It’s probably a good start. Would be interesting to see where we are after that.
Wow, now there’s a really interesting thought experiment!
Who represents people in areas where there are nearly, or exactly, 100% white people?
I think something we often forget living in the city is that minorities are… minorities. Every oppressed group (except women) is outnumbered (in the US) by a A LOT. All these places out in the US everyone is a WASP. LIke, 100% of the whole fucking town.
The US is as a whole 76.9% white and 61.3% non-hispanic white.
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American Exceptionalism and Individualism is a motherfucker and that’s what is holding us back. Hell, we embrace that people be misinformed, dumb, and harmful because of all that still qualifies as a virtue of freedom. A lot of this plays credit to Luke’s article about the predatory society. It doesn’t matter if you exploit people, if you made profit while doing so that makes you an American success. Our government has sided with the people who can continue to exploit which is why we have very backwards policies with our tax guidelines and how corporation can be judged as people.
Not only does slavery need to be fully taught in length at our public education but we really need to put Reparations into course. Since every facet of American life is formed from slavery and affects the lives of black people, we should start greatly considering it. There’s probably a reason to debate against it considering the level of inflation and taxes going up from the influx of money, but we could cover the trillions of costs from our military budget.
I don’t think racism can truly leave the United States because racists have found ways and new suckers to create new forms of racism. What was out-and-out public racism has now morphed into a nihilistic, cultish form of racism comes from people who can’t comprehend how much of Western society was built on exploitation. But we do need to start making exceptions for what is hate speech is and start enforcing it.
Every major issue of American society and American government can be broken down but these are some starter thoughts.
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Then I suppose the question is: do you have a suggestion for walking back from this edge that you consider more reasonable?
First non-white person to move there has 100% of the franchise.
The influence of money on politics is still the root of most of our problems. Without that the government would actually start functioning according to the will of the people to a great enough extent for things to start being fixed.
The racist rural gerrymandered-majority?
I’m suspect that the majority are racist. Just seems that way due to gerrymandering. That whole taking money out of politics thing may have something to it. Maybe we can fix the gerrymandering with no money around.
First only white land owning men could vote. Over time the not white people and women got to vote, but then oh no. Now money matters and not votes. We haven’t really had an extended period where everyone could vote and money wasn’t corrupting everything so severely.
Real campaign finance reform can fix a lot. But it may be that we have to be a bit more extreme. In addition to taking the money out, we need a one time reset. All elected officials from the money era are out. Immediate end of term. Elect all new people. No previous representatives allowed to return.
Like taking all the steroid era baseball players and just giving them the permanent boot. The second level problems like redistricting will likely be addressed by this new government. At least a lot more likely than the one we have!
Given the cases that were recently argued before the Supreme Court, and what’s going on with the various cases in states like Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, it seems far more likely that gerrymandering will be fixed, at least to some degree, before we deal with the abuse of campaign finance. Hopefully, one Congressional districts are less gerrymandered, that can somewhat combat the influx of money into politics.
One problem with trying to make this all young vs old or rural vs urban is that the money that wants certain policies is just going to change the argument to continue to split things. If things swing 70% democrat they’ll still find shills to take their money for their policy and try to paint the argument in a particular way. They’ll also keep people split into an us vs them mentality unless they can swing a full fascist state that favors those who already have theirs. I think that even if we somehow went with Rym’s only non-whites can vote, that will just change the debate over ten or fifteen years while the actual wealthy and powerful figure out how to game that system in their favor. The solutions to me are amendments, war, or ai, I believe in that order of likelihood.
I think people do want to change it. A very large majority of US people do agree on some issues, campaign finance reform being one of them. We just lack a clear means of turning that desire into actual policy. Even when we vote and get the representatives we want, they often do not fight hard enough.
I look at South Korea a lot, because I watch their television. Obviously they have a lot of problems, but what they also have is a culture of activism that actually works. They organize protests, they show up to them, and they get results. Their previous president of the country resigned because of protests! The employees at KBS went on strike, and 141 days later the president of KBS was ousted!
Largely this is because of their history. After the war they were ruled by military regimes until '87! It was largely due to student protests in the '80s that they were able to start a new government with democratic elections. Their government started via protests. It was recent! Those protestors are alive now and not that old. The protests worked! Direct results were clearly visible! This is a major reason why activism is a part of their culture.
Compare that to activism in the US. Spectrum Strike isn’t going so well. Most protests are often short lived and rarely achieve direct recognizable and significant wins. Sometimes we make a big democratic push for something like net neutrality, and the opposite happens anyway! That’s not to say it never works, but it hasn’t worked well enough.
There are many reasons it doesn’t work, but money is perhaps the biggest one. To keep using the net neutrality example. Imagine if Verizon and telcos were not able to influence the FCC and have their stooge as its chairperson? I can only imagine then that our activism would have worked. When it works, people get encouraged to do it again, and again. When people try and fail, that is what makes them give up hope and stay home to play video games, especially when they still have bread and circuses.
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We cant discount the utter size and disparity of lifestyles in the US. You can have millions marching in DC but supporters from Colorodo are largely stuck. You can have mass protests in each of the 50 states, yet not reach a critical mass where it can make an impact.
For sure, there is potential. But the US is huge. S. Korea only has to mass one group in one place to have significant draw from the entire nation.
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Yep. Just another of many reasons.
Gerrymandering is only about 17% responsible for holding back progress:
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I don’t disagree, though I think that article doesn’t hit everything. Living in Missouri I feel like my state is very gerrymandered, and maybe that isn’t the biggest deal everywhere (blue states are still blue, red states are still red) but historically we were a pretty purple state because you had two large population centers (Kansas City and St. Louis) that swing the vote for our governor and electoral college quite a bit, but internally the state became very very very red through my lifetime. We have 1-2 other cities that swing blue a bit, one of which I live in. We’re not quite Arkansas, but this guy who seems like an actor is drawing more media attention than other real candidates: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/wp/2018/01/25/gop-candidate-says-feminists-have-snake-filled-heads-hopes-daughters-dont-become-she-devils/?utm_term=.a5bf1396dbc6
By all accounts his platform should be absurd parody for television. But literally mentioning him draws more attention to it, and with it more support. It’s insanity. Fighting this should be trivial, yet it’s incredibly not. That’s what makes me think armed revolt is an actual response, yet with the way technology is, that’s less and less realistic over time. With sufficient tech the oligarchy wins by default. With sufficient tech the masses win by default. Neither is ideal, it’s basically who holds the weapons.
I have 0% panic, but I still can conceive of how all this shakes out into incredible wars that benefit the oligarchs of both sides.
One thing I haven’t seen discussed that I feel has to be addressed…
The US is a needlessly large collection of states with different needs, cultures, and interests. The conflict between states not wanting the same things literally caused a civil war and is the primary driver of our political divisions. That’s not to say that inter-state doesn’t have divisions too (You can Republicans all over NY), but it’s much less of a problem when they’re focusing on local issues rather than deciding something for a country full of people.
America is an empire in the classical sense. We expanded, we get involved in wars, we have tributaries, and we have the strongest military.
Empires don’t last. It’s impossible for people to tolerate one political entity having this much power for too long. And it’s impossible for everyone within an empire to feel like one united group of people for too long. What we see more and more is that people don’t identify with other Americans who have a different viewpoint and lifestyle to them, and want the government to tell them that they are the true Americans.
I’m not saying I want to see all the LGBT and non-white folks in the South get isolated down there and treated like second-class citizens while NY secedes and is overall a more positive, diverse place…But I’m saying that mass change for a country this large may just be impossible.
This has been discussed quite a bit in other threads on the forum, but it’s totally relevant here.
While some states are MASSIVELY overrepresented in terms of Senate seats and in the Electoral College, there’s no way any of them are voluntarily going to give up power for things like proportional representation or even the winner of the popular vote earning the presidency. Nobody ever voluntarily dilutes their own power.
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I don’t think states giving up power is the question, I really think that America can’t function as a united country of these 50 states.