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[EuchreJack]

What future political theories are viable?
Personally, I'm dreaming about the future of the GOP.  But the Democrats seem to also be facing an existential crisis.
And I'm curious what other political parties exist, and how they exist.
Can new political parties ever exist? What would they believe, and how would they rise to prominence?

[Loud Whispers]

There will be the controlled opposition/proposition parties which will wage war against one another over issues like the colour we paint our walls all the whilst agreeing on allowing unregulated capital to consolidate, and then there will be the parties which will be called radical for suggesting that perhaps people come ahead of money

That's not a prediction for a future, just an observation of what has come to past, and what will yet still come

[EuchreJack]

Arguably, the first government was created when one person realized they had more than their neighbors, and wanted to keep their neighbors from taking it from them.

The protection of wealth was a founding principle of the United States.  The United State was created as a protest against taxation, and the first revolt it put down was to enforce its own taxation.

Unfortunately, Americans waste time talking about genitalia when they should be making sure their government is fair in taxation and spending.

The Democrats have a political system called Bribery.  You back them, they claim to help you.
The Republicans generally call upon God to mobilize voters.  You back them, or you surrender your country to the heathens.

[Quarque]

Can new political parties ever exist? What would they believe, and how would they rise to prominence?

Yes. But only if America can abolish the electoral college and replace it with a system such as you have all over Europe, with a popular vote. The electoral college is anti-democratic (unfairly giving people in rural areas far more voting power than others) and it kills any would-be new parties.

In Holland we have something like 20 political parties and new ones are started every year. (Most disappear pretty quickly, but sometimes they grow.)

[Loud Whispers]

Arguably, the first government was created when one person realized they had more than their neighbors, and wanted to keep their neighbors from taking it from them.

The protection of wealth was a founding principle of the United States.  The United State was created as a protest against taxation, and the first revolt it put down was to enforce its own taxation.

Unfortunately, Americans waste time talking about genitalia when they should be making sure their government is fair in taxation and spending.

The Democrats have a political system called Bribery.  You back them, they claim to help you.
The Republicans generally call upon God to mobilize voters.  You back them, or you surrender your country to the heathens.

I doubt it. The first government was probably formed by a collection of the biggest ooga chaka + the wisest malaka tunga + the fairest berry bunga. You leave a bunch of people on a ship for a few months and by the end of their journey they've either formed a government of sorts, or they've started ritually sacrificing one another. And once they're done doing that you usually end up with a government of sorts anyways.

Wealth and wealth protection is certainly a useful cornerstone of Anglo-Saxon law, but it is apparent that what has failed is that capital has become so consolidated and incestuous that the entire system, not just in the USA, but around the world, has awarded capital owners such privileges and power that the global economy is shifting away from responsible wealth production and just rampant rent seeking and wealth extraction.

Let's say you're one of the world's megacorps or megawealthy. You pay nothing in taxes because your wealth is tied up in assets which you've managed to legally bind up in careful holding companies or non-taxable events. You already have more wealth concentrated than it would take 1,000 generations of your descendents to spend. You do not need to make smart decisions, you do not need to work hard, simply by having access to this wealth you can then access vast sums of cheap credit. Using this cheap credit you can then purchase loads of assets, sitting on the appreciable assets you had, the assets that you acquired, and then benefitting by repaying using the inflated currency you receive.

But then let's say you're a poor single working professional. Most of your wealth is extracted in rents, often lost to the wealthy who purchased the house you live in on credit. Your salary is too low and your credit score unproven so you will never own the house you live in, even if you could afford the monthly interest payments, because the bank assumes you're a much higher risk post 2008. You can work harder and work smarter and still see your living standards continuously decline - which we do see amongst younger generations like Millennials or Gen Z, where each successive generation is living in smaller rooms than the previous, having less savings than the previous, less wealth in assets or pensions than the previous.

The consolidation of wealth to such an extent is venomous to the sovereignty of nations and people. It is no surprise that politicians stop listening to their constituents when they're hanging out at bars with people who own hundreds of billions - even trillions of dollars worth of assets under management. This is where true bribery and corruption takes place. When the decision making of your country rests in the hands of people no one voted for, you see the abrogation of your democracy in piecemeal. Voting Republican or Democrat doesn't really matter at the end of the day if neither is willing to do anything about it. You see this in the UK or USA for example, where actual radicals get abandoned by their own parties - or worse. Jeremy Corbyn in the UK was slaughtered by his own party after he announced he would make finance serve the economy, instead of the economy serve finance. As a result Boris Johnson has managed to survive multiple career-ending mistakes because labour-inclined voters see no point in voting for a labour party that is indistinguishable from the conservative party. Ditto for the Democrats. When Trump came to power, who did the Democrats ultimately select? Yang with his UBI proposal? Warren with her google antitrust proposal? No, they choose the only person on the planet capable of losing to Trump, because the need to keep wealth consolidated against the majority of the human race is too potent.

It doesn't even make economic sense. Since Adam Smith it has been proven knowledge that economies are at their most prosperous when people are given the means to pursue their own development and trades. Even to this day we accept that the bedrock of the economy rests on the shoulders of small and medium sized businesses, yet all of our politics focuses on the enrichment of mega-wealthy companies. All of the measures which would advance our nations - accessible quality education for the youngest, accessible quality advanced education for the young, public infrastructure development for accessible transit e.t.c. that should just be common sense are instead sacrificed on the cult like altar of privatisation, where the governments of our nations seem blind or indifferent to the madness of leaving a public necessity like healthcare or water under the auspices of a private company with no competition. Don't want to pay our prices? Go drink water and get medicine elsewhere peasants

Instead we get to watch as all of politics engages in an ouroboros of blatant corruption with politicians at every level of legislation ducking in and out of corporate boards as soon as their political tenure is over. Instead of arguing how they want to help the average family they want to argue whether reaper drones over Yemen should have an American flag or a rainbow flag on the tail. In many ways controlling who is selected for you to vote for matters far more than who you vote for, otherwise you'll just have the choice between two people who won't change shit for shack
Even voting reform of your electoral system won't change much if the parties are stacked with corporate BDSM slaves

[Quarque]

Even voting reform of your electoral system won't change much if the parties are stacked with corporate BDSM slaves

It would help a lot, though. With more parties to choose from, it would be much more difficult for corporations to bribe all of them. People would have alternatives to choose from.

[Loud Whispers]

True that

[McTraveller]

To start, people first must acknowledge the basic concept of a social contract.

If you don't have that as a basic starting point, everything else is moot; it really does devolve into "might makes right."

[EuchreJack]

So, this bullshit about megarich is just that.
Check out this list of the Top Richest People in the World.
They ALL made their money by their own ideas.^{or successfully stole new ideas, same diff}  Most are First Generation.

This whole "Let's blame it all on those rich people, because they're not me" is not new.
Elon Musk is the same as Thomas Edison. Maybe stop blaming the rich pioneers for all our problems?

To explain this symbolically, we're blaming the few people at the very top of the ladder, rather than the more despicable folks a few rungs down.

I find it quite interesting that people want to blame the MegaRich.  Why not blame the Sorta Rich?
Did you know that most politicians are the children of prominent business owners?

It isn't Elon Musks you should be complaining about.  It's the Barack Obamas and Donald Trumps you should be pissed at.

If you were born poor, you can become rich.  But if you were born poor, you CAN'T succeed in politics.  It takes one lifetime to get the wealth, and a whole other lifetime to use that wealth to enter into politics in any meaningful way.

[Loud Whispers]

Spoiler: -snip- (click to show/hide)

So, this bullshit about megarich is just that.
Check out this list of the Top Richest People in the World.
They ALL made their money by their own ideas.^{or successfully stole new ideas, same diff}  Most are First Generation.

This whole "Let's blame it all on those rich people, because they're not me" is not new.
Elon Musk is the same as Thomas Edison. Maybe stop blaming the rich pioneers for all our problems?

To explain this symbolically, we're blaming the few people at the very top of the ladder, rather than the more despicable folks a few rungs down.

I find it quite interesting that people want to blame the MegaRich.  Why not blame the Sorta Rich?
Did you know that most politicians are the children of prominent business owners?

It isn't Elon Musks you should be complaining about.  It's the Barack Obamas and Donald Trumps you should be pissed at.

If you were born poor, you can become rich.  But if you were born poor, you CAN'T succeed in politics.  It takes one lifetime to get the wealth, and a whole other lifetime to use that wealth to enter into politics in any meaningful way.

The problem of capital accumulation in a rapacious economy is beyond personalities. It's the entire structure which permits this to happen which needs correction; if tomorrow Bezos and Musk died or gave away all of their wealth, what would change? Many of these capital consolidations do not even belong to a person, like assets to Blackrock, or media to Disney, or infotech to Google. Imo this introduces multiple problems.

When all of US media is controlled by 4 companies and social media by 3 companies, it's self-evident this is a problem. A living room full of people set the limits of national discourse. But this is not the only problem; money talks louder than media. 12,000 lobbyists with $3.77B between them work around the clock to pervert the course of politics, such that even if you were to vote in some radical outsider or bog standard politician like Trump vs Biden, there won't be any actual change to the status quo. Given that the status quo has been engineered to benefit wealth consolidated around a small number of people and entities, they will spend considerable sums of money to ensure that their candidates win, and that their candidates serve their interests before the interests of the people. A look a the top spenders is telling. Is it any surprise that lawmakers will reward bankers for destroying the economy or disregard pharmaceutical companies for waging an opium war against the populace.
There are many megacorps and individuals who are collectively responsible for human misery on a scale the mind cannot comprehend, but that is besides the point. The fact that these entities and persons are willing to enslave people around the world, short change workers, get them drugged up and set the world aflame is also besides the point. The point is that this level of wealth consolidation is a danger to democracy, because it outcompetes the people when it comes to getting loyal public servants elected or employed. There is no point in having a democratic government if all of your elected officials and unelected officials are riding a merry go round between office and corporate desk. For all the problems you have, not a single one which affects the interests of consolidated capital can be resolved until the malign influence it has over politics is excised.

The sort of rich just don't introduce these kinds of problems because it's all a matter of scale. Someone who owns three houses is not a threat to democracy or an unaccomodatable influence on the local housing market compared to a hedge fund that bought up 30,000 homes in your town and is jacking the prices up. Barack Obamas and Trumps come and go, but the interests of consolidated capital remain constant. It is ever the great American tradition to break up monopolies - and it is a tradition which should be enjoyed once more if the American people are to actually enjoy the fruits of their labour, rather than see it all skimmed off to become dead money elsewhere.

Let's compare Elon Musk to some hypothetical industrious genius born at the same time as him. This hypothetical man is a real da vinci, good at everything he does, and hard working and humble to boot. Only problem is - he is African American and poor. Elon Musk is born into wealth and has emeralds slipping out of his pockets, so he never has to actually lift up a finger to labour, nevertheless he manages to acquire other people's properties and become successful. Now the banks love Elon, because he's got plenty of assets and is a low risk borrower. So when he wants to go to the grocery store and buy twitter or a new superyacht, instead of taking it out of his debit account, he borrows cheaply. The bank lets him borrow great sums cheaply because he owns lots of valuable assets he can sell in a pinch - so he gets the best on every account. He gets to enjoy the benefits of keeping his shares as they appreciate in value, the benefits of his newly purchased assets appreciating in value, AND the cost of the inflation such cheap credit issued for peoples and institutions like him gets passed onto ordinary people.
Meanwhile our da vinci has probably died in obscurity already because they could not afford university, could not access any credit at all to purchase a house, and the contributions they could have made to humanity wasted away in an amazon warehouse. Being poor is expensive; being rich is cheap. I always find it funny that Americans 100 years ago were proud to be a nation of hard workers, but now their false gods are sheltered men whose lives have never experienced a day's work, whose fortunes were made just taking ownership of someone else's efforts, risk and genius.

This is how economies fail - no point in trying when the chief determiner of success is not hard work and talent, but just having money to harness those who do. And when you have the economy at it is now, with rents through the roof and wages below the floor, it just becomes pointless

tl;dr
it's dangerous
it's illegitimate
it's unfair
and it's self-defeating

[EuchreJack]

No wonder kids are shooting up schools.
The solution: Take the guns from the poor people.
Can't risk them shooting rich kids.

Like seriously: Does anyone truly think any gun regulation is going to stop rich people from arming themselves and the people that provide their security?

[MrRoboto75]

They ALL made their money by their own ideas.

Wow, the ability to pay for things online and an online bookstore.  Never would have occurred to anyone.

[MaxTheFox]

I once made a misc politics thread, but it died.

Can new political parties ever exist? What would they believe, and how would they rise to prominence?

Yes. But only if America can abolish the electoral college and replace it with a system such as you have all over Europe, with a popular vote. The electoral college is anti-democratic (unfairly giving people in rural areas far more voting power than others) and it kills any would-be new parties.

In Holland we have something like 20 political parties and new ones are started every year. (Most disappear pretty quickly, but sometimes they grow.)

I understand why the electoral college is a thing (so rural states don't get shafted), but it's clearly working poorly.
And yeah, like I care that the billionaires put in effort. They all need to be cut down to size. There are no exceptions.

[EuchreJack]

They ALL made their money by their own ideas.

Wow, the ability to pay for things online and an online bookstore.  Never would have occurred to anyone.

You forgot to include the subscript: "or successfully stole new ideas, same diff"
The key to success is not having a new idea but knowing how to make money off of an idea.

And for the record, Thomas Edison was as much of as asshole as Elon Musk. That was really my point. They even covered it in a Doctor Who episode.

What I am so desperately trying to explain is that the United States of America was Founded by Rich Assholes. Everyone is complaining about Rich Assholes like these are the first ones to ever do this shit.  They're absolutely not.

Anyone ever heard of Robber Barons? A handful of them tried to manipulate the Gold Market so Only They had any money whatsoever.

[MaxTheFox]

Anyone ever heard of Robber Barons? A handful of them tried to manipulate the Gold Market so Only They had any money whatsoever.

They are also trash.