The implosion of the Democratic Party thread

"The 1% are in control of both parties."

If by "the 1%" of Republicans you mean the at least 50% of them going at a dead sprint towards Dominionist authoritarian Ologarchy...
If by "the 1%" of Democrats you mean the roughly 5% of bought and sold corporatist puppets that the media blindly calls "moderates" despite their fucking up policies that 70% or so of the population want (sometimes more) and the similarly sized Old School leadership that who'll cling to the status quo until the Reactionary insurrectionists rip it from their grasp and stomps it into powder while they watch...


The Bernie wing, as folks think of it are not the "extremists" - they're the ones who actually think the role of the government is to help someone outside the 1%, which is a view shared by the vast majority of Americans, who haven't sold out yet. Warren, Wyden, Schatz, Murphy, Baldwin and more in the Senate, AOC and Jayapal and Porter and Pressley and many many many more in the House.

But with few exceptions, they don't control any of the official levers of power because they haven't been there long enough. It's not extreme to listen to the people instead of those who write the massive checks - that's just how we've been trained to see the situation.

There's really not much substance to this article, but I've seen it shared by rural democrats.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/democrats-rural-voters/

The 1%, when discussing politis in 2021, generally refers to the wealthy.

I think the people who are like the author are blind to how few of them there are due to the racist mechanisms that allow you to purchase land in rural america and own farms. racists are not obvious when they are in their bubble. It is better to let the muted voice of liberalism be far away and make the bubble.

Except that's not the way it works. Southern states continually jerrymander amd throw up as many roadblocks to make voting as restrictive as possible, and that impacts the white Democrats as much as the blacks and browns.

Look, I'm checking deuces from Murica if CA ever got serious about secession and all, but there is more work to be done to engage fence sitters. Virginia was considered a lost cause before Obama did legwork to get get butts in seats there and current governor race aside, they're now considered as blue as California and NYS.

I won't say pour all the energy there, but people are people and voting *for* something is a stronger motivator than voting *against* something.

That's due almost entirely to northern Virginia (the DC suburbs, basically) and Richmond. Outside of that the state is solid red. Kind of like New York, which outside of three major metropolitan areas is also very solidly red. This is part of what's causing the divisiveness in American politics right now . . . our national politics are being decided largely by a handful of cities. People in the rural areas are feeling quite correctly that they don't matter.

There are more people in those cities.
Dirt and sod can't get up and vote.

So it doesn't bother you that anyone not living in a city basically doesn't count? Disenfranchisement is okay as long as the "right" people are disenfranchised?

Now you're getting it.

Wrong thinking will be quickly punished.

True. But the balance between urban and rural areas was one of the major reasons for the Electoral College. So that everyone would (in theory) have an equal voice. When a segment of your polity goes decades without feeling like their interests are being represented, hilarity ensues.

Because, to explain once again for the benefit of those who refuse to grasp the concept, the Senate is supposed to represent the states as political entities, not the people. The people are represented by the House. The bicameral legislature is one of those "checks and balances" you heard about in grade school.

Direct election of Senators is one good thing in a sea of electoral shortsightedness that gives rural states way too much power.

But, as we’ve noted before, those rural states are largely dominated by Republicans who enact policies that make Democratic city dwellers wealthier. So ultimately I recommend those rural voters do their homework instead of complaining all the time.

Direct election of Senators was a major mistake. They need to go back to being selected by state legislatures.

Do too much homework, and you stop believing in trickle-down, start believing in science and medicine, and then the whole onion starts to peel apart.

I could only go along with that if you cut up the largest states into multiple city-states and diluted the power of the existing rural states (looking at you irrelevant Dakotas).

This old trope again. Politics aren't being decided by cities; cities don't vote. They're being decided by PEOPLE.

And it's rural areas, not cities, whose power is radically disproportionate to their population.

Fun fact. Less than a third of registered voters in N.C. are Republican. They are outnumbered by both Non Affiliated and Democrat voters. Yet they control the State legislature.

One person = one vote seems fair enough to me. Anything that gives a small group of voters proportionally more power than a larger group of voters seems extremely undemocratic.

I know you'd be shitting blood if someone suggested black peoples get six votes in every election while white people only get one to make up for there being six times more whites than blacks in America.

Oooh, and we could do the same for other minorities, and also weight by age, the older you are, the less your vote counts.

We should weight the votes by weight. In inverse order.

Fun fact, Americans used to believe that the fatter the Presidential candidate, the better - big country needs a big man to run it...

Post WW1 and scarcity, being trim started to be desirable.

Used to?

You're saying Obama's problem was that the dude was skinny?

Let a white vote count for three-fifths of a black vote

Since coming up a legal basis for assigning racial categories to individuals is both problematic and impractical, what about this?

We have data down to the census block on how people self-identify. The five largest racial/ethnic groups in the U.S. appear to be:

• White
• Black
• Non-white Hispanic
• Asian or Pacific Islander
• Native American

So, I propose the following. In keeping with the principle @Lanzman advocates, whereby regions with smaller populations should have their influence artificially magnified in the upper legislative chamber, we group all majority-white census blocks into one Senate "district," all majority-Black census blocks into another, and so on.

Every group gets 20 senators.

All 20 can be elected as a bloc, or we can further subdivide each of these groups into 10 subgroups by geography, on the assumption that majority-Black census blocks in rural Alabama may have different concerns than majority-Black census blocks in Boston, majority-white census blocks in Nebraska may have different concerns than majority-white census blocks in suburban northern Virginia, and so on.

This would be fair, sensible, and democratic, right?

What problem is this attempting to solve, and can you point to a present day example of this type of setup working to successfully do so?

The more influence you give state elections on national politics, the more you will make the focus of those election campaigns the national issues, rather than the localised ones those state governments are meant to focus on.