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Comment by pwarner | Hacker News Reader

I'm not following the details of this closely, but it sounds like he's a Democrat criticizing Democrats in SF for going to far left. Often these critiques from within the party are the best. There are lots of voices on the Republican side who see that party shifting too far right. I find those voices trying to pull to the center the most useful from both sides.

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we'd all do better a country (IMO) if we all were more willing to criticize our allies for failing our supposed shared values than for criticizing our opponents for failing the values we believe they should have.

This won't win elections, so it wont happen (easily at least).

Just a reminder that the world is infinitely complex and there's no "two sides". That American politics has been taken over by two political organizations is one of the greatest scams of all time

Truly I'm in awe of both the American republican party and the American democratic party.

I think Duverger's Law [1] is applicable here. The dominance of two primary parties is an emergent property of the rules for how candidates in the U.S. typically win elections ("plurality wins" as opposed to "majority wins"), not an ab initio "scam".

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

Indeed. And much like the TV show "Survivor", the factions continuously shift so that they remain balanced at nearly 50-50 over time. People who are in the majority but "at the bottom" jump to the other team, which re-balances the two parties.

A good example is how 30 years ago the Democratic party was solidly identified as the champion of the "little guy." But since then, the working class has felt abandoned by the Democratic party and now somehow they look to the GOP and Trump for help. It would have been inconceivable in the mid-80s that a state like West Virginia would become a Republican stronghold.

Yes, and who makes those rules? Neither the republicans or democrats are interested in changing it to a more democratic system.

"Changing it" woukd require a constitutional amendment, which is a near impossibly in today's landscape.

When the corrective mechanism is nearly impossible to invoke, it doesnt really matter who wants what.

In SF, we subdivide the partys in to groups (moderates and progressives), but even that is unacceptably simple.

E.g. I am a moderate on housing policy (except the finite resource of public open space), I am generally progressive on transportation policy (we need to dedicate at least 25% of streets explicitly to prioritize non-automobile traffic if we have any change at growing or even fighting climate change). I am moderate on public anti-social behavior (when you don't get punished for breaking into a random person's car, you suddenly create a pipeline to organized crime, we see by bippers dumping tourists luggage a block away after taking the items they can fence). I am a progressive on criminal justice reform (I am convinced by the data that our prisons are crimongenic, however, I think the focus should be on prison reform).

It's entirely plausible to have a nuanced view on all theses issues, but most people don't want to think too hard about things, and politics as team-sports is a much easier and instinctual concept when it comes to the principal-agent problem.

Republican politicians are significantly to the right of their constituents. Democratic politicians are also significantly to the right of their constituents. And the solution of mainstream Democrats appears to be... embracing the left wing of the Republican party, while rejecting the left wing of their own party, thus ceding significant power to the Republican party as a whole (the left wing of which happily goes along with the right wing's lunacy).

Is it good that we have to play "my team/your team" with politics? No, but it becomes a simple prisoner's dilemma. One team plays "always defect" and the other team... insists that not defecting is the right thing to do, and thus loses repeatedly.

I think the solution is simple: Democrats need to vote in Republican primaries and pull that party back closer to the center. Primaries are low-turnout affairs, so a Democratic bloc can put the scare in any nutso incumbent.

Unfortunately Democrats do the opposite. They interfere in Republican primaries to push that party further to the right and nominate the extreme candidates (the pied-piper strategy).

https://theweek.com/speed-reads/1015258/the-pied-piper-strat...

It's such an idiotic tactic. It completely undermines any legitimate concerns that the GOP has an extremism problem. If one truly believes those extremists are dangerous, then they should be defeated at any stage of the election process, not cynically advanced to a general election.

The smart example is crossover voters helping Georgia's Brad Raffensberger win over his Trump-backed primary opponent.

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