The implosion of the Democratic Party thread

oh and by the way, what you describe - one bunch lording their will over the unwilling - is objectively what we have right now. 25% of the population, Dominionist right nutters who happen to control one whole political party, want no abortions at all - 75% do. A year from now the 25% will have their way.

How is that in ANY sense more ethical than the 75% straight outvoting the 25%?

I'll concede that in matters of civil rights the majority often needs to be compelled by law to not abuse the minority even when the votes aren't there - which is why we have a constitution. But that reality wouldn't extend to people of color deliberately disenfranchising whites the minute they get the majority so that cuts both ways. Or it's supposed to if the poor helpless rural voters and their oligarch puppet-masters didn't also own the courts.

Voter: "I need things" (child care for instance, or paid family leave)
Dem: "I'll work to get those things"
GOP: "OMG SOCIALISM!!"
<voter votes Dem>
Dem: these are the things we Democrats are working to provide including the things you need, as you voted for"
GOP: "Well now you're just buying votes"

Translate: Vote Republicans so they can do whatever the goddamn please no matter what you need.

We do not pay taxes to the government because we just want to give money to the people of the government. We pay them so the government can provide us with certain things, and that also involves operation costs. Some of those things could be medical care, food, and shelter in case of emergency. That is not free shit. When you contribute to the societal government and it provides things in return, that6 is not getting free shit. Thaty is a lie created by the right wing retards like @Federal Farmer , @Paladin , @Lanzman , and @Uncle Albert because they have no understanding and hate brown poor people getting the services they feel they are giving away.

Seriously, under their rules getting the police or fire department to show up is some sort of freebie everyone is getting. Having roads is some sort of freebie everyone is getting which is why UA wants his brokedick jeep to have to pay tolls. They all want to force indoctrination into white supremacy in our schools since they are providing those freebies.

Utter bullshit. What the GOP is doing to the nation RIGHT GODDAMN NOW is a direct course to single party rule. Hide and watch for about 5 years and see who ends up being the party that can never lose.

Besides that, my "plan" can't possibly result in anything LESS than two parties. Why? Because in order to be a viable party you'd have to at least *pretend* to be interested in things that VOTERS ACTUALLY FUCKING WANT. Does that mean the Dominionists wouldn't be able to elect a pro-theocracy candidate?
Yup.
That the White nationalist fascists would never be able to give power to Steven Miller or his fellow travelers?
Yup.
That the hard left would forever be denied a pure communist representative?
Damn skippy.

And that's GREAT. We don't need any fringe nutter bullshit running things (which is exactly what we'll have before the end of the decade unless something wildly improbable happens)

But no, not one party - in fact, if you structured things wisely (say, for example, with RCV and multi-rep at-large districts in the House) you'd have every chance of more than 2, not less. Not that having more than 2 doesn't have it's own problems - as Ontario how the Ford Administration got to power - but it would be hell and gone from one party rule.

And quite frankly i have to ask, if you are REALLY disturbed at the prospect of one party rule, can you direct me to your multitude of posts bashing the ongoing Republican campaigns to make elections irrelevant on the state level so as to lock in GOP dominance for the rest of our lives? Did I miss that? I admit I don't read every thread. isn't the clear and present danger, the train that's literally 100 ft away while you are tied to the tracks, a lot more panic inducing that the theoretical train heading in the other direction that might at some point appear if we get out of the current danger?

Psst. That's NOT one party rule my dude.

That's because most voters don't want the shit they are peddling. The solution to that is to change your fucking platform - preferably to something more thoughtful than "Whatever Trump shat out of his face this morning"

Nope. Number one, the "Sanders party" could no more survive on promising plans that voters don't want that the Christian nationalist Republicans could.BOTH need to moderate to survive. And your description of the reformed Republicans would be, say, Eisenhower, not Trump or Ted fucking Cruz.

That's a GOOD thing. People will vote for that.

All that said, the "gimmie free shit" party as you call it?

Take any given proposal of Sanders or Warren, or hell AOC and poll it without party labels or other indicators, and you'll find 60, 70, 75% and sometimes more LIKE that idea. THAT ain't the fringe party, my friend, the "government I can drown in the bathtub" party is. It's just that one party is afraid of* their "extreme" which isn't in fact extreme and the other is yoked like a plow-horse by theirs.

Your quaint ol' "the parties are just alike" mentality is at least 30 years out of date.



*some of them, the old school Pelosi/Hoyer/Neal crowd - but also, the sold out part. The oligarchs who run the GOP are only too happy to kick some megabucks to, say, Kirsten Sinema if she'll do a 180 on what she ran on in order to pull big Pharma's nuts out of the fire. A certain portion of the party is terrified of the implications of listening to the voters and not the oligarchs. That problem, too, will need to be solved before "my plan" can get us to "one person one vote" in a real sense.

You might have missed it, but the current flavour of "both sides" false equivalence Lanzman has been pushing is "Both sides are still equally bad because whatever bad things the Republicans are actually doing today, the Democrats might also do a century from now, or may have done a century ago."

News flash boss:
if someone says "White segregationists set up Jim Crow laws that kept black people (and poor whites) unequal for a century and it was bad in the following ways...and had effects that persist until this day"

and *you* are ASHAMED because of learning this - you're telling on yourself. My daddy, and his daddy, and his daddy before him were racists, born and bred, and voted regularly for racist politicians who enacted racists policies that hurt them too (because no one in my family was ever well off) and you want to know how ashamed of that I am?

Not one goddam bit.

*I* Voted for Ronald Reagan and every other Republican that crossed my field of view until at least 2010.
THAT I'm ashamed of - because **I DID THAT**

But who got elected before 1982? And what they did in office? Ain't none of me - and every half-wit high school kid knows that.

You want me to tell you who, REALLY, white parents don't want their kids learning the truth about racism past in this country?
REALLY?
The same reason that 100 years ago they didn't want them learning about evolution, and 60 years ago they didn't want them sharing a classroom with black kids - because a lot of parents want their kids to think ALL THE SAME BULLSHIT THEY THINK.

Same as religion, TBH, take little Timmy to Sunday School before he knows what day of the week it is and beat Jesus into his brain with a nine pound hammer every week until he clings to the same ridiculous mythology that you do (and that's not me starting an "Is Jesus real?" tangent I'm talking about all the other garbage that most churches put on top of the supposed gospel message like the shit they say when people you love die)

That's all this moral panic now is - how DARE you expose my impressionable child to facts that *I* don't like to think about and don't want him to know. Religion, basically, wearing a political suit.

You know what that gets you? A nation full of Josh Mandels and Steven Millers. Which, I guess, is fine if you're a straight white male who's blessed to not be a Jew then I guess you can afford to preach from the libertarian soapbox while the rest of us get put in our place and never need to notice.

That's what they mean when they say "privilege"

Which is an interesting thing because basically every thing that Republicans at every level say "OMG the Democrats are planning this awful thing" is straight projection. In their minds they think "If I gain the power to I'll ensure my party never loses again, which of course the Democrats would do if THEY had the power so it's okay if I do it first!"

Basically assume everyone is as craven as you are and be the worst first because we're all villains here.

I may not live to see it but I'll make a prediction: when the Republicans have arranged all the mechanisms so that they can do anything they want in complete confidence they will never lose power again - like say Putin's Russia - hide and watch and see who ACTUALLY comes and takes all the guns.

Oh, missed this bit the first time, let me pause and laugh in your ridiculous ass face for being such a simpleton as to be played into beleiving that there's even such a fucking thing as "cultural marxsm"

I swear I ***HAVE*** to remember to stop taking you seriously even a little bit.

I mean, back to the VERY basics - dude could demonstrate, like, even ONE actual verifiable communist holding ANY power of position or influence sufficient to accomplish the mass indoctrination plans we're told are afoot.

(as if one, or even a hundred, could even get such a thing off the ground - but there's not EVEN one)

Again, I'ma invoke Josh Mandel.

Full-on homeschooled in the heart of White Christian Nationalist from start to finish, saturated in precisely the worldview that these "anti-communist" opponents of BLM and CRT Federal Farmer types WANT kids to be raised in, and that dude (and tens of thousands of others like him) a straight up sociopath. They're basically a trial run, beta test, for what Rufo and company would like to do with their school board crusades and the results are NOT persuasive that it's a good plan.

I mean, Y'all all know MY testimony - i believed EVERY lie, and when my own personal self knowledge finally convinced me ONE thing they'd taught me was false, eventually, slowly, painfully, I looked around to see what else was a lie and eventually I concluded that the answer to that was.

Fucking ALL of it.

Heh, I went to a deeply conservative SBC privately owned college and was already a Tony-Perkins loving straight dittohead going in.

What did college do to make me the Warren Progressive I am today?

Yes my knowledge of Pokemon cards and pre-1999 Star Trek is serving me well as an adult.

He'd have to graduate high school first to have the privilege of college indoctrination.

I was fairly libertarian throughout college. Not long after I graduated, I realized how the real world works and became much more liberal. Libertarianism and conservatism is an ideology of entitlement.

I know you’re just trying to be a douche, but I’ll bite. A few things that have stuck with me since childhood, oh and before you make the “joke” about me being a kid or something, I’m not and you know it. Growing up in the Boy Scouts, growing up in a southern Baptist family, growing up in a southern community and growing up in a mostly Republican family still affects me today. Yes I grew out of those things for the most part, but they still influence my thinking. And before you also make some of the obvious jokes, no I was never molested either. Fuck off..

As a "college professor" (university lecturer), I can tell you we have enough of a job getting our actual course materials to stick in the students' noggins, let alone cultural leftyness.

I've got far too much work on my hands teaching DNA replication, transcription and translation, the fundamentals of molecular biology and its applications and the principles of animal breeding/selection to have to put together slides and ad-libs on how we've always been a racist culture.

I'm not sure I could even fit that into a 45 minute lecture slot with all the science stuff.

Yeah, but conservatives have faulty DNA.

Same here. It's an easy philosophy to adopt in college: it seems nicely principled and consistent, which is a very appealing thing for a person who's still developing their sense of self; it makes you feel slightly edgy, without the stick-in-the-mud aspects of outright conservatism; and when you're young, you may not have had a chance to see its consequences in action.

I was fairly libertine. WTF did you study?

Libertarianism is West Coast for "Saying I'm a Republican won't get me laid if I live in a major city"

OK after all that all I have to say is Thank you and

I was a wannabe libertine.

It’s just all or nothing with you, no nuance, no balanced thinking

Fuck critical race theory, you’re proof they need to teach more critical thinking in school

There are two basic types of democracy - direct and representative. Direct democracy means "everyone votes for everything" and is unwieldy beyond a fairly small scale, like say a small village. Representative democracy, which is what the US and most other liberal western democracies have, is also known as a republican government - the people elect representatives who (in theory) represent/defend/advocate for their interests at the national level.

So if you accept the basic idea of representative democracy, the first issue you run into is dividing up the population into chunks which will all have the same representative. What we in the US call "congressional districts," since our legislature is called "Congress." This leads to the question of apportionment - how do you draw the districts? Do you go with simple geometry, and just divide up the country into equal-sized units based on nothing more than math? That results in some units having lots and lots of people in them and others having very few. This is Nova's complaint about the Senate, by the way, as that chamber was originally set up in roughly this manner since the Senate's purpose is to represent the several states as political entities, not to represent the people. So Wyoming or Alaska get two senators, just like California or New York get two. This is a feature, not a bug. It was the only way the delegates to the Constitutional Convention could come up with to balance large and small states in the national government and it's pretty much still the only way to do that. This is also why Senators should go back to being appointed by state legislatures instead of being directly elected by the voters.

Apportionment in the House of Representatives is done the other way, by drawing districts around roughly-equal numbers of people. Because the House represents the people directly. However, politics being much more about "my side winning" than actual representative government, gerrymandering has resulted in districts with absolutely ludicrous borders, to make seats "safe" for one side or another. This practice needs exterminated, probably by Constitutional amendment. Congressional districts need to be drawn based on population and geometry, and nothing else. Let the chips fall where they may in terms of political parties - and incidentally, most of the founding fathers were very much against the idea of political parties, even tho such are almost inevitable in a democratic government.

Anyway, the result of drawing congressional districts this way (leaving out, for now, the question of the actual number of districts and therefore representatives we should have) would most likely be that both major parties would become a lot more centrist since to win a district the candidate would have to appeal to a broader selection of political opinions amongst the voters in that district. Or at least in most cases as there would surely still be some deep red/deep blue districts no matter what you do. Large cities are almost always going to swing much more "liberal" than rural areas, probably due to city dwellers being a lot more dependent on government services simply because they're on public utilities instead of wells and septic systems, live in high density housing requiring a lot more policing, stuff like that.

TL;DR version - the answer is to re-draw congressional districts based strictly on population and go back to state legislatures appointing Senators.

We have a very similar government system to the US, with the real main differences being that the power of the presidential equivalent (Governer General) is appointed by parliament (congress) and that states are represented by 12 senators each. In some ways our states also have more independence than US states (although not all) so the overall structure is very familiar to me.

Multi-member Senate representation does a lot to ensure that the senators are representing the overall state interests. Senators are still representing their states, but proportional representation means that more of the state's voters are represented in the Senate.

As I've mentioned before, I still don't understand the logic of having senators appointed by the state governments, all that would do is undermine the legitimacy of State level elections by making them be focused more on federal politics.

What do you think of the idea of increasing the number of congressional seats? The limit there seems to also result in a big imbalance where some are over or under represented in Congress.

I’ll throw my two cents in even though this is addressed to @Lanzman . I absolutely would support lifting the cap on representatives and I’d probably double or triple the number of representatives.

One of the things that I have learned in studying the history of corporations (as well as other organizations) is that they quite often structure themselves in such a way that they automatically prevent people who have good ideas from being able to advance. I don't think that there's any way in which you can craft rules to ensure that only people with good ideas can advance, but I do think that there are ways that you can ensure that people with good ideas aren't completely shut out (as they often are now).

One way you could do that would be to ensure that every so many years the size of Congress increases. Doubling the size of Congress every fifty years seems like an easy way to solve the problem without creating something that's rapidly unwieldy.

You can't just leave out the number of reps, because the House shouldn't have been capped.

You don't say...

I would never Race to make such an obvious joke.