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) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 04 2016, @04:13AM
1. repeal superior personhood of fictitious legal entities...
Yeah, no duh.
2. have Big Media give free air time for candidates (thus eliminating the 'need' for zillions in campaign funding), they are OUR airwaves, have them work for us, for a change...
They're OUR airwaves, but not OUR transmitters -- and getting bogged down in arguments about who subsidized what when, or whether they could have succeeded without using the state to exempt corporations from the normal rules, or... That's ALL a losing game.
The first step is recognizing the radio spectrum as a commons, which you've done (or close enough); the second step is managing that commons in some sane fashion, renting rather than selling chunks of it off permanently, that sort of thing. Then you've got a bulletproof basis to demand, as part of the rent, that they use a certain amount of time on their transmitters to display state-controlled content, including candidate airtime.
That said, I distrust state propaganda, even (or especially!) when it's supposedly neutral; how do I know that candidates aren't being told what they can and can't say on their free airtime, etc.? Good thing I have internet and don't watch/listen to anything on the airwaves anyhow -- because I trust Google so much more than the state! AAAAAaaaaarrrrggghhhh! (I really don't have a good answer.)
3. instant runoff/ranked choice voting methods have the potential to give us REAL choices, third+ parties, and break the one Korporate Money Party's stranglehold...
No, No, No! IRV is EVIL -- it has the same 2-party lock-in tendency as plurality.
And ranked choice ballots in general suffer pathological behavior compared to scored choice ballots (range/approval voting).
We now have an unresolvable cycle; any voting system that manages to make sense of that is a monstrosity that makes sense out of nonsense. (Most ranking systems would call that a 3-way tie, BUT if there's other voters, most systems will combine PART of our three ballots with the other ones, and quite possibly return a completely different result than if we three had not voted at all.
A simple, elegant voting system can actually add those up (A=14,B=12,C=18) and say who won.
C won because you mostly favored it, he completely favored it, whereas B failed because I rated it very low -- this time, we put more information in, and it can actually be solved. And, if other people voted? Our votes mostly canceled each other out, but not entirely -- so we'll have just the right proportionately small net effect. These voting systems not only let voters express honest preferences, they are mathematically well-behaved.
4. i would dump the existing computer-based PROPRIETARY vote-rigging systems, as well...
Yeah, no duh.