Over the last couple years, I’ve really grown to dislike both political parties and feel pretty isolated. Maybe I’m being too cynical, but it just feels like both sides aren’t really interested in solving issues and just want to pander to their bases even if their ideas don’t make any sense. Anyone else?
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Circa 2021: WSO discovers The Independent party
I dislike both parties but I also dislike independents even more in some ways.....not a popular opinion. I feel like if you're in the middle, you really don't believe in anything and don't have clear guiding principles to politics. Some Democrat sells you policies you like, you vote that way. Some Republican sells you something another year, you swing that way. I'd rather stand for something and vote that way constantly rather than just blowing with the wind.
One year a Republican sells you a new tax cut, so you vote for them. Then, another year, the Dems have a spending plan that helps your niche or interest group and you vote for them....kind of a shitty transactional form of politics.
I agree which is why I always hesitate to label myself as an independent. I get the whole “take the bad with the good of your party” thing, but it just feels like the bad aspects of each party are getting harder and harder to ignore.
As a registered independent with the following candidate preferences/voting:
Trump (R) - Presidential Election 2020
Paffrath (D) - California Recall Election
Youngkin (R) - Virginia Governor's race
Adams (D) - NYC Mayoral race
I can say that this is nonsense. Being in the middle means by and large that you understand that solutions to problems are nuanced and complex and often require pieces from both sides of the aisle. Let me explain just a few quick examples to get my point across:
Taxes - I strongly disagree with the idea that taxation is theft, and believe that people aren't really thinking about public sector services that they enjoy when they say that, but as I explained in my response to Drumpfy below I'm against blanket tax rates on corporations. At the same time, the high taxes on the ultra wealthy need to be reasonable - something like 70% w/o deductions is ludicrous.
Policing - I don't support defunding the police at all, and am against blanket removals of qualified immunity. At the same time when bad apples like the Floyd or Arbery incidents happens (clear reckless behavior), there has to be a system of accountability in place. Based on this I thought Adams was a better fit for the job to strike this balance compared to Sliwa.
“Stand for something” generally just means create false dichotomies and refusing to see the world probabilistically and without nuance. Conviction is strongly overrated and should be properly categorized as overconfidence.
I think the issue is that we have solved most of the major problems that we (both parties) agree about. The only problems that seem to exist today have conflicting moral and cultural issues that neither side can negotiate between (ex abortion).
Honestly, George Washington warned us to avoid political parties and look where we are now. Bipartisan BS making things like Covid-19 political.
I get what you're saying, but I actually don't think that abortion is one of these issues. In my opinion, what's missing in that issue is that both sides are talking past each other and that there is a general lack of scientific education in the population regarding the maturation of a fetus.
One side keeps talking about women's rights and the other side keep's talking about ending a life. Where this conversation needs to go is a scientific and philosophical discussion on when life begins done by a group of individuals who understand the development of a human fetus at 20 weeks. If the conversation headed in this direction and people became more educated on the scientific facts, I don't think that you would have a 50/50 split of opinion in the country.
Gen Z has become a lot more green friendly largely as a result of education focusing on the environment. I think it's high time for science classes to include better education on human development and present specifically in the context of abortion whether you approve of it or not. Honestly, in my entire high school and college education, I think I spent maybe half a week studying the growth of a fetus in 7th grade and nowhere in that short discussion was it even mentioned at what stages the fetus can be legally terminated.
Almost every liberal "pro-choice" person, I've spoken to knows that the fetus is a baby once the heart beat is detected As [Memberberries] intelligently commented once, there's a reason why abortion is talked about as "a difficult decision" even by the "pro-choice" crowd. Challenge a liberal and first they'll start out by arguing the baby can't feel pain, can't see etc. and once you point out that there are disabled people who are alive who lack these qualities, you'll eventually whittle down the argument to something about how having the baby is inconvenient.
Democrats make a lot more sense to me. We can afford childcare, paid leave, and better roads and bridges if corporations pay a 15% tax minimum and the government can better drug prices. That’s a pretty fair policy, which is why even West Virginians support it.
Have you ever stopped and wondered why almost all the big execs in tech, Wall Street, and F20 are Democrat donors? Because increased regulation and taxes kills out the competition in the mid-cap/regional business range. Tax rate is a meaningless metric because due to deductions and a bloated tax code, ultrawealthy and rich corporations aided with an army of HNW lawyers can weasel out of tax codes in a way that regional corporations can't. Also an equivalent tax % hits poorer people harder than wealthy. Imagine a 0 deduction tax code (obviously inaccurate but for simplicity). Suppose you a tech guy make a salary of $200K in Manhattan and now your taxes go from 20% a year to 30%. Now let's assume the same for someone who makes $2M. Who do you think is going to face the impact of that 10% tax raise more. You or the $2M guy? So a blanket raise on corporate taxes is a policy that hurts small and medium sized corporations more, which is exactly what we don't want because oligopolistic competition leads to a whole host of other issues (which I'm happy to get into if you want). A similar argument exists for minimum wage, except it gets even worse because large corporations will look to either automate away the job or outsource to factories with poor working conditions overseas.
Unless we have regulations and taxes that progressively increase based on market cap with a non-deductible tax rate, corporations will gain more market share and leverage.
Now, before you think I'm arguing in an abstract sense, think about the pandemic. With lockdowns, reduced capacity, curfews, etc. (all forms of business regulation). who gained and who lost? Which sized businesses permanently closed and which sized businesses are booming?
It’s a 15% minimum corporate tax rate. That means no matter what kind of deductions they use, they have to pay 15%. Small or big, it doesn’t matter. Right now some companies pay zero dollars. That’s got to stop.
And Biden is pushing global consensus on it too. Recently there’s been a race to the bottom, where countries continually lower their corporate taxes. Capitalism was just fine when companies paid more, so let’s do it!
Both parties are so polarized and extreme that I think both have awful takes-
Take abortion for example. I think abortion is morally questionable and would personally never want a woman I got pregnant to get one, but I think it makes sense in cases of rape or where the mothers life is on the line. I’d also rather someone get an abortion than have a kid they can’t afford that ends up on welfare/the streets/etc. So I think abortion should be legal, but I also don’t want my tax dollars funneled into planned parenthood/abortion clinics or encouraging abortions at all. However, republics take is generally “no abortions whatsoever” and democrats is “let’s use tax dollars to fund abortions”. Where is the nuanced take of “abortions are obviously terrible but occasionally are a necessary option and should be available”?
You can do the same thing with guns, taxes, or any other issue- the parties are both just idiotically extreme on either side. How hard is it to find a candidate that believes some taxes are necessary to pay for society but we shouldn’t have a 50%+ marginal tax rate, some societal safety nets/minimum wage need to exist but we shouldn’t be handing out free money to everyone who asks, climate change is a real concern but that doesn’t mean we can immediately stop using oil, we should have background checks on gun sales but shouldn’t make guns illegal, etc etc.
The main problem is that candidates have to win their primary first before running in a general election, so those candidates often end up being further to the left or right than where the middle 40-50% of this country actually is. I don't know what the best away around this is.
One of the problems is that this is sort of a black and white issue in some regards. If it's wrong to kill a fetus, then it's wrong whether that fetus is born to a billionaire mother or a crackhead.
On the rape case, on an ideological level, I think hard-core Republicans would say it's still an innocent life. From a realistic point of view, if you told Republicans that the Left is willing to settle on abortion for only cases of rape, 95% of Republicans would sign up for that right away. Republicans would love that deal so I don't think you can say that there is really a party against that as a compromise. In fact, if that was the law of the land, Republicans would be doing backflips in excitement.
I wouldn't say I hate both parties, but I don't feel like my viewpoints are holistically represented by either party. I also don't like being framed as being "in the middle," because that makes it seem like I'm just taking an average of the spectrum of views as opposed to arriving at a position based on a consistent ideology. I have strongly held positions that I believe are aligned with a consistent worldview, and yet I often find the outcome of those positions is that I'm all over the place on most measures of the modern political spectrum.
Someone can look at a particular issue (or law, or bill) through a few different (and very valid) frameworks and arrive at different answers. I most often hear peers using the "does the outcome of this law/argument/vote benefit me personally" or the "does the outcome of this l/a/v benefit society as a whole," and we could have a long discussion about the merits of both; I wish I heard about more people using the "is this l/a/v an appropriate expression of the powers of government as they currently stand" or the "is this l/a/v a theoretically appropriate expression of the powers of government at this level of society" frameworks, because those are important too.
Put differently, you can like the outcome of a law (either because it benefits you, or society at large, or both) and still think it's a bad idea because it's an inappropriate use of a government's power over its constituents.
All of this to say that I'm often disappointed in the theatrics of modern politics. Ever read the Federalist Papers? They were incredibly thoughtful, nuanced, passionate arguments about the design of government and its interaction with society. And they were in newspapers! Public debate! What a concept.
I understand your point, but it's laughable to think that politics hasn't been theatrics since the invention of government. The founding fathers were no less politicians than the people we have today.
I kind of find it funny that a few commentators keep mentioning the need for a party that doesn't tax too much but still spends......not sure if anyone has noticed, but that's basically the Republican Party.
I can point to plenty of Republican administrations that lowered taxes but none that cut spending. Perhaps, they spend too much on the military but they are also fans of infrastructure, medicare, preserving Social Security etc.
As a libertarian, I acutally don't think Republicans are radical enough. But if you can see past the rhetoric in the media and you want a party that taxes less but still spends, seriously vote Republican.....not the way I would want to go but if that's what you're looking for, the option is available at the ballot box.
My issue with republicans is they lower taxes, keep spending, and run up the deficit. Look at the deficit by president and it’s all republicans who ruin our budget. I’d rather a democrat who just owns their spending and taxes on it vs a democrat who fucks over the country down the road by just adding to the debt Willy nilly.
Build back better and Obamacare are paid for. Trump and Bush tax cuts weren't. That says something about the "party of fiscal responsibility".
This is one of my biggest gripes with the American political structure, it's unfathomable to me that a country as diverse as this only has 2 real political parties, or more accurately set up an electoral system that results in such massive and diverging polarization. It would be cool if there were more parties overall, I feel like then, for example, AOC could start her own bullshit communist party or whatever and people would pay even less attention to her since her support wouldn't necessarily be needed for coalition-building, since I believe the majority of the electorate would be split between generally more moderate political parties (center-left/right, etc.).
I'm not a political scientist, but I think having some kind of ranked choice voting system would help, if only for electing less extreme members from both parties in the short-term. I know this method is becoming more popular in some states (Maine started or is about to start electing their US senators this way), but I'd be curious if it actually leads to less-polarizing candidates getting elected as the theory would suggest.
As a former president of Tanzania (Nyerere) once quiipped, "The US is also a 1 party state but with typical American extravagance, they have 2 of them.”
Technically AOC, Bernie, etc. are part of their own party , the democratic socialists of America. The only thing is they haven't actually split from the Democratic Party, because that would give Republicans the most votes among the three parties in several elections.
I know, but you know what I mean. You'd then have something like neo-constitutionalist/libertarians, center right, Christian fundamentalist, etc.
I used to feel the same way. Neither side uses money efficiently. Lots of pandering to their extreme bases.
Strongly believe in women’s rights and gun control. But also believe in less taxes, less social programs, more police, strong military.
But after trump and how the right did nothing to stop his ridiculousness, I feel as a non-white person I have no choice but to vote left in the near future.
I’m a Muslim immigrant from a shithole country and I can tell you the left is bat shit crazy and they’ve pulled the wool over your eyes. They’re policies are downright counterproductive and detrimental to the long term viability of the USA. Center left folks like sistema or manchin are tolerable but the far extremes of both parties are retarded and dangerous and I’m afraid the bell curve on the left has a much fatter tail and a lot more of the folks on the left are socialists and communists than are not at this point.
Manchin refused a billionaire tax, of which his state has zero (0) but supports a payroll tax on West Virginians who earn less than 25k a year on average.
Manchin keeps fighting for subsidies (yay, socialism!) to keep the obsolete coal industry alive, while West Virginians foot the bill and in some cases pay more for energy than they do for their homes.
How is that tolerable at all? His philosophy is simple: make life worse for working people.
https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/19/politics/west-virginia-coal-rates-manchi…
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