Comment by choward | Hacker News Reader

Comment by choward | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The issues you call partisan aren't really partisan but they are made partisan by politicians and those with power.

A large majority of the country is for making marijuana legal at the federal level. Most people don't like corporations and billionaires funding our elections. Most people are against gerrymandering. Most people are for legal immigration. Most people agree that out healthcare system is broken and way too expensive. Most people want education to be affordable and effective. Most people care about the environment. Most people don't want people to be jailed for petty things or people wrongly convicted.

The things people disagree on are the way these issues are framed by politicians and the powerful and the proposed solutions. However it's easy to agree that all of these things are a problem. I'm not saying everyone agrees but a lot more people agree on things then you are lead to believe by those who benefit from keeping the country divided.

> The issues you call partisan aren't really partisan but they are made partisan by politicians

Literally what does an issue being “really partisan” mean besides there being a sharp distinction between (in a two party system) the major parties or (more generally) between some group of parties and some other group of parties on the issue?

“Not really partisan but made partisan by politicians” is a nonsense description.

A more simple way to put it is that the politicians are hyper focused on the minor things we disagree on and complete ignore the things we mostly agree on. This division helps keep people hating each other and not focusing on important issues while also keeping their donors happy since they love the status quo.

Here's another simple way to put it: if politicians only focused on what you call "minor things we disagree on", voters can simply and easily vote them out. But voters don't think those are minor issues, it's just that you don't personally value them. Abortion, for example, is hardly a "minor" issue, for many it's a matter of life and death. You may think marijuana is a "minor" issue, but for others it's a critical crossroads that will determine the future of their community and country.

Politicians don't have mind control powers, there is no mechanism to make voters "hyper focus" on issues that voters themselves consider minor. If voters focus on something, it's not minor to them. All you're saying when you dismiss these politicians' focus as "minor things" is that you either don't know or don't respect the decisions of the voters they represent.

It's a perfectly appropriate description. To take abortion as an example, most people are in the middle ground where abortion up to a certain point (~12 weeks iirc) is ok with abortion until birth allowed in extreme cases. This is also how things are in a lot of other countries. Yet the rhetoric is dominated by the extreme positions of either no abortions or abortions until birth because not properly addressing the issue is convenient for politicians (after all, they had 50 years to codify Roe v Wade rather than leaving it to legal precedent).

These extremists are the only people that show up and care enough to make sure the representatives they vote for actually represent them on this issue. If you don't care enough to do that, I don't know why you expect politicians to care either. It doesn't really matter what "most people" say in these no-stake questionnaires. If "most people" care about getting this middle ground passed, then there'll be enough of them to vote out anyone who sticks to an extremist position. So where are these "most people"? Because I can't find them anywhere in the electoral surveys that matter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com