Am using 'you' in generic fashion, not necessarily 'you' yourself:
If you believe that each and every person is Equal, that their right to speech is Absolute, and that any attempt to muzzle others is wrong, you are a Democrat.
If you cannot compromise because you believe your values or interests or self is more important than the lives of others and their values, you cannot be a Democrat. That view disregards the rights of others.
Now reverting to 'you' as yourself:
Your post is fully correct with the problem we face. It is not a battle of 'balls' like Bush showed he had, it is a battle for the 'small d' value of democracy itself. The belief that all voices must be heard for a just solution.
It is the Constitution set up a Senate and a House of Congress to give Equal power to states with or without large numbers of people in their borders. Because states or within states, regions, with less people often provide the raw materials and food and water for the rest of the states or regions. Those people have much different interests than those who are consuming their resources.
They are purchased at the lowest possible price with value added as they are converted and made use of according to an different societal structure. This has always caused resentment if it gets unbalanced. The New Deal and other programs the Democrats set up and Republicans supported mitigated the resentment of those who call themselves the producers, but now they want more. It is the agrarian versus the rural struggle. Tom Paine addressed this in the document that was one of the philosophical basis's for Social Security. That is, that when a person by society has become landless, they should be supported as their means of support, the land, is gone.
The winners in these neverending battles for resources are glad to be rid of them and sent to the big cities. The culture of conservative areas in terms of religion and corporate structure tends to admire feudalism.
The ones dispossessed have no such comfort and mythology to sustain them and seek other ways to make a living and suceed. And they have, for the most part, and pushed back at those who dispossessed them with federal power. It is almost a pattern that is subconscious, just a flow of energies in different directions.
Now we have those with that rural mindset threatening the Union once again. They think they are right and no longer believe in democracy or bipartisanship since they were long enriched and empowered. They have enough now to press their case.
Bipartisanship is simply the right way to govern in a two or more party system. The fact that the GOP are everything you say they are does not make the Democrats wrong. They are holding true to the values of having a democracy and are hemmed in. We are not the only country this has or is now happening, in which those who got their advantage and got rich off the whole, so rich, they didn't need to support the whole anymore.
The Democrats are trapped by their own values. I don't know how to get out of this trap. The feudalists will not be converted away from their way of thinking. It took a Civil War to do so, and that was not a shining moment for the democratic process. It was the bloodiest war we have ever had, and in a much less connected nation than we are now. We all need each other, or so the Democrats feel.
Okay, that's my rant for the night, also thinking out loud.
Your post was good.
= new reply since forum marked as read
