Of course, Trump’s ambassador to the Netherlands visited the German war cemetery at Ysselsteyn last July.
Of the 31,000 WW2 soldiers buried there, 2,500 are from the SS- including Julius Dettmann who ordered the arrest of Anne Frank and her family.
(There are also 85 WW1 soldiers buried at Ysselsteyn, whose bodies floated down the Maas from Belgium and washed up in the Netherlands. All German soldiers buried in the Netherlands were dug up and moved to Ysselsteyn after WW2).
The Democrats (by and large) have principles; they just don’t have the spine to back up the parts of their platform that would do the most good…
See also the Wild Rose party, doing their best to dig the fringe right hole that Alberta is starting to slide into ever deeper. All started because Albertans are super mad that people in Toronto never listen to them. 
This is key. In the U.S., total multi-faction internal collapse of a duopoly party seems to be the only way it will be replaced with a new duopoly party. We’re not there yet with the GOP, and a Bull Moose style third party effort like this won’t do the job.
Right now, we still have what someone a few years ago called a “quasi-parliamentary” party structure with four elements: establishment Republicans, right-wing populists (really fascists), establishment Dems, and left-wing populists (really social democrats). This group is mainly estabishment Republicans, and therein lies the problem: jettison the appeals to racism and religious fundamentalism that helped them make their margin and inevitably led to the fascist takeover of the party, and they’re not left with much to offer. “Banks, big business, and bomb-makers” are a very limited constituency, maybe attracting 5% of the the electorate (10% if you include well-paid minions).
If we’re to see the GOP replaced with something else, we’re going to have to see a post-Whig-like range of more than two conservative alternatives. Absent some form of ranked-choice voting it’s going to be an internal struggle amongst those alternatives, with a bunch of mergers and splits and reunions. The core problem any and all of those factions will have to address is that their suckers are slowly waking up to the fact that the undergirding Libertarian promise that “you too can be a millionaire, anydayrealsoonnow” that backed up de-regulation and tax cuts has always been a lie.
The Dems are going through their own internal struggle, but the battle won’t be as messy. For them, it’s mainly a matter of the age 55+ leaders dying out, and with them the Third Way/neoliberal-lite approach that’s most younger liberals and progressives in the party understand is unsustainable. Here one of the two quasi-parliamentary factions/sub-parties will eventually win out.
No, I understand all that, and I agree. I’m not wringing my hands, longing for quiet fascism. I’m just saying it’s strangely hard to remember the Republican party as anything other than what it is now. Once upon a time, your neighbor may have held a job, and worn a suit, and been able to hold an intelligent conversation on a topic of reality. But after they’ve spent 12 years wearing an insane clown suit, jerking off and shitting on the lawn, while screaming about how all the other residents in the neighborhood are Reptillian aliens bent on drinking the blood of babies… yeah, hard to ever remember what that person was like before.
EDIT: typo
I’m just a big picture guy and will leave the details to others, but that’s pretty much what I would like to see - a smaller center party that can prevent the two larger parties from having controlling majorities in Congress (and thus de facto one party rule) and that can also work with another party to advance legislation. Basically, a middle-of-the-road deal and king maker. Personally I would be totally in with the DSA as you describe it, but most of the US is more to the right than I am, and democracy dictates that’s where polices should sit.
American politics right now is just back-and-forth whiplash, depending on who gets to call the shots despite the other side. It’s designed to be a system of deal-making and compromise, but Newt Gingrich broke that 25 years ago and it’s been down hill ever since. Throw in the litmus test primaries the Republicans run and you end up with the border-line fascist party we have today.
The other problem here is that when US democrats talk about centrism, the republicans win. They will never again compromise. They’ve made that clear since at least Gingrich. They are devoted entirely to pulling the Overton window to their side, and it’s working. Americans long for “centrism” but keep losing sight that the entire US political system is pretty much to the right of every other Western democracy (and worsening). Bernie’s views are mainstream in Canada and maybe even slightly right in a few areas in Norway. The focus, IMHO, should be on pulling the other way, not on continuing to give them rope.
If there is no majority party and the Republicans or whoever on the right won’t compromise with the center party, then the Republicans will be unable to advance their programs at all. If the center party has its own legislation it wants to advance, and the Republicans on the right won’t play, then the center party would have to look to the left to pass bills. The idea is to force parties to work with each other or they get nothing.
Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of parliamentary political system. At the beginning the framers were openly antagonistic to the idea that parties should exist within the system at all. After a few years that proved to be an idealistic pipe dream, but the misguided reaction was to effectively do everything possible to limit the number of parties to two. The duopoly has only been cemented in the subsequent centuries.
Paralyzing the process is what Republicans want, though. They win when nothing gets done. It’s been McConnell’s entire strategy. They want to undermine the idea that good governance is even possible. That’s what serves their ends.
A.K.A. Lawful Evil.
That’s the idea - break the paralysis. If enough centrists break away from their two parties and form a viable third party, then the Republicans would either have to play or become irrelevant. I’m fine if they become irrelevant.
Yeah, it’s a fundamental change in how we do things. But what we have now is toxic and unworkable, and it is allowing a far right shift in a party that can still viably gain and control absolute power.
But that’s a fallacy. If you’re talking about politicians, it’s correct, but if you’re talking about policy it’s way wrong. Look at the polls about popularity of progressive policies where universal healthcare, free public university education, housing support, UBI, worker’s rights, etc. have 60-70% support from the population as a whole, the US has a similar political profile as most western democracies.
It’s when people have to choose between corporatist conservatives and outright fascists that the problem occurs. They mostly don’t want either but they can’t choose policies, they are forced to choose politicians.. That’s why you generally see the most progressive policies being adopted at the state level through ballot measures rather than legislation.
It would be nice, but the UK has never managed that. We have the Tories with about 30% backing because the vote was split between Labour and the Liberals.
What I want is Approval Voting: you vote for all the parties you can stand, and the one with the most approvals gets in. This favours centre parties, were traditional voting seems to favour two-party extremes. However, I can’t see either of the two parties anywhere letting that happen, as they don’t want to share with a third.
Agreed, and that’s putting it mildly. To have even a hope of changing things: ranked-choice voting would have to replace FPTP as the standard; the Electoral College would have to be abolished; gerrymandering would have to be outlawed; and Citizens United would have to be overturned as the first step in meaningful campaign finance reform. There’s no real political will in either duopoly party to do any of those things.
They won’t do it unless they can find enough support to be bigger than the current GOP.
Which I don’t see happening. The GOP is so entrenched and moneyed, and so reliant on controlling their clueless base to win elections.
So break up that duopoly and give people more choices on who to vote for. That’s part of the point of my suggestion - broader representation that has to work together in Congress. It really doesn’t matter where the center lies, what matters is allowing progress to be made, and forcing the right to either get along or get left out. As of right now, our system is “winner gets all” and we need to stop that.
You’re right about these. And there’s a huge psychological hurdle, too. Too many people view voting for a third party as “throwing away my vote”, an attitude that would also have to be overcome.
But I think it does. A lot of the rage and anger against the US Government is because of that mismatch between the policies people want and the legislation corporations buy.
That anger causes electoral chaos that benefits the GOP, as it can be directed against all politicians.
