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The more a party wins, the more the Overton window shifts in its favor.
If Democrats win enough times, Republicans will have to push less radical ideas to get a chance at being elected.
And if Republicans aren’t as much of a threat, Democrats will have to come up with an actual platform that isn’t just “we’re not Republicans”.
You can see the difference in Democrat Presidents from before and after the three consecutive R terms of 80-92, and how Middle-of-the-road the following ones have been. Which allowed Republicans to get more extreme.
We just need to make that happen in reverse.
By the same logic, the more either party wins, the more the Overton window stays fixed on the current systemic status quo being the only viable, or even imaginable system.
Both parties are unambiguously serving the interests of their respective elites. They're just using different tactics to distract their respective audiences. In both cases the core strategy is to evoke the strong emotional intuition that sacred values are being violated. For conservatives, those values are tradition, and especially sexual norms. For liberals, it's the protection of vivid victims.
The only actual solution is to stop fighting your enemies and start working together to actually redistribute power and reform the whole system.
Oh, worth putting out there, the other tactic I see often is to create the impression that the only alternatives are 19th century political philosophies: capitalism vs communism, etc. In reality, there is a massive space of potential global political and economic systems we could adopt, and we're in a much better position to work together as a single species to scientifically explore that space and design a stable global system than we were 150 years ago. But we can't get started while everyone is convinced that all they can do is vote for their team in the next election.
Then by that logic, how do you explain Republicans going more and more off the deep end after they kept on winning? The system isn't "fixed on the status quo", it's actively getting worse.
Both parties serve elites, that's true. But they can only afford to do that because one party promotes Christofascism and half the country joyfully votes for them, so the other can basically do nothing and still be the better choice for a sane person.
There's a lot that we could theoretically do to change the system, but is that possible when the majority of people in voting age are forced to have a stable job to survive and mass media does everything they can to push narratives in the few spare time they might have to get informed? I'd love if everyone could afford to organize general strikes to, for example, put in place an actually functional voting system instead of FPTP, but that's just not a likely outcome and probably won't be in our lifetimes.
Let me be clear, I'm not saying all we can do is vote for "our team". But we NEED to keep doing that, at minimum. Then, if you can afford it, you can also organize to push for reforms, protest, strikes and everything else. But if we keep on letting fascists take office because "the other side was better, but still bad so I didn't vote them", soon it'll even be illegal to do anything else.
To your opening question: in two dimensions, you can stay still in one while moving along the other.
We're in a complex multidimensional space of political/economic possibilities, but the current discourse keeps everything focused on a single left/right dimension as though that's all that matters. By ensuring you're only seeing that battle, always fighting the other half of the population, they prevent any possibility of change in other directions (e.g., massive capital market reform/redistribution).
I'm not American so can't speak to your detailed points about Republicans, but the same left/right, liberal/conservative division is happening everywhere, as well as the simultaneous acceleration of the polarisation of wealth, erosion of wealth redistribution systems and rapid destruction of our global environment for the short term gain of the ultra wealthy.
Insisting that you must constantly fight the other half of your country's population is an error. You are being distracted and misled. So are they. You don't win by beating them. You win by convincing them to stop fighting too.
The problem is that pretty much everything economic still moves on a left/right axis. Capital market reform/redistribution is a left-wing concept, and polarization of wealth, or lack of market regulation, is a right-wing one.
Then at present time there’s a lot of other concepts that have been stapled onto the simple economic axis to further divide the population, such as culture war, religion, discrimination and whatnot, but even if you remove all of that, there’s the fact that a lot of people simply don’t want wealth redistribution. The infamous “temporarily embarrassed billionaires”, as they’re often called. You can’t convince them to “stop fighting” if the very thing you want to achieve is the same one they’re fighting against.
The only way to convince them is to straight-up depropagandize them, to make them realize that the “American Dream” is bullshit, that they’re never going to magically become a billionaire and benefit from all the stuff they’re fighting for, and that wealth redistribution would benefit pretty much everyone on the planet. But there’s people that have tried and failed to do so with their own family, how possible is that to successfully do for the whole country? Especially when every form of information, whether it’s mass media or social networks, work to convince them of the opposite?
Yeah, this is exactly the dilemma we're facing. Some days I feel like it's impossible, our species is doomed and it's our generations' fault. This was the pivot point where we had the knowledge, the technology, the potential to organised ourselves to sustainably share this planet in perpetuity, but instead we chose short-term greed and factionalism.
I wouldn’t say it’s any generation’s fault, it’s simply that, even in a (supposed) democratic age, the elites still have way too many tools to sway the public consensus in their favor. Most people ultimately get greedy when they have the option to do so, and there can never be enough safeguards to prevent that from happening (or maybe there can be and we just haven’t thought of them yet, who knows).
Our generation (but mostly, the Silent Generation and Boomers) have in a sense enabled the elites to do so, but can you really say it’s our fault when the game was rigged from the start?
Thanks for the chat. It's rare to have an intelligent dialogue on here, especially when politics is involved.
I feel that if you can perceive/understand a problem and it's consequences, you become morally culpable for solving it, however hard that might be.
By "generation", I mean all the people alive today, and in the last century or so, rather than those discrete named decadal generations. Collectively, especially in the face of climate change and the accelerating consumption of non-renewable resources, we know that our actions could doom countless future generations. It's our responsibility to build a sustainable world. But instead we choose cheaper prices and immediate advantages for ourselves and our factions (nations, ethnic groups, political parties, cultural identity groups, etc).
Thank you too! I feel like a lot of times online discussions get derailed by tribal mentality, and that prevents both sides from understanding each other’s points, even when they might actually be similar. I think if we all focused on discussing our ideas without personal attacks or assumptions there would be a lot more intelligent dialogues, and while apparently not everyone agrees, it’s always nice when it does happen.
This is a valid reasoning, the issue is that mass media does its best to first convince you that there’s no issue, then that there’s an issue but the consequences aren’t that bad, then that the consequences are bad, but we can’t really do anything about it (the fact that Learned Helplessness is a named concept should be enough to tell how prevalent it is).
And even if someone manages to not fall for that and conceive a plan on how to change things, in a society where you have to work 40+ hours weekly for enough money to get by, how many people have the resources, time and willpower to work towards that plan?
I admit that my outlook might be too pessimistic, but I really feel like it’s going to be hard to correct course until there’s a very large amount of people in a situation so dire that they have nothing to lose. And while that could theoretically happen over time with the political landscape, I fear that for climate change we don’t have that much time.
You have me at a depressive phase, exhausted from my work week, so I fully agree with you. However, I know the more optimistic version of me would say:
But we overcame feudalism, we abolished slavery. These were also systems where the (incentives * power to change things) were strong and aligned to preserve the status quo. Still, our ancestors made the choices that made the world better for us, rather than for them. There must be a prosocial kernel in us, a drive we could appeal to if we could just broadcast a coordination signal loud and reliable enough.
I live in a remote town with a sizable population of city-raised, university-educated workers. I'm surrounded by people fully committed to both the liberal and conservative worldviews. Both groups have shitty individuals, exploiting the beliefs and biases of their faction for their personal advantage (the liberal ones tend to be smarter and more insidious, but all the worse for it; the conservatives dumber and more direct). But the majority of both groups are well-intentioned, caring people who would and do sacrifice for others. They're just all convinced that fighting the mostly good people in the other faction is what's right, rather than working together to change the game entirely. The challenge is to convince, to coordinate, not to defeat.
We overcame feudalism and abolished slavery in the strict sense of the terms, but did we really overcome the whole concepts or did they just shift to a more socially acceptable and insidious version of them? We do have what are commonly called “Technofeudalism” and “Wage Slavery”, and while they’re substantially better than the “original versions” for the “vassals” and “slaves”, the outcome for the ones benefiting from them are relatively the same: corporate giants can still get free money/services just by “renting” stuff they still have ownership on, and billionaires can pretty much “own slaves” from their perspective, since they get labor at a cost that is insignificant in relation to their net worth.
So, again the pessimist in me says, did we really get rid of those concepts with our own efforts or did most of the elites just “allow” us to do that after realizing it wouldn’t really be a problem for them (Mostly speaking about slavery, as quite a bit of time passed between feudalism and technofeudalism)? Will getting actually rid of those concepts be as “easy” as that? (Not that it was easy to get rid of slavery, but we did manage to do it in the end)
And most importantly, in the time since we abolished slavery we did gain more ways to organize across a country or across the world, but at the same time the ruling class gained mass media and social networks which are a MUCH more effective way of spreading propaganda than simple newspapers. What if that was the missing piece that ultimately allows them to make sure we can never get meaningful change going?
When something isn’t going well and we don’t think it’s our fault, the first instinct is to point the finger at someone else, and they know. That’s why the ruling class made sure that we keep pointing our fingers at each other so that the people pointing at them are never enough to consistently organize for change.