"honestly I’m still fucking pissed at the “Greens” for their role in helping destroy the environment)."
Was I supposed to get a different take away then?
I should have said Moore. You are 100% correct
Well, that was clearly referring to the election of 2000…
This would have been the useful takeaway:
We need to be together on fighting the fucking fascist right now, not bickering over whose fault it was we got here
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The Tea Partiers are a good example of an insurgent movement within a party ultimately taking over. I’m not sure how you see that as an example of third party success. If they had started their own party they would have fizzled into nothing.
I see no reason progressives can’t model an insurgent campaign within the Democratic party that does much the same thing. Tea Partiers call moderate Republicans ‘Republicans in Name Only’, why not do the same with Democrats who still think their primary constituency is K Street? Why not make a fuss in the nomination process, and support passionate, committed people rather than people who are most likely to appeal to a middle that doesn’t exist? Why not show up with placards everywhere your message is being ignored. It certainly worked for the Tea Partiers - they now control the whole damn country and they didn’t even have to start a third party.
The point of a third party, at least in Canada, has been to marginalize the progressive vote. All the progressives vote for the NDP and get massively underrepresented in Parliament due to FPTP voting and broad but shallow support. We get to feel snubbed, but who gives a crap what progressives think when it doesn’t translate into getting elected?
As long as you have FPTP voting there is no point in a third party. Nobody fears them, and all they do is serve to marginalize that viewpoint - right or left.
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Very true!
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Why so there is! Dunno how I missed that! (I searched, really, honest!)
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I like this idea.
Me too!
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Just because we vote in our elections doesn’t give me the right to lord it over Americans. Oh wait, yes it does.
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The Tea Party are rubes who drained already wounded bank accounts into the rich media engine that took advantage of them, and allowed the alt-right to become the driving force of the GOP to the point that the Tea Party lost the primary and the alt-right - who won by stealing Tea Party voters.
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Showing up with placards is easy. Getting candidates elected (much less being a candidate) is hard.
This writer repeats a popular wive’s tale that Ralph Nader “stole” the election from Gore in 2000. This is not true. Bush and Gore each got about 2.9 million votes. Nader received 97,000. To blame him for Gore’s loss, one must make two assumptions - 1) All or a majority of the Nader voters would have voted for Gore instead of Nader, and 2) all or a majority would have voted at all. No one could determine whether Bush or Gore would have gotten a majority of Nader’s votes. Futhermore, there were 8 other candidates who received enough votes to tip the election to either candidate. Nader did not cause Gore to lose. Gore actually won Florida, but the Supreme Court (improperly) stopped the recounting in the state, which at that point showed Bush ahead by 537. In addition, if Gore could have won his own home state, he would have become president. But he didn’t. A candidate is responsible for his own campaign. Nader was not the bad guy. Scalia and his cohorts should get more blame. And Dems for not objecting when the votes could be challenged in Congress.
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I think Michael Moore is correct in saying that we have to take steps now. We don’t have time to create a new party. We really have to work within the existing Democratic party structure.
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I think it usually takes more time, energy, and money to completely gut and retrofit a thing than it does to make a new one.
In this election I think a lot more progressives would have gone third party had they not been so completely, utterly terrified of Trump.
Then there were some Trump voters, bless their ignorant little hearts, thought this turd was actually going to “drain the swamp”.
“#6. Abolish electoral college and electronic voting; Election Day held on the weekend, restore voting rights of former prisoners”
While we are eliminate demagogue prevention systems that have never worked, why don’t we get rid of super-delegates as well.
I agree with most of these points and some of the sentiment but if America doesn’t heal some of its partisan divisions then this is all pointless.
You cant heal America from the inside if you’re in a civil war!
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The problem is that all instant runoff voting does is prevent a third party from being a “spoiler” to the other two. It’s main objective is still keeping those two in power.
What we need is a system where your first choice gets 5 points, second choice gets 4, and so on. The winner of the election is the one with the most points.
In that scenario, the person who wins the election is less often the one that 51% marked as their first choice, and usually the one that 80% marked as their second choice. It breaks the partisan lock and ensures a candidate that everyone can live with.
I still voted for IVF here in Maine because it seems like a worthwhile step towards a better system.
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It lowers the barrier for entry to “enough first preference votes to take second place”. Get there, and If you’re sensible you can arrange preference votes from the weaker of the two majors and take the seat.
As I said, it still tends towards two party dominance. But it isn’t that hard for an independent or minor party to pinch a seat, particularly if they’ve got strong local support. There are usually three or four independents in the lower house at any given time, and it’s not that rare for them to hold the balance of power.
An analysis of the situation requires people to be able to distinguish between ‘the Left’, ‘liberals’, and ‘Democrats’. The Democratic Party does not test for ideology, so its adherents may be leftist, centrist, rightist, pure opportunists, idiots, or anything else. Liberals may be left- or right-wing. The Left includes anarchists, communists, socialists, and others who are not part of the Democratic Party and are mostly distinct from liberals. The Democratic Party, throughout the 20th century and continuing into the 21st, has spent a great deal of time, energy and money on destroying or disorganizing the Left, which is why, although a great many Americans entertain leftist preferences, sentiments, and beliefs, they are not effectively organized.
As to what happened in the election, almost no one predicted it correctly, and an attempt to analyze anything as complex as a general election ever, much less a week after the event, is absurd. You don’t know what happened, just as you didn’t know what was going to happen.
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