Is it bad to be Anti-Democratic?
Been watching since your coverage of the 2020 primaries on the Hill and love the thesis of your show, as someone who is more heterodox in terms of my political views and has always believed that no political party holds a monopoly on the truth. This is half comment and half question. On Tuesday, Krystal made comments that a lot of American government's setup is anti-democratic. And while I don't necessarily disagree, I feel like this critique of the institution rather than how the Democratic party goes about bringing its message to the American public doesn't take into account the reasoning that the founding fathers gave for this setup within the Federalist Papers, which Saagar briefly mentioned on Tuesday (i.e. mediating the impulses of an easily swayed public, wanting the judiciary to be shielded from day-to-day public sentiments, balancing needs between sparsely populated states and highly populated states, and just forcing presidents to take into account the uniqueness of each state as well [e.g. didn't win the popular vote, but Trump did win 30 out of 50 states]). It's a balance that I think works well if handled in the right way. You both have talked about how the Democratic party has at times basically given up on trying to bring its message to rural America and I feel like this helps to mediate the "issue" of how our electoral politics are setup in the US constitution. If our government was more small d "democratic", then it validates the impulses of Democratic party leaders who basically just want to ignore the needs of rural America and people who don't agree with them 100%. To put this more into a question, what are your thoughts on whether we should focus more on making American democracy more "democratic" or on whether both parties need to stop being so narrow-minded in terms of the voters they try to appeal to? Oh, and let's assume we get rid of the filibuster, because even though the Senate is anti-democratic, it still was meant to pass legislation with a simple majority.
Inflation, BBB, and Dem Midterms Massacre
Hi Krystal and Saagar, love your show and it was awesome seeing Krystal kill it on Real Time! This question is actually kind of a follow-up to that discussion, just because while I agree a lot with progressives, I find myself unable to not be a little cynical with the messaging that is pushed in terms of how Biden and the Democratic party could have set themselves up for a better midterm. The overwhelming majority of progressives seem to be saying that if Biden had delivered for the American people that they would be coasting into midterm success right now, but when they mostly mean by "delivering" is that they should have pressured Manchin and Sinema to pass the Build Back Better bill in full. With inflation on the rise looking to lead into a possible forced recession, wouldn't increased spending just have led to more ammo for Republicans in the midterms? And depending on how immediate the benefit from the BBB bill is, it would be hard to fight against. Right now I feel like the main response Dems have when Republicans try to blame them for inflation is that most of the Covid spending happened under Trump and wasn't even money that went directly to people, like you mentioned on Maher, Krystal. But if BBB had passed it would have been a whole other ball game and a greater fight that I'm not sure could be won in our current political environment. Not an argument to not do anything, but just something I think about when these conversations come up.
Close Captions
Hello, I love your videos. I’m delighted to see more clips of both Krystal and Saagar on other sites. I want to share more of your videos, and I can share YouTube clips with computer generated close captions but many of my older relatives are hard of hearing and they only use Facebook or Instagram, so is there a way for you to include closed captions in the video files to make them more accessible to that group. It’s not something we think about a lot, but people who are hard of hearing are literally in an echo chamber of their own thoughts and on point of view, and your voices are really important to helping breaking down those ideological silos. My mom needs you :-)
The Abortion Conversation Makes No Sense To Me
If it is illegal to destroy a bald eagle's egg because of the recognition that destroying an unborn endangered animal is the same as killing a living endangered animal, why does the question of whether or not an unborn baby is a human being deserving of dignity not seem to matter in the abortion conversation? The discussion on the MSM and this show seem to gloss over that point and focus on the affects of child-rearing on a mother. Guttmacher statistics boil down to the vast majority of abortions being performed because the child isn't wanted by the mother due to the impact on work, finances, or their relationship. If a mother has a living child, though, negative impacts to her work, finances, or relationship stemming from the child would not allow her to have them euthanized so why is the conversation different? Pro-life people translate this unwillingness to engage with the question of a fetus' status as a human life as a declaration that "a human is only deserving of dignity if they are wanted by the person they depend on for survival, are independently able to care for themselves, or . Would love it if you both could engage specifically with the question of if, and then by extension when, these rights are conferred to an individual because typically a pro-choice person jumps straight to the accusations of a pro-life person not caring about the impacts to the mother of that unborn child being born rather than whether or not that unborn child is a human being.