To some degree, this whole mess is due to pushing ostensibly state-level laws (abortion regulations, for example) to the national level, which leaves much less room for genuinely national issues, like internet regulations, defense spending, immigration law, etc.
It might seem unnecessarily inflammatory to bring up abortion in a net neutrality discussion, but it's hard to get around the fact that appointments to the Supreme Court (which basically sets abortion policy) might have been the thing that convinced enough people to vote for Trump.
So I guess I agree that a lack of choices results in outcomes like this, but U.S. democracy provides other mechanisms for political diversity. They're just not being utilized on certain key issues at this point in history.
At that time, sure. Time will tell whether electing an extremist candidate was a good idea or not.
Losing in deep red Alabama isn't a good sign.
Actually, I meant extremist. The "Trump" party is full of people who want to roll back amendments to the 1940s or earlier.
These are extremist views, in my opinion, and don't represent the average American. Bannon and those who would raise white supremacist marches chanting against Jews can go suck a lemon.
Are you serious? Every politician is an ideologue. It's why we elect one over another. We agree with one's idea about policies over another's.
The only people who we expect to divorce themselves from ideologies are judges, who are there to interpret the law, not make it.
I think most of them are true Republicans in the sense that they want to elect people they think are trustworthy and then let them make decisions as their proxy. In that case, a candidate can have policies and platforms to convince people to let her be their proxy, but she doesn't need them. She could just have a "trust me, I'll make the right decision" pitch.
Besides, if Trump is an ideologue, what is that ideology? At best it's a new (or at least renewed) nativist spin on identity politics. That's not an ideology; that's a team.
Republicanism is an ideology. Trump's is clearly farther right than previously elected R presidents.
He does have a laundry list of issues he tweets about, a subset of which he picks at with executive orders (which, itself, is unconservative) but that seems more like raw appeasement of his political base than anything coherent (or even consistent!).
There are a few exceptions, I guess. He's, at least in rhetoric, for a strong military. Though we're nowhere near a "Trump doctrine" that proposes a coherent framework for that desire. It's, again, more of an id-driven move than anything rational.
And in the meantime, who cares if the country is lit on fire? That's the future elected officials' problem.
Sarcasm aside, I actually agree that we need to speak with our vote. I just wish we didn't have such large swings of the deregulation penis in the meantime, and instead we had cool-headed, logical people at the helms of these agencies and our Executive branch. I suppose it's too naive of me.
More charitably, they chose Donald Trump on the suspicion that he would do "better" than Hillary Clinton on: abortion, immigration, the economy, leading in "the culture wars", and maybe a few other issues. Net neutrality was a litmus test for basically nobody.