I can’t remember who said the Democratic Party is acting like a •minority party• when what we need is an •opposition party•. The piece below captures that feeling (and its venom is fully justified).
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https://www.everythingishorrible.net/p/fucking-fight-you-useless-fucks
A still-forming thought:
Perhaps we might usefully view this pathetic situation as a major political party realignment in the US that has been left half-finished. When Nixon adopted Goldwater’s Southern Strategy and won, the Republican Party effectively became a fascist party — but the Democrats never became an anti-fascist party.
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[disclaimer: not a political scientist, just riffing here]
Plurality voting forces a two-party system. There will always be two parties (or if a third forms, the system will rapidly collapse back to two; this happened twice in US history).
The role of the two parties can change, however. Parties are coalitions, and coalitions are heterogeneous. There are lots of ways to draw lines through the myriad political interests to form two coalitions of roughly equal size. And those lines can shift.
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Paul Cantrell
Orion Ussner kidder