Today those tropes are very inaccurate, but many voters still take them as true distinctions. The last balanced budget was under a democratic president. Both parties have voted for expansions of federal authority, the Patriot Act and its renewal for example. Both parties want to tell us what we can and can't do to our own bodies, though they disagree on specific policies. Both parties believe in states' rights only after losing federal office.
The list goes on and on, suffice it to say we don't have a clear distinction of two parties with differing principles of how governments should be designed.
It's a fairy tale, but they do believe/hope for it.
I will gladly live in a conservative county over progressive one. And reading this paragraph in a article about AI is complete nonsense. This is a go touch grass moment if you needed one.
Your personal preferences and beliefs have little to do with conservatism at large and the motivations of the powerful people who promote it. If you want to reach a place of open minded debate and discussion in which there can be different legitimate approaches to governing, you have to start with an honest assessment of the world as it is, not as you would like it to be.
The reason it's relevant in an article about AI should be self-evident. AI is powerful, the industry is already massive, and the leaders in that industry are involved in quite a bit of political maneuvering. You may choose to ignore politics, but politics will not ignore you.
This idea that if some group isn’t all reading from the same sheet of music you imagine they should be reading from means they are hypocrites is just wrong.
Try working in a government office - you will be lucky to get a water cooler - BYOW.
"Small government" means "fuck you, I got mine, now let's gut the IRS so I can do some white collar crime".
If anything, your question reduces to making one party sound incompetent or deceitful, I don't know if that's intended. (And considering that aspect of the party is another fun can full of real-life worms.)
Based on the parent comment, I think it's more "one party sound incompetent and the other deceitful". There was a senator who used to say that American politics was a contest between the stupid party and the evil party.
I thought so in my teens. But now I know that I was naive. How can you be sure that you're not?
But if you've spent the time since your teens to come to the opposite conclusion in spite of everything going on around, then I suspect there will be very little I can say to you that will make sense to you.
We would not have a costly war in Iran, blockaded Strait of Hormuz, $6-7/gallon gas, or blanket import tariffs hiking up the prices of consumer staple goods if we voted for the “party that promises bigger government and does deliver.”
I would submit the idea that the latter party is consistently misrepresented and has been the only one that has delivered smaller budget deficits anytime recently.
See also: Tax Cut and Jobs Act, the Kansas Experiment.
The truth of the matter is, our elites are undertaxed at historic levels. At no point in our lifetime have the wealthy been taxed at a lower rate than they are today. There isn’t actually anything wrong with government spending outside of the endless/aimless wars (started by…). It’s the revenue side that deserves scrutiny.
This 100% applies to you. If you can’t see ICE actions as oppressive, you’ve definitely lost touch with reality.
Complete brainrot...
"This changed in June 2025, just weeks after White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, reportedly frustrated with the slow increase in ICE arrests, called the head of every ICE Field Office into a room in Washington, DC and ordered them to “just go out there and arrest illegal aliens.” Following this meeting, the Trump administration launched its first splashy raid of an American city, sending hundreds of agents into Los Angeles and sparking fiery confrontations between protestors and federal agents." [0]
That's what you're talking about when you say "just enforcing the law"?
> Also they're enforcing the law regardless of the skim color.
"Publicly available ICE and research datasets show clear shifts in who is being arrested and detained—large growth in interior arrests and detention of people without U.S. criminal convictions and major variation across states—but they do not provide a consistent, complete public breakdown of ICE arrests and detention by race and nationality at the county level, so any precise county-level racial or national origin tallies are not available from the cited public sources." [1]
So how do you know that? Are you just guessing? You're accusing me of the exact thing you're doing. Honestly it sounds to me like you're the one suffering from some serious brainrot.
[0]: https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/blog/ice-arrest-s...
[1]: https://factually.co/fact-checks/justice/ice-arrests-detenti...
just look at what's going on in Ukraine right now
Please remind us when Democrats have "taken away guns", and while you're at it when were those small arms last used to fight back against a tyrannical government?
You're right they don't want to carry a musket, but that's because muskets are not sexy. They don't want superdrones either, because superdrones are not sexy.
2A people just like guns. Guns, culturally, are sexy.
It's the other way around. Americans voted for Trump hoping he'd improve the country's economy and address the cost-of-living crisis. For example, one of the main proposals was to make ICE bigger and use it to deport as many people as possible, hoping it'd give back jobs to Americans. Another key proposal was to withdraw from climate agreements and stimulate the mining industry.
On migrant workers, much of the US economy is underpinned by the assumption that cheap manual labor is abundant, with the implicit assumption that this tier of labour isn’t going to try and clamour for workers rights (which is a whole other story, but whatever). It’s (part of) the reason the US continues to have globally extremely cheap gas even as the prices hit highs within a domestic frame of reference.
And restarting mining rather than trying to adapt the mining workforce better to a changing landscape is just going to make it hurt worse when the US has to catch up with the rest of the developed world on that front.
As a close outside observer, it feels more like one side of the US electorate is motivated by sore and a misplaced sense of being owed retribution more than anything else.
>COVID restrictions
>The state of the economy
>The state of culture, broadly-speaking
>Letting a black man become president, and the attendant ramifications (intrinsic and extrinsic, cause and effect)
I'll leave it to readers to judge. (You can probably guess what I, as a progressive, think of these impetuses, in driving half-ish of the country to vote for everything Trump embodies. And, frankly, what drove the other half-ish of the country to vote for Biden and Harris.)
There was like 70 million Americans who voted for Trump, most likely for a wide range of reasons, and sometimes multiple reasons and sometimes probably even conflicting reasons. People are complicated, saying that half a country did something because of some few reasons usually over-simplifies so much it gets harder for you to actually understand what is happening/happened.
> the American electorate is relatively simple-minded
It's favorable for many people who don't agree with the current administration to believe so, I'm not sure how true it is in practice, and again, I believe believing so might hurt your chances of actually understanding things properly. That sort of bias really get in the way.
> https://navigatorresearch.org/2024-post-election-survey-the-...
> findings from our post-election survey among 5,000 self-reported 2024 general election voters
Again, more than 70 million Americans voted for Trump, you're not gonna gain any understanding from a self-reported survey of ~2500 people.
A sample size of ~2500 is statistically huge - the margin of error is very small. You should sign up to a stats course.
I don't think that's been the Republican messaging for years (ever since Trump) and it's certainly not a "large part of why people vote for them".
I think a very large fraction of Republican support in this day and age is based on social and cultural topics and feelings.
So repubblicans have not been about small government for a long time and Trump is not even a pure-blood repubblican so it was to be expected that he would do the thing that repubblicans have not been about for a long time...what in the circular reasoning? Oh and please name one repubblican president who successfully reduced spending or "made government smaller"