They (US politics) literally do though, right? At least that’s my impression as a non US person.
If my understanding is correct it would need an overhaul of the constitution to change that, right? (The part about representatives of states cascading to select the representatives who then select the boss).
I’m quite uneducated though in US politics so perhaps I’ve got something completely wrong!
The number of combinations of choices in social and human affairs is pretty much infinite so politics in a real Democracy could theoretically be infinite-sided (though only if there were no “representatives” of citizens and people directly voted on everything - i.e. direct Democracy)
Because the US isn’t really a proper Democracy (more like an attempt at one), the vote itself in American has only 2 real options, but there are other ways to expand the number of choices because the two main parties in America are umbrellas for ranges of possibilities and they do have somewhat democratic (rigged, but still with more choices than the actual vote) internal selection systems in the form of Primaries.
If one properly analyses it, it turns out the presidential selection system in the US is really a multi-stage affair in which two of the stages - the Primaries and the actual vote - are open to the public (though there is quite a lot of selecting going on behind closed doors even before the Primaries).
So if people participate in both Primaries and the actual vote, they de facto have more choices than 2.
Also another thing to keep in mind is that this is a cyclical process and the outcomes in one cycle - i.e. who won and by how much - influence what happens in the next cycle so the vote itself defines not just what happens in one election, but also which choices will be made available - i.e. which candidates will be fielded - in the next.
All this means that if one actually cares and makes an effort, there’s more “Democracy” to be had than it might seem at first sight and the vote itself has more influence than just that immediate choice, so anybody claiming that “you have no choice but to vote lesser evil” either has a simplistic view of things or are purposefully trying to deceive others.
This is without going down into the whole local politics and civil society participation, which in the US is almost as livelly Democratic as in Europe.
I think that at the very first hint of fuckery, everyone should vote in the green party’s primaries and write in the progressive candidate that the party is exerting influence to block. Democrats don’t deserve voters ever again if they’re not going to listen to them.
We can just walk in and take over the green party. They’re tiny and have tiny primaries.
That doesn’t alter the fact that the entire electoral system in the US is Mathematically rigged to make it pretty much impossible to succeed in a candidate from a 3rd party being elected as president - the level of difficulty is that of getting over 100 million people to switch their vote in a single election (you can try it over multiple election cycles, but what happens is that after years of trying and failing, most people give up, so it has to happen quickly or it won’t work).
As I see it, for a 3rd party to grow in the US it has to start by winning local elections since the number of people who need to change their vote to it is much less and then build on such victories to win seats in Congress, then build on that for the Senate, and only then for the President.
Anyways, my original post was about what can be done and how things should looked at “in the context of how the election system is in the US” (as fucked up as it is) and what it is realistically possible in it, rather than what it should be.
You are correct although I don’t even think the two party system is related to the constitution. I think it’s more about precedent than anything else. The country is too conservative to change the way things are done even when it’s not legally bound. I’d love to leave this shithole. The day trump won in 2016, I lost faith irreparably that we’d ever be decent again. As you can imagine, 2024 nuked the tiny sliver of hope I had again. I expect the worst moving forward. I grew up in a world that this generation was supposed to be able to fix. But the oligarchs have ensured only the oldest most corrupt rich asswipes alive can access power so that dream is dead.
There is no left in the US. Democrats and Republicans are just different flavours of the same Conservative shit…
Hell, the Overton window has slid so far right that even the Liberals here in Canada are basically conservatives from about 20 years ago
I believe this line of thinking only serves to sanewash right-wingers.
Only true if you think the entirety of politics fits in 1 bit.
They (US politics) literally do though, right? At least that’s my impression as a non US person.
If my understanding is correct it would need an overhaul of the constitution to change that, right? (The part about representatives of states cascading to select the representatives who then select the boss).
I’m quite uneducated though in US politics so perhaps I’ve got something completely wrong!
The number of combinations of choices in social and human affairs is pretty much infinite so politics in a real Democracy could theoretically be infinite-sided (though only if there were no “representatives” of citizens and people directly voted on everything - i.e. direct Democracy)
Because the US isn’t really a proper Democracy (more like an attempt at one), the vote itself in American has only 2 real options, but there are other ways to expand the number of choices because the two main parties in America are umbrellas for ranges of possibilities and they do have somewhat democratic (rigged, but still with more choices than the actual vote) internal selection systems in the form of Primaries.
If one properly analyses it, it turns out the presidential selection system in the US is really a multi-stage affair in which two of the stages - the Primaries and the actual vote - are open to the public (though there is quite a lot of selecting going on behind closed doors even before the Primaries).
So if people participate in both Primaries and the actual vote, they de facto have more choices than 2.
Also another thing to keep in mind is that this is a cyclical process and the outcomes in one cycle - i.e. who won and by how much - influence what happens in the next cycle so the vote itself defines not just what happens in one election, but also which choices will be made available - i.e. which candidates will be fielded - in the next.
All this means that if one actually cares and makes an effort, there’s more “Democracy” to be had than it might seem at first sight and the vote itself has more influence than just that immediate choice, so anybody claiming that “you have no choice but to vote lesser evil” either has a simplistic view of things or are purposefully trying to deceive others.
This is without going down into the whole local politics and civil society participation, which in the US is almost as livelly Democratic as in Europe.
This assumes honest primaries. Or primaries at all.
We get what party leadership decides.
Oh yeah, as I mentioned there is a lot of closed-doors choosing going on before the Primaries.
Then the Primaries are rigged (with things like super-voters in Democratic Primaries).
All, of course, all assuming there are Primaries.
This does not add up to Democracy, IMHO, it’s just slightly better than only having a 2-choices Vote with no Primaries at all.
I think that at the very first hint of fuckery, everyone should vote in the green party’s primaries and write in the progressive candidate that the party is exerting influence to block. Democrats don’t deserve voters ever again if they’re not going to listen to them.
We can just walk in and take over the green party. They’re tiny and have tiny primaries.
That doesn’t alter the fact that the entire electoral system in the US is Mathematically rigged to make it pretty much impossible to succeed in a candidate from a 3rd party being elected as president - the level of difficulty is that of getting over 100 million people to switch their vote in a single election (you can try it over multiple election cycles, but what happens is that after years of trying and failing, most people give up, so it has to happen quickly or it won’t work).
As I see it, for a 3rd party to grow in the US it has to start by winning local elections since the number of people who need to change their vote to it is much less and then build on such victories to win seats in Congress, then build on that for the Senate, and only then for the President.
Anyways, my original post was about what can be done and how things should looked at “in the context of how the election system is in the US” (as fucked up as it is) and what it is realistically possible in it, rather than what it should be.
You are correct although I don’t even think the two party system is related to the constitution. I think it’s more about precedent than anything else. The country is too conservative to change the way things are done even when it’s not legally bound. I’d love to leave this shithole. The day trump won in 2016, I lost faith irreparably that we’d ever be decent again. As you can imagine, 2024 nuked the tiny sliver of hope I had again. I expect the worst moving forward. I grew up in a world that this generation was supposed to be able to fix. But the oligarchs have ensured only the oldest most corrupt rich asswipes alive can access power so that dream is dead.