The nature of the American electoral beast

[Griffon64]

A country can't run without infrastructure. Therefore, spending on roads, dams, power sources and other civil projects, as well as produce and agriculture ( not strictly infrastructure perhaps, but without food a country can't run either ) should be an underpinning to whatever else tax dollars gets spent on, in my opinion.

South Africa's road infrastructure is widely criticized ( by its population ) as being in severe state of disrepair. Yes, I have driven down secondary roads where you have to drive down the middle of the road because the sides are potholed away, but for the most part, the roads compare well to America's. I was surprised, once I got over the fact that most interstates ( if not all, I won't know ) is at least dual carriageway, to find that South Africa's roads doesn't compare that badly, even though they've declined steadily over the past decade or so. Johannesburg and Cape Town's aging, failing power grids was criticized heavily too, yet it seems that especially in the eastern states, cities have power grids that are not as they could be, either. First world and Third world is relative, depending on where you live. The grass is always greener ...

Anyway, all of that just to say that I believe spending on infrastructure is an important function of whatever level of government should handle it, as is keeping the agriculture healthy.

But then, who doesn't like receiving?

[Primula Baggins]

It's hard to realize how bad things were just a little over a generation ago. Many of the finest universities discriminated freely against blacks and did not admit women at all. It wasn't just harder to get in; you couldn't even apply. Segregation was the rule even where it wasn't the law. Offensive stereotypes were common in mass culture. Many jobs were completely closed to women, often by rules specifically designed to exclude them. As Ax says, it was hard for a married woman to get credit in her own name. And of course, women were subjected to a kind of patronizing disrespect—for their competence, for their career aspirations, for any indications of independent thought—that pervaded the culture.

Much of the prejudice and discrimination against all kinds of people has merely gone underground, but at least it's illegal; at least a politician can actually lose an election, in the South, for expressing it.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

No, Holby, I think the shift to the right has been happening since before 2001. Now the next 20 years may well produce an overall shift to the left, which perhaps 911 delayed.

The shift right has been occurring since post Carter days (ie Reagan), but the Clinton scandals and 911 certainly lurched the country even moreso to the right. Tuesday's vote was a correction of that lurch but not necessarily a shift to the left overall.

The Bush administration screwed the right wing party by being so damned extreme.

*sigh* I can barely make sense out of what I just said.

It makes pefect sense to me.

But perhaps that says more about me then anything else.

[Faramond]

If we're going to characterize racism as conservative, then sure, there has been a dramatic shift to the left in the last 20 years in that area.


Redistricting doesn't create a situation in which a party only gets 44.7% of the vote. The Republicans gained in states outside of the plains states and the south in 1994 as well.

The shift is no invention. It's right there to see if you care to look. Compare Clinton to Carter. Compare Bush the younger to Bush the older. To be competitive the Democrats have to run ever more moderate candidates, while the Republicans can get away with running very conservative candidates. Compare the typical freshman Democrat in 2006 with the typical freshman Republican in 1994, and tell me which group is closer to the center. What sounds like an "invention" of pundits and the media to me is calling it all demographics and redistricting.

What happened is that various forces on the right actually got their act together after 1964, figured out the demographics, and launched a long-term project to become much more competitive than they have any right to be.

This phrase "any right to be" is puzzling to me. What do you mean by it? Is it that conservatives have no right to win elections, or that the only way they can win elections is through trickery or deceit or manipulation of the system?

[Primula Baggins]

Racism is not a tenet of conservatism as a political philosophy. But it would be hard to deny that racist/sexist beliefs correlate with conservatism in a one-way sense, anyway—by no means are/were all conservatives racist or sexist, but people with racist/sexist beliefs are overwhelmingly conservative politically.

[MithLuin]

Of course I'm generalizing, and generalizations only go so far. You farm until you can't afford to any more, so yes, many farmers depend on subsidies.

But as a "for instance" - let's say it snows 2 feet. In a rural area, you go get on your tractor and plow your driveway. You then offer to plow the driveway of the little old lady next to you (for free, or for coffee), and then your neighbor down the street who has no tractor (he pays you $50). Or you own a backhoe or plow, and regularly contract with people to plow their driveways when it snows. If you live right on the street, you get a shovel and get to work. No one waits for the gov't plows, because they might take awhile to get to the side streets, and you're on your own for your quarter-mile-long driveway anyway .

In the city. You look out the window and say "oh my goodness, it snowed!" and then wait for the city to plow your street. You might dig your own car out (or you might just try to drive over the snow), but you sure the heck aren't going to dig out a parking lot so you and the neighbors all have someplace to park. You then set up folding chairs in your parking space so no one takes it while you are gone. If for some reason the city doesn't dig you out in a timely fashion, you complain. Loudly. But no one ever thinks to do it themselves.

(In suburbia, you use your snowblower to clear out your little driveway, and you have a snowblower because your neighbor 3 houses down had one last winter....)

Again, this is a generalization - it doesn't hold true for every snowstorm in every city or rural area. BUT....there is something to it. Maybe the "something" is just that you need gov't control when you put a lot of people together. You can't have a free-for-all. But I still much prefer the country.


I think ax was saying that if you win because you counted the votes cleverly, you aren't the "representative" winner. Just like in the other thread, where it was suggested that while white males might be a very big demographic, a gov't composed exclusively of them wouldn't be terribly representative.

[Faramond]

Well, that's the way liberals try to taint all conservatives, yes. Doesn't make it true, though. I fear there are a lot more racist liberals than most liberals would like to admit.

[Primula Baggins]

I have a hard time imagining that there are many racist liberals, Faramond. Racist belief seems to require a belief in hard lines and absolute categories, and we all know those are not characteristic of liberal views.

And I specifically did not say that all conservatives are racist. I said most racists are conservative. That says nothing about how many, or how few, conservatives are racist.

[MithLuin]

If you were racist and wanted to vote for someone in this week's election, who would you pick?

I'm not suggesting there aren't racist Americans (there clearly are), but I don't think there are racist platforms. Not that I know about, anyway.

So, politically, it's not an issue.

(Racism is an issue, of course - but not in determining whether to be Rep. or Dem. or whatever)

Edit: I mean, I know it comes up all the time - in this election, a Dem. got in trouble for saying that the Rep. candidate was "slavishly" adhereing to the Rep. party line - he was black and called her remark racist. She apologized and said it was poor word choice.

But its rhetoric, not policy.

[Voronwë the Faithful]

The shift is no invention. It's right there to see if you care to look. Compare Clinton to Carter.

Ooh, that's a dangerous comparison to make for your argument, Faramond. Carter was arguable much more "conservative" then Clinton. In fact, he ran as "conservative Democrat" (as opposed to Clinton, who ran as a "moderate Democrat" and was actually supported by Pat Buchanan. From Wikipedia:

Jimmy Carter was a born-again Christian and a member of the Southern Baptist Convention. While the Republican Party began to pursue a strategy of wooing born-again Christians as a voting bloc after 1980, led by activists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, in 1976 the evangelical Christian vote went largely to Carter. Carter combined conservative fiscal policies, conservative social views, with more moderate views on peace and ecology, making for a rare combination in the history of American Presidents.

[Holbytla]

Carter combined conservative fiscal policies, conservative social views,

Fourteen percent interest rates and lust in his heart.

[nerdanel]

If you were racist and wanted to vote for someone in this week's election, who would you pick?

I'm not suggesting there aren't racist Americans (there clearly are), but I don't think there are racist platforms. Not that I know about, anyway.

So, politically, it's not an issue.

Well, if I was still registered to vote in Virginia, and I was searching for a potentially racist candidate, I would pick someone who:
- called Indian-Americans "macacas"
- repeatedly displayed the Confederate flag on his property or in his personal life right up to the year 2000
- in 1995, 1996, and 1997, as Governor of Virginia, declared Confederate History and Heritage month and characterized the Civil War as "a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights"
- opposed a state holiday solely to honor MLK Jr., as opposed to the utter joke that was "Lee-Jackson-King Day"
- allegedly repeatedly used the n-word in college, according to nineteen former sports teammates of his
If there was such a candidate on the ballot, and I was a white racist, I would probably be inclined to support his candidacy. Just sayin'.

[axordil]

Faramond--
The only way any minority can take or maintain control in a democracy is through manipulation of the system, so yes, I'm saying that the GOP has been gaming the system with great success since 1968, after the 1964 debacle.

And I am certainly not saying that 1994's GOP gains were only in the South and West..only that that's where the vast majority of their gains were, and that those gains are explainable without an ideological shift. There are always ideological fluctuations in the handful of honest swing disticts out there, and that accounts for the rest of them.

I do not equate conservatism with racism, or sexism, or the like. I do equate it with not being particularly interested in doing anything about them. That's not to say there aren't individual conservatives here and there who ARE interested in fighting for tolerance--I know some personally. It's simply making what I consider an undebatable observation that conservatism, as a movement, doesn't care so much about that kind of stuff at best, and is at least covertly hostile towards it at worst...and that both extremes are viewed as OK by the people in power within the movement.

[MithLuin]

So, you're saying the country isn't (roughly) evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans? It isn't about half and half?

Clinton wouldn't have won without Ross Perot being a player in the election. It is fairly difficult to see how he won with such low percentages if the country was "really" much more left-leaning. It's not like 53% of the country voted for him while the rest of the votes got squabbled over by the "other" candidates.

We keep track of the popular vote. At some level, the zones and boundaries don't factor into that. We know what people vote.....

I think a 2 party system is polarizing, but I don't know what the alternative looks like (and I don't mean 1 party, I mean multi-party!!)


Oh, I thought the death of Strom Thurmond cleaned out the last of those....so glad I don't live in VA.....

[Faramond]

Ax and Prim, you're both way out of line. Let's rename this thread the "tell as many viscious stupid lies about conservatives as possible".

[Primula Baggins]

Faramond, I think that was out of line. Neither one of us has posted any lies. I'm not putting up links because I don't care to tie such places to HoF, but there is no question that racist organizations also espouse many conservative beliefs. It does not work the other way around—if I had said that, I would be attacking conservatives. But I never said it. I was extremely careful to make clear that I was not saying it.

[Faramond]

But it would be hard to deny that racist/sexist beliefs correlate with conservatism in a one-way sense, anyway—by no means are/were all conservatives racist or sexist, but people with racist/sexist beliefs are overwhelmingly conservative politically.

A lie. There are, sadly, many racist liberals as well.

I do not equate conservatism with racism, or sexism, or the like. I do equate it with not being particularly interested in doing anything about them.

A lie. But liberals only accept that there is one way to fight racism, and that's the liberal way.

Both lies are designed to "illustrate" that ( wink wink nudge nudge ) conservatives are racists and liberals are nearly uniformly non-racists. I could come up with parallel slanderous statements about some minority group that weren't technically racist but exposed an extreme prejudice.

[nerdanel]

Faramond - serious question - what techniques to fight racism, sexism, etc. would you attribute to conservatism, or would you say are espoused by a significant number of conservatives?

[Primula Baggins]

NO.

I did not say that conservatives are racists.

I said that racists are, mostly, conservative politically. I stand by that statement.

If I said "rats are mammals," would you conclude that I meant that all mammals are rats?

[MithLuin]

Friendly reminder that politics is a very highly charged subject. While it is true that some people (like me) don't care who the heck runs our country so long as it isn't me and they leave me alone.....

most people have much more vehement opinions about how things ought to be done.

Please keep in mind the Halofiriens are not all of the same political bent and could easily be offended by casual (but partisan) statements.


Yes, Prim, he read what you said, and he disagrees with that.

As for the current disagreement - you can either both go dredge up racist groups and analyze the leftiness or rightedness of their agendas....or you could discuss the actual issue at hand, which is "where are most Americans?" Racism shouldn't even be on the table, unless we think it is a staple and mainstream of American values (well, of course it is a staple of American politics, but that's different).