Dan Arely and various polls on various issues have shown, repeatedly, that the Republican Party does not speak for the views of the majority of Americans on a host of issues.
Most of all, NEITHER PARTY is speaking for the view shared by an overwhelming majority of Americans that we should have less income inequality in this nation.
NO ONE in the Republican Party presents this issue in a way that's honest, because income inequality has soared since Reagan and his voodoo economics became the mantra of the Republicans - and a way for them to deny that they, and too many Democrats, as well, just want to reward the rich who already have too much wealth and power in this nation - to the point that they're a danger to democracy.
http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/08/americans-want-to-live-in-a-much-more-equal-country-they-just-dont-realize-it/260639/
A majority of Americans want greater economic equality.
...from the total pie of wealth (100%) what percent do you think the bottom 40% (that is, the first two buckets together) of Americans possess? And what about the top 20%? If you guessed around 9% for the bottom and 59% for the top, you're pretty much in line with the average response we got when we asked this question of thousands of Americans.
The reality is quite different. Based on Wolff (2010), the bottom 40% of the population combined has only 0.3% of wealth while the top 20% possesses 84% (see Figure 2). These differences between levels of wealth in society comprise what's called the Gini coefficient, which is one way to quantify inequality.
We took a step back and examined social inequality based on the definition that the philosopher John Rawls gave in his book A Theory of Justice. In Rawls' terms, a society is just if a person understands all the conditions within that society and is willing to enter it in a random place (in terms of socio-economic status, gender, race, and so on). In terms of wealth, that means that people know everything about the wealth distribution and are willing to enter that society anywhere along the spectrum. They could be among the poorest or the richest, or anywhere in between. Rawls called this idea the "veil of ignorance" because the decision of whether to enter a particular society is disconnected from the particular knowledge that the individual has about the level of wealth that he or she will have after making the decision.
What was particularly surprising about the results was that when we examined the ideal distributions for Republicans and Democrats, we found them to be quite similar (see Figure 4). When we examined the results by other variables, including income and gender, we again found no appreciable differences. It seems that Americans -- regardless of political affiliation, income, and gender -- want the kind of wealth distribution (that comes down to this: no more than 18% of wealth held by the wealthiest shown in Figure 3, which is very different from what we have and from what we think we have (see Figure 2). The reality is the top quintile of wealthy in this nation own 84% of all the wealth.
Americans are not even aware of the huge disparity in wealth - which explains how some can think they're going to hurt by taxing the very wealthiest (and doesn't it benefit the very wealthy to maintain this ignorance?)
A majority of Americans want to end the war on marijuana (which is THE largest part of the drug war, in terms of arrests and monies spent to put people in jail for doing the equivalent of drinking a beer. For more than a decade, polls have indicated a majority of Americans supported legal medical marijuana and yet the Democrats as well as Republicans ignored this reality. Thankfully we now have federal-level legislators trying to deal with this - Holder needs to recognize he can't pardon banks for laundering drug money and then turn around and arrest a grandmother who wants to relieve her arthritis with something that has far fewer possible side effects than any pharmaceutical drug.
http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/04/majority-now-support-marijuana-legalization-poll-finds/
A majority of Americans want stricter gun control laws.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/lookout/poll-stricter-gun-laws-155122502.html
A majority of Americans thought the Republican Party was too extreme last year, too, on issues of gay rights, abortion rights, rejection of science, as well as the issues mentioned above.
http://crooksandliars.com/blue-texan/cnn-poll-majority-americans-think-repub
So, if the majority of Americans don't think the Republican Party reflects their views of what they want this nation to be about, why in the HELL do we have so many Republicans in office? Oh yeah, because they 1) gerrymander districts to get elected and 2) the fucking stupid arrangement that allows so few people to have too much power by the way Senate seats are allocated.
This is just wrong. It's not representative democracy when some religious zealot in Kansas gets to make the law for a woman in New York City - when the majority of Americans disagree with that zealot, and not just the person whose rights should be respected in the face of religious misogyny.
Something has got to give. This system is no longer working for the benefit of the majority.
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