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So, we need a refresher on how minority rule has done?

Craig234

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Here's the thing. I'd like to comment on how minority rule has been terrible. But the people who support the minority candidates, in my opinion, are largely 'brainwashed', so there's not really a way to have a rational conversation with them. They'll look at a 6'2 Democrat and say he's short and a 5'6 Republican and say he's tall. Having said that.

All that this electoral system we have that distorts the value of votes to put the thumb on the scale for small states does, is for no good reason but historical political issues, arbitrarily give some Americans more say than others, which rarely even gives us minority rule from a president, and more often minority rule in the Senate.

I won't try in this post to go into the disaster of this overweighting of votes in the Senate, leading to Republicans having more power than they should, resulting in the killing of hundreds of good bills the House passed that would have passed under a fair system. I'll just mention the two clear minority rule presidents.

It'd be possible for an unfair, corrupt system of minority rule to give us a great president and prevent the majority from picking a bad one. Let's say JFK had been a minority president; we might say, "the system wasn't fair, but it benefited the country in his being elected instead of Nixon." But that's not what's happened.

My point is that while the unfairness is its own flaw, it's also resulted in disaster for the country.

In one case, George W. Bush was a president elected by a minority of votes, over Al Gore, a politician who was the leading politician in creating the Internet and a champion of preventing great harm to the climate.

Instead of what good things he'd have done as president - with just an obvious item that he would NOT have disbanded the anti-Osama bin Laden operations that might well have prevented 9/11 - we got Bush, a buffoon, elevated by the wealth and political power of his father, who gave the country a big increase in inequality with huge tax cuts for the rich; who overnight wiped out the deficit reduction from eight years of Clinton/Gore with wasteful spending; who responded to 9/11 with a huge increase in the US 'Security State', creating the 'Department of Homeland Security', and using the even to start a war on Iraq based on lies, for the purpose, he'd admitted as a candidate, of increasing his "political capital" as a "war president" to pass unpopular pro-plutocracy economic policies, that gave us Dick Cheney and torture, black site and Guantanamo operations, illegal warrantless wiretapping, and lax oversight helping lead to the Great Recession.

Those are just samples - for example, the Great Recession had him hand the power to respond over to Wall Street figures who pushed through nearly a trillion dollars to be doled out to Wall Street firms, by a former Goldman-Sachs CEO, secretly without any oversight or accountability. His mismanagement of the Iraq post-war is historic, including disbanding the Iraq army creating a massive insurgency. I haven't gotten to his starting the 20 year Afghan war.

And then we had another minority president, trump, and it's not worth even giving the summary as I did for Bush - people either know the disaster or they're in the cult. But we're seeing some of the fallout in the 1/6 hearings.

While Hillary was the second most disliked modern presidential candidate after trump, I think it's clear she probably would have been far better on most issues. Just for one, we might have seen harsher treatment of Russia, as it fought the Ukraine war launched in 2014, instead of having a president who served Putin, that might have led to Putin being less able to launch the bigger invasion in 2022.

So apart from the fairness issues of minority rule, the violations of democracy, it's also been a disaster for the country by giving us the two worst presidents in the country's history, instead of the US continuing the Clinton policies which had reached an annual surplus, not starting two bad wars, not signing two massive tax cuts for the rich redistributing trillions from the American people to the rich, further corrupting our politics, and a lot more. We wouldn't have an attempted presidential coup. We wouldn't have a Supreme Court stacked with radical far-right corrupt Justices, four placed by those two presidents. We wouldn't have 'Citizens United' and many other corrupt rulings by only the radical right-wing Justices. We'd have had all kinds of better policies. The one previous Democratic presidency this century saw the longest economic expansion in history.
 
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