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2025 Political Thread

Let me just get this out of the way while it's on my mind... So sick and tired of this gerrymandering bs.

Newsom has campaigned to pass a 28th Amendment that would ban so-called "assault weapons" - but I say the 28th Amendment should be something that actually makes sense, like a formal ban on gerrymandering.

Because voters themselves have now become a huge part of the problem. In 2008, California voters approved the independent, non-partisan Citizens Redistricting Commission. But a lot has changed since 2008. In 2025, those same voters now largely support Newsom's gerrymander - not because it's fair, but because it entrenches their preferred party.

And I guess blind loyalty to one's political party is more important than transparency and accountability these days. In today's ever more polarized political climate, voters are either indifferent to or openly INVITE authoritarianism if their team is the one calling the shots.

At least the Texas GOP are upfront and honest about their authoritarian power grab - which does NOT make it right, but hey, they get one point for honesty I guess. California Democrats' gerrymander is authoritarianism with a smiley face - by implementing it with a "free" election that's de facto predetermined based on the state's party majority, they have a flimsy justification for "defending democracy".

And of course, a 28th Amendment to ban gerrymandering would never pass in today's political climate, because the parties see each other not as opponents, but as existential threats. And anything that could potentially take power away from one's party would be automatically opposed, even if it also takes power away from the other party.

There is indeed an existential threat to American democracy. But it's not one party or the other, or even the parties themselves - it's blind voter loyalty to them. Modern voters care more about entrenching their own party's power than upholding democratic principles.

And until that stops, America can never truly heal.
 
TH2002 said:
Modern voters care more about entrenching their own party's power than upholding democratic principles.
Click to expand...

I'm no expert on American history but have the impression that our founders, with some religious roots at least, as well as Europe's long, sad example before them, had a pretty jaundiced but accurate view of human nature and of politics.

They were practical, in other words, and expected such power grabbing by various factions. They worked that into their design for a democratic republic.

The democracy would take care of itself. And it does. It's hard to see the big picture, and would be even if control freaks weren't constantly using mass media these days to blast me with counsels of despair ("Democracy is self-executing"), and often it's frustrating and ugly to me because I'm not getting all of what I want.

Trite as it is, the idea is that everybody should get some of their own way. And it's just impossible to see if that is happening sometimes in the short term.

None of that addresses California, of course. The gov sounds like a pain. He must be feeling insecure, to drag out that tired old chestnut of an assault-weapon-ban division maker. Maybe there's a good alternative to him and/or his policies that he doesn't want Californians thinking about?
 
What's unhealthy in a democratic republic is the sort of widespread unity that I saw prevail throughout my younger days from the Sixties right on through the late 1980s/early 1990s when H. Bush shattered it by addressing pro-life groups and when Operation Rescue was doing its thing.

You had to be there, maybe, to understand what a shock that was to all of us Boomers who liked the unity and thought we were living in a post-revolution Utopia. Really, though it has taken me decades to see that.

Many of us and our descendants have not gotten over it yet. I did, fortunately. Other Americans showed me their long-stifled but equally valid points of view, most notably:

  • A pro-life group up in Troy, NY, who posted a billboard image of a baby and the words "It's not a choice. It's a baby." Slipped in subliminally while I was driving, under all the hoopla that would have kicked in had I thought about it, and I realized they were right. (City made them take it down for some BS reason, and that was an eye-opener, too.)
  • A very drunken black man at the truck stop in McCalla, Alabama, the very first time I went there to see my father and stepmother. He saw my Lady Liberty New York vehicle plate and said, "You come down here to IN-te-grate us?" I can't begin to convey the sarcasm he put into that one word. Aghast, I just mumbled a bit and he staggered on his way, having made his point: PBS's "Eyes on the Prize" and other celebrations of white saviorhood were not the whole story by a darned lot.
Sigh. America is a wild place.

Anyway, awful as these days are, maybe the democracy is a little bit better off now than it was thirty, forty, fifty years ago.

That said, we've got to flush out all this hate.
 
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