6mo ago

The debate gets interesting sometimes

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It's not wishful thinking. It's just obvious.
You're dead right in that politicians are greedy assholes.
They want to win elections and to do that they need votes.
What would the republican party do if they'd lost miserably in every election in the last decade? Obviously they would shift their policies to the left in order to be more popular.
What would the democrats do if the republicans moved to the left? Obviously they would have to move further to the left to minimise the votes lost to the republican party.
As the population votes on the left, political policy moves to the left. This seems so plainly obvious to me.
- Democrats only put forward a slightly more leftie candidate either after they lost an election or after they came very close to losing one. Republicans haven't put forward a more leftie candidade ever, even when they lost elections.
  Sure, in a theoretical America were 80% of Americans were unshakeable convict lefties, it would make sense that both parties turn Left if they lost too many votes because that would be were 80% was that those people, being unshakeable in their political convictions, would not buldge from them.
  However the Left in America is but a small minority and both parties have decades of actual proof that it's perfectly possible to keep the Left small with the right kind of propaganda because that's what they've done, again and again and again - the American political "center" isn't way to the Right of that in most of Europe by chance and wouldn't be moving even more to the Right not just in America but everywhere because people's political convictions are unshakeable and unchangeable.
  Further, if there is one thing Trump has proven is that it's absolutelly feasible to move a huge fraction of voters even more to the Right when they were already very much into the Right (i.e. from Reaganism to pretty much Fascism).
  Your entire theory is anchored on the idea that the electorate doesn't move, it's the politicians who move, when everything in History and even Present day, not just in Politics but even Marketing, not just in Democracy but in Authocracy, shows that the vast majority of people are incredibly easy for those who have control over a suficient fraction of the Press to push in the direction they want them to go.
  (FOX News would not have the influence it has in American politics if people's political convictions were unshakeable).
  Add that factor to your thinking and it makes a lot more sense that the crooked politicians looking for a payout from doing politics for very rich people would favour using propaganda to convince people that doing what's best for the rich is the right thing to do or that the fault of the problems in America is entirelly of immigrants so all the real solutions are around immigration ("and ignore all the tax cuts for the rich and deregulation I'm doing over here") rather than moving to were people were politically and doing what people wanted instead of what's best for the rich - the propaganda option works and guarantees that the mainstream politicians who chose to shift the electorate with propaganda instead of moving to were the electorate is, keep leaving politics far more wealthy than they came in.
  Look around at Politics in American since at least Reagan and what I described in the paragraph above is exactly what has been happenning and is still happenning.
  
  Sorry mate, you just haven't understood anything I've said.
  Of course the electorate can move. More people need to vote for the dems. Politicians will chase the votes.
  
  I'll leave you to your fantastical notions, which are contrary to pretty much all Historical evidence in Psychology, Marketing and Politics, about how people behave, both inside and outside Politics.
  
  What you're calling fantastical notions are well understood concepts of political science.
  
  Your theory is literally picking up a single known effect that yields the results you desire and denying all others.
  It's like claiming nothing should ever sink because there's Surface Tension in the interface between water and air whilst ignoring everything else including far more important elements like Gravity and Density and then when confronted with the fact that stuff has in fact sunk in water, just treating thatrecorded observation that disproves your theory as irrelevant.
  Such selective picking up of only the part of the theory that yields the results you desire and denial of observations that disprove your theory, is not Science, it's not even Logic, at best it's Fantasy - in other words, a particularly illogical kind of wishful thinking.
  Picking the parts of a Science you like and ignoring the rest does not yield something Scientific, just like putting a steering wheel on a rock doesn't turn it onto a car.
  
  Your analogy just isn't analogous.
  I'm not cherry picking obscure data to support a "theory".
  What I'm doing is patently obvious, indisputable cause and effect.
  If a kid sells orange juice by the road, but everyone buys lemonade from the kid next door, it's not gonna take very long for OJ kid to change their game.
  If the republicans keep losing elections, they will move to the left to attract voters. The dems would need to move left to minimise voters lost to the republicans.
  It's not a complicated theory. It's a well established obvious feature of democracy.

435 comments