(03-11-2019, 04:52 PM)jagibelieve Wrote: I don't know if I would call it a "civil war", but there is a "war" heating up in politics these days, mainly in the democrat party.  Their "face of the party" is leaning further left into socialism and their "base" or "establishment" part of the party is having a hard time reigning all of that in.  I'm thinking that the democrat party's only hope of winning the presidency is to run somebody like Joe Biden.

Having said that, I do believe that politics today, especially for the younger generations leans more towards the left-leaning part of the democrat party.  The democrat party is going to change their playbook and target millennials, genZ'ers etc. even more which can and will change the political landscape of this country.  Gone are the days of compromise and actually getting things done.  I think the last time that happened was when Bill Clinton was President and Newt Gingrich was The Speaker.

The more that the political "leadership" moves towards the left and socialism, the more I fear for our country.

We've had lots of socialists in government twice before. Once In the late thirties and once in the mid-60s. Both times they were a minority in the Democratic party, and both times they had to cooperate with capitalists to get the votes they needed. These socialists campaigned for government unemployment insurance and a 40-hour work week and things like that. But they couldn't pass those things without help, because they never won enough elections. And then their help went away whenever they agitated for something more radical.  
So our history with them has actually been lucky.
Many other countries have not been so lucky.
There is an inflection point between simply trying to help more and more people and trying to make sure that the people will never be able to remove you from power.  If we ever elect a leader who wants to cross that inflection point, history and international experience show that there is no sure way to stop them.
I think those who came before us were able to switch so quickly between working with socialists and fighting against them because they thought about things on a case-by-case basis. Ideology is too strong now. Political ideology is nothing more than a fiction that those who gain power invent to explain why they should stay in power. In the 1600s, the divine right of kings was a political ideology. 400 years from now, historians will attempt to reconstruct our government and society and they will be able to make sense of taxes and spending and they will understand law and order. but they are likely to find our ideologies as ridiculous as we find the idea of a divine right of kings.

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