The USA is a racist society

[Eric the Green]

(12-12-2021, 07:38 AM)Anthony 58 Wrote: We installed (or maintained) a lot of right-wing dictators during the Cold War, including some utterly reprehensible characters like the "chomo" Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay, and the apartheidists in Rhodesia and South Africa, in whose comparison the Thieu regime in South Vietnam totally paled, on the theory of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."

That's right, although we didn't go to war for them. Thieu was just another one of these, though. Not worth all the lost lives and minds. The Vietnamese regime is not the worst communist regime either.

I don't think the USA supported aparteid in Africa, and from the 1980s it supported boycotts against South Africa to support the freedom movement there. I don't know about Stroessner either. Support for dictators by the USA is more clear in cases like The Phillippines and South Korea in the 1950s and 60s, and banana republic regimes and contra rebels in Central and South America and the Caribbean, and support for Israel's enemies like Egypt, and even today support for Israel and Saudi Arabia and the Saudi attack on Yemen.

Quote:And the term "neoliberalism" needs to be retired, on the grounds of the confusion it causes - at least in the United States anyway.  A far more concise alternative would be neoclassical liberalism, since it seeks to re-create the policies advocated by Adam Smith, in more-or-less unvarnished form (furthermore, as Michael Lind so correctly pointed out in Up From Conservatism: Why the Right is Wrong for America, what distinguishes neoliberals from conservatives is their respective stances on social and "moral" issues, just like what distinguishes left-liberals from national liberals - like present company! - is their respective stances on economic issues).

It's a confusing term, but it won't be retired just because some people say so. Neoliberalism is a more determined and insistent type of classical liberalism.

As I said, there may be some neoliberals (aka economic conservatives) who are social liberals, especially in the media like Lind, but they are rare. In fact, they are two authoritarian ideologies that fit together, especially because the main supporters at the polls of neoliberalism are white rural Americans who resent paying welfare taxes to blacks, and these same people are also fanatic conservative Christians. Support for the religious right and opposition to "socialism" is what characterizes most conservatives and Trump supporters these days. And the corresponding alliance is true on the left. Most left-liberals today are liberal both socially and economically. They vehemently oppose both the religious right's supposed morality and also oppose neoliberalism.

Also, since neoliberals are strongly against democracy, this authoritarianism also finds an ally among conservative Christians who want to impose authoritarian religion and traditional authoritarian values on the country. Also, the neoliberals' opposition to democracy separates them entirely from their classical liberal forbears.

Today the economic issues are the most polarized. Most Republicans support Reaganomics/neoliberalism, and most Democrats oppose it. A few Republicans oppose Trump's extremism, especially on some social issues, but they still support neoliberalism.

Quote:So far as Joe Manchin goes: How can he possibly behave any differently from the way he does, representing as he does a state that Donald Trump won by 39 points in 2020?

I'm not sure he can go against the Republicans in his state, unless those voters decide to support Democratic proposals. On the other hand, he is a Democrat, and the Party needs him to actually be one. Right now, Republican policy includes removing democracy. Can any Democrat really allow this to happen?

Quote:And I guess that the House would have no input on the Washington D.C./Puerto Rico question - plus Hawaii can be given a third congressional district (and fifth electoral vote) by adding such Pacific territories as American Samoa, Guam, and the Northern Mariana Islands to it (the Virgin Islands can also be made part of the state of Puerto Rico - but it is doubtful that doing so would increase the number of House seats/or electoral votes accruing to Puerto Rico, due to the small populations of the three islands).

But the most useful reform of all for the House is to divide the population of each state by the population of the least populous state (currently Wyoming) to determine how many House seats each state gets, rounding off the result to the nearest full seat.  This would result in California having 69 House seats, instead of the 52 it will have starting with 2020 election.  This, together with the one seat to which Washington D.C. would be entitled, Puerto Rico's six (with or without the Virgin Islands), and Hawaii's third seat (as above), that's 443 House seats (up from the present 435) right there - and in addition to California adding 17 seats, Texas, Florida, New York, etc. would get multiple additional seats as well, and so on down the line.  We might even end up with a House consisting of exactly 500 seats - the UK, with one-fifth our population, has 650 seats in its House of Commons; and many key constituencies, such as Staten Island, would henceforth have stand-alone seats in the House (New York's 11th Congressional District encompasses, in addition to all of Staten Island, portions of the southwesternmost tier of neighborhoods in Brooklyn).

And with the enhanced clout given to states like California and New York in the Electoral College, there would be no need to abolish the EC - at least for the time being.

There's an idea that might allow the EC to function. I don't know if anyone is proposing it.

Right now, without this, CA and NY don't have enough EC votes now and are losing them. So, the red states are getting more clout, and to me that's at least a reason to give EC votes to Puerto Rico and make them a state. I would support ending the electoral college because it gives too much clout to small rural states, and it's not the will of the people. Since this is unlikely to happen, the only hope now is for red states to go more blue. It's a slow process and the Republicans are successfully resisting this, at least for now.