[dragonwriter]

> The names of the parties Republican & Democrat aren't just random words, they represent the philosophical differences in where the bulk of the power in government should rest

No, they don't. Also, the two original parties were the Democratic-Republican Party of Jefferson, Madison, et al., and the Federalist Party of Hamilton, Adams, etc al.

Both, BTW, favored what is, I modern terms, a democratic republic and a representative democracy, though the Federalists initially favored a stronger central seat of power and the Democratic-Republicans favored a weaker central seat of power, though the bigger divide quickly became over foreign policy.

The Republicans weren't a major party until after the Federalist Party collapsed leaving a brief period of unstable one-party domination, then the D-Rs fractured, leaving the Democrats and Whigs in the Second Party system, then the Whigs later collapsed and the Republicans and the Democrats formed the Third Party system with the most critical initial issue being over not abstract form of government but slavery. While the identity of the two major parties has been the same since, their political alignment has changed several times; we’re now in what is generally regarded as the Sixth Party system.

[yucky]

Your post has the tone of disagreeing with what I said, yet never actually does.

The names of the parties change over the years, and the ideologies shift. But we have essentially always had one major party pushing to put more power directly into the hands of voters and another major party wanting to conserve the power in the established governmental frameworks.

The two current parties are no different in that regard. Democrats want to abolish the Electoral College and run government from Ballot propositions (direct democracy in action). Republicans are against those things and want to shift more power to the states of the Republic.

[Clubber]

My understanding is that the Democrats want to leverage a strong federal government to various aims (welfare, social security, medicare, medicaid, regulation, etc) while the Republicans want a smaller federal government and give the power to the states. This divide is about power of the federal government vs power of the states, or the Jeffersonian / Hamiltonian divide.

You've shown examples of where the Democrats want more direct democracy, so there's that too. I don't know if this is a recent phenomenon or not. I've never known the Ds to make much about it either way until you mentioned it.

[bmazed]

the US is a dictatorship disguised as a democracy..the dictators happen to be those with the most influence and $ which then they hand down generations..no 1 person has ever ruled the world, they are just the main face of the whole...both rep and dem are influenced by the same "shadow" entities..so it doesn't matter who wins from either side they all respond to the same people