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Comment by dc-programmer | Hacker News Reader

It’s not. I don’t care about the blue team. If a yellow team popped up tomorrow that actually cared about the well-being of the public and not corporate interests I would vote for them instead.

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

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(I made an edit on my previous)

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?

Yes I’d co-sign the core of what your saying here. It’s pretty alarming actually. And social issues are being used as a wedge/relief valve/distraction to avoid bringing too much attention to where things are materially going. I do believe that many economic issues are deeply related to some social issues and that’s where we might disagree.

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

In the course of this, I read [0]. The whole thing is shocking, really.

If you come up with something, ping me in a thread.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disfranchisement_after_the_Rec...

I first read about the more disturbing (i.e. waved over in school) details of reconstruction a few years ago in Grant’s biography (really good btw as was Chernow’s Hamilton). One of the most shocking events was https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilmington_insurrection_of_1... and also the New Orleans massacre. The klan would violently put down attempts by black peoples to assert themselves politically and would kill the Republicans who helped them in the process.

Thank you. I found it on libbyapp.com. I loved Whitman's epigraph at the beginning!

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.

> It's a mystery to me why the blacks switched to voting Democratic.

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.

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