When did the American political left lose its balls?

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

As long as I can remember, the Democratic party has dithered to Republicans and social conservatives on issue after issue without even putting up a fight. During Monicagate, one Democrat after another went up and proclaimed how disappointed they were in President Clinton and tried to distance themselves from him as damage control. No one stood up to shame the Republicans for focusing on the President's sex life instead of things that matter (tm). The DNC completely failed to notice how popular Clinton still was outside of the Washington beltway and that no one in the outside world who was even marginally inclined to vote Democrat really gave a shit whether he was getting head under the desk while balancing the budget and creating jobs. Al Gore conceded defeat without a fight despite some pretty blatant evidence that the election was rigged by Diebold and he actually won. After 9/11, the political center and left folded completely and let the right rush us all off to the worst foreign policy mistakes since 1953 and only offered weak, mealy-mouthed objections to Bush's warmongering years after the fact. Today, Obama's popularity is so low that a Democratic candidate froze like deer in the headlights rather than admit voting for him despite clear and overwhelming evidence that conservatives have been disastrously wrong about healthcare from Day 1. Instead of shoving a clear victory in their faces, Democratic candidates have run away from Obamacare and allowed Republicans to convince the voting public that grass isn't green, the sky isn't blue, and the ACA isn't working. The right wing establishment has poisoned the word "liberal", and is now doing the same to "progressive", which the political left fled to instead of mounting a defense, and a woman's right to have an abortion is under greater threat than at any time since most of us were alive.

I'm not old enough to remember when left-of-center politicians loudly and proudly defended their positions and called conservatives on their bullshit, but I know that some of you are, and I would like to know when the left neutered itself, what political debates were like beforehand, and hopefully gain some insight to when we can expect surgical reattachment of liberal testacles.

[Elheru Aran]

I suspect there are a few different causes, but in general since LBJ no President has really felt safe declaring themselves to be liberal. Jimmy Carter was about the last liberal President to not face a seriously virulent opposition willing to slander them left and right. Clinton had issues even before he was elected. Certainly part of that was his own fault-- it's hard to not buy that the guy could be a serial philanderer-- but apart from that he got a hell of a lot of flak from the right-wing establishment on health care, taxes, guns, you name it.

So after him ran Al Gore, who had the personality of a sheet of paper. The 24-hour news cycle, Internet, and Republican machine had a field day with that, and with Kerry as well. Obama was the only Democrat candidate in recent memory, aside from Hillary, who's managed to actually look good and pull off a win. Admittedly, his competition wasn't too difficult-- John McCain and Romney both embodied some of the worst stereotypes of Republicans...

[Channel72]

Probably because of this.

PRINCETON, NJ -- Americans continue to be more likely to identify as conservatives (38%) than as liberals (23%).

Yeah, the tone of that article is optimistic and suggests a bright future for American liberalism and the Democratic party - but it demonstrates that most Americans are still uneasy about identifying themselves as "liberal" - most Americans identify as "moderate" or "conservative". The Democrats obviously know this, so their PR strategy has essentially been to appear as moderate as possible, while painting the Republicans as too extreme, while quietly supporting liberal causes. Democrats are, at the end of the day - very careful. Obama wouldn't even publicly endorse gay marriage until it became obvious that popular opinion would allow it.

Obviously, the top strategists in the Democratic party are still wary of appearing too liberal - they'll support gay marriage because public opinion has swayed in that direction, but they're still pretty cautious, and they interpret a lot of Republican attacks as an indication that they may need to swing back to the center a bit.

[Maraxus]

As long as I can remember, the Democratic party has dithered to Republicans and social conservatives on issue after issue without even putting up a fight. During Monicagate, one Democrat after another went up and proclaimed how disappointed they were in President Clinton and tried to distance themselves from him as damage control. No one stood up to shame the Republicans for focusing on the President's sex life instead of things that matter (tm). The DNC completely failed to notice how popular Clinton still was outside of the Washington beltway and that no one in the outside world who was even marginally inclined to vote Democrat really gave a shit whether he was getting head under the desk while balancing the budget and creating jobs. Al Gore conceded defeat without a fight despite some pretty blatant evidence that the election was rigged by Diebold and he actually won. After 9/11, the political center and left folded completely and let the right rush us all off to the worst foreign policy mistakes since 1953 and only offered weak, mealy-mouthed objections to Bush's warmongering years after the fact. Today, Obama's popularity is so low that a Democratic candidate froze like deer in the headlights rather than admit voting for him despite clear and overwhelming evidence that conservatives have been disastrously wrong about healthcare from Day 1. Instead of shoving a clear victory in their faces, Democratic candidates have run away from Obamacare and allowed Republicans to convince the voting public that grass isn't green, the sky isn't blue, and the ACA isn't working. The right wing establishment has poisoned the word "liberal", and is now doing the same to "progressive", which the political left fled to instead of mounting a defense, and a woman's right to have an abortion is under greater threat than at any time since most of us were alive.

I'm not old enough to remember when left-of-center politicians loudly and proudly defended their positions and called conservatives on their bullshit, but I know that some of you are, and I would like to know when the left neutered itself, what political debates were like beforehand, and hopefully gain some insight to when we can expect surgical reattachment of liberal testacles.

I don't think that's accurate, leastwise from a historical angle. Like, Democrats gave the same "Holy Jesus this is a waste of time" speech every single day during the impeachment. Gore conceded in Florida after the Supreme Court, in an unprecidented and literally indefensible decision, ordered a stop to the recount, delivering Bush the state. Gore could have done a lot better in that election, but he couldn't have fought on after Rehnquist voted the second time. And there were a lot of passionate Democratic voices against the Iraq War! The Senate Dems obviously dropped the ball there, mainly because of the elections that year.

Things are looking pretty fucking gloomy for the Dems. I think that this perceived lack of "testicular" fortitude has very little to do with that. The President's real unpopular and we're defending some tough turf. Most of the really vulnerable seats are states that Obama lost by 15% or more in 2012 AND 2008. They'd be tough whatever the circumstances. And the Dems are doing reasonably well in the governors races, despite the general suck. As a Californian, you of ALL people should know this. Governor Moonbeam and the Democratic brand are so successful that he's going to win re-election despite launching his campaign literally two days ago. And we're likely to win 2/3rds in at least one part of the state ledge. And we're likely to keep the more competitive house seats.



More broadly, I think you're asking why the Republican Party is so very effective, while the Democrats just can't seem to do anything right. It's not that they're wrong, it's just that they suck. And I think it's a fair point, but that the underlying idea there is wrong. It's fair in that the Democrats really aren't an effective force for legislation, at least on the national level. They're relagated to utter powerlessness in like fifteen states, and it looks like they're going to lose seats on the state level. This election kinda sucks if you're a liberal because you're losing and there's really no discernable reason other than the electorate just kinda doesn't care for you.

I think it's wrong because the two parties aren't in any way equal. The Republican Party has this massive Conservtive Movement behind it. That Conservative Movement has a lot of very powerful and influential people all pulling their oars in the same direction. The Conservative Movement isn't doing so hot right now. Broadly speaking, it's losing influence on the presidential elections, it has already lost the gay marriage fight and is rapidly losing other parts of the Culture Wars too. And the people that make up the Conservative Movement are shrinking proportionally to the rest of the voters. But it still has a great deal of strength, especially on the local level. The revolutionary changes the Conservative Movement brought down in Wisconsin and North Carolina and Texas are truly astonishing.

The Democrats don't have anything that can compare with this movement. Probably because they're not promising to kill all regulations that aren't industry-approved and keep the capital gains tax at 2%. The Republicans have an awful lot of money going their way, and now it's so untracible that the RNC can't possibly hope to control much of it, to say nothing of the whole pot. And the Democrats are relatively more ideologically diverse. The Republicans are essentially all conservative at this point; it's only really a question of degree. And they've discovered that lockstep and EXTREMELY BITTER opposition to the Democrats doesn't exactly hurt that much. The Dems who are going to lose in four days are overwhelmingly in states that Romney won (AK, AR, WV, SD, LA, ) and the Dems are just not doing well enough to match the 2012 electorate. The Dems have had a lot of their dead weight pruned away in the last few elections. The semi-craven Blue Dogs are essentially extinct. Most of the "New Democrats" that sprang from Clinton's DLC nonsense have moved to the left and vote reliably Democratic something like 90% of the time anyway. If the Dems ever retake the House and Senate, it won't be through those old cowardly conservative Democrats, but more ideologically cohesive (whatever that may be).

TL;DR: Don't cry. There's always 2016.

[His Divine Shadow]

You gave the rich too much power, we all did really, now we're harvesting the results of taking our boots of their necks as they work to turn society back to one of peasants and aristrocracy. Put the boot back and let them know they should be glad that's all they're getting.

[Fingolfin_Noldor]

I'm wondering more like whether there were liberals and balls in the first place. America's idea of a liberal is often considered a conservative in some parts of the world.

[Darmalus]

I'm wondering more like whether there were liberals and balls in the first place. America's idea of a liberal is often considered a conservative in some parts of the world.

All things are relative. By the standards of our great-grand kids even the most progressive among us will be considered some sort of vile, biased troglodyte. American liberals are just that, liberals by American standards.

Anyway, the Republicans have purged their ranks of all dissenting voices, which allows them to all pull in one direction as hard as they can. The Democrats are united only in the sense that they are "not Republicans" which means they can't pull hard in any direction, attempting to do so would just cause the entire party to fly to pieces as every group pulled in their own direction. That would be a Republican dream come true since it would give them a decade or two of complete and total control of the US government. So the Democrats don't do anything because they know they can't and wait for a miracle.

[PKRudeBoy]

I suspect there are a few different causes, but in general since LBJ no President has really felt safe declaring themselves to be liberal.

I like Bill Hick's theory...
[youtube]http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NPTJXdBBrcU[/youtube]

In reality however I think a lot has to do with the left trying to build an actual consensus on issues, while the right plays games of chicken like its October '62.

[Metahive]

My own pet theory is that American society at large, despite claims to the contrary is really conflict-adverse and puts harmony above all and that the success of the right wing was to present themselves as the defenders of the status quo who oppose the faddish left wing boatrockers even if the roles were really reversed (see taxes for the rich and median income of the middle class).

[DaveJB]

In reality however I think a lot has to do with the left trying to build an actual consensus on issues, while the right plays games of chicken like its October '62.

If it's anything like this country, the left and their political views are probably a lot more splintered between various different sub-groups, whereas the right is a much more homogeneous group whose views are based on a rigid interpretation of biblical morality (only about ten times moreso than their UK counterparts).

[PKRudeBoy]

In reality however I think a lot has to do with the left trying to build an actual consensus on issues, while the right plays games of chicken like its October '62.

If it's anything like this country, the left and their political views are probably a lot more splintered between various different sub-groups, whereas the right is a much more homogeneous group whose views are based on a rigid interpretation of biblical morality (only about ten times moreso than their UK counterparts).

While the left here is about as whole as Humpty Dumpty, the right requires all sorts of cognitive dissonance to keep its own factions in lockstep. Trying to reconcile the business wings desire for cheap labor with the Tea Party nativism, neocon American imperialism with libertarian isolationism, and Christian morality with slashing programs for the poor produces an incoherent mess that is starting to crack.

[Covenant]

We don't really have a political left. Even when you consider the perception of the American populace we have little of what you would call "the left" and at best something you could approach calling a liberal or progressive view of right politics. This is why the Libertarians have had so much traction (relatively speaking) from amongst both Parties and why most people recognize that the difference between a Republican and Democrat comes down to a few matters and a point or three on economic policy.

People are aware of a political left though, they just see it as a foreign or alien element of the outside world. There's a lot of neo-traditionalistic rhetoric about the dangers of Multiculturalism in Europe, but before that took over the narrative people did recognize the outside world as a place where various degrees of Socialism were in experiment and some to good effect. So it is not to say that the Americans do not understand what a political left would look like, they simply have none of their own. This is not always the case--there were huge labor movements in the past and from the 20's until the 60's there was still a vein of American left that was very American and very patriotic before it got erased by the protest culture of the 70's.

What we have in America instead of a Left are identity politics, which have been the driving force behind a lot of the modern advances in civil rights. They've been very successful because they entirely abdicate any real position on socioeconomics and have zero coherency with other aspects of a political left. They are "ala carte" arguments that are basically devoid of actual right/left political content--the only reason people reject these civil rights is casual bigotry. That melts over time. People on the right (which, mind you, covers a lot of the Democrats too) will no longer agree to making slanders on people based on color, but just as before they will make it based on education, occupation, location, and association. I swear I didn't mean to make that sound jargony.

Basically I mean that if you're dumb, or under-employed, or from either a poor part of the city or rural, or a member of a class of people with associations to these groups, then you have failed in some manner to "bootstrap" yourself out of things. The lie about bootstrapping is so heavily ingrained in American culture (it IS the American dream, the whole thing relies on it) that it becomes perfectly fine to have some kind of Two Minutes Hate against the people who haven't accomplished it. Never mind you have a better chance of winning the Carousel from Logan's Run than bootstrapping yourself in one generation from a rock-bottom status, that's still the mythology of America. It is the core underlying component of both the American Left (things like affirmative action only help to give people a chance to bootstrap themselves, not address the underlying problems, etc etc) and of the American Right (you only have those rights and privileges that you or your family have earned by superiority) and it frames the entirety of our politics. It is also a pretty far-right concept because enforces a status-based social structure.

Aside from that we also have a de-facto two party system which ruins all hope of moving past the "point-scoring" political strategizing stuff. You would not have a glorious revolution the moment you move away from a two party system and towards a coalition party system (10 parties, pick your top 3 in order, etc) but it would greatly diminish the gotcha-politics point-scoring way that American politics behave and open the door for actual political thought.

[Covenant]

Ahem, but to address the top point, I think they lost their balls when they lost a core of political thought. They're like a boxer with no center of gravity--you can only punch so hard. The "center of gravity" for the left is, not surprising, a leftist political theory. But this got surgically removed by the government when the Left itself started to fracture around the 50's and 60's. I'm not talking conspiracy theory stuff, I just mean it got socially paved-over to the point that the political language of America has no way of expressing these thoughts or organizing around them.

This happened mostly the 60's I would say, because through the 50's they were still going strong if under DELIBERATE siege by the American government in an effort to establish a counter-identity to the Soviets (whose humanitarian failures disheartened the Left here just like it did Orwell and others) but during the 60's they really got dismantled and dismembered past the point of coherent organization. You can still hear it though. Go back and listen to things like the songs of Pete Seeger:

Talking Union

"Now, boys, you've come to the hardest time
The boss will try to bust your picket line
He'll call out the police, the National Guard
They'll tell you it's a crime to have a union card
They'll raid your meetin', they'll hit you on the head
They'll call every one of you a goddam red
Unpatriotic, Japanese spies, sabotaging national defense

But out at Ford, here's what they found
...
That if you don't let red-baiting break you up
And if you don't let stoolpigeons break you up
And if you don't let vigilantes break you up
And if you don't let race hatred break you up
You'll win. What I mean, take it easy, but take it"

This song was actually written in '41 so the mention of "if you don't let race hatred break you up" is important to note, as it underlies the point that race hatred (and this could be applied across the board to other forms of hatred) are a way to break up your solidarity when working towards social change, and this was more than 70 years ago. They also mock the "boss" in the song as a wife-beater, so there's a degree of solidarity with women in this song as well, and in other songs sung by Seeger and the like. This is a form of American Left that actually was political, because it saw itself as part of a movement which superseded the divisions of race and sex. Gender equality is a bit beyond 1930's thought so I won't fault them for not adding a like "And if you don't let the non-binary gender spectrum (which is performative and not innate) break you up..." especially when these things are still confusing today.

But if you did then you've got a pretty good idea what an American Left would have looked like. Unfortunately, it was broken up, and continues to be broken up. That's why we really have no "Left" nowadays. Those songs weren't sung by Ivory Tower intellectuals but the most common of the common man as folk tunes that permeated a culture of social change and dissent that seemed to advance what we would now consider "Far Left" thoughts despite being poor, from the south, religious, so on and so on. The difference was political thought. When the hell was the West Virginia coal miner the champion of gender and racial egalitarianism and an advocate for socialism?

When we had an American Left.

[PKRudeBoy]

I think the problem with the bootstrapping myth is that for about half of the country's history it was true. You could pack up your shit, move out west, and through hard work, make something of yourself. While the east coast had established class structures, there was always a frontier where with skill and luck you could make a fortune for yourself, unless you catch dysentery or get washed away in a ford, of course. Of course, we eventually ran out of frontiers, but no one said reactionaries actually paid attention to circumstances changing unless it's to bitch and moan.

[Covenant]

I think the problem with the bootstrapping myth is that for about half of the country's history it was true. You could pack up your shit, move out west, and through hard work, make something of yourself. While the east coast had established class structures, there was always a frontier where with skill and luck you could make a fortune for yourself, unless you catch dysentery or get washed away in a ford, of course. Of course, we eventually ran out of frontiers, but no one said reactionaries actually paid attention to circumstances changing unless it's to bitch and moan.

I'm not sure how many fortunes really were made out there just with hard work. You could make a subsistence farm with just your hard work, but even something like panning for gold was not a ticket to riches. If you got lucky you still needed to buy property, stake a claim, exploit the claim, build infrastructure, etc etc. You certainly had a much less dense population but you still relied on an exploitive social infrastructure unless you were intelligent and probably more than a bit educated. People who have education and capital to start a business aren't really bootstrapping themselves.

There may be some merits to the argument but I think, when you look at the history, there's pretty few times and places when you could actually make a fortune without having capital first. People can still "make something of themselves" by working a dead-end job, but it's just not an awful pleasant something. Being a fur-trapper, for example, meant you were basically perpetually in debt. Being a successful subsistence farmer with a government "pennies to the acre" land sale may mean you have no debt (assuming you didn't need a bank loan to get started and just did it all yourself with your family) but you also had no real capital with which to do much of anything. There was potential for growth but it was hard.

The people who tended to make a bunch of money were either exceedingly lucky (and thus exceedingly few in number) given the odds, or the very first, or had capital. Starting a tobacco plantation does not cost much, but it costs SOMETHING. Nowadays you can still do things like that: start a sugar plantation in some place where there's a shitty economy with little more than a year's salary in American dollars. It is totally possible. But you still need the capital to do it, and it helps to have a good education. Those are not free.

What you see a lot of in the Americas are second, third or fourth sons of decent families coming to make a fortune instead of trying to inherit the scraps left over after their father's debts and their eldest brother and their sister's dowries are all attended to. There's still some merit to that, of course. Nobody should feel entitled to live in ignorance. But I think the American dream puts such an emphasis on "Hard Work" because of... obvious reasons. Nowadays people talk more about the entrepreneurial spirit and cleverness being the thing you need, not hard work. Thats still "true" but it still benefits the people (like me) who have good educations and favorable social standing. I may be bootstrapping myself from zero PERSONAL funds but have benefitted TREMENDOUSLY from the non-personal funds of my parents to educate and house me for so long at no cost to myself.

[Channel72]

I think the problem with the bootstrapping myth is that for about half of the country's history it was true. You could pack up your shit, move out west, and through hard work, make something of yourself. While the east coast had established class structures, there was always a frontier where with skill and luck you could make a fortune for yourself, unless you catch dysentery or get washed away in a ford, of course. Of course, we eventually ran out of frontiers, but no one said reactionaries actually paid attention to circumstances changing unless it's to bitch and moan.

The bootstrapping myth is also of course bolstered by various (extremely unlikely) anecdotes. Look at Oprah Winfrey: she started out poor, now she's a multi-millionaire, blah blah, etc.

The problem is that the likelihood of success is mostly correlated with origins - where you started out, who your parents were, etc. If you're born into a middle class family, you have a pretty good chance of replicating the success of your parents - or perhaps exceeding it or at least approximating it. Anecdotally, I managed to exceed the income of my parents, but they provided me with excellent opportunities and fantastic support. If I were born to poorer parents, or fucked up parents, I'd likely not be doing so well.

The median income in the US is $51,939, so at least half the people in this country are what we would consider "middle class" - meaning that most of these people will have children who have the opportunities to obtain similar incomes. So, in a sense - the "bootstrap" myth is partially true - for most people - with a fuck-ton of qualifiers. But for the "working poor", who make up about 20% of the country, the opportunities are much less. They need much more than "bootstrapping" to break through to middle class levels - they need extraordinary persistence, inhuman levels of optimism and ambition, and overall, serious fucking luck - which is completely at odds with the "bootstrap" mythology.

[Channel72]

I'd also like to point out that, ironically, the "bootstrapping" myth is much more true in socialist countries - or even (gasp!) some Arab countries with free University education, like Kuwait.

In these countries, if you're born to very low-income parents, you still get provided a free education and decent living conditions, which enable you to acquire the time and stability to actually work hard and get educated.

In the US, you don't get free education after the high-school level, unless you excel enough to get a scholarship - which is a chicken & egg problem because you're probably not going to excel if you're born to poor parents.

[Tanasinn]

I think our last two red scares, particularly the Soviet-era one, gutted the American left and left them afraid to be called a communist. What we have left are intelligensia who can't appeal to labor because they've never done a wrench's turn of actual physical work, whitebread politicians with no loud convictions and no charisma who bore and embarrass us, and a bunch of little factions fighting over things that by and large either don't affect your common taxpayer or aren't things they care about. Ideas like the 'self-made man' and 'American dream' that permeate our culture despite the more complicated reality will always undermine any more collectivist agendas even of well-organized, charismatic leftists.

Patton put it best, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser." And 'loser' is the stink that permeates the American left in the common consciousness.

[Raw Shark]

The most leftist candidate for Governor in Colorado this year is named Harry Hempy. This might actually be the only serious (long)shot the Green Party ever gets at this state, if he shanghais the vast stoner vote on name appeal. I exercised my franchise to his advantage this afternoon, because he's the only one in that dialogue who wants big money out of local politics and doesn't think that fracking is a super fun idea and everybody should try it.

[Maraxus]

The most leftist candidate for Governor in Colorado this year is named Harry Hempy. This might actually be the only serious (long)shot the Green Party ever gets at this state, if he shanghais the vast stoner vote on name appeal. I exercised my franchise to his advantage this afternoon, because he's the only one in that dialogue who wants big money out of local politics and doesn't think that fracking is a super fun idea and everybody should try it.

But he's not going to win. Hickenlooper might keep his job or Beauperez might take advantage of the general blech around Democrats, but they're the only two guy who have a shot in hell at winning. This Hempy dude doesn't have a chance. At best, he'll perform poorly and people who might otherwise have voted Green will vote Hickenlooper instead. at worst, he'll suck enough left leaning votes away from Hickenlooper that Beauperez wins and brings in a Republican State Senate, if not the House too.

This is something that I truly don't understand. I can kind of grok people voting third party in an election where there's not much at stake. But for CO Gov there's like quite a lot at stake. Especially if things go to shit in the state legislature. Why would you vote Green Party

[LaCroix]

This is something that I truly don't understand. I can kind of grok people voting third party in an election where there's not much at stake. But for CO Gov there's like quite a lot at stake. Especially if things go to shit in the state legislature. Why would you vote Green Party

And this statement summarizes why politics in the US will never change from being a trench war between Republicans and Democrats, and why the parties behave like they do.

[Raw Shark]

[snip]

But he's not going to win. Hickenlooper might keep his job or Beauperez might take advantage of the general blech around Democrats, but they're the only two guy who have a shot in hell at winning. This Hempy dude doesn't have a chance. At best, he'll perform poorly and people who might otherwise have voted Green will vote Hickenlooper instead. at worst, he'll suck enough left leaning votes away from Hickenlooper that Beauperez wins and brings in a Republican State Senate, if not the House too.

This is something that I truly don't understand. I can kind of grok people voting third party in an election where there's not much at stake. But for CO Gov there's like quite a lot at stake. Especially if things go to shit in the state legislature. Why would you vote Green Party

In protest. Aside from their stances on abortion rights (which I don't think anybody on the right really wants to lose as red meat for the base), I honestly don't see a lot of difference between the two. Besides, an incumbent governor hasn't lost re-election in over fifty years in this state (source), so while the polls are close, I'm not really worried. If Beauprez or Hickenlooper wins in a landslide, nothing changes, but if the Looper wins by the skin of his teeth partly because of a strong Green vote, maybe he'll listen to the conservation wing of the party a little more. I voted straight Dem for legislature, where I see the stakes as higher this time around.

[Darmalus]

This is something that I truly don't understand. I can kind of grok people voting third party in an election where there's not much at stake. But for CO Gov there's like quite a lot at stake. Especially if things go to shit in the state legislature. Why would you vote Green Party

And this statement summarizes why politics in the US will never change from being a trench war between Republicans and Democrats, and why the parties behave like they do.

If the US changed to a system where getting 10% of the vote got you 10% of the total representation we'd see radial political shifts. Unfortunately right now the winner gets 100% representation (in that specific seat) and everyone else gets 0%. So representation is heavily skewed and change is at a glacial pace.

[Raw Shark]

If the US changed to a system where getting 10% of the vote got you 10% of the total representation we'd see radial political shifts. Unfortunately right now the winner gets 100% representation (in that specific seat) and everyone else gets 0%. So representation is heavily skewed and change is at a glacial pace.

That is pretty much a dream at this point. The remaining political left with "balls" can only hope to influence the emasculated Democratic Party.

[TimothyC]

Somewhere around 1971-2 to Nixon. He offered the left a lot of what they wanted, but his health care plan wasn't single payer, and his income plan didn't cover everyone so several of his proposals died. Those people who lament the Blue-Dogs forget that it's the Blue Dogs that are the part of the party that tend to make the margin between a minority and a majority for Democrats, so yes, please keep them out of your party.