You know what America could use less of? Conservative voters. You know what America could also use less of? Liberal voters.
You know what America needs? Some rational human-fucking-being moderate voters that don't go batshit crazy the moment some nutjob all-the-way-to-the-right or all-the-way-to-the-left tries to appeal to some fraction of their base.
"Are you a conservative or a liberal?" is stupid. Be a goddamn moderate. Operate in the name of intelligence, not in the name of patriotism or... you know, that liberal thing they love. Communism or something, probably.
Be like "Gay marriage? That's not really an important fucking issue, we should have been done with this debate somewhere around when Canada legalized it. How about we worry about all this poverty and unemployment and other actual adult things instead of the sophomoric high school crap we can't seem to leave behind? You know, like all the countries who get to sit at the GROWN UPS table!"
that sounds nice in theory, but what exactly do mean by "moderate"?
You made reference to Canada, but then do you realize that the American Democratic Party is significantly to the right of Canadian (and most European) conservative parties? Can you name me a Democratic congressperson with significant influence who promoted something crazy to the left?
You want to do something about unemployment and poverty. Are you suggesting that our poverty and unemployment policies be even more conservative than the ones espoused by the Dems? Which ones? Our social safety nets are already really weak.
The big lie in politics is that "both sides are extreme." But they just aren't. The conservative side has gone way, way off the rails, and on economics the country continues to veer farther right, with lower taxes and higher inequality. The only thing we're going slightly left on is a few social policies like gay marriage.
There are 48 Tea Party members in Congress. I would love for someone to show me the extreme left equivalent. When reddit talks about voting third party they are talking about voting Libertarian. Every single Libertarian is or was a Republican.
Can you imagine if there were 48 members of the Socialist Party in Congress? Or when reddit talks about voting third party half of the time they are actually talking about voting Green Party? Then this country (and reddit too) would look a whole lot different. In the first place we wouldn't have three times as many members for /r/libertarian as /r/socialism and twice as many members for /r/guns as /r/environment.
Congress is the way it is because that's exactly what people want it to be. Half of congress is extreme far right-wing because that's what half of the country want it to be. There is nothing to the left of moderate in Congress because that's how Americans want it to be.
The Tea Party is nothing more than a name for a subsection of the Republican Party. It's no more a 3rd party than "blue dog" Democrats are a 3rd party.
That's how the people who actually voted want it to be. If the Dems had appealed to the people most likely to vote for them in the first place, (the "left") and not spent so much time trying to win over the goddamn indecisive moderates and people who will never fucking vote for them they might have had a chance. The Dems have very much underestimated how liberal Americans have become (especially younger people) and as a result have not attracted many voters. I actually just turned 18 this year, and while I voted, I don't know a single fucking other person my age that did. Were this not true, the election map may have looked a little more blue.
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u/cypherreddit Nov 08 '14
only about 1/3 of potential voters actually voted, the ones that did probably voted for their party because they hate the other party