There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.
Yeah duh. “Moderate Republicans” have been about as common as unicorns for a long time.
In my household we usually call those “Democrats”.
I’d love real political parties, instead.
Or how about instead of multiple political parties with arbitrary distinctions across a central divide having a party that attempts to represent one standard deviation around the norm and uses data to decide its platform?
Essentially support nothing unless 68% of the country supports it in multiple reputable polls.
While it wouldn’t yet support universal healthcare (only 5% away from that marker and trending towards it), the party would absolutely be against cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
It would have been supporting preventing people with mental illness from owning guns for years now, and increasing the age to purchase to 21.
Term limits and max age for Congress.
Preventing Congress’s stock ownership and trading.
Giving Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices.
Raising the minimum wage.
Weed legalization (as of last year).
Yet somehow when we break these up into competing parties where all that matters is that the other side doesn’t get a chance to win because each side loudly focuses on wedge issues or expanded scope popular to their side and unpopular to the other, we end up with representatives that do jack to further any of the above issues.
I’d really love for a data driven party focused on the central majority. Because even though I’m personally more progressive than that party would represent, the battle becomes shifting public mindset on the topics I care about but in the meantime topics everyone cares about will at least be getting work done to advance.
Let’s have a single party that wins every election because it appeals to a significant majority of the country rather than more small parties that represent less and less of the country, and have primaries for that party run with ranked choice voting.
yep ’ liberal conservative’ === ’ conservative democrat’…
like, if these groups sat down they would realize they have the same agenda. but the ‘party’ gets in the way of actual discourse… of actually getting things that need to be done accomplished.
i know, cuz i hate them both. they fucked over bernie. im at the ‘let the world burn’ stage of my life after hoping for 40 years.
looking back, after what obama and pals did to usurp the last movement in bernie, the united states deserves the cluster fuck that is what trump hath wrought.
Yeah enjoy the civil unrest and insecurity. Remember the toilet paper nonsense when covid kicked off? There are members of congress who’ve openly talked about political violence being inevitable. Things will probably get much worse before they get better.
I’ve been legitimately telling my trans/PoC/whatever friends that now is the time to arm yourself and start networking with like-minded people because the right has been doing it for decades. They have connections and established support, both material and propaganda. They do not believe people different than them should exist or should exist as a “lesser” class.
I for one am not looking forward to going underground and trying to survive/resist the Christian Fascism that’s trying to grow up in America. Go vote and take your friends with you. Agitate for change, the silent majority never existed, they’re just a loud minority.
I’ve been learning a foreign language in preparation for emigrating for 3 years now.
I’m not giving up on my home. Injustice anywhere is unacceptable, and while I can’t blame people who do what the must to survive, I personally won’t leave the US.
Yeah, I’d feel the same way if I didn’t have a mixed-race family to worry about.
Where would you go?
Well, I’m not sure. I’m learning French, but that’s less because I have specific goals for Metropolitan France and more because, as a silver lining of colonialism, there are a bunch of French-speaking tropical islands evenly-scattered around the world. Even before Trump, I was thinking of early-retiring onto a sailboat and visiting some of them.
In a shorter term, “flee the US” sort of situation it’d be more about finding a job in any first-world country that would have me, whether I knew the language or not. (Paris or Montreal would be high priorities though, since I like what they’re doing with their bike infrastructure and such.)
Oh that’s cool, yeah a French speaking country would be my first choice too (if English isn’t an option) because I grew up in a family that sometimes spoke it. I’m super rusty though.
Thanks for the answer!
Yeah, fuck all those many, MANY people who will suffer terribly! I’m upset about Bernie so let it all burn. /s
🙄
That’s horseshoe theory bullshit. Republicans just elected a speaker of the house who is proud to be an enemy of the first amendment. They are opposed to any effective use of political capital by the government. Wake the fuck up.
So long as you accept this is a shitty, selfish position. The kids who never voted don’t deserve fascism. Even most fascists deserve better than that abusive, parasitic, ideology. I can’t blame you for being conditioned into learned helplessness, but not helping when you can is not a virtue.
The fact that a fucking Cheney was one of the kind of sort of reasonable by comparison ones, and she was basically chased out, really says it all
And Republicans have been pushing out their own who would have been considered conservative just a decade ago.
theyre called ‘democrats’ now… and for some time