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I don’t want any Republicans to win, but even when they lose the outright fascist ones still hurt our country by promoting violence and pushing the Overton window ever-farther to the right.
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The parties may have their nominal differences, but they both recognize that if we could vote for anyone else, we wouldn’t vote for them. They need the two party system because then they each get to panic their voters with “If you don’t vote for us, The Bad People will win.”
In its way, the two-party system is as antithetical to actual democracy as the Electoral College or any of the other glaring flaws in the American political system. But unless you make forming a political party or caucusing punishable by summary execution, I don’t see a way to fix it.
Actually, I take that back: things like proportional representation or alternative voting systems might make a difference. But the two parties will both fight tooth and claw against any attempt to introduce such innovations because they know that any improvement would undermine their own power.
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Um… not right now, no, the differences aren’t “nominal”… You have one party that has gone full on fascist. That matters. We really do need to stop pretending like this is just the normal sort of duopoly shit going on…
In this case, this was absolutely true. They are targeting trans people, rolling back women’s rights, promising one party rule, impose Christian values on all of us… etc, etc… This is not just hyperbole - these are the things that they are saying to their voters right now…
Yes, we need real political reform, too, but how about we also recognize how close we are to not having any kind of REAL democracy AT ALL!
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Switch elections to non-partisan ranked-choice primaries with 4 winners and non-partisan ranked-choice generals, make all House seats at-large in their states, and raise the size of the House to 600 and you’d be back to coalition governance, which would be more stable with an every-four-year executive branch. But nobody’s going to vote for that.
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When someone says “the parties aren’t that different,” the speaker is usually someone who doesn’t belong to an out group. (Fixed typo genitive for plural.)
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More worrying in the current atmosphere, the duopoly also sets the stage for the Putin-esque sham democracy that the Republicans desire: an effective one-party state where the other major party is powerless or compromised. The hapless Dem establishment has demonstrated that they’re well suited to that role, but time and demographics may change that. It’s a race against time.
Since the duopoly isn’t going anywhere, the answer isn’t “better Republicans” (as others have pointed out, no such thing is possible) but “better Democrats”. Fortunately, there’s a new wave of dynamic younger candidates and elected officials who understand the urgency are slowly supplanting the complacent Third-Way Boomers who’ve been in control of the party since the early 1990s.
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Sad. One more good actor to ignore, just because he’s stupid.
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They have openly expressed their admiration for Putin and Orban… I’m really not sure how much more evidence that people need AFTER AN ACTUAL COUP ATTEMPT to be convinced that this isn’t normal “both sides” duopoly BS going on, but a serious threat to even HAVING a democracy! Like… how much more evidence do people NEED, exactly!
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Anybody can stand for election in the Democratic Party primaries, which present a very wide range of candidates from every walk of life and ideological stripe. Blue Dogs like Manchin and Great Society Reformists like Wyden and New Progressives like Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez continue to win their primary elections, time after time.
The US does in fact have a multiparty democracy with elections: it’s called the Democratic Party.
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Frankly, at this point I want to go back in time and unwatch every gol’ dang James Woods movie I ever watched.
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His entire career, in my estimation, has been spent playing assholes. In real life, surprise! He’s an asshole!
Maybe the universe is course-correcting, because if these are the only roles he can reliably play, and we haven’t seen him, I’d tend to think that there isn’t much of an overall appetite for “naturally-occurring assholes with a limited range.”
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The World Class D-bag James Woods, hitting the ole sauce were ya & being your authentic a-hole self.
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Dick Nixon would like a word (along with every southern democrat that moved to the Republican party in the 50s and 60s)
(Although Dick is probably the most left president from an overall policy standpoint than anyone except maybe Carter since (I mean, he worked with Keyes and instituted food pricing controls! The EPA happened under him!). But that is more about how far the line has moved over the last 50 years with neoliberalism and the slow, steady move of the “center” as discussed by the media to the right (in reality of course, this is not true, it’s just GOP propaganda and corporate control of the media)
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Had a long blah blah comment about this, but…
Be a better human. I’ll try to as well.
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… which one? there’s at least three that I can think of off the top of my head that fits that bill.
Well, if we have to go that far back, than so be it.
I was going to say "no, that started with ‘Tricky’ Dick Nixon, but:
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Nixon was more of a mixed bag, I’d argue. As you note… He’s the last liberal consensus president, though his administration was stocked with bad actors bent on dismantling the liberal consensus…
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Point conceded. Bad choice of words on my part. Strike the word ‘nominal’, because the differences, as you say, are absolutely real.
Again, no disagreement from me there. But what I was picturing was a scenario where you have a frothing fascist on the one side, and some disappointing Democrat on the other: a Joe Manchin type, say. Along comes a bright-eyed bushy-tailed independent who believes in all the things that you believe in, has real viable proposals for change, is passionate about representing voters rather than their corporate constituency etc.
That’s when the DNC gets to go “But if you vote for the independent, then it’ll split the vote, and the Republicans will win.” And they’re right, so most voters will pragmatically vote Lesser of Two Evils and get another four years of mediocre representation. They’ll hate it, but it’s better than the unthinkable alternative.
The same thing probably applies on the other side too. I’d bet that a lot of conservative voters, even regular Fox viewers, would prefer to back a reasonably sane and sincere candidate who cares about the stuff that they care about. But the party puts up John “All my Best Friends are Billionaires” P. Taxcutter or Karen “Storm the Capitol” MacHitler and tells them “If you don’t vote for John and Karen, then the Satanist pedophile Democrats will win.”
Alternative voting systems could potentially break this stranglehold. So too could demographic shifts. The two party system can exist because the country seems to be not just polarized but more or less evenly so. So long as the division is close to 50/50 (even if that’s artificially maintained by things like the Electoral College), there’s no room for maneuver. If demographic change (in particular, rising numbers of left-leaning younger voters) makes the Republicans essentially unelectable (absent things like voter suppression and gerrymandering), then more possibilities open up.
But that will happen only over the dead bodies of the existing power structures and power holders.
Trust me, I know. It’s what keeps me awake at night. Well, that and the neighbor’s dog.
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Agreed. Rotten to the core though as a person. There is obviously a direct line from The Southern Strategy to where we are today
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Right, because no one smart ever had communication challenges.
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