The General US Politics Thread

I'm sure a Malcolm Tucker could pull it off...

Why not ask the UK how voting reform faired?

I'm just going to assume poorly.

Yes, voting reform takes amazing amounts of incompetence. In a place with as much inertia and gridlock as the US, I think several fatalities would be needed to create the proper momentum.

42% turnout at the referendum with 67% of those voting saying no.

Now it was a shit option we were offered, but still.

The campaign included outright lies such as "Vote no to stop the BNP" when the BNP were part of the no campaign.

edited 21st Apr '15 9:46:02 AM by Silasw

The Justice Department and FBI have formally acknowledged that nearly every examiner in an elite FBI forensic unit gave flawed testimony in almost all trials in which they offered evidence against criminal defendants over more than a two-decade period before 2000.

(Vox) The Class War in American Politics is over, the Rich won and are the only ones seriously left to keep fighting.

(Kaiser Foundation) For the first time since late 2012, approval for the Affordable Care Act has polled better than disapproval.

edited 21st Apr '15 9:51:45 AM by PotatoesRock

Those kinda...stopped existing. A long time ago. I mean we have organizations that are independent on paper, but they're all super-partisan anymore.

So bad as to make things worse. In practice it shuts out third parties out of the final ballot entirely, and in the really slanted districts you get two candidates of the same party (it happened in a bunch of California's districts in 2012).

I'd prefer if unaffiliated voters were given a copy of both primaries and instructed to choose one.

edited 21st Apr '15 10:14:24 AM by Pykrete

One issue I have with making a private organization draw up the districts is that there's no way to be sure they aren't secretly biased. We have pizzerias that have stances on Gay Marriage for fuck's sake. Even if by some chance they aren't biased I guarantee the losing side will claim they are in some way.

Oh fuck that's just what we need more people not trusting Science. Thanks to the idiots at the FBI we are now going to see more people who are actually guilty get off the hook, all because of your fuckups.

About Vox, if we were to define the current American situation as a class war, the rich have won most of the recent engagements. However the lower classes have recently come back swinging. Hell I'm half convinced were going to see a socialist revolution at the very least,if not an all out attempt to abolish capitalism. Then again everyone says I tend to overblow things. But still it seems the situation in the US is ripe for some kind of left wing revolution. The major obstacles are that they currently lack a charismatic radical leader, Warren doesn't seem like the type who would overthrow the government in anything other than an election.

Edit: Loryeta Lynch is cleared for her hearing

edited 21st Apr '15 10:46:27 AM by JackOLantern1337

Now... what makes you think there will be a left-wing revolution? I certainly want to see one, but realistically, why do you think that?

We have way too much Bread and Circuses for a full-on revolution to succeed. Ironically, Marx was right in at least one way: the trappings of socialism serve to insulate workers in a capitalist society from the worst excesses of the rich so that they never reach a sufficient state of revolutionary fervor.

All it might take, though, is another spectacular failure of capitalism a la 2008.

The real problem is that, should such a revolution occur, the working classes are way too divided among ideological lines to have any chance of creating a genuinely better society after the dust settles. More likely is a Divided States of America.

By far more likely than a violent revolt is the emergence of a new New Deal, as business and politicians align to throw enough of a bone to the enraged masses that they don't find their heads on pikes.

edited 21st Apr '15 11:16:12 AM by Fighteer

That's the sort of thing I'm afraid of if there's a revolution. They'd suck at creating a new government, and wouldn't agree on what the government should be.

We'd get a quasi-replay of the Constitutional Convention, with the factions split among sovereign individualists, neocons, social democrats, evangelicals, Greens, and hardcore anarchists — although the latter, as always, would probably decline to participate in the process and would instead turn to asymmetric warfare.

Revolution is unlikely, as American military power is rather strong. And even the American Revolution wasn't truly citizens rising up against the state, but rather local governments rising up against a larger foreign empire.

But just in case I'll be storing up supplies in order to become an Anti-Rebel in case there's a socialist or anarcho-capitalist revolution. (Just kidding)

edited 21st Apr '15 11:28:31 AM by Protagonist506

I think you might be underestimating the cultural mass unification the United States has.

You might not seem like it or act like it or see it but I doubt a civil war is likely in those regards. The roots run deep. Nothing short of the bloodiest of acts would trigger something like that.

And the unrest that led to the New Deal wasn't against government, but against business. In fact, the only genuine revolt we've seen in U.S. history has been from the reactionary conservative side. Social democrats don't take to the streets with guns; they get people out to vote.

The largest threat to our cultural cohesion comes from the bigoted, Bible-thumping, sovereign individualist faction, which has formed an alliance of convenience with large business interests who want the government out of their faces so they can restore the Gilded Age. That group is violently insular to the point where they might as well be a different nation. The differences are irreconcilable and will only end in demographic irrelevance or war.

Edit: Of course, the True Believers of the insane right are few in number, but they thoroughly dominate the Republican Party and the Fox propaganda network, which has large chunks of the media and of the populace drinking their Kool-Aid. This isn't enough to start a war but it is enough to almost completely shut down attempts at progress.

edited 21st Apr '15 11:35:16 AM by Fighteer

Yes. Those and those they can manipulate easily with the ever prevalent jingoistic propaganda.

But blood ties run a lot deeper than that in the U.S. Just how many people dont have a loved one in many other states that would despise to see a civil war erupt? The interdependence within states is strong, despite the chokehold of these extremist groups. Heck, from what I remember once, if texas seceded they would spend most of their money in water because they dont have enough of their own to survive.

The economic interests of big corps would supercede the political ones because there is money and there is too much interrelation between states, economical and familial, if not necesarily political.

Big suits talking smack about other big suits on tee vee is a demonstration of hatred and they can rally up a significant amount of people to do significantly crazy things.

But war? I personally doubt it

I doubt it as well, but the crazy right will continue to threaten war in response to any attempt to impose more democratic reforms.

Yeah. Well. I can threathen you with war too, yanno.

They actually did it once. In 1860. And now, as then, the largest dividing issue is race.

edited 21st Apr '15 11:46:10 AM by Fighteer

It was the Democrats who were opposing Lincoln's election, not the Republicans.

The parties had different demographic compositions back then. Republicans were still the party of big business while Democrats were the party of the working class, but in those days the big business interests in the North aligned with the intellectual elite to oppose slavery (for differing reasons), while the Southern plantation owners rallied poor, ignorant whites in defense of slavery and their agrarian lifestyle.

Today, Republicans remain the party of big business and Democrats remain the party of the working class (ostensibly; both were always controlled by their respective wealthy interests), but the hat of civil rights advocacy has swapped entirely.

The two big breaks occurred in the 1920s and the 1960s. In the 1920s, Democrats rallied the working class to oppose the inequality of the Gilded Age, which, combined with the nascent socialist movement, resulted in the New Deal and the first real economic power allotted to non-elites. It was still populism against big business, but this time populism won — with a catch: the policies that emerged from the New Deal were still in favor of whites (and men). Both sides brought their intellectuals to the debates, but economic reality favored the Democrats.

In the 1960s, the Civil Rights era finally brought about the end of legal segregation, and this caused the second great demographic shift in our politics: all the poor Southern whites who'd stuck with the Democrats through the New Deal, and barely tolerated women's suffrage, had finally gotten fed up with the party that would dare tell them they couldn't stick it to the blacks any more. They defected to the Republican party, which triggered the descent of that party into anti-intellectualism, since its leaders were forced to pander to the prejudices of their new constituency to remain in power.

edited 21st Apr '15 12:31:27 PM by Fighteer

Yeah uh. Race or not I still don't see it. Economic interests will supercede political stuf and as economies move towards more socially progressive measures, punishing others, the strong economical powers with money will start losing their pull and they will either adapt or just remain isolated rich assholes. Which is not bad at all, being rich.

But the rest, the numbers they would be actually capable of moving into war? Those would be just...a minority so ridiculously small that I doubt it could account for any sort of army unless we are talking about Rush Limbaugh somehow leading a party of a level 15/Sorcer/3blackguard/10Arcane Scholar of Candlekeep with automatic still spells 0-9, A halfling assassin with at least 15 levels of rogue and a half orc barbarian/weaponmaster

I agree that full-scale civil war is nearly impossible; what's likely to happen instead is the rise of small-scale insurgencies that are tacitly abetted by the hardcore Tea Party political leaders in various states. Ironically, this gives the fanatical right in this country far more in common with Islamic insurgents than they'd care to acknowledge.

Domestic terrorism is already the FBI's number one security issue; the Islamic threat is barely even a blip on the radar. We just don't hear about it because, for the most part, they don't call it domestic terrorism. (It isn't very organized, for one thing.) The Cliven Bundy standoff is one example.

What concerns me most is the Tea Party engineering another economic collapse, whether through malice or stupidity. They came closest during the debt ceiling standoff in 2012. Had a default actually occurred and lasted more than a nominal length of time, we'd have had major unrest, possibly enough to have martial law declared.

edited 21st Apr '15 12:28:14 PM by Fighteer