There are no moderate Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Oh, no doubt some members are privately appalled by the views of Mike Johnson, the new speaker. But what they think in the privacy of their own minds isn’t important. What matters is what they do — and every single one of them went along with the selection of a radical extremist.
Or how about instead of multiple political parties with arbitrary distinctions across a central divide having a party that attempts to represent one standard deviation around the norm and uses data to decide its platform?
Essentially support nothing unless 68% of the country supports it in multiple reputable polls.
While it wouldn’t yet support universal healthcare (only 5% away from that marker and trending towards it), the party would absolutely be against cuts to Medicare and Social Security.
It would have been supporting preventing people with mental illness from owning guns for years now, and increasing the age to purchase to 21.
Term limits and max age for Congress.
Preventing Congress’s stock ownership and trading.
Giving Medicare the ability to negotiate drug prices.
Raising the minimum wage.
Weed legalization (as of last year).
Yet somehow when we break these up into competing parties where all that matters is that the other side doesn’t get a chance to win because each side loudly focuses on wedge issues or expanded scope popular to their side and unpopular to the other, we end up with representatives that do jack to further any of the above issues.
I’d really love for a data driven party focused on the central majority. Because even though I’m personally more progressive than that party would represent, the battle becomes shifting public mindset on the topics I care about but in the meantime topics everyone cares about will at least be getting work done to advance.
Let’s have a single party that wins every election because it appeals to a significant majority of the country rather than more small parties that represent less and less of the country, and have primaries for that party run with ranked choice voting.