As described in the article, the political bias is intentional. It is the result of (not-so-transparent) ethical guard rails baked into the system.
I feel like that plays into conservative hands of "they're trying to silence us!"
Why do 70,000,000 people vote (R) every year, knowing that the other 70,000,000 (D) think they are "unethical"?
Why do people vote if they have different values? What kind of question is that?
Why aren't (R)s able to see and respect (and convert) to values of (D) (or vice versa?)
Why are people so stuck in their ways? Why does it feel the conversion rate for convincing people to "change their values" or "see things differently" is basically 0?
Do we have any stats on whether we really are in one of the most divisive political periods in our nation's history (or history in general) or not? Is it hyperbole fed to us by the media?
Where is this going to end/lead to?
The parties choose the policies they peddle based loosely on principal and tightly on the voting blocks they think they will gain/lose them.
>Why are people so stuck in their ways? Why does it feel the conversion rate for convincing people to "change their values" or "see things differently" is basically 0?
Because politics in secular western societies has supplanted religion in some ways (it's very much not a like for like replacement) and people don't just change religions.
Therefore, how much longer will our nation be "held back" (debatable) by people whose values + beliefs conflict themselves/defy logic/date back to what feels like its found or prior?
Not trying to start a flame war or a "pick a side" war, just genuinely curious what legitimate conversations are going on about this topic/its weight.
I think the most interesting and legitimate conversations in this space are those where people genuinely try to understand what others want, and seek out areas where they agree and have common ground.
This is difficult
It is a dynamic system which self corrects.
If one party loses to many voters, it corrects it's policy to bring it back to the middle.
Wait no, that's exactly what they didn't do. They went on fox, yelled that these new kids were dumb and woke and don't know how the world works (that's sure ironic) and yelled that the voting age should be raised.
I didn't say anything about age, and I didnt say anything about center on social issues. Im talking about the middle of a vote divide.
The fact stands that senate votes were 39,876,285 to 39,802,675.
This 0.18% difference in turnout is amazingly close to 50/50.
The Median Voter Theorem does predict that they'd reach for the most conservative centrists, but that's an overly naive model for the short term. It may well work in the long term, but in the short term they can try to get higher voter turnout among people who are nominally their supporters anyway -- a thing not modeled in the math of the Median Voter Theorem.
Actually, they did - if you go back and look at the 2008 and 2012 election cycles, the Republicans ran incredibly moderate candidates (honestly, Bush was pretty moderate himself). It wasn't until that approach kept failing they finally went back to their roots (kind of, sort of, because Trump wasn't really all that right wing, but he did oppose illegal immigration).
Neither the McCain/Palin nor Romney/Ryan tickets were “incredibly moderate” by comparison to past Republicans; by comparison to the 2016 and later party, sure.
> It wasn't until that approach kept failing they finally went back to their roots
While appeal to nativism and White Supremacy has been part of Republican campaigns for 5 decades (including 2008-2012), and focus on non-race culture war issues has been for a 3 decades (also including 2008-2012), the former u has largely been coded until recently, and the latter has never had the kind of vicious legislatige agenda attached as you see now. The Republican Party of the last few years isn't a “return” to anything of its past. Neither is the naked nepotism and disregard for domestic democratic institutions.
Because it happens slowly so it's hard to spot. But there are lots of cases where this does happen, albeit almost always people moving from left to right.
Recent case in point: Elon Musk. Now a hated figure by the left, only a few years ago he was firmly in the OpenAI style left-liberal camp (utopian tech, climate change, solutions-over-tradeoffs etc). He's now firmly on the right and sticking up for classical western values like freedom of speech, freedom of association and so on.
If you asked him he'd say he hasn't changed, the values of the left have changed. To what extent that's the case is left as an exercise for the reader.
It's almost as if you can summarize the entire thing as "what you believe is based on where you were raised", and as a message board of "intellectuals/thinkers/tinkerers" who are collectively aware just how much can be learned/how much information is out there (online, talking about HackerNews), it seems weird that this is like... "accepted" at a national scale.
Not that we have any control of it. It's just weird...
Not as much as popular media pretends, the illusion of this is true is mostly an artifact of the electoral system.
> and beyond that there are regions that attract a given kind of politics (landlocked vs coastal regions).
Again, not really, though there is a bit of a second order effect; the divide is more urban/rural, and, again, is exaggerated in popular perception largely because of FPTP voting and other political structutres which artificially magnify even slight local dominance (e.g., local governments with vote N of M with N winners super-FPTP bodies, which give local aligned bare pluralities 100% control of a multiseat body, aren’t unheard of.)
Short version as I see it: We need more political parties. To facilitate that, we need to change our voting mechanism from plurality(first past the post) to something like ranked choice, approval, etc.
This eliminates the spoiler effect. The spoiler effect and "choose only one candidate", in short, is what forces us into a two party system.
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If we had more parties, we could organize into a larger set of parties with a better mixture of policy priorities and values. We currently tend to bundle ourselves to whichever party currently owns our "must have" issue, whether it be guns, abortion, LGBT rights, or 'scope of government'. There is no reason "gun rights" and "respect for LGBT existence" have to be in opposite parties. There is no reason "social conservative/anti-LGBT" and "environmentalist" have to be in opposite parties.
We would have a lot more compromise and majority building on popular issues if interests could be more accurately represented by nuanced parties.
It's the late stage of a first-past-the-post electoral system. Because FPTP is winner takes all voters cannot make a decision based on their political beliefs, they HAVE to vote tactically to make a vote count. Extreme external factors aside, the system itself is destined to create only two parties with any chance of gaining to power.
FPTP is of a time when local politics mattered far more as people traveled less and knew less about issues outside their local area. What a politician could do for your local town/state was of more importance than what was playing out at the national level.
Now people want to see their their own individual beliefs represented in the federal government because since the internet supercharged communication everything seems like it plays out at a national level.
Two parties cannot represent everyone, but voters are forced into this choice.
Unless you can think of an actual ethical reason that gay marriage should be banned?
Registered republican voters support gay marriage by a significant margin, according to recent polls.
For the sake of steelmanning: do you see the ~30 countries around the world that have legalized gay marriage as being more advanced than the rest, or as merely having different customs and cultural values that aren't translatable?
No, that's why it was so ridiculous. There was a lot of absurd hysteria that didn't make any sense, yet a lot of conservatives argued very fervently that gay marriage is wrong and legalizing it would be a mistake.
The two main arguments I recall are that it would ruin traditional marriages (despite hearing this a lot, I never heard how it would actually happen) and that it was a slippery slope. The slippery slope arguments were usually along the lines of claiming this would lead to men marrying one animal or another.
Nobody ever hears these arguments now because none of the absurd predictions had any validity and everyone can plainly see that since gay marriage has been legalized.
He knows this is a trap.
They also typically claim something like "I'm just voting for gun rights" or other very specific carve outs, but if you press them on other things they usually seem perfectly happy to tell you that they think the world is woke and that we need a strongman and all sorts of classic conservative talking points.
Another reason is the religious angle. Millions of americans are enthusiastically, extremely christian, at least as claimed. This includes things like denying that evolution happens, denying the world is more than 6000 years old, sometimes denying that jesus was a white man!, denying that the US is not a christian theocracy, often denying that the new testament supersedes the old testament, sometimes denying women individual rights as free and equal people in society, etc etc etc. Look up the numbers of people who believe in these things.
> They seem to deny that a government can do anything
Counterpoint: government share of the economy should be as small as practicable, and decisions should be left to as low a level of government as practicable. Much fewer things should be decided at the federal level and it's better to let the private sector handle things.
> deny that racism is still a problem affecting millions of americans every day
Counterpoint: one can acknowledge the racist history of the country while rejecting the race essentialism that modern-day liberals see as the right way forward.
> deny that healthcare should be a basic human right
Counterpoint: basic human rights should be negative rights only (the right to prevent the government from doing something to you) and not positive rights (the right to have the government do something for you). The latter always infringes upon the former, but the reverse is not true. There's no way around the fact that healthcare is a resource that requires people to work to produce; you can't just legislate "more healthcare" without having people perform that work one way or another.
> deny that free markets inevitably centralize power structures and create monopolies
Counterpoint: most every monopoly you find will have the power of the state behind it. There's no evidence to suggest that a monopoly in any industry would remain so indefinitely, even if government did not break it up.
> deny that average americans are broadly underpaid
Counterpoint: in order to claim that someone is underpaid you must equally claim to know what the real value of that person's labor is. How do you know that someone is underpaid?
> deny that authority figures they like should face justice
Counterpoint: historical evidence makes it clear that politicizing justice is detrimental to the smooth transition of power, because each successive party in power, wary of recriminations from the other side, will be progressively more incentivized to hold on to it. This is why Ford pardoned Nixon. And since I'm sure you're referring to Donald Trump: he has had more legal scrutiny than any other individual on the planet in the past few years, and I'm sure many (R) voters would come around to seeing him face justice if anything substantial backed by evidence comes up, which hasn't happened yet.
1. Rich assholes who want to become richer and don't care about people who aren't rich 2. Turbo-Christians 3. People who's economic interests are intertwined with industries republicans protect, like oil/gas 4. Culture warriors
There are also a lot of people who aren't any of those things, and aren't really invested in the Republican party, but who vote Republican because they're part of communities where that is basically expected, and they're good little sheeple.
The first three groups pretty much just in the wrong, and they deserve to lose. The culture warriors aren't exactly wrong, though they exaggerate quite a bit. Of course, if the democratic party got off the woke/identity politics train and went back to being the party of the working man it would solve a lot of problems.