Yet another weird SF fan


I'm a mathematician, a libertarian, and a science-fiction fan. Common sense? What's that?

Go to first entry


 

Archives

<< current
 
E-mail address:
jhertzli AT ix DOT netcom DOT com


My Earthlink/Netcom Site

My Tweets

My other blogs
Small Sample Watch
XBM Graphics


The Former Four Horsemen of the Ablogalypse:
Someone who used to be sane (formerly War)
Someone who used to be serious (formerly Plague)
Rally 'round the President (formerly Famine)
Dr. Yes (formerly Death)

Interesting weblogs:
Back Off Government!
Bad Science
Blogblivion
Boing Boing
Debunkers Discussion Forum
Deep Space Bombardment
Depleted Cranium
Dr. Boli’s Celebrated Magazine.
EconLog
Foreign Dispatches
Good Math, Bad Math
Greenie Watch
The Hand Of Munger
Howard Lovy's NanoBot
Hyscience
Liberty's Torch
The Long View
My sister's blog
Neo Warmonger
Next Big Future
Out of Step Jew
Overcoming Bias
The Passing Parade
Peter Watts Newscrawl
Physics Geek
Pictures of Math
Poor Medical Student
Prolifeguy's take
The Raving Theist
RealityCarnival
Respectful Insolence
Sedenion
Seriously Science
Shtetl-Optimized
Slate Star Codex
The Speculist
The Technoptimist
TJIC
Tools of Renewal
XBM Graphics
Zoe Brain

Other interesting web sites:
Aspies For Freedom
Crank Dot Net
Day By Day
Dihydrogen Monoxide - DHMO Homepage
Fourmilab
Jewish Pro-Life Foundation
Libertarians for Life
The Mad Revisionist
Piled Higher and Deeper
Science, Pseudoscience, and Irrationalism
Sustainability of Human Progress


























Yet another weird SF fan
 

Sunday, February 24, 2008

Have the Political Parties Changed That Much?

There's a discussion of the claim that the major parties have switched positions over the past century at Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science (seen via God Plays Dice). I don't see how there has been that much of a change.

As fas as I can tell, the Republicans, from the start and continuing to the present, have been based on the following two principles:

  1. Big business is America's persecuted minority and deserves an affirmative action program. (The first makes some sense, but I think the second part is going too far.)

  2. Single-issue voters should always be taken seriously if they don't interfere too much with big business. This applied to anti-slavery voters, anti-alcohol voters, anti-abortion voters, etc. Sometimes this makes sense and sometimes it doesn't.

Ever few decades, the Republicans decide that there are more voters on one side of a single issue than the other and swing from one extreme to the other. For example, John McCain appears to be betting that there are more open-borders single-issue voters than closed-borders voters.

On the other side, the Democrats have always been about identity politics. They started out as the rural white identity-politics party and have gone through several changes in their list of favored ethnic groups since then.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

"This applied to anti-slavery voters, anti-alcohol voters, anti-abortion voters, etc."

Included in the "etc." were the anti-polygamy voters of the late 19th century. Which makes it deeply ironic that most Mormons vote Republican nowadays.

11:50 AM  

Post a Comment

<< Home

 
Profiles
My Blogger Profile
eXTReMe Tracker X-treme Tracker


The Atom Feed This page is powered by Blogger.