Our Political System Is Hostile to Real Reform
dissentmagazine.org
dissentmagazine.org
[1] https://www.people-press.org/2017/10/05/8-partisan-animosity...
It was around 2002 that there was sufficient political atmosphere for McCain to gather the support of nearly all Democrats and 11 GOP allies for the bare minimum of 60 votes to beat a GOP filibuster.
The bill had restrictions on: (1) soft money, or money meant to promote issues or parties, (2) hard money, or money meant for specific campaigns or candidates, (3) advertising in proximity to an election, and (4) foreign contributions.
President George Bush declined to take a stance and signed the bill into law without comment.
It was challenged by Citizens United, a conservative non-profit, challenging whether they could be restricted from airing political ads near the election date, and it was overturned 5-4 by the US Supreme Court conservative majority along known party lines.
All parties have their failings, but it would be a mistake to think that a vote for either party is equally meaningless with regards to campaign finance. In the GOP, it's only McCain and a scant few allies who paid for this issue. The Democrats as a whole spent severe political energy and opportunity on campaign reform, while McCain spent his own political currency against the energetic opposition of his own party.
PS - Buckley v. Valeo made it clear that a regular weak-sauce bill wouldn't do.
That McCain’s legacy withered so soon after suggests the inadequacy of his reach, not that a vote for the GOP, which worked so tirelessly to filibuster McCain, is the same as a vote cast for Democrats. It was only until Enron and after his presidential run that McCain had the window to gain the bare minimum 60 votes to stop his own party from filibustering his bills to death.
And now we hear that the GOP are the same as the Democrats on campaign finance reform. Okay.
I'm a Democrat, but it's only because I'm a leftist and in the US, the Democratic party is "the left" and voting for any other party under the current system would only be implicitly supporting the party I disagree with more than my own.
Unfortunately decades of NRA and Republican propaganda have taught gun owners that no Democrat or liberal owns a gun or supports the Second Amendment.
If we look at current response of the various governments, it looks like they effectively decided to increase the already high level of income inequality even further.
It seems system is unwilling to revise itself at all, which will keep making various socioeconomic issues worse in the long run.
I guess one good thing is that current system keeps getting less and less stable with each crisis, so sooner or later it will collapse for real, once that happens I hope humans will be able to come together and build something better.
Here is just one topical example of how this kind of consolidation over the past decade has hurt us. And this program is more than five times the size of the 2008 program: Ventilator company Covidien acquired Newport to prevent it from building a cheaper product that would undermine Covidien’s profits from its existing ventilator business. [1]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/29/business/coronavirus-us-v...
This is very bad for America and - (I know politics is frowned on hut this is the real world and this is a political problem we are discussing) - and if anyone thinks the Democrats are not equally to blame you need to look again, they could have stripped this program from the House bill and passed it without and forced the Republicans in the Senate to either show their hand that they’re holding Americans hostage for this or force them to blink first. But they refused to do that, IMO because they're clearly aligned on giving $4T to large business. If you disagree with that please explain what prevented them doing that. I would like to know.
But when you have truly enormous amounts of money and power at stake and a system that has settled into a certain posture that has concentrated those resources into certain hands...of course it would be very hostile to any change.
As the article states it takes shocks to bring about significant changes and hopefully we can move things forward some as a result of the current situation.
Systems continue to exist, but most of them also change in various aspects - some superficial, some fundamental. Republican Rome was quite different from what Imperial Rome ended up being; the US of the 1800s is very different from the US of today.
I'm of the opinion that high voter participation is critically important because if you're not voting, you're not being represented, and if you're not being represented, those who are will benefit (likely) at your expense. In the U.S. however, people are understandably unenthusiastic about voting, because it almost doesn't matter.
Imagine what would have happened in 2016 if we had ranked choice voting and Bernie ran as an independent. Many on the left would have been energized to actually vote because they could vote for the candidate they actually wanted (Bernie), but would have been able to say "well if Bernie doesn't win, I guess Hillary is better than Trump". Bernie wouldn't have won, but neither would Trump. More importantly, though, those that supported Bernie would have been represented. You could point to the actual election results and see that X% of voters supported Bernie's ideas above the other candidates'.
The problem with the U.S. is that we don't get to vote for the best candidate, we get to vote for the least worst.
And don't get me started on the over-representation of low population states in the senate and electoral college.
Let's not even talk about the Senate where 500k people get the same amount of votes as 50 million. Yes, the founding fathers goal to not let rural areas be unrepresented was achieved at the expense of making the most populous areas underrepresented. So now instead of majority rule dominating minorities, minority rule dominates the majority. Brilliant! What could possibly go wrong? /s
In terms of the electoral college, perhaps something similar could be done. Not sure how though.
The things you probably find crazy: Gun ownership, owning trucks, large houses, etc. we find essential.
It's a big country, with different needs for different people. The day we trash the electoral college is the day we destroy America.
Of these, only gun ownership even has remote relevance to Federal politics, and none of them are actually essential, or even exclusive to rural residents to begin with.
This is why the electoral college is so very important. Without it, politicians would quickly shift even more focus to populous areas, to the detriment of the rest of the country.
I mean, the two party process gave you a choice between a millionaire from New York with at least a tenuous cultural connection to rural America, and a billionaire from New York with none, and judging from your former comments, you seem to have voted for the billionaire, and then the electoral college decided whether or not your vote mattered, and chose Kang over Kodos on your behalf. Luckily for you, your state agreed with your vote. But if you happen to be of the wrong party in some states, thanks to the electoral college, your vote simply ceases to matter.
I don't think the electoral college is giving you the leverage against urban cultural power you seem to think it does.
This is a crazy over-reaction.
The electoral college is a stupid mistake of history, that doesn't do anything positive but does undermine faith in our political system by making the loser win occasionally.
Getting rid of it won't do anything but increase stability a bit
The real power centers, the banking, corporate and foreign-policy elites, are content to govern the empire indirectly, and keep us all fighting with one another over things like pronouns, so long as wages are ruthlessly suppressed.
It will keep going. Until it stops.