Its always refreshing to look at the american political system if i am disappointed by the German one. Sure our sucks too, but at least we have more then 2 unvotable major parties.
In the German system (or any other multiparty system), voters can effectively punish a political party without wasting their vote, because there is a lot of overlap between the parties.
If you don't like the current coalition but are a left-leaning person, you can vote for Die Linke. You might not agree with all of their positions but you at least can agree with some of them. Even if that is not palatable if you previously voted SDP you can switch your vote to Green or vice versa to punish the specific officeholders representing your constituency. If you voted for the FDP last time, maybe try Union next time. There are many ways to do this, and overall I think it makes the parties themselves more accountable to the voters because voters defecting their party list votes can drastically change the makeup of the Bundestag.
Similarly, right-leaning UK voters are punishing the Conservative Party by threatening to or actually voting for Reform candidates. Scots can punish the SNP by voting Labour.
You can't do this in the US. In the USA, the only recourse the voters have over the parties is to vote out undesirable candidates through primary elections so that the party cannot nominate them. This works alright, sometimes, but it is not an effective way to punish party leadership for bad decisions, and many primaries are uncompetitive anyway.
Meanwhile in California there are a ton of choices, but the party has already decided who's gonna be the candidate in so many other states, that we don't count.
There are lots of things to vote for besides president. Frankly, if your political involvement is limited to caring only about the President once every 4 years, then you have no right to complain. The only way to change things is to get more involved, not less.
We all agree with this premise and mostly that the FPTP system is a large contributing factor to the TPS saying how it has based on seeing how places that don't have a TPS appear to do so because the have different voting systems like different iterations of ranked choice voting.
What I am wondering is what 'we' think the best way to implement voting would be?
Can't remember which South American country did it, might have been Venezuela, but at least one of them has an official app. You register to vote on your 18th birthday, and get daily notifications about the various proposals at each level of government that applies to your address. They also created a team to boil the proposals down into plain language. You vote personally and the government has to, in theory, listen to the will of the people.
Of course that system will still be susceptible to propaganda, as evidenced by the fact that whatever country did it, still has some serious issues.
Criticism of the comic aside, two party system is still definitely undesirable. I believe it is a side effect of first past the post voting. What we really should implement is ranked choice voting. It gets rid of the dumb "voting third party is voting for [opposite party]" argument by letting you vote for who you want guilt-free and falling back on your lower-ranked votes if #1 wasn't popular enough.
But you know, this will always meet resistance because politicians would lose their jobs for implementing this.
STAR voting allows you to say "I refuse to vote for this candidate at all," which certain implementations of RCV do not. It can and has ended up with candidates no one wanted winning in Australia, and other places that have implemented RCV
STAR Voting fails the Later-No-Harm criterion, which makes it a no-go for me. Any voting system that can have lesser ranked candidates siphoning off support from higher ranked candidates is, for me at least, a fundamentally broken system that ultimately just reverts to FPTP when people start bullet voting to avoid that flaw.
All you'll be demonstrating to the DNC, establishment Democrat politicians and moderates is that you'll vote blue no matter who so they'll continue to slide to the right.
It's not really propaganda when it's true, at least not in the negative sense of "false manipulative information." If it wasn't true we'd already have it. Republicans don't have complete control everywhere, and there are states where Democrats have complete control and they don't do it because corporations have complete control over most Democrats.
"We" have like a handful of actual progressives in the entirety of our government, state or otherwise.
How about spending some of your time and energy telling moderates they can either compromise with leftists and progressives or lose to fascists a second time?
Biden had a lot of help in the 2020 general election he won't have this time around. I won't be voting for him again. I'll be voting 3rd party or write in.
All you said is that you're voting trump. Lots of people said the same dumb shit last time and trump lost his ass. I'm not worried about folks like you. Plenty of you folks aren't even real anyway. Lots of far right astroturfing.
But if they compromise with leftists instead of telling them to suck an egg, they won't have a scapegoat anymore to blame all their losses and woes on!
Sure, they might just win instead, but that's like at best third on their list of priorities behind corporate donors and the status quo.
That's why you gotta pass it using a referendum. Take it out of the hands of the legislators and into the hands of the people. Ohio just enshrined abortion protection into their constitution that way.
The democrats have been trying to raise minimum wage for idk 15 years now, they just haven't been given a functional enough majority to make it happen at the national level, though they have absolutely done so at the state level. I think your complaint might be misdirected, and could better apply to the fundamental structure of our bicameral legislature, and especially at the filibuster rule that is getting increasingly unpopular with senators themselves. When the filibuster is gone sometime in the next 6 years I expect, you will see a noticeably more functional senate.
I am thoroughly confused as to why this comment is getting downvotes. It corrects the misinterpretation of the poster in a polite and civilized manner, while bringing forth interesting discussion as to what the future may hold and possible solutions to our country’s predicament.
It's the first part. The vast majority of Democrats are "moderate" and "corporate captured."
It's not a "both sides are equally bad in all respects." It's "both sides will not give us a change of law to enable a living wage be the standard." It's only speaking to that one aspect.
It might also be a complicated topic, but you don't solve a complicated topic by never starting on it.
Are democrats opposed to changing that, or just not prioritizing it because it can get complicated and there are a million other concerns?
Are those "concerns" bigger than the concern of Trump winning the general election? Make a choice. Raising the federal minimum wage in order to avoid losing to Trump sounds like a bargain to me.
Then spend some of that energy telling moderates to start compromising with leftists and progressives if they don't want to lose to fascists a second time.
Sadly, while we would value your support for stopping multiple genocides by voting against Trump, your numbers are far outweighed by that of moderates. I am sorry you can't comprehend very basic cause and effect and if that costs us our country, I guess you can rest well being so stupid you won't think you were part of the problem.
Yeah, subby. We get it. "Both sides are bad." But one side is boring corporatists who don't give a crap and the other side is 100% concentrated evil fascists, authoritarians and religious nutjobs. And while that's a choice between the lesser of two evils, it's not a difficult one.
Sounds like average election candidates in Russia.
Stalinist
Member of LDPR
"Let's calm down" member of United Russia
Noname(if lucky)
UR always makes themselves to look like lesser evil. "Look at these clowns", "old thief is fed up, new one will be hungry and steal more", "look how experienced we are". If they don't have 1, 2 or 4th, they will make their own janitor to run against them, so they will look like "lesser evil".
We do get it. It's obvious. It's so obvious that the only people still supporting FPTP are in favor of it; they don't give a crap about selling us out to fascists.
And the "not fascists" angle worked a lot better when they weren't aiding a genocide.
That may have been the point of the original comic, but given the caption, I think OP's point wasn't that both sides are bad, but was that a two party system is inherently biased towards corporate capture.
And while that’s a choice between the lesser of two evils, it’s not a difficult one.
There's other choices. Moderates and Biden could choose to compromise with leftists and progressives any time. But all signs point to them preferring to lose to fascists a second time.
Moderates like it just fine. They're happy continuing to elect awful pro-corporate, strike blocking, genocide supporting piece of shit candidates and then expecting leftists and progressives to support them in the general. If moderates didn't like it they would have voted for one of the many alternatives in the 2020 primaries.
You need to cut the crap. Stop lecturing leftists and progressives and giving moderates a free pass. Moderates are the majority voting bloc for Democrats and thus they take the lions share of the responsibility. Spend your effort lecturing them.
I'm further left than you but anyone with a brain knows that it's a two party system and any vote for any other party is just pissing in the ocean. Find change inside the party with progressives but at the end of the day you (unfortunately) either vote blue or red or you might as well not vote at all.
No. I'm fine with voting 3rd party or writing in knowing they'll likely not be elected. Are moderates fine with Biden losing to Trump? If not then they need to find some policy to compromise on in order to encourage progressives and leftists to vote for Biden again. We compromised in 2020 and voted for Joe Biden in the general. We've gotten fuck all for it. It's time for a compromise in the other direction. There's no point for us to stand around a table when moderates refuse to give us a seat.
That’s the problem with this “both sides” take. Yes, there is no true leftist party in the US. They’re both corporatists. The Republicans are undeniably much worse, though. Anti-union, anti other labor rights, oppose every kind of social safety net, want to privatize (loot) and profit from public assets, are thoroughly in favor of racist classist policies of every type imaginable. Some democrats are too, but ALL republicans are like that.
