The Age of Ideologues: how do we resurrect pragmatism and good-faith governance?

[salamander]

@Trotsky,Trumps goons see the world in that particular mindset: there is no reconciliation to have with enemies internal or domestic, because they are contradictions that post existential threats. It's very hard to argue with that perspective, just ask Weimar Germany.

Probably because of my syrupy Canadian brain I don't undersrtand. What does this mean? Are you talking about facism?

 

[Judge]

In post-Reagan, post-Gingrich, and post-McConnell America, the Republican Party has increasingly advocated policy making (and obstruction of policy making) that is empirically indefensible, from financial deregulation and insistence on long-debunked trickle-down economics, to repealing of environmental and consumer welfare laws, to furthering voter ID laws that are known to be frivolous, based on nonexistent premises, and which only serve to disenfranchise voters.

This may be ultra-partisanship, outright corruption, or as more optimistic persons like @Jack V Savage believe, actual commitment to flawed ideology. This disregard for good faith governance was recently epitomized by the budget-busting 2017 tax cuts.

However, it was not always like this, and during the years of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon conservatives engaged in good faith reaches across the aisle to pass laws on topics like progressive taxation, environmental regulation, consumer protections, and labor organizing rights. Today, conservatives championing social programs, graduated tax brackets, and regulation of industry for the good of the American people would be nearly sacrilegious.


How do we recapture the pre-Reagan days of good faith governance that allows Democrats and Republicans to agree on meritorious policies that do not fit an ideological agenda of deregulation, upward distribution, or (if you are to represent that the Democrats are ideologues as well) social justice?

LOL anyone with your username calling anyone else an ideologue is hilarious.

Edit: No one EVER ran on trickle down economics as a platform. The republicans have made tax cuts to all. Never just tax cuts to the rich.

So at least have some truth in your crying.

 

[Quequeg]

It will require a complete overhaul of campaign finance.

There should be 1 general fund that is equally divided between all candidates for both the Republicans and Democrats

Conservatives are diehard against this concept, Trump supporters are so proud of getting Gorsuch on the supreme court who will do nothing but keep the money in politics.

 

[Denter]

In post-Reagan, post-Gingrich, and post-McConnell America, the Republican Party has increasingly advocated policy making (and obstruction of policy making) that is empirically indefensible, from financial deregulation and insistence on long-debunked trickle-down economics, to repealing of environmental and consumer welfare laws, to furthering voter ID laws that are known to be frivolous, based on nonexistent premises, and which only serve to disenfranchise voters.

This may be ultra-partisanship, outright corruption, or as more optimistic persons like @Jack V Savage believe, actual commitment to flawed ideology. This disregard for good faith governance was recently epitomized by the budget-busting 2017 tax cuts.

However, it was not always like this, and during the years of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon conservatives engaged in good faith reaches across the aisle to pass laws on topics like progressive taxation, environmental regulation, consumer protections, and labor organizing rights. Today, conservatives championing social programs, graduated tax brackets, and regulation of industry for the good of the American people would be nearly sacrilegious.


How do we recapture the pre-Reagan days of good faith governance that allows Democrats and Republicans to agree on meritorious policies that do not fit an ideological agenda of deregulation, upward distribution, or (if you are to represent that the Democrats are ideologues as well) social justice?

Weird how the country has gotten more right wing as its gotten more diverse.

Maybe the 1930s-1980s was a unique time- its certainly not the norm in American politics.

 

[Jack V Savage]

Weird how the country has gotten more right wing as its gotten more diverse.

Maybe the 1930s-1980s was a unique time- its certainly not the norm in American politics.

Has the country actually gotten more right-wing? I think the right has moved right quickly, and the left has moved left to a lesser extent. The center is probably more left now than it's been in a while. Right-wing economic policy has probably never been less popular.

1920-1970 was a unique time in history for reasons not directly related to politics that might weigh on politics. Most of the improvement in human living standards occurred during that period (and most of the improvement that didn't occur in that period occurred in the 50 years immediately preceding it or the 48 years since--so pretty much all in the past 150 years). You could argue that the liberal consensus was both a cause and a result of the explosive improvement in quality of life. And the slowdown in growth since then could be both an effect and a cause of the cracking of the liberal consensus.

 

[Pupi]

I have not read that, but I will, as what you're saying is pretty interesting

He's been hailed as a 20th century Thomas Hobbas. He was also the Legal Theoretician of the Nazis. He says that politics is war and ultimately about racial war.

Probably because of my syrupy Canadian brain I don't undersrtand. What does this mean? Are you talking about facism?

Possibly a protean version of it.

 

[JamesRussler]

k

 

[JamesRussler]

Conservatives are diehard against this concept, Trump supporters are so proud of getting Gorsuch on the supreme court who will do nothing but keep the money in politics.

Hey man, lay off Gorsuch. He's got some views you should be very happy with, especially when it comes to limiting the power of the administrative state to make its own legal determinations. Can't we at least agree that courts, and not bureaucrats, should determine our legal rights?

As for money in politics, I think Citizens United was wrong to the extent that it lets foreign, subversive elements affect our politics. Corporations are not people, and not all "people" who make up those corporations are entitled to vote. It might be prudent to put a hard limit on all corporate political expenditures. But you can't stop private persons from purchasing political advertisements – not consistently with our Constitution. Anyway, at the end of the day, Donald Trump proved that you don't need big corporate SuperPACs to become president, as long as you have billions of dollars of your own money, and a shrewd political mind.

 

[franklinstower]

In post-Reagan, post-Gingrich, and post-McConnell America, the Republican Party has increasingly advocated policy making (and obstruction of policy making) that is empirically indefensible, from financial deregulation and insistence on long-debunked trickle-down economics, to repealing of environmental and consumer welfare laws, to furthering voter ID laws that are known to be frivolous, based on nonexistent premises, and which only serve to disenfranchise voters.

This may be ultra-partisanship, outright corruption, or as more optimistic persons like @Jack V Savage believe, actual commitment to flawed ideology. This disregard for good faith governance was recently epitomized by the budget-busting 2017 tax cuts.

However, it was not always like this, and during the years of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon conservatives engaged in good faith reaches across the aisle to pass laws on topics like progressive taxation, environmental regulation, consumer protections, and labor organizing rights. Today, conservatives championing social programs, graduated tax brackets, and regulation of industry for the good of the American people would be nearly sacrilegious.


How do we recapture the pre-Reagan days of good faith governance that allows Democrats and Republicans to agree on meritorious policies that do not fit an ideological agenda of deregulation, upward distribution, or (if you are to represent that the Democrats are ideologues as well) social justice?

The answer to this is known and I cannot take any politician seriously who does not LEAD with the it.

Money in politics the the reason. All other problems flow from it. Wealthy people and wealthy corporations often write the very policies that are put forth by politicians.

Publicly funded campaigns, no donations from any groups of any kind, national voting holidays, serious scrutiny over how or what any politician is invested in and regulations on these et. No revolving doors between government and the private sector etc.

Its easy but almost no one in power is even willing to discuss it.

 

[Madmick]

A unabashed radical leftist who named himself "Trotsky" waxing nostalgic about "pragmatism".


I racked my brain trying to conjure an image of equal sincerity.

Spoiler: I found it

 

[RockstarChris]

In post-Reagan, post-Gingrich, and post-McConnell America, the Republican Party has increasingly advocated policy making (and obstruction of policy making) that is empirically indefensible, from financial deregulation and insistence on long-debunked trickle-down economics, to repealing of environmental and consumer welfare laws, to furthering voter ID laws that are known to be frivolous, based on nonexistent premises, and which only serve to disenfranchise voters.

This may be ultra-partisanship, outright corruption, or as more optimistic persons like @Jack V Savage believe, actual commitment to flawed ideology. This disregard for good faith governance was recently epitomized by the budget-busting 2017 tax cuts.

However, it was not always like this, and during the years of FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon conservatives engaged in good faith reaches across the aisle to pass laws on topics like progressive taxation, environmental regulation, consumer protections, and labor organizing rights. Today, conservatives championing social programs, graduated tax brackets, and regulation of industry for the good of the American people would be nearly sacrilegious.


How do we recapture the pre-Reagan days of good faith governance that allows Democrats and Republicans to agree on meritorious policies that do not fit an ideological agenda of deregulation, upward distribution, or (if you are to represent that the Democrats are ideologues as well) social justice?

Democrats need to stop being hypocritical idiots. Stop pretending you are the party of race when democrats are the most racist party the world has ever seen. Thats a start.

 

[JamesRussler]

The answer to this is known and I cannot take any politician seriously who does not LEAD with the it.

Money in politics the the reason. All other problems flow from it. Wealthy people and wealthy corporations often write the very policies that are put forth by politicians.

Publicly funded campaigns, no donations from any groups of any kind, national voting holidays, serious scrutiny over how or what any politician is invested in and regulations on these et. No revolving doors between government and the private sector etc.

Its easy but almost no one in power is even willing to discuss it.

- Ban lobbying, and limit private contacts with legislators to public comment hearings
- No publicly funded campaigns. Are you crazy?
- Limit campaign spending by corporations, but not private persons in personal capacity
- Agree about national voting holidays
- Agree about "revolving door" employment arrangements

 

[Trotsky]

A unabashed radical leftist who named himself "Trotsky" waxing nostalgic about "pragmatism".


I racked my brain trying to conjure an image of equal sincerity.

Spoiler: I found it

Coming into a thread and making a post that is solely an ad hom? And only mere hours after censuring your target for hurting your feelings whilst posting on-topic?

Man, that kind of thin-skinned hypocrisy is as Trump-like as red ties or intergenerational incest.

 

[Quequeg]

- Ban lobbying, and limit private contacts with legislators to public comment hearings
- No publicly funded campaigns. Are you crazy?
- Limit campaign spending by corporations, but not private persons in personal capacity
- Agree about national voting holidays
- Agree about "revolving door" employment arrangements

Exact opposite of the Conservative/Republican position.

 

[franklinstower]

- Ban lobbying, and limit private contacts with legislators to public comment hearings
- No publicly funded campaigns. Are you crazy?
- Limit campaign spending by corporations, but not private persons in personal capacity
- Agree about national voting holidays
- Agree about "revolving door" employment arrangements

- No publicly funded campaigns. Are you crazy?


I must have written poorly. I mean ONLY publicly funded campaigns.

 

[Quequeg]

There's a growing sense among centrists, and certainly on the Right, that the Left has been dealing in bath faith:

• When the Left says "equality," it really means "give advantages to minorities only."
• When the Left says "diversity," it really means "less white people."
• When the Left says "voting rights," it really means "let felons, illegals, and corpses vote"
• When the Left says "clean energy," it really means "fuck you, coal country."
• When the Left says "progressive taxation," it really means "redistribution."
• When the Left says "immigration reform," it really means "open borders."

And so on. And here you are bemoaning a lack of "good faith reaches across the aisle," while simultaneously insulting your political opposition as subscribing to a "flawed ideology." Even your pleas for "good faith" are made in bad faith. SMH!

They have been indoctrinated by 30 years of rightwing counter factual propaganda.

 

[panamaican]

You win the war of ideas by presenting your ideas more persuasively. I disagree with a lot of what the GOP has done recently but their success speaks to their ability to present their message in such a way that enough people will support it. Complaining that it's a bad message misses the point.

It's not flawed ideology. That's a misrepresentation. It's an ideology that only serves a limited few.

In many ways, this conversation goes back to the modern weaponization of identity politics by Nixon to turn the South to the GOP. Nixon pitted white voters against black voters to ensure GOP success for decades to come by using racial tension to secure a greater percentage of the white vote. And it was a perfectly fine strategy except he never calculated on the demographics changing significantly.

A good short term plan, a bad long term one.

 

[Shoemaker]

Make politics boring again. Focus on policy, reject theater. This circus today is nothing new by the way. It comes and goes.

This sort of segues into my response which is: more funding for education. The theater is most effective on the least educated. The more we educate people and deprecate the idea that intellectualism is wrong, the more we’ll reason. Not entirely, but more.

 

[JamesRussler]

Exact opposite of the Conservative/Republican position.

Maybe in 2000, but not anymore.

 

[JamesRussler]

- No publicly funded campaigns. Are you crazy?


I must have written poorly. I mean ONLY publicly funded campaigns.

Actually, I think you wrote correctly, and I wrote poorly – my apologies for that.

I meant to say "Publicly funded campaigns? No! Are you crazy?" Why should we pay for Anthony Weiner's mayoral candidacy after he already got busted tweeting his namesake body part? You wanna pay for Larry Flynt to run? Vermin Supreme? Dennis Hastert? Stormy Daniels? Don Blankenship? Fuck no. Nobody does. It's a fun thought, but hell no we don't want publicly funded campaigns.