQ have any inherently better judgement in politics. On the contrary, if you look at the “engineer’s fallacy” many people of above average intelligence are prey to popular ideological fashions of their day such as eugenics, Marxism, and libertarianism which have sophisticated though ultimately fallacious structures of justification.
I mention the differing IQ not to pick on people but to highlight that what is effective communication for one audience can be counterproductive with another. And that can lead to interesting outcomes.
I’d be for larger house and automatic voter registration. However, I think national referendum for amendments is crazy.
Why?
How deep into the weeds do we want to go? Why smaller congressional districts are more representative? How some type of proportional representation makes for better elections? I’m still a little vague on the topic rules of this board so I’m not sure about whether these discussions are pertinent to this particular thread but these are great issues that we could debate almost endlessly.
We don’t often agree, but I wholeheartedly concur with the text in bold. Direct democracy is just nutso - ask Californians how they feel about direct democracy.