If you are a white leftist and you talk “both parties are the same they are both capitalist” you will loose most of your black audience. I think it ought to be obvious that this isn’t because blackfolks love Democrats (in most cases, there is always someone being simple in any group) —no. it’s because the difference between the parties is material and obvious and these are unstable times.
When I hear such talk I wonder if the speaker is working on voter suppression.
Voting brings me no joy — but I never miss an election out of a kind of stubborn spite. I’ve never heard anyone explain how having all the marginalized and left leaning people not vote would be more annoying to the Democrats and Republicans than if we all do vote— and for the Democrats especially in the primaries.
I also don’t think voting is real political engagement, but it’s kind of the bare minimum. Even if you do a write-in for every office.
@stib That would be interesting. But it would also mean we’d inevitably have an openly fascist “america first” party — Then there would be the coalitions needed to get anything done. I used to think breaking up the two party system would help but I no longer really think it would be any better and in some ways it would be worse.
If we really did universal suffrage we could get pretty far. And make up the difference in local politics.
@maco @futurebird @stib from a place which recently made the switch from one set of rules to the other: what changes isn't the competition between two poles, but who can leader the coalitions.
Before proportionality, it was much harder to have anyone but the more radical centrists (or those who managed to look like it) being considered to the prime positions, and this effectively ended marginalising the more radical-looking voices.
Now, charismatic leadership throws all those regularities away
@maco @futurebird @stib so I don't think the US after Trump would behave predicably if it changed its electoral rules: for starters, you already have an aberrantly extreme right in control of one of the coalitions, so giving more air to dissidents in that side could moderate them? or to help competing strongmen arise? There's no good way to know.
On the other side the potential effects are less unpredictable, but with that threat in front, any rearrangement would probably have to wait...
@maco @futurebird @stib in any case, most of this is quite moot, because what would need to happen to change those rules is really complicated and does require an almost impossible coordination between government and (at least most of the) opposition.
And the energy for such measures is being spent on the Trump trial mostly, because that's seen as the way to stop him and to avoid some form of recurrence.
@hmantegazzi @futurebird @stib
EDIT: I was wrong! Ignore below.
and it would take a *Constitutional amendment* to change from districts to proportional distribution of members.
We still haven’t finished ratifying a Constitutional amendment that was passed in 1972!
@smitten @stib @hmantegazzi @futurebird @maco Yes, states have had at-large seats in the past.
I would prefer to expand the house with 120 additional members from party lists based on their share of the national popular vote which “level” the number of seats won from districts to ensure proportionality.
Germany, New Zealand, and Scotland use this electoral system.
#USpol #USpolitics #politics #FairVote
@smitten @danwentzel @maco well, that would be a good first step: getting a national electoral authority.
I won't say that ours is perfect, but it functions really well, and even facing lots of pressures, it has proved itself as functionally impartial. I guess the key is that its board, instead of forcing it to be apolitical, is formed by election experts from all the political parties at once, so all attempts to bias the institution in one direction are caught and stopped right away.
@smitten @danwentzel @maco the Europarliament is very very different from any kind of national legislative, because it has to deal with the full sovereignty of the member States and the practical lack of a politically determined Executive that could govern and enact their policies.
It's more like an overgrown and permanent international summit, crafting treaties instead of legislating in the proper sense.
@hmantegazzi @smitten @danwentzel now that idea I'm pretty darned sure is unconstitutional, because "running elections is the right of the state" is the basis on which SCOTUS overturned the VRA.
Remember: the 50 states relate to each other and to the federal government much more like how the 27 member states of the EU do, than like a single country. So that's like saying the EU should tell France how to run elections.
@maco @smitten @danwentzel in my biased opinion as someone from a little country, if you want an union, you have to put up with uniting things.
But again, all of this is basically daydreaming because neither the institutional nor the political conditions exist for any of those changes.
And the original point of this thread stands: in absence of better rules, abstaining is helping the worst people out there.
Most democracies do have proportional voting where the amount of power comes from the amount of votes. In most of them this works fine. Not perfect but fine.
I am not American, but from what I understand you already have coalitions in the US system, they are just hidden in back room meetings, in groups like the "freedom caucus"?
Having a proportional voting system means this kind of coalition building is all in the open, where people can see it and scrutinise it, and where they can choose which faction their vote goes to.
@stib @futurebird
If I may offer an alternate method (and why): approval voting (AV)+top-2-runoff.
Reason is,
1) RC ballots are complex, easy to spoil, tricky to recount. AV is harder to spoil.
2) exact method of transferring lower-rank votes is tricky to explain, easy to conspiracy-talk about.
3) evaluating result requires all ballots, is not parallel-able. Compare to FPTP, or AV; for these results can be accumulated at precinct, summaries transmitted to central.
Primaries should be AV only.
Ralph Nader did this! We got GWB as a result. Then the Bernie bros in 2016.
It's a deeply ingrained, dangerous ignorance.
@CartyBoston @futurebird Ah, now, careful with falling into the trap of blaming the left for what the right did.
Nader should have been a lesson learned that third-party doesn't work without electoral reform but Republicans stole the presidency.
@liquor_american @CartyBoston @futurebird I doubt it's a coincidence the same players are running the same playbook today.
"Perhaps the most famous operative on the scene was Nixon’s “dirty trickster” himself: Roger Stone.
In a 2008 New Yorker profile, Stone claimed he had been recruited by none other than James Baker III, the former secretary of state leading the Bush recount team, and that it was Stone’s idea to court protesters via Cuban radio."
My point is Bernie, like Nader, suggested there were few differences between the established parties.
It most likely damaged the establishment candidate (Sec. Clinton) in the general.
You can vote for whomever you want but Bernie's record is his record.
Y'all I should not have made reference to "Bernie bros" it was unnecessarily provocative.
his supporters were white men
Whether intended or not, voter suppression is often the result of such arguments.
If you can't find some enthusiasm for preventing the end of democracy, that's on you.
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