In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On April 28 2017 08:13 a_flayer wrote: Can someone explain to me how the Republican Party got started?
ikr. It is how it is and was and always will be. Accept and embrace your corporate overlords already.
No but seriously, He's more popular than they are, if he waits for the right moment it could work. A significant number of Democrats (republicans too) could just as easily vote progressive if it meant full coffers and winning elections. It's a small number within the party that directly benefit or ideologically agree with the whole neoliberal thing they have going.
GH, I know you've got big hopes for the progressive wing of the party, but you guys can't be self proclaimed socialists. You will not win a general election with that attitude. Trump would have beaten Bernie from that fact alone.
gotta market yourselves as fair capitalists, follow trump's lead. Branding!
On April 28 2017 08:13 a_flayer wrote: Can someone explain to me how the Republican Party got started?
It started as an anti slavery party. So there was a single issue that united everyone. not a historian so I'm not going to start saying I know anything more than that.
s/anti-slavery/anti-wallstreet/
Didn't they take some subgroups within the Democratic party and use those to start a new party? Like, the Whigs or something? Seems to me like the subgroup has been created (Berniebros), its time for phase 2.
If you have a national populist leader to rally behind, and a slew of candidates at local levels in various states who have the same message, its entirely possible to get this started in a real sense. You'd not only take the Democrats who want Bernie, you'd also be taking the disenfranchised independent Trump voters.
But sure, keep shouting "FPTP it can't be done."
Just like Trump couldn't possibly become president.
I feel like this should be so obvious it doesn't need saying but things have actually changed in the last 200 years regarding political theory. If you're trying to defend your incredibly stupid argument against claims that you don't really mean it by following it with exactly the kind of statements one would expect you to make after the original argument then you have succeeded. If you're trying to actually make a point then you've somehow gotten further from it.
On April 28 2017 08:13 a_flayer wrote: Can someone explain to me how the Republican Party got started?
ikr. It is how it is and was and always will be. Accept and embrace your corporate overlords already.
No but seriously, He's more popular than they are, if he waits for the right moment it could work. A significant number of Democrats (republicans too) could just as easily vote progressive if it meant full coffers and winning elections. It's a small number within the party that directly benefit or ideologically agree with the whole neoliberal thing they have going.
GH don't embarrass yourself further by adding yourself to the roster of fools who promote third parties in a two party system. It's been tried plenty of times, what you get is Maggie Thatcher winning a landslide, modelling herself on Reagan and engaging in class warfare.
In 1981 four of the most senior figures in the British Labour Party defected and founded their own party, the SDP (now the Lib Dems). In the 1983 election Labour got 8,456,934 votes, 27.6% of all votes cast. The SDP got 7,780,949, 25.4% of all votes cast. The Conservatives got 13,012,316 votes, 42.4% of all votes cast and a colossal majority in Parliament, 61.1% of all seats. They actually got a lower share of the votes than they had in the preceding election, down from 43.9%.
It's not just theoretically impossible, the theory that says that the divided vote will fuck the voters over has been shown to be true plenty of times.
The SDP (Lib Dem) got fucked over and over until 1997 when they ran a coordinated campaign with Labour, the party they splintered away from, where Labour voters would vote Lib Dem in Conservative seats where Lib Dems were second and Lib Dem voters would vote Labour in Conservative seats where Labour were second.
If a third party wants to make any headway in this country, running for president ever 4 years isn't how it is done. It need to start with small elections and work the way into the political system. A party can just spawn board voter support out of nothing.
On April 28 2017 08:13 a_flayer wrote: Can someone explain to me how the Republican Party got started?
It started as an anti slavery party. So there was a single issue that united everyone. not a historian so I'm not going to start saying I know anything more than that.
s/anti-slavery/anti-wallstreet/
Didn't they take some subgroups within the Democratic party and use those to start a new party? Like, the Whigs or something? Seems to me like the subgroup has been created (Berniebros), its time for phase 2.
If you have a national populist leader to rally behind, and a slew of candidates at local levels in various states who have the same message, its entirely possible to get this started in a real sense. You'd not only take the Democrats who want Bernie, you'd also be taking the disenfranchised independent Trump voters.
But sure, keep shouting "FPTP it can't be done."
Just like Trump couldn't possibly become president.
I feel like this should be so obvious it doesn't need saying but things have actually changed in the last 200 years regarding political theory. If you're trying to defend your incredibly stupid argument against claims that you don't really mean it by following it with exactly the kind of statements one would expect you to make after the original argument then you have succeeded. If you're trying to actually make a point then you've somehow gotten further from it.
So it's just impossible that a third party candidate wins a district in Wisconsin in 2018? Or a governor position in Minnesota? Or finds herself elected in a city council somewhere? And these kinds of things happening in various parts of the US all at once because they're all backed by the most popular politician of the time?
On April 28 2017 08:42 Plansix wrote: If a third party wants to make any headway in this country, running for president ever 4 years isn't how it is done. It need to start with small elections and work the way into the political system. A party can just spawn board voter support out of nothing.
Yes, that is what Nick Brana and Cornel West were saying in the interview that I posted, and it could grow very fast if backed by Bernie and a portion of the explosion of the thousands of new Democratic candidates that share in Bernies ideas.
The key is that they need work with another party. We don't have a parliamentary system, so they can't fight the Democrats from the left and then come begging to them to pass legislation when they win. Saying they are Democratic Progressives and run on a single issue could be effective. But they need to be clear they are working with the democrats.
The republican party succeeded because the issue they focused on (slavery) was the one that broke the US whig party into pieces and power hates a vacuum.
There's actually a really famous US example of 3rd party votes giving Woodrow Wilson the presidency with a very small % of the vote (I think it was like 33%, while his two opponents had something like 29% + 27% each). Theodore Roosevelt's attempt to claim a third term is a pretty famous lesson, the bull moose progressives pretty much did themselves in with that move.
The actually successful parties in the US were the temperance movement and other single issue parties that focused on getting represented in the house. There's a much lower barrier to entry there and single issue parties are actually somewhat hard to defeat - they make for great protest votes and only have to defend one position, and the party only succeeds if it's a popular position that's been ignored by the major two parties (healthcare reform, marijuana legalization are the only two I can think of in the current climate, and the latter doesn't affect everyone). As soon as 4-5 members are elected, well, even a small voting bloc, as seen by today's tea party, can make a massive difference in calculations of power in DC. Generally one of the parties caves so they don't lose power, and the third party vanishes.
On April 28 2017 08:53 a_flayer wrote: So it's just impossible that a third party candidate wins a district in Wisconsin in 2018? Or a governor position in Minnesota? Or finds herself elected in a city council somewhere? And these kinds of things happening in various parts of the US all at once because they're all backed by the most popular politician of the time?
Could you please stop being borderline offensive, KwarK?
No, regional anomalies can occur, especially in single issue areas. A good example would be the Scottish National Party in Scotland or the The Parti Québécois in Quebec. National parties exist on extremely broad platforms for the purpose of having national appeal and that can leave them vulnerable to being targeted by single issue parties. But nationally? It simply doesn't happen. And not because nobody has ever tried it. It doesn't happen because the system is built to crush it.
I'm sorry if you're getting offended. You're saying the kind of things that only an idiot or someone completely ignorant of political theory would say. I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here by assuming you're just not understanding the political theory and I'd like to continue to do so. Here is a decent primer to the problems with FPTP.
It's pretty likely that even Bernie wouldn't keep his seat in the Senate if the Democrats ran a candidate against him, instead dividing the vote and allowing the Republicans to win.
On April 28 2017 09:05 Nevuk wrote: It's much, much easier to takeover the democratic party against their will than it is to make an entirely new party.
Which is exactly what happened with New Labour in the UK. Oddly enough New Labour were actually pretty much identical to the SDP who broke away 15 years earlier but by working outside the party they pushed the Conservatives on to a fourth term.
The Tories governed the UK from 1979 to 1997 and instituted a radical economic policy that amounted to class warfare while only ever having a minority of support among the voters because the opposition couldn't accept that sometimes you have to make a tactical alliance with people you disagree with.
Historically speaking a desperate requirement for ideological purity over compromise has always been the Achilles heel of the left.
On April 28 2017 09:05 Nevuk wrote: It's much, much easier to takeover the democratic party against their will than it is to make an entirely new party.
The whole third party bid is a bad plan in general and normally just gives the other side a free win. Especially when our third parties are fucking garbage. Bring back single issue parties. Fuck the Green Party and Libertarians. It is an embarrassment to watch them role out every 4 years to soak up money and air time.
You know whats embarrassing? Giving up a free win to the Orange Fuckface von Clownstick, Man-Baby, Comedy Entrapment and Unrepentant Narcissistic Asshole that is Donald Trump. You might know him as Mr President.
Of course it's embarrassing, you think many of the people that post here are happy that such a clown is at the top of the food chain? It's just more and more apparent that the way politics are run is extremely flawed and people just won't get into reforming it because they'd have to burn everything that's been worked at for 100+ years. It's such a paradox as well. You have people trying to run a country for people that are barely interested in who's running it (except when they feel like it matters to them) and they don't even have to vote for the people that will run how things are done. I think that at the very least compulsory voting might be a step in the right direction because that just makes you being involved a necessity, something you can't just blow off with the wave of a hand.
Edit: But even when looking at our neighbor The Netherlands, it's not needed and they seem to be much more involved with politics than in the US as well. It's strange that such tiny countries in Europe can have so much more diversity in the political spectrum and still kind of work (I still have a lot of issues with how things work here, even though it's as close as a fair system as it gets at the moment). Perhaps the US is ran on too big of a scale for it to work, but then how do you explain the UK? Perhaps it's just what tradition and use of the system dictates and humans are too stubborn (read unwilling and lazy) to change..
On April 28 2017 09:26 a_flayer wrote: You know whats embarrassing? Giving up a free win to the Orange Fuckface von Clownstick, Man-Baby, Comedy Entrapment and Unrepentant Narcissistic Asshole that is Donald Trump. You might know him as Mr President.
Who only won because of the bullshit electoral system of constituency FPTP, exactly the same system you're refusing to acknowledge in your strategy to deal with him.
The system is dumb, broken and totally fucked up. However the only people with the power to change the system are the people who have already won due to the broken system when they would not otherwise have won. Therefore they are the people least inclined to fix it. The only possible solution is for those who object to it to play the bullshit rigged game, win it and then use that power to fix it. Refusing to play the broken game, and splintering off into your own party is refusing to play, just leaves those who still play it constantly patting themselves on the back and running the show their way.
However what makes it even worse is that the Democrats as a party are actually making FPTP even worse with moves like changing state constitutions to pledge all state electoral college votes to the winner of the national votes. That makes it even more winner take all. What they need to do is the opposite, award state electoral college votes according to PR so that a third party running in California could win 30% of the EC votes and then leverage those in the Presidential elections to get themselves some cabinet posts and some of their policies on the table.
Third parties only have power when votes equate to power and coalitions can be formed. The more winner takes all a system gets the more the coalition must be formed before the ballot box, not after. The Democrats are responding to the failures of FPTP by actually making it even worse in the hope that they benefit from the specific ways in which they're making it worse.
On April 28 2017 09:26 a_flayer wrote: You know whats embarrassing? Giving up a free win to the Orange Fuckface von Clownstick, Man-Baby, Comedy Entrapment and Unrepentant Narcissistic Asshole that is Donald Trump. You might know him as Mr President.
Who only won because of the bullshit electoral system of constituency FPTP, exactly the same system you're refusing to acknowledge in your strategy to deal with him.
No, I just don't think he is the only one that needs to be dealt with.
Also, careful. You're falling into the trap of Russian propaganda. You can't discredit the US electoral system, the FBI said so. That's dissident talk!
On April 28 2017 09:26 a_flayer wrote: You know whats embarrassing? Giving up a free win to the Orange Fuckface von Clownstick, Man-Baby, Comedy Entrapment and Unrepentant Narcissistic Asshole that is Donald Trump. You might know him as Mr President.
Who only won because of the bullshit electoral system of constituency FPTP, exactly the same system you're refusing to acknowledge in your strategy to deal with him.
No, I just don't think he is the only one that needs to be dealt with.
If the Dems splinter then the damage will be done exclusively to those who believe in left leaning causes. Exclusively.
On April 28 2017 09:26 a_flayer wrote: You know whats embarrassing? Giving up a free win to the Orange Fuckface von Clownstick, Man-Baby, Comedy Entrapment and Unrepentant Narcissistic Asshole that is Donald Trump. You might know him as Mr President.
Who only won because of the bullshit electoral system of constituency FPTP, exactly the same system you're refusing to acknowledge in your strategy to deal with him.
No, I just don't think he is the only one that needs to be dealt with.
If the Dems splinter then the damage will be done exclusively to those who believe in left leaning causes. Exclusively.
According to a certain Democratic presidential candidate, economic policy is one the few areas where the Republicans and Democrats see eye to eye. Democrats are hardly on the left.
Anyway, its four years of Trump. We'll see if the Democrats adjust their message sufficiently to get enough people out to vote for them in that time. So far, I'm not very optimistic about their messaging. There might be enough people like you that will just bend over and take it up the ass from the banks because "that is just the way it is".
EPT
