| sc94597 said: Just want to point out that neither party is representing the majority of American people and any claim of "mandate" is over-blown here (or any recent election really.) If either of the major parties appealed to the majority of voting-eligible American adults who didn't vote, enough to get a sizeable minority of their votes, they would be a dominant party in the same way the Democratic-Republicans were in the Era of Good Feelings, the Republicans were for decades after reconstruction, and the Democrats were in the New Deal era. This should be what the Democrats focus on solving in the next few years. How can one capture this large, majority, disaffected population? What are the issues they care about? I can guarantee it is not the things either major parties focus on. |
The government is broken, and it can't be fixed with Republicans in power because that was their goal. The Republican goal is to shift responsibilities from the government to the private sector, so they do not want to allow government to be used as a tool to solve the problems that Americans face because that would undermine their goals.
Public education is bad? Well that is the point. It makes it easier for them to say "Maybe we should get rid of the Department of Education and funnel kids into for-profit private schools".
So, when the Democrats get some degree of power, they have enormous systemic forces preventing them from making those huge changes that would be needed to really capture that disaffected vote. They are forced to make small changes because it is much easier to break the Department of Education and stand in the way of progress than it is to fix these problems. And that disaffected population is too detached from politics to see what is happening, both in terms of the smaller improvement that the Dems are making and the obstacles that the Reps are creating.
