The Deseret News forums and comments are a blizzard of bashing, some attacking Democrats/liberals/Biden and some Republicans/conservatives/Trump. Consider the possibility that most of the attacks are valid. What if Republicans and Democrats are both wrong?
This should be a familiar concept to many. A prominent Utah faith is based on the premise that all the existing beliefs were wrong.
An exception to the bashing is some variation of “why can’t we all just get along, be civil, be kind, etc.” That is a wish, not a remedy — how can we actually break the stalemate?
Let’s talk about ideas instead of ridiculing each other. Here’s a few:
- Abolish closed primaries and candidate selection by caucus. Both enable fringe candidates.
- Eliminate gerrymandering, as Utah is working at. Voters should pick politicians, not the other way around.
- Implement ranked choice voting. If two major party candidates are unacceptable, this enables a third choice without losing the ability to pick the “lesser of evils.”
- Spam e-mail and phone calls are universally detested, but there’s a simple fix. We all have an address/phone number list. Require anyone not on that list to pay a small fee to phone/e-mail us. This destroys the economics of spam, which ends spam. Address advocacy media similarly. Nonprofits/impartial organizations get free media access. With for-profits and advocates, either the consumer pays for them, or they pay to access the consumer. For example, you don’t pay for MSNBC or Fox unless you want them.
- To address the rampant misinformation, assess civil/legal penalties for misinformation based on the stakes and the distribution.
Republicans and Democrats are content with their war of annihilation and generally oppose these and similar ideas — which is exactly why we should all consider them.
John King
Layton