But ...
I'm not American, I'm just looking in from the outside, but to me it seems that all these things (income inequality, life expectancy, education, ...) are things that the Democrats try to improve while the Republicans want to limit social security, decent health care, and try to tear down decent education. Yet people vote Republican? To try to improve the things that Republicans will not improve?
It's a sentiment I often see, not just here, and I just don't understand it.
Democrats say they want to improve these things, then get in office and worry more about trivialities then doing the work of governing.
A green new deal that set out to get electricity to people's houses at $0.08/kwh and stood a reasonable chance of doing so would have been a great start. That's not what it was, alas.
You can't just look at what the parties say they want to do when they're in power. You have to look at what they actually spend their time and energy on while in power.
Both parties are pretty hypocritical when it comes to stated goals vs revealed goals.
My sister is naturalized American, and the way she describes it — even if dems were well-intentioned, they had no guts to pull the trigger to make things better. Because pulling that trigger will, for sure, hurt a lot of people and they care about their image.
I can see some truth to it while living across the border. The things move extremely slow due to enormous amount of legislative barriers and opposition. When you make any big disruptive change, obviously families will suffer, incomes will be lost and etc. So, if you want gigantic changes (good or bad) for a huge country, you need either backing of super majority of people or ability to be above the law because everyone would be afraid to go after you. From my point of view, that’s why China can do drastic changes to their established sectors (tech, private education, construction and etc.) and keep pivoting as necessary. Sure, I don’t agree with their political ideology. However they have an enormous bureaucracy that will sit down and rewrite laws when the goals change.
I’ve met some Republicans throughout my travels, and after some drinks have heard how they want to feel proud of their country. How they used to be proud of their land, origins and etc. Nowadays, they just don’t feel it.
It would be very dumb of me to generalize, but when a good chunk of people don’t feel proud of anything in their lives, it shows signs of cultural weakness. A weakness that’s incredibly easy to exploit as the feeling of pride actually feels good. Current admins are giving a sense of hope that they’ll restructure entire government to some point where citizens will be proud of their progress.
An alternative perspective from someone say in the de-industrialized US Midwest four years after Obama was elected would be something like the following. They voted in Obama. Instead of improving income inequality, life expectancy, education, etc., the Democrats brought in a bunch of social changes. Life expectancy lowered in the US and I think lowered even more in the Midwest (mostly because of drug use, but economic factors must have contributed to drug use). In the end the Democrats didn't improve anything and they voted in Trump.
Biden comes in, it was similar, maybe worse because of inflation and increased income inequality. Imposed a bunch of social changed as well. Democrats say a bunch of things and all that ends up happening is a bunch of social changes that most of the country find strange. Now we have Trump again.
It's a sentiment I often see, not just here, and I just don't understand it.