The US is always already trending every political direction at once.
1: That explains the support for Chaos candidate Arioch Donald Trump.
Interesting. I clicked through expecting to read yet another "demographics shifts will save us...any day now...really" article of the kind I've been seeing for the last 20 years. At least this was something different.
This was the part that struck me:
Yet the nation's answer, by large margins, seems to be yes. When the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law examined polls, it found that between two-thirds and three-quarters of Americans now support barring discrimination against transgender people. It also found a dramatic rise in recent years in the percentage of Americans who consider anti-transgender discrimination a "major problem." According to Andrew Flores, who conducted the study, a person's attitude toward gays and lesbians largely predicts their attitude toward transgender people. Most Americans, in other words, having decided that discriminating against lesbians and gay men was wrong, have simply extended that view to transgender people via what Flores describes as a "mechanism of attitude generalization."
I'm not sure this is irreversible though. For instance, in the sixties, the country accepted a level of gun control that would be miraculous now. And that's only one example of a reverse that wouldn't have been anticipated.
4:
As much as I'd love to be optimistic about the fact that 75 percent of people support this-or-that measures to protect transgender people, I think it's pretty clear by now that American democracy has been jimmy-rigged to such a state that the will of the majority really doesn't matter. The general public already is much more liberal than anything that could ever get through congress. An overwhelming number of Americans are in favor of mandatory waiting periods for firearms, but the big spender on that issue (the NRA) isn't, so we get nothing. A strong (I think ~65%) thinks Planned Parenthood funding is just fine as is. If the will of the majority particularly mattered to these bastards, political discourse would look completely different.
So I think it's going to take more than the people to pull leftward. There needs to be real reform with respect to the way that elected officials are able to draw district lines. I'm certain a majority of the population supports, that, but...
Also I think median-ish voters is so poorly educated about a) what our current policies are b) who supports what changes that even if they are more than vaguely sympathetic to liberal ideas we've got a long way to go before we get real reform.
I was talking yesterday to my conservative step-dad about Martin Shkreli, the financier who raised the price of a cancer drug from $10 a pill to over $700. When I told my step-dad about the price-hike, his eyes widened and he said incredulously "They can do that!?" Says he'll stay home if Trump or Cruz gets the nomination, though, which I guess is the next best thing.
The general public already is much more liberal than anything that could ever get through congress.
Pretty much nothing is going to get through Congress for the next four years. The long game is winning the Senate and killing the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees and reshaping the law that way.
That is the most optimistic thing I've ever heard Apo say.