The GOP doesn't really have policy goals. They have platitudes, like "stop cancel culture" and "fuck all Mexicans", but no realistic policy to make it happen.

Again, that's a description of the current state of things. And yes, it was a travesty that the GOP ran on basically no real platform in 2020. This void will be filled eventually though. It would be foolish to assume that this state of affairs in the GOP will last for 3-6 more years.

I mean, it's already lasted for 12 years. I don't have a problem thinking it will happen for another 6. They had nothing under Obama, had basically nothing under Trump, and there's no glimmer of hope for the near future which is why they're going full steam on "cancel culture" as the fake issue of the day.

Under Obama they could at least pretend to care about the deficit and such, but since they totally blew out the deficit even before corona nobody is gonna buy that for a second anymore.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Mar 11 2021 11:02pm

DeSantis handled COVID perfectly and he's currently passing legislation against media companies. He has a golden ticket in 2024.

I mean... the OG tea party stuff would have been the platform, or the platform would have emerged out of this movement given a bit of time. But the party elites stopped it dead in its tracks and tried to redirect the energy towards "fiscal conservatism". Like... yeah, right, Cleetus and Dixie primarly hated Obama because they disagreed with his fiscal policies. Yup, that's gotta be it... and their vision for the future of America "by chance" happened to align perfectly with that of the Koch brothers, totally believable.

And if we're being honest, "fiscal conservatism" was an electoral stinker. And then it also backfired spectacularly during the 2016 primary when Trump could just waltz in and take over.



Sorry for the little tangent. My point is this: the main reason why the Republican party does not have a well-defined or agreed-upon agenda right now can be traced back to when party elites tried to subvert the will of the base and meddled with the "natural" progression of the party's policy priorities. That's the moment when things got derailed on the policy front, and when the seeds for the rise of Trump were sown.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 11 2021 11:47pm

Universal healthcare, increased taxes on the wealthy, universal pre-K, raising the minimum wage, etc. For Democrats it's just a matter of how much to push for. For example, the Dems want to push green energy and infrastructure but the question is how large? A trillion over 10 years? 5 trillion over 10? How quickly do we ween ourselves off natural gas?

Republicans though seem to have fundamentally different PRINCIPLES though. There's no way you can come up with legislation if you can't even agree on the direction of the country.



They might in 4 years time but they might not. The point is though that the Democrats have policies on a wide variety of issue that are favored by many people whereas the Republicans do not. Look no further than Mitch McConnell's actions. If it would have benefited the GOP more than the Democrats, he would have done it 100%.

I guess I can agree with that on the broad strokes.

Generally, leftists want policies that make the country physically better, and conservatives want ones that make the country more "fair", but that "fair" is in a hierarchical sense, where it doesn't matter if you could realistically climb the ladder, as long as it's theoretically possible that you can climb the ladder. Like, it doesn't matter if you die because you technically had a chance. That's why they're against abortion, it lets mothers off the hook for being irresponsible, and takes away a chance to play the game. Once they're born it doesn't matter, they've had their chance to play the game, all bets are off.

That's the fundamental difference between conservatives and liberals. Conservatives care about hierarchy, and problems are a result of messing with the hierarchy, whereas leftists care about the physical circumstances and say problems are a result of poor circumstances. Where a conservative would say "he should have saved his money", a liberal would say "he never had access to a job that paid enough to save his money, and didn't get educated on good financial habits" and the conservative retorts with "well he should have educated himself, and he could have eaten Ramen instead of vegetables to save money". Not realistic at all, but theoretically possible, so it's fine. Liberals (most democrats) are a weird middle ground where they want to put processes in place that will help people, and as long as everybody follows them in good faith it's fine if some slip through the cracks. Leftists would say we can simplify the system and just give people things to improve their well-being, because the things are physically there and available and the only thing stopping us is the system, and conservatives would say having those systems is bad on principle because having a human made system results in an unnatural hierarchy.

This post was edited by Thor123422 on Mar 12 2021 12:43am

So, I guess your argument is that the Dems should seize the opportunity to pass as much policies which are popular, in the sense of polling well, as they can, and then hope that this will insulate them from the typical midterm backlash? Imho, that's a very risky strategy. To name just one example: the idea of affordable, universal healthcare was popular since... basically forever. However, when Democrats actually rolled out Obamacare, the Republicans were nonetheless able to successfully polarize the issue and to galvanize their voters around it. You never know beforehand which kinds of legislation will end up popular or an electoral stinker.

And let's not forget that many of the items on the Dem agenda are already very polarizing, even many of those for which polls show narrow majorities in favor (say 52-45 or so). Radical climate legislation, packing the Senate, packing the Supreme Court, expanding mail voting, large-scale amnesty, comprehensive police reform, aggressively trying to "enforce" ""equity"" (aka equality of outcomes), restrictive gun legislation - all of these things are high-risk issues. They could play well with voters, but could also backfire spectacularly.




Imho, far and away the most popular parts of the Democratic agenda are the economic policies, those which expand and tighten the social safety net and funnel more government money into the pockets of poor and middle class Americans. For example, it was really clever by the Biden admin to use the covid relief bill to introduce de facto federal child benefits. They should do more of this kind of stuff. But on most non-economic issues, Democratic policies are iffy, if not outright toxic.


Likewise, the economic/fiscal agenda of guys like McConnell is toxic, and the GOP will be going nowhere as long as they dont drop it.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 12 2021 03:26am

Funny thing is when you call it "the affordable care act" and describe the policies, it's massively popular among Republicans. It only became an electoral stinker because of Republican branding.

That's a bit of revisionist history. All provisions in the ACA are polling well except for the individual mandate - but that's hardly surprising since those other provisions are giving people entitlements while the individual mandate is the centerpiece which pays for all of it. Yes, people are generally supportive of the idea of "free universal healthcare" - but those who already had decent healthcare before the ACA tend to place more importance on the "free" part in "free universal healthcare" than Democrats want to admit.

Another thing to keep in mind is that the ACA kinda sucks in states which refused the medicaid expansion. Iirc, the bill was originally intended to include a federally mandated, nationwide medicaid expansion, but the courts struck it down and left this part up to the individual states. This gave red states the opening to turn Obamacare into something which genuinely sucks for a ton of people, which further fueled opposition against the policy.

On top of that, Democrats kinda failed in putting things into perspective. The ACA went into effect during a time when the yearly rise of healthcare premiums picked up pace based on demographic and economic (aftermath of the Great Recession) factors. The baseline during those years was that healthcare costs would rise substantially, even without Obamacare. Republicans obviously blamed Obamacare for surging costs, and Democrats were unable to counter these misleading claims.

This post was edited by Black XistenZ on Mar 12 2021 11:26am