And don’t shoot the messenger.
If the GOP and Democratic party were to merge, what would be the difference in
1. Race relations
2. War
3. Climate change
4. Immigration
5. Trade
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I’m curious as to the answers you’ll get. However, I say, we need to rid the country of libtards and SJW’s and free it so only true-blooded ‘Muricans, those who accept Jesus Christ as their Lord and Savior, are allowed to remain, and, more importantly, vote. Best way to do this is for ‘Muricans to vote me into the Senate in 2020 so I can enact my plan to build gas chambers and crematoriums to rid ‘Murica of the lazy poor, the faking disabled, and the whining, crying elderly who want their fucking social security checks every month–the lazy fucks. I’ve heard no argument better than mine to “cure” ‘Murica from the “problem” that is the people I’ve mentioned above.
Also, as long as a person advocates for a Christian, Evangelical theocracy for ‘Murica, it matters not what political party they claim to be a part of. We simply must cleanse America of all non-Christians so it can once again become a nation of hope, love, and peace. Only through the loving embrace of Our Lord and Savior, Jesus Christ can this be accomplished. With His guidance and rule, I vow to “cure” ‘Murica of all that ails it with gas chambers and crematoriums. No plan is better than mine. Period.
Vote for inspiredbythedivine1 in 2020. Vote to Make America Free Again. $Amen$!
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I recall SoM saying non christians didn’t belong in America. You may just have a point
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Oh, I most certainly do! Like I’ve said, I’ve not heard a single argument better than mine to help us create a truer, freer, more Christian America from anyone.
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If the GOP and Democratic party were to merge, what would be the difference in
1. Race relations
2. War
3. Climate change
4. Immigration
5. Trade
The left leaning commie pinko libtards would go to war with the right leaning Christian commie pinko libtards, and like the calico cat the the gingham dog, they would kill each other off in a shower of feathers, fur and stuffing.
The new government would quietly sweep up the mess, and continue on as before. Whatever that was.
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My first thought would be civil war, but then I took the easy road
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Hahaha Judy.
You have quite a way with words.
Happy Sunday good friend
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Thank you, Maka. As do you.
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I appreciate the question. The difference between the Democratic Party and Republican Party in the U.S. (not the individual members because there isn’t uniformity in either party) should be addressed generally with respect to political ideology and specifically with respect to various issues.
Ideologically, the Republican Party under Trump is now full fledged fascist and no amount of sugar coating could hide it. The Democratic Party since the 1990s under Clinton and Obama is essentially corporatist – i.e. a more benevolent version of fascism.
On racism, the difference is quite stark. The GOP is now openly white supremacist whereas Dems have maintained their liberal pro-equality philosophy.
On war, there really isn’t much difference.
On climate change, the Republican Party is wholeheartedly denialist while the Democratic Party rhetorically supports the science even though they don’t want to pursue effective mitigation policies.
On immigration, the GOP is inclined to shoot first and ask questions later and Dems just want to ask questions.
On trade, the only difference is that the Republican Party allowed a populist and protectionist (Trump) to run for president while the Democratic Party refused to allow a populist and socialist (Bernie Sanders) to have the same opportunity.
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I think I like the nuance, Bob. We can expand this to include other questions such as drug enforcement, prisons and all.
It’s good for reflection, I think
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Excellent reply..agree completely
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I was going to pen a series answer, but Mr. V sums it up. Especially regarding the Party of War. Which is the only political party extent in the United States.
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Both parties haven’t found a war they didn’t support, at least in the beginning
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I would suppose the only thing worse than a 2 party system would be a one party system. We may save the climate debate, but freedom would likely no longer ring. Itโs headline news right now when one senator votes against party lines. People are too devoted on both sides to see they may be the problem. Maybe a totalitarian regime is what we deserve.
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Looking at how the parties vote, it really is a two party dictatorship where the party with the majority rules. So where would the difference be?
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It would come apart almost instantaneously.
Now, if we changed to a parliamentary system with a Green Party, a Conservative Party and a Popular White People’s Party, we could solve most of our problems.
Our current, sorry state of affairs has come about because the Conservative Party has allowed in the membership of the Popular White People’s Party and can’t figure out how to shake the dirty little fuckers.
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Do you think there are more areas of convergence between the two parties than what keeps them apart?
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No. Some symbiosis is possible, but at this point, the two parties have come to represent how people value their fear.
Bins for the amygdala, they can never overlap substantially, unless they change essentially.
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IN a sense, there would be a rapture, you mean
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Well, ideally everybody who wanted to go to White People Heaven would be taken up straightaway, where the baby Jesus would be waiting for them with a basket of wings, a cold PBR, a brand new side-by-side and a couple of child brides.
With the provocative factor gone, a reorganization would be possible, though still difficult.
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Interesting perspective
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The best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.
Winston Churchill
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On this very important, I think he was right
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And yet, and yet, the best argument against any form of aristocracy is a perusal of history. Especially once the Lawds and Ladies and Kings and Queens start inbreeding.
One thing we cannot forget is some of the worst things done in the past hundred years were policies and programs promoted by America’s best and brightest. I am thinking especially of Vietnam, but look at Libya, Iraq, and Syria. They were not cooked up by Joe Sixpack but by Thurston Howell III, alumnus of Muckety Muck New England University of High self Regard.
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Brian, your choice of names continues to interest me. You are second only to our gas chamber senator
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Consider yourself lucky, Maka. You are too young and not American enough to understand the reference to the absolutely awful American television show from the early 1970s in which a crew of diverse stereotypes was marooned on an island, “Gilligans Island” Thurston Howell III was a stereotypical clueless (i.e., he inherited his money, thus the “III”) 1%er. ๐
Speaking of neo-reactionary critiques of “democracy,” I am a supporter of Aeon, a sometimes fascinating on line magazine.
This was in my box today! Japanese feudalism and its link to the modern American alt-right. Fascinating, if a tad bit too…sympathetic?
https://aeon.co/essays/echoes-of-kure-tomofusas-thought-in-the-nrx-movement
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I am going to read this shortly.
Youth has its advantages, it seems ๐
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Political parties are messy coalitions of interests, defined as much by what they oppose as what they advocate. The GOP and Democrats would only merge if there were another coalition which threatened their combined interests. I think the answers to your question would depend on what that other coalition was selling.
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Interesting perspective, Mike.
As things stand, do you think there is a great divergence on the above points I raised or they are so far apart that they wouldn’t converge anywhere? For example, do you think Bob’s view is a nuanced view of how things stand?
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I think he gets a lot of the positions right, but I disagree that it all starts with ideology. I think ideology is, frankly, just propaganda, the narratives the parties use to justify their positions, positions that are arrived because it’s in the interests of those in the coalition.
This is more obvious when you read about the history of political parties. When reading about the debates of the 19th century, it’s much more obvious that the parties are alliances of interests, alliances that tell ideological stories, but the stories only exist to justify positions the party is going to hold anyway, because it’s in the interests of its constituents (or donors).
This is why we shouldn’t be shocked by the Republicans currently going against so much of the ideology they’ve historically promulgated. The interests of their party have shifted, so the ideology is shifting. It’s worth remembering that in the 19th century, the Democrats were generally the entrenched conservatives and the Republicans the agents of change. Interests shift, and ideologies follow them.
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I agree with your larger assessment, but I neither stated nor implied that political parties’ policy positions start with ideology. In fact, I was making a clear distinction between them. That said, ideology – particularly those relating to cultural identity – is far more prevalent and influential in the current Republican Party than in the Democratic Party where pragmatic concerns hold sway over its leadership.
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Ah, sorry, I didn’t read you closely enough. I stand corrected.
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I am slightly aware of the shifts in ideology of the parties. I don’t think a person like Ingersoll would be a Republican if he were alive today.
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On Ingersoll, you’re probably right. The current party is an alliance of white nationalists, evangelicals, and big business interests. (Although the business interests appear to be getting increasing leery of the alliance.) It doesn’t leave a lot of room for an outspoken nonbeliever.
You asked somewhere else on the thread if one party would be a threat to democracy. It’s worth noting that the two party system in the US is structural, the result of how our constitution is architected. Getting anything done requires the cooperation of several people elected or appointed independently with staggered terms. That forces alliances to form, and counter alliances, and due to the staggered terms, the alliances need to be long term and slow changing.
Larger alliances are more effective than smaller ones, but decisions always have winners and losers. The result is two long standing political alliances with slowly shifting constituents, exactly what we have in the US.
The two party system has been disrupted a couple times in our history, but it takes something pretty traumatic, such as one party possibly commiting treason, or a civil war, but even with those, the system restabilizes back to two parties within a few years.
So if things ever did collapse to one party, it wouldn’t last long. At least unless we heavily modified our constitution to something more like a parliamentary system with proportional representation.
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Thank you Mike.
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Boom! That was a shot fired towards the messenger ๐
I think the only way to mix oil and water would be by some sort of industrial blending of the sort that neither party would survive. Which makes the questions a moot point.
However, I’d like to think that if such a thing were possible, that there would be some improvements down the list.
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Hey shelldigger friend, you mean their positions are so far apart that only civil war is possible?
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Mak, I wasn’t thinking that much into it. But both sides are so polarized that attempting to blend them together would be chaotic. And now that you mention it, civil war is a remote possibility.
It is a remote possibility now.
Not only are the two parties galvanized into their positions, the general population seems to be as well. I know that right now I despise R’s to the point I don’t want to be in the same room with such a fucking idiot.
I am sure they feel similarly about me.
I didn’t used to feel this way. I knew Faux News, and religion both, trains their listeners to hate anything that isn’t exactly like them. I was like whatever. After the first year of tRump, I have become polarized.
I keep saying when the revolution needs me, call. I’m only half kidding.
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So you don’t see areas of convergence?
I mean, both parties agree war is good except one side prefers use of drones and another might prefer sending boots?
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I don’t know if both parties agree that war is good. If that is the case I don’t want to be a D either. War may necessary, or inevitable at some point, but I could not agree it is good.
There may be some areas where both parties can find common ground, and they do at times. But of late it has been rather blatant, party before country, and any politicain who has gone so far as that, no longer has any business being a politician. They ought be tarred and feathered and run out of town. Forever branded as a traitor to thine own country.
Integrity should be the highest priority of our Congress. It does not exist on the R side of the aisle. I’m not sure how well it would measure on the D side, but I’m hopeful it is still there…
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On the invasion of Iraq, there was support from both sides of the aisle, no?
Obama expanded the drone program and failed, even when he had the majority to close Guantanamo bay extending a legacy of injustice and cruelty
Congress continues, with bipartisan support to expand military spending each year.
Let us all hope there is enough integrity left in Congress to last you many more years of calm, maybe not peace
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Yes I seem to recall there was bipartisan support for the invasion of Iraq. Which only proves our gov’t is far from perfect on a good day.
Obama was unable to do a lot of things. Because the day after he was elected the R party drove a wedge right down the party line. The R’s found a way to agree, they agreed to do nothing on practically everything Obama tried to get done.
Now they are still in control of the Senate and still refuse to cooperate on even the most sensible bills, simply because they were sponsored by D’s. It’s pathetic. Shameful.
Nevermind the entire tRump debacle. Throw that into the picture and anyone can see we are in a very bad place in this country.
We are pretty much screwed right now because the R’s have the Senate. They stand united against everything on the other side. No matter what headway is undertaken, it gets slammed in the Senate and goes nowhere. That despicable piece of shit Mconnell won’t even allow anything that makes good sense to hit the floor.
Integrity, determination, the willingness to get things done are gone. Honesty, trust, patriotism have been struck from the vocabulary. Lies, obfuscation, half truths, misdirection, and corruption are the words of the day.
I’m coming to live with you. ๐
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You would not survive a day in this hell hole of a place!
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Ha! That depends on how much booze you have in the house ๐
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w can always restock booze
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I would like to say that I think a lot of perception of the US is based off new or tv and it might be different from what other people see. There is a lot of division in the country so I think if you try to combine it, it will become another civil war. Iโm a very open minded American that comes from midwestern US which is not very open minded. So I have seen both sides. I think the US as a country should be more open minded than it is because it started out as a country where people could start over and make a better life but that is not the case anymore. People deny climate change or deny that there is a race war when that isnโt the case. This country was never a Christian country, it was started by atheist or agnostics that wanted a better life and I think people have lost sight of that. Cities have more of an open mind than rural areas in this country.
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I like the nuanced view such as this. There are areas of divergence and areas of convergence it seems, just like everywhere.
It is not always the case that one party system is a dictatorship. There can be dissent within the party, but when dissent is stifled, then break up is inevitable
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Exactly. I know people on both sides and in both sides there are people that agree or disagree on issues. It is a very tense time in the country right now because both sides have extremes but also not. Nothing seems to be able to get resolved because of the extremes and they are the only thing that seemed to be televised or videoed. People in the middle arenโt being very active
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Why are the centrists quiet? Because their silence, I think, emboldens the extremists on either side
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I think itโs complacency. For so long the centrists have stayed quiet because the extremes used to not be as extreme and balanced each other out but now the extremes have become further apart. So it has become a problem of nobody is balancing each other out and centrists are scared to speak up or think it will all fix itself.
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Makes sense
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Republicans vs. Democrats
Alien vs. Predator
Freddy vs. Jason
King Kong vs. Godzilla
Qu’est-ce que la diffรฉrence?
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Are the differences that wide? No common denominator? Or place of convergence?
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If the Democratic party was triumphant in the merger, the country and the world would be in a much improved state. If the others were triumphant, then suicide is actively encouraged! Naked hugs!
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So if a merger happened with either party having a majority say, the outcomes would be different. Interesting perspective
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The two major political parties here are on two VERY different leanings. Just compare President Obama to the current idiot in office!
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Mr. Orange provides for good entertainment
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If there were some crazy alternate universe where the parties merged, people would just find some new way to split into two political camps again. People are tribal by nature, constantly dividing ourselves into “us” and “them”. Unfortunately, our current authoritarian fascist leaders are really good at demonizing “them” to rally their supporters into a stronger “us”. I’m embarrassed to live in this country right now.
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Do you think having one party would be detrimental to democracy?
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