(07-26-2016, 05:18 AM)David Horn Wrote:(07-25-2016, 06:50 PM)Anthony Wrote: But, no pun intended (!), what difference does it make?
If Hillary wins, the Republicans, with their majority in the House, will be able to block anything and everything she wants, indeed, in many cases, even preventing bills from reaching the Senate on matters such as the budget, which the Constitution mandates must be voted on by the House first; and if Trump wins, the Democrats, with the filibuster, which is more-or-less mathematically impossible for them to lose, will be able to block most things that Donald Trump wants to do - especially if Trump pulls a William Howard Taft and sells out to the billionaires on economic matters.
So, the gridlock will be broken in the 2018 election - which, like all midterm elections, will be dominated by the oldest, richest, and whitest among us.
This is the unfortunate truth. If Trump wins, the game plan may be a bit different, though that's not likely. It's one of the reasons I'm still concerned about a failed 4T.
We will find the political structure accommodating wealth and bureaucratic power instead of people. We will see the Republicans manipulate the political system so that they can never lose any federal or state election that they want to win. They will arrange things so that Democrats either have no voice (totalitarianism) or have some ability to operate only where Republicans have never had credibility. Maybe they will change electoral laws so that people are obliged to vote as their employers demand, which would ensure a very right-wing America. If the 2016 election is a lost opportunity for Democrats, then 2018 will then be the end of competitive democracy in America.
We already have a deformed democracy; corporate lobbyists have the real power in the legislative process in the Congress and in many State legislatures. Government by lobbyists is how things are done at the Federal level and in most states. Power held by people with no responsibility to the People is no democracy.
Democrats will get about 30% of legislative seats, all of them associated with ultra-urban districts, as in Michigan, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Michigan's Congressional delegation now reflects what Republicans want: Republicans effectively gerrymandered the state so that Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Muskegon, Lansing, East Lansing, and Battle Creek are diluted with rural areas hostile to urban politics. So does Ohio: Ohio Republicans have splintered such urban areas as Cleveland, Columbus, and Cincinnati as political bases with core areas that could never vote Republican are ultra-safe seats and the rest of the districts often have a 55R-45D split in votes.
30% of the vote for the opposition as a predictable reality? That's how the Communist Party does things in China. Once some of the most radical leftists to have ever existed, the Commies might as well call themselves a Conservative Party because the party has gutted the 'socialist' character of its agenda while maintaining the dictatorship. China has a dictatorship even if the concept of the dictatorship being 'of the Proletariat' is a joke. The currency still bears images of Mao Zedong even if Maoism is practically dead in China.
30% of the vote representation in power to the Opposition as a predictable reality in America? Anyone who believes that American government still operates on principles established in the Federalist Papers is a fool. Ruthless people have found the seams in our political system and have had the audacity to exploit them. Our currency will still have images of Washington, Lincoln, Hamilton, Grant, and Franklin -- but anyone who thinks that our political order reflects them now is a fool. Yes, we did have the successful Civil Rights Movement that challenged the racist realities of American life with some success, but that movement confirmed the values of the Founders (except for their sleazy compromise with chattel slavery). Martin Luther King, Jr., like most of the non-radical exponents of civil rights for blacks, was content to pressure the System to include blacks in the political process and make the system responsive to blacks.
Permanent, powerless presence may be better than persecutions and annihilation. America needs only a secret police or brutal militias to become a sick parody of a noble dream.
But that is a 4T. Whatever democracy America has going into a 4T always ends up in peril. George III precipitated the American Revolution as he tried to tighten his formal grip on the Colonies which had largely been left to themselves. Slave-holding interests got their Fugitive Slave Law and came close to breaking the Missouri Compromise with Bloody Kansas and could not accept Abraham Lincoln as President of the United States (I have my suspicion that Lincoln was going to end slavery in America much as the British did, which would not have required a horrible war of resistance by slave-owners). The Great Depression delivered Germany to an evil leader and gutted whatever elements of democracy had developed in Japan; America was fortunate to get the best possible leader of the time, one who used democracy to push humanistic reforms upon America. America would find itself at war with two of the most Evil Empires with fearsome war machines at the same time. Losing the one war that America absolutely had to win would have realized the nightmarish world of The Man in the High Castle.
This time we Americans must see ourselves on the brink of becoming an Evil Empire on par with Japan and Germany in power during World War II, if not with the genocidal horrors. Should American elites get the internal power that they seek in America, then they will surely seek to spread their celebration of greed and power for a few into places where such is unwelcome.
As in the last Crisis, nobody will rescue or deliver us from failure. We now need another Lincoln or FDR. Obama was good, but not that good. Hillary Clinton has yet to impress me as even as good and effective as Obama. Donald Trump reflects everything wrong with America today.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.