More than 120 Republicans met in a zoom call to talk about forming a third party

boing
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I imagine it would be what the 2012 autopsy recommended. If you can ditch much of the racism, a lot of minorities are both religious and espouse conservative values. Who knows if that would work.

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The RNC is caught between a rock and a hard place on that one. You can’t ditch the racism without angering the base, but also struggle to expand beyond the base until you do so. While there’s no danger the core voters switching parties, there is a danger of them becoming disillusioned and simply not showing up on voting day.

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I’m talking center US political spectrum. And really, the idea is that neither the Left(ish) nor the Right have a majority. They have to work with a third group between them, which would hopefully end the last 30 years of constantly stalled legislation and vindictive leadership. It may not work, who knows, but what we have now isn’t working very well.

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Then there is no platform left.

Seriously, the GOP is now only defined by what they are against.

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Then you will have to take into account the rise of the millennial and zoomer left, who are more DSA than Democratic. Piss them off and then you are dealing with two parties splitting into four. America is in the middle of a political realignment, and that is to the left as well as the right.

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It’s Nixons all the way down.

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That would work, too. Anything to break the two party system.

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I think you missed the word “principled”…

Yeah, there are more principled politicians. . . (sorry, that made me barf in my mouth a bit) on the democrat side, but again, there seems to be a corrupting influence of politics/power. After they’ve been in for a while, it all becomes how to win the game/secure another election/reward your corporate overlords, and not “how do I best serve my constituents”…

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I believe that’s a feature

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I think third parties would have very little success unless rank choice voting gets some serious momentum.

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I think they might actually have some success in Congressional districts whose voters would only vote for a Democrat after pigs fly, but are also a bit squeamish about the degree of crazy coming out of the mouth of the GOP nominee who won the primary after their usual party hack failed to condemn Planned Parenthood for somehow causing the latest school shooting quickly enough.

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Well, if no-one else is going to…

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See also UKIP in the UK which has managed to infiltrate the Conservative party at the constituency level and got a whole lot of lunatic know-nothing rentagobshites into Parliament.

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The ideal situation for most people in the USA would be:

  1. The current Republicans disappear, they are now a fascist party as defined by Umberto Eco and contribute nothing useful to US politics.
  2. The new right wing party become the new conservative party. They would need to have a party constitution that forbids fascism, otherwise they will just end up back where the Republicans are now.
  3. The Democratic Party becomes a smaller centrist party
  4. The DSA become the new left wing party, consisting of the left wing of the Democrats and left wing independents. Make it a social democratic, democratic socialist and libertarian socialist* party. A Tankie led party will just be a left wing version of Trump so we want to avoid that.

This would be a recentering of the Overton window, hopefully correcting a lot of mistakes that have been made over the last 60 years. I don’t know if it will work though, the Democrats may have too much power and a one party state is worse than a two party state.

This isn’t personally what I want, but I have been accused of being utopian when I talk about that which amuses me as I am constantly fighting against pessimism and cyncism in my mind.

* Not to be mistaken for right wing Libertarianism, that comes from a completely different philosophy. They will be in the new conservative party, except for the Hoppeans who will be kicked out for being fascists.

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I Can’t Believe It’s Not Hitler Party?

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i would be delighted for the outcome you describe. on a structural basis it is almost impossible to achieve because of the combination of the “winner-take-all” system most states use in apportioning electoral college votes in conjunction with a presidential executive system which is replicated in miniature as governors in each state. third parties have almost no chance to succeed on a national level because of this.

when third parties do move into prominence they have done so in the wake of a previous party’s collapse and the following realignment. the most prominent example would be the collapse of the whig party splintering into the american or “know-nothing” party, the free-soil party, and the republican party elements of which eventually merged into the republican party along with elements of the liberty party.

because the presidential system is baked into the constitution it would require the extremely difficult amendment process to change, a very high bar indeed. along with the difficulties of the amendment process would be the difficulty of making popular a system different from what everyone has previously experienced.

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