Americans - explain to me the difference
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So I always wondered (and am too lazy to actually Google it, plus seed bonus) what is the biggest difference between republicans and democrats and how is the president elected? ???
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republicans are more conservative, they oppose gay marriage and abortions and promote gun ownership, usually are very religious and most of the time bring religion into politics. While democrats are more liberal and more progressive and is in favour for abortion and gay marriage while do tend to go for stricter gun laws. Those are main social issues. There are more difference in other areas, however i felt that these where the most distinctive ones.
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Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves, was a Republican, but things change over time and since Dem Lyndon Johnson got the Voting Rights act passed in the 1960s, the parties have shifted position on race issues. Johnson predicted his party would lose the South (former Confederacy) for a generation. The racists who supported segregation and supported "Jim Crow" laws of the type that required blacks to ride in the back of the bus, separate drinking fountains for different races, and so on, began leaving the Democratic party in favor of the Republic*nts.
Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and others began their presidential campaigns by using the "southern strategy" to recruit voters, using "dog whistles" that could only be heard by friendly deviants. In a 1981 interview, legendarily ruthless campaign adviser Lee Atwater explained how that worked:
ATWATER: You start out in 1954 by saying, "Nigger, nigger, nigger." By 1968 you can't say "nigger" – that hurts you, backfires. So you say stuff like, uh, forced busing, states' rights, and all that stuff, and you're getting so abstract. Now, you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is, blacks get hurt worse than whites.… "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, uh, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger."
Not surprisingly, then, his party's insistence on dealing with nonexistent "voter fraud," the failed "war on [some] drugs," charter schools, for-profit private prisons, and privatizing government services, all have a substantial racial component. Just recently, those behind the ban on marijuana were found to have admitted that their motivation was substantially racial.
Three-term Dem president Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) created much of what passes for today's welfare state in the U.S., creating Social Security, protections for labor unions, and much else that pulled the country out of the Republic*nt-caused Great Depression. Its sequel, the Great Recession in which military-deserter Bush tried to steal everything left standing as he left office, was prevented from absolute global catastrophe by bailouts for the banksters who created the problem after Repugs managed to wipe out financial protections installed by FDR to control the plutocrats. That was in line with what an earlier Roosevelt, Rethug Teddy, did when building his career as a "trust buster."
Now, of course, every major Rethug is married to supply-side economics, the demonstrably failed theory that making the rich richer will help prosperity trickle down. Even though everyone is heartily sick of being trickled on (tinkled on?), and even though US states like bankrupt Kansas and Louisiana (taken from cash surplus to growing deficits by Repug governors) demonstrate how that theory is more holey than righteous.
Comedian Will Rogers decades ago said "I belong to no political party; I'm a Democrat." At the moment, the Dems are fairly united and it is the pig party that is clawing at each other's throats. It is that party that had Sen. Joe McCarthy waging bogus anti-Commie witch hunts, and which still defends the old skunk today. They also still defend Japanese Internment Camps and slippery Dick Nixon, who began his infamous political career helping old "Tail Gunner Joe" in his divisive political smears. Now, wrapped in a cloak of religion (the one true religion, mandated by the one true god) these same folks are passing laws all over the country to suppress gays and lesbians who want to marry, live in their own home/apartment, and even hold a job.
Recent reactionary laws passed in Indiana, Mississippi, and North Carolina are some of the more obvious examples of their pandering to the claim that religion trumps federal laws and takes precedence over court decisions as well. That same argument was used to uphold slave-holding, back in the day. It also allows abortion doctors to be murdered for doing legal medical work that saves lives, making them "baby killers" responsible for murdering fetal-Americans, apparently for fun and profit.
St. Ronnie the Dim, patron saint of narcolepsy, let the Aids epidemic flourish for years without acknowledging it in public. He famously said government is not the answer to problems because "government is the problem." Also, in response to Vietnam error protests, said "If there's to be a bloodbath let it be now." His stand on the environment is made clear when he spoke of saving trees thousands of years old– "If you've seen one redwood, you've seen them all."
That's a far cry from Rep. Teddy who created the National Parks Service, but right in line with the ammosexuals who supported the Branch Stupidian (Bundy) takeover of federal land in defiance of the common good. Similarly, it was Gen. Dwight Eisenhower, in charge of Allied forces on D Day, who sent in troops to integrate schools in Mississippi (where, just this week, a married inter-racial couple was kicked out of a vacation park for not being lily white), and who created the national highway system.
But that was then, and now he would be considered a RINO-- Republican In Name Only. Which is why the nation's infrastructure is collapsing and for a claimed cash savings, largely black Flint, Michigan is being poisoned by the state's crooked governor.
It is not Dems who are primarily campaigning for segregation, an end to women's health rights, equal pay for equal work, an increased minimum wage, decent medical care, and more wars in more countries. It is not Dems who are known for denying global climate change or promoting the fantasy that the universe is only 6,000 years old (Noah had dinosaurs with him on the ark).
Not all members of either party agree on whether there should be a protective wall along part of the US border, whether fracking is good for the environment, or whether women, like corporations, "are people too, my friend." But pretty much only one party longs for an idealized America that never existed, is terrorized by changing demographics, thinks torture is a fundamental American value, or believes Bush the Lesser "kept us safe" (while creating ISIS).
These are some differences between the two parties. Since there is, as showman P.T. Barnum never actually said, "a Republic*nt born every minute," no doubt someone more brainwashed by Faux Noise will be happy to correct the record and explain why shutting down the federal government, raising taxes on the poor (while cutting them on the rich), abolishing the Environmental Protection Agency, defunding consumer protection efforts, and not allowing the uppity Kenyan usurper to appoint people as the Constitution explicitly requires him to do.
Remember, these are the people who claim credit for the Civil Rights movement, and allege that Fascism is a liberal conspiracy. They may also explain why bailing out the US auto industry is a communist plot and why deficits matter more than people, ideology more than historical accuracy in text books, and investing in clean energy is a quick road to destruction.
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Well as can be seen by a prior poster, the differences are so simple that it can be answered by saying, "them bad, we good." If it only was that simple. The vast majority of Americans are neither Republican or Democrat, but vote on who the lesser of two evils is because we realize the only good politician– the kind that can do no harm, is a dead politician. At its inception, government was considered an act of public service, but now seems to be not only a career-choice, but a way of life that is vested in only worrying about the next election and trying to cover their own ass.
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Republicans believe in small government and allowing the people control the distribution of wealth. Democrats are more likely to give that power to the federal government.
As for social issues, some republicans are stuck in their religious toxic cesspool like Ted Cruz. That's why I am supporting Trump or Kasich since being economically fiscal matters more to me.
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I think we can agree that most political parties in the US and abroad tend toward some kind of good-bad dichotomy that is somewhat Manichean. The citizen political servant who goes into government service for a time and then returns to the private sector has hardly been the case anywhere for decades.
But only one party pretty much claims to be an arm of the one true god fighting against Satanic opponents. When you hear that some traffic cop or local board member insists on using their position to proselytize, talk about Jesus, and make each encounter into a revival meeting, you can bet what their political party is. Similarly, when some official casually says that if they don't get their way, ammosexual violence is the solution, that officeholder or party apparatchik is not committed to rational discussion, negotiation, and compromise rather than violence and threats of violence.
Right now, a supporter of one party's presidential frontrunner has threatened to unleash personal confrontation against delegates, which is not that great a difference from making personal attacks on the wives and children of competing political figures. This contemptible backing for the law of the jungle is not universal. And it is not any state run by Democrats that has made a top priority the victimization of women, legalizing intolerance and hatred against minorities (see North Carolina's absurd bathroom laws), and suppressing the vote. Wisconsin's Republic*nts just made it much more difficult and expensive to cast a ballot, and making that happen was, at least in private, cheered as a maneuver to cheat Democrats out of self-representation. Pretty much the triumph of mad King George, with predictable results.
There is an ongoing myth that the party most desperately and openly committed to making sure government cannot work (by refusing to appoint judges, for example, or make sure that boards and agencies have enough funding and personnel to do the jobs Congress set for them to do.
If people were in charge of their own money, why is it that the top one tenth of one percent receive almost all of the income and, while paying nearly nothing in taxes, still own more of the nation's wealth than almost all of the rest of the nation? Productivity is up, but the average worker has seen wages remaining flat for decades.
If individuals are to control their own money, why does one political party continue a longterm campaign to destroy labor unions? To oppose an increase in the minimum wage rather than abolish it? Markets no longer exist to serve the people; the people exist to serve the market. Democrats, with their wild-eyed theories about equal pay for equal work and such old nonsense as paid vacations and the 40-hour work week and extra pay for overtime, don't seem to be the ones against putting people's control of their own lives into their own hands.
There is a notion, too, that decisions should be made at the lowest level rather than inflicted from above. Yet N. Carolina just took control over LGBT rights AND minimum wages, because someone on high objected to what local governments were doing, with the support and consent of local voters. Oklahoma now has far more earthquakes than California, caused by new methods of squeezing fossil energy out of the ground (fracking) no matter the cost or risk to local residents. Thus, states are now making it illegal for anyone closer to the danger zone to have any control over fracking at all.
In Michigan, the governor assumed control over a number of cities, rendering their elected office holders completely powerless. So now schools are falling into disrepair, afflicted with mold, and have fungus growing out of classroom walls. The governor has just been sued for running an alleged criminal enterprise for poisoning the entire population of one town through irresponsible conversion to water that is sometimes a hundred times the danger level officially defined as too high for actual sewage, much less for drinking water.
Have you seen the Oscar-nominated film "The Big Short"? A number of major movie stars tell the disgustingly true story of how the world's economy was brought to its knees by outright fraud. And keep your eye on this week's revelation of the Panama Papers, documenting worldwide fraud and the means banksters illegally pay secret bribes to countries in the Middle East. China and Russia have been exposed for financial shenanigans and the prime minister of Iceland has resigned, but there is much more to come, criminal investigations have been launched around the globe, and the US role has not yet begun to be aired.
As long as engorged plutocrats are shipping jobs and wealth overseas, fairness is out the window. Lots of blame to go around, for sure, but supply side mythology has long been exposed, and right now "serious" people are talking about plugging a ringer into the convention process, the man behind the shameful and despicable Ryan Budget of unicorns and hot air that every single Republican has voted in favor of, generally more than once.
These are the people who would have killed auto manufacturing in the United States and boasted about it. These are the people who have more than once shut down the U.S. government and threatened not to pay the nation's bills, which is a fundamental and sworn obligation now held in contempt as nothing more than political leverage.
You can believe all of this is true because I am a fair and impartial observer with no ax to grind. Or you can take a little time to check it out for yourself. How, for instance, Kansas is falling to financial ruin while next door Missouri is thriving. Or how Gov. Jingle in Louisiana turned a surplus into increasing annual deficits and still thought he should be president. Or you could track rising GDP (gross domestic product) against flat wages. Or check how it is that corporate "job creators" are now making a hundred times what their company's average worker makes, instead of the fraction such officials used to be satisfied with.
There is a myth that the market is a level playing field. It ain't. And when banks gamble with customer money and lose, everyone suffers. Well, except that last time the Treasury had to bail them all out, and nobody went to jail. Instead, they all paid themselves massive bonuses. iCarly was in charge of legendary Hewlett-Packard and escaped with a golden parachute even as the company itself went up in flames. A massive gas leak that poisoned the air for months in Southern California was finally put out and the head of the company in charge is now swimming in obscene rewards for doing such a good job.
One party talks a lot about creating jobs, but when they took control of congress less than two years ago, they proceeded to do exactly nothing. What with spending most of their time on vacation and dealing with such partisan hackery as Benghazi (with one investigation after another coming to the same conclusion that there was nothing improper), repealing Obamacare nearly a hundred times, and freaking out over abortion because of a bunch of criminal mockumentaries that may still put the perps in the slammer. None of this hysteria had anything to do with creating a budget (still not passed and the deadline is approaching once again) or rewriting the tax code or protecting consumers (from credit card fraud and "payday lender" usury, for example), but to really screw things up it takes Republic*nt, and there's one of them born every minute.
Thus have we heard.
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Now the airhead behind the "Ryan Budget" balanced by unicorns and pixie dust (and which all available members of the prion-diseased fifth column in D.C. has endorsed) is pretending not to run for president if the forthcoming Cleveland con goes as currently expected. These illustrations may help explain the difference between some positions taken by Rs and Ds.
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I don't think there is much differences between the two parties now, however, I think there are conservatives and liberals on both sides
