[USA] SJEDINJENE AMERIČKE DRŽAVE - unutrašnja politika i uticaj na svetska kretanja

[Angelia]

40 minutes ago, ObiW said:

Gospode Bože....

 Izvini, a sta je to?

Ili nisi razumeo pitanje, predpostavljam da pricas o 401k, koji ja eto nemam (posto ne verujem u taj program).  Pa tako i ne mogu da otvorim portal, osim ako ne postoji neki portal za drzavnu penziju, pa ako postoji interesovala me informacija.

[melankolic]

 

Progutao mi softver post (valjda, ne vidim ga) pa odgovaram opet ali krace.

 

Ne pominji mi zimu - ziveo sam 11 godina na Aljasci.

Noma objektivnog razloga zasto je negde bolje, postoje samo subjektivni.

Mator sam da opet ucim jezik od nule. Lenj sam da opet pakujem citavu kucu. Sve skupa, OK mi je ovde.

Niko me ne proganja ni zbog cega.

Da postoji neki aspekt zivota i da mi je jako bitan a ne mogu da ga praktikujem, selio bih.

Ovako, ja se divim tvojim postovima na temi Bastovanstvo i zavidim ti, a nadam se da cu ti sledece godine konkurisati. Hebo drzavu i politiku.

 

 

Izvini, o čemu ti pričaš?

Ko koga uopšte proganja? Uzeo si neku tvoju epizodu iz Srbije i onda nekom logičkom akrobacijom došao do zaključka da niko još nije smislio nešto bolje od USA. Sve to sa “višnjom na torti” u vidi izjave da si mator da učiš neki drugi jezik i da se seliš ?!? Pa upravo te to isključuje iz rasprave na pitanje da li je neko smislio nešto bolje od USA.

To što tebe niko ne maltretira ne znači da nikog drugog ne maltretiraju nekakvi Trampovci ili teroristi po školama ili verski fanatici. Da ne govorim o AA, Hispancima / Meksikancima, sindikalcima, trudnicama, levičarima, onima koji nemaju da plate lečenje i drugima koji su na margini. Ali ti si, kao, mator pa to treba uneti u jednačinu o “državi blagostanja”.

 

[mrd]

10 minutes ago, melankolic said:

Pa upravo te to isključuje iz rasprave na pitanje da li je neko smislio nešto bolje od USA.

Prvo da ti odgovorim na pitanje da li je neko smislio nesto bolje od USA? NIJE!

Ko si ti da nekoga iskljucujes iz diskusije. Zoran59 retko napise post, ali svaki njegov post ponuka na razmisljanje, za razliku od nekih drugih! Ti si sebe iskljucio iz grupe koje razmisljaju odavno, ali ti ne smeta da pises:

12 minutes ago, melankolic said:

Da ne govorim o AA, sindikalcima, trudnicama, levičarima, onima koji nemaju da plate lečenje i drugima koji su na margini. Ali ti si, kao, mator pa to treba uneti u jednačinu o “državi blagostanja”.

Ti ovde jedino znas sta su levicari, blago tebi imas ogledalo. Ko su AA, sindikalci, trudnice, oni koji nemaju da plate lecenje? E, o tome nemas pojma, ali ti je lahko da o tome diskutujes, posto ti i onako nista nemas da ulozis osim reci. Sacekaj da prodje vreme, pa kada preturis preko grbace ono sto je poster kome si bez trunke stida ovako nekulturno, po obicaju, odgovorio, mozda ti dodje iz spoja sa stolicom u glavu i bude nesto pametno.

[melankolic]

Ti ovde jedino znas sta su levicari, blago tebi imas ogledalo. Ko su AA, sindikalci, trudnice, oni koji nemaju da plate lecenje? E, o tome nemas pojma, ali ti je lahko da o tome diskutujes, posto ti i onako nista nemas da ulozis osim reci. Sacekaj da prodje vreme, pa kada preturis preko grbace ono sto je poster kome si bez trunke stida ovako nekulturno, po obicaju, odgovorio, mozda ti dodje iz spoja sa stolicom u glavu i bude nesto pametno.

Izvini ali tu gde ja živim ne proglašavaju za komunistu svakog ko drugačije misli.

[ObiW]

1 hour ago, mrd said:

Pisali smo o tome na onom penzionom topicu, gde su neki izrazili veru u penzione fondove, a neki su objasnjavali da se sa tom mesecnom penzijom u civilizovanom svetu zivi od srede do nedelje.

Onaj koji se oslanja na kocku, cesto nema novaca.

 

Nista ti nisi razumeo. Tamo smo pricali o drzavnoj penziji, a tu nema kockanja. 

 

1 hour ago, Angelia said:

 Izvini, a sta je to?

Ili nisi razumeo pitanje, predpostavljam da pricas o 401k, koji ja eto nemam (posto ne verujem u taj program).  Pa tako i ne mogu da otvorim portal, osim ako ne postoji neki portal za drzavnu penziju, pa ako postoji interesovala me informacija.

 

  Rekla si 'ne" pre-tax stednji + contribution matching koji ti daje kompanija. Lepa se tu para baca kroz prozor.

 

[mrd]

7 minutes ago, ObiW said:

a tu nema kockanja. 

Kako nema kad je taj novac u fondovima? Neko ga obrce za nas.

[Angelia]

1 minute ago, ObiW said:

 

  Rekla si 'ne" pre-tax stednji + contribution matching koji ti daje kompanija. Lepa se tu para baca kroz prozor.

 

Pa da, ja cak i objasnjavala oko toga da ne verujem u penzione fondove. Ja to nisam htela ni u UK. Veruj mi da nista nisam time izgubila. Znaci nema tu bacanja para. 

Cini mi se i da si ti postavio to pitanje o portalima zbog pada na berzi danas - vidis zasto ja ne volim te fondove  

[boxcube]

8 hours ago, melankolic said:

 

Izvini ali tu gde ja živim ne proglašavaju za komunistu svakog ko drugačije misli.

 

 

 A znaci zato ti skoro svakog ko se ne slaze sa tobom nazivas fasistom i stromfrontovcem da razbijes monotoniju?!

[melankolic]

   A znaci zato ti skoro svakog ko se ne slaze sa tobom nazivas fasistom i stromfrontovcem da razbijes monotoniju?!        

 

   Kao prvo, trebao bi da se osvrneš na koga se odnosi to da se svako ko drugačije misli naziva komunistom. Ne, nisam mislio na forumske trampovce nego na samog Trumpa. Taj Trumpov desni radikalizam gde se u svakoj kritici vidi komuno- socijalistička zavera nije njegov izum. Puno je knjiga koje govore o jednoj toksičnoj mešavini ideologija i svetonazora - od onih ultrakonzervativnih, preko klerikalnih do antidžihadističkih od kojih je nastao moderni desni radikalizam i desni terorizam. Ti kao učen čovek (pretpostavljam da to jesi s obzirom na to koga si turio u avatar) a opet s druge strane nekritičan prema Trumpovim imbecilizmu, bi ipak trebao da budeš malo bolje upoznat sa predistorijom desnog (posebno evropskog) radikalizma. Kao drugo, ono što mene jednako iritira kao stav jeste ta vrsta konformizma koju je u ovom konkretnom slučaju prikazao zoran gde je on s jedne strane jedan izuzetno korektan sagovornik po mnogim pitanjima (i moj istomišljenik na mnogim temama) a s druge strane čovek koji sebi dozvoljava da izjavi, parafraziram, da je USA najbolji od svih svetova (opet se i tu ograđuje pa je reč o subjektivnom stavu utemeljenom na iskustvu života u različitim delovima USA što prosto isključuje objektivnost , dakle mnoge faktore koji moraju biti ispunjeni da bi se dala tako grandiozna izjava). Da se razumemo, ja uopšte ne delim zemlje, regione i ljude na loše, dobre i najbolje. Prosto ta vrsta rangiranja kod mene ne postoji. U današnjem ludom svetu postoji samo podnošljivo / trpno i nepodnošljivo stanje. Šta, recimo, da kaže neki roditelj na tu temu kojem je dete jedan dan otišlo u školu a istog tog dana popodne leži u obdukcionoj sali? Ne govorim o zemlji poput Avganistana i Iraka, Sirije ili neke afričke države. Govorim o “lučonoši demokratije”, o zemlji čiji izrazito uticajni ljudi odbijaju da se suoče sa posledicama tog divljezapadnjačkog promišljanja.

Zaista je deprimirajuće da većina od 60 % građana koja se zalaže za regulisanje pitanja ličnog naoružanja nema dovoljan uticaj na administraciju da se ta stvar pomeri sa mrtve tačke. I zato je logično pitanje : dokle više? Koliko još ljudskih života treba besmisleno da nestane da bi se oni koji odlučuju dozvali pameti? Izvini ali to je meni ista vrsta militantnog fanatizma / fanatičnog militarizma kao i islamski fundamentalizam.

 

Ne znam šta da kažem ako jednako podržavaš šenlučenje na, recimo, Balkanu i u USA. Ne tvrdim nego iznosim kao tezu.

Šta je pa to drugačije? I na Balkanu isto tako postoji tradicija nošenje oružja a uvek smo se gnušali na forumu te pojave. Kako je to tako preko noći kod istih tih ljudi to postala normalna pojava ali samo kada se tiče USA?

 

 

P.S. Kao referencu o “slobodi govora” pozvao bih se na posleratno (tačnije 19.1.1945.) suđenje jednom poeti, piscu i publicisti Robertu Brasillachu kojeg je francuski sud osudio na smrt posle samo 25 minuta većanja, odluka koja je izazvala salvu nezadovoljstva u publici a gde se odbrana (ista ona koja je branila Petena) pozivala na spas “francuske duše”. Zanimljiv primer za sve one koji brane pravo na slobodu govora današnjim neonacistima i rasistima.

 

[zoran59]

16 hours ago, melankolic said:

 

Izvini, o čemu ti pričaš?

Ko koga uopšte proganja? Uzeo si neku tvoju epizodu iz Srbije i onda nekom logičkom akrobacijom došao do zaključka da niko još nije smislio nešto bolje od USA. Sve to sa “višnjom na torti” u vidi izjave da si mator da učiš neki drugi jezik i da se seliš ?!? Pa upravo te to isključuje iz rasprave na pitanje da li je neko smislio nešto bolje od USA.

To što tebe niko ne maltretira ne znači da nikog drugog ne maltretiraju nekakvi Trampovci ili teroristi po školama ili verski fanatici. Da ne govorim o AA, Hispancima / Meksikancima, sindikalcima, trudnicama, levičarima, onima koji nemaju da plate lečenje i drugima koji su na margini. Ali ti si, kao, mator pa to treba uneti u jednačinu o “državi blagostanja”.

 

 

Mel, ne znam zasto mi predbacujes nesto sto nisam napisao, ali si izgleda propustio nesto sto jesam napisao, pa cu ponoviti i boldovati.

17 hours ago, zoran59 said:

Nema objektivnog razloga zasto je negde bolje, postoje samo subjektivni.

Dakle, nigde nisam pomenuo "drzavu blagostanja", pogotovu ne "za sve".

Tvrdim da mi je ova drzava omogucila prosperitet kakav mi ne bi bio moguc da sam ostao na Balkanu. A postoje i ljudi koji se u ovom drustvu nisu dobro snasli - ne samo dosljaci nego i neki ovde rodjeni.

 

Vec sam jednom na starom forumu opisao zgodu, a ovde cu je ponoviti, mozda bude jasnije.

Tokom prve polovine '90-ih, u vreme rata i najvecih sranja, jedan prijatelj mi se zalio kako je tesko. Ponudio sam mu pomoc da dodje u USA, a on se zahvalio i odbio, sa recima: "Ma, znam da je tamo bolje, ali samo ovde se osecam kod kuce!"

Posteno. Odrastao covek je doneo odluku kakva mu odgovara.

 

Nekadasnji Crnci se danas polit-korektno nazivaju Afro-Amerikanci. To je u redu, ako se oni tako prijatnije osecaju ja cu ih zvati kako oni hoce. Mada, privatno, nisam primetio da od toga zive bolje. Rasizam je zlo koje treba do kraja iskoreniti, ali ne mislim da je sam naziv grupe ljudi neko veliko resenje.

Opet cu povuci paralelu: neki pekari u Srbiji bi verovatno vise voleli da prodaju proizvode makar i ljudi pricali da su ih kupili kod Siptara nego da ih mozda zovu Albancima ali im razbijaju radnje...

 

Da opet pomenem pricu o mojem prijatelju: na slican nacin, niko od tih koji se nazivaju Afro-Amerikanci ne pokusava da ode u Afriku. Valjda ljudi misle da im je ovde bolje - uprkos rasizmu kojega nesumnjivo ima! Svi zdravi ljudi, svih rasa, i dalje rade na njegovom iskorenjivaju.

U tome je najbolja strana zivota u USA - ovo drustvo, uprkos povremenim incidentima ili oscilacijama, dugorocno konstantno napreduje. Nije jos gotovo, nije savrseno, ali je u svim socijalnim aspektima zivota Crncima neuporedivo bolje nego pre 50 godina, a i tada je bilo bolje nego pre 100 godina.

Opet, poredi to sa oscilacijama, pa i nazadovanjem, na Balkanu.

Srbima je u Austro-Ugarskoj bilo jednako dobro (ili lose) kao Hrvatima. Za vreme Kraljevine, bilo im je bolje (iz kolektivnog ugla gledanja) nego nekim drugim "narodima" - sta god ta rec znacila. U SFRJ, bilo im je opet podjednako. A u danasnjoj Hrvatskoj, cesto nije prijatno biti Srbin.

 

To se u USA ne moze desiti. Ni Crncima ni bilo kome drugom. Nije jos gotovo, ima dosta posla, ali ide na bolje.

 

 

Edited August 15, 2019 by zoran59

[Anduril]

Da pejstujem ovde tekst o jednom od razloga trenutnog raspada americkog politickog sistema i tribalizacije mada ne delim optimizam autora na kraju.

Prilicno je neverovatno kako su pre svega desni libertarijanci/republikanci, samoproklamovani Tea Party nastavljaci raznih struja od Hajeka do Rothbarda, naseli na razne oligarhe poput brace Koch, Murdocha, Cato think thankove, itd.

Rothbard, koji je svojevremeno pisao neke od najbolji eseja o korupciji americke oligarhije od Morgana pa do Rokefelera, se okrece u grobu. 

Sadasnje stanje naravno ide u slicnom pravcu samo sto je oligarsima na raspolaganju mnogo jaca infrastruktura.  

I naravno, imaju jasan cilj za razliku od ideoloskih gluposti i propagande na koje se pale svi koji su naseli na ovaj plemenski rat raznih ljubitelja slobode.

 

Quote

Tuesday, June 11, 2019 - 12:00am

The Republican Devolution

Partisanship and the Decline of American Governance

Jacob S. Hacker and Paul Pierson

JACOB S. HACKER is Director of the Institution for Social and Policy Studies and Stanley B. Resor Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

PAUL PIERSON is Co-Director of the Successful Societies Program at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and John Gross Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley.

It is a measure of the chaos of Donald Trump’s presidency that just months after the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, nobody in Washington seems to remember it. Congressional Republicans transitioned seamlessly from backing the president as he inflicted gratuitous harm on the economy in pursuit of his unpopular border wall to acquiescing as he declared a phony emergency to usurp Congress’ constitutional power of the purse. Now, they are back in their familiar role of defending his efforts [1] to thwart an independent investigation into the links between his 2016 campaign and a hostile foreign power bent on subverting U.S. elections.

American governance, it seems, is in a bad way. But the crisis did not begin when Trump entered office. If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency in 2016, Washington would hardly be humming along. Instead, it would be mired in a more intense version of the ruinous politics [2] that plagued Barack Obama’s presidency after 2010. Solutions to pressing national problems would still be stuck in partisan gridlock. Narrow, powerful interests would still dominate debates and decisions. And popular resentment—rooted in economic and demographic shifts and stoked by those seeking to translate voter anger into profit or votes—would still be roiling elections and governance alike.

For a generation, the capacity of the United States to harness governmental authority for broad public purposes has been in steep decline, even as the need for effective governance in a complex, interdependent world has grown. Almost every aspect of today’s crisis is part of this long-term shift. In 2017, for example, the Trump administration pulled the United States out of the Paris climate accord, but Trump’s shortsighted decision was only the latest example of the country’s halting and grossly inadequate approach to climate change. The current radicalized debate over immigration reflects heightened racial and cultural resentment, but it also stems from three decades of failure to reach a consensus on reasonable reforms to the nation’s antiquated border and citizenship laws. Rising death rates among middle-aged white Americans in large swaths of the country are not merely a contributor to the backlash that elected Trump; they are also a symptom of the virtual collapse of the federal government’s ability to address major public problems.

What went wrong? Skyrocketing inequality [3], regional economic divergence, and demographic changes have all played their part. But there is one overriding culprit behind the failure of the U.S. political system: the Republican Party. Over the last two and a half decades, the GOP has mutated from a traditional conservative party into an insurgent force that threatens the norms and institutions of American democracy. If Americans are to once again harness the combined powers of democracy and markets for the public good, they must have a clear picture of what has gone wrong with the Republican Party, and why.

FROM GOLDEN AGE TO BROKEN AGE

Even with the best leadership, the last few decades would have presented big challenges. Like many wealthy countries, the United States has undergone a disruptive transition from an industrial manufacturing economy to a postindustrial knowledge economy. Along with the decline of unions, the deregulation of finance, and the federal government’s retreat from antitrust enforcement, that transition has tilted opportunity and wealth toward those at the very top of the economic pyramid. It has also concentrated growth in cities and sucked it out of rural areas and small towns. Yet even as yawning inequality has made structural reform more pressing, many white Americans have seen the United States’ inevitable march toward a majority-minority society as an even greater threat.

American political institutions have always posed difficulties for those seeking to tackle problems like these. The U.S. system of checks and balances, with its separate branches and levels of government, requires a high level of compromise to function. Historically, the system also facilitated compromise because its frictions and fragmentation—famously celebrated by James Madison at its birth—encouraged a proliferation of interests and perspectives rather than the emergence of a single dominant cleavage. With rare and unpleasant exceptions, as in the run-up to the Civil War, the two major parties featured internal divides large enough to permit cross-party bargaining. Durable coalitions even emerged from time to time that transcended the main party divide. These crosscutting cleavages allowed public officials to overcome the system’s tendencies toward gridlock and confront (albeit often incompletely and haltingly) many of the biggest challenges the nation faced. That process transformed the United States into one of the richest, healthiest, and best-educated societies the world has ever seen.

No longer. Almost every element of today’s political system—from electoral jurisdictions to economic regions, from public officials to advocacy organizations, from the mass public to the mass media—is neatly lined up in the red or the blue column. Political scientists continue to debate how much of this is true ideological polarization, in which partisan disagreements reflect fundamentally different values and worldviews, and how much of it is merely an increased alignment of partisanship with other divides in an ever more diverse and unequal society. But this debate is secondary to the basic change. Once, many cultural, racial, ethnic, and geographic divides cut across parties. Today, it is partisanship all the way down.

 

 

In this transformed context, previously muted weaknesses of the American system are coming to the fore: the opportunities for self-aggrandizement by a president unconstrained by norms of restraint or by the other branches of government; the lack of a clear, circumscribed role for the federal courts, which are now filling up with partisan judges armed with lifetime appointments; the politicization of a late-to-develop administrative state; the endless opportunities for obstruction in a bicameral legislature; the huge tilt of the Senate toward rural states. Although state and city governments often have greater freedom to act, intense partisanship at those levels and gridlock at the federal level are pushing them, too, toward more polarized and less effective governance. The laboratories of democracy have become laboratories of division, testing grounds for policy approaches, electoral maps, and voting rules explicitly designed to cripple one side of the partisan fight.

In short, the U.S. political system still requires compromise but no longer facilitates it. On the contrary, it is generating a doom loop of polarization as partisan forces run up against institutional guardrails and emerge from the collision not chastened but even more determined to tear them down.

THE GREAT RADICALIZATION

Yet the diagnosis of polarization—true enough as far as it goes—obscures what makes that polarization so destructive. Elite discourse frequently implies that the two parties are mirror images of each other, as if both were moving at the same rate toward the political fringes, shedding norms and principles as they did so. But this is simply not what is happening. The core problem is not equal polarization but asymmetric polarization. The Democratic Party has moved modestly leftward, mostly due to the decline in the party’s presence in the South. But it still aspires to solve problems and so is relatively open to compromise. (For example, Obama’s signature health-care law, now so reviled by Republicans, was built in considerable part from past Republican proposals.) By contrast, the Republican Party has moved dramatically rightward and now represents a radically disruptive force that the U.S. political system is ill equipped to contain.

This trend well predates Trump. Four years before Trump became the GOP’s champion, two respected observers of Washington politics, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein, reluctantly concluded that the GOP had become “an insurgent outlier.” It was, they lamented, ever more “ideologically extreme; contemptuous of the inherited social and economic policy regime; scornful of compromise; unpersuaded by conventional understanding of facts, evidence, and science; and dismissive of the legitimacy of its political opposition, all but declaring war on the government.” Even that harsh portrait now seems mild, as the GOP’s voters, activists, and politicians rally around a leader who engages in relentless race baiting, shocking assaults on press freedom, and nonstop denigration of the rule of law.

The problem is not simply that Republicans have moved much further to the right than Democrats have moved to the left—an asymmetry evident not just in congressional voting patterns but also in the relative position of each party’s presidential, vice-presidential, and judicial nominees. The problem is also that Republicans have proved willing to play what the legal scholar Mark Tushnet has dubbed “constitutional hardball.” Since at least Newt Gingrich’s House speakership in the 1990s, Republicans in Washington have deployed strategies designed to disrupt and delegitimize government, including the constant use of the Senate filibuster, repeated government shutdowns, attempts to hold the U.S. economy hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and the unwillingness to accept Democratic appointments to key positions—most dramatically in the case of Merrick Garland’s failed nomination to the Supreme Court.

Things are no better at the state level, where anti-Democratic strategies have often become antidemocratic ones. In Texas, Republicans gerrymandered districts by reapportioning House seats just five years after the last line redrawing, rather than following established norms and waiting for the decennial census. In North Carolina and Wisconsin, Republican-controlled legislatures attempted to strip power from state offices after elections in which voters opted for Democrats. In state after state, Republicans have launched systematic efforts to disenfranchise young, low-income, and nonwhite voters who they worried were unlikely to support the GOP. And in several states, Republican elected officials have overridden voter initiatives to expand health care (Maine), enfranchise ex-felons (Florida), and implement ethics reforms (South Dakota).

The radicalism of the GOP means that it is no longer a conventional conservative party. It now displays characteristics of what scholars of comparative politics call an “antisystem party”—one that seeks to foment tribalism, distort elections, and subvert political institutions and norms. Although these tendencies appeared well before Trump’s election, they have grown only stronger under his presidency.

In short, Madison’s formula for ensuring moderation has stopped working. Extremism on the right, rather than provoking a moderating reaction, has become self-reinforcing. Positions that were once at or beyond the outer fringe of American conservatism have become first acceptable and then Republican orthodoxy. More than ever before, the Republican Party is dismissive of climate change, hostile to both the welfare state and the regulatory state, and committed to tax cuts for the rich—positions that make it an outlier even among conservative parties in rich democracies. Trump’s presidency has reinforced the GOP’s insurgent nature, as he and his allies have launched attacks on the foundations of democracy—the press, the courts, law enforcement, the political opposition—with virtually no pushback or even complaints from within their party. These norm-exploding stances raise the specter of democratic backsliding of a kind that seemed impossible only a few years ago. Yet they are less a departure from the recent history of the Republican Party than a hastening of its march down an alarming path.

WHAT HAPPENED?

The standard explanations for the Republican Party’s radicalization focus on race and culture, seeing in the United States the same forces of resentment that have driven right-wing populism in other rich democracies. The parallels are real, but the right-wing backlash in the United States looks different from its foreign counterparts in at least two respects.

First, although energized by popular anger, the radicalized GOP depends heavily on an organized network of powerful, well-funded right-wing groups that are closely tied to the Republican establishment. The billionaire Koch brothers, raising unprecedented resources from the extremely wealthy and extremely conservative, have built a virtual shadow party. Through organizations such as Americans for Prosperity, they have poured a few billion dollars over the past decade into grass-roots mobilization and campaigning on behalf of hard-right Republicans and hard-right policies such as the Trump tax cuts. The powerful U.S. Chamber of Commerce has undergone a massive expansion, moved far to the right, and become an increasingly integrated part of the Republican Party. The American Legislative Exchange Council has done much the same at the state level. Although some of these groups, such as the National Rifle Association and prominent evangelical organizations, promote social conservatism, the main focus is economic policies that remove constraints on business and reduce taxes on corporations and the wealthy.

The second difference follows from the first. Mostly due to the power of these organized groups, the Republican Party has embraced the rich and dismissed worries about inequality to an extent unmatched by right-wing parties abroad. Typically, right-wing populists are welfare-state chauvinists, advocating greater benefits for native-born workers. Republicans, not so much. Beneath the labels of “repeal Obamacare” and “cut taxes,” their economic priorities are radically inegalitarian and wildly unpopular. Even GOP voters don’t want to slash Medicaid or eliminate health insurance protections for patients with preexisting conditions, and they have scarcely a greater appetite for budget-busting tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. Indeed, Trump won the GOP nomination in part by hinting at a more moderate stance on economic issues. In office, however, he has populated his administration with veterans of the Koch network and business lobbyists, joining hands with Republican elites. Together, they have doubled down on the GOP’s plutocratic economic agenda, undercutting the capacity of the government to address national concerns. To maintain the support of the Republican base, meanwhile, they have intensified partisan conflict over noneconomic issues, especially racial ones.

The conversion of a populist backlash into plutocratic governance is further enabled by the presence of a formidable right-wing media network. Partisan media outlets aren’t unique to the right, but the outrage machine is much larger, more influential, and less tempered by countervailing voices on the conservative side of the spectrum. Indeed, the greatest victory of right-wing outlets has been their ability to discredit alternative sources of information. The center-right media space has emptied, and right-wing news and opinion have cut themselves (and their audiences) off from mainstream sources that try to uphold the norms of accuracy and nonpartisanship. The news consumption of the most active elements of the Republican base is increasingly limited to a handful of ideologically convivial outlets—especially Fox News, which is now essentially a form of Trump administration state TV. This media isolation both encourages and enables the confrontational, tribal politics of the GOP.

The final major contributor to the GOP’s radicalization has been electoral geography. Over the last quarter century, as prosperity has become concentrated in urban and coastal areas, nonurban areas have grown more Republican, and urban areas, more Democratic. This has not only hardened geographic political divides. It has also given the Republicans a significant electoral edge, because the U.S. electoral system—its severely malapportioned Senate; its single-member, winner-take-all House districts; and its Electoral College—rewards parties whose supporters are widely distributed across large swaths of sparsely populated territory.

Nowhere is this rural advantage clearer than in the Senate, with its huge bonus for people living in low-population states. The anti-tax activist Grover Norquist explained the math to attendees at the Conservative Political Action Conference a few years back: “While you don’t redistrict states, the nice people who drew the map of the United States districted in such a way that we have all those lovely square states out West with three people who live in them—two are Republican senators, and one’s a Republican congressman.”

The same problem affects the House of Representatives, although in a less obvious way. Democrats, whose supporters are clustered in cities, waste votes by running up huge margins of victory in urban districts, whereas Republicans, whose supporters are spread more efficiently across districts, win a greater number of seats by narrower margins. Urban concentration hurts Democrats at the state level, too, giving Republicans an edge in state legislatures—an edge they’ve then used to gerrymander both state and federal districts to further increase their advantage.

Thus, bias feeds on bias, allowing the GOP to flout majority sentiment while sustaining, or even expanding, its political power. In recent House elections, Republicans’ share of congressional seats has exceeded their share of the two-party vote by roughly five percent. In 2012, they even gained a House majority with a popular-vote minority. With much greater regularity, Republicans have achieved Senate majorities with a minority of national votes (calculated by adding up all the votes from the three two-year election cycles that elect the entire chamber). Republicans have also lost the popular vote in six of the past seven presidential elections. Yet despite all these losses, conservative justices now have a solid majority on the Supreme Court. There, they have enabled blatant vote rigging in Republican-controlled areas (by invalidating a key provision of the Voting Rights Act) and empowered the plutocratic forces behind the Republican Party (by gutting campaign finance regulations and supporting a comprehensive attack on already battered labor unions). Now, the Court looks poised to allow the Trump administration to add a question about citizenship to the 2020 census—a measure achieved by circumventing normal procedures and opposed by career officials at the Census Bureau—which would almost certainly reduce the count of noncitizens and thereby the electoral representation of Democratic-leaning areas.

 

All these trends have fed on one another. As inequality has grown, it has empowered economic elites and given their political allies an incentive to substitute antisystem resentment for real efforts to provide economic opportunity. Democrats certainly deserve some of the blame here: both the Clinton and the Obama administrations did little to address the dislocations caused by trade or the growing geographic divergence in economic outcomes. But the biggest barrier to serious action has been the Republican Party. In the absence of an effective response, places left behind by the knowledge economy have proved fertile terrain for fear-mongering by right-wing media and, increasingly, Republican campaigns. And as the GOP has alienated the racial and ethnic minorities that make up a growing share of the electorate, it has found itself drawn to countermajoritarian strategies—gerrymandering, restricting voting, and encouraging aggressive interventions by activist judges—that undermine not just effective governance but also representative democracy itself.

BREAKING THE DOOM LOOP

What might foster a better-functioning democracy? It is hard to see a route to a well-functioning democracy that does not involve a serious electoral rebuke of the Republican Party—one bigger and broader than the losses it experienced in 2018. But even with such a rebuke, any Democratic president, no matter how moderate and open to compromise, would face monolithic Republican opposition in Congress and the conservative media. The Senate’s stark and growing rural bias ensures that the Republican Party’s strength in the chamber will exceed its popular support, and Republican senators will be armed with the filibuster and the knowledge that legislative obstruction has delivered them political gains in the past.

Any Democratic president would also face a conservative Supreme Court, whose newest members are Federalist Society stalwarts chosen for their combination of extreme social conservativism and Ayn Rand–style libertarianism. Before these judges, reforms passed by any Democratic-controlled Congress (assuming they survived a filibuster) would face a highly uncertain fate, however obvious their constitutionality might have been in the past.

As bleak as the situation looks, there are reasons for guarded optimism. The first is that effective governance, directed to real public needs, can deliver far-reaching rewards. The potential for such rewards, in turn, can create opportunities for skilled politicians to build broad political coalitions. To take just one example, moving the United States’ inefficient health-care system closer to the best-performing foreign models would reduce pressure on both public and private budgets while softening inequality and making millions of Americans healthier and better off. Climate change presents not only an existential threat but also an inspiring opportunity to create well-paid jobs rebuilding the United States’ crumbling infrastructure and to jump-start a technological revolution in green energy. What’s more, GOP policies such as the 2017 tax cuts hand out so much cash to so few people that reversing them would be an easy way to offer broad gains. In short, the problem is not a shortage of good policy ideas; it is a system that cannot turn them into reality.

Another reason for optimism comes from the growing number of politicians and policymakers who recognize that the immediate priority is updating the United States’ antiquated electoral and political institutions. After winning the 2018 elections, House Democrats put a package of such reforms—given the honorary designation of H.R. 1—at the top of their legislative agenda. The reforms proposed are mostly sensible first steps to increase voter turnout, limit gerrymandering, and curb the role of money in politics. But more important than the specifics is the fact that political reform now occupies the leading edge of progressive thinking. The common theme of these proposals is that in a democracy, popular majorities should decide elections and the winners of those elections should be able to govern. Opportunities for minorities to obstruct normal lawmaking should be limited, and the government’s ability to carry out important public policies should be enhanced. After all, a public sector that lacks the funding and expertise to deliver on ambitious policies is a public sector that continually vindicates the arguments of those trying to cripple it.

Reform will still face fierce opposition at every turn. But if democracy is protected, the forces of reaction cannot win forever. Social tolerance continues to increase, especially among young Americans, and Trump’s presidency has only accelerated this trend. Moreover, the United States is growing less white and less rural with every passing year. The 2018 midterm elections showed that Trump has galvanized young and nonwhite voters and spurred his opponents to organize to defend democratic values. The GOP has turned to a polarizing and countermajoritarian strategy precisely because it knows that it is in a race against time: every election cycle, as the party’s older, white voting base shrinks as a share of the electorate, Republicans’ revanchism appeals to fewer and fewer Americans. The party’s rhetoric conjures up a mythical past because the GOP as currently constituted cannot survive in a democratic future.

Effective governance is elusive not because the problems Americans face are insuperable but because asymmetric polarization has collided with aging political institutions that are poorly equipped to handle a radicalized Republican Party. Reforming these institutions won’t be easy, nor will Republicans naturally move back toward the center. But there are powerful forces pushing for change, and there are ample opportunities for improving American society just waiting to be seized—if Americans can get their government working again.

Copyright © 2019 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. 
All rights reserved. To request permission to distribute or reprint this article, please visit ForeignAffairs.com/Permissions. 

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Source URL: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-06-11/republican-devolution

Links
[1] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/2019-05-21/american-hustle
[2] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2012-12-03/can-america-be-fixed
[3] https://www.foreignaffairs.com/reviews/review-essay/2017-08-15/what-kills-inequality

 

 

[Amigo]

15 hours ago, boxcube said:

 

 Zato sto je USA najuspesnija implementacija one politicke teorije koja se zalaze za pretstavnicku ustavnu republiku gde se nacija stvara zato da se slobodni pojedinci umreze u jednomformalno pravnom sistemu a ne da drzava daje prava pojedincima uslovno kako bi oni jelte sluzili drusvu. Sto je gotovo uvek slucaj u populistickim demokratijama gde nuzno sledi da svaki pojedinac ima daleko manje slobode. Ne vrti se sve oko tog Hitlera i slicih zlikovackih debila svet je daleko slozenija stvar sto ima svoje lepe i ruzne strane. Ima se gde naci i velicanstvenost i lepota izvan tih moronskih rasnih i klasnih teorija.

 

To ti tako vidis, medjutim intervencije po svijetu, od zemalja koje su blizu, pa do zemalja koje su na drugoj strani globusa i izdvajanja za vojsku koja su daleko najveca na svijetu, nam govore da USA i te kako racuna na silu i da bez te sile americka politicka elita smatra iz nekog razloga da ne mogu da opstanu.

 

 

14 hours ago, zoran59 said:

 

Progutao mi softver post (valjda, ne vidim ga) pa odgovaram opet ali krace.

 

Ne pominji mi zimu - ziveo sam 11 godina na Aljasci.

Noma objektivnog razloga zasto je negde bolje, postoje samo subjektivni.

Mator sam da opet ucim jezik od nule. Lenj sam da opet pakujem citavu kucu. Sve skupa, OK mi je ovde.

Niko me ne proganja ni zbog cega.

Da postoji neki aspekt zivota i da mi je jako bitan a ne mogu da ga praktikujem, selio bih.

Ovako, ja se divim tvojim postovima na temi Bastovanstvo i zavidim ti, a nadam se da cu ti sledece godine konkurisati. Hebo drzavu i politiku.

 

 

Zorane, vjerovao ili ne, ja takodje volim Ameriku i postoji  toliko toga sto mi se dopada i cijenim americki doprinos cjelokupnom covjecanstvu. Kao sto sam rekao vec zivotni stil koji sada zivim je jako slican tvom americkom, od arhitekture, automobila, jezika, umjetnosti i svega drugog, Znas i sam, medjutim postoje i stvari koje ne valjaju i koje treba kritikovati, tako da se uglavnom ne slazem sa ljudima koji bi pojeli i americku tortu i americko govno. Ne mislim na tebe naravno.

Sto se tice politike, slazem se, malo se zezamo samo 

 

12 hours ago, Angelia said:

Pa da, ja cak i objasnjavala oko toga da ne verujem u penzione fondove. Ja to nisam htela ni u UK. Veruj mi da nista nisam time izgubila. Znaci nema tu bacanja para. 

Cini mi se i da si ti postavio to pitanje o portalima zbog pada na berzi danas - vidis zasto ja ne volim te fondove  

 

Ne vidim smisla odbijati kontribuciju i meciranje kompanije, sto cak kod mene nije ni moguce odbiti, a umjesto stokova, novac se moze uloziti u sigurne fondove sa malim interesom.

Osim toga dugorocno, posto je to ulaganje u penziju, novac ide nekom promjenljivom, ali u prosjeku krivom koja raste.

 

I moj fond je nesto pao, ali desavalo se to i prije, pa ce se vratiti. Generalno Tramp ovim ekonomskim ratom protiv Kine ne moze nista dobroga da donese, on je navikao na bankrote i muljavine i umjesto stabilnosti, njegova politika puna kontroverzi destabilise i USA, a na zalost i sire.

[mrd]

41 minutes ago, Amigo said:

Ne vidim smisla odbijati kontribuciju i meciranje kompanije,

Zbog cega, ako izracunas da ti nije povoljno? Postoji inflacija, tako da ako ti novac ne uvecava vrednost, onda si na gubitku. 

To je tako prosto!

[Amigo]

18 minutes ago, mrd said:

Zbog cega, ako izracunas da ti nije povoljno? Postoji inflacija, tako da ako ti novac ne uvecava vrednost, onda si na gubitku. 

To je tako prosto!

Koja je to racunica da odbijas da ti kompanija uplacuje redovno npr 4% od tvoje plate za penziju.

 

Evo sta si sam rekao o penzionim fondovima na temi Penzionado 

 

 Osnovno je da penzioni fondovi, cak neke i ti kao korisnik mozes da kontrolises, na kojim ces accountima da drzis pare, rastu. 

 

Sad rastu, sad ne rastu 

[Angelia]

59 minutes ago, Amigo said:

 

Ne vidim smisla odbijati kontribuciju i meciranje kompanije, sto cak kod mene nije ni moguce odbiti, a umjesto stokova, novac se moze uloziti u sigurne fondove sa malim interesom.

Osim toga dugorocno, posto je to ulaganje u penziju, novac ide nekom promjenljivom, ali u prosjeku krivom koja raste.

 

Kod mene je volonterski, i meni ima smisla. 

[Yoyogi]

1 hour ago, Anduril said:

Da pejstujem ovde tekst o jednom od razloga trenutnog raspada americkog politickog sistema i tribalizacije mada ne delim optimizam autora na kraju.

 Sto ne rece to svojim recima, tvoj cut/paste je retko ko procitao. Ja nisam.

[nssa]

10 minutes ago, Angelia said:

Kod mene je volonterski, i meni ima smisla. 

 

 

Mozes li ovo malo da objasnis, posto odbijati 100% na ulozen novac znaci da imas investiciju koja ce ti to nadohnaditi. I koliki ti je rizik na takve investicije? Mozda takva informacija moze i nama da pomogne, bez obzira sto nismo u USA

 

Pretpostavljam da i USA kao i u Kanadi penzioni fondovi ulazu u low gain/very low risk fondove ili stocks, s tim da zbog velicine portfolia mogu da ga diverzifikuju cime umanjuju sveukupan rizik (koliko se secam sveukupan rizik investicije sve vise tezi najnizem riziku pojedinacne investicije sto je broj pozicija veci). Sto ce reci da vremenom, a penzioni fond je dugorocno ulaganje, gotovo sigurno je da ce se pocetni ulog uvecati, odnosno da umnogome prtai krivu porasta (nekog) stock indeksa.

Sad ako ti mislis da mozes da bolje investiras i uvecas svoj pocetni ulog 200% vise nego penzioni fond (a da nemas i mnogo veci rizik) mene stvarno zanima kako se to ostvaruje

 

Ovo 200% je zbog odbijanja da se pocetni ulog uveca istim doprinosm komanije (company match contribution) znaci na tvojih $100 penzioni fond u tvoje ime ulaze $200, a ti sama samo svojih $100

[nssa]

8 minutes ago, Yoyogi said:

 Sto ne rece to svojim recima, tvoj cut/paste je retko ko procitao. Ja nisam.

 

 

Pa recimo da poprilicno pobija tvrdnje @boxcube oko pretstavnicke demokratije, ili sam ih ja obojicu pogresno shvatio

 

pojednostavljeno sam shvatio da je

 

pretstavncika demokratija kad biramo pretstavnike koji "upravljaju" u nase ime

populisticka demokratija kad direknto ucestvujemo u "upravljanju"

 

mada moze i @boxcube da to pojasni i da primere, verovatno to meni nije najjasnije

[Anduril]

17 minutes ago, Yoyogi said:

 Sto ne rece to svojim recima, tvoj cut/paste je retko ko procitao. Ja nisam.

 

Pa ima kod ce da procita. Ukratko, Republikanska partija sistematski potkopava sistem koji su tvorci zamislili pre 250 godina.

Vec od vremena Gingrica, dakle devedesetih, se GOP krece sve vise prema desnici, odbija kompromise koji su ranije bili normalni i na kraju sebe predstavlja kao anti-sistemsku partiju iako je deo sistema. 

Celo drustvo se polarizuje sve do vrhovnog suda sto ranije nije bila praksa na ovako agresivan nacin. Institucije postaju predmet uskih partijskih interesa kao u banana republikama. 

Kao uzrok se navodi sirenje politickih NGO organizacija u senci Republikanske partije koje finansira mali broj desnicarskih oligarha.

Te oligarhe naravno ne zanima previse generalna sloboda Amerikanaca ili kako politicki sistem treba da funkcionise kao celost sa desnicom i levicom zajedno, nego iskljucivo njihov uzi interes. 

Preko te desnicarske propagandne mreze se onda uspesno manipulise veliki deo biraca i time dalje potkopava ceo sistem koji su postavili oci nacije, pa Linkoln ili Ruzvelt. 

Demokrate takodje nekako igraju tu igru mada manje ekstremno i agresivno. I tako, videcemo sta ce biti dalje...

[Yoyogi]

5 minutes ago, Anduril said:

 

Pa ima kod ce da procita. Ukratko, Republikanska partija sistematski potkopava sistem koji su tvorci zamislili pre 250 godina.

Vec od vremena Gingrica, dakle devedesetih, se GOP krece sve vise prema desnici, odbija kompromise koji su ranije bili normalni i na kraju sebe predstavlja kao anti-sistemsku partiju iako je deo sistema. 

Celo drustvo se polarizuje sve do vrhovnog suda sto ranije nije bila praksa na ovako agresivan nacin. Institucije postaju predmet uskih partijskih interesa kao u banana republikama. 

Kao uzrok se navodi sirenje politickih NGO organizacija u senci Republikanske partije koje finansira mali broj desnicarskih oligarha.

Te oligarhe naravno ne zanima previse generalna sloboda Amerikanaca ili kako politicki sistem treba da funkcionise kao celost sa desnicom i levicom zajedno, nego iskljucivo njihov uzi interes. 

Preko te desnicarske propagandne mreze se onda uspesno manipulise veliki deo biraca i time dalje potkopava ceo sistem koji su postavili oci nacije, pa Linkoln ili Ruzvelt. 

Demokrate takodje nekako igraju tu igru mada manje ekstremno i agresivno. I tako, videcemo sta ce biti dalje...

 

Generalna americka populacija nema pojma da Vrhovni sud uopste postoji.

U Texas, 2016. u junu, lokalni izbori, pre federalnih, biraci se pitali "A gde je Tramp na listi?"

[Angelia]

7 minutes ago, nssa said:

 

 

Mozes li ovo malo da objasnis, posto odbijati 100% na ulozen novac znaci da imas investiciju koja ce ti to nadohnaditi. I koliki ti je rizik na takve investicije? Mozda takva informacija moze i nama da pomogne, bez obzira sto nismo u USA

 

Takva informacija ti nece pomoci, posto bi morala da ulazim u licne detalje. 

[nssa]

9 minutes ago, Angelia said:

Takva informacija ti nece pomoci, posto bi morala da ulazim u licne detalje. 

 

Nije da bas razumem jer sam pitao o vrsti investicije, nacinu ulaganja. Ne vidim kakve to veze ima sa licnim detaljima, ali ne insistiram

[Angelia]

15 minutes ago, nssa said:

 

Nije da bas razumem jer sam pitao o vrsti investicije, nacinu ulaganja. Ne vidim kakve to veze ima sa licnim detaljima, ali ne insistiram

OK, evo bez ulaska u licne detalje - investirala sam u biznis, u projekte koji kao cilj imaju povracaj od profita ili exit. Rizik jeste veci ali ako verujes u investiciju, i znas o cemu se radi, povracaj zna da bude drastican. 

[nssa]

4 minutes ago, Angelia said:

OK, evo bez ulaska u licne detalje - investirala sam u biznis,

 

 

Hvala na odgovoru, i to je vrlo dobro ako je biznis tvoj.

 

U Kanadi je ulaganje u penzioni plan koji kompanija "match" je ogranicen na 3-4% godisnje plate, davno bilo pa sam zaboravio. Ako je i kod tebe takva situacija ne vidim razlog da ne radis i jedno i drugo (divrzifikacija)

 

[Amigo]

Ova 4% od kompanije je free money, ne vjerujem da bi to Angelia propustila tek tako, mora da ima neki drugi dil sa firmom, neku drugu vrstu kompenzacije.

Ona je ozbiljan igrac. ne zeza se ona sa sicom, kao mi obicna raja, no offense Angelija, u tom pogledu stvarno respect.