Under the lenses of a duopoly, American politics seems like a well oiled machine, oiled by the tears of the constituency, but they are working together. The orange tumor seems to be a new thing that for some reason smells like fundamentalist state.
There are a lot of similarities when it comes to their tendency towards Corporatocracy and military spending, but it largely ends there.
When it comes to taxes, fiscal priorities, rights for individuals, foreign policy, crime and punishment, and of course social issues they are very different and in most cases take the opposite approach.
For example, Republicans want lower taxes for the wealthy while Democrats want lower taxes for the lower and middle classes. Republicans want to restrict individuals rights - especially for non-christian white males, Democrats don't. Republicans favor heavy handed punishment including capital punishment, Democrats favor rehabilitation and a ban on capital punishment. Republicans want to blow up the national debt through tax breaks and pork, Democrats want to control the debt through responsible spending and investments. Republicans want to stop investment in education and science while Democrats want to increase investment in these areas. These are all very real and not just aesthetics.
This is a curious comment. HackerNews has always told me it was in fact the opposite - it's easy enough to source quotes from over the years. Could this forum have been wrong all this time?
Democratic voters want those things. It's not at all obvious the party establishment does.
The tell is that when Republicans push through their policies, Democratic opposition is weak and ineffectual. Instead of ferocious opposition the Dems send one of their famous sternly worded letters.
Since at least 2000 the party establishment has absolutely refused to do any of the things it could do to change this - including packing the Supreme Court, supporting and promoting grass roots activism between elections, using the filibuster, and so on.
Biden couldn't even get any of Trump's prosecutions over the line - including televised evidence of insurrection, and treasonous mishandling of official state secrets (!)
However it's spun, there is a very obvious reluctance to challenge the extremes of Republicanism.
The party is far more likely to censure one of its non-centrists than its centrists, while the opposite is true of the Republicans.
The Democrats operate as if they're controlled opposition. It's like their donors pay them to blunt their base. They haven't accomplished anything legislatively this century beyond pass the 1993 Republican healthcare plan under Obama's name. They couldn't even raise the minimum wage.
In my experience this is dead on. People have short attention spans but this has been happning the whole 21st century. In 2008 Obama won the primary despite the best efforts of leadership to nominate clinton. They even scrambled the "super delegates" (delegates who vote for the candidate chosen by senior leadership) hoping that even if Obama won more delegates, they could override the voters choice.
Of course, they failed, and democrats won 2 elections in a row running a candidate labeled a radical socialist. Obama became the only 21st century president to win the poplar vote twice, and the DNC has been trying to drag the party back in the 20th century ever since, blaming their own voters when it doesn't work.
It boggles my mind that they refused to even engage with the "undecided movement", which created a grass-roots get out to vote movement out of thin air. In swing states no less.
The starkest contrast between the two parties is womens rights and to a lesser extent LGBTQ rights. Although I'm not even sure how true this is anymore with so many politicians backing Cuomo, who resigned because an investigation found overwhelming evidence he sexually harrassed and assaulted female employees. And I'm pretty sure people like Chuck Schumer and other centrists view the LGBTQ community as a liability.
itsanaccount says "An oak tree's vote adds more to our democracy than your comment does to this conversation."
Now you're calling for the trees to vote! Have you no shame, sir? I assure those reading not to panic: no unregistered trees shall be allowed to vote, even in California, as long as Donald Trump is President! Simultaneously we extend our grief to all of those in CA whose registered and unregistered trees were slaughtered by the recent fires in CA.
"I've seen thing you people wouldn't believe... forests on fire off the hills of Redmond.... I watched fire retardants glitter in the dark streaming in the skies over San Bernadino. All those votes will be lost in time, like tears in the rain...Time to go."
- parting words of homeless anarchist who started the blaze.
The healthcare issue doesn't even make sense. Democrats passes the ACA and were going to create a public option but couldn't gather enough Republican support to ensure it could pass. It was an earnest attempt to provide healthcare for all Americans. The Republicans have done nothing even remotely similar and have only attempted to take healthcare away.
One item over the course of 12 years is uh lip service at best.
The lesser of two evils is still an evil.
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Somebody will certainly bring up the filibuster at some point. Thats not in the constitution and can be removed at any point by 51 senators. As a whole democrats are not united on what to do hence why they never remove it. Which then lets them point to it as a scape-goat as to why they can't fix any problems.
If you're not part of a group that will suffer under a white-supremecist theocracy they look very similar.
If you're part of a group that will, there is a visible difference.
Picking the lesser evil is actually a good thing if you can reduce harm. It doesn't solve the problem of it being a lesser evil, but it may make space to change that.
I agree with what you're saying, but it strikes me (& this is particularly poignant on THIS site), that this discussion is somewhat equivalent to the "blub" paradox (aka, how do you explain the power of lisp macro's to someone who grew up only with c & Java).
Americans are THAT brainwashed into thinking they really have a real choice at the ballot box, when in reality all choices that matter were weeded out long long before in the backroom selection process...
Counterpoint: folks not from America create a 2d projection of our government where on the whole Americans are very aligned and where (usually Europeans) are not and conclude that US parties are the same while their parties are very different.
Meanwhile I can't tell the difference between any of the (just picking one) UK parties. From an outsider perspective their government seems exactly the same no matter who is elected. But I don't conclude that the Brits are brainwashed and instead that I would have to be there to actually understand just how different they are.
We're at a point in the US where your political party is a dating dealbreaker for 60% of Americans and 85% of Americans only date within their own party. This isn't a small group of heavily politically involved with strong opinions, this is everyday people recognizing what are extremely different and fundamentally incompatible world views.
We're only 6 months in and I would hope the world can really feel the difference when a conservative government took power. I would be shocked if anyone couldn't tell the difference between our government pre and post january.
Rebuttal to your counterpoint: I've lived in the US for 25 years, so I'm not unaware of the "supposed differences".
What were saying is that these "supposed differences" are mostly over inconsequential things, designed to mobilise the masses into 1 camp or another, all while LEAVING THE MAJOR ISSUES untouched.
It doesn't matter if team red or team blue is in charge, immigrants get scapegoated and caged (happened under Obama & Biden).Just that team red takes greater visceral delight.
It doesn't matter if team red/blue is in power, the HOLOCAUST is armed, funded & covered for.
It doesn't matter if it's team red or blue, the military budget keeps going up, and the almost pyschopathic need to keep dumping military bases into other peoples backyards, the need to freeze conflicts into eternal points of instability (to then be exploited in the future), the need to keep poking at other people's pressure points to instigate war, the need to continuously "regime change" any sovereign country you like (all the while bemoaning "foreign interference" in your own elections... irony wants its ball back)
And failing all of that, the need to create/arm/fund terrorist groups of any stripe or persuasion to get what you want done. Be they right-wing death squads in Central America, to neo Nazis in Europe, to Daeesh in Syria/Iraq (and we can all drop the pretence now that CNN & the state dept all rushed in to validate the Daesh head honcho in Syria)
Etc, etc, boringly etc.
All of these things did happen, are happening, and will continue to happen - irrespective of team red or blue.
And irrespective of whether the bulk of the American population actually wants these things or not.
But yes, I'll grant you, voting team red or blue will impact the eternal question of who gets to urinate in which public bathroom.
Yeah, no. The Overton window is so incredibly small in America that normal, run of the mill political positions - either left or right - in the rest of the world are deemed extremist and radical in America.
Things have been far more polarised since the rise of social media. You can blame fox news and cnn or whatever all you want, but given how far the US is from the days of Clinton, Reagan, Nixon, Kennedy etc I don't see how you can simply blame "corporate media".
Corporate media used to have regulations on how much local media any single company could own. I think the consolidation of media ownership made it easier to have a single corporate vision.
Both are true. The end of the Fairness Doctrine normalised the psychotic distortions and lies pumped out by Fox. But the same machine that uses Fox also runs bot farms, astroturfing operations, and curated social media algorithms to normalise even more extreme RW POVs.
The problem is not the people taking advantage of a vulnerability, but the vulnerability itself. That such a significant portion of the US population is so gullible and so ready to believe misinformation that aligns with their desires is the real issue.
The problem is not media, at least not primarily. The problem is an ancient and not-democratic first past the post system, preventing emergence of any alternative, good or bad.
I agree with your sentiment, but Canada uses FPTP and as much as I would love to move to a proportional system, our politics is significantly less limiting than yours. Both of your major parties, and all of your corporate media are so captured by billionaires you don't even know how bad things are in your country without an external frame of reference.
Really? Is your speech freer than mine in Canada? Are your human Rights protected better than mine? I wonder what the rioters in LA would have to say about that?
The US is notably "freer" for some types of speech. Quite a few countries ban Nazi flags, hate speech, etc. to some extent. The EU bans direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. The UK banned political parties from advertising on TV in 1955.
In my opinion, doing so to some extent is important to preserve the rights of other parts of society, but that's not a universally held opinion by any means.
