Arizona Republican Senators Determined to Take on President Trump - OpsLens

We definitely need a reboot of the system. Term limits would be a good start, then throw in a balanced budget amendment. I would also add national referendums on some issue so that the people can have their say with out having out of reach reps screwing it up. Lastly we need a method to recall politicians not doing their job.

Are we talking about party or ideology - Republican and Democrat, or liberal and conservative? I took a look at the 2016 platforms of both parties. Both have numerous platform points, many that align and overlap; the Democrat platform, for instance espouses supporting troops, keeping faith with veterans, and a strong military; while the Republican platform has topic points for "A Culture of Hope" and "Environmental Progress", though as you can imagine, the approaches are far different. But you are correct; it is difficult to distill the numerous catch phrases, buzzwords, and dog whistles that populate either platform down to discrete principles; but I bet if you could, they would not be far different between Republican and Democrat, liberal or conservative... the difference is in the approach or tact that is taken.

Someone once said, "What you do speaks so loudly, I cannot hear what you say", and if we look at the actions of the politicians aligned to these parties, by and large their actions serve to reduce the high falutin language in their party platforms to nothing more than pablum fit for the consumption of the base to which they are pandering at the moment.

To get a take on the core, fundamental differences between the two parties or ideologies, I have been looking and leaning heavily of Haidt's moral foundations theory which distills the basis of morality into 6 foundational elements: Care/Harm, Fairness/Cheating, Loyalty/Betrayal, Authority/Subversion, Sanctity/Degradation, and Liberty/Oppression. It is interesting to see where people that self-identify as liberal or conservative fall along this spectrum, and the foundational elements in play when approaching any given issue.

Core principles are no longer operative, as is the thought of loyal opposition. It has now become a blood sport and we the voters are the donors.