Try and come up with a political platform that will somewhat please the other side...

[Thank you for being a friend...]

...without giving up your own convictions.

I'll try:

- Promote family values by allowing parents of newborns to stay home with their babies instead of having to work.

- Mandate that every high school teach religion (in a historical context) and religious ethics.

- Allow armed, responsible gun owners (in everyday clothes) to patrol schools to act quick in the case of a school shooting.

- Search for ideas on how to reduce the need for taxation by generating government revenues in other ways.

- Decentralize the federal government and create a second federal capital city out West... basically spread the power outside the Beltway elite.

[This user has not been convicted of 34 felonies]

Not all things I fully agree with but think some folks on the right could co-sign:

-Break up Big Tech companies and promote “free speech” on social media platforms by encouraging tech companies to allow all viewpoints.

-Reign in corporate welfare, force all companies to pay back loans given in times of economic crisis, and penalize companies whose CEOs take bonuses before a loan is fully paid back

-Limit gun control measures, institute a voluntary weapons buyback and promote proper gun safety and education. Oppose banning the sale of any weapons.

-Federally decriminalize marijuana and allow states to set terms of legalizing marijuana

-Invest in job training and trade school programs for high school students who don’t wish to attend college

-Decrease foreign aid across the board and use sanctions in place of foreign intervention

-Make climate change an American innovation issue; invest in tax breaks for companies that actively fight climate change and develop new technology to mitigate the threats

[VBM]

Impossible. The Republican agenda is literally just “vehemently oppose anything the Democrats say and do”. If Democrats became just as conservative as Republicans, Republicans would either go even more to the right or attack Democrats from the left

[AlterEgo]

Impossible. The Republican agenda is literally just “vehemently oppose anything the Democrats say and do”.

This is your brain on epistemic closure:



The people behind "the other side" have values and desires just like you.

It's easy to believe otherwise based on selective impressions from right-wing political entertainment or the machinations of their political operators, granted. But many of them view the opposite side through a similar parallax, which is how functioning adults come to believe that shouting about communism is a good way of making sense of the actions of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

I mean, in fairness, we do have a national healthcare system, the premise of which originally was designed by Republicans and then implemented by Republican governors at the state level, which then became completely evil when attempted to be implemented by Congressional Democrats.

[VBM]

Impossible. The Republican agenda is literally just “vehemently oppose anything the Democrats say and do”.

This is your brain on epistemic closure:



The people behind "the other side" have values and desires just like you.

It's easy to believe otherwise based on selective impressions from right-wing political entertainment or the machinations of their political operators, granted. But many of them view the opposite side through a similar parallax, which is how functioning adults come to believe that shouting about communism is a good way of making sense of the actions of Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi.

I’m mainly talking about elected Republicans, a majority of which are just nefarious actors who  clearly don’t believe a word they say and are just saying it in order to con conservative Americans into supporting them, and so they have to make Democrats perpetually the enemy no matter what. However, even among Republican voters, there is a significant portion who don’t actually know or care about policy, and instead only care about sticking it to the Dems because Fox News told them that Dems are scum of the Earth

[RINO Tom]

In the age of the internet and social media, you CAN'T ... if you ever could.  In the past, saying something like "You cannot vote Republican at this point and still be a good person!" was unthinkable not because they parties were ~so different~ but rather because there was no platform to utter such an opinion without saying it in front of other people ... and normal people who wanted friends and not to be seen as an unlikable weirdo wouldn't say such things, especially without knowing others' politics.

Now, you can post whatever you want on Instagram or something and face little to no consequences.  The number of people who post some dramatic thing about how their political opponents are evil and then go to brunch or happy hour with people they know have differing political views is literally hilarious, and it speaks to how toxic staying only on the internet can be.

This is all to say that there is a disturbingly large percent of people who won't shift their attitudes on the parties if the parties change stances ... they'll shift their attitudes on the STANCES to remain opposed to the other party.

[Hammy]

Strict, targeted caps on objectively wasteful spending, such as what private contractors can charge the government for things like simple office equipment, landscaping, hardware, etc as an example.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I mean, in fairness, we do have a national healthcare system, the premise of which originally was designed by Republicans and then implemented by Republican governors at the state level, which then became completely evil when attempted to be implemented by Congressional Democrats.

I think it's "Republican governor," singular?  unless there's someone besides Romney?

You can't necessarily expect that just because a plan was proposed by a few on the other side a number of years ago, it should generally win support from that side.

The individual mandate, though supported at first by a few Republican think tank policymakers and politicians, was never a grassroots position, and the conservative movement as a whole pushed against it.

In 1994 Sen. Don Nickles (R., Okla.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) turned the Heritage plan into a bill. Peter Ferrara and others, such as Tom Miller at the Cato Institute, rallied other conservatives against the plan. “By endorsing the concept of compulsory universal insurance coverage,” wrote Miller, “Nickles-Stearns undermines the traditional principles of personal liberty and individual responsibility that provide essential bulwarks against all-intrusive governmental control of health care.”

Ferrara convinced 37 leaders of the conservative movement, including Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist, and Paul Weyrich, to sign a petition opposing the bill. “To this day,” Peter writes, “my relationship with Stuart Butler and Heritage has never recovered.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/

Conservatives were not always as dead-set against the mandate as they are now, and some influential conservatives supported it.

But we shouldn’t overstate the case. I think an accurate description of the history of rightist opinion on this question would look at three separate groups: politicians, think tanks, and grassroots conservatives. This last group never really focused on the individual mandate, and never really had any reason to. I doubt that it would ever have been popular with this group.

The think tankers were divided, with the Heritage Foundation an outlier. It was an outlier, too, in the broader right-of-center intellectual world. (For whatever it’s worth, I was reading NR pretty closely in the mid-’90s and do not recall its ever endorsing the mandate.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/history-individual-mandate-ramesh-ponnuru/

[AlterEgo]

I mean, in fairness, we do have a national healthcare system, the premise of which originally was designed by Republicans and then implemented by Republican governors at the state level, which then became completely evil when attempted to be implemented by Congressional Democrats.

I think it's "Republican governor," singular?  unless there's someone besides Romney?

You can't necessarily expect that just because a plan was proposed by a few on the other side a number of years ago, it should generally win support from that side.

The individual mandate, though supported at first by a few Republican think tank policymakers and politicians, was never a grassroots position, and the conservative movement as a whole pushed against it.

In 1994 Sen. Don Nickles (R., Okla.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) turned the Heritage plan into a bill. Peter Ferrara and others, such as Tom Miller at the Cato Institute, rallied other conservatives against the plan. “By endorsing the concept of compulsory universal insurance coverage,” wrote Miller, “Nickles-Stearns undermines the traditional principles of personal liberty and individual responsibility that provide essential bulwarks against all-intrusive governmental control of health care.”

Ferrara convinced 37 leaders of the conservative movement, including Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist, and Paul Weyrich, to sign a petition opposing the bill. “To this day,” Peter writes, “my relationship with Stuart Butler and Heritage has never recovered.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/

Conservatives were not always as dead-set against the mandate as they are now, and some influential conservatives supported it.

But we shouldn’t overstate the case. I think an accurate description of the history of rightist opinion on this question would look at three separate groups: politicians, think tanks, and grassroots conservatives. This last group never really focused on the individual mandate, and never really had any reason to. I doubt that it would ever have been popular with this group.

The think tankers were divided, with the Heritage Foundation an outlier. It was an outlier, too, in the broader right-of-center intellectual world. (For whatever it’s worth, I was reading NR pretty closely in the mid-’90s and do not recall its ever endorsing the mandate.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/history-individual-mandate-ramesh-ponnuru/

But all that is really only because insurance companies have really good lobbyists. It's great to talk about all that "personal freedom," but if you're going to provide insurance coverage to everyone, the risk has to be spread around. That is the way insurance is "supposed" to work.

[🐒Gods of Prosperity🔱🐲💸]

I mean, in fairness, we do have a national healthcare system, the premise of which originally was designed by Republicans and then implemented by Republican governors at the state level, which then became completely evil when attempted to be implemented by Congressional Democrats.

I think it's "Republican governor," singular?  unless there's someone besides Romney?

You can't necessarily expect that just because a plan was proposed by a few on the other side a number of years ago, it should generally win support from that side.

The individual mandate, though supported at first by a few Republican think tank policymakers and politicians, was never a grassroots position, and the conservative movement as a whole pushed against it.

In 1994 Sen. Don Nickles (R., Okla.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) turned the Heritage plan into a bill. Peter Ferrara and others, such as Tom Miller at the Cato Institute, rallied other conservatives against the plan. “By endorsing the concept of compulsory universal insurance coverage,” wrote Miller, “Nickles-Stearns undermines the traditional principles of personal liberty and individual responsibility that provide essential bulwarks against all-intrusive governmental control of health care.”

Ferrara convinced 37 leaders of the conservative movement, including Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist, and Paul Weyrich, to sign a petition opposing the bill. “To this day,” Peter writes, “my relationship with Stuart Butler and Heritage has never recovered.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/

Conservatives were not always as dead-set against the mandate as they are now, and some influential conservatives supported it.

But we shouldn’t overstate the case. I think an accurate description of the history of rightist opinion on this question would look at three separate groups: politicians, think tanks, and grassroots conservatives. This last group never really focused on the individual mandate, and never really had any reason to. I doubt that it would ever have been popular with this group.

The think tankers were divided, with the Heritage Foundation an outlier. It was an outlier, too, in the broader right-of-center intellectual world. (For whatever it’s worth, I was reading NR pretty closely in the mid-’90s and do not recall its ever endorsing the mandate.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/history-individual-mandate-ramesh-ponnuru/

But all that is really only because insurance companies have really good lobbyists. It's great to talk about all that "personal freedom," but if you're going to provide insurance coverage to everyone, the risk has to be spread around. That is the way insurance is "supposed" to work.

Why would insurance companies lobby against an individual mandate

[Person Man]

I mean, in fairness, we do have a national healthcare system, the premise of which originally was designed by Republicans and then implemented by Republican governors at the state level, which then became completely evil when attempted to be implemented by Congressional Democrats.

I think it's "Republican governor," singular?  unless there's someone besides Romney?

You can't necessarily expect that just because a plan was proposed by a few on the other side a number of years ago, it should generally win support from that side.

The individual mandate, though supported at first by a few Republican think tank policymakers and politicians, was never a grassroots position, and the conservative movement as a whole pushed against it.

In 1994 Sen. Don Nickles (R., Okla.) and Rep. Cliff Stearns (R., Fla.) turned the Heritage plan into a bill. Peter Ferrara and others, such as Tom Miller at the Cato Institute, rallied other conservatives against the plan. “By endorsing the concept of compulsory universal insurance coverage,” wrote Miller, “Nickles-Stearns undermines the traditional principles of personal liberty and individual responsibility that provide essential bulwarks against all-intrusive governmental control of health care.”

Ferrara convinced 37 leaders of the conservative movement, including Phyllis Schlafly, Grover Norquist, and Paul Weyrich, to sign a petition opposing the bill. “To this day,” Peter writes, “my relationship with Stuart Butler and Heritage has never recovered.”

https://www.forbes.com/sites/theapothecary/2012/02/07/the-tortuous-conservative-history-of-the-individual-mandate/

Conservatives were not always as dead-set against the mandate as they are now, and some influential conservatives supported it.

But we shouldn’t overstate the case. I think an accurate description of the history of rightist opinion on this question would look at three separate groups: politicians, think tanks, and grassroots conservatives. This last group never really focused on the individual mandate, and never really had any reason to. I doubt that it would ever have been popular with this group.

The think tankers were divided, with the Heritage Foundation an outlier. It was an outlier, too, in the broader right-of-center intellectual world. (For whatever it’s worth, I was reading NR pretty closely in the mid-’90s and do not recall its ever endorsing the mandate.)

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/history-individual-mandate-ramesh-ponnuru/

But all that is really only because insurance companies have really good lobbyists. It's great to talk about all that "personal freedom," but if you're going to provide insurance coverage to everyone, the risk has to be spread around. That is the way insurance is "supposed" to work.

Why would insurance companies lobby against an individual mandate

The good news is that it appears that we didn't need an Individual Mandate. I don't think we ever will so long as ACA plans are attractive and attainable.

[Amenhotep Bakari-Sellers]

Impossible, Obama tried to do it and he got had by Rs on DC Statehood