You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

Randaly comments on Open thread, July 29-August 4, 2013 - Less Wrong Discussion

3 Post author: David_Gerard 29 July 2013 10:26PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (381)
Tags: open open_thread

Comments (381)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Randaly 31 July 2013 01:36:26AM 2 points [-]

At least in American politics, this seems to me to be cyclical: conservatives were very tightly united during the 80's and 90's, and are presently fairly divided. (Their present divisions are partially papered over by the two other factors that lead to increased party-bloc voting- the end of racism as an effective issue that ran across party lines, and a general increase in party-line/ideological voting that also shows up among Democrats. Non-substantive votes like the historic near-failure of Boehner's run for House Majority Leader, and the Party's internal discussions, show divisions better.)

Comment author: Prismattic 31 July 2013 02:08:53AM 2 points [-]

There have been some substantive examples as well. The TARP vote was considerably more divisive for Republicans than for Democrats. Both parties were about equally divided on the recent Amash Amendment vote (to defund the NSA).

Comment author: johlstei 31 July 2013 04:24:54PM *  0 points [-]

I don't think the racism as an effective issue is over. Atwater's southern strategy seems alive and well to me. This was first executed (successfully?) by Reagan and the pattern seems to hold. Here's Atwater's quote on the matter:

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 forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me — because obviously sitting around saying, "We want to cut this," is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than "Nigger, nigger.

Comment author: Randaly 01 August 2013 12:01:09AM 1 point [-]

This is not relevant to what I said, for several reasons. First, guessing at your beliefs, you almost certainly believe that only one party today is racist; therefore, racism is not an effective issue that runs across party lines. (Note that until the 60's-70's, the South was split between Democrats and Republicans; there were effectively four political groups in the US: racist Democrats, racist Republicans, non-racist Democrats, non-racist Republicans. This screwed with party-based analysis of voting patterns.) The second is that, so far as I know, Congress no longer holds any straight-up-or-down votes on racism ala the Voting Rights Act; racism itself is not an issue, as nobody would vote for it.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit