It’s a flawed analogy. As an individual I can leave an abusive relationship and the immediate risk of harm. As an individual I can’t leave the entire environment and end the immediate risk of harm. And the harm is very much immediate and ongoing for me.
Should the Nazis get in power now - it’s over for future generations as well.
So I’m voting for Biden. You do you. Maybe you’re safer than I and can risk it.
If there was ranked choice in my state under these conditions- I’d still vote for Biden.
There is no past the now. We are at a precipice, where a single election cycle can have devastating effects on countless lives. It sucks that that’s the way things are, but the two-party, first past the post system is just one of many reasons why we have gotten to this point. And ranked choice voting alone is not going to resolve the fascist threat, especially since there are still many places where the fascists win elections with ease.
There are contributing factors, and then there are causes. And the causes are not on our end of the political spectrum.
Think very carefully about who the abusive partner is in this sentence. There is someone trying to kill us, but it’s not the system itself.
There is no time to change the voting system before 2024, nor much support (yes, due to the duopoly domination) for said change. In the vast majority of the states, FPTP is the only game, and it is the only weapon we have to stop the Nazis. If there were ranked choice, spoilers would not exist. But they do! Why do you suppose the fascists are funding RFK jr’s run? I appreciate your passion for an alternative to our current system, but pretending it is something other than it is is a recipe for fascist victory, and the end of democracy. Just to be clear, if they win, they will end democracy. And wishing for an alternative to the Democratic party will not help to defeat them. I am very happy that Maine and a few other locales made the leap to a better system, but most of us are stuck with what we have. Telling me to pretend otherwise is not helpful.
On other topics, is that quote from Mal Goes to War?
I’m going to vote for Biden. Then I will vote for Dems all down the ticket. Because third parties are not viable in the US nationally and in most states. Doing otherwise is just a round about way of supporting fascism. This is our reality. I’m sad people cannot seem to grasp this.
I hope that once Dems have solid control of the national level we can start putting in the protections our democracy needs to remain a democracy. The states that do finally turn blue or already are blue can start to put in ranked choice voting and anti-gerrymandering measures.
The house is burning. We need to save it before we can move on to pretty much anything else. We have to break the fascists before we can risk infighting between the not–actually-facists.
Even if your ideal scenario worked in the short term, you would be taking two steps forward on climate change (while throwing millions of people under the bus) instead of one step forward and saving them.
Please look at history. Incremental changes last. Revolutionary changes don’t.
To speak to the concerns in the post, it will also be the end of any attempt to limit greenhouse gases for however long their new regime lasts. Something we need to have done yesterday postponed indefinitely and reversed in the meantime. The next generation’s survival can’t afford that.
This thread has been clarifying for me. I’m usually more reserved about who I’ll support during the primaries.
I’m going to be unapologetically pro Biden starting now. Give money- maybe buy some merch. Certainly send some merch to my republican brother anonymously.
I know that people have been saying we’re in an existential threat for a while, but this is absolutely the case now. We are in an existential threat, for some, to their very existence. We ignore that fact at our peril.
Allright, I give up. I don’t think you understand the big picture here. Incremental change works in stable societies. We are in the middle of a Toffler wave. This isn’t the French revolution, it’s the industrial revolution: You don’t get to choose the timeframe for that. It happens and you either adapt or your civilization dies.
Gen X grew up before home computers, let alone the internet or watches with a million times more processing power than the Apollo program. Since I finished high school we’ve gone from the Human Genome Project being a barely plausible long term goal to having CRISPR technology in every decent university. We have robots on Mars, city sized factories in China, and I can buy a 3D printer for under $100 which I can use to make a free energy generator . We’ve gone from Mad Men to Star Trek in a fraction of a human lifetime. By the next election cycle, AI is going to going to decimate middle class jobs and deepfakes will be easier to create than authentic video is to validate.
I honestly don’t know how to explain to you that capitalism cannot survive near-infinite supply and 80% unemployment; and our quasi-democracy cannot survive the information apocalypse. Again, this isn’t the French revolution, it’s the industrial revolution. The systems we rely on are designed for a world which literally doesn’t exist anymore- and the problems with that are going to increase exponentially as reality moves increasingly further away from the parameters those systems functioned within. The radical change is happening whether we like it or not.
And y’all are acting as though something as simple and tested as ranked choice voting is some kind of lofty and unattainable end goal instead of the first baby step towards building a framework suitable for the future that already exists.
Can you explain how the introduction of ranked-choice voting would lead to the kind of systemic changes that would create the policy outcomes that we’re talking about here? Because, although I think that ranked-choice voting would be a good step in the right direction, I really cannot understand the assumption that this would lead to different policy outcomes.
Even in Maine, which has had ranked-choice voting for several election cycles now, it’s still very much a two-party game.
Even Maine doesn’t use it for presidential elections, only state-level. Wikipedia was out of date. Maine does use RCV for the presidential general election.
Changing our voting systems requires voting on it. How are we supposed to do that before the next election? We can’t do it through deciding it and force of will… so in the meantime, don’t vote for the GQP vote for Democrats.
ETA: strikethrough because third parties and the spoiler effect
And I don’t think you understand that these are nevertheless the systems we have to work with in the here and now, and we must vote strategically in reality, not fantasy, in order to avoid a complete loss, in the short term, of the ability to ever make progressive change again.
RCV is a very small but, I believe, effective weapon against forced false choices and general conservativism. It’s about simply acknowledging that “yes, there are other options” in a way that has real tangible results. It helps break the mindset that there are only ever two sides to a story, or that choices are binary. I think that is a critical part of making actual progress rather than trying to maintain stasis (democrats) or revert to some mythical past (republicans). If you can’t even consider the idea of change as a possibility, it’s never going to happen. RCV breaks that mental block in a very conservative way that still lets people hedge their bets on the establishment while putting their support behind something they actually believe in.
And going further, a Borda method of ranked voting (based on point totals rather than instant runoff) promotes consensus governance- Where the candidate everyone can agree on as their second choice stands a better chance than the one 49% will be dissatisfied with. This is the method which fits most with my own political philosophy, because I think it’s the best for uniting diverse and sometimes conflicting ideals. It’s the only one which doesn’t seem to me to treat politics as a zero sum game.
From THAT point, I think there’s a lot of positive ways to move forward. But I don’t think we will until we believe we can- And judging by the growing number of people who are registering as independent and declaring no confidence in the existing two party system, that’s not something we seem interested in.
That’s exactly my point. We are in an era of technological and social change that is displacing our political and economic institutions at an exponentially increasing rate. That is going to continue happening, and not a century or a lifetime down the road, but within the next decade. The future “fantasy” world is inches away and there is nothing we can do to prevent it.
This is a radical change, and if we don’t make radical adaptations to it, that change will destroy us. The other option is try try to maintain things the way they are, or were, in a world that keeps moving on despite efforts to the contrary- And that inevitably leads to fascism because there is no other way to maintain a societal structure that isn’t adapted to the world it’s a part of.
Or maybe- probably- there’s still another option out there that neither of us is smart enough to have come up with yet. What I do know is that what we have, isn’t that.
No. We all acknowledge that ranked choice is better than FPTP. We all acknowledge it’s something to work toward. Unlike you, though, we acknowledge that it can’t be manifested before the 2024 election, where one of the duopoly parties will likely run a fascist candidate for President. We also acknowledge that voting for a third party candidate in that election will neither bring about ranked choice voting nor help defeat the GOP candidate.
I understand when you say that belief in the possibility of change is a prerequisite for change, but I do not see how ranked-choice voting (a) solves the issue of political nihilism and (b) results in better policy outcomes.
I think that ending gerrymandering or abolishing the filibuster would do a lot more good in terms of ending minority rule, which is a much bigger problem than forced false choices and 49% of people being dissatisfied with the person who wins an election. Indeed, the way the lines are drawn, it’s often more like 30% dissatisfied with their own representative even though 60% of the population has to vote blue for the Democrats to take the House. And without sixty votes in the Senate, they can’t really do anything even if they do take the house.
Not according to everything you’ve written in this thread. It’s in fact 180 degrees from “vote third party because ranked choice is good, even in areas that don’t have ranked choice, because magic.”
I agree wholeheartedly, and I don’t believe that’s possible until the duopoly is broken.
See, again, there’s a very real scenario where a small third party win could radically alter the landscape: By providing a handful of senate swing votes that break the deadlock.
