American Politics Discussion Thread

[Mjmd]

I've argued extensively for alliances before. I feel like I should do a full right up and save it again so I can just quick post every once in a while.

[BING_XI_LAO]

The tools aren't rocket science.
- Don't concentrate too much political power in one place, spread it out and have effective checks and balances. (The US has too much power concentrated in the executive, and Congress is ineffectual at checking the executive when it does misguided things.)
- Political parties need to emphasize their centrist voices and tendencies so they can work together, and build and refine on one another's administrations. They don't have to agree on everything, but there needs to be some degree of commonality of vision. (The US has political parties that are constantly tearing down what each other does, and the party on the right has no vision of what should be done other than fight the left and cut taxes to benefit their rich donors. They don't even stand for reducing debt any longer.)
- Media voices should be centrist, honest, fact-oriented, and provide balanced viewpoints. It is important to treat differing opinions with respect, even if you disagree. That said, giving extremists oxygen only promotes unhelpful division. (Publicly funded news media in other democratic countries is much more widely trusted within their own country than the balkanized media in the US, and less prone to promulgate propaganda. This splintering of the US media landscape with the advent of cable media has been corrosive to public trust in general, and trust in the media and government in particular.)

This is all very well if you like the centrists and the various "checking and balancing" powers.
I take particular objection to the term "balanced viewpoint". If you have A and B as viewpoints, then an AB compromise is only good if the components were good in the first place.
If you copy someone else's point of view then you are subservient to that person, if your viewpoint is "balanced" then you are intellectually subservient to many people. It's not necessarily an alternative to a simplistic point of view, maybe now you've amalgamated multiple stupidities.

- People in general need to understand that democratic norms and values are not something to be casually discarded in order to get a political win. They are the glue that holds a democratic society together. People need to feel respected and that their neighbors are just as deserving of trust and respect.

What are the norms and values? Democracy has been changing the norms and values very rapidly. For example, in the US context, don't the people who like "norms and values" also support the physical elimination of national heritage in the case of Confederate monuments?
If each election is a contest over political values, then obviously political values cannot be what binds the two sides together. For people to feel loyalty across the aisle you'd need something immutable like a state religion (which maintains uniformity by punishing heresy), or for the state to be ethnically defined.
Why would Americans feel loyalty if they have no religious, racial or ideological commonality? And indeed Western regimes deliberately undermine all three by enforcing secularism, mass migration, and the constant electoral contests (however vapid they are).

Or if you assert various political values as the frame within which the democratic debate is to be had... then what is the point of the debate? You would have already addressed every point of interest prior to an election. And any ruler would get 'checks and balances'-d into inaction. What we have in the West, excepting Trump's spasms, is simultaneously lacking the bottom-up participation of substantive democracy, and the top-down reforming capability of an autocrat. Worst of both worlds.

If you prioritize personal power, money, or scoring political points over sticking to those norms and values, as people in the US have been increasingly doing, your society will rot from within, as has been happening in the US for some decades.

Are there really no great leaders in history who expanded and improved their society while prioritizing personal power (to include, executing rivals for the throne), living in glorious palaces, and "punishing treason" (scoring political points)?

I think the problem I have with your viewpoint, is that you value discussion, compromise, negotiation and so on in the halls of power. But my perspective is that people are not bringing genuinely felt, original points of view to the table. If they are regurgitating the views which serve special interests, or which they collectively learned in the education system, then the debate is superficial and predetermined. And the appropriate punishment for this would be if a commie-fascist divine right monarch, who is also the high priest, sent them all to the gulag.

I feel it's somehow related that I don't view trolling as a bad thing. Trolling includes satire, arguing positions you don't really hold, trying to figure out how people will react... all of which are intellectually compelling and good mental exercises. The only bad aspect of trolling is trying to piss people off emotionally, but even that can be "fair retribution" for annoyances like ad hominems, or the various silent hypocrisies which are most evident in our repeated devastations of the Middle East, with no-one being punished for it.

Both the troll and the monarch stand above the circumscribed, circumcised petty dialectics of the western party-political systems.

[BING_XI_LAO]

Frankly if your leader is such a bitch that he can't even kill his rivals, live in a golden palace funded by the people, and so on, then how can you expect him to bend history to his will?
What is the alternative, a council of bureaucrats, going to do other than follow the path of least resistance?

[Zed-F]

Sarcasm (and trolling) relies on shock value. Overuse it, and it loses impact.

Sad to see that you are so entrenched in your bitterness and cynicism that you don't think problems can actually be solved. That's self-defeating, in my view.

[CFCJesterFool]

Frankly if your leader is such a bitch that he can't even kill his rivals, live in a golden palace funded by the people, and so on, then how can you expect him to bend history to his will?
What is the alternative, a council of bureaucrats, going to do other than follow the path of least resistance?

I like how you think LOL!

[Charr Babies]

Yup.  I knew Trump was smart enough to not let that go on.  I put my money on it, literally, had a few paychecks worth of uninvested cash and bought the dip and caught the bottom just about perfectly on Monday and so up handsomely today.

That's a little too intense for my liking. I like to bet on the long term. So, I have been betting against the US (dollar) since March last year when gold was ~$2000, It is now $3200+, I am optimistic it will hit ~$4k by year end. Small risk but huge returns  

[T-hawk]

That's a little too intense for my liking. I like to beg on the long term. So, I have been betting against the US (dollar) since March last year when gold was ~$2000, It is now $3200+, I am optimistic it will hit ~$4k by year end. Small risk but huge returns  

Well sure, I invest long term too, everything is in stock index funds. Figured this worked both ways, a short term dip to buy, and even if it didn't bounce back right away, that's where the money would be going long term anyway. The US stock economy still outperforms everything else on the planet on average. I do wonder if I should diversify more, into gold or crypto or anything else. I do have some in a REIT (real estate stock fund) but that's all. Maybe I'll run to gold when the next D administration is about to get elected.

[darrelljs]

It's a good time to be paid in Euros .

Darrell

[Boro]

The tools aren't rocket science.
[...]
- Media voices should be centrist, honest, fact-oriented, and provide balanced viewpoints. It is important to treat differing opinions with respect, even if you disagree. That said, giving extremists oxygen only promotes unhelpful division. (Publicly funded news media in other democratic countries is much more widely trusted within their own country than the balkanized media in the US, and less prone to promulgate propaganda. This splintering of the US media landscape with the advent of cable media has been corrosive to public trust in general, and trust in the media and government in particular.)

I only have time for this bolded point, dear Frozen Turkey, but it's an important question none the less.

Who decides on who an extremist is?

* Committee? Then who selects the committee, and what are the limits of it's ability to declare people extremists? What stops them from declaring political opposition or people who just disagree them as extremists? It's modern day excommunication by the pope, just like it's softer form of dismissing dialogue as "[the bad guy's] talking points / propaganda".

* Define them by law? Again, what are the requirements and limits of defining them? What are the stops that prevent abuse by redefining them to suit political needs, while allowing definitions to be adjusted if needed.

* Referendum? Twitter mob? let it be a popularity context?

Debate / argument culture deteriorated so much I doubt it will ever recover. Facts and reality doesn't matter, only scoring a "win" or "own" and dismissing any inconvenient part of reality (as long as possible), switching the topic when something is really inconvenient... Any kind of censorship in such an environment is ripe for abuse.

Finally, I'd like to note (so you can all ignore the important part and chew on something else instead while feeling satisfied that you are "the good guys") that the american media landscape is more centralized than fractured (GE, News-Corp, Disney, Viacom, Time Warner, CBS) at least since 2011. "Big Tech"'s control over internet perception through effective monopoly does not need explanation. As for online media, I'll deal with that cesspool when I'm particularly bored.

[Zed-F]

For decades, each party policed itself and decided which voices on their flanks were too extreme to be allowed oxygen. Those days are gone. Now everyone is able to shout their opinion onto the internet and find a like-minded audience, regardless of how ludicrous their position is. The fracturing of the media landscape started with the rise of yellow cable news and the dismissal of the fairness doctrine, but it certainly didn’t end there.

Other western democracies haven’t let things go as far as the US has. But to your point that debate and culture will never recover… I don’t know. Maybe eventually. The US survived McCarthyism. It survived civil war. There is an argument that these kinds of political changes are cyclical. But if healthy political discourse does return, it probably won’t be for quite a while, and the US won’t be the same by the time it has. It seems to me that the Rubicon has been crossed.