And a lot are totally clueless and just have no idea of what's going on.
There's a lot of propaganda, poor education and lack of information in the US. Just watch a presidential debate, it's a joke.
Every american is given a voice, to vote for the best party, the best candidate, based on what they know and believe. Voting is anonymous. You dont have to tell anyone what you voted for. Vote for a third party, or for whatever you think is best.
But don't ever vote out of habit.
The reality is Democrats and Republicans are about 6 inches apart on every single major issue. Compare the platforms of the "left" and "right" here to other major democracies worldwide, and you'll see.
Things are a little different with the current administration, but even that, the concrete policy and substance issues aren't all that far apart.
- Neither side supports socialized medicine.
- Neither side supports free or cheap college or doing anything about student debt.
- Neither side supports decriminalization or legalization of narcotics.
- Neither side is interested in reducing defense spending.
- Neither side is interested in immigration reform (as evidenced by the Obama administration having, for a long time, controlled both houses and the presidency and changing literally nothing).
- Neither side is interested in reforming the intelligence services or closing GITMO -- remember that?
- Neither side is interested in prison reform or policing reform. Police in America kill 10X as many people per capita as Canadian police kill. The only leader to actually implement any form of prison reform in decades was Donald Trump, credit where due. And that's likely only because he's not really a Democrat or a Republican.
- Both sides persecuted and prosecuted Asange and Snowden.
Really, what are the major points of policy differentiation? A 2% tax hike on the wealthy?
In an autocracy, it's murkier.
You were definitely right to call me out on that.
It reminds me of the 'literacy tests' given to black voters, back in the Jim Crow era. We're doing this to help them participate in our democracy, the racists would say. But the reality was in fact the complete opposite.
The structure of the political system itself matters too - for example, this concentration of so much power into a single person, that the US and other countries have with the presidential model, gives them some very autocratic attributes as well.
I do think your claim about citizens in a democracy ultimately being responsible for the actions of their government is a bit much though, or at least not very useful. individual voters may have opposed the victor in the election, or they may have grudgingly voted them in to avoid an even worse candidate.
If we ever fix our government to add more democracy or operate more on the opinions of the citizens then I might feel connected to what my government does but as it stands now there's very little connection between me and others around me and the government that takes actions on the world stage.
I'm not arguing the city would be better off with more republicans in office, but it's a good example to show how even affluent people can be totally disenfranchised in a political system. no matter how effectively these people mobilize, they will never win an election, even at the most local level, in the foreseeable future.
Has the nice property of being well-nigh incorruptible, cheap to implement, and perfectly representative of the population interested in serving.
I also like the fact that it provides direct agency as a “voter” (volunteer to serve), rather than indirect agency (vote for a volunteer).
America is a Representative Democracy. we vote, but we are powerless to change what our Representatives do on our behalf.
by the way, this is really where the root idea of a "Deep State" existing comes from. We vote for Obama to close Gitmo, then he doesn't do it and we never know why. We never voted for illegal NSA domestic mass surveillance, yet here we are and it's normalized. We never voted for CIA renditions, black sites, torture and political assassinations, yet here we are. We never voted for the Federal Reserve to give trillions of dollars to the richest megabillionaires to park that wealth in real estate and price ordinary people out of affordable housing, yet here we are.
it's no longer a crazy conspiracy theory to look at the catastrophic effects of FedGov and how nothing ever improves and conclude the reason is because the govt we think we have is not really in control, but rather a secret State-Within-a-State is in control. a Shadow Govt, a permanent class of faceless bureaucrats wearing dark suits who operate the machinery of Govt and who flaunt the efforts of our elected Representatives and who ignore the will of the voters.
if there ever was an entity that called for extravagent levels of hyperviolence unseen in history to overthrow it, the Deep State is that entity.
GITMO never closed because the US didn't find countries super willing to take in the detainees, and felt it would be "too distasteful" to let them stay in the US proper. Not a good case for violating human rights law, IMO, but to quote POTUS "it is what it is."
1993, 1994, 1995, Clinton was President and the House and Senate were both Democratic. Clinton's big immigration reform bill was the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996. It's purpose was to "[strengthen] the rule of law by cracking down on illegal immigration at the border, in the workplace, and in the criminal justice system — without punishing those living in the United States legally."
Clinton created the mass-deportation machine in use today. Clinton's bill made it harder to immigrate to the US. Clinton created the 3-year and 10-year re-entry bars that continue to separate loved ones to this day. If an unlawful resident marries a US citizen, they're entitled to a green card but they can't apply for it from within the US but as the minute they leave they get a 10-year re-entry bar.
The last guy to grant amnesty to the undocumented was Reagan in 1986, and he was, last I checked, a Republican.
At some point you've gotta stop blaming the other guy.
Democrats are not the party of immigration, legal or illegal.
Obama was not as much of a centrist but he was obstructed heavily by the opposition.
I'll continue to blame the people who vote 90% in one direction over the ones who vote 90% the other lol.
Edit: you added some specific comments about immigration. This is correct, Democrats are not very pro-immigration. They are more pro-immigration than the GOP, e.g. DACA order vs. DACA repeal, but the two parties are pretty close on immigration. There is a much bigger gap on issues like healthcare.
"Instead of starting from scratch and getting rid of private insurance, he has a plan to build on the Affordable Care Act by giving Americans more choice, reducing health care costs, and making our health care system less complex to navigate." This is a quote from the Biden campaign site.
As though letting anyone enroll in Medicare is "starting from scratch."
Compared to the Trump plan on healthcare which roughly amounts to: "Leave the Affordable Care Act in place because there really is no other option that anyone can come up with."
So, the Democratic plan is to leave private insurers be, so long as they cover pre-existing conditions. Which is the Republican plan. The difference is one is framed positively and the other negatively? Bumping up vs ignoring Medicare and Medicaid financing? Maybe? Even that's not clear from the Biden site.
The issue is the system is broken entirely, and both sides plan to move the deck chairs around -- one six inches to the left, and one six inches to the right. This was equally true of DACA. Leaving people in a perpetual state of deferred action parole via executive order is not a solution to anything.
A good half the county would strongly disagree with what you feel - and that they’ve blocked those from passing isn’t proof that the system is failing, it’s proof it’s working. Obama got his healthcare plan. Every president usually gets maybe one or two bigger things they want, not all. It’s a sign that it’s working. Remember, you’re in a democracy, and about half of the people don’t agree with DACA, increased immigration, single payer...
There are clear and obvious differences in how the party operates and which side is on team Science for instance, but the core policy issues just aren’t all that different.
Now you could say neocons and neolibs did dominate for a while, and yea that has some truth. But it’s not so true today.
The two party system is really interesting because within each party you really do have diversity, and then they all compromise with each other. The dems are doing that this year. They have to do that, or else they lose their electorate. The parties move around constantly. Ron Paul moved the needle. Al Gore brought forward environmentalism. The Liberals have changed wildly over the last 30 years from being more middle/low class focused to being the party of the rich, of tech, and shifting towards focusing on minorities. That they were more aligned for a bit doesn’t prove anything.
Look at how Trump is remaking the right. It’s been fascinating and he’s done a sort of garbage cleaning on their platform.
Look at how Bernie’s success has radically pushed the left.
"Extreme socialist" would be arguing that the state should own the means of production. Until AOC starts arguing for nationalizing Google as a means of making core internet infrastructure public, for instance, I wouldn't worry about the "extreme socialists."
Ok, four major leftward shifts the party is embracing, could easily name more. Can you name some things we’ve moved right on?
Tell me Bernie didn’t win a significant portion of the vote and all the early primaries twice now? Joe Biden doesn’t support universal healthcare and very high taxes including a huge raise on capital gains, he doesn’t have a running mate who calls for reparations? He hasn’t totally changed on policing? Elizabeth Warren is suddenly a minor player in the party when her and Bernie combined had a significant chunk of the debate time and raise as much money as anyone? When it’s convenient for your argument you suddenly claim they are minor, when they aren’t.
And yes all those positions are a big move left for American politics.
And I’m just sticking with the economic issues, socially we’ve moved much further left.
The general position that we’ve moved right is laughable, I’m still waiting on examples.
Also, the two parties have conspired to put in all kinds of barriers, at the state and local level, to make it difficult to unseat their primacy.
But to say they just aren't all that different, ignoring the effect of consistency over time, is like suggesting the pressure differential above and below an airfoil isn't that different. It is true, but it's not a complete answer either.
"There is only one party in the United States, the Property Party … and it has two right wings: Republican and Democrat. Republicans are a bit stupider, more rigid, more doctrinaire in their laissez-faire capitalism than the Democrats, who are cuter, prettier, a bit more corrupt — until recently … and more willing than the Republicans to make small adjustments when the poor, the black, the anti-imperialists get out of hand. But, essentially, there is no difference between the two parties."I guess it would probably be something similar to Noam Chomsky, who is voting Democrat this year because the policy differences are so stark.
start here on page 19 of Chomsky's book he wrote in 1979.
https://libcom.org/history/chomsky-pol-pots-genocidal-regime...
Chomsky was dead wrong about his heirarchy of languages and he set back computing by 50 years. He has also been wrong about geopolitics, since he ends up supporting the very Western Imperialism that he rails against.
No opinion on Chomsky's politics. But that quote definitely needs some substantiation.
Personally, I don't see how anyone, has managed to set back computing by 50 years.
But the three grammar classes were correct, and are still in use. They were later found to match work done 2500 years ago, in India.
Being wrong in science, particularly biology, is not a crime, nor, usually, even a shame.
These kinds of stats are so dishonest. Police in America are subject to 10x more violence per capita as Canadians.
Citation needed.
Especially as studies show that increasing militarization of the police force leads to more civilian deaths [1], and the trend towards militarization has been stark and pronounced in the US. [2] The issue is really that the US uses police as customer service for life and as front-line mental health treatment due to lack of proper socialized medicine. They are also trained to shoot first and ask questions later -- to treat everyone as a potential threat to their lives.
However, let's take what you say as fact. This points to a deep failure in society that needs to be addressed. People are products of their society, and if society is more violent in America then some serious introspection needs to be done. Looking at 10X per capita and shrugging it off as "well that's just America for you" is the problem.
[1] https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/usappblog/2018/07/05/evidence-sugges...
[2] https://fee.org/articles/the-militarization-of-americas-poli...