Are Republicans and Democrats The Same Thing
YES
Side Score: 128
|
 |
NO
Side Score: 91
|
 |
 |
|
Yes, Republicans and Democrats are the same thing, they are both liberals. Now I do not mean liberals in the sense that one has what we now consider more left wing views than the other, but rather that they both fall into the category that Liberalism is the primary Ideology behind both parties. Both republicans and democrats, desire limited government, capitalism, no single religion, and protection of individual rights. You may argue that in some cases they do not believe in such ways, however all in all the majority of the policies come back to these four values. To say that they are not Liberals is rather absurd, as liberalism is really what took the place of what we call classical conservatism, where the nobles were obliged to rule, as they had the necessary means to do so.(so it was believed) Here in America we've narrowed the political spectrum to be democrat or republican. However you'll find that the true spectrum is as follows from left to right; communism, socialism, liberalism, classical conservatism, fascism. James Madison wanted power to be split up when he designed what we have come to know as American politics, he was afraid of tyranny. The two house system although not his original idea, preserves Madison's idea that none of the power will be concentrated, especially since your state only gets two senators. Now theoretically you could still have many parties with this system except it's a winner take all system as well. This allows for no coalitions, but rather a black and white win or lose. If in another country and a coalition needed to be formed you would most likely find groups like democrats and republicans coming together to oust the socialist and communist coalition. When looking at what actually divides the parties, it is not their ideologies, but the system itself. Madison successfully made a system where the same ideology, can be torn apart and prevent a tyrant, and in doing so we've been taught to believe that democrats and republicans are the same, when in reality they share the same beliefs. And as for the Republicans being the party of Lincoln, and the democrats white slave owners, we find that Lincoln wasn't breaking from his beliefs, that he was a capitalist, and believed that a "free market" would in fact be better than a slave driven market. one way or the other his goal was to unify the country. Also the democrats are capitalists, and really had to shift their party views with FDR, after reconstruction. Parties change. Once more I reiterate that both parties are LIBERALS, and because of this we are really losing out on seeing whats beyond liberalism. Posted 96 days ago | Tagged As: yes
Although I agree that both parties are more the same than they are different, your spectrum of government is confused. At the extreme left is going to be totalitarianism and at the extreme right is going to be no government, or sometimes called anarchy. Whys is communism not at the left? It is not at the left because under communism there is no government. For instance, ask a Russian what it was like to live under communism. They will tell you that they did not live under communism. They lived under socialism. The difference is that in the Soviet Union, socialism was the goal. Communism is a form of anarchy. It is an anarchy of private property. Nobody owns the means of production. Interestingly, if one studies pure capitalism, there is also a strong tendency towards anarchy, except that this form of anarchy is government anarchy. It is freedom to have property without unnecessary government intervention. Communism generally tries to be accomplished ironically enough with more government (the exact thing that they are trying to get rid of). This is not only socialism for the state, but the plan is to have international socialism. On the other hand, fascism is socialism, but it is national socialism as opposed to international socialism. However, BOTH are totalitarian. That is why BOTH belong at the left. International socialism is just slightly to the left of fascism. In the middle of the road would be Constitutionalism which is the left ended spectrum of Libertarianism. Extreme right Libertarianism is anarcho-capitalism. So, when the democrats call the republicans fascists and the republicans call the democrats communists, guess what? They are BOTH RIGHT!!! They are both totalitarian and they are both socialist. They differ only by degree and they are not fundamentally different. We do NOT have true "left" and "right" parties but two extreme left parties to choose from. Oh, by the way, Lincoln sold out the founding father's dream of freedom and liberty. Don't believe me? Well, then you have been taught well and socialized well. Read Marx's ten planks of communism again. Lincoln implemented 9 of the 10. Lincoln didn't slaughter as many americans as did Lenin or Hitler, but he is up there. Lincoln could not be more different than the founding fathers. The former did not believe in the principle of Independence whereas the latter did. Posted 60 days ago | Tagged As: No
The question of the debate is a little misleading: of course they're different, in certain ways. But let me rephrase it in the way I think the debate creator meant it: Are Republicans and Democrats the same thing, in terms of their primary purposes? To that question, I say yes. If voters want real change-- the ones who are smart enough to realize what that means-- they are unable to get it through the 2-party system we have. The candidates will have different public platforms, yes, but some issues are not discussed because they are not up for debate in the minds of the people who pull the strings. Whether you know it or not, any candidate who makes it this far has already been corporate-approved. The others tend to get locked out of debates, or get contemptuous coverage in the [corporate] mainstream media. Posted 97 days ago
the thing about the corporate media is that they're more concerned with what makes them money than political ideology. they cover the democratic and republican conventions cause they know that's what most people will watch. honestly, how many people care about Nader? the only time they show Nader supporters is when those retards march the streets and say shit like "fuck America" and "soldiers are baby killers". i actually feel bad for Nader... he gets all the retards. Posted 96 days ago | Tagged As: independence
If by the "same thing" one means corrupt, power hungry organizations that do little more than perpetuate a constant campaign mentality and create tensions increased tensions between people of different parties, then yes both the Republicans, the Democrats and any other political party are the same. Posted 95 days ago | Tagged As: yes
We are currently governed by corporations and a rich elite who demand fealty to their agendas. Any man or woman from either party who attempts otherwise is apt to get shot (Kennedy). Hence both parties cower in the face of corporate pressure. Look at our congress and senate -- majority Democrats -- and the way they do the military/industrial complexes bidding with nary a by your leave, just like the Republicans. Nor is Obama any exception -- twisting and tying himself to AIPAC and the new Cold War on an analysts whim. One can only wonder what the corporations have got on the lot of them. Posted 98 days ago | Tagged As: Politics
I agree with almost everything you postulate with one exception... the 2004 Presidential Election. Like you, I thought the two parties were totally in the pockets of big corporative power. My thoughts were that Bush and Gore were basically no different except that the folks who owned Bush were just a little scarier. I live in Washington, DC so I traded votes with a guy in Oregon who wanted to vote for Nader. Well, you know what happened and if you have seen nothing else in the last eight years you HAVE to see there is a huge difference between the Democrats and Republicans. Power corrupts and Democrats have been as guilty as anyone when it comes to passing legislation favorable to their donors and lobbyists and getting caught with their hands in the till. However, Democrats never wanted to destroy government because then they would have no reason to run for office. In the last seven years the Bush administration has overseen the greatest transfer of public wealth into private coffers. The number of "sole source" contracts have grown exponentially at home and abroad. The tough guy party who always run on national security fears was on watch when we suffered the greatest attack on our home soil ever. Their response? Blow up Iraq even though they didn't have anything to do with 9/11. So we wreck their national infrastructure and instead of helping the folks we liberated from tyranny rebuild their society, we bring in Haliburton, KBR, Bechtel and a host of other crony corporations on no-bid or "sole source" contracts. Where do you think $10 billion a month is going? It wasn't war for oil; oil contracts were the icing on the cake. No, it was Grand Theft USA - the looting of the treasury along with massive tax cuts for the wealthy. Katrina drowns New Orleans and instead of helping residents reclaim their homes, FEMA gives out sole source contracts for toxic trailers. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/ content/article/2007/08/22/ AR2007082200049.html Gore-Lieberman may not have been ground shaking but you can bet the treasury wouldn't be under such unbridled assault. And for sure we wouldn't have Alito and Roberts on the Supreme Court and the court only one vote away from legalizing the Police State the Bush administration is foisting on the nation. Hillary Clinton was the odds on favorite to win back in 2007 so the GOP fielded a bunch of empty suits like Rudy Giuliani as their serious contenders. Like it or not, Clinton represented the status quo for the monied elites, why else would Clinton take her campaign to the bitter end making Obama burn millions of dollars on the campaign for months after the primary was all over except for the shouting? Obama threw a wrench into the works by having an impeccably organized campaign - and if you heard his acceptance speech you would see he is doing anything but cowering. This is it. This is the year. There is a HUGE difference between the parties. Posted 95 days ago | Tagged As: No
Saying the parties are in the pockets of big corporations is juvenile. Everybody has lobbyists, the National Education Association is the most powerful and they are a corporation, are they evil? They are wrong, but I don't know about evil. Of course, there were huge differences between Bush and Gore. Gore believed that government could solve your problems and Bush didn't. It is the typical difference between Democrats and Republicans in general. I always hear all this blather about big evil, money hungry corporations from people who always vote for candidates that want to expand the powers of one of the biggest money corporations of all time, the government. I have heard nothing nor have I read anything on this so called transfer of public wealth into private coffers theory. What is public wealth anyway? Isn't it just money taken forcibly from private citizens? What has happened in the last 7 years is private wealth creation, not transfer. The standard of living has gone up, while taxes and inflation have gone down. Another thing, KBR is Haliburton and it was Clinton/Gore that signed the current contract they are operating under now. In fact sole source contracts were Gore's idea. It was all part of his re-inviting government scheme. Delphi had the contract before Halliburton. The idea is a pretty solid one however, Clinton needed a service company that had security clearance so he could launch his war in Kosovo. The government didn't have time to put out the contracts for bid, and really didn't have the time for companies that might have been able to pull off what Halliburton does, to get security clearance. Bush/Cheney is only under such unbridled assault because the media doesn't like them, and conservatives don't run NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN, PBS, MSNBC, The New York Times, etc. Nobody in government ever said that Iraq had anything to do with 9/11. Ever. Iraq was in violation of 17 UN resolutions. The UN gave the US the go ahead to invade Iraq, something they didn't do in Kosovo. Who cares about that? Bush bad, Clinton good. You know, it you don't pay taxes, you don't a get a tax cut. Here is some more simple math, If I make a million dollars a year and you make one hundred thousand dollars and we both get a ten percent tax cut, my tax cut is bigger. However, I still pay more in taxes than you do. Are capital gains tax cuts considered tax cuts for the wealthy? My father would be interested to know that, seeing how capital gains tax cuts are good for his pension plan. So yes there are huge differences between the parties. Democrats equate with socialism and have nominated a huge Fabian Socialist and Republicans equate with capitalists and have seemed to have lost their minds in the last couple of years. Posted 89 days ago | Tagged As: yes
What a crock. What country at war time spends months bidding contracts in fields where there are only a couple firms capable of the work on the scale it is needed. We could always contract the work out to a foreign company whose nation doesn't assess the second highest corporate taxes in the world so that they can do the work cheaper. I am sure that would please you to no end. As far as a police state . . . only ONE candidate in my lifetime has ever had the audacity to say we need a civilian security force and that is the Obamassiah. Cowering? He is running scared. He has lost all momentum. The media has found a new favorite fresh face and are no longer treating him as the anointed one. He is having to think on his feet and the gaffes are coming hot and heavy as he stammers his way through unscripted responses. He looks, sounds and probably is exhausted. Good of you to bring up Gore though. This is looking like the biggest choke job since Gore threw away the presidency when the Clintons handed it to him on a silver platter. Posted 82 days ago | Tagged As: yes
LOL you conspiracy guys are all the same. Kennedy was NOT part of the rich elite? His daddy bought him the presidency by using riches and mafia connections both made bootlegging during Prohibition to control union votes. As for American corporations, they pay the second highest corporate taxes in the world plus the three plus percent tax imposed by Sarbanes Oxley. This sounds like an agenda imposed by large corporations? As for your not at all subtle anti semitic injection of AIPAC into a rant about business and corporations, they have the same thing over the Democratic party that the teachers unions and trial lawyers associations and George Soros and Michael Moorer and Moveon.org have over the party. They deliver PR, cash and votes in huge numbers. Nothing sinister or difficult to figure out in that. Posted 84 days ago | Tagged As: No
I'd try to keep things simple this time, because I don't know much about politics since knowing politics has nothing to do with and\or has no parallel metaphor in my experience of things. This one's a little rumor-engaging-strategy game for me. Nobody knows those people anyway, one way or another, to be in it, is to be covered with it. I believe that the answer of this question depends on who you ask, and how wide is their spectrum of valid opinions, beliefs and ideals. If your spectrum was X, and then X went up by Gay Rights, and now you have Y which is X plus "There should be a right for people who like to sleep with people from the same sex (too) to have their partner's given name printed into their identification documents". Whatever X thought of R's and D's, Y knows exactly where he puts his badass finger when he sings the "curse of those who have no dignity, in this country". Then Y gets shot accidentally, he decides to convert to Z and vote for R's, cause obviously, he's not gay, and for one to be able to carry those things will require one to prove his responsibility and accuracy, Z will say that he is just being rational. One day, Z might get high, or convince himself that modernism was a mistake, and that when movie met industry went down the whole art with it, and that mass-media is a brainrace of loudmouthing, and none of those videoized bedtime stories are more then a rumor anyway, and that our depart from nature's hands had cr |
