Spit-balling compromise ideas in today's political climate

Politics and religion
1

So the Mass Shooting in Pittsburgh thread had some interesting discussion about the current political climate.

Both sides are entrenched, we should be looking for compromise!

No, one side is full of bigots, racists who should be shamed into realizing their position is shameful!

But I looked around for a thread on ideas for compromise and I couldn’t find one.

I honestly think the political Right is so far deluded that it’s hard to think of any kind of ideas that could be reasonable compromises. But there’s no bad ideas in this thread. Spit ball anything and everything, and see if something semi-reasonable comes out of your head.

The other day President Trump was saying we should get rid of birthright citizenship. So I started turning that in my head. What would be a reasonably big enough target the left could try to aim for if they let the Right get rid of birthright citizenship? How about Climate Change? The Right acknowledges that man-made Climate Change is real, and agrees to implement a carbon tax and in exchange, the left agrees to a constitutional amendment to change it so that only children of citizens are born citizens.

2

That’s a pretty awful trade. A constitutional amendment vs a tax that can easily be revoked at a moment’s notice?

There’s quite a few things I think I can compromise on. People can keep their guns, but can we close some loopholes? I’m fine with examining security of our borders and enhancing it where necessary and effective, but can we talk about the real fact that we need legal immigration and we should be looking for ways to increase it?

I don’t think the modern day GOP is interested in budging an inch on either of those things.

3

Eye for an eye. He takes the 14th amendment, we take the 2nd.

4

They’re not equivalent targets. One is a huge, amorphous and way too easy for Republicans to slow down and obfuscate and derail (which they absolutely, positively would). The other is overturning a single rule.

5

I think gun control is the most likely place for compromise, as demographics push more toward those who support reasonable restrictions and away from the “any restriction violates the 2nd” crowd. Immigration reform too, but not for a while, as Trump has made it way too contentious to do anything soon.

6

There are many many areas on which compromise is possible ideologically, but Obama tried that stuff for years. He hobbled his own legislation bending over backwards to get GOP support. He nearly trashed the country’s economy doing it. Remember when he offered Boehner basically every Republican wet dream fantasy? Remember when the ACA was very similar to the plans promoted by the Heritage Foundation for decades? It certainly seems as if compromise is impossible–as if Republicans will only take “everything we want and nothing you want” as an answer. I don’t know where you go from there.

7

Are you looking for ideas about compromise only (that is, we have to some how do things the Trumpster fires want and things the libs want)? Or are you looking for ways to return to a functioning governing apparatus (other than just, “throw out all the bad guys”)?

I think two things need to happen to get a functioning apparatus back together in the short term:

  1. A group of folks with enough money and clout needs to fund the creation of a new party, based on the core principles of equal representation (that is, they strive to get the same percentage of support from all demographic groups) and evidence-based policy. So they campaign on broad themes and desired outcomes, and on the idea that policy specifics must be determined by rigorous analysis. Note that this should produce a centrist party that some of us leftists will be frustrated with at times.

  2. We need to figure out how the Fourth Estate works in the age of digital press and social media. Wikipedia shows a good example - not sure that everything should have that level of rigor, but if the major sources of online media like Apple News (the one that supplies stories on the phone), Google News (ditto for Androids / the Google homepage suggestions), Google search, Facebook, and Twitter all created systems by which specific articles or sites could be disputed, corrected, or simply flagged as unsupported, and if every article or post was accompanied by helpful cards showing related headlines that have not been marked disputed, then you would have a much healthier media diet. Would that be enough? Probably not. I think there also needs to be a culture shift away from the two keys to Trump: a) no more reporting what someone said as if that in and of itself is sufficiently newsworthy, no matter who the person is - the headline, the lede, and the article need to present people’s words in appropriate context and b) stop assuming people can’t understand details and evidence and start summarizing available details and evidence better (with links to more depth).

I do think 2 will happen eventually, in some form - there will be pressure to provide reliable content and that pressure will lead to a system of checks and balances in media reporting that tries to ensure people get the whole story (though it will probably look different from my proposed solution).

As for policy compromises - no one cares about those. Better is to articulate goals and criteria for success than to argue about whether a tax bracket should be 39% or 45% or whether minimum wage should be $15. The pitch might contain some amount of policy to give an idea of how to get there, like “Inherited wealth should be taxed” or “Education and healthcare should be subsidized by the government”, but the goals are the key point: reign in runaway wealth inequality and make essential health and developmental services available to everyone without exception regardless of their circumstances (or whatever other goals you come up with).

8

Here’s a compromise. Admit that science is real, and I’ll stop calling you a fucking moron.

Yeah, probably not gonna fly, is it?

9

It is kind of hard to articulate goals for compromise here. What Rock8Man uses as an example (trading a chunk of the 14th amendment for saving the planet) is a compromise of sorts, but I’d view it more of a “deal” since no one really got to any middle ground on either issue.

I’d be very willing to compromise with the GOP on any number of issues. Here are my starting positions:

  • I’d like the wholesale ban of all semi-automatic weapons to include handguns.

  • I would like universal health insurance for 100% of the populace paid for through higher taxes on stock payments and dividends.

  • I would like for the US to immediately implement measures that reduce our greenhouse gas output by 90%.

  • I would like a vast expansion in our immigration policy that encourages young, healthy, smart people to come to our country and implementation of a “guest worker” status that would strengthen our agricultural sector. .

But I’m willing to back down a bit on many or even all of these. I would be perfectly willing to meet the GOP somewhere in the middle on these issues. For instance, on climate change, I’d be willing to accept a compromise that only limits the upcoming climate-based deaths to… I dunno, a few hundred million?

10

Context:

  1. I don’t think either party is woefully out of step with demographics, except with regard to race where the Democrats are considerably less white than the population and the Republicans are considerably moreso. But on large general categories like income, age, education, and religious affliliation, though there are differences, they tend to each capture about half of voters.
  2. How do you enforce equal representation? Would you use a lottery system? Some sort of affirmative action for party membership?
  3. The Democrats are already a party with broad representation that campaigns on broad themes and desired outcomes and policy determined by rigorous analysis that is more centrist than many leftists might desire. What would a new party offer that’s different?
11

There are significant differences in terms of age (52% vs 42% under 50 for Dems vs GOP), in terms of education among white people, and in terms of gender (especially among whites). The religious affiliation numbers also matter a lot: 35 vs 8 for evangelicals (GOP vs Dems) and 12 vs 29 for Unaffiliated. All of these things have major effects on policy - if you are trying to appeal to Evangelicals because you’ve decided that’s your base, you are going to do a lot of things differently to match that demo. If instead, your goal is to find the groups whose support for you is low and adjust the policies that driving them away, you will have a more centrist (and probably less prone to racism) party.

You don’t enforce it, you just strive for it. You look for ways to appeal to the people who currently don’t like you, instead of steering into the ones that do. Note that I’m not saying this what all parties should do, I’m proposing it as a guiding principle for a centrist party.

Well, the Dems are actually skewed the other way as we’ve noted, so one thing offered would be more support for white evangelicals or whites with strong religious beliefs. Another thing would be a set of alternative ideas for how to solve problems that isn’t also accompanied by racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. Or at least, is accompanied by far less of those things than the current GOP. Basically, this would be a place for the Bidens, Manchins, Heitkamps, and Hillarys to get together with the Collinses and Romneys and McCains and Bakers. I personally would still be over on the Dem side voting for AOC and Warren and whoever else could articulate strong progressive values, but I think there are plenty who would find that group appealing, especially divorced from the GOP extremism.

12

In addition to the problem that the bulk of the current right wing defines compromise as “the right wing gets everything, the left gets nothing”, there is the huge problem of deception and breaking political norms.

For example, how do you compromise with GOP deception on health care? One of the key things Dems want is protection for people with pre-existing conditions and now Trump says the GOP will do that, except the GOP has no plans to expand or increase the ACA protections and in fact is vigorously engaged in fighting to reduce or eliminate those Obamacare protections for pre-existing conditions.

Or what about breaking political norms? How do you compromise with state legislatures that impeach judges and officials of the opposing party on flimsy and ridiculous grounds, then appoint themselves to be the Judges deciding the legality of their own actions? How do you compromise with a political group that repeatedly tries to stop your voters from voting so that a minority of voters can dominate a state?

Conceptually, there are compromises to be made on actual policy but the current GOP is a politically, ideologically, and cognitively bankrupt institution that reasonable people cannot actually negotiate with or compromise with.

In theory, if the GOP were to return to being a normal political party, we could consider compromise at that point. However, due to the perverse internal logic of the GOP base/media machine/synergy, that’s not going to happen.

The only solution is for the GOP to suffer sufficient political losses that it either returns to behaving like a reasonable party, or the GOP breaks up and a reasonable center/right party arises.

I keep coming back to Trump’s huge and ridiculous lies on health care. I mean, Trump says he wants to protect people with pre-existing conditions! That’s a huge compromise right there! Massive! Awesome! Let’s compromise!! But… Trump doesn’t have a proposal to actually expand or even defend protections for people with pre-existing conditions. The GOP doesn’t have a proposal to do that. Trump’s admin is fighting to reduce or remove the protections that exist in the ACA. The GOP in the states is doing the same thing.

You can’t compromise when the compromise is a lie. You can’t compromise when the other side has no respect for norms and no intention of operating in good faith. Compromise requires both sides to be willing to compromise, and that includes having a common foundation of truth, and common agreements on norms and working together in good faith.

I would love to be able to compromise with the GOP but they are just not an entity with which that is reasonable or advisable.

13

My idea of compromise would be to split the country up peacefully.

14

That’s gonna be one hell of a corridor between California and New York.

15

These can largely by consolidated to just “white”. Trump dominated among white folks in every demographic. The GOP is the white party.

[W]hen white pundits cast the elevation of Trump as the handiwork of an inscrutable white working class, they are being too modest, declining to claim credit for their own economic class. Trump’s dominance among whites across class lines is of a piece with his larger dominance across nearly every white demographic. Trump won white women (+9) and white men (+31). He won white people with college degrees (+3) and white people without them (+37). He won whites ages 18–29 (+4), 30–44 (+17), 45–64 (+28), and 65 and older (+19). Trump won whites in midwestern Illinois (+11), whites in mid-Atlantic New Jersey (+12), and whites in the Sun Belt’s New Mexico (+5). In no state that Edison polled did Trump’s white support dip below 40 percent. Hillary Clinton’s did, in states as disparate as Florida, Utah, Indiana, and Kentucky. From the beer track to the wine track, from soccer moms to nascardads, Trump’s performance among whites was dominant. According to Mother Jones , based on preelection polling data, if you tallied the popular vote of only white America to derive 2016 electoral votes, Trump would have defeated Clinton 389 to 81, with the remaining 68 votes either a toss-up or unknown.

I think the idea of a centrist party is interesting, but I fear it would mostly split Democrats and hand winner-take-all electoral victories to the GOP for all time. (Hillary, btw is ideologically quite progressive–closer to Sanders than to Obama. Obama, McCain and Romney were pretty middle-of-the-road partisans. That is, Obama is a pretty standard Democrat and McCain and Romney were/are pretty standard Republicans. None of theme are centrists in the way that McCaskill, Manchin, Heitkamp, Collins, Snowe, and Murkowski are.)

I tend to think the way forward lies more with your point 2. The stuff you posted about how Wikipedia moderates its content was really good. We really have to figure out, as a culture, how to handle a world where media can be consumed at will and in volume.

16

They could be, but the internal differences are still relevant, and Trump’s voters from 2016 are not identical to the GOP voters in general (though I suppose you could make the assumption that they are now). Still you can’t hand-wave away the disparity in college vs. non-college voters simply because non-college non-white voters were forced to vote Democratic by the crazed racism of the right. This also applies to non-white men and non-white people with religious affiliations. Saying that only race splits the parties because it splits them so extremely that it distorts all other demographics is not a great argument against the need for a party that steers against demographic-based divides.

Didn’t you just ask me why it would appeal at all to Democrats? I think there are plenty of people who would be amenable to candidates who tried to connect with them who didn’t have a D in front of their name. Instead of possible primary challenges follow by uncontested general elections, we could have actually contested elections all across the country, then a government controlled by 3 parties who had to like work together to get stuff on the agenda.

17

Our electoral system structure all but ensures that a three party split is, at best, a volatile temporary state. Two parties is the natural state of single representative, non transferable vote, first past the post systems.

It would require major reforms of allocation of representation to begin to be feasible for more than a cycle or two.

The unitary executive contributes, but is not insurmountable. A single transferable vote could make a 3 party system more stable, as it would no longer ensure that people have to game their vote. I.e. I would really like person A to win, but they are unlikely. I really hate person B, so I’ll vote person C since they are more likely to win.

Then the positions you actually want aren’t accurately represented in your vote, and it entrenched the two major parties. With a transferable vote you could rank them so that if person A had the lowest total your vote switches to C. Now you can vote for whom you really want to win, making sure your positions are more accurately reflected in the polls, while also not worrying that it hands the election to the person you like least.

The Ross Perot effect, if you will.

18

You’re going to have to explain this in more detail for me to accept your pronouncement. Two-party rule is the norm in fptp systems if you assume that the whole electorate votes for every office. But we don’t have that and the mix of preferences is wildly skewed between the electorate for different offices across the country. As a Democrat in Texas, I might have to choose between the Democrat I like and the Centrist who could win, but how is that different than the current system where the Democrats nominate people like Joe Manchin? The problem with the current system is that when party discipline and partisan polarization are very high, a vote for Manchin is a vote for Schumer and a vote for Collins is a vote for McConnell. Adding a central party creates a far more workable system.

So you’ll have to explain to me how it is unstable. Assuming that someone set it up and ran candidates in those gaps (and absorbed some of the low-hanging fruits like the red state Ds and blue state Rs), what would cause it to fall apart?

19

Losing. Look at the 1992 presidential election, about the high water mark for third party national voting. Yet the third party vote was either ineffective, or actively harmful to the electoral chances of Bush. The next election third party voting fell off a cliff.

The reason it is unstable is because with single non transferable votes you very easily have situations where theoeast favored candidate wins, due to the two more favored splitting votes too much.

Let’s say candidate A is the left, B the centrist, and C the right

A is the favorite of 35%, and the second choice of 25%
B is the favorite of 25% and second choice of 50%
C is the favorite of 40%, and second choice of 0%

10% of A have no second choice, and 15% of C have no second choice

In this scenario the centrist is the most popular, or at least most acceptable to the broadest swath of people. A decent compromise candidate. But there is a portion of hardliners on both sides who would be unhappy with them, 25%.

However, because voting is winner take all here, then the person with the least broad appeal wins.

And people notice. Note how many people were (wrongly I’d add) blaming Bernie voters, or Jill Stein and Gary Johnson voters, for Clinton losing. How many people got mad at third party voters, and blamed them for Trump? How many people who voted for them, say a Stein voter in Wisconsin, regretted what they thought was a harmless protest vote because Trump won? That, had they known, they would have voted Clinton?

Do you think those people would be more, or less, likely to vote for a third party? They’d go back to strategic voting. Not voting for who they really want perhaps, particularly in primaries even, but voting for who they see had the best chance of beating the person they really despise.

No, a third party would gain some support perhaps, and in best case scenario may even win, in which case they may totally supplant one of the existing parties. At which point the Whig party collapses and ceases to be within a decade, replaced by the Republican Party.

No electorally third parties are not stable members of our government. They either get coopted by one of the two major parties, or they actually cost elections for one of them, and garner a backlash as people are less happy about their least favored party winning instead.

20

Republicans are not interested in compromise. All one needs for proof of this is the comment Trump made after the Kavenaugh confirmation. Asked about his concern if his nominee is a rapist he replied “I don’t care. We won”.

That is the mentality. They must win no matter what the cost or what is good for the country. You cannot compromise with someone who is unwilling to do so.