[Newfie]

Nefarious,

Check out this thread.

healing-the-partisan-divide-pt-3-t74189-140.html

Oh how we love to hate.

[evilgenius]

Well, there are protections built into the political structure of the US for the minority. If the president is not from the majority party, for instance, it takes a two thirds vote to override a veto. Congress can pass all manner of laws, and the president can sign them, but if they are unconstitutional the Supreme Court can rule them invalid. We are not like the UK, either, where if you lose a court case you will have to pay for the other side's court costs. If you are wronged, you can bring a case in the US, even if you face such legal expertise on the other side that you are practically guaranteed to lose.

We don't enshrine a particular class of people by the way we run our court system. Sort of, we don't. We do have some issues having to do with keeping certain people down through the use of laws that make it really tough to overcome failure to appear warrants and other charges and fees that get piled up on a person, when they, often, commit some crime that everybody does, only for which they got caught. Those things leave the field open for subjective enforcement, which can become a class issue.

Speaking of looming issues that could blow up soon, the way that local municipalities in the US rely upon traffic fines in order to thrive off of the revenue stream, especially DUI's, may blow up that same way, when self-driving cars become popular. Somebody was talking about Atlas Shrugged dealing with the danger of bloated bureaucracy. Local municipalities that have utilized huge revenues from fishing hole style revenue streams often have bloated bureaucracies. This is also true of overblown house price valuations that can collapse all of a sudden.

But the criticism is, I think, largely about representational democracy right now. Somebody else also said that there are too many groups that all think they are the norm. When it doesn't go their way, they complain that democracy isn't working. It's very easy to see a representative who doesn't come from your group and automatically malign them. No one is really just like them, so everyone gets maligned.

Since probably the oil shocks of the 70's people have distrusted big government and institutions. Many people thought those high gas prices were a conspiracy. And, since the 80's, at least, some groups, especially the religious right, have been deliberate about demanding their own way out of a claim to some sort of moral high ground and not as a result of the democratic process. The country has a lot of issues, but it has survived, so far.

[Outcast_Searcher]

Since probably the oil shocks of the 70's people have distrusted big government and institutions.

You say that, and yet, look how wildly popular the two big buffoons leading the far left POTUS charge, Liz Warren and Bernie Sanders are.

Their main proposal is to just blatantly buy the US election buy stealing all the wealth possible from the most successful, and use that to greatly expand government to provide lots of "free" stuff to magically take care of people too irresponsible to pay their bills, or who just don't WANT to pay for things like medical care for their family.


If they were just on the lunatic fringe re popularity that would be one thing. But hell, Liz Warren is leading the dems, last I checked. So how, exactly, is this showing that people don't want big government and institutions?

One of us is missing something huge.