Comment by pyoung | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pyoung | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Except for the fact that I would describe myself as a moderate. I can empathize with the desire and need for sensible tax cuts and smaller government, but I can't support a platform that is incoherent and hypocritical.

EDIT: To add a little more substance. I think the incoherence stems from the fact that the current conservative alliance is formed from approximately 3 distinct groups, with different priorities. You have the religious folks who care about abortion, same-sex marriage, drug laws, etc... And then you have the blue collar group that cares more about immigration, guns, etc.. And then you have the pro-business group which mostly cares about taxes and deregulation. From the outside looking in, it shouldn't be surprising that it's hard to empathize with the 'conservative' world view, because the external manifestations of that worldview are often very contradictory (i.e. why would a group that supports small-government also support the drug war, etc...)

I would describe myself as liberal, even by the already relatively liberal standards of coastal California, but I'm not sure incoherence and hypocrisy are things only the Republican party is guilty of.

I see many of the same aspects of incoherence among Democrats and you don't exactly have to look for it in the hidden trenches of the Democratic party. I certainly don't think Sen. Feinstein's views on encryption are in line with those of an open progressive society.

I see the same hypocrisy in Democrats' views on gun control, and specifically the prohibition against convicted felons exercising their constitutional right to bear arms.

I'm generally of the opinion that the criminal justice system in the US is fundamentally broken and institutionally racist/discriminatory. Going by that premise, and seeing the specific hurdles that poor people, and specifically poor black men, face in terms of selective enforcement, likelihood of being offered pretrial plea bargains, chances of conviction, and length of sentencing, I find it hard to view any laws that hope to strip citizens of their rights based on a tainted justice system as anything other than racist. And yet, these laws are broadly supported by both Democrats and Republicans.

> I would describe myself as liberal, even by the already relatively liberal standards of coastal California, but I'm not sure incoherence and hypocrisy are things only the Republican party is guilty of.

An electoral system that can naturally support only two substantially competitive parties guarantees that parties that cannot maintain incoherence will also not be major parties. While the electoral system empirically does reduce the significant axes of variation of political vies in the population [1], it doesn't reduce it so far as to actually fit on the one-dimensional axis implied by a two-party system. So the major parties must be incoherent to be competitive.

[1] See, Arendt Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy for research on this.

It isn't "incoherent and hypocritical" but gets portrayed that way. Some of that is messaging as the GOP is not very media savvy, but by and large, its people who have no desire to understand before reporting.

[edit after the edit - please don't edit after someone has already replied - it makes the replier look bad]

From the outside, Democrats can be viewed as a bunch of special interests under one tent. I find much of these "group slicing" to be problematic when talking about the GOP as I don't think its really those groups or the ultimate belief is what is reported. Viewing a group through another group's lens is fraught with peril.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com