This is the classic Republican playbook of tearing down institutions not in the name of small government but rather to replace core functions with private offerings. Doesn’t hurt in this case they can also stick it to a union at the same time
These folks can’t stand that they lost the civil rights battle, the Roe decision (till now), and less remembered the affirmation of the rights of the detained. Maybe there would be less partisanship if they just stuck to trying to lower taxes rather than wage an full assault of personal liberties.
Moderates just want oppressed groups to lay down and take it so their prized stability is not jeopardized
There was no realignment. Who owned the slaves? Who was responsible for Jim Crow and the KKK? Which party set up the Great Society which destroyed the black family? Which party controls the teacher's unions and the public schools?
The Democratic party. 100%. Those are just facts.
We can't fix this until we quit the partisanship. We need to fix the public school system. You'll remember the teacher's union official, who, when asked when he was going to start thinking about the kids, replied, "When they are old enough to vote."
EDIT: Please read at least the introduction to the "Dixiecrat" splinter party page for history[0]. (Wikipedia isn't known for having a conservative slant on things.)
The national parties didn't meaningfully realign, that's probably true, but the racists did.
Your history conveniently stops at around 1970 and leaves our figures like Jerry Falwell and Nixon’s southern strategy. The partisanship is not being driven by rhetoric - it’s being driven by tens of millions of people being left behind by neoliberalism with zero attempt at mitigating the harm done. If people felt like the current system worked for them then they wouldn’t adopt extreme views.
But sure let’s keep on liberalizing and consolidating economic and political power. It’s worked out great the last 4 decades.
Edit because you edited: wanted to drive home point I can barely stand the democrats. In a sane country they would be the center right party
You know, if that yellow team popped up, I'd likely be right in line behind you.
Both the Democratic party and the Republicans drifted to the left over the last fifty years. And then the Democrats reached around and embraced the elite that a century ago was on the right.
Now, the Fortune 500 C-suite and virtually all the richest counties in the US uniformly vote for the Democratic party. And that party is a strange conglomerate of the lower class, for which they trade votes for handouts (while destroying their culture) and the elite (comprising the tech corporations, the Beltway, the Hedgies, the media and academia), which trades political favors for donations.
I think I'm with you on neo-liberalism and the excessive consolidation of economic and political power. The Democratic and Republican parties, the tech corporations, the media, and academia form the block benefiting from this consolidation. What to do?
Tearing it all down isn't a good idea - history shows that. The kind of people who tear things down are the last people you want in charge of the new order.
But, if we could flex the system over the next fifty years, what should we do?
I’m not too optimistic for team yellow though. We need good-faith experts to lead us through these times (and social trust) but the last few years have been as disastrous if not not more for wonks as the financial crisis. Between Fauci and J Powell it’s not looking too good
If you come up with something, ping me in a thread.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement_after_the_Rec...
It's a mystery to me why the blacks switched to voting Democratic. I can only think that the history they learned in school was falsified, and then they were convinced that the Democratic party was responsible for giving them their civil rights.
Have you considered asking them?
> they were convinced that the Democratic party was responsible for giving them their civil rights.
Democrat Harry Truman abolished segregation in the federal government and military. Democrat Kennedy proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Democrat Johnson signed it. The Congressional vote broke down by region: >90% of northern state representatives voted for, >90% of southern state representatives against. This was a big factor in the realignment, where southern Democrats switched to the Republican party. Strom Thurmond for example did so in 1964, and the 1964 presidential election flipped many southern states from Democrat to Republican. (In 1968, many of them went to George Wallace, another former Democrat who left and went independent.)
It's true that the Democratic party has a history of racism, and it's also true that Republican Lincoln freed the slaves, but things change over time, and political parties change over time. Today's Republicans are not the party of Lincoln, and today's Democrats are not the Dixiecrats.
There was no meaningful change to the parties since the 1930s. FDR Democrats believed in social engineering, and Biden Democrats believe in social engineering. All that’s changed is that FDR Democrats wanted to discriminate against Black people, and Biden Democrats want to discriminate against white people.
What you might call social engineering, others might call rejecting social Darwinism. Now the elderly and disabled can live till old age instead of dying on the streets like they did pre-social security. Thanks FDR? The TVA was pretty sweet too.
The core of the Democratic Party (the oldest in the world) has been distrust of big business and advocating for the common man (literally white men for most of it but that can change). It’s essential they go back to these roots and start attacking things like Citizens United with the same verve Republicans go after their goals
Keywords: identity, marginalized, disproportionately, underserved.
But if this is real, this thinking falls into the trap of thinking in final binary outcomes rather than viewing politics as a discourse. Are unions perfect? No. But the center of power has shifted so far in the opposite direction that there needs to be elements far on the other side to bring things back to a sane level
Edit: iPhone autocorrect was bad on this one
What I meant to say, to be more clear, is that Democrats need to pull back from the messaging about how important it is to be LGBTQIAPP+ and Disproportionately Affected Marginalized Communities of Every Shade of Color Except Pink and get back to the roots of being against corporatism, rather than changing the corporate logo to a fist or rainbow for a month twice a year.
And hey look, if it makes you feel any better, I'm browner than pink and I'm on a lot of spectra. I'm not bitter or scared or hateful (OK well sometimes any combo of those), just shaking my head at it all.
HN seems to be incapable of differentiating between national political parties and wide, more genal political ideologies.
Is the teaching of evolution really such a big deal?
I was never taught creationism, nor evolution, nor anything even remotely touching those subjects. In High School, I was barely taught what a variable was; my math education capped out at rote solving of quadratic equations. I learned the atomic model. of the day, and memorized a quarter of the periodic table. I learned that Shakespeare existed and that sentences in English usually have an object and a subject. I learned that a blood cell contains a lot of little things that I can't do shit about.
I was top 1% of my class.
If we must go to a core set of things that should be taught to all, I can't see much reason why the trivium and quadrivium have been so thoroughly abandoned, yet my niece knows exactly what gender she wants to be when she turns 7. And FWIW I'm sorry for bringing that last part up, and no I'm not joking or trolling.
Probably the best thing we could do to produce better educational results is to correct the damage done to city centers by rapid deindustrialization and the war on drugs, and invest in rural communities left behind with infrastructure like broadband. Obviously I don’t think either will happen. But just shifting kids around isn’t going to do anything (but there is money to made in sectors like edtech)
I don’t say never so I suppose a school could fail for endogenous reasons in which case action is needed. But there are less drastic actions than shutting it down, such as firing all the admins.
Would you consider the possibility that the negative synergistic feedback loop you describe is actually caused by failing schools, instead of the other way around?
Four out of the fifty kids in her class went on to become doctors, 10 became engineers, two of which now work at SpaceX. Resources are not the problem. Discipline and motivation are.
The solution is simple, but few people have the guts to implement it. Sad, but true. I think outcomes in a lot of these failing schools would be better if we took money away from them. Make them focus on what matters and give teachers and administrators the power to discipline or expel problem students.
The solution that follows from your story is not that poverty breeds innovation/grit or whatever. It’s easy to come up with counter examples to this (affect of war and depressions on educational outcomes). The thing that your wife’s classmates had was hope. Hope that if they worked hard enough they would be successful.
For many reasons, kids growing up in certain areas have very little reason for hope. And this is not irrational thinking: there parents likely are one of the millions of people left behind by the neoliberal era or they are part of a permanent underclass of society. This is what we need to address.
And yes every kid should have a pencil. And not have to worry about breathing in Asbestos. If the answer was just cut funding to bad schools, no child left behind would’ve been a success (narrator: it was not a success).
My mother-in-law literally hands out a bag of 10 mechanical pencils at the start of the semester to each student, which she pays for herself. A week later these kids are asking her if they can have a pencil.
Again, the issue is discipline and motivation. The kids have zero incentive to remember to bring a pencil, and zero consequences if they forget. If anything, they're being taught that you don't have to be responsible: the teacher will bail you out anyway and can't impose consequences if you don't remember.
These kids, even in low-income areas, go to school in palaces. These buildings get so much funding from states, federal government, and the Department of Education that they often abandon perfectly useable buildings to build brand new ones to the tune of tens of millions of dollars. Your comment about asbestos is a complete strawman.
You want to make a kid feel hopeless? Put him in a 45-minute math class where the teacher has to spend the first 15 minutes of class dealing with three troublemakers who are so disruptive they have to be sent to the office multiple times a week. The kids in that classroom will quickly internalize the idea that education doesn't matter, discipline doesn't matter, that they themselves don't matter.
That's what's driving the hopelessness you describe. Multiply that by 180 days a year, 12 grade levels, and yeah, you'll get the negative synergistic spiral you described in another comment.
If kids don't learn discipline at home, and don't learn a modicum of it at school, well, you get crime. Not a year goes by where my mother-in-law doesn't see the mug shot of one of her students from 10 years ago on the nightly news. It shouldn't be surprising to anyone that after living 18 years without any real consequences for their behavior, these kids get out of school and sometimes turn into criminals.
Teachers can't even teach in many of these schools. They spend more than half of their time writing up troublemakers for the nth time this semester and leaving voice messages on their absentee father's phone. Who wants to sign up to be a teacher in that environment? The exodus of teachers from the public schools proves my point.
You want to give those kids hope? Discipline them. Kick the troublemakers out of school if they continue to misbehave. Show them that they matter enough to properly educate and train. Not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but the basics of society: some behavior is not okay and will not be tolerated, things are expected of you, and their are real and sometimes painful consequences for not meeting those expectations.
Do that and you'll see something crazy happen: those kids will start learning, behaving, and growing into productive, honest, good citizens. Most of the problems you describe will disappear. Until we do, expect more of the same.
But it doesn’t seem right to discount the effect of resources on educational outcomes (not talking about football stadiums either - looking at you Sunbelt).
I largely benefited from attending well funded schools. My parents moved to the districts with good public schools, so I was able to take AP classes and such. However, a whole world was revealed to me going to college. The kids who went to Georgetown Prep or Andover had probably read millions more (assigned) words than me and had taken Linear algebra and Diffeq already. Their HS tests weren’t multiple choice - they were essays. And their HS class sizes had been small and taught by Ivy League grads.
Conversely, I know people whose schools offered exactly zero AP classes and were way behind going into college especially for technical tracks.
There are all kinds of anecdotes about irredeemable neighborhoods or conversely about stereotypical bootstrap stories. But at that end of the day the correlations are clear. Ruch parents are not going to send their kids to a school that intentionally or unintentionally deprives students of resources. They understand, as we all should, that education is an investment in human capital where you put dollars in hoping for future returns.