The green party has a lot to say about this. Besides ranked voting, they taught me that the laws establishing major parties on the ballot, giving them much lower bars to entry- are all state level laws, there is no federal law govering access to the ballot. So if these laws are to be overturned, they can be taken one at a time, on a state by state basis, bypassing the federal house and Senate entirely. As for not being able to imagine it, just look outside the US. Not every good idea was invented here.
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Yes. We’re not going to get rid of the duopoly, since we’re not a traditional parliamentary system. However, as of this election, per Clay Shirky, we have a quasi-parliamentary system. As a democracy we need to make additional room for that voter demand, and FPTP simply doesn’t allow it.
Imagine for a moment that we had preference voting as a standard in the last election. That would have given Sanders an option to do a third party run, perhaps under the banner of the American Pirate Party started by @roomwithaview . Based on his popularity as witnessed, that would have had a serious effect on the Democrats both during primary season and during the general election, to the point where a Clinton campaign as tone-deaf and arrogant as the one we saw might lose to Bernie’s Pirates in the general.
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Starting with us Boingers as the initial “base”, please reply with what you think our manifesto should be.
I’ll begin it with:
- a viable alternative to the Republican and Democratic parties, inspired by the likes of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren
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Before we congratulate Michael Moore on his prescience this election, we should remember that he predicted a Romney win in 2012… It’s a 50-50 guess and he’s 1 for 2 now… Still, he’s dead right about in much of his analysis, and it is surprising how much in this interview from 2012 remains true this time around:
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Campaign funds will only be raised from individual donors, not from corporations. Super PAC spending, though not under party control, will be actively discouraged.
A basic code of ethics will be written and used for all hiring, personnel, and candidate membership decisions. Any candidates acting in violation of the ethics code will be stripped of party affiliation.
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It won’t be a viable party in the U.S. without preference/instant runoff voting. So the first and only item on your American Pirate Party’s manifesto should be preference voting in every state in the Union. Push that through and you’ll have reason to expand the manifesto.
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The experience here is that preferential voting does reduce extremism, but it still has a strong tendency towards two-party dominance. If you really want to get the third parties up and running, you need proportional representation.
OTOH, too much party diversity brings its own problems; see Italy. Hence, the common practice of using proportional representation for only part of the legislature.
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Yknow what else is “baked into the system?” The president being able to appoint new SCOTUS members. Its almost as if the rules have been changed.
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Moore is the anti-Trump: another shrill populist entertainment figure monetizing the short attention span. Stick them both in the Large Hadron Collider and study the results for science.
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Yup. Anything that relies upon federal level or constitutional reform ain’t gonna happen in the short term; the GOP/Dem establishment won’t allow it. You need to knock off the established powers first.
Although a brand new party is appealling, I think it’s up against too much institutional advantage. I suspect that you’d have a better shot at gutting and replacing the Dem power structure while keeping the name and the skeleton of the organisation intact.
Time for a Tea Party of the left. Primary out the corporate crooks, force the legislators to follow the platform, hijack the party from within. And don’t be gentle about it.
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Agreed, that’s definitely at the top of the priority list. However, getting to that point requires some organization and a “base” in each state to make it so. Not to mention that even before that happens, as @nemomen commented above: [quote=“nemomen, post:20, topic:89457”]
It would at a minimum help improve the dynamics of the elections since slagging/demonizing your opponent would be far riskier. I expect it would also push parties into better representing/delivering for their constituencies
[/quote]
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The President nominates new SCOTUS Justices. The Senate approves them in its own sweet time. The only thing that’s changed is we have GOP Senators so obstructionist and so uninterested in actual governance that they were willing to leave a vacancy open for years if Clinton had won.
We are not a parliamentary system, but we can make changes within the framework we have that will allow the duopoly we’re stuck with to accommodate our new quasi-parliamentary reality.
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I’m sure somebody’s got a good code of ethics for political candidates posted online somewhere - anybody got a link?
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I agree and I don’t think either party is in line with the views of a majority of Americans. Even if both parties imploded and came out as something “better”, the current system is LOCKED in to a two party system. There simply is no other viable outcome. It may not always be R vs D, but it will ALWAYS lead two a 2 party system.
We need a weighted voting system now. Unfortunately, no one in power currently WANTS that. It would go against their ability to retain political power. Well, I say no one wants it, maybe some of them do, but the people in control only have power to lose from reform. I guess the one silver lining is that Trump isn’t a product of the party, and not beholden to it if it were set on his desk. But getting it to the presidents desk is going to be a hell of a task.
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And this I learned from both college history and politics classes, because basically what happens is a third party if it gains enough voters it will cause one of the major parties to change their platform and bring in the third party or what happened to the long gone Whig party they don’t change and the new party takes its place.
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Liberals feel aimless and powerless, falling all over each other trying to figure out what happened. Like teenagers at a party that went off the rails, some are locked in the bathroom crying, some are fighting amongst themselves, others are telling everyone it’s going to be fine, and some are standing on the kitchen table yelling, trying to restore order in futility.
All this is true, although “liberals” not being sci-fi robots who can’t understand your human “emotion,” also pretty predictable. But then you go on to say
The left needs a designated driver,
from your perch on the kitchen table. The problem is that this is just regular old infighting with a healthy splash of holier-than-thouism, of which we have always had more than we could handle anyway.
A lot of stuff happened. Six days out, I’m not quite ready to have blogs tell me What It All Meant and What Must Now Happen. I like Moore’s politics just fine on the whole, and most of his advice is good advice in this or any situation, but I don’t need him appointed Savior and Only Sane Man of the Left. Nobody does.
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Total rubbish. No one seems to actually vote in your - once every four years, leader of the free world - elections for president.
America should be seriously ashamed about registration and about turnout.
Solve that. Solve everything.
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Here’s some more, agree or disagree?
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Internal spending before external (e.g. infrastructure repair before foreign war)
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Support of national business before international (e.g. tariffs, penalties for outsourcing)
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Corporate leadership personally responsible for corporate actions
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" The DNC must apologize to Bernie Sanders for trying to rig the fight against him, for defaming him, for cheating."
That one is partly ridiculous. Yes, the DNC’s conduct was wrong. So was Sanders, for driving his voters away from the Democratic candidate toward Stein and Johnson. He was single handedly responsible for handing the election to Trump.
I’m down with the rest of it, but Sanders can kiss my balls.
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I would further suggest that there be a rather low cap on donations per year per individual, e.g. $500. This not to prevent financial support, but rather to goad supporters to “spread the word”, because ultimately what we need is voters!
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