Finding Common Ground
This country is getting more and more partisan. We need to fix that before more people get shot.
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Note: Everything in this post is my personal opinion. If you don’t agree, set up your own Substack. Or, leave me a comment.
I was looking for a photo illustrating two angry people in an argument. This one was one of the suggestions. I like it!
Call your Congresscritters! Keep Calling!
I’ve written on these issues before. See the links at the end of this column.
Yesterday I called my Congressperson, who happens to be a Republican, to ask her to do what she can to tone down the rhetoric in Congressional debates.
I also called both of my Democratic Senators and asked them to do the same thing.
I feel that there are probably many issues all or most Americans agree on, so I’m suggesting that we work on those issues first, get some wins, then move on to more contentious matters.
My hope is that by finding consensus on popular issues we can lay the groundwork to have rational discussions about what are currently political land mines.
So I asked three LLMs (Chat GPT, Copilot and the Search Assistant in Google Chrome) “What are the top concerns of all American voters today? How do they correlate with voter’s political philosophies?”
The answers varied (try it yourself), so I picked three issues that I think folks on the right, middle and left might be able to find consensus on.
First, all three LLMs agree that the economy, including cost of living, inflation and jobs, is the top concern of most Americans.
From what I can tell, the far right thinks the solution is:
shrinking the Federal Government
lowering or eliminating taxes
reducing or eliminating regulation
a strong national defense
basing our government on Biblical Principles
On the other hand, I gather the far left wants to:
tax multimillionaires and billionaires to pay for a social safety net including
a living minimum wage
SNAP (food stamps)
universal free healthcare
free college or trade school education
government run affordable housing
and possibly some kind of Universal Basic Income distributed to everyone in the country.
Basically the far left wants the Star Trek universe.
The thing is, I think most of us are somewhere between those extremes. I could write a whole column on possible compromises, but I want to get to the other two top concerns I gleaned from my LLM queries.
The second biggest concern is a little cloudy, but the issues kind-of fit together. People are concerned about Immigration, Border Security and Crime.
The most extreme folks on the Right (Stephen Miller, Tom Homan, Kristi Noem) appear to want to:
Find and deport every undocumented immigrant
Seal the border and not let anyone in for any reason
And they think that will go a long way to solving the “crime problem.”
On the far Left there are people who:
consider borders to a social construct and therefore irrelevant
point out that crime is down and has been decreasing steadily for years
also note that statistically, immigrants commit fewer crimes than native born citizens.
Again, I strongly suspect most of us live somewhere between those extremes. We should be able to hammer out some kind of compromise that allows foreign workers to contribute our economy without throwing the border wide open to anyone who wants to cross.
Again, that’s a whole ‘nother column.
The third common concern I think most Americans have is Democracy, Threats to Democratic Institutions / Political Extremism.
Coming from a left-of-center point of view I’ll try to be fair here, but from what I can tell the extreme Right’s major concerns are:
Government Overreach in regulation, taxation and personal preference when it comes to public health issues such as vaccination
Religious Freedom: devout Christians consider they are being discriminated against by non-believers
Cultural and Social values: support for LGBTQ+ rights (as a bad thing), excessive gun safety laws, property rights.
The far Left is also concerned about:
Government Overreach: voter suppression, suppression of free speech, violation of civil rights, selective investigation and prosecution of “political enemies”, abrogation of rule of law and due process
Religious Freedom: the freedom to worship as you please or not worship at all
Cultural and Social issues: support for LGBTQ+ rights (as a good thing), weak or non-existent gun safety laws, freedom from theocracy.
See what I did there?
Again, this could be a whole ‘nother column, but this one is already too long.
Stay tuned, I’ll be back again next week. In the meantime here are some old columns I’ve pulled out of the archive and un-paywalled:
Call your Congresscritters! Keep Calling!
Trump lie of the week:
Lies our President has told recently. Not necessarily this week. I’m only posting statements rated “Pants On Fire!” by Politifact. I’m too disorganized/lazy to keep track of these so I there may be duplicates once in a while.
^^^This! THIS RIGHT HERE is what should have convinced the American people not to vote for this lunatic and his self-proclaimed hillbilly running mate.
Musical Coda:
A contemporary take of The Rascal’s classic upbeat song from 1968.
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