The GOP candidate who would represent a suburban Chicago district is an open Holocaust denier, white supremacist and anti-Semite

Because they want it like that, so they can continue to suck up all the money in politics and not do anything worth a damn to earn their keep?

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It is a way of taking power away from Jews, denying them martyrdom.

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Yea, I think this is the case in a lot of states. The only real safeguard they have is to be organized enough to always get their own candidate and get them enough support to keep crazies like this out.

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Yeah, that seems obvious in retrospect - the parties in power have gamed the system to exclude competitors. Smaller parties suffer from a political Allee effect, so they never get a foothold in America’s collective subconscious.

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Yeah that’s the thing there. He’s tried to get this nomination before. And they found an excuse to bounce him. He’s run on this platform for a bunch different offices unsuccessfully for decades. He’s less a “GOP candidate” than a perpetual troll candidate. I’ve seen little indication the party or GOP politicians support or even know the dude.

That said there’s a reason that he keeps seaking that GOP stamp on his nonsense. And he’s only able to do this because the GOP nomination is completely uncontested. They don’t bother to run anyone in that district. Even if they didn’t want to activate or make a rule to get rid of the guy (the will of the people is more important than Nazi’s! But only when it comes to shit like Nazi’s!). All they’d have to do is run almost anyone else at all. Itd be cheap and easy. You know whoever it is is going to lose the general. But Just put up a local with enough money to get his name out there. Let him win the primary. Problem solved.

That they don’t care enough to actively avoid the optics of “open Nazi wins gop nomination” till the very last minute is very telling.

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The few times 3rd parties made a splash, it tended to be when they replaced an older party - the Whigs falling apart over slavery and the Republican party taking it’s place. Generally speaking, they get swallowed by the mainstream parities - the progressive party basically becoming part of the Democratic party, for example.

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They should have known that they’d never get rid of a crank with a technicality, “but rises again, harder and stronger”.

I do wonder at the people who signed his nomination petition. Did they:

  • Not know.
  • Knew and didn’t care, maybe liked it.
  • Knew and thought it was great to troll the GOP with a Nazi crank.
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Awful as this guy is, at least the local GOP is denouncing him, and – given where he’s running – his chances of actually winning should be close to zero.

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He’s in a suburb of a major American city with a large black population… the fact that the dudes a nazi surprises you? It always surprises me when they are NOT nazis. Especially right now in the current climate. Suburbs during the postwar period grew at the rate they did as whites abandoned cities when black people became their neighbors. it should be a huge shock to think that white supremacy is a part and parcel of that demographic shift.

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All of these idiots have their little networks. So you get a bunch of your sovereign citizen and nut bar friends to sign it. And we know the right isn’t above circulating petitions under false pretenses. Big during the whole prop 8 thing.

That should be another easy way to get rid of the guy. How many non residents or cemetery denizens are on those petitions. How many people didn’t realise what they were signing.

Might be a great thing to look into if you were concerned about your party’s current associations with fascists and racists.

At least this sort of thing is neutering the “actually the Nazi’s were liberals. See it says ‘socialist’ right in the name” horse shit.

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Except that was how they bounced him out the last time. Like the Borg, if you don’t kill him, he adapts. This time he probably has the best petitions in Chicago.

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Hey Alan, Frye is busy in another thread…you got this one?

Alan, “Hold my tea.”

Whereas the Democrats want pot in every chicken:

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A two-party system is the Nash equilibrium for a first-past-the-post, single-representative-district based voting system. If there were three or more similarly sized parties, any two could win almost all the seats by joining. Repeat until there are two left. Then, the smaller can gain votes by adopting positions closer to those of their opponents. End result - two about equal voting blocks with mostly views from near the middle of the Overton window. Extreme views are mostly excluded.

It doesn’t work nearly as well when political divisions are actually really deep and persistent. And the public primary process (that replaced the old “smoke filled backrooms” of a half century ago) makes polarization more intense, because only the most politically active voters bother to participate in the primary process. It also doesn’t work in “safe” districts, where the incumbent’s incentive is to stay safely in the center, and only the most rabid opposition bothers to show up at all (because they know they’ll lose).

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Rick-Nazi-Punch

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Oh good, finally we’re getting somewhere. I’m sick of all this Trumpian ambiguity.

image

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There are some good replies here, but one missing historical element bears stating: the US was founded by people who explicitly wanted NO parties, because they’d seen the corruption of the UK Whig/Tory dynamic and set out to create a system without partisanship.

This situation was incredibly unstable and the Framers formed themselves into “Democratic Republicans” and “Federalists” in the earliest years of the Republic, and partisanship was born – but also back-formed into the US Constitutional structure, with all kinds of mischief and lock-in (that is, everything the Framers worried about from a partisan system).

By contrast, the Westminster system and its precursors (from which the Canadian system is descended) had parties from the outset, and seem to be more accommodating to pluralism on average (though, that said, how many non Liberal/Tory Canadian Prime Ministers have their been?).

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Ballot access laws also favor the two main parties by making it harder for third parties to qualify. The weakness of parties in the US (e.g. there is no control over who claims membership) makes it a viable strategy to become a faction of one of the two parties. Take the Tea Party. My understanding is that in places like the UK the Tories could have just expelled anyone planning an insurgency like the Tea Party, and those people would have gone on to found their own party. In the US they managed to get their Republicans elected and so now control a faction of the GOP.

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ETA: In the case of the Illinois Nazi chucklefuck in the UK he absolutely would have been expelled from one of the major parties. And taking over the GOP is exactly the strategy 1980 Libertarian VP candidate David Koch ultimately decided made the most sense.

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Ha! That doesn’t stop the Breitbart commenters from waving their dick-stumps.

At the same time they say the Nazis were leftists, they have no problem with the Traditionalist Worker Party being on the far right.

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