Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by rtpg | Hacker News Reader

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I didn't get this at first reading, but it's a pretty subtle and important point.

Powerful families are chummy with other powerful people because power ends up being the most important status symbol, and ideology can hide behind it.

It's basically the reason that orthodox Republican economic policy can even exist. It's terribly debunked theory, but because the messengers are WSJ op-ed writers that went to fancy schools and wear bow ties to work, their view "couldn't possibly be just wrong".

There was some polls recently that showed that when asked about GOP tax plans, people refused to believe that the pollsters were even telling the truth on the facts, because it was so absurd. Of course there wouldn't be a tax break for private jet maintenance!

But politicians believe their friends, just like we all do. It's the base of "keep politics out of X".

Perhaps the point is subtle, because you seem to have missed it entirely. Republican policy isn't wrong because it isn't Democrat policy; it's wrong because they're the same policy with two slightly different marketing plans. If we judge this policy by its results, it's clearly neither progressive nor conservative. Rather, it's highly effective in keeping the plebes hard at work while ensuring that all resources of society are controlled by the wealthy and powerful and amoral. If you still care to defend one party against the other, you're still being manipulated.

I do not understand how, given what has transpired in 2017, anyone can still claim the false equivalency of the GOP and Democrats

Immigration, taxes, healthcare, these are all places where the final results would be massively different with a Democratic majority right now.

Perhaps in the 90s it was less different. But now there's such a clear difference.

Sure Democrats aren't asking for full blown socialism. But they're asking for stuff thats way different than what the GOP is pushing for.

That's a useful talking point to use when Republicans are in the midst of passing terrible legislation, it really spreads the blame. But it's a nonsense false equivalence in this era when they are undoing every single that the Democrats did under Obama's administration that they can, including and especially protections put in place to protect people from financial abuse by powerful incumbent players. You have taken a point about the very rich and used it to propagate the party equivalence meme.

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