Being dyslexic, shortsighted and drunk has it’s advantages, I misread this Trump article title as: “I love the smell of Ancient Orange in the morning”
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They are morally repubnant
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Is that Mr Spock extolling the virtues of Napalm? We come in peace, my arse.
“Trump has stupid argument with ___ about ___.”
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It’s pretty generic by now…
You could insert words and names totally at random, and it would be accurate more often than not.
How so. Everyone votes their conscience, there would be no parties to control discourse or homogenize the voting practices of their members so results would reflect the actual values of the people. No party line to tow. No need to vote for things you would not otherwise vote for were there no party politics to think about. No one to tell the ignorant who to vote for forcing people to become more informed and make their own decisions with their big human brains.
The idea would be to prevent any group from gaining entrenched power and keep things dynamic. If this devolves into a one party system than something has gone horribly horribly wrong. If this doesn’t save us then there is no saving us and we may as well go back to being serfs. We almost are already.
Are you describing a system with no political parties or no politicians (direct vote democracy)? It sounds more like the latter.
Here’s the problem with having no political parties, but still having a representative democracy (politicians): if there isn’t a structure for politicians to organize around visibly, some significant number will organize invisibly, and dominate policy. Political parties in a representative democracy simply codify what is going to happen anyway, with more transparency: aggregation of voting blocks around core values/goals. Parties also can publish their platforms, giving voters a shorthand so that we don’t have to spend all our time researching which politician stands for what policies. Sure, you can argue that we should spend all our time researching who stands for what. I would disagree. While I maintain familiarity with what my public representatives stand for, I also like to do other things, like fishing and hiking.
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So essentially you’re saying this system could not work because it needs politicians and politicians are untrustworthy and will always secretly attempt to dominate policy? Makes sense bu what do you suggest?
I would argue that parties “publishing platforms” is a crux of our difficulties because it’s a bundled deal sort thing. You can take it or leave it, but if you take it you take the whole thing. That inevitable means that by choosing a party you’ll wind up supporting something that you would never have supported otherwise. It also means that people with good ideas that don’t fit a parties platform have no realistic chance of participating in politics at all.
“Shorthand” is useless. All that is in practice is someone in a party telling party members how they should spend their vote. If people don’t do their own research they know nothing at all . They’d be taking it on faith, and faith in party has led us here.
If you’ve got a better idea, I’m always open to hear it.
I’m saying that “a person is smart. People are panicky, dumb dangerous animals.” (Agent Kay, MIB) In a representative democracy, politicians inherently become politicians to gain and consolidate power. Some do so in order to do good and help people. Some do so for ego, and some just to line their pockets. And there are various degrees of all of the above. These people will inherently organize in aligned groups to gain more power over individuals who do not build alliances. It’s better to lay that all out in the structure than to let it grow like mold in the dark corners.
Clean up and modernize the structure we have now in the US. Get rid of FPTP voting, establish universal voter registration with vote-by-mail and other participation-maximizing structures, eliminate the Electoral College. The existing two-party system is already on the brink of fracturing into 3 or even 4 political parties. The only things holding it together is FPTP and the EC. Getting rid of those will nudge it off the cliff.
Government is a group of people working together in an agreed-upon structure towards common goals. In any group of two or more people, there will be compromises. That is inherent to any group of people in any organization that is trying to accomplish ANYTHING. The main problem with a two party system is that the vast majority of voters get a platform that they mostly disagree with, in order to avoid the party that they entirely disagree with. Once we get past the A or B choice, there will be large parties that voters can support with platforms they can mostly agree with. There will be smaller parties that can still be influential that voters can choose with platforms they almost entirely agree with. If you’re only going to support politicians who you 100% agree with, you’re down to a group of maybe a dozen, and you have no influence at all. People complain about “holding their nose” to vote for flawed candidates, but unless you’re voting for yourself, there will always be some degree of compromise.
But it’s realistic. Of course voters should not just become informed prior to voting, but stay informed at all times. However, there is only so many hours in the day. Even if you read the newspaper every day, cover-to-cover, you’re still trusting the source of that news to condense the information for you. No single voter has the time to stay fully informed. The value of party platforms is that the politicians of that party agree to consolidate around those core policies. That allows voters to research the party platform and just look for where individual candidates differ from the platform. That’s a lot more digestible than keeping up with every individual politicians policies and voting record.
I do think we also need to get a lot of the money out of politics. Political advertising has become part of the problem, and should be informational rather than emotional. Limits on the volume and type of political advertising would help. PACs are a menace, for example.
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Hillary Clinton was a practicing lawyer, which means she had the exact same qualification as about half the senate and Obama, so…???
Dammit, who gave him the six infinity stones?
No, really, I think your assesment is correct.
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Imagine a system in which there are elections, but there are no competing parties. When representatives get elected, they go off to join an assembly that allows no party affiliation, but is instead a collection of individuals.
Now compare that hypothetical system to what they have in, for example, Cuba.
Political parties are allowed to exist in Cuba (although non-PCC parties have tended to attract state repression), but they are not permitted to campaign in elections (PCC included). Candidates are not allowed to identify themselves by party affiliation.
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Joining together to pursue mutual interests is a natural human behaviour. Political party formation will inevitably happen unless it is somehow prevented.
The only way to prevent the formation of political parties is by outright banning them from existing and actively enforcing that ban. The most usual means of achieving that is to set up a single-party default and ban all other options. Cuba is actually a bit more liberal than most in that respect.
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And even then you usually end up with rival factions struggling for control within the party, but with less transparency and accountability than you tend to have in multi-party system.
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