2018 Democrats thread

[caulfield12]

Obama made everyone think racism was dead and buried.

The normalization of Trump makes many of us believe it simply will never be overcome in America.

Pretty crazy swing in 8 years.

[Texsox]

Presidents get too much credit and too much blame. One of the biggest contributions they make is being a cheerleader. Trump has a group of Americans cheering that we haven't heard from since the early 1950s. 

Why did everyone love Reagan? After the scandals of Nixon, the clumsiness of Ford, and the wimpiness of Carter he was a bigger than life cowboy literally riding in on the white horse to save us. 

Clinton? A sax playing young good looking guy after the octogenarian Reagan and the "is it is mother or wife?" Bush duo. Cheerleading when we wanted it. 

[caulfield12]

Clinton could at least be respected due to his intellectual heft (Rhodes Scholar) and experience (youngest governor in history) not to mention his personal backstory of overcoming obstacles.  He was the best orator of his generation, better even than Obama at connecting to anyone in a room, regardless of their educational background, and making them feel he was speaking to you personally (Obama was always a bit reserved/aloof/different/other in that regard.)  It was far easier to imagine yourself hanging out and drinking a beer with Clinton/George W. Bush than Obama, lol.

His (Clinton's) foibles with women will obviously be connected to his legacy, but that period of economic explosion (dawn of the internet age) and the end of the Cold War/Peace Dividend years will always be looked on positively...except for those labor unions and progressives who felt that the Dem's triangulated too far to the center (especially on trade policy) and became "Republican Lite" out of desperation (Carter the only Dem president in a long string of Republicans).  Especially on issues like the death penalty, welfare and prison reform, drug crimes, the positions of the two mainstream parties became almost indistinguishable.

Of course, the obvious point is that Wal-Mart's/globalization's rise under Clinton's supervision was just as logical for a native Arkansan than the Republicans benefiting from Koch Industries largess for their energy and tax policies.  Two sides of the same coin.  A lot of the financial regulations/restrictions that were loosed in the 1980's and 1990's led directly to stock market bubbles (tech crash) and eventually 2008.  Not to mention 9/11 and the fact that Clinton Admin has to be held at least partially responsible, despite no longer being in office.

At that time, about the only areas you could distinguish the two parties politically on were on social issues...and the environment (especially Gore).

Edited May 2, 2018 by caulfield12

[Soxbadger]

1 hour ago, Texsox said:

Presidents get too much credit and too much blame. One of the biggest contributions they make is being a cheerleader. Trump has a group of Americans cheering that we haven't heard from since the early 1950s. 

Why did everyone love Reagan? After the scandals of Nixon, the clumsiness of Ford, and the wimpiness of Carter he was a bigger than life cowboy literally riding in on the white horse to save us. 

Clinton? A sax playing young good looking guy after the octogenarian Reagan and the "is it is mother or wife?" Bush duo. Cheerleading when we wanted it. 

 

Tex,

 

As im sure youre aware that is why some European countries have a Prime Minister and President, so that one can just be a cheerleader.

The problem with Trump the cheerleader, is he is making the crowd cheer against his own team. Not sure how effective cheerleaders would be if they spent 99% of the game telling the crowd how terrible the current team, that they should arrest the former coach and that the golden age was back when only white men could play. 

[Jack Parkman]

With regard to the Dam/Reddy discussion: I don't understand why Bernie wasn't more popular with the racial minority groups. Though it seemed like he was ignoring social issues, he really isn't because economic empowerment goes a long way to cure social ills. As I said earlier, there is a combination of socioeconomic factors involved in empowering marginalized groups, whether by race, sex/gender identity or disability. Changing social attitudes isn't good enough alone, because then you get "pity work" where someone understands how crappy a marginalized person's situation is and gives them a low paying job that doesn't match their skillset or career goals. Giving someone a job because of their situation alone isn't good enough either, because if social attitudes don't change, the person in question is subjected to harassment or lack of advancement. The reason why I don't  understand why Bernie wasn't as popular with racial minority groups, is that in my opinion they stood to benefit the most from his policies. Better pay, more opportunity, getting out of the poorhouse, etc. 

With regard to the Democratic in-fighting: We have to realize what is at stake here. Our country is under attack by an authoritarian regime, that isn't able to do what it wants because the Founders of this country put a darn good amount of checks and balances in place to prevent that. Unfortunately, the checks and balances are being eroded by corruption in the form of legalized bribery via Citizens United, along with the entirety of the GOP which has been hijacked by the economic elites, and runs on propaganda such as fear mongering, hawkish tendencies, and racial division. Our democracy is in trouble. I, personally am conflicted with regard to the "progressive purity police." On one hand keeping the destructive GOP out of positions of power is an awesome thing, but at the same time I believe that the mainstream Democrats are at best centrists and at worst Eisenhower Republicans. Sometimes you have to put what is best for the country ahead of the advancement of the party's agenda. I think that both parties have lost their way, and it is resulting in a broken system. The Dems, in order to win elections HAVE TO put the middle class ahead of taking money from PACs and other special interests, unless they have the public's greater good in mind. I have very little faith in the system to correct itself until we nearly return to gilded age work conditions. It won't get that bad again, but it will get as close as they can under current law. People have felt the hit, but it hasn't hit home hard enough yet. I believe we actually need another great depression to get our collective heads out of our collective asses and wake up and smell the roses, so to speak. It seems like it has to get really, really bad before people will change their mind. We know two things: 1. Lassez-faire capitalism doesn't work 2. Communism doesn't work 3. What does work, is something in between.

We had a good balance for a long time and unfortunately, got complacent and people forgot what works and doesn't. Corporations have proven time and time again they aren't responsible enough to pay their employees a living wage/not pollute the environment/make decisions that values a human life over saving money for the company, if paying lawsuits are less costly than saving a human life. This is why strict regulation is necessary. Nobody talks about how monopolists have gotten around monopoly laws by creating a cartel for certain goods and services There are very few choices, especially with regard to technology. Nationwide, there are 4 cell phone companies and 5 cable companies. 4 companies controlling the entire market is not acceptable. Most general household items, you get at Wal-Mart, Target, or online at Amazon. Books are Amazon or Barnes and Noble. Computer operating systems: Microsoft or Apple. There is the illusion of choice, but there really isn't any choice in the US market, because mergers have destroyed it. There are somewhere between 4-10 companies in any one type of good or service area, and that is too few for truly healthy competition. The Sherman Antitrust Act is still on the books and needs to be brought back with a vengeance. Until the cartels are broken up, nothing will change. That is the first step to rectifying the economic ills of our country. 

[Balta1701]

So let's see...

The Democrats need to put social issues on the back burner. Look at the Republicans pushing "fear mongering, hawkish tendencies, and racial division." We should totally just let them do that, after all, social issues are icky. There's clearly no connection between your two first paragraphs. And the tens of thousands black people who are disenfranchised by the voter ID law in state x has nothing to do with how elections go. 

And "The Dems need to not accept PAC Money". Great. So we're starting every race from dramatically behind on money. I'll buy "the system is broken" as a response to that and something we should try to fix...but how do we win enough races to actually make a difference by giving the other side a head start? The people who have refused PAC money haven't suddenly surged out to an incredible and unusual series of victories by stating that they haven't taken it.

[caulfield12]

It has taken unique candidates like Dean, Obama, Sanders and Warren to get by with lots of smaller individual donations...not sure how easily that success can be replicated.

[StrangeSox]

 

[GoSox05]

On Mike Pence praising Joe Arpaio. 

 

@radleybalko 5h5 hours ago

Reminder: Joe Arpaio once faked an assassination attempt, then framed a man for it — all to win sympathy for his reelection campaign. The innocent man spent 4 years in jail. Taxpayers footed the $1 million settlement.

 

These people are all for law and order. 

[Jack Parkman]

4 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

So let's see...

The Democrats need to put social issues on the back burner. Look at the Republicans pushing "fear mongering, hawkish tendencies, and racial division." We should totally just let them do that, after all, social issues are icky. There's clearly no connection between your two first paragraphs. And the tens of thousands black people who are disenfranchised by the voter ID law in state x has nothing to do with how elections go. 

And "The Dems need to not accept PAC Money". Great. So we're starting every race from dramatically behind on money. I'll buy "the system is broken" as a response to that and something we should try to fix...but how do we win enough races to actually make a difference by giving the other side a head start? The people who have refused PAC money haven't suddenly surged out to an incredible and unusual series of victories by stating that they haven't taken it.

1)Not what I said. I said that social issues and economic issues are fundamentally intertwined and inseparable. I prefer the term "socioeconomic." I'm arguing that one without the other does nothing for the good of a disenfranchised population. I speak on this from personal experience.  Both are equally important. Never did I say that social issues need to be on the back burner. Just that they are useless without economic empowerment as well. What good is it if people are nice to you if you're homeless, starving and physically uncomfortable? 

2) I really don't know how to get around this with Citizens United still on the books. That SCOTUS decision legalized bribery. The issue in my book is that by taking the money,  a politician has to continue to put politics/party/special interests over their constituents. It is a catch-22 of epic proportions. I think that if the party as a whole took that position, they can win elections by making it a key talking point, but it is still a massive quandary. 

Edited May 2, 2018 by Jack Parkman

[StrangeSox]

On 5/1/2018 at 1:04 PM, StrangeSox said:

hey speaking of how great neoliberal economic principles work for the masses

 

sure, workers are passing out in his warehouses and have to get food stamps because they're paid so little, but Bezos can't think of any possible way to spend his vast wealth besides "space travel"

shocking follow-up

 

 

[Balta1701]

3 hours ago, Jack Parkman said:

1)Not what I said. I said that social issues and economic issues are fundamentally intertwined and inseparable. I prefer the term "socioeconomic." I'm arguing that one without the other does nothing for the good of a disenfranchised population. I speak on this from personal experience.  Both are equally important. Never did I say that social issues need to be on the back burner. Just that they are useless without economic empowerment as well. What good is it if people are nice to you if you're homeless, starving and physically uncomfortable? 

2) I really don't know how to get around this with Citizens United still on the books. That SCOTUS decision legalized bribery. The issue in my book is that by taking the money,  a politician has to continue to put politics/party/special interests over their constituents. It is a catch-22 of epic proportions. I think that if the party as a whole took that position, they can win elections by making it a key talking point, but it is still a massive quandary. 

When people who are minorities tell you that the overwhelming number of things they deal with are not just economic issues generally, that they are fundamental unfairness directed specific to them, and they only can get fixed if you specifically care about that (Here's one from today), and people respond "no you're wrong that's really not important but my issues are", well that's exactly the problem. That's the viewpoint we're getting in this thread. It doesn't just disagree with data, but it's also belittling the experience of those groups, and denying data for good measure.

[southsider2k5]

17 minutes ago, Balta1701 said:

When people who are minorities tell you that the overwhelming number of things they deal with are not just economic issues generally, that they are fundamental unfairness directed specific to them, and they only can get fixed if you specifically care about that (Here's one from today), and people respond "no you're wrong that's really not important but my issues are", well that's exactly the problem. That's the viewpoint we're getting in this thread. It doesn't just disagree with data, but it's also belittling the experience of those groups, and denying data for good measure.

And that is exactly why people voted for Trump.  A large portion of his voters feel like he is the first candidate to acknowledge THEIR problems in a long time, instead of them feeling like they WERE the problem.

[Dam8610]

8 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

So let's see...

The Democrats need to put social issues on the back burner. Look at the Republicans pushing "fear mongering, hawkish tendencies, and racial division." We should totally just let them do that, after all, social issues are icky. There's clearly no connection between your two first paragraphs. And the tens of thousands black people who are disenfranchised by the voter ID law in state x has nothing to do with how elections go. 

There's clear connection between everything he's saying, you just don't want to see it. And clearly we need to prioritize economic issues to get rid of those voter ID laws, because a big reason so many voters get disenfranchised under those laws is they can't afford the costs of the voting ID, and thus far the Democrats' focus on social issues had stopped exactly 0 of these laws from passing. Insanity is continuing to try the same thing and expecting different results, like that strategy you're advocating.

8 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

And "The Dems need to not accept PAC Money". Great. So we're starting every race from dramatically behind on money. I'll buy "the system is broken" as a response to that and something we should try to fix...but how do we win enough races to actually make a difference by giving the other side a head start? The people who have refused PAC money haven't suddenly surged out to an incredible and unusual series of victories by stating that they haven't taken it.

The Democrats' biggest mistake has been this fear. If they disavow corporate money, the money will come from the people. You should know that from the fact that Bernie was outfundraising Hillary at points in the 2016 campaign with no PAC money. That's not to say no PAC money is acceptable, just not the kind that's coming from huge corporations and the 1%. Doing this will also result in at least one political party with the will to write a law that does away with the Citizens United decision.

[Dam8610]

2 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

When people who are minorities tell you that the overwhelming number of things they deal with are not just economic issues generally, that they are fundamental unfairness directed specific to them, and they only can get fixed if you specifically care about that (Here's one from today), and people respond "no you're wrong that's really not important but my issues are", well that's exactly the problem. That's the viewpoint we're getting in this thread. It doesn't just disagree with data, but it's also belittling the experience of those groups, and denying data for good measure.

I would sadly say to them that it's not working to deal with those issues right now, so let's focus on dealing with other issues that will lessen the inequality and disenfranchisement you're experiencing, and eventually our society will get to a place where those issues can be dealt with. I empathize with the struggles of the disenfranchised, but, again, insanity is continuing to try the same thing and expecting different results. I don't like leaving those issues alone, but they're not winning elections and they're actively driving voters away. The Democratic Party has been okay for decades with doing very little for minority communities while expecting their votes, why is it suddenly a problem now that a large block of the base sees a problem with the strategy and messaging and wants to change it in the hopes of making some actual progress?

[caulfield12]

1 hour ago, Dam8610 said:

There's clear connection between everything he's saying, you just don't want to see it. And clearly we need to prioritize economic issues to get rid of those voter ID laws, because a big reason so many voters get disenfranchised under those laws is they can't afford the costs of the voting ID, and thus far the Democrats' focus on social issues had stopped exactly 0 of these laws from passing. Insanity is continuing to try the same thing and expecting different results, like that strategy you're advocating.

The Democrats' biggest mistake has been this fear. If they disavow corporate money, the money will come from the people. You should know that from the fact that Bernie was outfundraising Hillary at points in the 2016 campaign with no PAC money. That's not to say no PAC money is acceptable, just not the kind that's coming from huge corporations and the 1%. Doing this will also result in at least one political party with the will to write a law that does away with the Citizens United decision.

Then you have to deal with the gerrymandering on a state by state level...the huge losses in governorships, state legislature control, school boards/city councils over the last decade or so.  (They're already making inroads in states like PA and WI, fwiw.)

That was "papered over" by the fact that Obama won twice, but for the state and local parties, it was a disaster.

As far as writing legislation to undo Citizens' United, to what end?  Hoping Gorsuch is going to be party to upholding it?  If anything, with one or possible two more justices likely to change before the Republicans give up power (at the very least, they can hope to delay until the last few months of 2019 when they can then use the "Merrick Garland Run Out the Clock Tactic"), and that's even more complicated to prevent if they don't flip the Senate, which is still looking like a 25% proposition at best.

The Democratic Party has been okay for decades with doing very little for minority communities while expecting their votes, why is it suddenly a problem now that a large block of the base sees a problem with the strategy and messaging and wants to change it in the hopes of making some actual progress? (quote)

Exactly right.  It's hard to name many SUBSTANTIVE policy changes that the Republicans have put into place that support the Christian Conservative/Fundamentalist/Moral Majority/Christian Coalition vote...sure, that effort at the beginning with stopping NGO's outside of the US from using funding for abortions, a few grenades tossed around about transgender military service, but it's almost all been lip service and PR spin.  

Yet those particular voters are trapped with nowhere else to go, not until/unless another party or the Dem's provide them a better voting option.  Trump couldn't be MORE the opposite of 1976 Jimmy Carter, the closest we've ever had in the last 50 years to a legitimate "moral" leader as president...yet his support levels are way through the roof, even vis a vis the "compassionate conservatism" movement of George W. Bush in 2004.

Edited May 3, 2018 by caulfield12

[Balta1701]

1 hour ago, Dam8610 said:

I would sadly say to them that it's not working to deal with those issues right now, so let's focus on dealing with other issues that will lessen the inequality and disenfranchisement you're experiencing, and eventually our society will get to a place where those issues can be dealt with. I empathize with the struggles of the disenfranchised, but, again, insanity is continuing to try the same thing and expecting different results. I don't like leaving those issues alone, but they're not winning elections and they're actively driving voters away. The Democratic Party has been okay for decades with doing very little for minority communities while expecting their votes, why is it suddenly a problem now that a large block of the base sees a problem with the strategy and messaging and wants to change it in the hopes of making some actual progress?

"It's not working to deal with you being unfairly jailed, shot, and unable to get equal paying jobs, solely because of who you are, so let's focus on something else".

I know you won't check your own privilege, but I hope others can see why "oh don't worry you're just going to be occasionally shot" isn't acceptable. 

[Dam8610]

1 minute ago, Balta1701 said:

"It's not working to deal with you being unfairly jailed, shot, and unable to get equal paying jobs, solely because of who you are, so let's focus on something else".

I know you won't check your own privilege, but I hope others can see why "oh don't worry you're just going to be occasionally shot" isn't acceptable. 

It's not acceptable, but you're the one saying we need to elect Democrats to keep Republicans out of power at all costs. Maybe some of those costs are going to have to be changing strategies and reprioritizing issues to attract voters and win elections. You recommend insanity, I'm looking for a better solution, so that maybe someday we can deal with those issues, and still make things easier and better for those people between now and then.

[caulfield12]

https://eand.co/why-american-collapse-is-only-just-beginning-not-ending-21cac6b14533

And I thought Trump's inaugural address was bleak, lol...at any rate, REDDY, the 30-40% of America who reads this essays and nods their head over and over again, they are the ones the Democratic Party has to figure out how to speak to (again) because they've been taken for granted for 25+ years by the national party.  It's also right in line with a Greg775 "humanity is collapsing" rant.

 

There are many beliefs America holds that the rest of the world finds gruesome and strange: guns, capitalism, greed, cruelty. But among these is a new one: that this dark period in American history is an anomaly — and therefore, things will revert to normal. Sorry. American collapse is not an anomaly — it is the very opposite: the culmination of decades-long trends. Those trends, which I’ll discuss in this essay, have not ended — and so collapse has barely only really begun.

Let me begin by dashing your hopes. There’s much talk of a “Blue Wave” — excited and hopeful talk. Alas, when we look closely at the wave of politicians that are to turn the country around, it’s all too easy to see that there is no transformative agenda that unites them — mostly, they stand for minor incremental changes, not exactly a New Bill of Rights. And as they are elected, they will quickly meet the reality of American politics: lobbying dollars which control a two-party system that offers the barest illusion of choice. Would you prefer armed teachers — or merely armies at school? Would you like greed with a sugarcoating — or lethally savage capitalism? And so on. The Blue Wave has as little chance of turning America around as Houdini might actually turning water into wine.

So the longest-running trend in America — that its democracy has long been broken (or never really been much of one at all, if you want to count the inconvenient fact that it was a segregated nation until 1971, which is usually too much reality for most Americans to bear) — can only continue. Today’s noble Blue Wave idealist is tomorrow’s capitulating Obamacrat — they must either compromise, toeing the party line, or they will quickly find themselves powerless, unheard, and invisible. So Blue Wave or no Blue wave — it is quite irrelevant — American political reality means it will simply go on having little chance of gaining working healthcare, higher education, public media, safety nets, or retirement, because it lacks the capacity to create it — though that is precisely what most Americans, by many measures, want.

But they do not just want it. They need it. The average American’s plight is so desperate that people in other rich countries can scarcely comprehend it. Dying from a lack of insulin? The elderly working at Walmart? Less than a week’s pay in savings? It sounds like a dystopian film, not reality. Yet this points to my second megatrend. American incomes have been flat since the 70s — but all the while, the basics of life, all the things above, from retirement to healthcare, have grown in price. First creeping up, and now skyrocketing. Of course, this shatters the average person economic hopes — but it makes those at the top ultra-wealthy. So America’s two great economic megatrends — rising inequality, growing poverty, and an imploding middle class, are likely to bite harder as well.

People who must choose between food and healthcare, of course, enjoy poorer and poorer standards of living. And that is America’s third big trend — a declining real quality of life. America yesterday was an optimistic nation — perhaps falsely so — yet still, there was the sense that eventually, life would get better for “all”, as each generation outdid the last. But now that hope is gone. Life is not getting better — it is getting worse, by the day. Life, however you would like to define it. Life expectancy? Shrinking. Infant mortality? Rising. Loneliness, despair, depression? Spiking. Trust, bonds, relationships? Imploding. American life will go on getting harder, meaner, nastier, crueller, and more dismal in every way — because a decent life, at least to the rest of the world, has become an unaffordable luxury.

What do people whose lives are falling apart do? Well, the first thing they usually do is take it out on each other. Americans have been doing that for a long time now, so much that it is a way of life. This is my fourth megatrend — it is an emotional one: rage, despair, and anxiety as a way of life. Americans will go on taking the bitter anger and grim despair of living in a collapsing society out on each other. After all, they have no way not to — no mental healthcare, universal education, functioning media, or even norms of basic decency anymore. They will go on hurting one another in every imaginable way — destroying each other in hard and soft ways, denying one another retirement, degrading and bullying each other at work and school and play, refusing to invest in the barest bits of society, walking around with machine guns, building tomorrow’s predatory systems, whether Ubers or hedge funds — precisely because there is no way to aspire to anything better, since the political system is broken, and the economy is irreparable.

Because it all seems so hopeless, societies governed by rage and despair also give up on democracy. So we are likely to see a constant “tussle” between authoritarians and the comic Marco Rubio-esque charade that passes for American leadership. But I put “tussle” in quotes for a reason. Authoritarians don’t need a majority — they never have, and that is foolish myth promoted by American intellectuals. It’s enough for fascists and tyrants to capture perhaps 30–40% of a nation to take over its institutions, norms, and future — because that 30% is like a wrecking ball, that can be used to intimidate, bluster, threaten, and bully (as long as the rest is split). That fringe, lunatic 30% now controls America wholesale — not just making any kind of progress not just impossible, but demanding wholesale regress: banning books, taking science out of schools, putting fundamentalist religion into public life, and so forth. That is my fifth megatrend, authoritarianism, and I am sorry to have to tell you that it will not stop with this President — it will continue, gain strength, and shape America for the foreseeable future.

I am sure that by now, perhaps, you find all this quite unbelievable. Ah, but wouldn’t you yourself have said where America is today was absurdly, absolutely impossible even two years ago? Wouldn’t you have laughed if someone had read you today’s headlines then, and cried, “LOL. Get real, dude. No way!!!!!”?

Edited May 3, 2018 by caulfield12

[StrangeSox]

this doesn't seem like it'd be legal

 

 

[Balta1701]

As one certain poster in this thread will tell you....how dare you bring race into things! They just arbitrarily don't like certain counties and prefer other ones.

[StrangeSox]

I swear I didn't steal my "trump is a symptom not the disease" language from this very good and correct article:

https://newrepublic.com/article/148142/republican-party-not-trump-real-threat-american-democracy

 

The Republican Party, Not Trump, Is the Real Threat to American Democracy

By JEET HEER

April 27, 2018

Quote

 

On Thursday morning, President Donald Trump called into Fox & Friends and went on such a rant that even the show’s conservative hosts seemed startled. “You look at the corruption at the top of the FBI, it’s a disgrace,” he said. “And our Justice Department—which I try and stay away from, but at some point I won’t—our Justice Department should be looking at that kind of stuff, not the nonsense of collusion with Russia.” As if to protect Trump from further embarrassment, Brian Kilmeade cut the interview short by saying, “We’d talk to you all day but it looks like you have a million things to do.”

This is what Trump’s critics have warned about all along: that he’s an authoritarian who would use the office of the presidency to destroy norms (like his attempts, as in the Fox interview, to undermine the independence of the Department of Justice). And in destroying those norms, some fear, Trump could destroy American democracy itself—or at least contribute to its decline. “Donald Trump is not the heart attack of democracy, he is the gum disease of democracy,” The Atlantic’s David Frum saidduring a Brookings Institution forum in February. “You can die from gum disease, but it festers for a long time before it finishes you off.”

But some Trump critics lately have argued that he’s not the disease at all. “The problems we face run deeper than the Trump presidency,” Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard political scientists and authors of the recent book How Democracies Die, wrote in The New York Times in January. “While Mr. Trump’s autocratic impulses have fueled our political system’s mounting crisis, he is as much a symptom as he is a cause of this crisis.” The crisis, as they see it, is that “the norms that once protected our institutions are coming unmoored.” Or, as Vox’ Dylan Matthews put it in a column earlier this week: “the death loop that American democracy appears to be trapped in.”

But American democracy as a whole remains healthy, as seen in the robust resistance to Trump within the government, the courts, and the public at large. The disease is localized within the Republican Party. Which is why, if indeed American democracy is in a death loop, any solution must not focus solely on ousting Trump, but on punishing and reforming the GOP.

 

Quote

But one institution has sorely failed in its constitutional duty to restrain the president. Time and again, the Republican-controlled Congress has ignored, defended, or outright enabled Trump’s authoritarian excesses.

“Donald Trump doesn’t have much of an agenda of his own and he has struck a bargain with people in Congress who do have agendas that he will sign bills that are very unpopular, that probably certainly no Democratic President would sign and probably few first-term Republican presidents would sign,” Frum said during the Brookings event. “He will sign those bills if in return he is given protection for actions that no president in American history has ever dared undertake, including running a massive global influence business while president.”

Levitsky and Ziblatt, as well as Matthews, point to polarization as a major cause of this crisis in American democracy. “Some polarization is healthy, even necessary, for democracy,” Levitsky and Ziblatt wrote. “But extreme polarization can kill it. When societies divide into partisan camps with profoundly different worldviews, and when those differences are viewed as existential and irreconcilable, political rivalry can devolve into partisan hatred.” But they seem reluctant to place blame. “Polarization ... encouraged politicians to abandon forbearance, beginning with the Gingrich-era government shutdowns and the partisan impeachment of Bill Clinton,” they wrote. “Democrats are beginning to respond in kind. Their recent filibuster triggering a government shutdown took a page out of the Gingrich playbook.”

Only at the end of their Times op-ed do Levitsky and Ziblatt come out and say it: “Intensifying polarization, driven by an extremist Republican Party, is making constitutional hardball a new norm for party politics.” Which is to say, this crisis is not simply the result of polarization, but what William A. Galston and Thomas Mann in 2010 called “asymmetrical polarization”: The GOP has moved much further to the right than the Democrats have to the left. In doing so, the party has become more cohesive and extreme—more willing and able, that is, to shatter political norms to achieve their ends.

 

[Dam8610]

3 hours ago, StrangeSox said:

I swear I didn't steal my "trump is a symptom not the disease" language from this very good and correct article:

https://newrepublic.com/article/148142/republican-party-not-trump-real-threat-american-democracy

 

The Republican Party, Not Trump, Is the Real Threat to American Democracy

By JEET HEER

April 27, 2018

 

Seems like stating the obvious.

[southsider2k5]

3 hours ago, Balta1701 said:

As one certain poster in this thread will tell you....how dare you bring race into things! They just arbitrarily don't like certain counties and prefer other ones.

It is too bad you aren't qualified to speak on this topic.

[Balta1701]

15 minutes ago, southsider2k5 said:

It is too bad you aren't qualified to speak on this topic.

A demand that a person confront the privilege granted to them by virtue of being white does not mean that no white people can act to help improve a system. You are misinterpreting it that way deliberately so that you do not have to face up to those inequities, as if you did you would feel compelled to act since it is manifestly unfair. By avoiding any discussion of your own privilege and pretending you are above that issue, you can pretend its not your fault that African Americans in Indiana have been systematically disenfranchised, for example, by a voter ID law passed by people you voted for. 

A demand that a person face their privilege when they are discounting the opinions (and lives) of other races is exactly the opposite of what you are stating it is here.