Paraphrasing Lawrence Lessig: “To even stand in the general election, you first have to win the ‘money election’.”

That's his take on how campaign finance influences which candidates run or are “taken seriously” by the media - presidential primaries or congressional candidates alike.

The republic is unfortunately not “dependent on the people alone” if money has a too tight grip on who gets to run for election.

Republican lawmakers by and large represent corporate business interests and the wealthy. They use social issues as their drumbeat to rally their base who won't benefit from these handouts to the wealthy. Many people don't understand economics but are happy to vote along social issues. Single issue voting is common for such issues.

Because republican lawmakers come from states where this is not a problem.

Perhaps many houses in red states are owned by corporate landlords but housing is way more affordable in those states.

So this is a case of lawmakers simply not seeing the problem amongst the people they represent and thus being unwilling to pass what they view as unnecessary regulation.

Ultimately housing affordability is a blue state problem.

Moreover for all the lip service democrats pay to housing, in my state of Oregon, where the democrats have supermajorities of both houses in the legislature and the governorship, they do nothing.

I think that if you spent time on American politics you'll find that the democrats rarely vote for actual regulation, they just promise it to you and then make excuses.

Because many spend so much time moral grandstanding and signaling their virtue they cannot conceive of anyone with a contrary opinion to them having any valid reason for disagreeing, and therefore the only reason for them doing what they are doing must be because they are morally deficient and evil.

This then gets reinforced by a media-industrial complex that is happy to continue to feed you points you agree with to get you to keep clicking.

Disclaimer: I am not saying I support the Republican party or that I agree with them, but that doesn't change that tons of people cannot possibly conceive of someone having a different viewpoint than them being anything other than morally deficient.

In Capital and Ideology, Piketty does a review of modern democracies, there's a two party system of left and right in every one except Poland where there was at the time of writing a far right and right wing party competing for dominance. Conservative parties typically rely on rural voting bloc, less educated and much older people, it's almost universal somehow, that doesn't make their opinion wrong off the bat, it's just demographics of voting. There's also actually a component of "harming these people I disagree with" that drives the vote for reactionary groups and is an active part of Murdoch sponsored media, there's not really a thoughtful process about how it could harm themselves.

For example, there was the irony of multiple cases of people voting for Trump because immigrants are bad, and then having their spouse deported for some visa violation. Or one can look at the people who have opposition to abortion voting for Republicans. Then someone who cannot consent is raped or someone has a non viable pregnancy and neither is eligible for an abortion, which has happened since Roe v Wade was re decided. In the USA, the Senate is decidedly unrepresentative of the people of the United States as a whole, the House less so with the limit to 435 members, but not as bad in some ways.

You can also look to Brexit post vote interviews where people who voted in favor of it said they didn't care if it hurt the UK, they wanted it to happen.

An older example in the USA, the Reagan administration characterized AIDs as the "gay plague" and played down the effects and had no official response to the health crisis other than to joke about it, delaying an effective national strategy. Today there is still a gay faction of the the GOP called the Log Cabin Republicans that is barred from some party events but still back the GOP, Peter Thiel has become a big GOP backer in spite of most state party platforms calling gay people abnormal and most subsequent federal GOP administrations sending and supporting people in Africa to criminalize gay sex.

On the topic of housing (the subject of this HN thread), the most NIMBY and unequal housing locations are in urban California where there hasn't been a Republican elected in 40 years. So maybe a bias by the writer, I'm not sure the full context or what was intended.

It tends to be that way because the Republican party line is to wring hands over how much any social program will cost, even if it's free school lunches for children who live in impoverished households, while over half of the government's yearly budget is a black box of untouchable military funds.

Both sides oppose good things for people. It's a false dichotomy and meant to divide.

Media is mostly run by the left so easy to vilify the other side.