A Brief Political Observation

[billroper]

There are plenty of politicians that I consider idiots. I'm sure that there are plenty that you consider idiots too.

I get a bit distressed though when I see Party X characterized as being evil adjectives A, B, and C -- and I get distressed at seeing Party Y characterized as being evil adjectives P, Q, and R. There've been some pretty evil parties in the history of world politics (the National Socialists come to mind) and I'm sure we could find some pretty authentically -- although probably small! -- evil parties in U.S. politics.

Our two big parties in the U.S. each seem to pull roughly half of the votes nationally. Now if either of those parties were e-e-vil, then that would suggest that half of the folks in the country were evil bastards. And I don't believe that.

I think that the vast majority of people in this country are fundamentally good people -- possibly flawed in one way or another, but fundamentally good. But each of us has different priorities based on our history and position in society, so it's not surprising that we're going to see different solutions as being more or less desirable.

And I don't think that either party is right all of the time. To pick a couple of examples, I think that the Democrats are right that there should be an estate tax (although I might disagree on the percentage and where it should kick in) and I think that the Republicans are right about requiring a secret ballot to bring a union into a corporation (but would be happy to look at suggestions for ways to prevent the corporations from using unethical methods to keep a union out).

But primary season is particularly annoying, because that's when most of the moderates tend to stay home. Candidates tack to the left or right to try to get their party's nomination, then run frantically back to the center to try to collect the mass of voters in the middle who are going to decide the election.

With the length of this presidential campaign cycle, we're now in something like our fourteenth month of pandering to the fringes of each party with no near end in sight. And it gets tiresome after a while.

Comments

That is how we Californians ended up with a Governator

[capplor.livejournal.com]

Short-circuiting the primary process was the only way a non-extremist could be nominated. I'd have voted for Riordan (a Repubican) if he'd just managed to get past the primaries. I did NOT like Gray Davis, but had to eat my "anybody but HIM" words.

But I'd say there's a difference between a party being evil, a party's leadership being evil, and everyone in the party being evil. The Nazi party (nice try of not naming them, and invoking whatever law that's supposed to be) is generally agreed upon as evil, but I'd apply that to the doctrine and say people were evil only as much as they believed in it, and otherwise, just too weak to buck the crowd. I have extreme suspicions that the Republican party's current leadership is evil. That doesn't mean I condemn every registered Republican (including my favorite cousin, my brother, and my mother) as evil. I do, however, wonder at their judgement. And, in fact, I once was proud to call myself conservative, until that became code for the Republican power structure.

--- Robin (since Fred probably never did call himself conservative)

[smallship1.livejournal.com]

Now if either of those parties were e-e-vil, then that would suggest that half of the folks in the country were evil bastards. And I don't believe that.

Which, on the same argument and using your example, would suggest that the majority of Germans in the thirties were evil bastards, and I don't believe that either. The argument is flawed.

There are of course good and bad people on both sides, but from where I stand there is a perceptible moral gap between your two parties, one which no longer exists over here (both our parties are evil). The techniques by which bad people induce otherwise good people to support them have perhaps grown more subtle, but they still exist, and one of those techniques is to rely on people's basic belief in the goodness of strangers. Because that is one belief we can not afford to discard.

[madfilkentist]

I don't think that either the majority of the people in the country are evil in any sense, or that most of the leading candidates of the Democratic or Republican Party are evil in the full sense. (As the userpic suggests, I'm not so generous with the current president of the US.)

But the state of ideas in the United States is such that people are inclined to support candidates who cater to their short-term wishes, regardless of whether the implied actions are right or not. This means that the political process favors those who disregard principles, are willing to help their supporters by injuring others, and are dishonest. I don't call this "evil" in the literal sense; I reserve that for a positive hatred of the good, delight in inflicting harm on the innocent.

The current leading candidates of the two major parties, John McCain and Hillary Clinton, both have no regard for the oath of office they will have to take if elected, both use demagogic techniques to justify increasing government power, both will hand favors to constituencies that will help them without regard to proper principles of government.

This is not a matter of just seeing different solutions as more desirable. It's a battle for loot and power which is considered acceptable because it's "democracy." On Tuesday people went to the polls to give their respective support to whoever they thought would give them something at someone else's expense, and are now engaging in a sickening display of self-congratulation because they did their "civic duty."

Evil? No. Disgusting? Yes.

[faxpaladin.livejournal.com]

So, just out of curiosity: Did you vote?

[madfilkentist]

This week? No. There was no primary in my state.

Earlier, I "voted" none of the above by staying away, after deciding close to the last minute against voting for Ron Paul.

[billroper]

And I had intended to vote, but didn't manage to get organized enough to vote in the early voting, as I was flying back from England on Super Tuesday. I admit that being in a non-competitive district didn't help motivate me. :)

As it happens, I would have voted for McCain who ended up winning Illinois.

[boogiebabe-smap.livejournal.com]

As a Moderate myself, I can definitely see your point. And I am VERY tired of all the campaigning and the election is still nine months away. If it were up to me, candidates wouldn't even be able to announce their candidacy until 1 January the year of the election. They'd have three months to campaign for their party's nomination before the caucuses/primaries which would all occur on the same day. The endorsed candidates would then have the remainder of the time up to November to run their actual campaign.

In this age of telecommunications, I don't think that's impossible. What's probably impossible is to have a campaign where each candidate tells exactly where they stand on key issues (instead of waffling in fear of offending potential voters) and campaigns on why they'd be good for the country (instead of the current mud-slinging where they only tell you what's bad about their opponent).

[phillip2637.livejournal.com]

"exactly where they stand on key issues"

Unless you have a strategy for keeping the politicians consistent over time, you probably wouldn't be happy with the results even if this did happen. Here in Canada, we elected a Liberal government at one point (1993) that went into the election with a wonderfully-detailed, complete, published platform, informally called "The Red Book". Anything notable in it turned out to be a lie. (But it was a novel semblance of truth and helped them get power.)

[madfilkentist]

Considering what some candidates promise, there are times we should be grateful they lied.

[aimee-moran.livejournal.com]

I heard an odd statistic today (admittedly on NPR) that more than 50% of the Republican party self-characterized into the neocon camp - that is, the more extreme religious right. I may have misunderstood, but if true that was a chilling observation, as I associate that group with a very rigid, inflexible stance, rather like negotiating with Mormons in Utah. If it is indeed true, are the mass of voters in the middle now characterizing themselves as independents? If not, where are they?

[billroper]

Someone's confused. There may be some overlap between neo-conservatives and the religious right, but there's a big difference between the groups which is one of the reasons that the Republican party gets yanked back and forth.

Neo-conservatives tend to concentrate much more on foreign policy issues.

The religious right concentrates on social issues.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

Except for the exciting overlap of needing to spark tensions in the middle east in order to bring about Armageddon.

Vote for These People If You Want to Surrender to Terror

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Mitt Romney, not helping:

"If I fight on in my campaign, all the way to the convention, I would forestall the launch of a national campaign and make it more likely that Senator Clinton or (Barack) Obama would win. And in this time of war, I simply cannot let my campaign, be a part of aiding a surrender to terror"

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Parties and individual politicians are complicated and stand for many things. The Nazis promised many things besides endless war and genocide, and presumably many of the people who voted for them had those other things in mind. Presumably many of the people in the USA who voted for, well, pretty nearly everyone in both parties, had in mind things other than endless war and torture and retroactive immunity for lawbreaking.

[backrubbear.livejournal.com]

But primary season is particularly annoying, because that's when most of the moderates tend to stay home. Candidates tack to the left or right to try to get their party's nomination, then run frantically back to the center to try to collect the mass of voters in the middle who are going to decide the election.

I think that's a symptom of the biggest problem here, IMO. For various - poor - reasons, we have two parties that have power. Those two parties don't do a good job at representing their various constituencies from an ideological standpoint - or maybe the Republicans do. Instead you get what would probably be 8-10 different parties in other parliamentary countries lumped into Democrats and Republicans.

I think there are extremists in both parties that actually hold to those ideologies. Those people heavily color their parties.

I think a lot of us would prefer to have a Moderate party that threw the crazies out on both sides and had reasonable middle of the road economic and social policies.

Unfortunately that's not likely to happen.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

I've felt hobbled by lack of a widely accepted vocabulary. I have my disagreements with classic Republicanism (he understated), but Republicanism has little or nothing to do with the current Administration. Which _is_ evil. And I refuse to conflate honest Republicans with the Busheviks.
Minimal government, personal accountability, avoiding foreign entanglements . . . the Bush Administration is in many ways a horrible opposite of Republican. But there isn't a generally accepted term to use for them, which leaves things more confused than necessary.