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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sun Tzu who wrote (281053)	11/10/2013 7:39:59 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Hi Sun Tzu; Nice questions. The Democrats don't run things for a number of reasons. First, poor people vote less often than wealthy. Second, the way the Democrats dish out patronage (and its modern equivalents) ends up alienating sections of society whether they're poor or not and they get pushed into the Republican column. Third, there's a certain smell of law breaking that's associated with the Democrats. That is, if you run into a smelly person who looks like he has been violating every law on the books beginning with vagrancy, and the person starts talking politics, you know in advance that they're going to talk a leftist agenda. This sort of thing pushes law abiding people towards the Republicans. Probably the best thing that happened to the Republicans during the 1970s was not civil rights, but instead was having regular Americans look at their TV sets and watch the Democrats demonstrating at Chicago, 1968. There's the "easy on crime" problem largely arising from the fact that the sections of society that tend to end up in jail the most, tend to vote Democrat. And then there's the fact that Democratic leaders talk about being men of the people and advocate income equality but they always end up filthy wealthy (sometimes despite having no reasonable obvious source of income) and this smells bad. Finally there's a certain "loathing of the military" that accompanies the Democrats and this alienates some voters. The US has a two party system in that elections are generally winner take all. Thus only two parties have a realistic chance of election. That means that absolutely nobody has a political party that represents their desires. There will always be something they don't like about whichever party most fits them. And people who, from outside appearances, seem to fit perfectly in one party will complain that their party isn't sufficiently extreme for their taste. When you actually talk to the public you find amazingly extreme beliefs. I'm stunned. The people here on SI are not an assortment of kooks from the extreme left and right wing. These are a pretty reasonable representation of the beliefs of the public. So one guy thinks that the Republicans are crooks who steal from the poor so he votes Democratic. And his complaint about the Democrats is that they're not punishing the Republicans enough. He wants socialism now. And another guy wants to bring the US back to the way it worked in the 1850s (uh, antebellum North that is). He votes Republican but his complaint is that they ended the government shut down too early and no one is bringing us back to the gold standard. Sure no one is happy. So what? That's the nature of the system. If we had a parliamentary system I think people might be happier with their personal choice of representative but I also think it would make our government far more unstable. Parliamentary governments are famous world over for being subject to control by extremist minority parties which can be swing votes and so can have large effects on the central parties. People complain about the extremism of the Republican and Democrat parties but I don't see it. I agree with what's his name that there's not a "dime's worth of difference" between them. But I see that as a good thing. If someone wants a political party that is run by people who don't self deal and become wealthy, well they'll just have to kill themselves because there is no such system on Earth and it ain't gonna happen here. So seeing the politicians pocketing cash doesn't bother me as much as it does a lot of people. Humans are made out of dust. -- Carl