SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the when-times-are-forced-to-change dept.
When trying to understand the two bad choices we have now, it can help to look into the past at where they came from. In this article, Matt Stoller at The Atlantic provides a deep dive into a transformation the Democratic party underwent in the late 1960s onward. In it we see how the Democrats morphed the anti-big-business politics that had powered it for over a century into the big-government politics that define the political conversation today.
Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy. The New Deal divided power, pitting faction against other faction, a classic Jefferson-Madison approach to controlling power (think Federalist Paper No. 10). Competition policy meant preserving democracy within the commercial sphere, by keeping markets open. Again, for New Deal populists like Brandeis and Patman [ed: links mine], it was democracy or concentrated wealth—but not both.
[...] The story of why the Watergate Babies spurned populism is its own intellectual journey. It started with a generation of politicians who cut their teeth on college-campus politics. In their youth, they saw, up close, not the perils of robber barons, but the failure of the New Deal state, most profoundly through the war in Vietnam. "We were the '60s generation that didn't drop out," Bob Edgar, a U.S. representative from the class of 1975, told me. The war in Vietnam shaped their generation in two profound ways. First, it disillusioned them toward the New Deal. It was, after all, many New Dealers, including union insiders, who nominated Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and who supported a war that killed millions, including 50,000 Americans their age. And second, higher education—the province of the affluent—exempted one from military service, which was an explicit distinction among classes.
[...] By quietly cutting back the influence of unions, [Democratic strategist Fred] Dutton sought to eject the white working class from the Democratic Party, which he saw as "a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote." The future, he argued, lay in a coalition of African Americans, feminists, and affluent, young, college-educated whites.
[...] By 2008, the ideas that took hold in the 1970s had been Democratic orthodoxy for two generations. "Left-wing" meant opposing war, supporting social tolerance, advocating environmentalism, and accepting corporatism and big finance while also seeking redistribution via taxes.
(Score: 0, Redundant) by fritsd on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:27PM
I do enjoy pontificating about US politics. Even though (or maybe because?) I don't actually know much about it. OK here goes:
Well, one of the most important principles is, that the voting has to be *understood* to be fair, by most voters (i.e. also with an IQ under 100).
So nothing fancy like advanced Condorcet voting. Stick to the basics: one person one vote proportional representation, with political parties to summarize and simplify the myriad options.
(I know you don't need political parties, but they make things easier for the voter.)
Red pencil and paper. If you don't understand the argument for voting on paper ballots, educate yourself. The percentage of people that is blind or disabled will just have to mandate a friend or family member to vote for them. It's harsh, but it simplifies things a great deal and makes fraud lots more difficult than anything at all with voting computers. Every voter V is allowed to vote for themselves, *and* they are allowed to accept the mandate of one (1) person B voting in absentia, whereby that second person B(lind) fills in and signs a paper form that they mandate V to cast the vote for them on that day.
Every person that has a legal residence, gets written in in the voting station closest to that legal residence. (Of course there are forms to fill in if you want to change your preferred voting station). I don't know what to do about homeless people who want to vote. Maybe give them one of those forms half a year before.
Every voter that approaches the voting booths, shows ID to the volunteers, and then in the (paper!) voting book the field next to their name is crossed out, and if it was already crossed out there will be trouble. After that they are given a ballot envelope.
Get rid of the Electoral College (do more than half of the voters understand what it's for? No? Then get rid of it.)
One person one vote immediately gets rid of your crazy "gerrymandering" in one fell swoop. Now, suddenly all votes count no matter where you live. This is good for democracy!!
Do the federal government election and the state election on the same day, a sunday every 4 years; do the typically American local dog-catcher and judge elections on the other (4*365.25-1) days, so the pensioners have something else to do besides Bingo.
Nobody else elects their judges and dog-catchers, guys. Do more than half of your voters understand they should vote for judges and dog-catchers as well as president and parliament? Does anyone bother?
Make it a federal crime to refuse your employees free time off to do their voting. Them voting is more important than your company's production schedule!
Now despite my big mouth I've never actually even visited the USA (let alone live there, God forbid!) so I'm sure I've bulldozed over nuances and details. Maybe the Cherokee and other Indians get guaranteed representation at the federal level, for example. I don't know if Washington DC is a state or not (it is drawn with a different colour on maps). I have no clue about Puerto Rico, either.
Maybe vest the power in the House of Representatives, with all laws subject to veto by the President and amendment and/or sending back by the Senate. Or is it that way already.
House of Representatives can sack the President if they win a motion of no confidence [wikipedia.org]. (That's actually a very well functioning mechanism).
The people elect the parties (which form the parliament); the parliament is sovereign, the president can go spin on it.
Have a low threshold of 3% of the vote; if a political party gets above that threshold, they get a proportional slice of the pie of *taxpayer-based* advertising money. Have prime-time TV slots pre-bought by this advertising money and distributed proportionately amongst the parties with > 3% votes. Any other sources of money to a political party with more than 3% votes means: go directly to jail, do not pass start.
The joke "America: the best government money can buy", is actually a bit shameful, don't you think? How much are the volunteers paid, by the way? Probably not as much as the lobbyists..
Whew.. did I miss anything? What I probably haven't articulated is, that if you have a proportionate voting system, the type of politics changes: political parties *know* they have to compromise and form coalitions sometimes, so the type of debate becomes much less adversarial, and more aimed at the actual issues. Imagine each political party as a Rorschach blotch on a 2-dimension Political Compass map. They overlap. The combined blob(s) which represents most of the voters, should govern. I for one welcome our new blobby overlords!
Observe the enormous difference in meaning between purple coalition (in the Netherlands) vs. the "red-vs-blue" states in the USA [wikipedia.org]. The people benefit if coalitions are somehow found that represent their wishes, not when it's guaranteed that 50% of the electorate gets shafted!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 03 2016, @06:49PM
Your prescriptions miss a few details.
The separation of powers is actually pretty important in the US. Making the president beholden to the House actively destroys that. This is a bad idea.
Unalloyed democracy turns into a tyranny of the majority, and the US of A is quite a diverse country. Telling the people of Wyoming, by default, to just suck it if the people of Wisconsin don't agree with them, is not exactly good for coherence. So, doing away with the electoral college or states' rights in general? Bad idea.
And yes, people do vote for other electoral offices.
And as for coalition governments? We'll ask Belgium how well that's worked for them first, I think.
What might make more sense is change representatives to public servants, who are not elected. Instead people vote for issues, and the representatives are banned (backed by stiff legal penalties) from voting to pass any law that violates the stated preferences of their constituency, with automatic standing for any constituent to lay a claim against their representative.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 04 2016, @12:43AM
Stick to the basics: one person one vote
That's garbage; there should be a ranked voting system. Anything else encourages voting for the 'lesser' evil.