HN Reader

The problems in the US are systemic. There will be no significant change without abolishing the two party system.

Weak. Ineffectual. Letting us down when it should be easy to lead against terrible policies. Good job, Dems.

These days the policy positions of each party are hashed out on social media by non-experts. For both the democrats and the republicans, instead of any sort of research or experts driving public policy decisions, it's instead the things that resonate with your average person's feelings as they scroll through their feed and get engagement.

The end result is of course populism. Each election cycle gets us closer to the policy positions of the Republicans being "Immigrants are bad" and Democrats being "Billionaires are bad".

We know where populism leads, and we've seen it for decades in south america. In a few decades, we will get to choose between the populist far left and the populist far right. Policy will get crazier and crazier and measurable societal outcomes will stagnate and perhaps go backwards.

This will continue as long as social media is the primary form of entertainment in the US.

> Political leaders and activists are petrified to go outside of a few slogans, because those slogans represent what the party writ large agrees on. They are actually angry when anyone demands they do so, making claims that there’s an attempt to avoid a “big tent” or engage in forms of inappropriate litmus testing, instead of seeing the demand to do the political work necessary to build a society.

I think this is really the core dispute, and I'd encourage the author to take it more seriously. Does the Democratic coalition work without pro-corporate liberals on board? How many people would jump ship if you excommunicated Reed Hastings and Ezra Klein, and which are the Republican voters who would be swayed to replace (and hopefully more-than-replace) them? Without good answers to these questions, there's a very real risk of creating an energized, passionate, anti-corporate Democratic party which simply does not have any path to 270 electoral votes.

"Chuck Schumer still imagines America as it was in 1980", in the author's words. But what this means is that Chuck Schumer remembers an era where California was a Republican stronghold, a poorly constructed Democratic coalition led to three consecutive Republican landslides, and they hung on in Congress only by maintaining the loyalty of legacy segregationists. He knows that it can happen again.