It is because we haven’t achieved consensus on these issues or there is a faction that believes they can get a better deal by holding out and continuing to fight.
Okay I said, if Biden is too old who is chosen when he steps down? Kamala, who while qualified was chosen to gain vote. Is that the alternative you want? Silence. Trump is also too old and definitely showing his age but it doesn’t matter anymore because the goal post moves again.
It’s pure radicalization and anything that can be labeled as a negative is rationalized to avoid regret.
My mother remains 100% silent about politics. Which is equally as hard to have a conversation.
So when you have people so radicalized they only put ear plugs in their ear, because they’ve been trained to want a war at home. They are too deep, what do we do? Wait until they die? What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
These are tough questions in a world where people can’t be proud we even have any kind of infrastructure. People feel they deserve better when we already have the best circumstances to be alive.
There is no consensus because there is very little left to strive for in the eyes of the average citizen.
This is why we can’t have single payer healthcare, because our populations are too busy fighting for their radicalized ideas.
What? You are more misinformed than your father if you don't know that illegal aliens are flooding into the country. Trying to choose a neutral source for you.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0jp4xqx2z3o
Since January 2021, when Joe Biden came to office, there have been more than 10 million encounters - about 8 million came over the southwest land border with Mexico.
Under the Trump administration, there were 2.4 million encounters on this border.
I'm not saying believe everything without due diligence. I'm saying everyone calling everyone else liars is not going to end peacefully for anyone.
Tooting is just zone 3, not abroad :D
The truth is harder to discern when each administration redefines encounters, but for example, the Trump administration deported fewer per annum than the Obama administration. I don't know what to make of that, myself, but I think that would come as a surprise to many voters.
They'll fight back against the power structures by ceding control to them, and taking massive bribes. Every time.
Even Bernie Sanders is a Big Pharma lackey, accepting millions.
The ACA as a single payer totally supportive law would maybe have passed back in the early 1800s when communists headed West.
Ah, a low-information voter, I see.
_Obama_ didn't write the ACA. It was written in Congress, and it passed only because Democrats had a once-in-a-lifetime filibuster-proof majority. Not a single Republican Senator voted for the ACA.
In particular, Joe Lieberman (Connecticut) blocked the public option. Obama tried to push for it behind the doors, but the ACA was as far as the Blue Dog Democrats were willing to be pushed.
And then, of course, Mitch McConnell happened and the Senate ground to a halt. ACA basically has not been amended since its passing.
Lobbyists, such as AHIP, were instrumental in structuring the law to benefit insurance companies -- including the removal of the public option.
Also, your argument was a strawman, as I never said he wrote it. If you re-read my post, you'll note I said "Obama [...] could've done single payer". As president, laws get enacted based on his signature and as the figurehead of the Democratic party he has significant leverage and sway over laws, so much so that he took credit for the ACA in its entirety. It's irrelevant whether he wrote it or not, nor did I make that argument.
Claiming that ACA is an insurance company handout because it hasn't been amended is a very interesting argument. The Democrats had a super majority. They could've done anything!
The Democrats are a party by and for lobbyist interests. Ultra rare supermajority? Time for a lobbyist handout!
That's incorrect. ACA was a mostly-consensus project, and insurance companies absolutely hated the 20% profit margin limit in the ACA.
At the end of the day _someone_ has to pay for the care. It has to be either the state (like in Medicare), or private insurance companies. Both approaches can work just fine. We need more regulation of the insurance companies, and we need to decouple them from employers.
> Ultra rare supermajority? Time for a lobbyist handout!
Republicans could have stepped in and offered a public version. Just _one_ Senator would have been enough. Yet Republicans decided to stonewall the ACA completely.
Yeah, you tried. Any more is probably energy wasted.
> What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
Explain to them how oligarchs are burning the younger generation's security and quality of life to amass ever more wealth and power for themselves.
Help them see how this is happening to both them and the people of their generation on the opposite side of the surface political divide.
Your arguments are going to be wildly unpersuasive because your parents don't understand why they're voting the way they vote. They just know that their emotional state is represented at Fox & Fox suggests voting for Trump. The same dynamic is true for pretty much everyone except the rare souls who like to actually look up how & why politicians vote in practice (which most people don't have time to do).
Try figuring out what emotions your parents are feeling and why. Even if you don't change their minds you'll probably get to a better spot in the relationship than if you're trying to convince them Kamala was a strong candidate (which, given her record, tough sell - how does a strong candidate lose to Hitler, we might ask to annoy everyone).
Edited first response since it was too reactionary on my part.
77+ million Americans don't want a "hopeful vision of the future". They want to be angry. They're addicted to the anger. They want to hurt people. Present them any vision you want; they are not ever going to pay attention to it.
The answer is to ignore the theater and focus on improving lives anyway. The few truly hateful ones will be resolved quickly once people aren't worrying about rent, groceries, and making a living wage.
I would argue that most people don't agree on this. Firstly housing;
For decades Americans were told that owning your own house was an investment. To keep home owners happy prices have to go up. Clearly the message was flawed, but no home owner wants to see that number go down. The arguments that rely on "this will reduce of home value" us a strong one thst gets lots of support.
If you ask folk they'll tell you Health Care is too expensive. But equally they'll push back on any approach to make it cheaper. Obamacare made it cheaper, the public voted dems out of office. Biden put price caps on pharma, and got voted out of office. In both cases Trump (with massive support) tried to, or did, wind it back.
Many states didn't take up expended Medicare. Now, we could argue that doesn't make health care cheaper (overall) it just moves it to a different payer. But apparently folk dont want that.
Corporations having power is completely because we give them power. If we truly believed in that excess we'd behave differently.
Truth is we mostly like our corporate overlords. We rail against Musk and Zuck, but we carry on using their platforms. Fox has power because they amplify people's fears and gives them a scapegoat.
Currently DEI is under the spotlight. It's a very convenient scapegoat to every unsuccessful white male. As long as we have someone to blame, we can avoid our own failings.
Vague memory here: IIRC, alongside Obamacare came a requirement to have healthcare, and if you didn't get it you'd be penalized on your yearly taxes. I'm fairly sure I remember that being a big part of the issue with it, people didn't want to be forced into it.
As a game developer: people are great at telling you what's wrong in their experience. They are awful at giving solutions.
I wouldn't be surprised if it was a similar thing here. There's another phenomenon where lowering speed limits is an unpopular decision. But once it's made almost all complaints disappear in a few months. I think this is one of the cases where we just need to do it and deal with any fallout as it comes.
>Corporations having power is completely because we give them power
Not necessarily. Especially not for Healthcare. That's an industry of people leaving the consumer almost completely in the dark and having businesses battle with businesses in how much money they can extract or save. And it's not the kind of thing you can just cancel and find a competitor for.
In other cases I feel many are frustrated. But most aren't frustrated enough to give up concinience nor security. So yes, we do give powerto Musk, to Zuckerberg, etc. Those are in our control but nothing has hit at a scale to really hurt them.
The parties aren't going to change unless the incentives change. You need to get something like the anti corruption act through on the state level:
The other issue is that a significant portion of the country is not guided by logic. But fantasies like if we don’t save Israel it’s going to prevent the second coming of Christ and all natural disasters are caused by “legalizing gay marriage”.
Like a lot of the US, the gap between the haves and the have nots has grown. Many people on HN probably have great healthcare. Many seniors, often reliable voters, also have good healthcare through government programs that look a lot like single payer. This leaves poor people and those in the lower middle falling further behind.
Their fear is that their taxes will help “illegals” and “those lazy minorities”.
You’re assuming these people don’t have active animosity. Besides a large majority of the base are “evangelical Christian”. By definition religious people don’t appeal to logic.
How can you convince someone that Israel isn’t perfect (I don’t know enough to have a strong opinion either way) when they think that saving Israel is the first step in the second coming of Christ?
You are never going to convince these folks that Trump isn’t literally sent by God to save America?
It's a genuinely hard problem, of course, because there are lots of people in the Democratic coalition who are radicalized the other direction. They feel - equally genuinely, and equally strongly - that excluding or deporting an immigrant is a grievous moral wrong which we can't tolerate for mere political expediency. That's what it means to say that there's not a consensus on immigration.
It’s no surprise that our county is where it is. There is far more profit in driving right wing propaganda (including liberals) than there is left wing propaganda because left wing propaganda is anti-capital by definition. And capital owns everything.
I've been on the other side of a similar conversation with my parents. I was a big Andrew Yang booster, going around ranting about how we obviously ought to establish a UBI immediately and anyone who says otherwise is a fool. As my parents correctly identified, I didn't really believe that, because I knew there were serious practical problems with funding such a program. But that doesn't mean that I was logically compelled to become a deficit hawk, or that I was brainwashed for not doing so. I was embracing the hyperbolic form of a problem I did (and do) see as quite important: we have enough resources to ensure that everyone in the US can live a decent life and ought to use them accordingly.
I got to hear about how (name I won't doxx) was being told how he was gonna be okay when he was obviously bleeding to death from a gut wound that wouldn't stop. It's the kind of story you hear about soldiers in a warzone. 7 people got shot; he was the one who died before paramedics could stabilize him.
Mass shootings are barely newsworthy anymore. They plopped the usual couple of sentences about it, and didn't mention the political angle on it, probably for fear of death threats.
All these societal institutions, politicians, churches - everyone that's supposed to give a shit; they all just collectively shrugged. "So it goes", as Vonnegut would say.
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It's that grotesquerie, that banality of people just pretending it's all social hysteria, or bothsides, or "it's not really happening" or any number of ways of just ... gaslighting it as not being real. That's what's so vile. It's a level of cowardice and dishonor I have no words for. At least own your deeds like actual men, don't weasel out of it like spineless worms.
Don’t let the radicalization turn you into lashing out at society because people have insulated themselves.
I heavily agree on this, people have nothing to look forward to, and nothing to be proud of. In fact, the state of the US is more embarrassing than anything. Every other country has free healthcare, high speed rail, free education etc... On top of that, there is no upwards social mobility. I know a lot of people my age are literally gambling everything on crypto and hustle culture because they have no future prospects or hope.
> This is why we can’t have single payer healthcare, because our populations are too busy fighting for their radicalized ideas.
but I have to say that this is beyond naive. A single payer healthcare system is broadly popular, it has had the majority of support for decades at this point. We can't have it because it goes against the profit motive of the people running that industry. We already pay more than we would in taxpayer money than we would if healthcare was free across the board. Its as simple as that. Blatant corruption.
And this circles back to the last point, people see this, they realize this... and they don't believe that they can change this. This is exactly why, across the world, Luigi Mangione is hailed as a Saint. Thats exactly why the response was, "I get it." and people should try to examine that more. Its honestly not very complicated.
Fox News and such, are the only ones providing answers and giving people a place to channel this anger. But it is at the expense of marginalized groups, and truthfully, everyone. The Neo-Liberal order has failed everyone, and the Democrats have nothing to offer. I mean, we have corruption and oligarchs controlling the government. People feel hopeless, and powerless.
Some people, I guess. Looks like more than half the people approve of what he's doing.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/30/us/politics/trump-approva...
And even then, I'd say that this is not really a good marker for like the general sentiment of the entirety of the population. But it's likely somewhat close as things currently stand, but you have to also recognize the current political climate, as well as that there has been no real counter narrative against trump's framing of politics. Democrats have done a horrible job of presenting any counter narrative whatsoever. And on top of that, a lot of people don't realise yet what these things are going to entail. I mean of course rich people want to downsize the government of course and of course they oppose tariffs. It's completely expected that trump supporters are going to be supportive of mass deportation. Boom my projection is that once people see how violent and cruel this is that a lot of them are going to be like. That's not what I wanted that I didn't know was going to be like this yada yada yada and quickly realise how a horrifying and stupid this is.
I disagree that people feel powerless to get healthcare, they are distracted. If you look at either party it is the one singular commonality between the two. Really it should be the flag ship of a 3rd party with the radicalized ideas second.
This from the party that spent 4 years claiming Biden didn't have severe mental decline but "a stutter".
Do not blame the voters for PR mouth piece unless you hear the lies are being repeated by the voters. If you don’t avoid this then it turns into a goal post moving contest.
Perhaps. But they sure do do a great job rallying people as well. So... I will blame the voters when they unironically fall for it.
This is why people voted for Trump. Like Dave Chapelle said, he's an honest liar. Most politicians are just outright liars.
To be frank, yes. Arguing with most single individuals is pointless anyway. If we were able to focus these conversations on congress we'd be in much better shape.
>What about the generations they’re radicalizing after them?
You have time to stop them. It's just scientific fact that younger brains are more malleable and open to information. It won't always work, but there is some hope there.
>There is no consensus because there is very little left to strive for in the eyes of the average citizen.
Maybe we shouldn't have let a few hundred rich guys beat us in an argument about Healthcare. Which is a bipartisan issue but they divide us with politics.