On Wed, 9 Jan 2002 07:20:34 -0500 "Nathan Newman" <nathan at newman.org>
writes:
> What are the parties disagreeing on? Whatever there is to vote on,
> which is all a legislator can disagree upon--- if there is no amendment
> offered on socializing the oil company, it really doesn't matter whether a
> candidate would have voted for it, does it?
-Isn't that the point in contention here? The fact that a rather limited -range of issues upon which there is only a limited range of disagreement -ever comes into play in our political system. Despite the statisitical polarization -between the two major parties, there is little fundamental divergence -between them in terms of worldviews. The Democrats are not -about to propose legislation for nationalizing the oil companies -nor even for taking over the healthcare industry any time soon.
People on this list either engage in breathtaking ignorance or disingenuousness, as if they had never heard of a parliamentary "rule." For those who have never heard of the beast, it means that nothing can even be voted on unless a majority agree to allow a vote. Any controversial idea or proposal dies in the Rules committee long before any vote ever happens.
So the "Democrats" only can propose a controversial idea and get a vote if they have the agreement of the most conservative members, who hold the power to team up with Republicans and block the vote. You could have 45% of the Congress stone-cold Marxist-Leninists and never see a single vote occur on anything remotely progressive.
Plenty of Democrats (as opposed to a nonexistent "the Democrats" which does not exist as a singular) have proposed nationalizing the oil industry -- check back in the 70s - but there weren't the votes to bring it to a vote.
Legislative fights happen on the 50-yard line because the moderate players located there get to set the rules that the ball never moves more than 10 yards either direction. You could replace 100 Democrats with Greens, Blues or Reds of whatever shade and that basic fact would not change.
And until folks learn enough about the legislative process to recognize this, most of the leftwing analysis of electoral politics in America will remain disconnected from reality. The median Democrat in Congress is for single-payer health care, massive increases in social spending, for gay rights, abortion funding for poor women, radical labor law reform, and almost every progressive wish list item imaginable. The problem is electing more of them to overwhelmn the conservative Dems and moderate Republicans who define what gets voted on and passed today.
-- Nathan Newman
>
> As with most statistics, the interesting information is not what the
> split
> in parties means in any year, but the trend over time. And what is
> most
> interesting is that in mid-century and immediately after, it was
> hard to see
> any clearcut divide between the parties, as conservative Dems mixed
> on the
> graph with liberal Republicans. What is interesting is that the
> defections
> of Southern Dems to the GOP visually reveals the increasing
> polarizaiton of
> votes between the parties.
>
> Nathan Newman
>
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