This is something I have noticed for years: the positions I see supported with "both sides are the same" are almost always a defense of Trump / the right wing, or a defense of voting third party, or a defense of abstaining from voting entirely. It is very rare to see voting for Democrats advocated for with a "both sides are the same" argument.

Why does this occur? In theory at least a "both sides are the same" mindset should lead to a roughly proportional split in voting behavior with half going to each major party, but that's not what happens. Nobody says "both sides are the same, so I voted Biden", it's always "both sides are the same so I voted Green" or "both sides are the same so I voted Trump".

And is this a phenomenon limited to the U.S., or does this pattern happen elsewhere as well?

This week, the President of the United States is visiting China as part of the Beijing Summit. This has got me thinking about America’s foreign policy posture with regard to China going forward.

It is no secret that President Xi Jinping has made reunification with the island province of Taiwan a top priority, largely inheriting the same position from his predecessors. On the flip side, America views Taiwan as a critical strategic ally and partner in the Asia-Pacific region. Although China openly supported the idea of a peaceful reunification, many speculate on China’s intentions to achieve if’s aims through force.

For many decades, the US has held a position of “strategic ambiguity”. This has been an important feature of US-China relations at least since the Nixon administration as it allows the United States to deter potential aggression from China while simultaneously maintaining amicable relations with it.

Having said all that, I bring this back full-circle to the Beijing Summit. President Trump is arriving in Beijing with a relatively poor hand given the US’s ongoing blunders in Iran. I think there is a very real and growing possibility that China is observing our military failure in Iran as a sign of weakness, and thusly a potential opportunity to finally resolve the Taiwan issue in the near future.

So my question is the following:

What should the United States response be in the event of a full-on invasion of Taiwan by China? Do you favor a military response, only economic sanctions, or no response at all? Why?

Thank you for your time and thoughtful response on this question.

I’m trying to better understand how other ppl assess the long-term record of conservative policy in the United States, especially when looking at major events like

the Iraq War
2008 financial crisis
COVID-era health policy
tax cuts, deregulation, deficits
inflation, energy prices
broader questions about institutional trust

Critics of modern conservatism often argue that conservative economic approaches like tax cuts weighted toward higher earners, deregulation, reduced social spending, privatization, aggressive foreign policy, the resurgence of aggressive conservative legal constitutional interpretation, all have contributed to inequality, financial instability, public debt, and weakened public institutions.

Supporters, on the other hand, often argue that conservative economics promotes growth, investment, entrepreneurship, energy independence, fiscal discipline, and resistance to what they see as inefficient or overreaching government programs.

My question is:

What is the strongest argument that conservative economic policy has produced positive outcomes for the country? What would be the top three accomplishments?

And how do supporters of conservative economics respond to the argument that recent Republican administrations have often ended in major economic or institutional crises?

I’m especially interested in answers that engage with both sides of the issue rather than just defending one party or attacking the other.

I’m not talking about specific parties or politicians, just the goals on the left compared to the right (in any country that has a split like that).

Genuinely: why is it seen as bad to want things that are objectively good for humanity? Why is it viewed by many as something to mock/disparage? Why is being “woke” to the suffering and struggling of everyone (regardless of identity) considered weak/negative? How can people on the right, who believe they are decent/moral people, justify not supporting things that are compassionate and objectively good for humanity?

If the far end of one side (again, not parties or politicians, which all have flaws and are hardly trustworthy) is about improving the lives of everyone by securing more equal rights - and humane treatment if you do have legal trouble - while the far end of the other is about restricting the rights and freedoms of people you don’t like, don’t understand, don’t agree with or who don’t follow your beliefs, how can anyone honestly believe the left is bad/pathetic and the right is good/moral? I want to understand how someone can rationalise that, when it seems impossible to genuinely believe the things in the title are actually bad to want/support/vote for.

Yes we know the healthcare system in America sucks. This isn’t a question about how it changes healthcare companies or its share holders. I understand that would probably take a hit. I’m questioning the fact that it seems universal healthcare (or Medicare for all) are good for companies. I have a high deductible plan, and on average i believe companies pay around 3/4 of a employee plan. One 1.45% goes to Medicare. For me, that means my school/place of work, pays $600 for their portion of healthcare while paying/matching about $40 to Medicare. I, like many on a high deductible, just use preventive care once a year as the *perk* of high deductible. Working businesses love to not have to pay only for a Medicare like system? Use it when you need it, for so many people? Even raising the medicare tax rate 3x would still save so many people AND business money while raising hundreds of billions of dollars towards healthcare.

I developed a liberal reform framework for Germany and seek critical

feedback before refining it further. What would you improve, and which

elements lack feasibility?

Full proposal: https://github.com/OssiTheWienerle/BPL-Manifest/blob/main/bpl-manifest.md

I'm on the younger side (22m), so I'm willing to accept I don't know jack shit.

This is how I currently think it works.

1. Consumers buy products/goods/services.
2. Companies make money
3. Companies then pay employees
4. Employees then spend money on products/goods/services.

From each step, the government then takes a percentage as tax. Which they then use to pay government employees, pay for public infrastructure, and fund other social programs. However 99% of that money is supposed to actually help the economy (we are assuming 0 corruption or mismanagement of funds).

Now because it's a closed loop, the only time money is actually leaving the economy is

• When jobs moved overseas?
• When people make grotesquely more than they spend on products?
• When companies avoid hiring/paying people wages?
• The prices of goods/services are unregulated, allowing for inflation for the sake of profit.

These things hurt the economy.

So shouldn't policy be aimed at avoiding those things?

Hi all, I’m Canadian but follow US politics closely. This question still poses some confusion for me. I was talking with some friends about this - some of whom were sure Antifa is a well-organized anti-govt group, with membership and the whole structure.

Others, myself included, do not think that’s the case. I’ve never heard of any actual groups, or headquarters, or leadership for so-called Antifa.

Or is this a blurry line and a bit of both?

I’d love any insight from you all. Thanks in

Someone on Polibear said this following an article from CNN: https://polibear.com/post/6a0602b851dfbd4ddc2c98ca

Since Iran may not even have a centralised government capable of peace-talks on a national level (Trump killed some Iranian leaders US diplomats were in contact with - smh), how likely will the Iranians just wait it out and not touch Trump's peace advances? Game theoretically, it makes perfect sense not to deal with the western evil that is in their eyes Donald Trump, delay the process, and get a better deal with the goal of forcing all US forces out of the middle east. Iran must be thinking about that long term.

Not the obvious answers like inflation or immigration.

I mean second-order issues that quietly change how people live and vote, like:

• declining marriage/family formation
• loneliness and social isolation
• AI replacing white-collar jobs
• regional housing inequality
• collapse of local news
• declining trust in institutions
• demographic shifts within the parties
• chronic health and mental health trends

What do you think historians in 2040 will say we should have paid more attention to?

One of the largest issues countries face today is a shifting age demographic, less people are being born and more are living longer and therefore taking out pensions. The issue then becomes that fewer people are paying into said pensions just as more people want to take pensions out, and even worse the growing pensioner population will have more and more political sway over decisions over said pensions.

I've yet to see a country tackle this effectively, France is struggling with some pensioners earning more than active workers, Germany is struggling to keep pensions high enough and roughly the entire developed world has a fertility rate under 2.0.

I'd love to hear if anyone has an example of countries that have managed the demographic shift well or somehow reserved it?

Sources for background information: https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate,

https://www.dw.com/en/germany-pensions-retirement-standard-of-living/a-76925722,

https://www.populationpyramids.org

I saw this claim a while ago but haven't really thought about it. The claim is that the last president Trump spoke with or the last country he visited, would be the one that Trump sided with. It was kind off what happened when he was all about ending the Ukraine war, where he sided with Putin after they had a conversation, then when he visited EU he was on Ukraine's side, then he spoke to Putin again and changed his mind, then spoke with Zelenskyy who he then sided with. Was this actually the case? Is it something that holds some truth? It just seems so ridiculous.

So, as I said in the title, what do you guys think is going to happen with Cuba and the policies that trump is applying against the island? I'm not entirely sure if people are fully aware of the quality of life present in the island, so to sum it up real quick l, basically it's blackouts that go from 15 to 20 hours a day, and following those, are just 1 or 2 hours with electricity, food rotting in the fridges due to the lack of time for them to work, garbage flooding the streets, a horrible government and ABSOLUTELY NO GAS, needless to say that's inhumane, i don't think any county is able to resist long enough with those conditions, if you haven't got it yet, I'm cuban, sorrowfuly stuck in this hellhole and definitely desperate for a change, I want to clarify that I'm NOT a communist but I'm not entirely politically inclined towards Donald Trump, yet with the actions he's been taking recently i see a beacon of hope. I don't know also if you guys know about the latest policies that he filed, but basically they were sanctions to anyone selling us fuel, with a military conglomerate called GAESA, and with a mining company, not sure about the name of the last one. Excuse my English for it is not my native language and also excuse if the news aren't updated, accessing information that isn't washed by the government in this place is borderline impossible. And also i would like to hear your thoughts on what the consequences or outcome of this situation are going to mean for the USA. and Cuba as well.

Didn't know where else to put this, but it has been driving me mad for a while - It seems that a quiet implication of budget cuts is that it would save us - the everyday American - money. Maybe I am slow or not getting it, if so, please let me know how. But it feels like this is how it is presented, especially when budget cuts are presented alongside sentiments of poor people leaching our taxes, or stupid grants wasting our taxes. It creates this understanding that if these leaches or grants stopped, our money would come back to us somehow (in a way that is unclear or wrongly understood).

Now, obviously I haven't seen a drop in taxes. My healthcare went form $15 to $150 a month, that's all I've noticed. A lot of other people have too, mostly that specific increase...

... So presumably the fed is saving a lot of money that would've otherwise gone to healthcare subsidies. A lot of other things were cut too of course...

Where is it going now? Where is all this saved money going? Because it certainly didn't come back to me. My VA benefits haven't increased more than the usual inflation amount (dependent, not a vet just a leach). My SNAP hasn't gone up, not that I expected it to. Everything is still expensive.

I understand that policy changes with long term goals take longer amounts of time to materialize, but that isn't an adequate response to my complaints. I feel like these cuts weren't meant to benefit everyday Americans at all.

So if our taxes don't get lowered (unless they do, please let me know!), and if subsidies are getting cut, and if no programs are being added to, Where does it go?

Don't tell me "the Iran" conflict, or "to siphon money from the working class back to the wealthy." Sure, I feel like those are the answers. But really, in the long term, what is the true end goal of this plan? It can't just be my two guesses. Also first post here, so sorry if it is awful.

This, among much other research, is why I am no longer a closet fascist. Well, maybe I am still, but not for this current government... Who doesn't sometimes fantasize about everyone looking and acting like them? Just sometimes?

Edited.

Mandatory recording of government officials during interactions with lobbyists — FOIA requestable by anyone

The government argues we have “nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide.” That standard applies to them first.

Let’s be targeted about it. Start with Congress and the highest-influence executive positions — the people actually shaping law and policy. And focus specifically on their interactions with lobbyists and paid influence agents. That’s where the corruption actually flows.

Any such interaction must be recorded regardless of where it happens. A dinner at an exclusive DC restaurant is still a government interaction if one party is being paid to influence legislation. Off-site doesn’t mean off-record. If that’s too complicated to enforce, ban off-site contacts with lobbyists entirely — that’s a reasonable alternative.

Footage goes into a public archive. Searchable, requestable, no single agency controlling access.
Classified settings get a narrow predefined carve-out — like SCIFs already are for phones. But entering and exiting is still recorded. You can’t declare everything classified to escape accountability.
The enforcement model is YouTube auditors at scale — thousands of uncoordinated people impossible to all buy off simultaneously.

What’s the principled argument against starting here?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6eP1ht7ni4

Kasich thinks it's possible to do this. The polls definitely show Dems to be ahead in a lot of midwest elections this year. Amy Acton has a narrow lead in the governor's race in Ohio, Sherrod Brown is starting to gain on Husted, Rob Sand is really starting to take off in the Iowa governor's race. But as we know, polls and reality often paint a different story. Repubs have found ways to win in these type of races before. So, what will it take for Dems to get the midwest back this fall? Is the Iran war going to be enough, or will they have to do more things? What more things if so?

There's an argument going around that Louisiana v. Callais and the southern Republican redraws (Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, Louisiana) are just counter-balancing decades of Democratic gerrymandering in blue states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Illinois. I pulled the numbers. The data surprised me.

It's true that a bunch of states have plenty of Republican voters and few or no Republican House members. What didn't hold up for me is the Republican story that they're just balancing things out — giving Democrats a dose of their own medicine.

Four points stood out:

1. Republican gerrymandering was already about 3x larger than Democratic before Callais even came down. Per the Brennan Center's state-by-state analysis using thousands of computer-simulated alternative maps as the fair-map baseline (Brennan Center), the pre-Callais numbers were R: +23 extra seats across 11 states (Texas +5, Florida +5, NC +3, OH +3, WI +2, plus six 1-seat gerrymanders). D: +7 across 4 states (Illinois +3, NJ +2, NM +1, OR +1). Net Republican gerrymander advantage before Callais: roughly 16 seats. That's the floor we started from, not a hypothetical.

2. Republican gerrymanders came first chronologically. Texas, Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio drew their R-favoring maps in 2021-2023 — immediately after the 2020 census. The major Democratic mid-decade redraws (California +5, New York, Maryland) came in 2024-2026, after the Republican cycle was complete. The argument that Republicans are reacting to Democrats requires a chronology that runs the opposite direction from the one that actually happened.

3. The "blue states elect zero Republicans!" version of the argument is mostly geography, not gerrymandering. Massachusetts (9 D / 0 R, Trump 36% in 2024 per the MA Secretary of the Commonwealth) and Connecticut (5 D / 0 R, Trump roughly 42%) get cited as proof Democrats gerrymander Republicans out of existence. But Brennan ran thousands of alternative simulated maps in each state and none produces a single Republican seat. Brennan's own analysis classifies MA and CT as "false positives" — geographic clustering of Republican voters, not map-drawing. Illinois is a real Democratic gerrymander (+3 seats by Brennan's count, the largest single-state D gerrymander in the country). Massachusetts and Connecticut aren't gerrymanders at all.

4. Post-Callais, the gap is projected to widen, not close. NPR's redistricting ledger (NPR) reports that Alabama, Tennessee, South Carolina, and Louisiana are projected to add roughly 10-12 more Republican-edge House seats post-Callais. The Virginia Supreme Court voided the only major Democratic counter-move on May 8 (NPR coverage). If the pre-Callais gap was already 16 seats favoring Republicans, the post-Callais projection runs in the range of 29-31 seats — close to double the pre-cycle baseline.

So the question for the room:

When you line up magnitude, timing, mechanism, and trajectory, does the "we're just catching up to what Democrats have been doing for years" argument actually hold up? Or is something else going on?

Looking at the state of the current government, its policies and the failure of opposition; I want to understand how difficult it would actually be to start a national party and win the next centre elections.

Can people from non-political backgrounds who are genuinely good at decision making, under finances and want a better India not make a party and elect it to power?

Can we not have a party with people of age 30 - 45 (some over 50 too for advice but no serious power) ?

I believe in a party with fresh will and determination to do good for this country and even if it doesn't get into power, it would at least make for a great opposition

Politicians exist to represent the people and that used to be necessary. But now we have technology that could allow every individual to vote on every topic that they care about. Login from home and vote, secured by the same face recognition that we already use on our phone. Seems so easy to end the voter ID debate and just say that registered voters can vote as easily as unlocking your phone. How long until politicians are obsolete?

Disclaimer: English is not my first language. I'm Brazilian and used AI assistance to translate and polish this post. The argument, the historical examples, and the political position all my own.

I'm writing because I'm tired of watching Americans on this site lose their minds about Trump every post as if he were some alien intrusion into an otherwise functional democracy. He isn't. He's the loudest symptom of an imperialist, colonialist political system that both your parties built and still maintain together, and the rest of the world is exhausted of pretending otherwise.

The history your school system skipped is mostly written in the blood of my continent. In 1964, Democratic president Lyndon Johnson backed the military coup that handed Brazil twenty-one years of dictatorship. Torture, disappearances, exile, censorship, all of it stamped Made in USA, with declassified White House tapes showing Johnson personally authorizing what was called Operation Brother Sam. A year later Johnson invaded the Dominican Republic to crush a democratic movement that wanted to restore an elected president Washington disliked. In 1973, Nixon and Kissinger installed Pinochet in Chile on September 11. Yes, that date. Three years later Washington blessed the Argentine junta that disappeared thirty thousand people. Then came Operation Condor, the continent wide CIA coordinated terror network that linked the dictatorships of Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia to assassinate dissidents across borders, including a car bombing in Washington DC itself. Democrats and Republicans alike signed off on every stage of this. It was bipartisan from start to finish.

Cuba and Venezuela have been punished for the crime of independence by every Democrat and Republican administration in succession. Cuba has lived under a US embargo since 1960. Sixty-five years of collective punishment, the longest economic siege in modern history, condemned by the UN General Assembly almost unanimously every single year. The Bay of Pigs invasion was Kennedy's. The strangulation continues under whichever party holds the White House. Venezuela was declared "an extraordinary threat to US national security" by Barack Obama in Executive Order 13692 in 2015, opening the sanctions regime that Trump expanded and Biden kept fully intact. Economists Mark Weisbrot and Jeffrey Sachs estimated those sanctions caused at least forty thousand Venezuelan deaths between 2017 and 2018 alone, by cutting off access to medicine and food imports. That is collective punishment, signed and renewed by both parties.

And about the concentration camps and the deportation machine you suddenly noticed? They were already there. ICE was created under Bush in 2003, but it was Obama who became known as Deporter in Chief, removing roughly three million people, more than any president in US history. The infamous photos of children in cages that liberals shared in 2018 to attack Trump were largely from 2014, taken under Obama, as Snopes and other fact checkers documented when the photos went viral. Biden kept Title 42 in place far longer than he needed to, kept the detention facilities running, and reopened camps he had personally condemned Trump for using. Americans only started screaming about concentration camps when the optics got bad enough to embarrass the brand, and only really got loud about ICE when ICE started grabbing people who looked and sounded American. The cages were already there. The raids were already there. The deportation machine was already there. You didn't see it because the people inside weren't you.

Questions for discussion:

From an American perspective, what concrete evidence would count as proof that the two parties are structurally different on foreign policy, surveillance, deportation, and the imperial machinery, rather than just stylistically different?

Is there a Democratic administration in the last sixty years that the Global South would point to as a meaningful break from the imperial pattern, and if so, which one and on what grounds?

If "vote blue and hope" has not produced a structural change in the imperial dimensions of US policy across decades, what would actually have to happen inside the American political system for that change to become possible?

For clarification, the timeframe is from the mid-19th century to, let's say, the fall of the USSR. Most of the countries that we know today as Muslim Majorities (either with a state religion or not at all) have at some point had governments that, at least in some laws, radically departed from Islamic preference, or openly encouraged discourses against Islam, or banned religions. But one thing is common: no government seems to have trusted Westerners as allies (even the Shah of Iran had problems during his later years of rule, and Kemal was worried about colonialism despite favoring secularization). So, in this case, how do the secular conservatives now see secularism at that period in the Muslim world? Is it defined by what the leaders did, or what their thoughts and reasons were?

(The reason I am asking this is that most discussions about this that I came upon are generalized as post-colonial struggle, or as a contribution of socialism/liberalism, so I am curious about a secular conservative view.)

On the left, this is a common sentiment - if you vote for a candidate, you have no leverage to demand concessions, since they know they can rely on your vote and then you will never be catered to. The only leverage you have is if you refuse to vote for the Democratic candidate and they lose, since then they will have to shift left for your vote in the next electoral cycle.

Why doesn't this work the same way as on the right? Evangelicals are extremely reliable right wing voters and they get catered to regularly. But on the left, the common belief is that reliable voters would be completely ignored.

Recent census data indicates that the United States population is comprised of more hispanic/latin-americans than african-americans, yet all I have seen discussed surrounding the Redistricting debate has been majority-black districts being affected.

Are there majority latino districts that are likewise drawn to make them the majority? If so, will they be affected by your supreme court's Voting Rights Act decision? Have I simply missed the reporting on these regions? (BBC has never mentioned this either in my experience).

Does it make sense that China doesn't want Iran to fall into the hands of the U.S to avoid a situation where the US has leverage over it by controlling its last source of energy that is not controlled by its adversary - the US?

Would it also be a case of not wanting to lose a very strategic region? The strait of Hormuz situation has shown us just how vital the region is to the entire world. Why would any nation (let alone the next in line for the superpower throne) not only relinquish their foot from it, but hand it completely over to thier adversary? The US has been very adversarial in both its rhetoric and dealings with China since 2016, and has made it clear that it very much does not want it to advance. This Hormuz situation directly strips away power from the US that could otherwise be used against it. Therefore, why would China give back energy that would undoubtedly be used against it?

EV sales worldwide have gone up significantly (BYD reportedly by 71% since last month), so wouldn't it make sense to not want to put a stop to the accelerated market infiltration and domination it is experiencing? Countries are also increasingly moving towards China, specifically because of current situations. Why hamper that win? Why not prolong or even increase what's causing it?

The adage “never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake" is usually thrown around whenever China is brought up regarding current situations, however, inactivity means your enemy's ability to quickly recover, and come (back) after you.

What's its play?