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Thread: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Cheney said she was considering the presidency. I suspect she would have to establish a new party.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    An article about a Maine congressperson trying to buck the two-party polarity:

    POLITICO: The Golden ticket to win a Trump district.

    https://www.politico.com/news/2022/0...maine-00052517

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    As a Wyoming resident, and given the stupid electoral college setup, my vote has not really mattered in either presidential or congressional races.

    Given that my vote is symbolic, a gesture, I would be happy to cast it for some party that reflected my views: Greens.

    That way it would at least register, rather than disappearing into the void.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    A lengthy excerpt from a long opinion piece/book review, worthwhile reading I think. (Probably won't show up on YouTube.)

    American Democracy Was Never Designed to Be Democratic

    The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system.

    By Louis Menand
    August 15, 2022

    The fundamental problem is that, as the law stands, even when the system is working the way it’s designed to work and everyone who is eligible to vote does vote, the government we get does not reflect the popular will. Michael Kinsley’s law of scandal applies. The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. The scandal is what’s legal.

    It was not unreasonable for the Framers to be wary of direct democracy. You can’t govern a nation by plebiscite, and true representative democracy, in which everyone who might be affected by government policy has an equal say in choosing the people who make that policy, had never been tried. So they wrote a rule book, the Constitution, that places limits on what the government can do, regardless of what the majority wants. (They also countenanced slavery and the disenfranchisement of women, excluding from the electorate groups whose life chances certainly might be affected by government policy.) And they made it extremely difficult to tinker with those rules. In two hundred and thirty-three years, they have been changed by amendment only nine times. The last time was fifty-one years ago.

    You might think that the further we get from 1789 the easier it would be to adjust the constitutional rule book, but the opposite appears to be true. We live in a country undergoing a severe case of ancestor worship (a symptom of insecurity and fear of the future), which is exacerbated by an absurdly unworkable and manipulable doctrine called originalism. Something that Alexander Hamilton wrote in a newspaper column—the Federalist Papers are basically a collection of op-eds—is treated like a passage in the Talmud. If we could unpack it correctly, it would show us the way.

    The Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would probably not have been ratified, is essentially a deck of counter-majoritarian trump cards, a list, directed at the federal government, of thou-shalt-nots. Americans argue about how far those commandments reach. Is nude dancing covered under the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of expression? (It is.) Does the Second Amendment prohibit a ban on assault weapons? (Right now, it’s anyone’s guess.) But no one proposes doing away with the first ten amendments. They underwrite a deeply rooted feature of American life, the “I have a right” syndrome. They may also make many policies that a majority of Americans say they favor, such as a ban on assault weapons, virtually impossible to enact because of an ambiguous sentence written in an era in which pretty much the only assault weapon widely available was a musket.

    Some checks on direct democracy in the United States are structural. They are built into the system of government the Framers devised. One, obviously, is the Electoral College, which in two of the past six elections has chosen a President who did not win the popular vote. Even in 2020, when Joe Biden got seven million more votes than his opponent, he carried three states that he needed in order to win the Electoral College—Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—by a total of about a hundred thousand votes. Flip those states and we would have elected a man who lost the popular vote by 6.9 million. Is that what James Madison had in mind?

    Another check on democracy is the Senate, an almost comically malapportioned body that gives Wyoming’s five hundred and eighty thousand residents the same voting power as California’s thirty-nine million. The District of Columbia, which has ninety thousand more residents than Wyoming and twenty-five thousand more than Vermont, has no senators. Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, in 1913, senators were mostly not popularly elected. They were appointed by state legislatures. Republicans won a majority of votes statewide in Illinois in the 1858 midterms, but Abraham Lincoln did not become senator, because the state legislature was controlled by Democrats, and they reappointed Stephen A. Douglas.

    Even though the Senate is split fifty-fifty, Democratic senators represent forty-two million more people than Republican senators do. As Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, points out in his book on the state of voting rights, “Our Unfinished March” (One World), the Senate is lopsided. Half the population today is represented by eighteen senators, the other half by eighty-two. The Senate also packs a parliamentary death ray, the filibuster, which would allow forty-one senators representing ten per cent of the public to block legislation supported by senators representing the other ninety per cent.

    Many recent voting regulations, such as voter-I.D. laws, may require people to pay to obtain a credential needed to vote, like a driver’s license, and so Holder considers them a kind of poll tax—which is outlawed by the Twenty-fourth Amendment. (Lower courts so far have been hesitant to accept this argument.)

    But the House of Representatives—that’s the people’s house, right? Not necessarily. In the 2012 Presidential election, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by five million votes, and Democrats running for the House got around a million more votes than Republicans, but the Republicans ended up with a thirty-three-seat advantage. Under current law, congressional districts within a state should be approximately equal in population. So how did the Republicans get fewer votes but more seats? It’s the same thing that let Stephen A. Douglas retain his Senate seat in 1858: partisan gerrymandering.


    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...inst-democracy

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chip View Post
    As a Wyoming resident, and given the stupid electoral college setup, my vote has not really mattered in either presidential or congressional races.

    Given that my vote is symbolic, a gesture, I would be happy to cast it for some party that reflected my views: Greens.

    That way it would at least register, rather than disappearing into the void.
    How would your vote for a Green have any more impact?

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    How would your vote for a Green have any more impact?
    An honest declaration of support rather than a lesser-of-two-evils vote? I'd feel better about it.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chip View Post
    A lengthy excerpt from a long opinion piece/book review, worthwhile reading I think. (Probably won't show up on YouTube.)

    American Democracy Was Never Designed to Be Democratic

    The partisan redistricting tactics of cracking and packing aren’t merely flaws in the system—they are the system.

    By Louis Menand
    August 15, 2022

    The fundamental problem is that, as the law stands, even when the system is working the way it’s designed to work and everyone who is eligible to vote does vote, the government we get does not reflect the popular will. Michael Kinsley’s law of scandal applies. The scandal isn’t what’s illegal. The scandal is what’s legal.

    It was not unreasonable for the Framers to be wary of direct democracy. You can’t govern a nation by plebiscite, and true representative democracy, in which everyone who might be affected by government policy has an equal say in choosing the people who make that policy, had never been tried. So they wrote a rule book, the Constitution, that places limits on what the government can do, regardless of what the majority wants. (They also countenanced slavery and the disenfranchisement of women, excluding from the electorate groups whose life chances certainly might be affected by government policy.) And they made it extremely difficult to tinker with those rules. In two hundred and thirty-three years, they have been changed by amendment only nine times. The last time was fifty-one years ago.

    You might think that the further we get from 1789 the easier it would be to adjust the constitutional rule book, but the opposite appears to be true. We live in a country undergoing a severe case of ancestor worship (a symptom of insecurity and fear of the future), which is exacerbated by an absurdly unworkable and manipulable doctrine called originalism. Something that Alexander Hamilton wrote in a newspaper column—the Federalist Papers are basically a collection of op-eds—is treated like a passage in the Talmud. If we could unpack it correctly, it would show us the way.

    The Bill of Rights, without which the Constitution would probably not have been ratified, is essentially a deck of counter-majoritarian trump cards, a list, directed at the federal government, of thou-shalt-nots. Americans argue about how far those commandments reach. Is nude dancing covered under the First Amendment’s guarantee of the freedom of expression? (It is.) Does the Second Amendment prohibit a ban on assault weapons? (Right now, it’s anyone’s guess.) But no one proposes doing away with the first ten amendments. They underwrite a deeply rooted feature of American life, the “I have a right” syndrome. They may also make many policies that a majority of Americans say they favor, such as a ban on assault weapons, virtually impossible to enact because of an ambiguous sentence written in an era in which pretty much the only assault weapon widely available was a musket.

    Some checks on direct democracy in the United States are structural. They are built into the system of government the Framers devised. One, obviously, is the Electoral College, which in two of the past six elections has chosen a President who did not win the popular vote. Even in 2020, when Joe Biden got seven million more votes than his opponent, he carried three states that he needed in order to win the Electoral College—Arizona, Georgia, and Pennsylvania—by a total of about a hundred thousand votes. Flip those states and we would have elected a man who lost the popular vote by 6.9 million. Is that what James Madison had in mind?

    Another check on democracy is the Senate, an almost comically malapportioned body that gives Wyoming’s five hundred and eighty thousand residents the same voting power as California’s thirty-nine million. The District of Columbia, which has ninety thousand more residents than Wyoming and twenty-five thousand more than Vermont, has no senators. Until the Seventeenth Amendment was ratified, in 1913, senators were mostly not popularly elected. They were appointed by state legislatures. Republicans won a majority of votes statewide in Illinois in the 1858 midterms, but Abraham Lincoln did not become senator, because the state legislature was controlled by Democrats, and they reappointed Stephen A. Douglas.

    Even though the Senate is split fifty-fifty, Democratic senators represent forty-two million more people than Republican senators do. As Eric Holder, the former Attorney General, points out in his book on the state of voting rights, “Our Unfinished March” (One World), the Senate is lopsided. Half the population today is represented by eighteen senators, the other half by eighty-two. The Senate also packs a parliamentary death ray, the filibuster, which would allow forty-one senators representing ten per cent of the public to block legislation supported by senators representing the other ninety per cent.

    Many recent voting regulations, such as voter-I.D. laws, may require people to pay to obtain a credential needed to vote, like a driver’s license, and so Holder considers them a kind of poll tax—which is outlawed by the Twenty-fourth Amendment. (Lower courts so far have been hesitant to accept this argument.)

    But the House of Representatives—that’s the people’s house, right? Not necessarily. In the 2012 Presidential election, Barack Obama defeated Mitt Romney by five million votes, and Democrats running for the House got around a million more votes than Republicans, but the Republicans ended up with a thirty-three-seat advantage. Under current law, congressional districts within a state should be approximately equal in population. So how did the Republicans get fewer votes but more seats? It’s the same thing that let Stephen A. Douglas retain his Senate seat in 1858: partisan gerrymandering.


    https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2...inst-democracy
    Thanks for this. Excellent article. While bleak at the same time.

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    Lloyd (August 20th, 2022)

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Quote Originally Posted by Chip View Post
    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    How would your vote for a Green have any more impact?
    An honest declaration of support rather than a lesser-of-two-evils vote? I'd feel better about it.
    oh, I see now. For sure.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    I found this interview of Arizona's Rusty Bowers interesting but sad
    https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...na-republicans

    Typos courtesy of Samsung Auto-Incorrect™
    M: I came here for a good argument.
    A: No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument.
    M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
    A: It can be.
    M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
    A: No it isn't.
    M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
    A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
    M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
    A: Yes it is!
    M: No it isn't!

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Great article, Lloyd. Thanks for posting it.

    MAGA: power before truth

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    The Republicans who resist the fascist lure of Trump are at this point, doomed to outer darkness.

    Sad.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Sadder, and scarier, still is the risk of the Trump-backing Republicans winning the 2024 Presidential election.

    Typos courtesy of Samsung Auto-Incorrect™
    M: I came here for a good argument.
    A: No you didn't; no, you came here for an argument.
    M: An argument isn't just contradiction.
    A: It can be.
    M: No it can't. An argument is a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition.
    A: No it isn't.
    M: Yes it is! It's not just contradiction.
    A: Look, if I argue with you, I must take up a contrary position.
    M: Yes, but that's not just saying 'No it isn't.'
    A: Yes it is!
    M: No it isn't!

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    The Americans have an oligarchy, where the lobbyist buy into both parties. If one could only give money to one party, 1/2 our problems would be solved.

    Someone said, one needs at least three parties to have a democracy. I agree, but the two ruling parties make it almost impossible to let any other party get to the US pig troth.

    In Germany we have, the tree huggers, the ex-commies, the once worker's party (don't have any workers in it anymore) ....the mainstream conservative small busnessman's party , the right wing national party, the righter wing Bavarian party and the Nazis. (Ie Trump Wing).
    Being ruled by the so called socialists (were once....still quite a bit more left than the US Democrats (they are no longer as far left as Bernie Sanders(sort of middle of the road US Democrat level)), tree huggers and small business folks, right now.

    They get as much done as the US Congress's two parties. In the peanut gallery there is the CDU/CSU and the Nazis. The CDU/CSU ruled in coalition (Mostly the SPD) for some 16 years until I think this year or late last year.

    Over here, the political party is bribed by the lobbiest, not the individual's campaign warchest. And you can't vote the individual out, like you can in the States.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    On my to-do list:

    Ditch the Electoral College and elect national offices by popular vote.

    Implement ranked-choice voting and in some places do away with party primaries.

    Crack down on dark money corruption, phony front groups (We Build the Wall, Save America PAC), and similar shady practices.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Pretty good interview on the premise of the "myth" of a Left and a Right:

    https://www.readtangle.com/the-myth-of-left-and-right/

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    I remember looking up the definition of liberal and thinking I agree.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Some parts I agree with and some are just blather.

    This seems at least plausible, except for the "everybody knows it's true" gambit, which is both cynical and asinine:

    ". . .a few years back, [social scientist] John Bargh at Yale said, I've got it. I figured out what it is that divides liberals and conservatives. All conservative positions are about fear. If you're afraid, you're a conservative. See, that's why conservatives went to the war in Iraq, they were so scared of terrorists. That's why they created the Department of Homeland Security, they were scared, they were afraid. And they would say, giving up a little bit of our freedom is a small price to pay for security because we're scared. Ha! Got it, says John Bargh, I figured it out. That's what a conservative is. A fraidy cat. Scared.

    Liberals, on the other hand, are more courageous. We shouldn't sacrifice our freedom. We're okay with a little more risk.

    Then, of course, Covid-19 comes along, and it's exactly reversed. Why? It's tribal. It's completely tribal. If Donald Trump would have ordered lockdowns and said the entire country can't leave their homes, I guarantee you — and everybody knows it's true — that it would have been liberals, not conservatives, saying, "how dare he! Our reaction to the coronavirus is worse than the coronavirus itself!" So why was it otherwise? Because Trump took a more relaxed approach to Covid. So it's completely tribal."


    I object to the idea that all threats and dangers are equal: fictional WMDs are not comparable to a genuine viral epidemic.

    One part with which I strenuously disagree is the notion that voters can exercise choices outside tribal boundaries. In a state that's controlled by the energy and mining industries, and dominated by Republicans (ranging from honest reactionaries with bad policies such as Liz Cheney, through opportunistic liars such as Harriet Hageman, to spittle-spewing whackjobs like Jan 6 rioter Frank Eathorne) the only decent choice is to vote a straight Democratic ticket. In a few cases (local offices in my home county) my choice will win, but for the most part they'll lose.

    Summed up, there are some good observations but quite a lot of inaccuracy and flawed reasoning.
    Last edited by Chip; September 10th, 2022 at 01:35 PM.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Not exactly on the topic, but close enough: Sinema jumps to "Independent":

    The Arizona Republic: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema: Why I'm registering as an independent.
    https://www.azcentral.com/story/opin...t/69712395007/

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Quote Originally Posted by TSherbs View Post
    Not exactly on the topic, but close enough: Sinema jumps to "Independent":

    The Arizona Republic: Sen. Kyrsten Sinema: Why I'm registering as an independent.
    https://www.azcentral.com/story/opin...t/69712395007/
    If she had true courage, she would announce her independence and then run for public office. As it is, she benefitted from Democrats who voted for her and for whom she is now abandoning. If I remember, she and Manchin held up key legislation that would have benefitted her constituency.

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    Default Re: Is it Time to Ditch the Two-Party System?

    Well, if she runs again in 2024, then she will have to run as an Independent then. It's coming soon enough. Angus King is an "Independent" in my state and he kicks butt in his elections. It can be done, but Arizona is different from Maine. Initially after switching to independent status, King won in a four-way race with less than 50% of the vote (he beat Collins then, too). Then he built his centrist reputation and has received over 50% of the vote despite running against both Republicans and Democrats each time. We'll see how Sinema does and what her opposition is (if she runs again for Senate).

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