Charles Lane is really behind the curve:
Majority rule is not the only progressive principle some progressives seem ready to sacrifice on the anti-Keystone altar.
Remember the corrupting influence of money on politics? Billionaire Tom Steyer has spent millions on TV ads backing environmentalist Democrats and trashing the pipeline itself, thus purchasing outsize influence in the White House and the Democratic Party.
Liberals had principles. There are no more liberals and there haven’t been since Walter Mondale was trounced in his run for the presidency. Progressives have no principles. They have goals, tropes, and tropisms but for them the end justifies the means. When you’re on the vanguard of history, of what use are principles? They’d be a violation of the goals you hold dear.
We don’t have any conservative nowadays, either, but that’s another subject.
I guess he is kind of right, but this is politics. The way our system works, even though the Dems represent the majority of the country in numbers, due to gerrymandering and the over-representation of small states, the majority is stymied by the minority. Many folks think that is a good thing. So, now when the majority want to pass it the minority should not object. Meh. In practice this means that the side that does not use the powers it has while a minority would almost never be able to pass a bill and never be able to stop one. If you really want the majority to rule, do away with the filibuster.
That said, I think the overwhelming principle for both parties is getting re-elected. The first step in the process is getting past the primaries. As long as the extremists on both sides have so much influence in the primaries things will remain screwy. That plus the influence of the professional media advocacy which really started in the 90s and when things started going crazy (not just recently as you claimed) means we don’t have much in the way of principles anymore.
Steve
Convenience _is_ a principle. So is naked self-interest.
The problem isn’t whether people have principles. It’s what those principles have become.
Dems are a plurality, at best. Look at the numbers of third-party & unaffiliated voters. Add to that those of us who don’t vote. In fact, non-voters make up a plurality of the electorate. Of course you imperious Dems claim to speak on our behalf, so no doubt you count us as yours too, just like the dead in Chicago.
And if the Dems got their way, the cities of the NE & west coast would be given carte blanche to tell people in Texas, Alabama, Iowa & Wyoming what to do with no input from those horrible fly-over people whatsoever. That would be so much better.
???? The people in flyover country are over-represented in Congress. They not only have input, they have more input than those awful people living on the coasts.
Steve
I liked how David Bernstein looks at it.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/2014/11/20/president-obama-should-not-act-unilaterally-on-immigration/
steve, you’re complaining that those people have more influence than they deserve. That seems pretty clear that you think the coasts should have more, and given your positions in the past, to have the only say so. It’s not like you didn’t think the PPACA shouldn’t have been passed by the slimmest margins possible.
Ice,
You’re right about dems being a plurality at best. In fact, in the latest Gallup figures the dems and R’s are equal in their percentages, while the independents remain in the comfortable range of around 41%. Even in earlier, more democratically favorable polling, the two major parties only have a gap of 5-7 pts between them.
Now when you look at the PPACA, that’s a different story. For a few years people slightly favored government-run HC, by 3 pts. But, now for the last three years there has been an opening gap of 7 pts who don’t want government-run HC. I think that’s significant, as expectations are not as reliable as actually experiencing the realization of that expectation and then not liking it, based upon one’s adverse experiences with it.