Current highway capacity is not projected to meet demand for much longer. That means California either has to widen the I-5 corridor or make rail transportation a viable option for more travelers. Neither is a cheap proposition.
5 Likes
And Republicans wouldn’t be pulling out all the stops gerrymandering districts or kicking people off voter registries.
8 Likes
Trying again, since the flag brigade has fired up their engines…
To say that chihuahas and golden retrievers are both dogs is not to say they are equal or equivalent.
To say that the Democratic Party and the Republican Party are both corrupt is not to say that they are equal and equivalent.
Claiming that I said they were equivalent is placing words in my mouth that I never spoke. I find that offensive and would like to ask you, politely, to refrain from doing it.
2 Likes
Have a nice day.
2 Likes
I’m curious when you are saying they had a lot of overlap. The Libertarians’ initial national offering was on the back of Californian property taxes and the Koch brothers, and I don’t see anything that talks about a combined history between the two.
4 Likes
No individual vote, for the most part, ever “matters”. In the sense of having an immediate, individual effect. Its only collectively that any voting has an impact.
And turnout is so low in this country that in any given area, in any given election. Even a small turnout increase could potentially shift things quite a bit. Even within a given party. “My vote doesnt matter” is sort of a myth, and one of the more common reasons given for not voting. It often comes off as “since my guy didn’t win my vote didnt count” or “since nothing immediately changed my vote didn’t count”, but if all the people whose guy didnt win voted. Maybe he would. Even if he doesnt. The person who did will likely have to reconcile with all those new voters.
Frankly voting is the one of the only direct ways you have to impact government. Buy its always a collective action. Even when you are pleased with how things have turned out, your vote didnt do that (not alone). By refusing to join that collective effort, the only effect you have is underlining the status quo.
Yes I’m sure his “record unemployment” will make inroads when he has literal white supremecists working in his administration.
For all the smug pontificating. People aren’t stupid. Though they’re often misinformed. And they aren’t going to over look an arm length list of policies that have an immediate, present, negative impact on their day to day lives. For the sake of one nebulous and widely debunked example of a positive.
A common Republican refrain is how could any black person not support the GOP when they are The Party of Lincoln ™. In their minds that single thing, freeing the slaves, entitles them to the bulk of the African American vote. Despite decades of racist politicking and policies with immediate harm on the Black community.
They also attempt to spin abortion as protecting black babies, because the teen pregnancy rate is higher among African Americans. And this unemployment thing isn’t a new Trump spin. Its a standard half assed attempt to cater to Blacks by the GOP, were good for business! Business is good for jobs!
And despite all that the best a GOP candidate can hope for from that demographic is aroundb20%. And Trump pushed it to an all time low, less than 10%.
The same is roughly true in other demographics, even where the break down isn’t nearly as extreme. Despite the rediculous spin that’s existed since at least the 80’s. The GOP is losing support in these groups. Due to the open bigotry coming out of the other side of their mouths, and policies that have very immediate negative impacts on the lives of these voters. They’re not going to increase support among hispanics when ICE is kicking down doors in hispanic neighborhoods. Not because of something as slow to impact, and difficult to see as unemployment numbers. Unemployment numbers that aren’t doing as much for these demographics as they are for whites.
Something that was in part only possible due to a low turn and a very close election. Higher turnout, especially among certain traditionally low voting groups (young people, minorities) probably would have resulted in a clearer result and fewer fights over hanging chads.
3 Likes
Even Carter is warning about not pushing the party too far to the left - echoing many points already raised here. Not that he doesn’t support progressive ideas (he says he voted for Bernie), just that Democrats need to not alienate moderates and independents.
3 Likes
I dont know that that’s the way to phrase it. The party can stand to be more to the left in a lot of places and states. And it cant risk it in others.
The thing to avoid is trying to force the DNC to become a pure party of one particular sort of left wing. For it to stop being a coalition party. Because people are different, in different places. They have actual, real, different beliefs and priorities.
And while its been clear that the Demcratic Party, and the American left in general can stand to move more decidedly left nationally. And the bullshit we’re seeing now is things finally catching up to that. The risk is in no longer making space for that difference. A risk of no longer being (or failing to really become) that prototypical big tent, reality based, practical political movement with broad appeal.
The GOP has ended up where it is in large part by emphasizing ideological purity as much as possible, by discarding reality for ideology. And sure that’s given them some electoral success (together with ratfucking our elections). But they’re almost incapable of governing at this point.
That’s a pathway to a much smaller party. With much less chance of national influence (without scumbaggery). And even more government intransience. I dont think there is much risk in shedding the increasingly unpopular center right wing of the party. And I don’t think there’s anything bad about shedding political opportunists and cynics. But there needs to be space for varied ideology and policy, especially regionally across the country. Where its generally consistent with the overall aims, and open to cooperative effort in the right direction.
3 Likes
I still think that had less to do with Perot and more to do with ALL THOSE CHARTS.
USians we love our charts!
2 Likes
If you’re in Delaware, I put together an attack web site for one of our own status-quo Democrats http://www.firekenwoods.com/ . Sadly, he won the primary by 58 votes.
His political crime in my eyes: he campaigned on a platform of saving the Elsmere Library, when he voted against new property taxes that would have funded the library (and balanced our budget, and funded parks, EMTs, etc). You can read about the taxes at my other site http://www.nccsos.com
1 Like
I’d say it even stronger. It’s a destructive meme, that spreads like a virus. It’s as irresponsible to say as intentionally avoiding vaccination. When people don’t bother to vote, they just lose their own voice. When they tell other people “my vote doesn’t matter” or “our vote doesn’t matter,” they discourage others from voting and the malaise spreads.
6 Likes
More broadly.
Along with giant douche vs turn sandwich. And that old Simpsons episode that was the meme before that, where the two candidates are identical alien plants.
At worse its a smug attempt to excuse your complacency as high minded. At worst people are actively promoting it specifically to keep the status quo going.
3 Likes
I mean, I love President Carter, but he’s not exactly a model to follow for winning elections in contentious times…
7 Likes
More to the point, he ran as a center-right candidate (both times he ran), so of course supports moderate candidates.
5 Likes
Shouldn’t that Trump hair be where the tail is?
To me, Blue Wave implies unity, which I get we may need now that the general election is approaching. Healthcare seems to be the party line issue for the dems right now, maybe since most folks aren’t willing to lose any recently afforded benefits, and Trump has conveniently shut up about it. It feels like progressives are achieving something with the Justice Dems and potential ousting of the Yellow Dogs like Feinstein and Cuomo. And then I think reversing course on the Overton Window is going to take more black swan events.
1 Like
Why does everyone in politics keep assuming that the magical silent “middle” still occupies the ideological average of Republican and Democratic positions? Politics has been sliding rightward since before I was born. The moderates and independents in Carter’s time would be considered dirty leftist commies now.
8 Likes
If you look at the size of the US voting population (235 million according to census data), you have roughly equal numbers of R’s and D’s who actively vote their party line (~60 million on each side). That leaves a sizable number (~100 million or so) who are either apolitical, unable or unwilling to vote. I would say these people come close to being a “middle” since they don’t vote for one reason or another.
Reaching out to this group is always the goal for both parties so the assumption is they have to be somewhat moderate otherwise they wouldn’t be sitting on the sidelines every election cycle. Hardcore lefty’s and righties will almost always vote their party no matter what. This means there has to be some kind of middle out there.
I don’t disagree that both of the parties have been pushed rightwards for 30+ years now but if you poll individual voters, progressive issues like universal healthcare, public infrastructure, wage growth, etc. are consistently popular once you strip the political baggage away.
What’s interesting is lately the Trump GOP isn’t even trying to reach the middle anymore. They figure they can win elections by pandering only to their base while disenfranchising enough of the other side to win on just the barest pluralities possible. I don’t think that’s a successful long term strategy and the Dems would be foolish to try and replicate it.
2 Likes
And all of those things are framed in the current political context as completely loony left-wing extremist fringe positions, a framing that even the Democratic establishment seems to accept. People expressing broad support for a wide variety of programs emblematic of more left-leaning social democracies, which both Democrats and Republicans have agreed are out-of-bounds, means that they are definitionally not in “the middle”. The scope of politically acceptable policy has become so narrow and restrictive that I can’t fathom any scenario in which 100 million non-voters can be reasonably expected to fit within it. Not every vote comes from people put off by the political extremes; there are people whose views fall completely outside of the sphere of “acceptable” political debate and thus see no reason to vote for anyone. (This is irresponsible in the current political crisis we find ourselves in, but people are people.)
I’m not advocating for Democrats to salt the earth and try to win on the same practices as the GOP. The GOP has to engage in voter disenfranchisement in order to win because they openly and repeatedly admit that they can’t win if more people vote. Their ideas do not enjoy broad support. Meanwhile, Democrats have been poo-pooing widely popular ideas like universal healthcare and substantial increases in the minimum wage, admonishing those who advocate for them as being out of touch and fiscally irresponsible (all while pitching billions and billions and billions of dollars into an endless and unpopular international war machine and coddling the industries that are leading the way in wealth extraction).
Democrats embracing popular left-wing policy positions that they’ve spent the last 30 years running away from is not even remotely the same as the GOP rushing into fascism’s open arms in order to retain their grip on power so that they can continue to dismantle the country for their own benefit.
4 Likes
I don’t know that it was a lot of overlap, but back in the late 70s I was very interested in Libertarianism and would attend meetings at the local university and similar venues. At that time, there was a significant and noticeable minority of what are often called “left libertarians” and what used to be called (back then) “green libertarians” or more often “hippies”.
Such people influenced the character of the movement - for example when the Randites would proclaim that no government had the right to tell any property owner what they could and couldn’t do with their property, we’d point out to them that under a strict reading of Libertarian philosophy, pollution that leaves your control (such as air and water pollution) is a violent assault on other people’s rights, and cause for the most extreme sanctions (property seizure or even death). So you can’t just burn anything you want because it’s your property! Libertarians idolize contract agreements, and the implicit contract created by natural commons is still a contract even though you have no choice but to be party to it. This argument, being entirely consistent with Libertarian philosophy, had impact.
But after the Green Party formed, those people left the Libertarian Party in droves, and now you won’t hear that argument much - certainly not from the likes of Gary Johnson or Rand Paul! Without that influence it’s a much less palatable organization and a disappointment to many lovers of liberty.
1 Like
