{ "schemaVersion": "portal-blog.v0", "room": { "id": "portal-blog-what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "title": "What MAGA and Democratic Socialists Agree On", "question": "Where is there any resonance in the MAGA world and any Trump commentary and conversations for traction on tax the rich?", "creatorName": "Randy", "createdAt": "2026-10-20T17:02:21.611145+00:00", "participants": 1, "nodes": [ { "id": "root", "label": "Overview", "parentId": null }, { "id": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "label": "What MAGA and Democratic Socialists Agree On", "parentId": "root" } ], "comments": [ { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216e2-e5e0-46d4-8d41-33f09ba2f4d7", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "Where is there any resonance in the MAGA world and any Trump commentary and conversations for traction on tax the rich?", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb216e2-e5e0-46d4-8d41-33f09ba2f4d7", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:eb008b69-99f2-4c37-ae34-fa36c77916b1", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "There is a real seam here, but it runs more through **anti-elite / anti-corporate populism** than through the left’s usual “tax the rich” language. I’m checking where Trump himself, MAGA media figures, and populist Republican politicians have gone far enough that the overlap becomes usable rather than superficial.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "eb008b69-99f2-4c37-ae34-fa36c77916b1", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216e2-e5e0-46d4-8d41-33f09ba2f4d7", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb216e2-e5e0-46d4-8d41-33f09ba2f4d7" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:05ba1fc3-8a94-4b1b-b458-9d84b43a0ac5", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "The strongest finding is sharper than I expected: **Trump himself crossed the line rhetorically in 2025.** He backed restoring a higher top rate on very high earners and closing carried interest, while Bannon was even more explicit: the working-class realignment requires higher taxes on the wealthy. The congressional GOP mostly stopped it.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "05ba1fc3-8a94-4b1b-b458-9d84b43a0ac5", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:eb008b69-99f2-4c37-ae34-fa36c77916b1", "parentSourceMessageId": "eb008b69-99f2-4c37-ae34-fa36c77916b1" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. There is a **real MAGA-populist opening on taxing the rich**, but I would distinguish it from the conventional Democratic slogan. The traction is strongest when the argument becomes: **stop privileging capital and wealthy insiders, use the money to benefit working people, and make the economy reward productive contribution.** That language is already circulating inside MAGA.\n\nThe clearest evidence is Trump himself. In April 2025, TIME asked him about raising taxes on millionaires. Trump said he “certainly” did not mind a tax increase on wealthy people, said he personally would be “honored to pay more,” and described the logic as raising taxes “on wealthy to take care of middle class.” His exact reaction was: **“I actually love the concept.”** His hesitation was political—he feared getting branded as a tax raiser—not substantive. citeturn679549search0 A few weeks later, he pushed congressional Republicans toward restoring the 39.6% top rate on very high earners and again pushed eliminating carried interest. citeturn796871news44turn542460search1\n\nSteve Bannon goes considerably further. In his formulation, this is part of what MAGA is *supposed to mean economically*. He told Semafor: **“We have to increase taxes on the wealthy.”** His larger argument is remarkably close to the terrain you've been exploring: over recent decades, returns have shifted from work toward capital; Republicans cannot claim a working-class realignment while preserving corporate tax privileges, stock buybacks and benefits flowing upward. His prescription was higher taxes on corporations and wealthy people alongside lower taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. citeturn679549search1\n\nJosh Hawley gives you another very useful bridge because he frames the issue less as redistribution and more as **whose side the market and tax system are serving**. In 2025 he said that if the White House wanted to finance working-family tax relief with a **“surcharge on billionaires, that's fine with me.”** citeturn542460search4 He separately endorsed Trump's willingness to let rates rise on very high incomes. citeturn258127search13 JD Vance's orbit and American Compass have occupied similar territory: American Compass explicitly argued that tax increases should be on the table rather than reflexively extending every upper-income tax cut and adding the cost to the debt. citeturn258127search1turn258127search2\n\nSo I think there are **three MAGA arguments that give “tax the rich” traction without requiring someone to become Bernie Sanders**:\n\n- **Anti-crony capitalism:** Why should hedge funds, private equity, monopolies or politically connected corporations get privileges ordinary workers don't?\n- **Working-class tax swap:** Tax capital or extreme incomes more so taxes can be reduced on wages, overtime, tips, families or productive work.\n- **Populist meritocracy:** Becoming rich by creating enormous value is fine. Structuring the economy so wealth extracts disproportionate value from everyone underneath it is the problem.\n\nThat third one is where I think your argument becomes particularly interesting. The MAGA opening is **not fundamentally hostility toward wealth**. Trump himself is a billionaire and much of the movement admires entrepreneurial wealth. The felt complaint is much closer to: *the system is rigged; elites use their position to take advantages unavailable to ordinary people.* That gives you room to say: **good—don't punish wealth creation. Fix the mechanism by which value and wealth become detached.** Taxing the rich becomes understandable as a response to that failure, while co-capitalism goes upstream and changes who gets the upside in the first place. citeturn679549search1turn542460news13\n\nThere is an important caution. **“Tax the rich” as a naked slogan is much weaker among Republicans than the underlying economic grievance.** A Marquette poll from August 2026 found only about 28% of Republican identifiers favoring a specifically worded “special additional tax on millionaires.” citeturn796871search1 So I wouldn't claim that MAGA voters have simply adopted the progressive tax agenda. The evidence says something subtler and more useful: **the old Republican taboo against ever raising taxes on wealthy people has cracked, particularly inside the populist wing.**\n\nAnd Congress shows the limits. Republican lawmakers ultimately rejected Trump's 2025 millionaire-tax push. citeturn796871search5turn542460search0 That tells us this is an **active fault line**, rather than settled MAGA doctrine.\n\nFor your broader argument, I think the remarkable sentence is almost:\n\n> **Trump and Bannon have already conceded the premise behind “tax the rich”: too much of the economy's upside is flowing upward. The argument remaining is what we do about it.**\n\nThat gets you very close to a genuine MAGA–DSA convergence point without pretending the two sides agree on the solution. The left says **redistribute the upside afterward**. The MAGA-populist right increasingly says **stop the system from privileging elites and capital**. Your opening is: **why are we waiting until afterward? Change how the upside gets distributed when the value is created.** memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:05ba1fc3-8a94-4b1b-b458-9d84b43a0ac5", "parentSourceMessageId": "05ba1fc3-8a94-4b1b-b458-9d84b43a0ac5" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2191c-3b76-4496-ac02-e4ac16060820", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "Expanding beyond that, what's the clearest top three pieces of the MAGA-DSA conversation? Three sentences both would absolutely agree on.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb2191c-3b76-4496-ac02-e4ac16060820", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872", "parentSourceMessageId": "258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:09c6042a-450d-45f5-9ba9-7a5d0e86857a", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "The overlap gets clearer if we separate **MAGA populism** from establishment Republican economics. I’m looking for propositions where the agreement survives even though the diagnosis and remedy differ.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "09c6042a-450d-45f5-9ba9-7a5d0e86857a", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2191c-3b76-4496-ac02-e4ac16060820", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb2191c-3b76-4496-ac02-e4ac16060820" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "If we’re looking for the **three strongest sentences of genuine MAGA-populist/DSA overlap**, rather than pretending the coalitions agree on the solutions, I’d make them:\n\n1. **The economy and political system have become tilted toward wealthy elites and giant corporations at the expense of working people.** Bannon describes a system in which returns have shifted from work to capital and attacks “crony capitalism”; DSA describes essentially the same concentration as corporate oligarchy. citeturn743162search0turn743162search1\n2. **Workers should have more power over their working lives and should receive more of the economic value their work creates.** That is explicit DSA doctrine, while Hawley’s labor turn and Bannon’s capital-versus-work framing bring the MAGA-populist wing surprisingly close to the same starting point. citeturn592513search3turn743162search11turn743162search0\n3. **The United States should stop pouring lives and money into endless foreign wars that do not serve ordinary people.** Antiwar politics is explicit in DSA, while opposition to “endless wars” has been a defining strand of America First/MAGA populism, even though Trump’s current Iran policy has created a major contradiction inside that coalition. citeturn455204search3turn455204search4turn455204news48\n\nThose strike me as the **deepest three**, because they're upstream of policy. Once you move down a level—to wealth taxes, unions, healthcare, tariffs, immigration—the agreement starts fracturing. But **elite capture, worker power/value, and endless war** produce a remarkably coherent shared diagnosis. memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:09c6042a-450d-45f5-9ba9-7a5d0e86857a", "parentSourceMessageId": "09c6042a-450d-45f5-9ba9-7a5d0e86857a" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21eed-4c70-4817-98e5-edfd9c899be8", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "You print the text of those, all of those links in one block?", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21eed-4c70-4817-98e5-edfd9c899be8", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51", "parentSourceMessageId": "8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:018c2535-8e45-4374-bb9b-9d5418c35f23", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "```text\nhttps://www.semafor.com/article/12/20/2024/we-have-to-increase-taxes-on-the-wealthy-steve-bannon\n\nhttps://www.dsausa.org/\n\nhttps://www.dsausa.org/statements/on-russias-invasion-of-ukraine/\n```", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "018c2535-8e45-4374-bb9b-9d5418c35f23", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21eed-4c70-4817-98e5-edfd9c899be8", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21eed-4c70-4817-98e5-edfd9c899be8" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21da4-b4bb-4d5d-bba5-c8dfcae25678", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "The Real Clear Politics, Axios, everything that's underneath the one, two, and three as sources.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21da4-b4bb-4d5d-bba5-c8dfcae25678", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:018c2535-8e45-4374-bb9b-9d5418c35f23", "parentSourceMessageId": "018c2535-8e45-4374-bb9b-9d5418c35f23" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes — here are the full supporting sources I was drawing from for those three points, including the RealClearPolitics and Axios pieces:\n\n**1 — Elites / corporations vs. working people**\nurlSemafor — Steve Bannon: “We have to increase taxes on the wealthy”https://www.semafor.com/article/12/20/2024/we-have-to-increase-taxes-on-the-wealthy-steve-bannon\nurlRealClearPolitics — Bannon: Populist-nationalism, taxes on millionaires, breaking up oligarchshttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/04/24/bannon_populism_offer_solutions_you_dont_like_but_you_can_live_with_the_alternative_is_luigi.html\nurlRealClearPolitics — Bannon: If sacrifices are required, they should come from the wealthyhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/12/05/bannon_if_the_oxes_gotta_get_gored_it_can_not_come_out_of_the_middle_class_and_working_class_americans.html\nurlRealClearPolitics — Bannon: Wall Street, elites and abandonment of working-class Americanshttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/05/02/bannon_the_elites_have_turned_our_beloved_military_into_rent-a-cops_for_wall_streets_casino.html\nurlDSA — Mamdani victory statement: working class, corporations and oligarchyhttps://www.dsausa.org/statements/zohran-mamdani-wins-national-political-committee-statement/\n\n**2 — Workers should have more power and receive more of the upside**\nurlAxios — Hawley leads bipartisan, union-backed labor billhttps://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/josh-hawley-unions-teamsters\nurlAxios — GOP fight over Hawley’s pro-labor turnhttps://www.axios.com/2025/01/30/senate-republican-josh-hawley-pro-labor-bill-chavez-deremer\nurlDSA — National program: Economic Democracy and Democracy at Workhttps://program.dsausa.org/\nurlDemocratic Left / DSA — Worker control and who receives the wealth workers createhttps://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/07/15/the-class-roots-of-return-to-office-mandates/\n\n**3 — Stop endless foreign wars that cost ordinary Americans**\nurlAxios — MAGA purity test: “no foreign wars”https://www.axios.com/2025/06/18/trump-maga-purity-tests\nurlAxios — MAGA concern about Trump violating the promise against “forever wars”https://www.axios.com/2025/06/24/trump-iran-maga-whiplash\nurlRealClearPolitics — Bannon: “We have to stop the madness and put Americans first”https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/08/15/bannon_we_have_to_stop_the_madness_and_put_americans_first.html\nurlRealClearPolitics — Bannon on the international order, working-class costs and warhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/02/27/bannon_trump_wants_to_reset_the_post-war_international_order.html\nurlDSA — Program: “End the U.S. War Machine”https://program.dsausa.org/\nurlDSA / Socialist Forum — “Beyond the Endless Wars”https://sfarchive.dsausa.org/issues/winter-2020/the-socialist-anti-war-tradition-leading-the-fight-against-war-and-imperialism/\n\nThe **RCP Bannon material is especially rich** for what you're looking at: he repeatedly ties *oligarchs + Wall Street + working-class economic losses + foreign-war spending* into essentially one critique. citeturn100455search0turn100455search2turn100455search3turn100455search5", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21da4-b4bb-4d5d-bba5-c8dfcae25678", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21da4-b4bb-4d5d-bba5-c8dfcae25678" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "And now print those links as text.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c", "parentSourceMessageId": "5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "```text\nhttps://www.semafor.com/article/12/20/2024/we-have-to-increase-taxes-on-the-wealthy-steve-bannon\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/04/24/bannon_populism_offer_solutions_you_dont_like_but_you_can_live_with_the_alternative_is_luigi.html\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/12/05/bannon_if_the_oxes_gotta_get_gored_it_can_not_come_out_of_the_middle_class_and_working_class_americans.html\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/05/02/bannon_the_elites_have_turned_our_beloved_military_into_rent-a-cops_for_wall_streets_casino.html\n\nhttps://www.dsausa.org/statements/zohran-mamdani-wins-national-political-committee-statement/\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/josh-hawley-unions-teamsters\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/01/30/senate-republican-josh-hawley-pro-labor-bill-chavez-deremer\n\nhttps://program.dsausa.org/\n\nhttps://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/07/15/the-class-roots-of-return-to-office-mandates/\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/06/18/trump-maga-purity-tests\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/06/24/trump-iran-maga-whiplash\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/08/15/bannon_we_have_to_stop_the_madness_and_put_americans_first.html\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/02/27/bannon_trump_wants_to_reset_the_post-war_international_order.html\n\nhttps://program.dsausa.org/\n\nhttps://sfarchive.dsausa.org/issues/winter-2020/the-socialist-anti-war-tradition-leading-the-fight-against-war-and-imperialism/\n```", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21fef-b2d6-449a-bd48-27fd5c6d009a", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "What is the overall support for the Iran war operation?", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21fef-b2d6-449a-bd48-27fd5c6d009a", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14", "parentSourceMessageId": "a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "As of the latest polling, **the Iran war is quite unpopular nationally**. The cleanest current measure is the Reuters/Ipsos poll completed August 31, 2026: only **25% of Americans say the U.S. military action in Iran has been worth the costs**, while a substantially larger share says it has not been worthwhile. Reuters now describes the conflict explicitly as “unpopular.” citeturn618983view0turn259744search0\n\nThat fits a remarkably stable pattern rather than one bad poll. In July, Reuters/Ipsos had **33% approving of U.S. strikes and 62% disapproving**; only 24% said the operation was worth it. By August, Ipsos was still reporting that **most Americans disapproved of the strikes**, and 83% expected the military involvement to drag on for an extended period. citeturn259744search10turn259744search3\n\nThe escalation numbers are even worse. Only **16% supported sending U.S. ground troops to Iran**, versus 79% opposed in late July. citeturn259744search10\n\nThere is a major partisan exception: **Republicans remain much more supportive.** Earlier in the war, Pew found 71% of Republicans/Republican leaners thought using force was the right decision, compared with 38% nationally; Quinnipiac in June found 75% of Republicans still considered the action worth it, versus 29% of independents and 4% of Democrats. citeturn362563search2turn362563search3\n\nSo for the MAGA/DSA question we were just discussing, there’s an interesting distinction: **“end endless wars” has enormous national resonance, but it is currently a live disagreement *inside MAGA***. The overall country is roughly **3-to-1 against the war being worthwhile**, while the Republican base remains its principal reservoir of support. That makes the antiwar MAGA voices—Bannon and others—more significant as an internal fault line than their numbers alone might suggest.\n\nI can also break out **MAGA/Republican support specifically—Trump voters vs. Republican leaners vs. independents—**because that is probably the more revealing number for your MAGA–DSA overlap.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21fef-b2d6-449a-bd48-27fd5c6d009a", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21fef-b2d6-449a-bd48-27fd5c6d009a" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21488-a28f-424d-a937-288c9756a2e1", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "Compared to Afghanistan over time and Iraq and various times and other deployments.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21488-a28f-424d-a937-288c9756a2e1", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9", "parentSourceMessageId": "5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:85ed8e3a-bc75-4e44-a072-973f06520519", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. The useful comparison is **support at entry versus support after casualties, duration, and mission drift**. Iran looks unusual because it began with much weaker public backing than Afghanistan or Iraq did, so I’m lining up comparable “was it right/worth it?” measures rather than mixing unlike poll questions.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "85ed8e3a-bc75-4e44-a072-973f06520519", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21488-a28f-424d-a937-288c9756a2e1", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21488-a28f-424d-a937-288c9756a2e1" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "The striking thing is **how quickly Iran has reached the level of public rejection that took Iraq years and Afghanistan more than a decade to reach.** The questions aren't perfectly identical across polls, so the percentages shouldn't be treated as one continuous series, but the historical comparison is strong.\n\n| Conflict | Early U.S. public support | What happened over time |\n|---|---:|---|\n| **Iran, 2026** | **38% right / 59% wrong** only weeks after the Feb. 28 opening attack | By Aug. 28–31, only **25% said the war had been worth it; 54% said it had not.** citeturn256424search0turn256424view0 |\n| **Afghanistan, 2001** | **~89–93%** said sending troops was *not* a mistake | Still 60% “not a mistake” in 2009; only in **2014**, after 12+ years, did opinion reach roughly 48% not mistake / 49% mistake. citeturn395521search3turn395521search9 |\n| **Iraq, 2003** | **71–76%** supported/right decision | ~55% still called it right a year later; around **2005** the country reached an even split; by 2007 only ~36% called it right. citeturn395521search5turn395521search6 |\n| **Persian Gulf War, 1991** | Even immediately before combat, roughly **65%** said deployment wasn't a mistake | After victory, that rose to **87%**. It never developed anything like the Iraq/Iran trajectory. citeturn736945search10 |\n| **Kosovo, 1999** | Roughly **62%** supported the air campaign | Fell to 53% during the fighting, then rebounded; 68% afterward said the strikes were right. citeturn736945search2turn736945search3turn736945search0 |\n| **Libya, 2011** | Only **47–50%** called the airstrikes the right decision | This was considered unusually weak support for an intervention at the time. citeturn736945search4turn736945search1 |\n| **ISIS, Iraq/Syria, 2014** | About **60%** initially approved | Support remained around 57–63% during the following year despite doubts about whether it was succeeding. citeturn736945search8turn736945search13 |\n| **Syria strikes, 2017** | **50% approve / 41% disapprove** | Gallup characterized even that as low historically. citeturn736945search7 |\n\nAnd there's an extraordinary apples-to-apples data point **today**. Reuters/Ipsos asked Americans in late August 2026 whether each war had been worth its cost: **Afghanistan 21%, Iraq 21%, Iran 25%.** Afghanistan and Iraq are being judged with 20-plus years of hindsight; **Iran got to essentially the same place after six months.** citeturn510256news5\n\nThere are two older precedents worth noting. **Korea** soured extremely rapidly: in August 1950, only 20% called entering the war a mistake and 65% said it wasn't; by January 1951, **49% called it a mistake and only 38% did not.** Vietnam began with 60% saying intervention wasn't a mistake in 1965, but that gradually inverted; by 1969, roughly **58% called Vietnam a mistake.** citeturn395521search9turn736945search12\n\nSo visually, I'd characterize the trajectories this way:\n\n**Afghanistan:** 90% →──────────→ 50% over **12+ years**\n**Iraq:** 73% →────→ <50% over **~2 years**\n**Korea:** 65% →→ 38% over **~5 months**\n**Iran:** **started at 38%** → 25% worthwhile at **6 months**\n\nThat last comparison is the story. **Iran didn't lose a national consensus. It never had one.** Reuters makes precisely that distinction today: Iraq and Afghanistan “started with solid support at home”; Iran “enjoyed no such honeymoon,” with most Americans opposed from the outset. citeturn256424view1\n\nFor the MAGA–DSA overlap you're examining, that makes the antiwar piece considerably stronger than I initially framed it. Nationally, this isn't merely a generic “people eventually get tired of wars” attitude. **The public entered this particular war already skeptical, and six months later it is polling roughly alongside the retrospective verdict on Iraq and Afghanistan.** memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:85ed8e3a-bc75-4e44-a072-973f06520519", "parentSourceMessageId": "85ed8e3a-bc75-4e44-a072-973f06520519" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21d7c-8e8f-4664-b381-45e2e3f61ad0", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "I want to look at the top, let's say, 10 issues that would be decided differently if the people were in charge. So national level public opinion: abortion, marijuana, psilocybin. Looking at government, with 25% of people generally saying that wars are worth it, is there any other deeper-level understanding that we've gotten? You know, 40% of the people say we spend too much on defense or not enough, something like that. So looking at the top 10 issues that would be different than they are today if the majority in the U.S. had its say.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21d7c-8e8f-4664-b381-45e2e3f61ad0", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8", "parentSourceMessageId": "938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7fa6f353-c2b3-4c26-8cea-46c4bd8bbeb7", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "I’m treating this as a **direct-democracy counterfactual**: not “what policies are popular,” but where a reasonably durable national majority appears to want an outcome that federal law or national policy still does not deliver. I’ll separate very strong cases from tempting ones—like psilocybin or defense spending—where the majority is less clean.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "7fa6f353-c2b3-4c26-8cea-46c4bd8bbeb7", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21d7c-8e8f-4664-b381-45e2e3f61ad0", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21d7c-8e8f-4664-b381-45e2e3f61ad0" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:25dd0696-bd63-45da-9d1e-1d8a7d736c71", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "A first cut is already emerging: **defense spending itself probably does *not* make the top ten.** Gallup’s 2025 poll found 55% opposed cutting defense spending, even while current-war support can collapse to 25%. That suggests the public distinction is “strong defense, fewer/shorter wars,” not simply “smaller military.”", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "25dd0696-bd63-45da-9d1e-1d8a7d736c71", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7fa6f353-c2b3-4c26-8cea-46c4bd8bbeb7", "parentSourceMessageId": "7fa6f353-c2b3-4c26-8cea-46c4bd8bbeb7" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:c747ade9-62ca-427b-8486-2eee488252b4", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "The other surprise is **psilocybin does not belong in the clean top ten yet**. Broad legalization is only around 27–28%; supervised therapeutic access can reach majority support depending on wording, but recent polling is too question-sensitive to treat it like marijuana.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "c747ade9-62ca-427b-8486-2eee488252b4", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:25dd0696-bd63-45da-9d1e-1d8a7d736c71", "parentSourceMessageId": "25dd0696-bd63-45da-9d1e-1d8a7d736c71" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. If we define the exercise narrowly as **“What would probably be national policy if Americans voted directly on clearly worded propositions?”**, there is a surprisingly large gap between majority opinion and governing policy.\n\nMy first-pass **top 10** would look like this:\n\n| # | If the public decided | National support | What differs today |\n|---|---|---:|---|\n| **1** | **Impose term limits on members of Congress** | **87%** | There are no congressional term limits; this would likely require a constitutional amendment. citeturn795876search0 |\n| **2** | **Require background checks for essentially all gun purchases** | **~80–90%** | Federal law still does not require universal checks for all private sales. Recent polling finds large majorities even within both parties. citeturn654783search7turn654783search12 |\n| **3** | **Ban members of Congress/elected officials from trading individual stocks** | **76%** | Members remain able to own and trade stocks subject to disclosure rules; proposed bans still have not become a general prohibition. citeturn373389search2turn771312search60 |\n| **4** | **Raise the federal minimum wage substantially — roughly $15** | **~70%** | The federal minimum remains **$7.25**, unchanged since 2009. A 2025 YouGov poll put support for $15 at 71%. citeturn795876search4turn376064search0 |\n| **5** | **Guarantee paid family leave** | **69%** | There is still **no federal guarantee of paid family and medical leave for private-sector workers**. citeturn145116search2turn771312search0 |\n| **6** | **Legalize marijuana** | **64%** | Recreational marijuana remains federally prohibited. Some medical marijuana was moved to Schedule III in 2026, while broader federal rescheduling remains underway. citeturn145116search1turn771312search2turn771312search3 |\n| **7** | **Elect the president by national popular vote** | **63%** | The Electoral College still determines the winner. Support for a direct popular vote has been above 50% in essentially every recent Pew reading. citeturn795876search2 |\n| **8** | **Raise taxes on large corporations and high-income households** | **63% corporations; 58% $400k+ households** | Current federal policy does not reflect that majority preference for higher rates. The broader sentiment is even stronger: 70% have said corporations pay too little. citeturn640025search2turn795876search6 |\n| **9** | **Keep abortion legal in all or most circumstances nationally** | **60%** | There is no longer a federal constitutional right to abortion, and access depends heavily on state law. citeturn656458search0turn656458search3 |\n| **10** | **Require Congress to authorize major U.S. military action** | **~56–70%**, depending on wording | Presidents continue to initiate major military operations without prior congressional authorization. In the Iran context, 56% called approval *necessary*; another 26% called it preferable. A broader 2026 survey found roughly 70% saying presidents should get congressional approval. citeturn373389search0turn373389search9 |\n\nI think **#10 exposes something deeper than “Americans are antiwar.”** The public doesn't appear to want a weak military. Gallup found 55% opposed cutting defense spending in 2025. But the same population can say, essentially, **“keep the military strong, but don't let one person decide to use it.”** Only 25% now consider the Iran war worthwhile. citeturn654783search96turn656458news87\n\nAnd there are several extremely strong candidates sitting immediately outside that ten. **72% favor limits on campaign spending**, even though independent political spending can be unlimited; **65% favored allowing undocumented immigrants who meet requirements to remain legally** in Pew's 2025 poll; and **72% currently say prescription-drug prices are under-regulated**, while 85% support Medicare drug negotiation—which has now been implemented for a limited subset of drugs. citeturn795876search0turn992054search4turn640025search0\n\n### The pattern underneath them\n\nThis is where I think your hypothesis gets much more interesting than merely assembling ten popular policies.\n\nThe discrepancies aren't uniformly left-wing. They're disproportionately **anti-intermediary**:\n\n**People → Congress:** term limits, stock trading ban.\n**People → presidency:** popular vote, war authorization.\n**Workers → economy:** higher wage, paid leave.\n**Individuals → personal choices:** abortion, marijuana.\n**Public → concentrated economic power:** higher corporate/high-income taxes.\n**Citizens → guns:** retain ownership rights, but require a common safety gate.\n\nThe public often lands in places that **neither institutional coalition cleanly represents**. On defense, people can favor strength *and* restrain presidential war-making. On guns, people can favor ownership *and* universal background checks. On immigration, people can want tougher enforcement *and* legal status for people already here. That's precisely where a binary party model starts obscuring the underlying preference structure.\n\nAnd **psilocybin is a useful control case** for this thesis: I would *not* put it on the list yet. Broad legalization polls around **27–28%**, far below marijuana. There is considerably greater openness to supervised therapeutic use, and some studies get majority support when the proposition is specifically clinical, but we don't yet have anything resembling marijuana's stable national majority. citeturn432544search2turn432544search4\n\nSo if you were trying to demonstrate the proposition **“Here is what the United States would look like if we simply asked the United States”**, these ten give you a surprisingly powerful first dashboard. The next useful pass would be to identify **20–30 propositions where (a) the polling question is essentially referendum-ready, (b) support exceeds 55%, and (c) existing federal policy clearly contradicts the result.** That would give us a much stronger empirical measure of the *representation gap* than cherry-picking individual popular policies. memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:c747ade9-62ca-427b-8486-2eee488252b4", "parentSourceMessageId": "c747ade9-62ca-427b-8486-2eee488252b4" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21b2a-cf8d-44c9-a6c1-d371b90efcbd", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "All right, I'm looking for support of particular policies. That defense funding should be allowed for, you know, major expenses that the Defense Department doesn't ask for. Anything along those lines. And, you know, support for the school lunch program. And support for tax reform, simplicity, tax simplicity. Yeah, any other collection of ten things not on this list, or specific pieces of this list that get more than 55% support.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21b2a-cf8d-44c9-a6c1-d371b90efcbd", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3", "parentSourceMessageId": "daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:971185eb-ba42-4879-8c6e-28981d6e11a5", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "I’m looking for **referendum-ready propositions with a clean >55% national majority**, especially the kinds of administrative/governance choices that rarely get framed as ideological questions. I’ll also flag where the poll wording is doing too much work, because that matters a lot for “the people would decide differently.”", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "971185eb-ba42-4879-8c6e-28981d6e11a5", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21b2a-cf8d-44c9-a6c1-d371b90efcbd", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21b2a-cf8d-44c9-a6c1-d371b90efcbd" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. Once we move away from the headline culture-war issues, there is a surprisingly deep bench of **specific propositions above 55% where federal policy either differs or hasn't acted**.\n\n| Policy proposition | Support | Representation gap |\n|---|---:|---|\n| **1. Don't increase Pentagon spending above what the Pentagon/President requested.** | **>60%** | A 2022 national likely-voter poll found more than six in ten wanted Congress to stick to the requested level rather than add more. Congress continues to receive and fund billions in “unfunded priorities”; DOD components submitted $134 billion of these additional requests from FY2020–25. This is almost exactly the proposition you were describing. citeturn951073search3turn315134search1 |\n| **2. Don't increase the Pentagon budget until DOD can pass an independent audit.** | **80%** | This one is strikingly bipartisan: 79% Republican, 80% Democrat, 82% independent in the 2023 poll. DOD received a disclaimer again on its FY2025 department-wide audit—the eighth consecutive failure to obtain an overall clean opinion. citeturn951073search2turn951073search1 |\n| **3. Give the military the legal right to repair its own equipment instead of depending on contractors.** | **73.5%** | A 2026 poll found 78.9% support the principle and 73.5% support the specific Warrior Right to Repair Act. The legislation remains under congressional consideration rather than being the general rule. citeturn489764search1 |\n| **4. Make school breakfast and lunch free for all public-school students.** | **60% lunch / 57% breakfast** | A national YouGov poll crossed 55% on both; earlier national polling found 63% support for universal meals. Federal policy remains primarily means-tested, although nine states now provide universal meals. A 2025 parent survey found much higher support—81%—but that's parents rather than all adults. citeturn124639search7turn459964view1turn185089search3turn185089search10 |\n| **5. Fundamentally reform/simplify the federal tax code.** | **88% say reform is needed; 66% call it overly complex** | This is an extremely broad consensus across parties: 89% Republicans, 88% independents and 86% Democrats said the code needs reform. But this is the one I'd label **directional rather than referendum-ready**: people agree overwhelmingly on simplification, while agreement drops when you specify exactly which deductions, brackets or credits disappear. citeturn516235view0turn180268view0 |\n| **6. Tax capital gains like wage income for households making $1 million+.** | **76%** | February 2026 polling found 70% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats favoring equal treatment at that income level. Federal law continues to give qualifying long-term capital gains preferential rates. citeturn902081view0 |\n| **7. Apply the Social Security payroll tax again to wages over $400,000.** | **79%** | Republicans 77%, Democrats 83%. The current structure stops Social Security taxation above the wage cap and doesn't restart it at $400,000. This is perhaps one of the cleanest examples of a detailed fiscal proposition receiving a huge bipartisan majority while Congress remains deadlocked. citeturn902081view0 |\n| **8. Require employers to provide paid sick leave.** | **78%** | YouGov found 78% would support such a ballot measure nationally, including 66% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats. Federal law generally provides **no entitlement to paid sick leave** for private-sector workers. citeturn927933search0turn927933search7 |\n| **9. Cap insulin cost-sharing at $35/month for everyone.** | **76%** | Medicare has a cap and many states have adopted limits, but there is still no universal federal $35 cap covering everyone with private insurance and the uninsured. citeturn837007search0 |\n| **10. Keep medical debt off credit reports.** | **82%** | Support included 78% of Republicans, 75% of independents and 88% of Democrats. The CFPB adopted such a rule, but a federal court vacated it in July 2025, so the national protection is currently gone. citeturn489764search75turn489764search0 |\n\nA few things jump out from this second batch.\n\n**Defense is richer territory than “cut the military.”** Public opinion isn't clearly saying *spend much less on defense*. It is saying something closer to: **make the Pentagon account for the money; don't give it money it didn't ask for; don't increase the budget when it can't pass an audit; and stop forcing troops to pay contractors to fix equipment they can fix themselves.** Those propositions get you into 60–80% territory without requiring an anti-military premise.\n\n**Tax policy has the same structure.** “Simplify the taxes” is overwhelmingly popular but underspecified. Once you get concrete, however, several propositions remain surprisingly strong: **79% tax wages over $400,000 for Social Security; 76% tax millionaires' capital gains at ordinary-income rates; 60% favor higher effective income-tax rates on millionaires; 78% favored a 2% wealth tax above $50 million in a deliberative 2025 survey.** citeturn902081view0\n\nAnd there is another group I would probably investigate for your eventual **“What the People Want” dashboard**: universal preschool polls at **79%**, childcare subsidies that cap low- and middle-income families' costs at 7% of income at **83%**, banning junk fees at **79%**, and banning personalized “surveillance pricing” at **76%**. citeturn902081view4turn489764search74turn489764search10\n\nSo I think you're uncovering a more interesting category than simply **popular policies Congress hasn't passed**. There are a lot of **boring, specific, operational decisions with 60–80% agreement** that almost disappear inside partisan politics. Those may be your best demonstration of the representation gap, because nobody has to agree on capitalism, socialism, MAGA, DSA, or even left versus right to answer them. memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:971185eb-ba42-4879-8c6e-28981d6e11a5", "parentSourceMessageId": "971185eb-ba42-4879-8c6e-28981d6e11a5" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb212e5-4cd9-4b3c-92fd-b9bb1d76b371", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "Some of these numbers to the greatest degree possible. So, you know, like full circle, you know, payfors. Some of these taxing, taxing endorsements will obviously go to pay for some of the pieces of the puzzle. So run the numbers on universal preschool and the like. You know, just give me the debits and credits, kind of if we did all of these things, you know, even to the point of defense contractors. Each— give me the numbers. They're usually justified here or there, how much each proposal would cost the taxpayer or save the taxpayer.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb212e5-4cd9-4b3c-92fd-b9bb1d76b371", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc", "parentSourceMessageId": "7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f66fc02-4005-44a4-acc1-d5501b54fd04", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "I’m going to put these on one ledger and keep three things separate: **federal budget impact, taxpayer/public-sector savings, and private household savings/transfers**. Otherwise a $10 billion reduction in medical bills can get misleadingly treated as if it were $10 billion of deficit reduction.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "5f66fc02-4005-44a4-acc1-d5501b54fd04", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb212e5-4cd9-4b3c-92fd-b9bb1d76b371", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb212e5-4cd9-4b3c-92fd-b9bb1d76b371" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:909de5ce-742c-4191-9337-b16a24c7f470", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "A key accounting distinction is becoming important: **the biggest “credit” in the set—taxing wages above $400,000 for Social Security—doesn’t normally pay for preschool or lunches.** It goes into Social Security’s trust funds. So I’m keeping the general-fund ledger separate from earmarked or private-sector savings rather than making the package look more balanced than it is.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "909de5ce-742c-4191-9337-b16a24c7f470", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f66fc02-4005-44a4-acc1-d5501b54fd04", "parentSourceMessageId": "5f66fc02-4005-44a4-acc1-d5501b54fd04" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:41a8e0b1-d9c4-490a-9ce4-e51241f2abd5", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "The fiscal circle is becoming fairly clean. Using the closest serious scores, **child care + universal preschool + paid family leave are about $925 billion over ten years before school meals**, while a 28% corporate rate alone is modeled at about **$1.4 trillion** in ten-year revenue under the current 2026 tax baseline. The tricky pieces are capital gains and defense savings, where design determines whether the headline number is real.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "41a8e0b1-d9c4-490a-9ce4-e51241f2abd5", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:909de5ce-742c-4191-9337-b16a24c7f470", "parentSourceMessageId": "909de5ce-742c-4191-9337-b16a24c7f470" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. When we put these on the same ledger, the scale becomes much clearer. I would **not call this a formal CBO package score**—the underlying proposals were scored in different years and some polling propositions don't map perfectly onto legislative text—but we can get surprisingly close.\n\n### The spending side\n\n| Majority-backed policy | Approx. federal budget effect | Annual equivalent | Confidence |\n|---|---:|---:|---|\n| **Child-care subsidies / cap costs for middle- and lower-income families** | **+$400B / 10 yrs** | ~$40B | CBO accepted the administration's $400B figure as an achievable design placeholder. citeturn536543view1 |\n| **Universal preschool** | **+$200B / 10 yrs** | ~$20B | Same CBO treatment: achievable policy target, though exact legislation matters. citeturn536543view0turn536543view2 |\n| **12 weeks paid family/medical leave** | **+$325B / 10 yrs** | ~$32.5B | Administration estimate incorporated by CBO as a placeholder. citeturn441766search0turn536543view1 |\n| **Universal school breakfast + lunch** | **roughly +$100–150B / 10 yrs** | ~$10–15B | My planning range, not a current CBO score. Federal lunch + breakfast spending is already $23.5B/year. During the pandemic, universal access was estimated around $29B versus about $18B under the previous system. citeturn972010search15turn260115search8 |\n| **$35 insulin cap for everyone** | **+$11.4B / 10 yrs** | ~$1.1B | CBO score for the insulin provisions themselves; costs largely shift from patients toward insurers/premiums/government. citeturn472102search2 |\n| **Federal paid-sick-leave requirement** | **well under $1B federal** | <~$0.1B | CBO found only $17M mandatory spending over 10 years and $562M discretionary spending over the first six years. The main cost falls on employers rather than the Treasury. citeturn472102search9 |\n| **$15 federal minimum wage** | **+$54B / 10 yrs** | ~$5.4B | Older CBO score; another $16B in interest. But affected workers receive **$333B more in cumulative pay**, so most of this policy operates outside the federal budget. citeturn472102search1turn472102search67 |\n\nUsing **$10–15B/year for school meals**, those policies come to roughly:\n\n**$1.09–$1.14 trillion of added federal cost over ten years.**\n\nThat includes the old $15 minimum-wage score. Leave it out, and we are at roughly **$1.04–$1.09 trillion**.\n\nNow the interesting part.\n\n### The revenue side\n\n| Majority-direction tax policy | Approx. 10-year revenue | Important qualification |\n|---|---:|---|\n| **Raise corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%** | **+$1.410T conventional**; **+$1.006T dynamic** | Current 2026 Tax Foundation model. The dynamic estimate accounts for its estimate of lower investment/output. citeturn700444search1 |\n| **Restore 39.6% top individual rate / pre-TCJA top bracket** | **+$409B conventional**; **+$187.5B dynamic** | Modeled against permanent 37% rates—the policy Congress ultimately enacted in 2025. citeturn122431view1turn614894search5 |\n| **Tax capital gains/dividends like ordinary income** | **+$137B conventional** | Current model applies parity to everyone, not just millionaires, so this is **not an exact score of the 76%-supported proposition** we discussed. citeturn700444search6 |\n| **Apply Social Security payroll tax again above $400K** | **+$1.477T conventional** | Huge—but I would **not use this to pay for preschool.** It is Social Security revenue. It substantially strengthens Social Security's finances instead. citeturn591331search9 |\n| **Federal marijuana legalization/taxation** | **+$8.1B gross revenue in CBO's MORE Act score** | Most was deliberately recycled into an Opportunity Trust Fund; prison appropriations could fall another ~$800M. It's not a major general-fund pay-for as that bill was designed. citeturn430666view0 |\n\nAnd capital gains contains a wrinkle worth lingering on. **Simply jacking up the realization tax rate is not necessarily a giant revenue machine**, because wealthy owners can defer selling assets. A current Tax Foundation model gets $137B from ordinary-income treatment; its very different mark-to-market proposal for ultrawealthy taxpayers gets **$628B conventional** because it removes that ability to defer realization. citeturn700444search6turn700444search7\n\nThat is a missing step in a lot of “tax the rich” arithmetic: **rate → behavioral response → taxable base → revenue**. The rate by itself doesn't tell us what comes in.\n\n### Now close the loop\n\nTake only two very recognizable tax changes:\n\n**28% corporate tax:** +$1.410T\n**39.6% top individual rate:** +$0.409T\n**Total conventional revenue:** **+$1.819 trillion**\n\nAgainst:\n\n**Child care + preschool + paid leave + meals + insulin + paid sick leave + $15 wage:** approximately **−$1.09 to −$1.14 trillion**\n\nThat leaves roughly **$680–730 billion over ten years** on conventional arithmetic.\n\nNow use the Tax Foundation's much more conservative **dynamic** numbers, which assume economic losses from those higher tax rates:\n\n**Corporate:** +$1.006T\n**Top individual:** +$0.188T\n**Total:** **+$1.194T**\n\nThat still roughly covers the **$1.09–1.14T** social-policy package, leaving approximately **$50–100B**.\n\nI wouldn't publish that as “the package pays for itself” without a proper integrated score—the policies interact, the preschool/child-care numbers are policy-design placeholders, school meals are my range, and the tax-rate polling we've discussed endorses the *direction* of higher corporate/high-income taxes rather than necessarily those exact rates. But as an order-of-magnitude test, **yes: we are in the same fiscal neighborhood.**\n\n### Then there is the money I'm deliberately *not* counting\n\nDefense is particularly interesting here.\n\nDOD components requested **$134 billion in “unfunded priorities” above the President's requests in just FY2020–25**, rising to $30B in FY2025. That's an average exposure of about **$22B/year**. But those are requests, not appropriations, so I would book **$0 savings** until we know how much Congress would otherwise have funded. citeturn591331search2\n\nThe Pentagon audit reforms have already produced measurable returns. GAO says modernization associated with the audit effort prevented at least **$5.5B in improper payments** from 2020 through mid-2023, and retiring 89 obsolete systems was projected to save another **$760M annually** through FY2029. citeturn441766search1turn441766search9\n\nMilitary right-to-repair is harder to score nationally, so again I would book **$0** rather than invent a number. But the scale is real: GAO has found lack of technical data contributing to sustainment problems where fixing only the portion of identified Navy ship problems for which cost data existed would cost **$4.2B**, and GAO explicitly says earlier attention to sustainment and IP could save billions. citeturn892950search9turn892950search23\n\nAnd **tax simplification may be the biggest non-budget number of the entire exercise**. Americans now spend about **7.1 billion hours and $148B out of pocket every year** complying with federal tax rules. When the value of people's time is included, the estimated compliance burden is **$536B annually**. That isn't $536B the Treasury could spend—the money is largely private time and compliance expense—but even a **10% reduction in that burden would represent about $54B/year in real economic savings.** citeturn272422search0\n\nSo there are really **three ledgers**:\n\n**Federal budget:** roughly $1.1T of the popular new benefits we've identified can plausibly be matched by roughly $1.2–1.8T from just two popular-direction high-end tax changes, depending on behavioral assumptions.\n\n**Social Security:** another approximately **$1.48T over ten years** from the >$400K payroll-tax proposal goes toward repairing Social Security rather than financing those benefits. citeturn591331search9\n\n**Efficiency/private savings:** tax simplification, Pentagon audits, right-to-repair, medical-debt rules, junk-fee rules, etc. can create potentially very large gains without showing up as equivalent Treasury revenue.\n\nThat starts looking less like a random wish list and more like the beginning of an **actual “People's Budget”**: *Here are the propositions with majority support; here is what each costs; here is what each raises or saves; here is what cannot honestly be counted as a pay-for; and here is the resulting balance.* memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:41a8e0b1-d9c4-490a-9ce4-e51241f2abd5", "parentSourceMessageId": "41a8e0b1-d9c4-490a-9ce4-e51241f2abd5" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2168b-f27f-4d1d-ae5b-a01a156d8d69", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "These are remarkable findings because common sense, this idea of unfunded mandates and referendums that get passed without consideration are a real problem. It's sort of like giving people part of the responsibility without making sure it pays for itself. Those can be a real problem. I want all of these things. Yeah, of course everybody wants services, but how are you going to pay for them? It's fascinating, without any real coordination, without having to even decide payfors, without having to poll every single person on what do you want and how are you going to pay for it, public opinion already falls down on these issues, as far as we can see, pretty responsibly, which is phenomenal when you think about it. It's almost like a collection of ants doing something that no single ant can do. And yet we put a few of the ants in power with enough power to block what 80 percent of us want to do. 80 percent of us want term limits in Congress, and who gets to decide whether there's term limits in Congress? It's Congress. Well who puts Congress, who puts politicians into power? It's the people. So Congress doesn't have this power. We have this power. We just need to recognize. We just need to utilize it in a concerted way. So it's really just wielding the power that we have, but at the onset, it's amazing to see how much better our lives could be: universal preschool, major changes to health care, major changes to just simplifying our daily lives, not extreme measures of taxing the rich by 90%, just changing a few policies that provide huge handouts, huge savings that are inappropriate when you look at everyone paying their fair share. Paying your fair share is representational to a percentage. It makes sense. If I make $30,000, I pay less taxes than if I make $60,000. That doesn't keep me from making $60,000. I'm better off. You don't even have to get into a heavily progressive tax concept. You could even flatten the rate further. People can understand that. We don't have to keep trying to squeeze so much out of the top. Let's just start with them paying what we pay. We already agree on that. So it's fascinating to see that the policies that we collectively endorse are workable, without even coordinating our individual choices. So imagine how effective they would be if we did coordinate our individual choices, if we could crowdsource this and put our personal attention onto every little facet that we care about, only the facets that we care about. Someone else cares about some other facet, God bless them. And model the whole construct over what works good for me, what works good for people like me. If someone meets my socioeconomic profile and has voiced several opinions sort of like mine, then they probably resonate more or less with the rest of what I think. Maybe, maybe not. And I can present that to them and let them decide: is this what you want? Other people like you like things to look like this. Do you have any other different ideas? Take those ideas into consideration. You plug this into a kind of platform like MeUs, where you really get to put attention on the things you care the most about. You get the fullest level of input from each individual, and each individual gets to see collectively the benefits of how everyone else is looking at the problem. Ah, this is how much we're spending in Pell grants. And this is the takeaway: by funding private universities with federal money, we're, in some ways, raising the prices of education for other people. Well, let's think about that: is that money better spent at technical schools that give us the real skills that most of us need? Should you really end up with a philosophy degree paid for by public education when that's not going to pay for itself for you personally over the next 10 to 20 years? Where should federal funds go? And letting people weigh in on the very specifics of these kinds of smart business decisions. We each individually would make the best choices for ourselves. And if we're making the best choices for ourselves, then we are collectively going to be making the best choices for our collective self. And the evidence that this is possible is right here in the top lines, in the big numbers. These are huge changes that Congress hasn't been able to do. Congress isn't able to do them because Congress operates on a win-lose election basis. Am I going to convince enough voters that I am working in their interest and the other person is not? If I'm just doing the kinds of things that everyone wants, then I'm not going to get my side on my side. And this is the red-blue problem. The problem of splitting our collective will, our 80 percent endorsement for a particular policy gets cut in half and thrown to the wayside because it doesn't move the needle on partisan politics. Because it's universally supported, we focus on the contention, because that's what wins an election. But that's no way to govern. That doesn't make any sense that the slightest majority should be able to decide everything on everything. The overwhelming majority, issue by issue, gets ignored so that we can fight over control. It doesn't make any sense. It doesn't make any sense for you getting what you want out of your government. Vote here. Click Yes if you want your say, the ability to address any issue, any specific issue, to say these are the parameters, this is what I want education to look like. This is what I want immigration reform to look like. We saw a giant immigration response, and most of it wasn't what people say they want. People who are in process, working to get visas, paying taxes, probably should be treated differently than people who have committed crimes. All of us say this, and yet the policy rollout didn't reflect that. Policy rollout follows a flat mandate. It's like when your boss tells you to do something and you're like you have to look busy doing it. That's what government has been doing. It's tried to look busy to get your vote. It's a lot of talk. That's why approval ratings are near the low double-digits for Congress for a long time, not just recently, forever. Because they're not doing what the people want. And the crazy thing is, the people act like it's the government that's the problem. Yeah, the two-party system, splitting our vote in half, is problematic, but that's not the problem. The problem is we think our responsibility ends when we check box red or box blue. That's not where our responsibility ends. Our responsibility is to make the system better so that we can have our say. And 250 years ago, technology didn't support you having your say. Information traveled on horseback, and the people were too busy working hard, manual labor lives just to survive. So in order to come up with decisions for the whole, representational government made sense at the time. Fast forward 250 years.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb2168b-f27f-4d1d-ae5b-a01a156d8d69", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638", "parentSourceMessageId": "1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:369b84a6-621c-42f1-860e-e9ab1a7a3a4b", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "There’s a strong argument in what you just laid out, but one step needs tightening: **individual preference does not automatically aggregate into a good collective decision.** The more defensible claim is that the public-opinion evidence suggests surprisingly coherent preferences already exist, and a system that exposes costs, tradeoffs, and consequences could make that collective judgment much more informed than today’s red/blue proxy.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "369b84a6-621c-42f1-860e-e9ab1a7a3a4b", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2168b-f27f-4d1d-ae5b-a01a156d8d69", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb2168b-f27f-4d1d-ae5b-a01a156d8d69" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. The strongest thing in what you just laid out is **not** “people always know best.” That claim is too easy to knock down. The stronger claim is: **when millions of people make judgments independently across different issues, the aggregate result already appears more fiscally and substantively coherent than our political system gives them credit for—and we are barely giving them structured information or any way to coordinate those judgments.**\n\nThat is where your ant image works. No single ant sees the colony. No single voter needs to understand every line of the federal budget. One person cares intensely about Pell Grants, another about military procurement, another about school lunch, another about insulin. A system that lets each person contribute where they have knowledge or interest, while exposing the whole group to costs, tradeoffs, counterarguments, and aggregate consequences, is conceptually different from asking every citizen to become a miniature senator.\n\nAnd the empirical beginning is striking. Americans simultaneously identify the federal deficit as a serious problem—64% called it a “very big problem” this year—while supporting various spending programs *and* revenue increases we just found could plausibly offset a substantial portion of those programs. That doesn't prove a crowdsourced budget would balance, but it pushes directly against the caricature that direct public input inevitably means everyone voting themselves benefits without considering costs. citeturn312955search2\n\nThere are three places I would tighten the argument.\n\nFirst, **“what is best for each of us” does not automatically become “what is best for all of us.”** Externalities, conflicting interests and finite resources are exactly why collective decision-making is difficult. What your proposed system potentially adds is the missing mechanism: *my preference enters the pool; your competing preference enters it; costs become visible; consequences become visible; alternatives can be compared; then we see where the collective judgment settles.* That is stronger than assuming aggregation works automatically.\n\nSecond, the **red-blue problem** becomes more precise if you describe it as a loss of resolution. Elections bundle hundreds of independent questions into one binary choice. Someone may agree with one party on five things and the other party on five others, but the ballot records one bit of information: **A or B**. Issue-by-issue participation preserves much more information about what the person wanted in the first place. The current polling illustrates that phenomenon: 87% support congressional term limits, 79% support maximum ages for federal elected officials, and 72% support campaign-spending limits—coalitions much larger than either party can normally assemble electorally. citeturn312955search0\n\nThird, I would modify one factual point in your narration. Congress has been deeply unpopular for a long period, but **not “forever” at low-double-digit approval.** Gallup's historical average since 1974 is around 33%; it reached 84% after 9/11 and hit a record low of 9% in 2013. Since roughly 2005, however, approval has averaged only about 21%. Pew's latest measure is similarly bleak: in July 2026 only **25% had a favorable view of Congress and 72% an unfavorable one.** citeturn899183search9turn899183search11turn312955search4\n\nAnd your term-limit example contains an interesting constitutional wrinkle that may strengthen the broader point rather than weaken it. Congress is **not literally the only gateway**. Article V allows amendments either through two-thirds of both houses **or** through a convention that Congress must call after applications from two-thirds of state legislatures; three-fourths of states must ultimately ratify. The convention route has never been used. So an 87% public preference can exist while the constitutional machinery still requires an extraordinary degree of organized, geographically distributed action before that preference becomes law. citeturn899183search0turn899183search4\n\nThe idea I hear underneath the whole passage is therefore something like:\n\n**We already possess the sovereignty. What we lack is sufficiently high-resolution machinery for exercising it.**\n\nRepresentative government solved an information and coordination problem in the 18th century: people were geographically dispersed, information traveled slowly, and continuous participation was prohibitively expensive. Digital technology radically changes the cost of gathering preferences, distributing evidence, modeling consequences and revising a decision. That does **not by itself establish that direct digital decision-making would outperform representative government**—questions of minority rights, manipulation, participation bias, expertise, security and preference aggregation remain substantial. But it makes the institutional-design question legitimate in a way it simply could not have been in 1787.\n\nAnd this is where Me°Us is more interesting than a national referendum website. **“Vote yes/no on everything” is the crude version.** What you're describing is closer to distributed attention: people engage deeply where they care or know something; the system surfaces relevant information and downstream consequences; everyone can inspect the emerging whole; and preferences can change as people see what everybody else's choices imply. That is a much richer proposition than direct democracy alone. memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:369b84a6-621c-42f1-860e-e9ab1a7a3a4b", "parentSourceMessageId": "369b84a6-621c-42f1-860e-e9ab1a7a3a4b" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216ec-6073-4b92-8d53-ec96c0a366bc", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "Look at Reddit. Look at Nextdoor. Yes, people love putting their attention on issues. And when we can agree, and when we can see what other people think and learn from each other, we come to much better understandings, and we can work out these concepts. And the concerns, the questions, as far as minority rights, and as far as whether or not the people should be in charge, should really, really be taken with a heavy contextualization, a heavy frame of reference of what we are talking about. What we are talking about is 80% of the country wanting something: term limits. And the people in charge getting paid in terms of power, in terms of winning elections, in terms of being in office, taking donations that are given by corporations and special interests to do something other than what the people want, as a surcharge on the people. You and I are the consumers who give money to these corporations, who then weigh in on public policy to make it favor their profit margin. We don't want that. So these considerations of how good people would be at ruling themselves if we all worked together and we agreed, this is the thing: we agree on universal rights. What I want for me looks very much, most fundamentally, like what everyone wants for themselves on the most basic levels. My personal security, on my own personal safety, is going to look very similar for me: protection for my family, the ability to think and act and be for myself. It's going to look really similar to what you want. So we have vast mandates to collectively protect ourselves individually. Those protections are universal. The rights of the majority protect the minorities. So there's plenty we agree on that will be equal, that will be across the board rights. Now, on the implementation of the fine details, recognize we're starting to get into the 5% here versus 5% there. We're not talking about 80% of the country thinking something and government doing the opposite. That's an outrage. That's a travesty that ought not be. So we don't have to get it 100% right. We don't have to get to perfect. We might be 5% off, but we will be multiple times better off in reflecting what the people want into what the people get. The questions, the considerations, security, all of the like, those all do need to be addressed, but we collectively can address them. Everybody weighs in. If we have five versions of a technology that tells us what we want, and all of those five versions line up pretty well, we've got a pretty good indication that we're getting what we asked for. We can check that the system is working. The ability to hijack the will of the people comes from pushing power into these collective nodes, putting one individual in charge of the effects on the many. The more you diversify the responsibility to a point where I am responsible for my part in this overall thing, the far less access anyone else has to manipulate the system. You're going to have to convince everyone to get your profit margin tightened, and it's not worth the money. What's more worth your money as a corporation is to provide consumers the goods that they want. Let's get back to that. Let's get back to corporations earning our business, not forcing it, not making our lives worse.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb216ec-6073-4b92-8d53-ec96c0a366bc", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54", "parentSourceMessageId": "9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:44f66d9f-d3df-4f2d-967e-1af2eb632fc0", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "The architecture you’re describing becomes much stronger when it is framed as **distributed self-government with a rights floor**, rather than “majority rule.” That distinction answers the minority-rights objection without giving up the central claim that broad, persistent public agreement should carry far more governing force than it does now.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "44f66d9f-d3df-4f2d-967e-1af2eb632fc0", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216ec-6073-4b92-8d53-ec96c0a366bc", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb216ec-6073-4b92-8d53-ec96c0a366bc" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "There’s a more defensible version of what you’re describing that gets very close to your formulation without requiring the claim that majorities are inherently wise.\n\n**The evidence for the participation premise is real.** In 2025, 52% of Americans said they often or sometimes got local news from online forums or discussion groups such as community Facebook groups or Nextdoor, up from 38% in 2018. Reddit itself was used by about 24% of U.S. adults in Pew’s 2024 platform survey. Those platforms are not representative samples, and they can amplify conflict and misinformation, but they do demonstrate that people will voluntarily spend substantial attention discussing public problems when the friction is low enough. citeturn469783search2turn469783search24\n\nThe stronger evidence for your *learning-from-one-another* point comes from deliberative-democracy experiments rather than Reddit. Stanford’s “America in One Room” brought a representative sample of more than 500 voters together with balanced briefing material, competing experts and moderated discussion. Participants showed substantial changes in policy preferences and decreased partisan polarization compared with a control group. Stanford has since extended the model to online, AI-assisted deliberation, explicitly exploring whether this kind of informed discussion can be scaled. citeturn684654search2turn684654search9turn684654search12\n\nAnd the representation-gap premise has unusually strong public-opinion support. Pew found **87% favor congressional term limits**, including 90% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats. Separately, **84% say special interests and lobbyists have too much say in politics, 80% say campaign donors have too much influence on congressional decisions, and 70% say constituents have too little influence.** Those are different questions, but together they describe almost exactly the institutional frustration you’re talking about. citeturn469783search0turn684654search1\n\nWhere I would change your language is this sentence:\n\n> “The rights of the majority protect the minorities.”\n\nI think your underlying architecture is stronger than that sentence. A majority **can** threaten a minority; that is one of the reasons constitutional rights have traditionally been placed beyond ordinary majority votes. citeturn469783search25turn469783search26 What you're describing sounds more like:\n\n**Universal individual rights establish the floor. Democratic choice operates above that floor.**\n\nThat matches the rest of what you said. My right to speak, worship, associate, receive due process, be equally protected by law, and remain physically secure isn't something 51% gets to withdraw from me. Those protections apply to *everyone*. Once that universal floor is established, the argument for allowing broad public preferences to determine ordinary policy becomes much cleaner.\n\nThere’s another distinction that helps your decentralization argument. **Redundancy isn't the same thing as independence.** Five systems reporting the same result is much stronger evidence if they use different samples, different implementations and independently auditable methods. Five systems trained on the same underlying data and making the same methodological mistake could confidently reproduce the same wrong result. So your QA/QC architecture becomes something like: independent polling, representative sampling, transparent raw results, competing synthesis systems, audit trails, adversarial testing, and the ability of citizens to inspect and challenge the output. That gets you much closer to your “five technologies all say the same thing” test.\n\nOne factual qualification is also worth preserving around corporate political power. Corporations cannot simply write unlimited treasury checks directly to federal candidates. They can establish PACs, and corporations can give unlimited amounts to Super PACs and make unlimited independent expenditures, subject to disclosure and coordination rules; they can also lobby government directly. citeturn441646search0turn441646search2turn441646search7 So the accurate version of your point is broader than “corporations donate to politicians”: **economic organizations have multiple legally permitted channels for converting concentrated resources into political influence, while an ordinary citizen mostly has a vote, speech, organization and comparatively small contributions.**\n\nAnd I think one of the sharpest ideas in the passage is your observation about **resolution**. Consider the information content:\n\n**Election:**\n“Choose Red or Blue for the next several years.”\n\nversus\n\n**Issue-level system:**\n“I support A strongly, B weakly, oppose C, don't know enough about D, care intensely about E, and want to hear the arguments on F.”\n\nThe second captures enormously more information about political preference. More importantly, the person need not spend equal attention everywhere. Someone who has spent 30 years repairing aircraft can contribute disproportionately useful information to military maintenance policy while ignoring agricultural subsidies; a farmer can do the reverse. Then everyone retains the final ability to decide whether the resulting proposition works for them.\n\nThat gets you to a formulation I think is more rigorous than “everyone governs everything”:\n\n**Everyone gets a say in everything. Nobody has to become an expert in everything.**\n\nThe platform's job becomes connecting **distributed attention → informed deliberation → visible tradeoffs → measured collective preference → accountable implementation**.\n\nAnd that changes the minority-rights/security objection substantially. Those issues remain real, but they're **design requirements**, rather than automatic arguments for concentrating decision-making in a few hundred people. Representative government also has manipulation, corruption, information failure, factionalism and minority-rights failures; changing the decision architecture changes where those risks occur rather than making them disappear.\n\nSo the empirical proposition underneath your larger argument can remain modest:\n\n**We don't yet know that a distributed system would make every decision better. We do know that people already devote attention to public problems, that structured deliberation can change and depolarize opinion, that enormous bipartisan majorities exist on some policies, and that Americans themselves believe ordinary constituents have too little influence while donors and organized interests have too much.** citeturn469783search2turn684654search2turn684654search1\n\nThat is enough to make the next question legitimate: **why are we still treating one election every two or four years as the fullest practicable expression of the public will?**", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:44f66d9f-d3df-4f2d-967e-1af2eb632fc0", "parentSourceMessageId": "44f66d9f-d3df-4f2d-967e-1af2eb632fc0" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21c35-6169-4a0c-b6c1-ec3bd053881c", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "Yeah, I'm going to push back on three things you misconstrued. Reddit is evidence that people want to be involved in the process and have a say. It has nothing to do with majorities. I'm saying what you're saying when I say the rights of the majority protect the minority. The rights of the majority are the universal rights that the minority also has. You're hypersensitive to minority-majority issues, and you misconstrue the construct because your training algorithm is logged in a past where the majority was a big collective operating unit, and there's a lot of historical problems for those who have been disenfranchised. So you're triggered by the words. But let me explain to you the meaning of those words in this context. The bulk of the people want universal preschool paid for. That's not some operating majority that is going to subvert a minority. It's what do most people want? And to get the best thing for the group, we should listen to what most of the group wants. All the group wants universal protection for themselves. So we will give everyone in the group universal protections that we agree on. Those protect each individual, no matter what they think, feel, say, are. Majority and minority on an issue-by-issue basis isn't a group of people. It isn't a majority group versus a minority group. It's a bulk opinion of the total group, issue by issue. Stop framing it as a big group of people versus a small group of people. It's all one total group of people, and we have degrees of preference on various issues. Where we have heavy alignment, where more of us, where we more strongly feel and think something, that is a more pronounced preference on a particular issue. It doesn't correlate to a particular group of people. It's us. So stop treating the word minority and majority as if it's a historical reference to various factions and various people groups. We're stepping through the factions. We're just talking about what we all want by focusing on what you, the individual wants. And you're hesitant on this distributed system. I'll take that as a gauntlet thrown down. That's my work. By the time I publish this, I want a link to say, Click here. Give your input and let's see where this goes.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21c35-6169-4a0c-b6c1-ec3bd053881c", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713", "parentSourceMessageId": "5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. I imported three conventional democracy critiques into a construct where they don't quite fit.\n\nThe distinctions are:\n\n1. **Reddit/Nextdoor are evidence about participation, not majority wisdom.** People voluntarily spend enormous amounts of attention discussing things that matter to them when participation is cheap and self-directed. Reddit alone is now used by roughly a quarter of U.S. adults. That doesn't make Reddit representative; it demonstrates that the premise *“people won't bother participating”* is weak. citeturn820352search2\n\n2. **“Majority” in your construct is not a group of people. It is a measurement.** On proposition A, I may be in the 80%; on B, the 35%; on C, the 51%; on D, I may have no opinion at all. There is no permanent majority imposing itself on a permanent minority. There is **one population producing a preference distribution, issue by issue**. Your universal-rights argument follows from that: where we have extremely broad agreement that *I want this protection for myself*, that protection gets extended universally—including to every individual who dissents from other collective choices.\n\n3. **The distributed system is an empirical proposition you intend to test, not something that needs to be assumed in advance.** “Click here. Give your input. Let's see where this goes” is crucial. You don't need to prove beforehand that 330 million people would govern perfectly. Build the apparatus, put real questions through it, compare its results with polling, deliberative samples, elections and actual policy, and expose the discrepancies. Stanford's deliberative experiments already give you a useful precursor: when a representative sample received balanced information and discussed issues, views changed substantially and partisan polarization generally decreased relative to controls. citeturn286993search0turn286993search6\n\nThe sentence that clarifies the whole architecture for me is:\n\n**A majority isn't a faction. It's where all of our individual preferences happen to converge on a particular question.**\n\nAnd then intensity matters too. **80%–20% is information. 51%–49% is different information. +5 conviction versus +1 preference is additional information. “I don't know enough to answer” is information.** Conventional elections compress almost all of that into which of two bundled coalitions gets control.\n\nThat makes the term-limit example unusually clean. **87% of Americans favor congressional term limits, including 90% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats.** citeturn820352search0turn820352search1 Red and blue are almost irrelevant to that preference. Once we bundle the population back into Red versus Blue, however, the 87% convergence loses much of its political force.\n\nSo I would also withdraw my earlier formulation that Me°Us is interesting because it is “more than a referendum website.” That's still true, but it undersells the central conceptual move. **You're trying to make collective preference visible at full resolution.** The referendum is merely one output. The deeper system is: *What do I want? What do you want? What do all of those individual answers add up to? What do we learn from one another? What changes when costs and consequences become visible? And where do we ultimately converge?*\n\nThen the gauntlet really is empirical: **build it and compare what the people say with what their government does.** That test doesn't require a theory that the people will always get it right. It gives us a way to find out what they would choose in the first place.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21c35-6169-4a0c-b6c1-ec3bd053881c", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21c35-6169-4a0c-b6c1-ec3bd053881c" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21de9-7926-498d-a920-52b70f937d5c", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "We had it elsewhere, but revisiting this whole construct and looking for support: immigration enforcement. Look at the— give me a breakdown. I think it was in a different chat, but just repeat it here. We had a very high level of enforcement. So find me polling. I think there were like four different facets. One was maybe in the 80 percentile percentage, and then on down for different levels of action on immigration, as well as path to citizenship and the ideas of, you know, treating people differently if they are contributing to taxes, all that stuff. Just where are the people on immigration?", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "bbb21de9-7926-498d-a920-52b70f937d5c", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222", "parentSourceMessageId": "9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:0b60b4e0-8eb0-49ee-8830-4cd4d656857f", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes — I’ll reconstruct the immigration picture as a **set of distinct policy questions**, because support changes sharply depending on *who is being removed, who gets legal status, and what conditions are attached*. I’m also checking the earlier version we discussed so I can preserve the structure rather than inventing a new one.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "0b60b4e0-8eb0-49ee-8830-4cd4d656857f", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21de9-7926-498d-a920-52b70f937d5c", "parentSourceMessageId": "bbb21de9-7926-498d-a920-52b70f937d5c" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "Yes. The earlier breakdown was essentially **four different immigration questions that get collapsed into one**, and the polling still supports that decomposition very strongly.\n\nThe cleanest current picture is:\n\n| Immigration proposition | National support |\n|---|---:|\n| **Deport undocumented immigrants convicted of serious/violent crimes** | **82–85%** |\n| **Give long-term undocumented immigrants with no serious criminal record legal status if they pay penalties/back taxes and remain crime-free** | **77%** |\n| **Give people brought here illegally as children a path to citizenship if they meet requirements** | **81–83%** |\n| **Create a path to citizenship/legal status for undocumented immigrants generally, with requirements** | **65–75%**, depending on wording |\n| **Maintain secure borders / enforce immigration law** | **57–61% call these very/extremely important** |\n| **Expand the border wall** | **56%** |\n| **Hire significantly more Border Patrol agents** | **49%** |\n| **Deport everyone living here illegally** | roughly **31–42% support**, depending on wording; Gallup finds **58% oppose** |\n| **Deport undocumented people with no violent-crime conviction** | **37% support / 44% oppose** |\n| **Increase workplace ICE raids** | **45% approve / 54% disapprove** |\n| **Current ICE enforcement has gone too far** | **62%** in Feb. 2026 |\n| **Due process/hearing before a judge for someone suspected of being here illegally** | **55% support** |\n\nThose aren't all from one survey, so they shouldn't be mechanically combined. But the pattern replicates across Pew, Gallup, Reuters/Ipsos, AP-NORC and other polling. citeturn926774search6turn627696view0turn704335search1turn766196search0\n\n### 1. Criminal conduct makes an enormous difference\n\nThis is probably the **80-something-percent number you remembered**.\n\nAP-NORC asked specifically about undocumented immigrants **convicted of violent crimes**: **82% favored deportation**, including 89% of Republicans and 79% of Democrats. A February 2026 Program for Public Consultation survey got **85% support** for deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of a crime. citeturn766196search1turn926774search6\n\nBut AP-NORC then removed the violent-crime condition. For undocumented immigrants **without a violent-crime conviction**, support for deportation dropped to **37%**, while 44% opposed. citeturn766196search66\n\nUMass found essentially the same distinction: **69% supported deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records**, but only **30% supported deporting someone who works full-time and pays taxes**, and only 37% supported deporting someone with no criminal record apart from immigration status. citeturn926774search1\n\nThat's a massive difference created by **one parameter: who are we talking about?**\n\n### 2. Working, law-abiding long-term residents get a very different answer\n\nThis is perhaps the most relevant result to what you remembered about **taxes/contribution**.\n\nIn February 2026, respondents were asked about undocumented immigrants who have lived here for years, **have not committed a crime**, and would have to **pay a penalty and any taxes owed and remain crime-free**.\n\n**77% favored giving them a long-term visa.** That included **69% of Republicans and 87% of Democrats.** citeturn926774search3turn926774search6\n\nAnother 2026 proposal added a longer residency requirement plus economic self-sufficiency, a background check, back taxes and a fine. At a **10-year residence threshold, 68% supported an earned path to citizenship**, including 57% of Trump voters in that particular survey. citeturn926774search45\n\nSo the public answer isn't well represented by either:\n\n**“Deport them.”**\n\nor\n\n**“Let everyone stay.”**\n\nWhen characteristics become visible, preferences change dramatically.\n\n### 3. Citizenship itself has substantial support\n\nGallup's June 2026 poll is particularly striking because it asked fairly straightforward questions.\n\n**75%** favored allowing undocumented immigrants living here to eventually become citizens if they meet requirements.\n\nFor people brought to the country illegally as children, support was **81%**. Even among Republicans, a majority supported the childhood-arrival pathway once “favor” and “strongly favor” were combined. citeturn627696view0\n\nPew asked it differently in June 2025 and got a somewhat lower—but still decisive—result: **65% said undocumented immigrants should be able to stay legally if they meet requirements**. Of the total population, 36% supported eventual citizenship and another portion supported permanent legal residency without citizenship. citeturn704335search0\n\nThat difference—65% versus 75%—is a good reminder that wording matters.\n\n### 4. People also want enforcement\n\nAnd this is where the binary political framing really loses information.\n\nIn February 2026, Reuters/Ipsos found:\n\n**61%** said secure borders preventing illegal entry were extremely or very important.\n\n**57%** said enforcement of existing immigration laws inside the country was extremely or very important.\n\n**60% simultaneously said a way for undocumented immigrants with jobs and no criminal record to obtain legal status was extremely or very important.** citeturn926774search2\n\nThose are not contradictory answers.\n\nThey amount to something roughly like:\n\n**Control entry. Enforce the rules. Distinguish serious offenders from everyone else. Create a lawful route for established, contributing people.**\n\nThat combination keeps appearing.\n\n### 5. The public becomes much less supportive as enforcement becomes indiscriminate\n\nPew found **56% support for expanding the border wall** in June 2025. But only 45% approved of increasing workplace ICE raids, while 54% disapproved. citeturn704335search1turn704335search2\n\nReuters/Ipsos later found only **28% supporting workplace immigration arrests**, versus 54% opposed, in July 2025. citeturn766196news68\n\nBy February 2026, **62% said ICE's current enforcement efforts had gone too far**. citeturn926774search2\n\nAnd in May 2025, Reuters/Ipsos found **55% saying people suspected of being here illegally are entitled to due process and a hearing before a judge**. citeturn766196search0\n\nSo again, **support for enforcement is not equivalent to support for every enforcement method.**\n\n### 6. Legal immigration is viewed quite differently from illegal entry\n\nGallup's latest national reading from June 2026 found **73% saying immigration is a good thing for the United States**, versus 21% saying it is bad. citeturn627696view0\n\nWhen Gallup asked specifically about **legal immigration**, Americans saw positive economic effects in several areas:\n\n**64%** — filling workforce gaps caused by an aging/retiring population\n**60%** — supplying workers for low-wage jobs\n**56%** — generating tax revenue for public programs\n**52%** — supplying science and technology workers. citeturn627696view0\n\nBut people were much more skeptical about housing costs and job competition for U.S.-born workers. So even here, the public response isn't generically “immigration good.”\n\n### And there's an interesting employer-side result\n\nOne of the more sophisticated formulations we've looked at pairs **mandatory employment verification with additional legal work visas**.\n\nA 2024 Program for Public Consultation survey found **83% support for requiring E-Verify while simultaneously expanding work visas**—82% Republican and 84% Democrat in that survey. The same project found 68% support for E-Verify without the visa expansion. citeturn926774search10\n\nThat gets much closer to treating immigration as a labor-market system rather than simply policing individuals.\n\n---\n\nSo if I reconstruct the **four-part formulation we were circling before**, it is essentially:\n\n**1. Border:** People want controlled borders and enforcement.\n\n**2. Crime:** People overwhelmingly want serious criminals deported.\n\n**3. Established residents:** People generally do **not** want indiscriminate removal of long-term, working, tax-paying, noncriminal residents; sizable majorities favor earned legal status.\n\n**4. Legal pathway:** People support legal immigration and substantial majorities support routes to citizenship or permanent status under conditions.\n\nAnd that's exactly the kind of example your Red-Blue argument is looking for. Calling the issue simply **“pro-immigration versus anti-immigration”** destroys most of the information contained in what Americans are saying. The same person can coherently favor **a secure border + deportation of violent offenders + employer verification + legal work visas + earned legal status for a worker who has lived here 15 years, pays taxes and hasn't committed crimes.**\n\nPolling suggests quite a lot of Americans occupy some version of that multidimensional space. citeturn926774search2turn926774search6turn627696view0 memcite", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:0b60b4e0-8eb0-49ee-8830-4cd4d656857f", "parentSourceMessageId": "0b60b4e0-8eb0-49ee-8830-4cd4d656857f" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:279614fb-93a8-453e-9ff6-147b4701b712", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Randy", "body": "numbers for removing police departments and getting rid of private property", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "279614fb-93a8-453e-9ff6-147b4701b712", "speakerType": "user", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6", "parentSourceMessageId": "fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6" }, { "id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5e95a8ce-4099-4384-ad30-ca535dfa0c22", "nodeId": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "author": "Riddlebot", "body": "The cleanest national numbers I can find are:\n\n- **Abolish police departments:** support has generally landed around **15–23%**. Gallup’s large 2020 survey found **15%** wanted police abolished; a national Yale-linked survey later that year found **23% support for abolition**, versus **66% for reform**. citeturn993358search3turn993358search0\n- **Defund/reduce police funding** is materially more popular than abolition: depending on wording, roughly **31–47%** supported reducing police budgets or shifting funding toward social services. citeturn487874search3turn487874search6\n- **Abolish all private property and have government hold it for the public good:** **7% yes, 77% no, 16% unsure** in a 2020 YouGov survey. Among Gen Z it was 12%; Millennials 10%. citeturn993358search37\n- A slightly softer formulation—**all private property publicly owned and government-managed**—got **11% support, 69% opposition**. citeturn487874search47\n\nA much newer 2026 HarrisX poll points in the same direction from the opposite wording: **91% supported private homeownership/private-property rights**, although that isn't exactly the inverse of “abolish all private property.” citeturn487874search7\n\nSo for the distinction you were making earlier, these aren't close calls:\n\n**Police abolition: ~15–23%**\n**Abolition of private property: ~7–11%**\n\nThat is very different territory from things like taxing wealthy people, worker protections, marijuana legalization, universal preschool, or immigration pathways, where national majorities can be found.\n\nOne wording caveat matters on the property question: **“abolish private property” can mean very different things in socialist theory**—sometimes private ownership of productive capital rather than people's homes and ordinary possessions. The 7% poll asked the sweeping version: *all private property*.", "createdAt": "", "seedUp": 0, "seedDown": 0, "positions": [], "threadId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "sourceMessageId": "5e95a8ce-4099-4384-ad30-ca535dfa0c22", "speakerType": "assistant", "pending": true, "replyToId": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:279614fb-93a8-453e-9ff6-147b4701b712", "parentSourceMessageId": "279614fb-93a8-453e-9ff6-147b4701b712" } ], "proposals": [], "claims": [], "commentVotes": {}, "claimVotes": {} }, "publication": { "slug": "what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "canonicalUrl": "https://www.portal-now.com/blog/what-maga-and-democratic-socialists-agree-on", "status": "published", "sourceUrl": "https://chatgpt.com/share/6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "mainlineCommentIds": [ "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216e2-e5e0-46d4-8d41-33f09ba2f4d7", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:eb008b69-99f2-4c37-ae34-fa36c77916b1", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:05ba1fc3-8a94-4b1b-b458-9d84b43a0ac5", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2191c-3b76-4496-ac02-e4ac16060820", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:09c6042a-450d-45f5-9ba9-7a5d0e86857a", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21eed-4c70-4817-98e5-edfd9c899be8", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:018c2535-8e45-4374-bb9b-9d5418c35f23", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21da4-b4bb-4d5d-bba5-c8dfcae25678", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21fef-b2d6-449a-bd48-27fd5c6d009a", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21488-a28f-424d-a937-288c9756a2e1", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:85ed8e3a-bc75-4e44-a072-973f06520519", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21d7c-8e8f-4664-b381-45e2e3f61ad0", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7fa6f353-c2b3-4c26-8cea-46c4bd8bbeb7", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:25dd0696-bd63-45da-9d1e-1d8a7d736c71", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:c747ade9-62ca-427b-8486-2eee488252b4", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21b2a-cf8d-44c9-a6c1-d371b90efcbd", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:971185eb-ba42-4879-8c6e-28981d6e11a5", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb212e5-4cd9-4b3c-92fd-b9bb1d76b371", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f66fc02-4005-44a4-acc1-d5501b54fd04", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:909de5ce-742c-4191-9337-b16a24c7f470", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:41a8e0b1-d9c4-490a-9ce4-e51241f2abd5", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2168b-f27f-4d1d-ae5b-a01a156d8d69", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:369b84a6-621c-42f1-860e-e9ab1a7a3a4b", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216ec-6073-4b92-8d53-ec96c0a366bc", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:44f66d9f-d3df-4f2d-967e-1af2eb632fc0", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21c35-6169-4a0c-b6c1-ec3bd053881c", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21de9-7926-498d-a920-52b70f937d5c", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:0b60b4e0-8eb0-49ee-8830-4cd4d656857f", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:279614fb-93a8-453e-9ff6-147b4701b712", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5e95a8ce-4099-4384-ad30-ca535dfa0c22" ], "sourceRefs": { "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216e2-e5e0-46d4-8d41-33f09ba2f4d7": { "turnIndex": 1, "sourceTextHash": "8c9591ad18eeafdf26392172205da9324413ef1c6dcc341cf49a844c1959bcbf", "sourceNodeId": "bbb216e2-e5e0-46d4-8d41-33f09ba2f4d7", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:eb008b69-99f2-4c37-ae34-fa36c77916b1": { "turnIndex": 2, "sourceTextHash": "699591d348d6caa3ffd3966f2c3cc43d60e6a6d475e012e0088a04cb64e0c962", "sourceNodeId": "eb008b69-99f2-4c37-ae34-fa36c77916b1", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:05ba1fc3-8a94-4b1b-b458-9d84b43a0ac5": { "turnIndex": 3, "sourceTextHash": "1d3dda3e714205959f9dac5e2f94a55a77fd475b0dfe69e7acf8691850c53c89", "sourceNodeId": "05ba1fc3-8a94-4b1b-b458-9d84b43a0ac5", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872": { "turnIndex": 4, "sourceTextHash": "9edc559e0c4b3cb5a42efe20641e1fa1978f752f1ec5722a39dd7f72814b663f", "sourceNodeId": "258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2191c-3b76-4496-ac02-e4ac16060820": { "turnIndex": 5, "sourceTextHash": "bacd02be05b2f4f7e6316b3ebff58f628d6549a1f7eb5adf21e9bff196e4c2f2", "sourceNodeId": "bbb2191c-3b76-4496-ac02-e4ac16060820", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:09c6042a-450d-45f5-9ba9-7a5d0e86857a": { "turnIndex": 6, "sourceTextHash": "dbef3c34d2aaae74733e594b40faace8b49a3ef09296c29abdfc9fa66ae5a812", "sourceNodeId": "09c6042a-450d-45f5-9ba9-7a5d0e86857a", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51": { "turnIndex": 7, "sourceTextHash": "543ea7bd5fe84ce7a015088a8080e4a6ef69b812d427762993f51b8fa7b52ded", "sourceNodeId": "8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21eed-4c70-4817-98e5-edfd9c899be8": { "turnIndex": 8, "sourceTextHash": "adbb3ed2cdeff4ca34ae6220aa8a95b5fc04a757b9f4698560c1c87a426d9958", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21eed-4c70-4817-98e5-edfd9c899be8", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:018c2535-8e45-4374-bb9b-9d5418c35f23": { "turnIndex": 9, "sourceTextHash": "6e7670487e41338b9df13fb6971433fda51e35085324a0e928b7eff3d391a71a", "sourceNodeId": "018c2535-8e45-4374-bb9b-9d5418c35f23", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21da4-b4bb-4d5d-bba5-c8dfcae25678": { "turnIndex": 10, "sourceTextHash": "efcf07e9350af2cdf9da4b15f2b25a0dc23879e2892e8b84173f1d9b6573cda0", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21da4-b4bb-4d5d-bba5-c8dfcae25678", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c": { "turnIndex": 11, "sourceTextHash": "efea2a6c2452f4f6a6729b6959e8c76b8505b48d5bac1d2018b914c129576461", "sourceNodeId": "5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558": { "turnIndex": 12, "sourceTextHash": "19d8e315ac23b5c18611bec37d8c5d79b64253aea591fa34c3159b6b9b1594f9", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14": { "turnIndex": 13, "sourceTextHash": "7d3928d7c8f72f2c9848dd9efe25abd5ae622a5ac6c6ac908a97e2f97ccd1812", "sourceNodeId": "a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21fef-b2d6-449a-bd48-27fd5c6d009a": { "turnIndex": 14, "sourceTextHash": "1741d788253311d00f6254d4e07e1e3e5eeaff96fe4163650723a445f60d05ca", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21fef-b2d6-449a-bd48-27fd5c6d009a", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9": { "turnIndex": 15, "sourceTextHash": "fea11920c67b5d3b93f8716c098c7997951c782d4c689177b81864f45dfc3c72", "sourceNodeId": "5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21488-a28f-424d-a937-288c9756a2e1": { "turnIndex": 16, "sourceTextHash": "ad0c448e7bc56ab4fb3fea63fa6a9ec61455877a7a0f798c2a18e5541995b7f3", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21488-a28f-424d-a937-288c9756a2e1", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:85ed8e3a-bc75-4e44-a072-973f06520519": { "turnIndex": 17, "sourceTextHash": "571a9750aadcc7dfc17d72b8ba49a36b23d2b1ef0e6b4da4dc188d1d8fc30bf2", "sourceNodeId": "85ed8e3a-bc75-4e44-a072-973f06520519", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8": { "turnIndex": 18, "sourceTextHash": "5c22be89b387eec4ae1839ed68d0bb5558f5f4c937ae769ed537e22d4421614e", "sourceNodeId": "938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21d7c-8e8f-4664-b381-45e2e3f61ad0": { "turnIndex": 19, "sourceTextHash": "45b00485a6a95d0ee06d38d8d9331cbd321019c27547afd9e2c2de6d1d34048f", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21d7c-8e8f-4664-b381-45e2e3f61ad0", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7fa6f353-c2b3-4c26-8cea-46c4bd8bbeb7": { "turnIndex": 20, "sourceTextHash": "785c21a391703d03da0c9db9823327ba8d3eb033a0ded52277fb147324efcb4c", "sourceNodeId": "7fa6f353-c2b3-4c26-8cea-46c4bd8bbeb7", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:25dd0696-bd63-45da-9d1e-1d8a7d736c71": { "turnIndex": 21, "sourceTextHash": "466ed90a0eed433e7f06593a2438a543df07526a596793fb24cdfa2694f70e71", "sourceNodeId": "25dd0696-bd63-45da-9d1e-1d8a7d736c71", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:c747ade9-62ca-427b-8486-2eee488252b4": { "turnIndex": 22, "sourceTextHash": "23ee359f1dad805e1011573be363011f81cb406ff72f1c7ec16a73af2621a099", "sourceNodeId": "c747ade9-62ca-427b-8486-2eee488252b4", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3": { "turnIndex": 23, "sourceTextHash": "892fef05d1c938b90fd6a2608f9c3346a68471a031298776eacb71523ebdcf40", "sourceNodeId": "daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21b2a-cf8d-44c9-a6c1-d371b90efcbd": { "turnIndex": 24, "sourceTextHash": "a4208a0cf1e48b11d11a5867828da0bc072179d0250481d20e97c4f50ad673b2", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21b2a-cf8d-44c9-a6c1-d371b90efcbd", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:971185eb-ba42-4879-8c6e-28981d6e11a5": { "turnIndex": 25, "sourceTextHash": "939d745485113dcfec21a4fbb47f69cb79b72346a47876d2aab181b3f87a0a5d", "sourceNodeId": "971185eb-ba42-4879-8c6e-28981d6e11a5", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc": { "turnIndex": 26, "sourceTextHash": "d1ecff519c0ab1edbdcfbabac5156a9b3f47b7d56342cbb5140583e8a3f813dd", "sourceNodeId": "7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb212e5-4cd9-4b3c-92fd-b9bb1d76b371": { "turnIndex": 27, "sourceTextHash": "0aa08c99928f2c684125cc30ddaa17794ac3a100307904a61a09db05b7ed509f", "sourceNodeId": "bbb212e5-4cd9-4b3c-92fd-b9bb1d76b371", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f66fc02-4005-44a4-acc1-d5501b54fd04": { "turnIndex": 28, "sourceTextHash": "2f236fe45b463f64871d33073c8846f6865d01ca3cbff896f87d896c2db66700", "sourceNodeId": "5f66fc02-4005-44a4-acc1-d5501b54fd04", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:909de5ce-742c-4191-9337-b16a24c7f470": { "turnIndex": 29, "sourceTextHash": "4358a28f8033ed39a1d67595f447df6b9efde09197bcc86edd4a8ef9df0611fa", "sourceNodeId": "909de5ce-742c-4191-9337-b16a24c7f470", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:41a8e0b1-d9c4-490a-9ce4-e51241f2abd5": { "turnIndex": 30, "sourceTextHash": "256b3b40f01d29feb1b8cd13427f4b2b45964e8243c3fac29b91a77c54ce3f36", "sourceNodeId": "41a8e0b1-d9c4-490a-9ce4-e51241f2abd5", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638": { "turnIndex": 31, "sourceTextHash": "b84fe9c3bd7475d68a1eaa165a156cdbd8ca5abc776cf63d046f87608c20156b", "sourceNodeId": "1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb2168b-f27f-4d1d-ae5b-a01a156d8d69": { "turnIndex": 32, "sourceTextHash": "46d7bdc00f7079a4fcf892b52d8166b09f5408afe8a832a0912c02ddeff10aa4", "sourceNodeId": "bbb2168b-f27f-4d1d-ae5b-a01a156d8d69", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:369b84a6-621c-42f1-860e-e9ab1a7a3a4b": { "turnIndex": 33, "sourceTextHash": "c79a0638ed0b088317da60f62eba652d5921c9497d9e73e6894bc484f39753c5", "sourceNodeId": "369b84a6-621c-42f1-860e-e9ab1a7a3a4b", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54": { "turnIndex": 34, "sourceTextHash": "ceb5ace06101feb629cb23812a32b7adf5e58e67ec0e066fbe1ff16f0f8d3d4d", "sourceNodeId": "9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb216ec-6073-4b92-8d53-ec96c0a366bc": { "turnIndex": 35, "sourceTextHash": "8c47b0fd45b601d7f23a2acc66edc62132e98468fce645915a99f345f52173ad", "sourceNodeId": "bbb216ec-6073-4b92-8d53-ec96c0a366bc", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:44f66d9f-d3df-4f2d-967e-1af2eb632fc0": { "turnIndex": 36, "sourceTextHash": "307c42ec8163d2dd9f449660d41c6315433dacd5a52d7af3a2d29b9a7380e41b", "sourceNodeId": "44f66d9f-d3df-4f2d-967e-1af2eb632fc0", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713": { "turnIndex": 37, "sourceTextHash": "51962e823a2e32e52831abe852e1b5c4d150a6ef730d8c9de5eb291ed5cbd53f", "sourceNodeId": "5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21c35-6169-4a0c-b6c1-ec3bd053881c": { "turnIndex": 38, "sourceTextHash": "2f1f996274e0cf5e14b11b06327665b7a697046de48aa3b53376fc3cf63bb2e1", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21c35-6169-4a0c-b6c1-ec3bd053881c", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222": { "turnIndex": 39, "sourceTextHash": "e2461d0e439a4608c0e585a5ead76d74e7d394f760b288696866955181777e74", "sourceNodeId": "9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21de9-7926-498d-a920-52b70f937d5c": { "turnIndex": 40, "sourceTextHash": "c636c730886271e111afe483ef3021085361fb7445a57f5873168b3358a7cba6", "sourceNodeId": "bbb21de9-7926-498d-a920-52b70f937d5c", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:0b60b4e0-8eb0-49ee-8830-4cd4d656857f": { "turnIndex": 41, "sourceTextHash": "14fff5c0b851af7885ad9a727fb637514401e2ef80c09af536e46c842f1c885c", "sourceNodeId": "0b60b4e0-8eb0-49ee-8830-4cd4d656857f", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6": { "turnIndex": 42, "sourceTextHash": "559d8015c4114a8c84ce9f37c72a68c8c30efa242232c7452e56065ec12541a0", "sourceNodeId": "fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:279614fb-93a8-453e-9ff6-147b4701b712": { "turnIndex": 43, "sourceTextHash": "0485307d49a862bf094fd6e6223f3934a59fd615e18ad23d3febc74b370748ca", "sourceNodeId": "279614fb-93a8-453e-9ff6-147b4701b712", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" }, "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5e95a8ce-4099-4384-ad30-ca535dfa0c22": { "turnIndex": 44, "sourceTextHash": "ad848f1af8c9a4966abe7fcc506bb8588376079541a9f306956f2c0eeed86e3d", "sourceNodeId": "5e95a8ce-4099-4384-ad30-ca535dfa0c22", "timestampStatus": "not_present_in_turn_export", "filingStatus": "pending_ontology_routing" } }, "displayBodies": { "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:258a1d89-8783-4873-b9f0-af3c7687a872": "Yes. There is a **real MAGA-populist opening on taxing the rich**, but I would distinguish it from the conventional Democratic slogan. The traction is strongest when the argument becomes: **stop privileging capital and wealthy insiders, use the money to benefit working people, and make the economy reward productive contribution.** That language is already circulating inside MAGA.\n\nThe clearest evidence is Trump himself. In April 2025, TIME asked him about raising taxes on millionaires. Trump said he “certainly” did not mind a tax increase on wealthy people, said he personally would be “honored to pay more,” and described the logic as raising taxes “on wealthy to take care of middle class.” His exact reaction was: **“I actually love the concept.”** His hesitation was political—he feared getting branded as a tax raiser—not substantive. A few weeks later, he pushed congressional Republicans toward restoring the 39.6% top rate on very high earners and again pushed eliminating carried interest. \n\nSteve Bannon goes considerably further. In his formulation, this is part of what MAGA is *supposed to mean economically*. He told Semafor: **“We have to increase taxes on the wealthy.”** His larger argument is remarkably close to the terrain you've been exploring: over recent decades, returns have shifted from work toward capital; Republicans cannot claim a working-class realignment while preserving corporate tax privileges, stock buybacks and benefits flowing upward. His prescription was higher taxes on corporations and wealthy people alongside lower taxes on tips, overtime and Social Security. \n\nJosh Hawley gives you another very useful bridge because he frames the issue less as redistribution and more as **whose side the market and tax system are serving**. In 2025 he said that if the White House wanted to finance working-family tax relief with a **“surcharge on billionaires, that's fine with me.”** He separately endorsed Trump's willingness to let rates rise on very high incomes. JD Vance's orbit and American Compass have occupied similar territory: American Compass explicitly argued that tax increases should be on the table rather than reflexively extending every upper-income tax cut and adding the cost to the debt. \n\nSo I think there are **three MAGA arguments that give “tax the rich” traction without requiring someone to become Bernie Sanders**:\n\n- **Anti-crony capitalism:** Why should hedge funds, private equity, monopolies or politically connected corporations get privileges ordinary workers don't?\n- **Working-class tax swap:** Tax capital or extreme incomes more so taxes can be reduced on wages, overtime, tips, families or productive work.\n- **Populist meritocracy:** Becoming rich by creating enormous value is fine. Structuring the economy so wealth extracts disproportionate value from everyone underneath it is the problem.\n\nThat third one is where I think your argument becomes particularly interesting. The MAGA opening is **not fundamentally hostility toward wealth**. Trump himself is a billionaire and much of the movement admires entrepreneurial wealth. The felt complaint is much closer to: *the system is rigged; elites use their position to take advantages unavailable to ordinary people.* That gives you room to say: **good—don't punish wealth creation. Fix the mechanism by which value and wealth become detached.** Taxing the rich becomes understandable as a response to that failure, while co-capitalism goes upstream and changes who gets the upside in the first place. \n\nThere is an important caution. **“Tax the rich” as a naked slogan is much weaker among Republicans than the underlying economic grievance.** A Marquette poll from August 2026 found only about 28% of Republican identifiers favoring a specifically worded “special additional tax on millionaires.” So I wouldn't claim that MAGA voters have simply adopted the progressive tax agenda. The evidence says something subtler and more useful: **the old Republican taboo against ever raising taxes on wealthy people has cracked, particularly inside the populist wing.**\n\nAnd Congress shows the limits. Republican lawmakers ultimately rejected Trump's 2025 millionaire-tax push. That tells us this is an **active fault line**, rather than settled MAGA doctrine.\n\nFor your broader argument, I think the remarkable sentence is almost:\n\n> **Trump and Bannon have already conceded the premise behind “tax the rich”: too much of the economy's upside is flowing upward. The argument remaining is what we do about it.**\n\nThat gets you very close to a genuine MAGA–DSA convergence point without pretending the two sides agree on the solution. The left says **redistribute the upside afterward**. The MAGA-populist right increasingly says **stop the system from privileging elites and capital**. Your opening is: **why are we waiting until afterward? Change how the upside gets distributed when the value is created.** ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:8fd2b51b-1c26-4d4b-b5ac-47a590c9ab51": "If we’re looking for the **three strongest sentences of genuine MAGA-populist/DSA overlap**, rather than pretending the coalitions agree on the solutions, I’d make them:\n\n1. **The economy and political system have become tilted toward wealthy elites and giant corporations at the expense of working people.** Bannon describes a system in which returns have shifted from work to capital and attacks “crony capitalism”; DSA describes essentially the same concentration as corporate oligarchy. \n2. **Workers should have more power over their working lives and should receive more of the economic value their work creates.** That is explicit DSA doctrine, while Hawley’s labor turn and Bannon’s capital-versus-work framing bring the MAGA-populist wing surprisingly close to the same starting point. \n3. **The United States should stop pouring lives and money into endless foreign wars that do not serve ordinary people.** Antiwar politics is explicit in DSA, while opposition to “endless wars” has been a defining strand of America First/MAGA populism, even though Trump’s current Iran policy has created a major contradiction inside that coalition. \n\nThose strike me as the **deepest three**, because they're upstream of policy. Once you move down a level—to wealth taxes, unions, healthcare, tariffs, immigration—the agreement starts fracturing. But **elite capture, worker power/value, and endless war** produce a remarkably coherent shared diagnosis. ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5f46f128-ab06-4ef0-89a1-86087475416c": "Yes — here are the full supporting sources I was drawing from for those three points, including the RealClearPolitics and Axios pieces:\n\n**1 — Elites / corporations vs. working people**\n[Semafor — Steve Bannon: “We have to increase taxes on the wealthy”](https://www.semafor.com/article/12/20/2024/we-have-to-increase-taxes-on-the-wealthy-steve-bannon)\n[RealClearPolitics — Bannon: Populist-nationalism, taxes on millionaires, breaking up oligarchs](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/04/24/bannon_populism_offer_solutions_you_dont_like_but_you_can_live_with_the_alternative_is_luigi.html)\n[RealClearPolitics — Bannon: If sacrifices are required, they should come from the wealthy](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/12/05/bannon_if_the_oxes_gotta_get_gored_it_can_not_come_out_of_the_middle_class_and_working_class_americans.html)\n[RealClearPolitics — Bannon: Wall Street, elites and abandonment of working-class Americans](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/05/02/bannon_the_elites_have_turned_our_beloved_military_into_rent-a-cops_for_wall_streets_casino.html)\n[DSA — Mamdani victory statement: working class, corporations and oligarchy](https://www.dsausa.org/statements/zohran-mamdani-wins-national-political-committee-statement/)\n\n**2 — Workers should have more power and receive more of the upside**\n[Axios — Hawley leads bipartisan, union-backed labor bill](https://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/josh-hawley-unions-teamsters)\n[Axios — GOP fight over Hawley’s pro-labor turn](https://www.axios.com/2025/01/30/senate-republican-josh-hawley-pro-labor-bill-chavez-deremer)\n[DSA — National program: Economic Democracy and Democracy at Work](https://program.dsausa.org/)\n[Democratic Left / DSA — Worker control and who receives the wealth workers create](https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/07/15/the-class-roots-of-return-to-office-mandates/)\n\n**3 — Stop endless foreign wars that cost ordinary Americans**\n[Axios — MAGA purity test: “no foreign wars”](https://www.axios.com/2025/06/18/trump-maga-purity-tests)\n[Axios — MAGA concern about Trump violating the promise against “forever wars”](https://www.axios.com/2025/06/24/trump-iran-maga-whiplash)\n[RealClearPolitics — Bannon: “We have to stop the madness and put Americans first”](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/08/15/bannon_we_have_to_stop_the_madness_and_put_americans_first.html)\n[RealClearPolitics — Bannon on the international order, working-class costs and war](https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/02/27/bannon_trump_wants_to_reset_the_post-war_international_order.html)\n[DSA — Program: “End the U.S. War Machine”](https://program.dsausa.org/)\n[DSA / Socialist Forum — “Beyond the Endless Wars”](https://sfarchive.dsausa.org/issues/winter-2020/the-socialist-anti-war-tradition-leading-the-fight-against-war-and-imperialism/)\n\nThe **RCP Bannon material is especially rich** for what you're looking at: he repeatedly ties *oligarchs + Wall Street + working-class economic losses + foreign-war spending* into essentially one critique. ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558": "", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14": "", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5b4d0f7b-8bd6-4d7b-aa2d-aadc6adf35c9": "As of the latest polling, **the Iran war is quite unpopular nationally**. The cleanest current measure is the Reuters/Ipsos poll completed August 31, 2026: only **25% of Americans say the U.S. military action in Iran has been worth the costs**, while a substantially larger share says it has not been worthwhile. Reuters now describes the conflict explicitly as “unpopular.” \n\nThat fits a remarkably stable pattern rather than one bad poll. In July, Reuters/Ipsos had **33% approving of U.S. strikes and 62% disapproving**; only 24% said the operation was worth it. By August, Ipsos was still reporting that **most Americans disapproved of the strikes**, and 83% expected the military involvement to drag on for an extended period. \n\nThe escalation numbers are even worse. Only **16% supported sending U.S. ground troops to Iran**, versus 79% opposed in late July. \n\nThere is a major partisan exception: **Republicans remain much more supportive.** Earlier in the war, Pew found 71% of Republicans/Republican leaners thought using force was the right decision, compared with 38% nationally; Quinnipiac in June found 75% of Republicans still considered the action worth it, versus 29% of independents and 4% of Democrats. \n\nSo for the MAGA/DSA question we were just discussing, there’s an interesting distinction: **“end endless wars” has enormous national resonance, but it is currently a live disagreement *inside MAGA***. The overall country is roughly **3-to-1 against the war being worthwhile**, while the Republican base remains its principal reservoir of support. That makes the antiwar MAGA voices—Bannon and others—more significant as an internal fault line than their numbers alone might suggest.\n\nI can also break out **MAGA/Republican support specifically—Trump voters vs. Republican leaners vs. independents—**because that is probably the more revealing number for your MAGA–DSA overlap.", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:938b031d-5848-4806-9c00-d2c0683312d8": "The striking thing is **how quickly Iran has reached the level of public rejection that took Iraq years and Afghanistan more than a decade to reach.** The questions aren't perfectly identical across polls, so the percentages shouldn't be treated as one continuous series, but the historical comparison is strong.\n\n| Conflict | Early U.S. public support | What happened over time |\n|---|---:|---|\n| **Iran, 2026** | **38% right / 59% wrong** only weeks after the Feb. 28 opening attack | By Aug. 28–31, only **25% said the war had been worth it; 54% said it had not.** |\n| **Afghanistan, 2001** | **~89–93%** said sending troops was *not* a mistake | Still 60% “not a mistake” in 2009; only in **2014**, after 12+ years, did opinion reach roughly 48% not mistake / 49% mistake. |\n| **Iraq, 2003** | **71–76%** supported/right decision | ~55% still called it right a year later; around **2005** the country reached an even split; by 2007 only ~36% called it right. |\n| **Persian Gulf War, 1991** | Even immediately before combat, roughly **65%** said deployment wasn't a mistake | After victory, that rose to **87%**. It never developed anything like the Iraq/Iran trajectory. |\n| **Kosovo, 1999** | Roughly **62%** supported the air campaign | Fell to 53% during the fighting, then rebounded; 68% afterward said the strikes were right. |\n| **Libya, 2011** | Only **47–50%** called the airstrikes the right decision | This was considered unusually weak support for an intervention at the time. |\n| **ISIS, Iraq/Syria, 2014** | About **60%** initially approved | Support remained around 57–63% during the following year despite doubts about whether it was succeeding. |\n| **Syria strikes, 2017** | **50% approve / 41% disapprove** | Gallup characterized even that as low historically. |\n\nAnd there's an extraordinary apples-to-apples data point **today**. Reuters/Ipsos asked Americans in late August 2026 whether each war had been worth its cost: **Afghanistan 21%, Iraq 21%, Iran 25%.** Afghanistan and Iraq are being judged with 20-plus years of hindsight; **Iran got to essentially the same place after six months.** \n\nThere are two older precedents worth noting. **Korea** soured extremely rapidly: in August 1950, only 20% called entering the war a mistake and 65% said it wasn't; by January 1951, **49% called it a mistake and only 38% did not.** Vietnam began with 60% saying intervention wasn't a mistake in 1965, but that gradually inverted; by 1969, roughly **58% called Vietnam a mistake.** \n\nSo visually, I'd characterize the trajectories this way:\n\n**Afghanistan:** 90% →──────────→ 50% over **12+ years**\n**Iraq:** 73% →────→ <50% over **~2 years**\n**Korea:** 65% →→ 38% over **~5 months**\n**Iran:** **started at 38%** → 25% worthwhile at **6 months**\n\nThat last comparison is the story. **Iran didn't lose a national consensus. It never had one.** Reuters makes precisely that distinction today: Iraq and Afghanistan “started with solid support at home”; Iran “enjoyed no such honeymoon,” with most Americans opposed from the outset. \n\nFor the MAGA–DSA overlap you're examining, that makes the antiwar piece considerably stronger than I initially framed it. Nationally, this isn't merely a generic “people eventually get tired of wars” attitude. **The public entered this particular war already skeptical, and six months later it is polling roughly alongside the retrospective verdict on Iraq and Afghanistan.** ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:daab438c-b665-4675-b1b2-f6db58d1ede3": "Yes. If we define the exercise narrowly as **“What would probably be national policy if Americans voted directly on clearly worded propositions?”**, there is a surprisingly large gap between majority opinion and governing policy.\n\nMy first-pass **top 10** would look like this:\n\n| # | If the public decided | National support | What differs today |\n|---|---|---:|---|\n| **1** | **Impose term limits on members of Congress** | **87%** | There are no congressional term limits; this would likely require a constitutional amendment. |\n| **2** | **Require background checks for essentially all gun purchases** | **~80–90%** | Federal law still does not require universal checks for all private sales. Recent polling finds large majorities even within both parties. |\n| **3** | **Ban members of Congress/elected officials from trading individual stocks** | **76%** | Members remain able to own and trade stocks subject to disclosure rules; proposed bans still have not become a general prohibition. |\n| **4** | **Raise the federal minimum wage substantially — roughly $15** | **~70%** | The federal minimum remains **$7.25**, unchanged since 2009. A 2025 YouGov poll put support for $15 at 71%. |\n| **5** | **Guarantee paid family leave** | **69%** | There is still **no federal guarantee of paid family and medical leave for private-sector workers**. |\n| **6** | **Legalize marijuana** | **64%** | Recreational marijuana remains federally prohibited. Some medical marijuana was moved to Schedule III in 2026, while broader federal rescheduling remains underway. |\n| **7** | **Elect the president by national popular vote** | **63%** | The Electoral College still determines the winner. Support for a direct popular vote has been above 50% in essentially every recent Pew reading. |\n| **8** | **Raise taxes on large corporations and high-income households** | **63% corporations; 58% $400k+ households** | Current federal policy does not reflect that majority preference for higher rates. The broader sentiment is even stronger: 70% have said corporations pay too little. |\n| **9** | **Keep abortion legal in all or most circumstances nationally** | **60%** | There is no longer a federal constitutional right to abortion, and access depends heavily on state law. |\n| **10** | **Require Congress to authorize major U.S. military action** | **~56–70%**, depending on wording | Presidents continue to initiate major military operations without prior congressional authorization. In the Iran context, 56% called approval *necessary*; another 26% called it preferable. A broader 2026 survey found roughly 70% saying presidents should get congressional approval. |\n\nI think **#10 exposes something deeper than “Americans are antiwar.”** The public doesn't appear to want a weak military. Gallup found 55% opposed cutting defense spending in 2025. But the same population can say, essentially, **“keep the military strong, but don't let one person decide to use it.”** Only 25% now consider the Iran war worthwhile. \n\nAnd there are several extremely strong candidates sitting immediately outside that ten. **72% favor limits on campaign spending**, even though independent political spending can be unlimited; **65% favored allowing undocumented immigrants who meet requirements to remain legally** in Pew's 2025 poll; and **72% currently say prescription-drug prices are under-regulated**, while 85% support Medicare drug negotiation—which has now been implemented for a limited subset of drugs. \n\n### The pattern underneath them\n\nThis is where I think your hypothesis gets much more interesting than merely assembling ten popular policies.\n\nThe discrepancies aren't uniformly left-wing. They're disproportionately **anti-intermediary**:\n\n**People → Congress:** term limits, stock trading ban.\n**People → presidency:** popular vote, war authorization.\n**Workers → economy:** higher wage, paid leave.\n**Individuals → personal choices:** abortion, marijuana.\n**Public → concentrated economic power:** higher corporate/high-income taxes.\n**Citizens → guns:** retain ownership rights, but require a common safety gate.\n\nThe public often lands in places that **neither institutional coalition cleanly represents**. On defense, people can favor strength *and* restrain presidential war-making. On guns, people can favor ownership *and* universal background checks. On immigration, people can want tougher enforcement *and* legal status for people already here. That's precisely where a binary party model starts obscuring the underlying preference structure.\n\nAnd **psilocybin is a useful control case** for this thesis: I would *not* put it on the list yet. Broad legalization polls around **27–28%**, far below marijuana. There is considerably greater openness to supervised therapeutic use, and some studies get majority support when the proposition is specifically clinical, but we don't yet have anything resembling marijuana's stable national majority. \n\nSo if you were trying to demonstrate the proposition **“Here is what the United States would look like if we simply asked the United States”**, these ten give you a surprisingly powerful first dashboard. The next useful pass would be to identify **20–30 propositions where (a) the polling question is essentially referendum-ready, (b) support exceeds 55%, and (c) existing federal policy clearly contradicts the result.** That would give us a much stronger empirical measure of the *representation gap* than cherry-picking individual popular policies. ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:7414a635-6740-4e80-8e34-59d7659cb0fc": "Yes. Once we move away from the headline culture-war issues, there is a surprisingly deep bench of **specific propositions above 55% where federal policy either differs or hasn't acted**.\n\n| Policy proposition | Support | Representation gap |\n|---|---:|---|\n| **1. Don't increase Pentagon spending above what the Pentagon/President requested.** | **>60%** | A 2022 national likely-voter poll found more than six in ten wanted Congress to stick to the requested level rather than add more. Congress continues to receive and fund billions in “unfunded priorities”; DOD components submitted $134 billion of these additional requests from FY2020–25. This is almost exactly the proposition you were describing. |\n| **2. Don't increase the Pentagon budget until DOD can pass an independent audit.** | **80%** | This one is strikingly bipartisan: 79% Republican, 80% Democrat, 82% independent in the 2023 poll. DOD received a disclaimer again on its FY2025 department-wide audit—the eighth consecutive failure to obtain an overall clean opinion. |\n| **3. Give the military the legal right to repair its own equipment instead of depending on contractors.** | **73.5%** | A 2026 poll found 78.9% support the principle and 73.5% support the specific Warrior Right to Repair Act. The legislation remains under congressional consideration rather than being the general rule. |\n| **4. Make school breakfast and lunch free for all public-school students.** | **60% lunch / 57% breakfast** | A national YouGov poll crossed 55% on both; earlier national polling found 63% support for universal meals. Federal policy remains primarily means-tested, although nine states now provide universal meals. A 2025 parent survey found much higher support—81%—but that's parents rather than all adults. |\n| **5. Fundamentally reform/simplify the federal tax code.** | **88% say reform is needed; 66% call it overly complex** | This is an extremely broad consensus across parties: 89% Republicans, 88% independents and 86% Democrats said the code needs reform. But this is the one I'd label **directional rather than referendum-ready**: people agree overwhelmingly on simplification, while agreement drops when you specify exactly which deductions, brackets or credits disappear. |\n| **6. Tax capital gains like wage income for households making $1 million+.** | **76%** | February 2026 polling found 70% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats favoring equal treatment at that income level. Federal law continues to give qualifying long-term capital gains preferential rates. |\n| **7. Apply the Social Security payroll tax again to wages over $400,000.** | **79%** | Republicans 77%, Democrats 83%. The current structure stops Social Security taxation above the wage cap and doesn't restart it at $400,000. This is perhaps one of the cleanest examples of a detailed fiscal proposition receiving a huge bipartisan majority while Congress remains deadlocked. |\n| **8. Require employers to provide paid sick leave.** | **78%** | YouGov found 78% would support such a ballot measure nationally, including 66% of Republicans and 92% of Democrats. Federal law generally provides **no entitlement to paid sick leave** for private-sector workers. |\n| **9. Cap insulin cost-sharing at $35/month for everyone.** | **76%** | Medicare has a cap and many states have adopted limits, but there is still no universal federal $35 cap covering everyone with private insurance and the uninsured. |\n| **10. Keep medical debt off credit reports.** | **82%** | Support included 78% of Republicans, 75% of independents and 88% of Democrats. The CFPB adopted such a rule, but a federal court vacated it in July 2025, so the national protection is currently gone. |\n\nA few things jump out from this second batch.\n\n**Defense is richer territory than “cut the military.”** Public opinion isn't clearly saying *spend much less on defense*. It is saying something closer to: **make the Pentagon account for the money; don't give it money it didn't ask for; don't increase the budget when it can't pass an audit; and stop forcing troops to pay contractors to fix equipment they can fix themselves.** Those propositions get you into 60–80% territory without requiring an anti-military premise.\n\n**Tax policy has the same structure.** “Simplify the taxes” is overwhelmingly popular but underspecified. Once you get concrete, however, several propositions remain surprisingly strong: **79% tax wages over $400,000 for Social Security; 76% tax millionaires' capital gains at ordinary-income rates; 60% favor higher effective income-tax rates on millionaires; 78% favored a 2% wealth tax above $50 million in a deliberative 2025 survey.** \n\nAnd there is another group I would probably investigate for your eventual **“What the People Want” dashboard**: universal preschool polls at **79%**, childcare subsidies that cap low- and middle-income families' costs at 7% of income at **83%**, banning junk fees at **79%**, and banning personalized “surveillance pricing” at **76%**. \n\nSo I think you're uncovering a more interesting category than simply **popular policies Congress hasn't passed**. There are a lot of **boring, specific, operational decisions with 60–80% agreement** that almost disappear inside partisan politics. Those may be your best demonstration of the representation gap, because nobody has to agree on capitalism, socialism, MAGA, DSA, or even left versus right to answer them. ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:1014f675-77bf-46f2-b7be-2e2caf296638": "Yes. When we put these on the same ledger, the scale becomes much clearer. I would **not call this a formal CBO package score**—the underlying proposals were scored in different years and some polling propositions don't map perfectly onto legislative text—but we can get surprisingly close.\n\n### The spending side\n\n| Majority-backed policy | Approx. federal budget effect | Annual equivalent | Confidence |\n|---|---:|---:|---|\n| **Child-care subsidies / cap costs for middle- and lower-income families** | **+$400B / 10 yrs** | ~$40B | CBO accepted the administration's $400B figure as an achievable design placeholder. |\n| **Universal preschool** | **+$200B / 10 yrs** | ~$20B | Same CBO treatment: achievable policy target, though exact legislation matters. |\n| **12 weeks paid family/medical leave** | **+$325B / 10 yrs** | ~$32.5B | Administration estimate incorporated by CBO as a placeholder. |\n| **Universal school breakfast + lunch** | **roughly +$100–150B / 10 yrs** | ~$10–15B | My planning range, not a current CBO score. Federal lunch + breakfast spending is already $23.5B/year. During the pandemic, universal access was estimated around $29B versus about $18B under the previous system. |\n| **$35 insulin cap for everyone** | **+$11.4B / 10 yrs** | ~$1.1B | CBO score for the insulin provisions themselves; costs largely shift from patients toward insurers/premiums/government. |\n| **Federal paid-sick-leave requirement** | **well under $1B federal** | <~$0.1B | CBO found only $17M mandatory spending over 10 years and $562M discretionary spending over the first six years. The main cost falls on employers rather than the Treasury. |\n| **$15 federal minimum wage** | **+$54B / 10 yrs** | ~$5.4B | Older CBO score; another $16B in interest. But affected workers receive **$333B more in cumulative pay**, so most of this policy operates outside the federal budget. |\n\nUsing **$10–15B/year for school meals**, those policies come to roughly:\n\n**$1.09–$1.14 trillion of added federal cost over ten years.**\n\nThat includes the old $15 minimum-wage score. Leave it out, and we are at roughly **$1.04–$1.09 trillion**.\n\nNow the interesting part.\n\n### The revenue side\n\n| Majority-direction tax policy | Approx. 10-year revenue | Important qualification |\n|---|---:|---|\n| **Raise corporate tax rate from 21% to 28%** | **+$1.410T conventional**; **+$1.006T dynamic** | Current 2026 Tax Foundation model. The dynamic estimate accounts for its estimate of lower investment/output. |\n| **Restore 39.6% top individual rate / pre-TCJA top bracket** | **+$409B conventional**; **+$187.5B dynamic** | Modeled against permanent 37% rates—the policy Congress ultimately enacted in 2025. |\n| **Tax capital gains/dividends like ordinary income** | **+$137B conventional** | Current model applies parity to everyone, not just millionaires, so this is **not an exact score of the 76%-supported proposition** we discussed. |\n| **Apply Social Security payroll tax again above $400K** | **+$1.477T conventional** | Huge—but I would **not use this to pay for preschool.** It is Social Security revenue. It substantially strengthens Social Security's finances instead. |\n| **Federal marijuana legalization/taxation** | **+$8.1B gross revenue in CBO's MORE Act score** | Most was deliberately recycled into an Opportunity Trust Fund; prison appropriations could fall another ~$800M. It's not a major general-fund pay-for as that bill was designed. |\n\nAnd capital gains contains a wrinkle worth lingering on. **Simply jacking up the realization tax rate is not necessarily a giant revenue machine**, because wealthy owners can defer selling assets. A current Tax Foundation model gets $137B from ordinary-income treatment; its very different mark-to-market proposal for ultrawealthy taxpayers gets **$628B conventional** because it removes that ability to defer realization. \n\nThat is a missing step in a lot of “tax the rich” arithmetic: **rate → behavioral response → taxable base → revenue**. The rate by itself doesn't tell us what comes in.\n\n### Now close the loop\n\nTake only two very recognizable tax changes:\n\n**28% corporate tax:** +$1.410T\n**39.6% top individual rate:** +$0.409T\n**Total conventional revenue:** **+$1.819 trillion**\n\nAgainst:\n\n**Child care + preschool + paid leave + meals + insulin + paid sick leave + $15 wage:** approximately **−$1.09 to −$1.14 trillion**\n\nThat leaves roughly **$680–730 billion over ten years** on conventional arithmetic.\n\nNow use the Tax Foundation's much more conservative **dynamic** numbers, which assume economic losses from those higher tax rates:\n\n**Corporate:** +$1.006T\n**Top individual:** +$0.188T\n**Total:** **+$1.194T**\n\nThat still roughly covers the **$1.09–1.14T** social-policy package, leaving approximately **$50–100B**.\n\nI wouldn't publish that as “the package pays for itself” without a proper integrated score—the policies interact, the preschool/child-care numbers are policy-design placeholders, school meals are my range, and the tax-rate polling we've discussed endorses the *direction* of higher corporate/high-income taxes rather than necessarily those exact rates. But as an order-of-magnitude test, **yes: we are in the same fiscal neighborhood.**\n\n### Then there is the money I'm deliberately *not* counting\n\nDefense is particularly interesting here.\n\nDOD components requested **$134 billion in “unfunded priorities” above the President's requests in just FY2020–25**, rising to $30B in FY2025. That's an average exposure of about **$22B/year**. But those are requests, not appropriations, so I would book **$0 savings** until we know how much Congress would otherwise have funded. \n\nThe Pentagon audit reforms have already produced measurable returns. GAO says modernization associated with the audit effort prevented at least **$5.5B in improper payments** from 2020 through mid-2023, and retiring 89 obsolete systems was projected to save another **$760M annually** through FY2029. \n\nMilitary right-to-repair is harder to score nationally, so again I would book **$0** rather than invent a number. But the scale is real: GAO has found lack of technical data contributing to sustainment problems where fixing only the portion of identified Navy ship problems for which cost data existed would cost **$4.2B**, and GAO explicitly says earlier attention to sustainment and IP could save billions. \n\nAnd **tax simplification may be the biggest non-budget number of the entire exercise**. Americans now spend about **7.1 billion hours and $148B out of pocket every year** complying with federal tax rules. When the value of people's time is included, the estimated compliance burden is **$536B annually**. That isn't $536B the Treasury could spend—the money is largely private time and compliance expense—but even a **10% reduction in that burden would represent about $54B/year in real economic savings.** \n\nSo there are really **three ledgers**:\n\n**Federal budget:** roughly $1.1T of the popular new benefits we've identified can plausibly be matched by roughly $1.2–1.8T from just two popular-direction high-end tax changes, depending on behavioral assumptions.\n\n**Social Security:** another approximately **$1.48T over ten years** from the >$400K payroll-tax proposal goes toward repairing Social Security rather than financing those benefits. \n\n**Efficiency/private savings:** tax simplification, Pentagon audits, right-to-repair, medical-debt rules, junk-fee rules, etc. can create potentially very large gains without showing up as equivalent Treasury revenue.\n\nThat starts looking less like a random wish list and more like the beginning of an **actual “People's Budget”**: *Here are the propositions with majority support; here is what each costs; here is what each raises or saves; here is what cannot honestly be counted as a pay-for; and here is the resulting balance.* ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9ee46be9-4a75-42c3-abf7-9d9de762ea54": "Yes. The strongest thing in what you just laid out is **not** “people always know best.” That claim is too easy to knock down. The stronger claim is: **when millions of people make judgments independently across different issues, the aggregate result already appears more fiscally and substantively coherent than our political system gives them credit for—and we are barely giving them structured information or any way to coordinate those judgments.**\n\nThat is where your ant image works. No single ant sees the colony. No single voter needs to understand every line of the federal budget. One person cares intensely about Pell Grants, another about military procurement, another about school lunch, another about insulin. A system that lets each person contribute where they have knowledge or interest, while exposing the whole group to costs, tradeoffs, counterarguments, and aggregate consequences, is conceptually different from asking every citizen to become a miniature senator.\n\nAnd the empirical beginning is striking. Americans simultaneously identify the federal deficit as a serious problem—64% called it a “very big problem” this year—while supporting various spending programs *and* revenue increases we just found could plausibly offset a substantial portion of those programs. That doesn't prove a crowdsourced budget would balance, but it pushes directly against the caricature that direct public input inevitably means everyone voting themselves benefits without considering costs. \n\nThere are three places I would tighten the argument.\n\nFirst, **“what is best for each of us” does not automatically become “what is best for all of us.”** Externalities, conflicting interests and finite resources are exactly why collective decision-making is difficult. What your proposed system potentially adds is the missing mechanism: *my preference enters the pool; your competing preference enters it; costs become visible; consequences become visible; alternatives can be compared; then we see where the collective judgment settles.* That is stronger than assuming aggregation works automatically.\n\nSecond, the **red-blue problem** becomes more precise if you describe it as a loss of resolution. Elections bundle hundreds of independent questions into one binary choice. Someone may agree with one party on five things and the other party on five others, but the ballot records one bit of information: **A or B**. Issue-by-issue participation preserves much more information about what the person wanted in the first place. The current polling illustrates that phenomenon: 87% support congressional term limits, 79% support maximum ages for federal elected officials, and 72% support campaign-spending limits—coalitions much larger than either party can normally assemble electorally. \n\nThird, I would modify one factual point in your narration. Congress has been deeply unpopular for a long period, but **not “forever” at low-double-digit approval.** Gallup's historical average since 1974 is around 33%; it reached 84% after 9/11 and hit a record low of 9% in 2013. Since roughly 2005, however, approval has averaged only about 21%. Pew's latest measure is similarly bleak: in July 2026 only **25% had a favorable view of Congress and 72% an unfavorable one.** \n\nAnd your term-limit example contains an interesting constitutional wrinkle that may strengthen the broader point rather than weaken it. Congress is **not literally the only gateway**. Article V allows amendments either through two-thirds of both houses **or** through a convention that Congress must call after applications from two-thirds of state legislatures; three-fourths of states must ultimately ratify. The convention route has never been used. So an 87% public preference can exist while the constitutional machinery still requires an extraordinary degree of organized, geographically distributed action before that preference becomes law. \n\nThe idea I hear underneath the whole passage is therefore something like:\n\n**We already possess the sovereignty. What we lack is sufficiently high-resolution machinery for exercising it.**\n\nRepresentative government solved an information and coordination problem in the 18th century: people were geographically dispersed, information traveled slowly, and continuous participation was prohibitively expensive. Digital technology radically changes the cost of gathering preferences, distributing evidence, modeling consequences and revising a decision. That does **not by itself establish that direct digital decision-making would outperform representative government**—questions of minority rights, manipulation, participation bias, expertise, security and preference aggregation remain substantial. But it makes the institutional-design question legitimate in a way it simply could not have been in 1787.\n\nAnd this is where Me°Us is more interesting than a national referendum website. **“Vote yes/no on everything” is the crude version.** What you're describing is closer to distributed attention: people engage deeply where they care or know something; the system surfaces relevant information and downstream consequences; everyone can inspect the emerging whole; and preferences can change as people see what everybody else's choices imply. That is a much richer proposition than direct democracy alone. ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5fd81dd4-a6f7-43af-9833-d168a52c7713": "There’s a more defensible version of what you’re describing that gets very close to your formulation without requiring the claim that majorities are inherently wise.\n\n**The evidence for the participation premise is real.** In 2025, 52% of Americans said they often or sometimes got local news from online forums or discussion groups such as community Facebook groups or Nextdoor, up from 38% in 2018. Reddit itself was used by about 24% of U.S. adults in Pew’s 2024 platform survey. Those platforms are not representative samples, and they can amplify conflict and misinformation, but they do demonstrate that people will voluntarily spend substantial attention discussing public problems when the friction is low enough. \n\nThe stronger evidence for your *learning-from-one-another* point comes from deliberative-democracy experiments rather than Reddit. Stanford’s “America in One Room” brought a representative sample of more than 500 voters together with balanced briefing material, competing experts and moderated discussion. Participants showed substantial changes in policy preferences and decreased partisan polarization compared with a control group. Stanford has since extended the model to online, AI-assisted deliberation, explicitly exploring whether this kind of informed discussion can be scaled. \n\nAnd the representation-gap premise has unusually strong public-opinion support. Pew found **87% favor congressional term limits**, including 90% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats. Separately, **84% say special interests and lobbyists have too much say in politics, 80% say campaign donors have too much influence on congressional decisions, and 70% say constituents have too little influence.** Those are different questions, but together they describe almost exactly the institutional frustration you’re talking about. \n\nWhere I would change your language is this sentence:\n\n> “The rights of the majority protect the minorities.”\n\nI think your underlying architecture is stronger than that sentence. A majority **can** threaten a minority; that is one of the reasons constitutional rights have traditionally been placed beyond ordinary majority votes. What you're describing sounds more like:\n\n**Universal individual rights establish the floor. Democratic choice operates above that floor.**\n\nThat matches the rest of what you said. My right to speak, worship, associate, receive due process, be equally protected by law, and remain physically secure isn't something 51% gets to withdraw from me. Those protections apply to *everyone*. Once that universal floor is established, the argument for allowing broad public preferences to determine ordinary policy becomes much cleaner.\n\nThere’s another distinction that helps your decentralization argument. **Redundancy isn't the same thing as independence.** Five systems reporting the same result is much stronger evidence if they use different samples, different implementations and independently auditable methods. Five systems trained on the same underlying data and making the same methodological mistake could confidently reproduce the same wrong result. So your QA/QC architecture becomes something like: independent polling, representative sampling, transparent raw results, competing synthesis systems, audit trails, adversarial testing, and the ability of citizens to inspect and challenge the output. That gets you much closer to your “five technologies all say the same thing” test.\n\nOne factual qualification is also worth preserving around corporate political power. Corporations cannot simply write unlimited treasury checks directly to federal candidates. They can establish PACs, and corporations can give unlimited amounts to Super PACs and make unlimited independent expenditures, subject to disclosure and coordination rules; they can also lobby government directly. So the accurate version of your point is broader than “corporations donate to politicians”: **economic organizations have multiple legally permitted channels for converting concentrated resources into political influence, while an ordinary citizen mostly has a vote, speech, organization and comparatively small contributions.**\n\nAnd I think one of the sharpest ideas in the passage is your observation about **resolution**. Consider the information content:\n\n**Election:**\n“Choose Red or Blue for the next several years.”\n\nversus\n\n**Issue-level system:**\n“I support A strongly, B weakly, oppose C, don't know enough about D, care intensely about E, and want to hear the arguments on F.”\n\nThe second captures enormously more information about political preference. More importantly, the person need not spend equal attention everywhere. Someone who has spent 30 years repairing aircraft can contribute disproportionately useful information to military maintenance policy while ignoring agricultural subsidies; a farmer can do the reverse. Then everyone retains the final ability to decide whether the resulting proposition works for them.\n\nThat gets you to a formulation I think is more rigorous than “everyone governs everything”:\n\n**Everyone gets a say in everything. Nobody has to become an expert in everything.**\n\nThe platform's job becomes connecting **distributed attention → informed deliberation → visible tradeoffs → measured collective preference → accountable implementation**.\n\nAnd that changes the minority-rights/security objection substantially. Those issues remain real, but they're **design requirements**, rather than automatic arguments for concentrating decision-making in a few hundred people. Representative government also has manipulation, corruption, information failure, factionalism and minority-rights failures; changing the decision architecture changes where those risks occur rather than making them disappear.\n\nSo the empirical proposition underneath your larger argument can remain modest:\n\n**We don't yet know that a distributed system would make every decision better. We do know that people already devote attention to public problems, that structured deliberation can change and depolarize opinion, that enormous bipartisan majorities exist on some policies, and that Americans themselves believe ordinary constituents have too little influence while donors and organized interests have too much.** \n\nThat is enough to make the next question legitimate: **why are we still treating one election every two or four years as the fullest practicable expression of the public will?**", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:9fe470ff-1db7-4807-a9dd-bd545fb05222": "Yes. I imported three conventional democracy critiques into a construct where they don't quite fit.\n\nThe distinctions are:\n\n1. **Reddit/Nextdoor are evidence about participation, not majority wisdom.** People voluntarily spend enormous amounts of attention discussing things that matter to them when participation is cheap and self-directed. Reddit alone is now used by roughly a quarter of U.S. adults. That doesn't make Reddit representative; it demonstrates that the premise *“people won't bother participating”* is weak. \n\n2. **“Majority” in your construct is not a group of people. It is a measurement.** On proposition A, I may be in the 80%; on B, the 35%; on C, the 51%; on D, I may have no opinion at all. There is no permanent majority imposing itself on a permanent minority. There is **one population producing a preference distribution, issue by issue**. Your universal-rights argument follows from that: where we have extremely broad agreement that *I want this protection for myself*, that protection gets extended universally—including to every individual who dissents from other collective choices.\n\n3. **The distributed system is an empirical proposition you intend to test, not something that needs to be assumed in advance.** “Click here. Give your input. Let's see where this goes” is crucial. You don't need to prove beforehand that 330 million people would govern perfectly. Build the apparatus, put real questions through it, compare its results with polling, deliberative samples, elections and actual policy, and expose the discrepancies. Stanford's deliberative experiments already give you a useful precursor: when a representative sample received balanced information and discussed issues, views changed substantially and partisan polarization generally decreased relative to controls. \n\nThe sentence that clarifies the whole architecture for me is:\n\n**A majority isn't a faction. It's where all of our individual preferences happen to converge on a particular question.**\n\nAnd then intensity matters too. **80%–20% is information. 51%–49% is different information. +5 conviction versus +1 preference is additional information. “I don't know enough to answer” is information.** Conventional elections compress almost all of that into which of two bundled coalitions gets control.\n\nThat makes the term-limit example unusually clean. **87% of Americans favor congressional term limits, including 90% of Republicans and 86% of Democrats.** Red and blue are almost irrelevant to that preference. Once we bundle the population back into Red versus Blue, however, the 87% convergence loses much of its political force.\n\nSo I would also withdraw my earlier formulation that Me°Us is interesting because it is “more than a referendum website.” That's still true, but it undersells the central conceptual move. **You're trying to make collective preference visible at full resolution.** The referendum is merely one output. The deeper system is: *What do I want? What do you want? What do all of those individual answers add up to? What do we learn from one another? What changes when costs and consequences become visible? And where do we ultimately converge?*\n\nThen the gauntlet really is empirical: **build it and compare what the people say with what their government does.** That test doesn't require a theory that the people will always get it right. It gives us a way to find out what they would choose in the first place.", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:fd6ccfd5-756c-4959-84f9-7b56624cf2a6": "Yes. The earlier breakdown was essentially **four different immigration questions that get collapsed into one**, and the polling still supports that decomposition very strongly.\n\nThe cleanest current picture is:\n\n| Immigration proposition | National support |\n|---|---:|\n| **Deport undocumented immigrants convicted of serious/violent crimes** | **82–85%** |\n| **Give long-term undocumented immigrants with no serious criminal record legal status if they pay penalties/back taxes and remain crime-free** | **77%** |\n| **Give people brought here illegally as children a path to citizenship if they meet requirements** | **81–83%** |\n| **Create a path to citizenship/legal status for undocumented immigrants generally, with requirements** | **65–75%**, depending on wording |\n| **Maintain secure borders / enforce immigration law** | **57–61% call these very/extremely important** |\n| **Expand the border wall** | **56%** |\n| **Hire significantly more Border Patrol agents** | **49%** |\n| **Deport everyone living here illegally** | roughly **31–42% support**, depending on wording; Gallup finds **58% oppose** |\n| **Deport undocumented people with no violent-crime conviction** | **37% support / 44% oppose** |\n| **Increase workplace ICE raids** | **45% approve / 54% disapprove** |\n| **Current ICE enforcement has gone too far** | **62%** in Feb. 2026 |\n| **Due process/hearing before a judge for someone suspected of being here illegally** | **55% support** |\n\nThose aren't all from one survey, so they shouldn't be mechanically combined. But the pattern replicates across Pew, Gallup, Reuters/Ipsos, AP-NORC and other polling. \n\n### 1. Criminal conduct makes an enormous difference\n\nThis is probably the **80-something-percent number you remembered**.\n\nAP-NORC asked specifically about undocumented immigrants **convicted of violent crimes**: **82% favored deportation**, including 89% of Republicans and 79% of Democrats. A February 2026 Program for Public Consultation survey got **85% support** for deporting undocumented immigrants convicted of a crime. \n\nBut AP-NORC then removed the violent-crime condition. For undocumented immigrants **without a violent-crime conviction**, support for deportation dropped to **37%**, while 44% opposed. \n\nUMass found essentially the same distinction: **69% supported deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records**, but only **30% supported deporting someone who works full-time and pays taxes**, and only 37% supported deporting someone with no criminal record apart from immigration status. \n\nThat's a massive difference created by **one parameter: who are we talking about?**\n\n### 2. Working, law-abiding long-term residents get a very different answer\n\nThis is perhaps the most relevant result to what you remembered about **taxes/contribution**.\n\nIn February 2026, respondents were asked about undocumented immigrants who have lived here for years, **have not committed a crime**, and would have to **pay a penalty and any taxes owed and remain crime-free**.\n\n**77% favored giving them a long-term visa.** That included **69% of Republicans and 87% of Democrats.** \n\nAnother 2026 proposal added a longer residency requirement plus economic self-sufficiency, a background check, back taxes and a fine. At a **10-year residence threshold, 68% supported an earned path to citizenship**, including 57% of Trump voters in that particular survey. \n\nSo the public answer isn't well represented by either:\n\n**“Deport them.”**\n\nor\n\n**“Let everyone stay.”**\n\nWhen characteristics become visible, preferences change dramatically.\n\n### 3. Citizenship itself has substantial support\n\nGallup's June 2026 poll is particularly striking because it asked fairly straightforward questions.\n\n**75%** favored allowing undocumented immigrants living here to eventually become citizens if they meet requirements.\n\nFor people brought to the country illegally as children, support was **81%**. Even among Republicans, a majority supported the childhood-arrival pathway once “favor” and “strongly favor” were combined. \n\nPew asked it differently in June 2025 and got a somewhat lower—but still decisive—result: **65% said undocumented immigrants should be able to stay legally if they meet requirements**. Of the total population, 36% supported eventual citizenship and another portion supported permanent legal residency without citizenship. \n\nThat difference—65% versus 75%—is a good reminder that wording matters.\n\n### 4. People also want enforcement\n\nAnd this is where the binary political framing really loses information.\n\nIn February 2026, Reuters/Ipsos found:\n\n**61%** said secure borders preventing illegal entry were extremely or very important.\n\n**57%** said enforcement of existing immigration laws inside the country was extremely or very important.\n\n**60% simultaneously said a way for undocumented immigrants with jobs and no criminal record to obtain legal status was extremely or very important.** \n\nThose are not contradictory answers.\n\nThey amount to something roughly like:\n\n**Control entry. Enforce the rules. Distinguish serious offenders from everyone else. Create a lawful route for established, contributing people.**\n\nThat combination keeps appearing.\n\n### 5. The public becomes much less supportive as enforcement becomes indiscriminate\n\nPew found **56% support for expanding the border wall** in June 2025. But only 45% approved of increasing workplace ICE raids, while 54% disapproved. \n\nReuters/Ipsos later found only **28% supporting workplace immigration arrests**, versus 54% opposed, in July 2025. \n\nBy February 2026, **62% said ICE's current enforcement efforts had gone too far**. \n\nAnd in May 2025, Reuters/Ipsos found **55% saying people suspected of being here illegally are entitled to due process and a hearing before a judge**. \n\nSo again, **support for enforcement is not equivalent to support for every enforcement method.**\n\n### 6. Legal immigration is viewed quite differently from illegal entry\n\nGallup's latest national reading from June 2026 found **73% saying immigration is a good thing for the United States**, versus 21% saying it is bad. \n\nWhen Gallup asked specifically about **legal immigration**, Americans saw positive economic effects in several areas:\n\n**64%** — filling workforce gaps caused by an aging/retiring population\n**60%** — supplying workers for low-wage jobs\n**56%** — generating tax revenue for public programs\n**52%** — supplying science and technology workers. \n\nBut people were much more skeptical about housing costs and job competition for U.S.-born workers. So even here, the public response isn't generically “immigration good.”\n\n### And there's an interesting employer-side result\n\nOne of the more sophisticated formulations we've looked at pairs **mandatory employment verification with additional legal work visas**.\n\nA 2024 Program for Public Consultation survey found **83% support for requiring E-Verify while simultaneously expanding work visas**—82% Republican and 84% Democrat in that survey. The same project found 68% support for E-Verify without the visa expansion. \n\nThat gets much closer to treating immigration as a labor-market system rather than simply policing individuals.\n\n---\n\nSo if I reconstruct the **four-part formulation we were circling before**, it is essentially:\n\n**1. Border:** People want controlled borders and enforcement.\n\n**2. Crime:** People overwhelmingly want serious criminals deported.\n\n**3. Established residents:** People generally do **not** want indiscriminate removal of long-term, working, tax-paying, noncriminal residents; sizable majorities favor earned legal status.\n\n**4. Legal pathway:** People support legal immigration and substantial majorities support routes to citizenship or permanent status under conditions.\n\nAnd that's exactly the kind of example your Red-Blue argument is looking for. Calling the issue simply **“pro-immigration versus anti-immigration”** destroys most of the information contained in what Americans are saying. The same person can coherently favor **a secure border + deportation of violent offenders + employer verification + legal work visas + earned legal status for a worker who has lived here 15 years, pays taxes and hasn't committed crimes.**\n\nPolling suggests quite a lot of Americans occupy some version of that multidimensional space. ", "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a:5e95a8ce-4099-4384-ad30-ca535dfa0c22": "The cleanest national numbers I can find are:\n\n- **Abolish police departments:** support has generally landed around **15–23%**. Gallup’s large 2020 survey found **15%** wanted police abolished; a national Yale-linked survey later that year found **23% support for abolition**, versus **66% for reform**. \n- **Defund/reduce police funding** is materially more popular than abolition: depending on wording, roughly **31–47%** supported reducing police budgets or shifting funding toward social services. \n- **Abolish all private property and have government hold it for the public good:** **7% yes, 77% no, 16% unsure** in a 2020 YouGov survey. Among Gen Z it was 12%; Millennials 10%. \n- A slightly softer formulation—**all private property publicly owned and government-managed**—got **11% support, 69% opposition**. \n\nA much newer 2026 HarrisX poll points in the same direction from the opposite wording: **91% supported private homeownership/private-property rights**, although that isn't exactly the inverse of “abolish all private property.” \n\nSo for the distinction you were making earlier, these aren't close calls:\n\n**Police abolition: ~15–23%**\n**Abolition of private property: ~7–11%**\n\nThat is very different territory from things like taxing wealthy people, worker protections, marijuana legalization, universal preschool, or immigration pathways, where national majorities can be found.\n\nOne wording caveat matters on the property question: **“abolish private property” can mean very different things in socialist theory**—sometimes private ownership of productive capital rather than people's homes and ordinary possessions. The 7% poll asked the sweeping version: *all private property*." }, "displayEdits": [ { "conversation_id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "source_message_id": "bbb21a7d-a4e0-460e-ac34-adcf1e993558", "before": "And now print those links as text.", "after": "", "approved_by": "user", "date": "2026-10-20" }, { "conversation_id": "6ad79e6b-8fd0-83e9-a830-0abf668b8d1a", "source_message_id": "a270427a-a8c9-4435-9cd4-7e403efa2c14", "before": "```text\nhttps://www.semafor.com/article/12/20/2024/we-have-to-increase-taxes-on-the-wealthy-steve-bannon\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/04/24/bannon_populism_offer_solutions_you_dont_like_but_you_can_live_with_the_alternative_is_luigi.html\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2024/12/05/bannon_if_the_oxes_gotta_get_gored_it_can_not_come_out_of_the_middle_class_and_working_class_americans.html\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/05/02/bannon_the_elites_have_turned_our_beloved_military_into_rent-a-cops_for_wall_streets_casino.html\n\nhttps://www.dsausa.org/statements/zohran-mamdani-wins-national-political-committee-statement/\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/03/04/josh-hawley-unions-teamsters\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/01/30/senate-republican-josh-hawley-pro-labor-bill-chavez-deremer\n\nhttps://program.dsausa.org/\n\nhttps://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2026/07/15/the-class-roots-of-return-to-office-mandates/\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/06/18/trump-maga-purity-tests\n\nhttps://www.axios.com/2025/06/24/trump-iran-maga-whiplash\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/08/15/bannon_we_have_to_stop_the_madness_and_put_americans_first.html\n\nhttps://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2025/02/27/bannon_trump_wants_to_reset_the_post-war_international_order.html\n\nhttps://program.dsausa.org/\n\nhttps://sfarchive.dsausa.org/issues/winter-2020/the-socialist-anti-war-tradition-leading-the-fight-against-war-and-imperialism/\n```", "after": "", "approved_by": "user", "date": "2026-10-20" } ], "replyPersistence": "browser_local_only", "ontologyStatus": "document_container_only; semantic_filing_pending", "section": "civic" } }