Sloganeering as a means of politiciking

Of the recent slogans I am seeing, the only one that is really new is "Abolish the Senate."

I have to admit that one surprised me.

In general, I see a lot of points in favor of bicameral legislatures. The problems we have with them are things like the institutional racism and cult-like devotion to a terrible leader... getting rid of the Senate without getting rid of that would not take away the basic problem.

I would imagine the reasoning behind it is that the Senate gives low-population states equal votes, which tends to favor conservatives. 

I get that, but Texas has the second highest number of representatives, right behind California. Add Texas and Florida together and they outnumber Texas. 

Southern states tend to have higher populations than Northern states. New York is the big exception, but that's one state. 

Yes, sometimes we have an advantage in the House, but it's not reliable. 

I could get behind abolishing the Electoral College.

I would be skeptical about getting behind one of the other ones: "Medicare for All"

Previously I have thought that it would be better to expand Medicaid than Medicare. Having some familiarity with both, there are ways in which Medicaid is better. Expanding both what it covers and whom it covers would make it better still.  

Now that we have a president shutting off Medicaid payments to certain states and eliminating price protections that had previously gone in, maybe it is not good to have everything run by the government 

If we had shifted to Medicare for All under Biden, what damage would Trump be doing to it now?

Would that be a problem with the legislation, or just with electing a malignant narcissist?

All of that requires thought, and slogans don't encourage thought. They are designed to stir up an emotional response.

That doesn't have to be bad if the original idea holds up logically and encourages more investigation. 

Current slogans focus on division and destruction:

"Abolish ICE"

"Defund the Police"

I have a lot of sympathy for both of those.

When ICE is a bunch of newly-hired thugs who don't have the intellect or fitness level to join the police who then get huge bonuses to go around tailing brown people, maybe just to seize them but too frequently assaulting and even killing them, yeah, I don't want that to happen.

Then do you go back to just INS? In this environment where you are encouraged to blame everything on immigrants and vilification and hostility are getting built in, what happens then? Are there plans for changing the environment?

Sure, with said current malignant narcissist in office, it might be hard to change the political climate, but it would be hard to abolish ICE with him still in there too.

What is the greater plan?

I totally support less funds going to police and more to housing and mental health care and programs like that, especially when the police budgets are going to militarized weapons.

I also know that wealthy areas will hire private security firms (sometimes even with police still funded) which have even less accountability. Is that an improvement?

I don't support the vigilantism that prison abolitionists rely on. 

Changing the tools of the power structure without changing the psychology of the power structure does not make the world a better place.

Thank you for telling me what you want to destroy, but what are you going to build and how are you going to do that? That's what I want to hear.

If we are just going to focus on sounding powerful and tough, well, I can see how things so easily fall back into racism and misogyny without closer examination. 

We have to be examining all of it.