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They touch on how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, but legislation tends to get passed based on wh

They touch on how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, but legislation tends to get passed based on which party has the majority of reps at that time. (Then they immediately digress into a long discussion about Trump, unfortunately). This, to me, is a much more interesting issue than assessing the different ways of counting ballots like ranked choice or approval voting, which seem more like a dry mathematical exercise in tweaking some technical process that we don't fully understand to begin with. There was this interview I heard on C-Span with Sue Myrick where they asked her about this lack of bipartisanship in Washington. She said that it's simply because politicians no longer relocate there, but just fly in on Monday and fly back out on Friday. So their spouses don't get together anymore for social events, and their kids don't play on the same baseball teams anymore. They don't socialize in any meaningful way with the other representatives. If representatives are anything like normal people, then I'd wager the revocation of the Fairness Doctrine in 1985 had something to do with it, too. The news media does a pretty good job conditioning people into hating the other party.

dragonwriter 8y ago
> They also mention how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, The New Deal and Civil Rights Act were earthshaking bills that broke the existing partisan alignment and caused a realignment around them; they didn't happen often before, the two of them happening without a few decades was essentially unprecedented in US history. Bemoaning that things like that don't happen anymore is...odd. And, yes, the period of realignment that started with the New Deal, was just seeming to settle out before being reignited with the Civil Rights Act, and was largely complete by the mid-1990s, when the few surviving conservative Democratic holdouts finally jumped ship in the wake of the 1994 election had more other “bipartisan” legislation than was normal before or since, because the national parties and the major national ideological factions were out of alignment.

dragonwriter 8y ago

> They also mention how true bipartisan laws like the New Deal and the Civil Rights Act just don't get passed anymore, The New Deal and Civil Rights Act were earthshaking bills that broke the existing partisan alignment and caused a realignment around them; they didn't happen often before, the two of them happening without a few decades was essentially unprecedented in US history. Bemoaning that things like that don't happen anymore is...odd. And, yes, the period of realignment that started with the New Deal, was just seeming to settle out before being reignited with the Civil Rights Act, and was largely complete by the mid-1990s, when the few surviving conservative Democratic holdouts finally jumped ship in the wake of the 1994 election had more other “bipartisan” legislation than was normal before or since, because the national parties and the major national ideological factions were out of alignment.