Neither party might go as far as you want, but it is also a mistake to think both parties are completely identical in their views of this sort of behavior.

How could two organizations of thousands of people ever be completely 100% identical, and why does that matter at all if neither party has rolled back these massively unpopular policies, even when controlling both houses of Congress and the executive?

Massively unpopular? I doubt most people are aware of them, and many would be in favor for protecting us from terrorism/drugs.

Yes, massively unpopular. Pew research found that 66% of americans opposed government data collection.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa...

We do have to keep context in mind. If you ask a question in general about data collection, will you get different answers than if you asked specifically about collecting data at the border?

What are you basing this on?

It was a question and not a statement so I don't need to base it on anything beyond knowing that how you ask a question in a survey is incredibly influential on the response you get.

I would guess that "Do you oppose government data collection?" would get different answers than "Would you support government data collection at the border in order to try to curtail illegal immigration and terrorism?" which is how this administration will likely defend this.

Sure, but you have no basis for assuming that people would buy that crap, yet you're implying there is evidence they would.

> yet you're implying there is evidence they would

My first comment on the issue was a question and my second one was prefixed with "I would guess...". I don't know how you can read either of those comments and assume that I am stating anything definitive.

It may not be your intention, but the tone of your comments is very aggressive. Further, your sarcasm is off-putting. I understand this is a hot-button issue, so maybe take a breather.

I stated a simple question asking if the linked survey was too general to definitively indicate how the public would feel about this specific issue. I then followed up with a guess about public opinion that was clearly labeled a guess. I honestly don't understand what prompted the hostile tone of your comments, but I apologize if my comments offended you in some way.

Could some questions really be arguments?

His question adds more than you carping about his question does...

Game theory. If people vote for the party promising policies closest to (using whatever metric) their ideals, and there are only two parties, optimal strategy for each party is to move as close to the center as possible.

They wouldn’t lose voters with ‘extreme’ ideals because, if they decided to not vote, parties would counteract by moving towards the new center, which would be further removed from the ideals of those voters abstaining from voting.

How do you square that with the rise of the Tea Party and the Alt-Right? It seems like they've found that they can motivate people to vote by moving _further_ from the center, and the moderates continue to vote the party line of whichever party they prefer.

Alt-right or the tea party would lose an election against a center-line party, big time.

Motivating people with ‘extreme’ opinions from one side of the spectrum to vote moves the center, so it can make both parties move in that direction.

Let’s (in a very simplistic model) say we have 100 voters on a 1 to 100 scale, so centered around 50.5.

If, normally, the extremes of 1 to 10 and 91 to 100 don’t vote, the center stays at 50.5. Convince the 1 to 10 people to vote, and the center moves to 45.5, so the two major parties move in that direction, too.

There’s an assumption here that most politicians are willing to, somewhat, go against their beliefs in order to get elected. I think that’s true, and unavoidable in a two-party system (which, in turn, is hard to avoid in a system with “winner takes all” elections), but if it weren’t, parties can easily replace candidates that object to a course change with others that either have different ideals or are willing to sacrifice some of that a bit in exchange for their career.

> so it can make both parties move in that direction.

This is the opposite of what we’re seeing on the right. Centrist republicans have been pushed out of the party for not being conservative enough over the last 4 years, and primary candidates go out of their way to outdo each other in terms of conservative positioning.

Nobody seriously running on the right is trying to be a moderate Republican on the federal level because being a “RINO” is political suicide.

The opposite of your view is what is happening for both parties. It's laughable to look at Republicans and think they are moving to the middle. The democrats have partly moved to the middle (Biden being a great example). But in primaries, which have the most energized voters on both parties tend to get less people in the middle. In practice, in reality, it doesn't work that way. Also gerrymandering tends to make districts even more polarized.

I am afraid your argument is not supported by the facts in all cases. https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/08/11/marjorie-...

66% of americans oppose government data collection. Obviously neither party is anywhere near the ‘middle’ and other political forces are driving what legislation gets passed.

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa....

> Game theory. If people vote for the party promising policies closest to (using whatever metric) their ideals, and there are only two parties, optimal strategy for each party is to move as close to the center as possible.

This theory requires either ignoring that voters may have a threshold at which they become disaffected or ignoring that political opinion may not be unimodal; if you consider both of those factors, that strategy ceases to be dominant.

In the real world, voters can become disaffected and abstain, and political opinion is often not unimodal (in the US it's closer to bimodal.)

What you describe is not what happened. Look at republicans who ended up with Trump and the base was pretty happy to move far away from the middle, demonizing black people and other minorities. This move from the middle energized a large part of the population in the us.

Primaries in gerrymandered districts weed out moderate candidates. Their goal is to win the majority in their district or state, so they can sometimes ignore all other parties.

They are not 100% identical, but they do agree on a huge number (a majority?) of important political issues, particularly in defense, foreign policy and economics, and make a big show of arguing over the other topics in order to try to differentiate themselves.

Not a US-citicien - enlighten me please. To me I don't see any difference when it comes to spying on foreigners.

Doesn't really matter if their vectors still point to the same general direction...

One wants it massively expanded. The other is ambivalent on if it should be fixed. They are not the same.

Wait, which is which?

Who controlled the executive at the time of the Snowden revelations? Remind me.

Perhaps you mean one is more open about their common policy goals than the other? That may be true, but it's cold comfort.

Did I claim they were the same? The result is the same in either case anyway. Power is a one-way ratchet.

While I understand the frustration please don't make false generalizations like this. There are several people with a consistent track record of pushing back on this stuff, like Wyden.

One senator on the left wing of his party who has been persistently unsuccessful across several administrations of both parties.

You are making my point for me.

This is one of the biggest problems with modern Western democracies - there are some thing (a lot of things) that governments do to work against their citizens that voting simply will not change. It feels so futile...

This is an example of why we need more viable political parties. Which is why we need a better voting system (ranked choice, approval, etc) so that other parties can become viable and start influencing politics. Of course neither of the two dominant parties want their power reduced in this way.

In the UK we have a few more political parties, but still only 2 dominate. Those 2 parties do actually differ on something: Labour wants to borrow and spend, the Conservatives want to be fiscally responsible. Aside from that though, things like foreign policy, defence spending, mass surveilance etc, are all the same - doesn't matter who you vote for.

Ballot measures are one way you take this on. You make it explicitly illegal for companies to have over data on users from your state unless a warrant is produced. This won't stop entities from tapping fiber or attacking companies and stealing data, but it does stop companies from just handing stuff over voluntarily.

We just have to keep increasing the visibility of this issue. Don't give up, I'm not giving up. I don't expect Biden to change this unless there is a very very large groundswell of people complaining. AOC and Sanders seem like people that could understand the reason why this is bad behavior.

I'm from the UK, so don't have the best optics on US politics, but Biden strikes me as quite conservative, probably leaning middle-right. I would guess that Biden would be "more of the same" as pre-Trump - probably a welcome relief after the madness of Trump, but many will not welcome a return to the status quo.

That sounds about right. We'll have to see how much pull the more liberal dems have on him, the impact of AOC/Warren/Harris especially. The republicans are saying Harris is more liberal than the whole senate, but I don't see that. Time will tell. Warren was who I wanted.

The (distant) third largest party behind the other two, the U.S. Libertarian Party, certainly would curtail this kind of overreach.