Comment by Mistletoe 15 hours ago
Maybe in 2028 a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points. I suspect the world will be very different then. The America I knew, remembered, and loved started dying with the passage of the Patriot Act.
There needs to be something like the federal equivalent of a referendum. I think with that, it would be possible to get rid of the patriot act and legalize weed, both of which seem to have popular support but zero chance of majority of representatives backing because they don't want to be liable for the worst-case corner-cases in the aftermath.
We are constantly voting in primaries and general elections. We vote in federal elections every two years, state elections generally at least as frequently, though often not in federal election year. We vote for mayor and city council and insurance commissioner and Secretary of State and county commission.
We don't need a referendum, we just need to choose representation that wants the same things we want. (Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do.)
By referendum I meant to be able to vote directly on a specific law.
If you look at how weed was legalized, it required a referendum in many (most?) states because no representative wants to be the guy that has his face plastered everywhere when some kid dies after he smokes some legal weed and smashes into a pole, even if most his constituents wanted the policy.
Representatives generally have to be risk averse to get to the point they can even represent people on issues. This means they are extremely reluctant to vote for anything that might come back to bite them somehow, even if it is popular.
>Alternate formation: Americans do not want these things as much as some of us think they do
There is extremely overwhelming evidence that a supermajority of americans have wanted medical marijuana to be federally legal for many years. And overwhelming evidence the representatives have not been successfully bringing that forward.
The first-past-the-post system, combined with our current primary system, is set up such that most Americans do not get the representation they actually want, and Congress is made up of extremists. We don’t have the Congress we have because most Americans actually want it that way.
An interesting what-if scenario; but, let's assume Sanders won and all else remained largely the same as it has:
Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised. Knowing our limitation that everything else has stayed largely the same as history since, this wouldn't be the case. The hypothetical administration's attempts at sweeping reforms, such as healthcare and climate regulation, would very likely be significantly curtailed or overturned by courts or constrained by constitutional limits on separation. The GOP, even though they actively outspend Democrats when in power, obstruct via financial limits each and every Democratic-led effort while crowing about expansion of debt incursion; as such, spending on Bernie's proposed initiatives would raise concerns about deficits, inflation, and taxation. Even with tax increases, there would be pushback from wealthy individuals, corporations, and lobbyists.
Basically, nothing would change in any significant way except, perhaps, the SCOTUS would not be outright overturning DECADES of 'settled law' in favor of an absurd view of the world as it was hundreds of years ago.
Yes. There are a few moments when Biden floated something that sounded like a promise made to Bernie and it got laughed out of congress by both sides of the aisle. The "capital gains income is income" proposal is probably the cleanest example. There would have been more of that and not a lot done. To make real change, you need congress on board and possibly the courts too.
> Unless the Sanders Administration had a very favorable or majority Democrat Congress aligned with his progressive wing, many proposals would be outright blocked or heavily compromised
This is a feature, and why Trump's second term is so different to his first, or Bidens, or Obamas, or Bush, or Nixon. You'd probably have to go back to FDR for such sweeping changes to the US state.
Trumps first term was overturning norms in behavior, but not overturning the way the entire governing system works, all four estates.
Many people will imagine things. However history constantly suggests that most of those are very different from the reality that results.
The good news is when your candidate loses you don't find out the evil they really do and you can say it is not your fault. The bad news is you don't find out what is bad about the things you think are good.
Just because a politician does the most virtue signaling towards the left doesn't mean that they'll produce the most progressive results. Bernie has a very poor track record of coalition building. He was getting into fights with Manchin even though he was needed as the 50th vote for the American Rescue Plan and Inflation Reduction Act.
He's never been a champion of financial freedom on an individual basis. He's consistently advocated for deeper and more intrusive regulations on cryptocurrencies.
Probably very similar unfortunately. The current state of US politics is that any policy further than center or maybe slightly left of center has a snowball's chance in hell of making it through Congress. The best case scenarios is probably what Biden accomplished: temporarily pausing the slide into far-right authoritarianism. Maybe he's able to pass some extremely watered down version of health care reform or tax reform but that seems unlikely. Certainly nothing like true progressive platform he ran on is possible in the US right now.
Yes, it would have been 4 years of zero progress because he would have been stonewalled by both parties.
I think the big difference would have been around Covid. The Trump administration really, really dropped the ball there, and a potential Sanders administration might have done better (i.e. invested money in preventing it from getting out of Asia, as was done for SARS 1).
Now, that might not have worked but anything might have had a pretty large impact on global/US deaths.
He was sabotaged by the DNC. Even Elizabeth Warren said that the nomination process was rigged by the DNC. Absolute corruption and the world would absolutely be a different place.
But his support of ratcheting up the Ukraine war disappointed profoundly. That’s not the Bernie I would have voted for.
That has been disproven. He ran again in primaries during 2020 and did horribly there. The progressives are just not popular, and they don't really do much to work with the rest of the Democrats. Unlike Republicans, where the party forerunner basically gets unilateral support from everyone Republican including those he personally insulted or harmed.
Sanders is old enough to remember what appeasement leads to, that's all.
supporting Ukraine has always been in America's interests. How embarassing it must be for Trump to be publicly humiliated by Putin over a cease fire.
There are many reasons Ron Paul was not very popular.
popular means whatever Hollywood decided to like
this is the end of celebrity culture at the hands of social media.
monarchies are the central core of celebrity cultism, look at France today; surrounded by the Monarchies and up in flames.
It's called the patriot act, anyone fighting it is instantly framed as anti-American.
> a presidential candidate can run with removing the Patriot Act as one of their campaign points
I've worked on privacy regulation. This would not get votes. The unfortunate fact is that the people most passionate about these issues are also tremendously lazy or extremely nihilistic. (Maybe it comes with the territory of not trusting institutions.)
Either way, privacy advocates can rarely muster even a dozen calls to electeds, let alone credibly threaten backing a primary opponent. The reason SOPA/PIPA worked is it animated a group of tech advocates beyond those with ideological opposition to surveillance.
Given how the democracy is attacked, I'm not sure there will be an election in 2028
you don't make improvements to a house, adorn it with gold all over, make 200m improvements if you have the intention of leaving.
behaviour says more than words
>he (and his kind) lives for short term gratification and will move on to another house and decorate that with gold.
Exactly. It's a social norm among that class of society
When a Koch, or a Scwab, or the CEO of some mega-corp buys a property on Martha's Vineyard, or the Hamptons, or Vail or overlooking Tahoe or whatever, with intent to actually spend even the scantest amount of time there themselves they engage in absurd unnecessary renovations. That's just how they do things. There is an occasional exception for those in that group who have "found meaning" in some other avenue for lighting money on fire.
Edit: You can thank me later for implicitly telling you where the best construction dumpsters are.
Every president remodels and redecorates the White House, often to a much greater degree. The consternation over it is an intentional distraction.
https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/report-cards/2022
I'm not sure that democrats enact/write less laws. If they don't enact (or write) less laws, i cannot see how the aggregate number of laws reduces.
This, apparently, is a "hard" statistical (research) problem, even though i've seen reporting on this exact subject, along the lines of "number of lines in bills written by each party" or similar. but the top 2 are democrats. I think "enacted" is a different metric, but i'm still pretty certain that democrats lead on "enacted" legislation, at least in the last 25 years.
No candidate can do that. The children were raised to be racist and ignorant. That basically means you are going to deal with poorly raised feral racist and entitled children. You aren’t going to rehabilitate that in your lifetime, the childhoods are fucked up. Maybe in 30-40 years these people will have a come to Jesus moment, but we don’t have a malleable national moral character to appeal to helpful sensibilities given how poorly the prior generation failed at raising proper children with good moral character.
Basically, a good portion of White America are gone cases. You won’t be able to explain to gone cases anything. That’s the reality of America.
the average man does not want to be free. he simply wants to be safe. ~H.L. Mencken
The bad guys will say you only need privacy if you’re guilty and the plebs will lap it up
1) If Trump somehow survives till 2028, there aren't gonna be elections in 2028 (or at least fare ones, if Democratic candidate wins Trump is gonna declare national emergency on suspect of voter fraud). TBD if Vance and the other crazies are in the same boat.
2) America started dying way before when we thought things like being anti woke was more important than policy.
Given how patriot act survived many terms of both republicans and democrats i highly doubt it.
It is a extremely convenient act for whoever is in power.