POP! Goes the Democrat!

Incorrect - entire viewpoints have shifted. The difference in free trade and not-free trade isn’t a tweak of details - it’s a wholesale change in principle. Executives need to hemmee in by the rule of law fours years ago - now, Republicans couldn’t care less about that. That isn’t a tweak of details.

You endorse a theme of the GOP being a rock-solid, you can trust 'em party for years while Democrats are going through radical changes. That’s false - both parties are transforming into something they weren’t before.

The record is mixed - but look at states (generally) with the highest education of its citizens and entrepreneurship and also look at states who require the most federal aid for its citizens. If what you’re saying is true, why do so many Blue States have smart people and high levels of entrepreneurship with lower levels of needing federal handouts?

The truth is more complicated - forget what you read in the fever swamps of the internet or listen to on talk radio.

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I’d say the one Rock solid aspect of the GOP is the reason they’re seen as unchanging when reality shows they’re absolutely not. It’s because the party shifts as an organism.

The GOP has perfected the hive mind mentality. Internal dissent will absolutely not be tolerated within the GOP. That’s where you get concepts as “vote for the party not for the man” and other such nonsense.

Look at Trump. The man upended decades of INTENSE GOP history. Election season he’s being shit on left and right for being a rino, yet subsequently crushes the vote with the historical republican base, considering him not being a ‘republican.’ Hillary obviously had a lot to do with it, but that obviously wasn’t the whole thing.

Fast forward to today. Trump set the precedence very early on that dissent won’t be tolerated. Fucking with long-standing Republicans (some even after death) and consistently driving home that HE is the republican party now. And like the organism it is, virtually all of the internal dissent has quietly faded away.

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THIS x 2000!

Thanks, @thunderbolt23

Absolutely agree.

100%. Look at the number of GOP “stalwarts” who self-castrated and handed their manhood over to Trump the moment Trump won. The party is a bunch of spineless followers that are told to get in in line, and they roll over without even a hint of a fight.

There have been a few times that the GOP has pushed back, and bravo in those instances, but by and large they do what they are told. The great irony is that that party of “rugged individualism” and the party who says to push back against authority (when that authority is the government) sits down and shuts up when they are told to sit down and shut up.

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Just got off work so I won’t get into it too much. Still it’s just a fact. When you look at the best states to live in by most metrics they are blue states.

But I’m a moderate. I don’t think far left or far right policies are successful. Again I’m from Kansas where we had that great experiment of Sam Brownback’s where we were going to cut everything and the prosperity would be nuts. People would be fleeing other states to get here.

But none of that happened.

IMO sky high taxes and huge government isn’t now the answer. No taxes and no government isn’t either.

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Again…another agree @H_factor

To sit here and argue that the GOP is the stalwart and never-changing savior of all that is good and American…and that the DEMS are the root cause of Urban rot and Decay, heavenly calamity and the Kardashians…and to some how try to back it up with “studies”…is the Ultimate in Confirmation Bias. The DEMS have done some good and bad…and the GOP sure as hell has.

And to reiterate…I am not going to be an apologist or defender of either.

I will say this (and this goes to someone’s aversion to “Creepy Joe”). While I am on record as saying that I will most likely not vote for either Biden or Trump and sit this election out…

Sorry, Conservatives… IN MY OPINION.…you have completely lost all credibility in casting moral dispersions on ANY of the 3,500 Democratic Candidates.

After embracing all that is Trump, that bullshit don’t fly with me…

The one thing that has remained somewhat constant is who benefits from having the GOP in power.

This is where the Dems have failed. It was the party of the workingman but it has forgotten him.

Forgive me if I’ve overlooked important nuance in my brief posts, but I still stand by my point. I’m not contending that the GOP is some bastion of principle. I’m contending that it is much closer to one that the Democrats, who are presently in the process of disenfranchising myself and the entire state of Maine from participating in the Presidential Election. LD 816, I linked it above.

That’s local politics, but similar legislation is underway in other states too.

On the national level it seems to me, a pretty typical American who works and raises children with most of my time, that the Democrats are favoring policies that unproven, irrevocable and of much greater potential impact than anything on the Republican side. Again, we have the advantage of a crystal ball of wokeness with the UK and EU, where we can watch these kind of bad ideas play out over time in societies similar to ours.

I also remember when Hugo Chavez and Venezuela were the absolute darlings of the left. They did it. They took power and implemented the right ideas, OUR IDEAS. And things were great for a few years and they all said LOOK, see how smart I am and how good these ideas play out.

I remember well, because I was an avid consumer of liberal media at the time.

We can always decide later that we need more immigrants from wherever for whatever reason. All sane countries manage who they let in and who they grant citizenship to, just as any sane person takes caution when deciding whether to invite someone they don’t know into their house. From what I can tell, the Democrats seem to be advocating for open borders and calling anyone who disagrees a racist. Many, such as the DA of Suffolk county (also linked above), population 800,000, campaigned on making things hard for ICE. One of the best men I know had to wade through screaming protesters just to go to work. He’s an ICE agent who works to bust international child sex rings with Interpol and law enforcement in all kinds of countries. He routinely spends weeks away from his family to hunt down and apprehend the worst people in the world, yet has to put up with self-righteous adult-age children who have nothing better to do than spend their time playing resistance warrior and screaming at people who do more for the community in a day than they’ve done in their lives.

Okay my ICE protester rant is over, thanks for sticking with me.

If you think I’ve misrepresented the Democrats’ position on border security, please say so. Again, I’m just a regular guy, not some political smarty pants. I’ve only listened to them speak and read their website, which didn’t seem to mention border policy except that they don’t want the wall. To give them credit, at least that much of their border policy was clear.

https://democrats.org/about/party-platform/

We can always decide later that massive entitlements should be extended to the population. We’ve done this before, and I think a strong case can be made that the Great Society legislation failed in its goals and has helped to produce outcomes that are severely crippling to a large swath of the people it was designed to help.

There’s a lot of nuance in that discussion too, btw, so please don’t interpret my statement as a suggestion that government assistance isn’t necessary. I believe it is.

We can always decide later that we should all turn in our guns, or some of our guns, or not. Cat’s out of the bag on that one anyway, but again that’s another discussion.

We can always decide later that yes, we should choose our words extremely carefully at all times and start implementing hate speech laws like in certain Canadian provinces, where mis-gendering someone can have very serious consequences. Let me tell you, one of my very best friends came out as trans about a year ago and I still slip up. Even his blue-haired super liberal friend slips up. I just slipped up there, I’m supposed to say “‘It’s’ blue-haired super liberal friend slips up.” Do you know how hard it is to consistently call a person “it”?

The people who drafted bill C-16 in Canada obviously didn’t. I say we just keep the social pressure on people not to be dickheads, treat people politely and wait and see while Canada and the UK slide down the slippery slope of their speech codes and speech police.

These are just a few examples, but I welcome any examples people might have that I’m not considering. What are the policies of the Republicans that are similarly transformative and irrecovable? What ideas are being advance that, if done, cannot be un-done?

@pfury

Sorry you brought up some good points and I hope to address them, but I’m out of time right now.

Well I think it depends on how you define transformative and irrevocable.

Spending massive amounts of taxpayer money on a Great Wall of America seems transformative and irrevocable.

I say that knowing full well it won’t happen of course. They had chances with the majority and didn’t want to do so. The dirty secret is Republicans love illegal immigrants. They love exploiting cheap labor. But it plays really well to working class people to say “these folks are why everything is bad for you.” Shit the president gave 30 billion to farmers. The very people who employ the most illegal immigrants of all!

Cutting taxes significantly targeted at the wealthy could be one. Cutting taxes and running up an enormous debt when the economy is doing well seems like a much bigger deal to me than most of the other stuff. I’m aware arguments can be made the other way as well. Like pf said earlier what happens when the next crisis comes through?

I think deciding that a party won’t stand up when someone says something horrific is certainly transformative and irrevocable. The behavior out of the presidency and largely ignored by his party is certainly transformative imo.

Well, take my city of Lewiston, Maine for instance. If you settle 5,000 people who don’t speak the language, practice an entirely different religion and hold dramatically different values in a city with a total population of 20,000, well, that’s going to be both transformative and irrevocable. It also happens that there is a dramatic difference in birth rate between the two groups, and demographics are taking over as 10 or so years have gone by.

I’m not saying it’s inherently good or bad, that’s a mixed bag for sure, only that it is transformative and irrevocable. I’ve watched it play out for over a decade here. Considering the nearly unlimited supply of people who would be happy to come here and collect generous state, local and federal benefits, it stands to reason that at some point you have to decide that enough immigration has taken place, or at least change the terms under which you invite new people here.

That’s just one example. I listed others above. Give up your guns, you probably won’t get them back easily. Give up your free speech in the name of not hurting feelings, you probably won’t get that back easily. If you let people in who don’t share your basic values, you can’t count on them to quickly adopt them. That may take a generation or two or may not really happen at all. We don’t know yet.

Revoking entitlements previously granted would, of course, produce massive social upheaval if they were ever revoked. It’s a lot easier to tear down a wall than it is to tear down a deeply-entrenched and inefficient bureaucracy that millions of people have grown to depend on.

@pfury I know I said I’m out of time and I am but I promise I’ll respond!

We’ve had immigration for a long time and been fine. We don’t have a correct religion or anything like that anyways. It would be hard to argue that immigration hasn’t been a net positive for the USA.

Guns isn’t happening. People May say certain things but nothing is happening significant on that front. Taking all guns away is a fringe viewpoint. We heard it for 8 years under Obama. Nothing changed except gun sales went way up.

Your free speech one doesn’t make much sense to me. I can’t think of any type of powerful individual that has attacked the first amendment more than Trump. I listed tons of examples in this very thread. Sadly it has been speech and attacks on entire religions. I guess as long as he’s killing the amendment to religions practiced by minorities maybe it’s ok? Seems like a dangerous precedent to set. Maybe it’s Catholics next?

I’m not sure what you mean by depend on. You mean like social security and Medicare which extends lives and keep some people who can no longer physically work from being homeless? What if those “entitlements” helped society out more than a wall?

Maybe their benefit is what makes them irrevocable? It’s like education most people would fight against you if you said we need to take away the “entitlement” of a K-12 education. Because most people think the value outweighs giving it up. Of course all these things have their issues but you are going to be in the minority big time if you suggest eliminating them. And again maybe that’s because people enjoy their lives more with them in place?

As for adding to Republicans transformative and tough to reverse (nothing is actually impossible to do so) I’ll take some foreign policy ones. Massive trade wars and sucking off Putin and Kim could certainly be transformative.

@H_factor Look. Nobody, least of all me, is saying that immigration should be stopped or that it hasn’t been a net positive. I never argued such a point.

I think I’ve been pretty clear in my positions and given specific examples to back them up. Forgive me if I find your counter examples to be uncompelling reasons to vote for any more Democrats.

@pfury I still don’t have much time to write today, but my general point of contention is that people are going to self-organize and generally do whatever is in their interest. That’s what we do. Some of these successful people happen to be in places that vote D and enact D policies, not all of which are train wrecks.

Many elements combine to form successful outcomes for people. Geography, culture, education, initiative, luck, parenting, the presence of other people who are generating opportunities that others can take advantage of, well established industries and businesses along with countless other factors. Somewhere in that mix of factors is government policy. How much it helps or hinders the generation of good outcomes is not an easy thing to measure, but that’s no reason to draw lazy correlations.

What do I mean by lazy correlations? Here’s an example. You often hear left-leaning types point to places like Australia or the UK as good examples of gun control success. They have low rates of gun violence AND strong restrictions on firearms, so the laws obviously work, right? Right? I mean it’s OBVIOUS.

Well, if you look at the rates of violence in the UK or AUS before they passed any landmark firearms legislation, you’ll see that very little change happened. Violence declined, but that was happening all throughout the western world including the USA during the same time period. In other words, a society of generally peaceful people remained peaceful after said legislation was passed. The legislation can’t take credit for outcomes that were already happening. My state of Maine is among the most peaceful places you’ll find in the western world, but fully-automatic machine guns are legal at the state level, you can carry without a permit and there’s basically no state level firearms laws that your average law-abiding Joe needs to worry about. If we suddenly adopted UK style legislation, I’m fairly sure we’d carry on being the most peaceful state in the US. File that one under “no shit, Sherlock”.

What I’d like to see is an explanation for how left-leaning policies improve outcomes, not the obvious observation that left-leaning areas have good outcomes. Of course people in a place like New York City or Connecticut or New Jersey have many chances to prosper. Of course areas rife with opportunity will attract people who take advantage of those opportunities. Of course successful people will generally raise more successful people.

Please don’t misunderstand my position as advocating anarchy or no government. I’m advocating for good government. What I’m observing are two parties who generally don’t fit that bill, but one party that’s locked and loaded on policies that are both irrevocable and transformative, with no guarantee of a good outcome.

Back to my little world, Maine Democrats are busy making sure my vote probably won’t count at all in the 2020 presidential election. That’s not hyperbole or exaggeration. LD 816. But hey, at least my blue wave government has tackled the important issues. Single-use plastic bags are now banned, taxes are on their way back up and we’re going to get an enormous electrical transmission line slicing through our woods so people in Massachusetts can get “green” electricity from Quebec, with no benefit to anyone in Maine except contractors and politicians.

You know what they say… When plastic bags are outlawed, only outlaws will have plastic bags.

That’s fine. I’m not trying to convert you to a different awful side. I just think it’s worth pointing out the flaws of both.

Isn’t that at least some evidence though? I mean we can always dismiss the successes of these places for a variety of reasons. It remains a fact that on the whole the places with the worst outcomes tend to be places dominated by Republicans.

That isn’t to say that democrat areas consistently have good outcomes or Republicans bad ones. It’s just we really haven’t seen on the whole places with big Republican control lead to the type of outcomes that would have us definitely say this is correct. I speak as someone who for the most part is moderate. I think far left and far right are the places that have the least chances of success.

No. I don’t believe it is. I don’t think I chose my words well.

What I’d like to see is an explanation for how left-leaning policies improve outcomes, not the obvious observation that left-leaning areas sometimes have good outcomes.

I suppose that depends on how you measure the outcomes, doesn’t it?

Are we going strictly by the numbers, or shall we play the percentage game?

I gave that, multiple times above. Left and right policies are much like supply and demand. They have a direct effect on the QoL of their voters. That’s why you see a consistent shift of the higher performing members of society to leftist leaning states.

It’s a self fulfilling prophecy by way of fulfilling voter wishes.

To specifics, left leaning policies are less likely to start wars, more likely to provide a robust social safety net (which directly impacts crime rate), and more likely to attract high level people.

I’m still dumbfounded at how we’re considering these possible Dem moves more irrevocable and transformative than the GOP of today?

We can’t take back the billions lost from other countries developing their imports elsewhere from the trade war.
We can’t take back selling nuclear tech to the Saudis.
We can’t take back gutting the tax rate, despite it already (realistically) being hilariously low.
We (apparently) can’t take back an ever escalating defense budget to fund a war machine.

And I’m supposed to be worried about universal health care? In a world where it’s the only viable long term option (math’s a bitch)? Shit man, that sounds okay.

I live in Ohio. My vote didn’t count either.

That’s the joy of any state run vote system. If the rules don’t swing the vote to your guy, it doesn’t count.

Sounds like there’s a lot of work being done for something that has no demand from your neighboring communities.

But it’s not. LD 816 isn’t a terribly radical idea. There are arguments for and against keeping the Electoral College, and both sides of that are in the mainstream. You make it sound like Maine Democrats have gone off the deep end in wanting to go with the popular vote in a presidential election - nah, that’s not a symptom of radicalism, that’s a pretty common, if liberal, point of view.

I wouldn’t support such a bill, but it’s not a sign the party has lost its mind. On the other hand, we have Trump - the American president - encouraging American citizens to boycott a private business (AT&T) to punish them for being connected to CNN, which reports badly on Trump. And the rock-solid, principled GOP had nary a peep about it.

Government officials arbitrarily attacking private enterprise for political ends is now happening in the GOP, but the Democrats want to pass a law through the ordinary, fair legislative process to make the popular vote what picks the president?

And you think the Democrats are the unchained radicals here?

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PF did that. I’d also have to look at state by state. It’s not a one size fits all.

I will share what happened in Kansas when we went far right. We had a massive tax cut. Enough to make revenue drop by I think around 6-8 million. Can’t remember the exact number. It was definitely aimed at the wealthy. Businesses found they could manipulate things and pay essentially no taxes. Bill Self the highest paid public employee did this as did many others. We raised the sales tax to help offset which of course meant we developed something to benefit the rich while adding something that would effect the poor more. Same thing when we made cuts to Medicaid. When you have no money you can’t afford public services that benefit people.

The loss of revenue wasn’t a one year thing. It was massive and consistent.

We had to take away from various funds to makeup the difference. Highways suffered some of the worst. Construction workers were laid off or not hired during seasonal time. We suffered in education. Teachers and support staff lost jobs. Schools couldn’t give raises to people or invest more in kids. Many schools had to close early to save money.

The idea was people would move to Kansas and businesses would do the same. It didn’t happen. We lagged the nation by far in areas of unemployment and GDP. People near borders simply started working in those states. After all if you’re a construction worker and you can’t find a job where you’re at because we can’t afford to fix a road you simply hop to someplace that’s fixing roads.

It’s a brief look I’m out of time for right now but hopefully it paints a picture of what can happen when Republicans hell bent to make sure taxes don’t exist take total control.