I really think the defining political problem of our age is campaign finance reform and to a lesser extent election reform.
But didn't those three things exist when the sanity you want to restore prevailed?
The US was broken in the 1800s. It was broken in the 1820s-1840s with the fight over slavery. It was broken in the 1860s, and we had to fight a civil war to restore any sort of santy. It was broken in the 1880s after Restoration was rolled back. It was broken in 1900 with the rise of the Klan again. 1915 was WWI, in 1920 we were back to being broken. 1930s we were broken by depression and the fight against fascism, 1940s we had WW2. 1950s we had Korea, 1960s we were broken, 1970s we were broken, and that begun the decline of any sense of civility in the congress.
1980s we were completely broken, 1990s we were completely broken, 2000s we were completely broken, 2010s we were completely broken...
The lack of justice for Nixon broke any sense of normality left in the nation. And the Republicans nevertheless played off the idea that Nixon was somehow crucifed, and elected Reagan, then went on a witch-hunt against Clinton. Then they elected a historically bad president in Bush, started the longest wars in US history, and when people complained they crucified Obama in response. And then they elected the loudest finger-in-the-eye they could find in response.
The US has been somewhat broken for literally its entire existence but it has been actively unable to transact its internal business for about half of that... about half of that being in the last 50 years.
The first is softball and obvious. Things can work on a small scale and collapse on a large scale. We started with around 30,000 citizens per congressional district (and thus per representative). And there was a strong urging to push it lower by some. This number was envisioned as remaining as a constant, for if you dilute the power and "connection" of the average voter too much, you risk exposing yourself to politicians too far detached from their constituency which can breed tyranny, corruption, and so on. And indeed 30,000 is already pretty far up there. Today we have more than 700,000 citizens per congressional district.
The second is a more contentious issue, but perhaps even more relevant. Today we've become an increasingly divided and polarized society where nuance is increasingly a lost art. Democracy does not work in such situations. Iraq is an extreme example. Iraq is fundamentally broken up into three major groups - Shiite, Sunni, and Kurds. And these groups tend to be extremely intolerant of one another with members of each group generally adopting wholesale all views of their own group and only their own group. It just turns into a tyranny of the majority.
Somehow the United States has started trending towards this exact behavior. This wasn't always the case. While we may have had vice president engage in a duel to the death with a secretary of the treasury, these were personal conflicts. Today people are engaging more in group conflicts. Democracy works when people are willing to work together, not when they view politics as a team sport where the idea is for your side to "win" and the other side to "lose."
The US has had that precondition for centuries, so if we were to lose it, it would be a very different case fro Iraq, who never had it.
I think the factor behind increased polarisation in the US and across the democratic world probably is this thing right here. The internet! People are now increasingly getting their news and information, and thereby their world view from "social media", not the traditional mass media of the last 2-3 centuries.
It's a huge sea change, and we're only seeing the beginning of it. So far it't looking kinda scary, but things will keep changing quickly, and I think we'll sort things out. We better :)
https://www.npr.org/2016/02/06/465781632/fact-check-clinton-...
First, the study specifically avoided self identification and labeling. They clustered people based on their answers to core belief questions. From which they found 7 key clusters. One of those the study labeled Progressive Activists. But that's a label put on after the fact. So it doesn't mean 8% of the population identify as progressive activist. Just that from the study, there's 8% of the population with very similar core beliefs.
Then the study demonstrates that self labels like being left, right, middle, conservative, Democrat, Republican, etc, are bad predictors of shared common issues.
Only 3 out of the 7 groups cared most about jobs, and only one group, the smallest one, cared most about immigration.
The groups the study labeled liberals make up 26%, and the ones labeled conservative 25%. But again, that's the labels the study gave people based on their answers.
Also, the wealthiest and withest cluster identified of them all is the Devoted Conservative.
Finally, the whole point of the study is that appart from the wings of progressist activist (composed of young professionals mostly), and from the traditional (old, white middle class mostly) and devoted conservatives (old, white and wealthiest mostly), all other groups are much more willing to compromise and have varying beliefs depending on the situation, and are most bothered by the wings polarizing the country. Thus when you look at the silent majority, they are much more diversified in opinions.
This reminds me of the futurama episode with the clones running for president: A: “your 10c titanium tax goes too far” B: “well I say your 10c titanium tax doesn’t go too far enough!”
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But these days, once you get past the five-second sound bites and the rhetoric, there is very little difference between what Republicans and Democrats actually do.
Obama was a pretty center-right politician, and Hillary would have been also. He didn’t support socialized medicine, didn’t support socialized education, didn’t push for a $15 minimum wage, didn’t really bolster unions — though didn’t try and demolish them either — and didn’t really tax the wealthy. He was also fairly supportive of the surveillance state. To his credit he did a lot of good work bolstering environmental regulations and pushing forward climate science. I’m a leftist by Canadian standards and I liked and respected Obama and I can confirm he was no leftist.
That seems oddly specific, do you know why it singles out trains?
<insert follow-on joke about Comcast>
i'm a bit confused... wasn't Obamacare, like, that? (nb not a US citizen)
In fact until they turned on it for political strategy reasons it was quite popular with Republican representatives and saw extensive bipartisan review and amendment. The Republican narrative that it was pushed through without them having a say is flat out false.
As a UK conservative I’ve had it up to my teeth with the US Republican Party. It seems like all they’ve got left is reactionaryism and nationalism. They’re now even dismantling trade deals largely built by free trade republicans, and can’t even support their own policies as soon as anyone else supports them too. They’re totally dysfunctional.
I’m a big believer that any political party that has power for too long becomes corrupt. Success attracts mouthpiece politicians that parrrot the party line because it’s successful, without thinking through and living the basic principles. I’ve seen it happen to the Conservative party. I voted con in 1997 but we deserved that defeat. It happened to labour under Blair and Brown. The US republicans have had the same disease since the Bush eras and just can’t shake it. The fact the democrats have occupied the centre right had forced republicanism into a reactionary corner. As a conservative myself it horrible to watch. They’ve become a twisted parody of the party I once loved under Reagan.
Oops. Rant.
For example in The Netherlands, the government defines a extensive healthcare package that every insurer must provide to everyone, insurers must accept everyone for and all their clients must pay the same price, and they also determine what hospitals can charge for certain procedures. "Add-ons" like sport-related Physical Therapy are mostly unregulated.
That's far more far-reaching than Obamacare, which allows age-based price discrimination, only mandates coverage of 10 categories and does not regulate hospital pricing.
Sanders is a socialist, he says as much himself.
I wouldn't call increasing military spending left or right, just about every corner of the political spectrum has done this at some point, most notably the Soviet Union.
As far as restricting all immigration, that's very far right.
(I based in South Africa, but traveled the world. So I'm fairly neutral)
So I guess you are right, it is truly 'big-business-friendly', whether that is good or bad, I don't know.
There is also a huge right-wing movement among celebrities. Ignoring one particular rap artist, many of the older and more successful actors are right-wing icons. From Clint Eastwood and Kelsey Grammer to Mel Gibson, once you are sitting on a pile of money one's opinions tend to shift right. The biggest and most successful media organization at the moment is FOX, and the biggest television stars are the fox presenters. IIRC Judge Judy remains the highest paid TV presenter/host.
And Regan. And Trump. Both hollywood personalities.
If they wanted “lower taxes” to be the biggest issues they have all the power to make it happen.
The only reason conservative groups do so well is because they are the exception to the majority left-leaning entertainment industry. Conservative thought is highly concentrated to a few sources (in the mainstream)
This is literally what happens every day in 2019 America. I invite you to spend five minutes learning about the American Legislative Exchange Council, how ALEC writes state-level legislation, the Republican project "REDMAP", and how they all fit together.
Here's one story: https://billmoyers.com/story/alec-koch-industries-gerrymande...
If they wanted “lower taxes” to be the biggest issues they have all the power to make it happen.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-04-30/corporate...
Copyright and intellectual property are entirely state constructs. Media companies and IP trolls (to whatever degree you can separate the two) definitely do not want deregulation in this regard.
Copyright and patent laws are enacted by Congress, and are explicitly an optional legislative power given to Congress by the US Constitution (Article I, Section 8, Clause 8). The two main types of "intellectual property" are explicitly something that Congress has power to legislate.
Congress has also legislated additional forms of "intellectual property": copyright is codified in 17 U.S.C. (Copyright Act), patents in 35 U.S.C., trademarks in 15 U.S.C. 1051-1141 (Lanham Act), and trade secrets in 18 U.S.C. 1839. So all of the substantive forms of "intellectual property" are federal law, and thus aren't state constructs.
EDIT: Ah, if you meant "state" as in "government" then yes you're correct.
Besides, most actors/directors/producers dont make nearly enough money to have the impact of a Koch or Mercer.
The problem wasn't really the bad debt. The problem was one of confidence, and putting the money into the banks restored that confidence.
As repugnant as it seemed, and still seems, to give that money to the bankers that created the problems, it was likely the right move at the time. We'll never really know since we can't go back and try the other way, but things were grinding to a halt, and putting money in people's hands was it going to move things quickly enough.
>The problem wasn't really the bad debt. No, it was a problem of bad debt, poorly managed securities specifically MBS lead to a Ponzi like situation that should have been allowed to wind down instead of propped up. Lenders should have bit the bullet and lessons should have been learned. The political fallout from the decision to put off the the inevitable are only starting to become manifest in current politics.
I live in Canada where atypical interest rates as a result of lockstep CB policy with the US has completely distorted our real estate market. The result is going to be a lost generation that lives at home for a decade longer than their parents. This is all the result of fiscal policy trying to hold up the remains of the 2008 crisis instead of raising the problem to ground and starting again with a more humbled outlook. The Piper will be paid, it's just a matter of when, and who will be paying.
Rolling back copyright is not exactly a great rallying cry for a politician. Out of all of the things that most young voters care about, that’s not on the top of their list.
The pirate party wouldn't stand a chance in the US IMO.
People just pirate instead of making a political statement out of it. Sometimes they justify it in terms of how they're broke anyways, or support creators in other ways, or in terms of how ridiculous copyright law has gotten... but none of it really rises to the level of a significant political movement. Maybe it's the usually toothless enforcement, or the general lack of will to sue 5 year olds for millions over singing happy birthday, or just enough settlement NDAs to hide the lawsuits under the rug, but I guess it just isn't seen as much of a political issue.
I suspect it's seen as a theoretical problem more than a practical one. When specific instances of draconian abuse of IP law do rise to being a visible practical problem (company vs company doesn't count), eventually enough political pressure mounts that one of the parties might fix it. But there are "bigger" issues, so it's usually pretty quiet, with neither party having clean enough hands to score any easy points, so they just settle for not kicking any more puppies.
While copyright reform gets little traction, mucking with the ability to pirate will stir up enough of a hornets nest to actually be a political issue (cough Net neutrality cough), which is currently generally "fixed" by the more regulation-happy Democrats than the business-friendly Republicans.
Exactly the point. Why is that? In Europe they exist.
While the US has only two major parties, these parties are unusually flexible and can accomodate major shifts: the Reagan revolution, "third way" Bill Clinton, Trump... The intra-group conflicts do get played out in the primaries.
I could imagine someone like Trump, but smarter, doing it. Big tech and big content are aligned with the Democrats. So why should the Republicans care about pissing them off?
By comparison, the majority of the other top ten most populous countries in the world are notoriously right of typical Western. (A crude measure, granted.)
...
"Those on the Left often called themselves "republicans", while those on the Right often called themselves "conservatives"."
...
"The use of the words Left and Right spread from France to other countries and came to be applied to a large number of political parties worldwide, which often differed in their political beliefs"
...
"The right is always the party sector associated with the interests of the upper or dominant classes, the left the sector expressive of the lower economic or social classes, and the centre that of the middle classes. Historically this criterion seems acceptable."
...
"The differences between left and right have altered over time. The initial cleavage at the time of the French Revolution was between supporters of absolute monarchy (the Right) and those who wished to limit the king's authority (the Left). During the 19th century, the cleavage was between monarchists and republicans. Following the establishment of the Third Republic in 1871, the cleavage was between supporters of a strong executive on the Right and supporters of the primacy of the legislature on the Left"
...
"The terms left-wing and right-wing are widely used in the United States, but as on the global level there is no firm consensus about their meaning."
...
"Some political scientists have suggested that the classifications of "left" and "right" are no longer meaningful in the modern complex world"
...
"In 2006, British Prime Minister Tony Blair described the main cleavage in politics as not left versus right, but open versus closed.[54] In this model, attitudes towards social issues and globalism are more important than the conventional economic left–right issues: "open" voters tend to be socially liberal, multicultural and in favour of globalism, while "closed" voters are culturally conservative, opposed to immigration and in favour of protectionism. This model has seen increased support following the rise of populist and centrist parties in the 2010s."
-- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Left–right_political_spectru...
From other hand, deep frustration with such situation leads to the populism we see around us.
Mostly "left wing" and "right wing" exist now just to serve as pejoratives to refer to people in "the other camp" relative to whichever label an individual has chosen to identify with.
A simple one-dimensional model like "left <-> right" cannot adequately represent the varieties of political thought in existence.
I believe the same with the terms 'liberal' and 'conservative', and I've been interested in writing a blog to explain myself. Essentially, everyone is both liberal and conservative. Every day we make decisions that stereotypically fit both of these labels, yet we entirely ignore it.
If a "conservative" is someone who conserves product and tradition and resists change, then wouldn't a a hippy protecting a forest from bulldozing be a conservative? Portland OR is going through growing pains right now because the locals (majority self proclaim as 'liberals') are being kicked out due to high rent. Wouldn't resisting this change be a conservative move?
If an overweight 'conservative' buys a pallet of soda because Walmart has a bulk sale, are they liberal because they're buying a lot, or conservative because they're getting a slight discount thus saving money? If neither political parties (D/R) want to actually reduce our debt, aren't they both 'liberal'?
[Edit: and if defining a person as (l/c) simply means they live a life that's more than half one or the other, then that will beg the question: how do you even begin to quantify this crap? Simply put... You can't. Use better words.]
My point is that these terms don't make as much sense as we like to think they do. We need to start using better and more descriptive terms to describe our politics.
I also take issue with framing this as entitlement, since copyright only exists due to the idea that content producers are 'entitled' to restriction on what they release to the public. I'd also argue that all members of society should have some entitlement to re-use and re-mix the social product. This isn't such a popular idea in late hyper-commodification, but I think it's an important one nevertheless, just as the creators of the material felt entitled to use society's abstract product (ideas and support) maybe it's right for me to feel entitled to use their abstract product - the idea of Mickey Mouse and Batman.
Well, maybe actually saying they'll fix copyright laws, throw large corporations to the curb and actively fighting to reduce the term to a reasonable length may help with that. Show they're not corporate shills, and do something that younger people may actually support them with.
Is that enough on its own? Hell no, there are tons of things these parties need to do to win trust back. But it would be a great rallying point for them, and get a decent amount of support from internet folks and younger people.