[js2]

The GOP cannot win free and fair elections unless its willing to moderate its views and accept non-white and conservatives into the party. The GOP knows this. Barry Goldwater foresaw what welcoming the religious right into the party would do, and the GOP commissioned its own study (which it promptly ignored) about how to attract Black voters.

This has been terrible for both parties, the GOP obviously because through its own gerrymandering it’s beholden to extremists. And for the Democrats who assume Black votes and haven’t been forced to implement meaningful change since the Civil Rights Movement.

So we’re stuck with a party that has only a minority of votes retaining power through anti-democratic means.

The answer to me is more democracy, not less. I hope for a Democratic blow out in November, want to see the Supreme Court expanded, and hope to see legislative change to expand voting rights, overturn Citizens United and pass campaign finance legislation, and start using non-partisan commissions to establish voting districts. I also want to see a national popular vote for presidents. And we have to reform the Supreme Court... term limits, a rotating bench, something.

The Democrats do not have all the answers, but the opposition party has to be interested in democracy and the good of America.

[Fauntleroy]

There are a lot of lovely ideas here, but I'm shocked Ranked Choice Voting isn't among them. Sticking with First-Past-The-Post will keep us stuck in the two party system—it simply has to go if we're ever going to have more than two parties (or better yet: true independent candidates!).

[andrekandre]

link for those interested: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instant-runoff_voting

[krapp]

As far as I'm concerned the Republicans signed their death warrant when they decided to respond to Obama's election by ginning up the narrative of a "cold civil war" and "grassroots" right-wing reactionary movements like the Tea Party, implying Obama was such a danger to the country that an uprising would be imminent if not inevitable, were he allowed to remain in power.

I believe what they wanted was to repeat the Southern Strategy by fanning the fuel of racism, xenophobia and right-wing hatred among their white base (an obvious tack to take with Obama) but the Republicans underestimated just how extreme that base had become since the Goldwater days and how unhinged the presence of a black "leftist" in the White House made them.

The Tea Party, being a Republican Party proxy movement, wasn't anywhere near as radical enough as its purpose was maintaining the Republican status quo, and for all the Tea Party's talk of "watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants" and such in their campaign ads, wasn't going to give the right the blood in the streets that they wanted.

Thus, we ended up with the reactionary movement against both the left and the mainstream right in Trumpist populism, the rise of the alt-right and embrace of QAnon and other conspiracy theories, and the start of open violence by right-wing militias against black and leftist "agitators."

Barring some effective, widespread counter-Conservative movement to return the party to sanity and core non-crazy-racist principles (which doesn't appear to exist) the Republicans have no alternative now but to ride the Trump train all the way to the end, or else split and form another party.

[dfxm12]

To add, this didn't really start with the Tea Party. You can trace this violent and racist "New Right" [0] back to at least Reagan and the Kanawha County textbook controversy bombing in the mid 70s [1].

0 - https://www.ushistory.org/us/58e.asp

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanawha_County_textbook_contro...

[js2]

We're seeing the effects of capitalists having pitted laborers against each other in order to undo the New Deal coalition. It has many facets. For a very sympathetic view of coal miners, I highly recommend watching Harlan County, USA, made in 1976:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harlan_County,_USA

Coal miners have been getting screwed for generations.

I wonder how many Americans know about the Battle of Blair Mountain. I never learned about it in my history books.

[travmatt]

I’d start with Barry Goldwater and the rise of the conservative movement.