| HN Mirror

I’m not saying that the sides are the same, I am saying that the two parties we have in the US are both spineless.

The people who want to ensure you have your rights protected will flip and turn on you if it can be part of a plot to smear the other party as evil villains.

The people who want to deny you your rights will tolerate you and not actually do anything to deprive you of your rights, once that 5% shifts and they can no longer use your putative rights as a crowbar to open up a floodgate of hatred towards the other party.

Like I really mean to say that slavery was only a partial cause of the US Civil War. It was a central cause. But it could only be a cause because there was a “powder-keg” atmosphere already in the air. And the reason I know this is because Southerners are emphatically not looking back at the Civil War saying “Those Northerners took our damn slaves away!”—which is what you would here if this was a True Cultural Touchstone—but rather “No our parents weren’t fighting for slavery, they were fighting for States’ Rights.” You don’t put lipstick on a pig if you’re proud of that pig. Slavery was considered South-Identity at the time, but it was revealed to be totally unnecessary to have Southern values, and now US Southerners would prefer to see their ancestors having died for their actual present-values, not their stated past-values.

And the party who brought them there—the Democrats—have since decided that they are now the party of civil rights. So if we discovered that Southern Culture did not contain something that folks thought was such a bedrock principle that they were willing to die for it, and that shocks us, what should shock us even more is that the Democratic Party cannot possibly have any sort of shared principles from then to now.

It cannot have a spine, not because politicians must be spineless, but because our divide-everything-into-First-Past-the-Post-seats election strategy actively makes having a spine into a competitive disadvantage. If the Democrats actually had a spine and stuck to their racist guns during the intervening years, they would have gradually lost members to the Republican Party at which point the Republican Party would have had an internal rift into two spineless parties, one of which would rapidly accumulate the old Democrats. I know this because this happened before: there was a political party called the Whigs that was very principled around an economic system of protectionist tariffs and did not take a clear stand against slavery at a time when that was becoming that 5% issue. The Democrats used this to get a pro-slavery Northerner as President, a bunch of alienated folks in the party started the Republican party to be anti-slavery, and that was the end of the Whigs.

They are not the same. But they also have no fixed identities. Most of the country is made up of moderates saying “I don’t agree with the folks in ‘my’ party but you should see the crazy ideas of ‘the other guys’, I have to vote _____.”

We can fix it if you become really vocal about switching the House to a proportionate system. If you can take a step back from “I hate them” please tell everybody you can, whenever you can, about our need for a proportionate system where parties have principles and we are not defined by the things that make us see each other into as evil fucks.

For example you can start with https://www.fairvote.org/what_is_proportional_representation...