The General US Politics Thread

I would go back and take out the Puritan root of American Conservatives, in my mind this would lead to a dramatic domino effect wherein we lose our prudishness, fervent religiosity, belligerent paranoia, and toxic masculinity which might lead to a dramatic increase in tolerance, cooperation, and generally more rational thinking.

edited 21st Nov '14 4:58:28 PM by Mr.Didact

Wouldn't that basically just be the democrats and the other left wing parties?

If your referring to time travel,then you might want to be careful. In all probability if that particular bug was weeded out of our system we would have turned out like Canada. That may seem all well and good,but consider the fact that our economy would almost certainly never have developed as much as it did, the British were already trying to limit colonial growth out of the belief that once the colonies grew to large they would rebel. And without that we most likely would not have had many of the other revolutions that shook the world and gave rise to modern liberalism,not to mention the fact that there would be nobody around to blanche against the USSR when the Cold War came around.

edited 21st Nov '14 4:58:22 PM by JackOLantern1337

Time Travel, probably not. Just somehow I'd want that particular philosophy to finally give out to more modern thinking. It's pretty ridiculous how many people I know who believe that Halloween is the Devil's Holiday because of all that BS.

I've never actually met anyone who thought that,and if anything my Conservative friends seem to be the ones most into it,good ol American tradition and all that.

The ones I know who believe that are often UBER-Religious.

Also I hate it when people think the 1950s were so great compared to now, and it's usually coming from the generation that fucked us over.

edited 21st Nov '14 5:40:35 PM by Mr.Didact

The badly mislead kind. Born-agains and Pentacostals love that kind of crazy shit.

Instant runoff voting.

From what I heard they were the height of all lameness. That said anyone I've found nostalgic for the era mostly focuses on how kids got far more freedom than they did now,well the younger ones anyway,and the mistaken belief that nobody dared question American global power, ignoring the Russians getting the bomb, China falling to Communism,the Cuban Revolution, or the Korean war. Also people tend to remember it as a quite time, when really all the problems that bubbled under the surface exploded in the next decade. That said I wouldn't blame the fifties generation for all the nations woes.

edited 21st Nov '14 5:49:42 PM by JackOLantern1337

"One thing" is an overhaul of the electoral process "Free speech yes, but electoral objectivity is more important."

Remove the power of religion to affect our politics.

Alternatively, empower a strong and vigorous Christian Left. (Careful with this one, though. Up till Prohibition, we had a strong and vigorous Christian Left and it disappeared up its own arse in a big way.)

Getting rid of gerrymandering would be a good first step. Also non partisan blanket primaries.

In the case of California, it'd be repealing prop 13.

I assume you refer to citizens united? If so I am personally I would lift all spending limits, but make it mandatory to disclose donors. Failure to report contributions would lead to prison time,and presumably from that a ban from holding public office.

I don't think I'd change anything, I'm not smart enough to do that. I just have a list of past presidents and politicians I'd like to punch in the dick.

Wouldn't be enough. A good deal of donors are already disclosed, but very few voters look up the data.

edited 21st Nov '14 7:10:39 PM by Pykrete

Total publicly funded elections at all levels of government, with guidelines in place dictating that the public money should be spent more on get-out-the-vote and more informative channels of advertising and promotions rather than ads.

Prevent our nation from establishing a military-industrial complex, at least at its current scale and depth. Basically take anyone who didn't listen to Eisenhower's farewell address and slap them upside the head until they do. Normally, I would strongly disagree with Fighteer's choice no questions asked, but the 2nd Amendment is actually a closely related legal component to the relationship between military affairs and political endeavors. The Constitution favors a standing armed militia to the defend the country, and it's generally understood that this means Americans should be allowed to have firearms to defend against those who pose a threat to the country.

Having said that, it's fair to say that the 2nd and 3rd amendments are actually an important part of the excessive growth of our defense infrastructure. I'm not opposed to either one of these amendments. National defense is a critical component to sovereignty, and guns are interwoven into that concept. Sorry, but they are. However, these legal protections have bled into fabricated justifications for the use of a 24/7/365 defense-related legislation that has in many ways caused more harm than good. As a simplified historical hypothesis, you keep your spear and shield at home in case you are called to war, but that somehow came to mean that it's cool to impale the living shit out of your neighbor with that very same spear if he looks even remotely suspicious.

George Washington was opposed to the idea of a standing army, and he based this fear partly on Julius Caesar imposing military power with a standing army by crossing the Rubicon. This is important if you are evaluating how the Roman state came to view democracy and how military organizations influence the democratic process. Of course Washington didn't really know it at the time, but when he advised against having a permanent standing army, he was basically talking about the military-industrial complex.

I'm not saying that the military is conceptually untenable, and I emphatically argue that military organizations have often been the crux of relatively civil nation building, especially before the early 20th century. Unfortunately, unchecked and unbalanced military activities under the pretense of liberty have given us some pretty nasty political moves such as the Monroe Doctrine, the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the Patriot Act, which included extraordinary rendition, the violation of privacy rights in the name of "freedom" and more or less the evaporation of the 4th and 5th amendments also in the name of "freedom", a moral concept that has become so nebulous that you can assign whatever trumped up definition you like.

In short, I'd have us seriously dial back our military activity while making more judicious and sparing use of it. Doing so would likely have the consequence of making the 2nd Amendment a lot less troublesome ^note  Other nations with even more relaxed rules on guns don't have the same level of gun-related violence, and it's likely not a coincidence that these nations have had relatively few wars in the past century . so both Fighteer and I theoretically get what we want.

edited 21st Nov '14 9:31:58 PM by Aprilla

I'd make the average American much better educated, with a federally funded, equitable and inclusive free and compulsory public school system that starts from age 2, with college also being free. The schools would accepting and supportive of LGBT children, accessible for disabled students, and multicultural, with strict separation of religion and state and a scientifically-informed, unbiased curriculum.

I like that one better than mine.

Man you guys all have these smart ideas but everything I can think of just boils down to stabbing rich people.

Get rid of the Electoral College so that everyone's votes are equal.

Nitpick, but I think you got the wrong Founding Father, Aprilla. From what I recall, Washington was very much supportive of a standing, national army. Even during the post-war pre-Constitution days when he was retired he offered up advice for managing a federal army in peace time. It was militia he couldn't stand. If nothing else, the war taught him that the militia were a shortsighted, fickle, undisciplined mob that couldn't be counted on to come through when it most counted.

He was against long standing alliances and such, I don't think he was really against the army sticking around. I think Jefferson was more against it, but he was the one who felt a good revolution every couple decades would be good for the country.

The more I actually read about them the less I like our founding fathers. I was always taught that they were upstanding pillars of perfection in the world.

Yay for southern education.

"How is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?"

edited 22nd Nov '14 6:35:31 AM by Achaemenid