***Official Political Discussion Thread***

Reminds me of when, after the Northridge quake, the contractor said it would take a couple years to rebuild the chunk of freeway that collapsed (can't remember which one, but it would have crippled LA). Some wealthy dude in Los Angeles offered, like, $100,000 per month for every month under their estimated timeline. It was magically completed within a few months. Weird.
Exactly!

Biden needs to work on his messaging. They need to say “Biden saved Christmas!” And photoshop him with a beard and a red suit. Really just bogart the whole conservative Christmas talking point. This was definitely a greed for the sake of greed situation and I am glad the government actually did its job fixing this.
 

In order for democracy to work, competing parties must accept that they can lose elections, and that it’s okay. But when partisans see their political opposition not just as the opposition, but as a genuine threat to the well-being of the nation, support for democratic norms fades because “winning” becomes everything. Politics, in turn, collapses into an all-out war of “us against them,” a kind of “pernicious polarization” that appears over and over again in democratic collapses, and bears a striking similarity to what’s currently happening in the U.S.

There’s no shortage of plausible explanations for why U.S. politics has become so polarized, but many of these theories describe impossible-to-reverse trends that have played out across developed democracies, like the rise of social media and the increased political salience of globalization, immigration and urban-rural cultural divides. All of these trends are important contributors, for sure. But if they alone are driving illiberalism and hyper-partisanship in the U.S., then the problem should be consistent across all western democracies. But it isn’t.

The quote below is about one of the four characteristics that make the polarization of our political environment different from what's observable in other democracies:
Third, more so than in other countries, Americans report feeling isolated from their own party. When asked to identify both themselves and their favored party on an 11-point scale in a 2012 survey, Americans identified themselves as, on average, 1.3 units away from the party that comes closest to espousing their beliefs, according to an analysis from political scientist Jonathan Rodden. This gap is the highest difference Rodden found among respondents in comparable democracies. This isolation matters, too, because it means that parties can’t count on enthusiasm from their own voters — instead, they must demonize the political opposition in order to mobilize voters.

and

Fourth, and perhaps most significant, in the U.S., one party has become a major illiberal outlier: The Republican Party. Scholars at the V-Dem Institute at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden have been monitoring and evaluating political parties around the world. And one big area of study for them is liberalism and illiberalism, or a party’s commitment (or lack thereof) to democratic norms prior to elections. And as the chart below shows, of conservative, right-leaning parties across the globe, the Republican Party has more in common with the dangerously authoritarian parties in Hungary and Turkey than it does with conservative parties in the U.K. or Germany.
(we already knew that)

Finally,

In fact, in a new book, “American Affective Polarization in Comparative Perspective,” another team of scholars, Noam Gidron, James Adams and Will Horne, shows that citizens in majoritarian democracies with less proportional representation dislike both their own parties and opposing parties more than citizens in multiparty democracies with more proportional representation.

This pattern may have something to do with the shifting politics of coalition formation in proportional democracies, where few political enemies are ever permanent
(e.g., the unlikely new governing coalition in Israel). This also echoes something social psychologists have found in running experiments on group behavior: Breaking people into three groups instead of two leads to less animosity. Something, in other words, appears to be unique about the binary condition, or in this case, the two-party system, that triggers the kind of good-vs-evil, dark-vs-light, us-against-them thinking that is particularly pronounced in the U.S.

The question is, who can make this happen, and how? Are there even politicians who think that breaking up the Dem/Rep coalitions and introducing actual proportional representation is needed?
 
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The quote below is about one of the four characteristics that make the polarization of our political environment different from what's observable in other democracies:


and


(we already knew that)

Finally,



The question is, who can make this happen, and how? Are there even politicians who think that breaking up the Dem/Rep coalitions and introducing actual proportional representation is needed?
It might have been here or on another forum but the issue against this use to be it makes government move slower. Of course this was before the Republicans became an outlier focused on creating gridlock and having tantrums. Their have been effective American. third parties before, but it would have to start local and work it’s way up. They would also have to be a lot more shrewd initially about where and who they ran in races.

The issue progressives have for example is they are still running people in Center to right districts and then get Mollywopped and everyone says “see the progressives are limited” the reality is the progressives aren’t choosy enough and lack a strong top down structure to protect their brand from being used by losing campaigns.

The Tea party took the Republicans over, but Flipside of that was the party was already schewing rightward. It didn’t take much for the party to become a race to meet the majority of the constituents to the shameful state they were already at. Rush Limbaugh is literally the founder father of the current Right and their “we hate everyone” philosophy. While he is dead, he laid the work for making hate mainstream.

I love the Working Families Party and think they could probably run third party candidates. However, overtime they made the smart choice just to provide support to democratic candidates they find appealing instead of running independently. If anything the most gutsy move would be to get people elected as Democrats and then (with the blessing of constituents and fundraisers) a few can jump ship to their own party on the state/local level and from there in time they can make the push to the national with the guys most likely to win. Keep in mind Cuomo (that POS) basically forced them to be at odds with unions which on the democratic side would be great as a third party base. So a third or fourth party would be great, but it would mean political experts were willing to take smart risks and the bravest politicians tend to be stupid as dirt and the smartest politicians tend to be chicken **** cowards.
 
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Another legal gun fight.



Does NT agree… making kids recite the pledge of allegiance is a form of indoctrination?

I mean yes i guess, but like it's a socitey. is

I don't really get how you have a socitey with some amount of indoctrination.


in canada we sing the anthem in French and English because bilingualism is an important value in Canadian socitey.
I would say it's indoctrination but not all indoctrination is bad.
 
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I think it was meant as an indoctrination sure, but now I think it is more of a silly tradition now

But by middle school it starts to become a joke, by high school, a lot of students think of it as a pointless hassle

Plus the fact they added "one Nation under God", something that goes against the spirit of the Constitution, to it just because they were scared of the community is so ****ing stupid

The fact it was clearly antagonistic to black Americans for a long time makes me think of it as even more silly

Say it, not say it, I don't have wrong feelings but I can't think of a strong defensive for keep saying it
 
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