And just to show how disconnected our government is, the Democrats barely support it, and the Republicans outright do not support it.
Ridiculous. But hey, continue not voting for a third party. That will sure fix things.
Ridiculous. But hey, continue not voting for a third party. That will sure fix things.
It sounds like you don't actually have much at stake here. If you're poor, or queer, or Muslim, and you're choosing between a high-minded protest vote vs. keeping out the guy who will spend the next four years trying to destroy your family's safety, you sure as hell are voting to win.
I grew up poor. I am queer. Winning isn't everything. Sometimes enough people need to care for things to change, and sacrificing what you care about to win will NEVER get you there.
No, that's not why most people vote. And to be clear, I have nothing against anyone voting to express their opinion (vote is speech, after all), but most people actually use their vote to make their next few years as least shit as possible.
That often means voting for someone you disagree with, because they're more likely to win. (This is, by the way, one of the reasons that Emmanuel Macron managed to finish first in the first french election round).
If I want to "express my opinion", I'll write an essay. Voting—which is by secret ballot—is poor for expressing opinions. It's to participate in choice of political leadership or (in the case of initiatives and referenda) concrete policy.
In that light, winning—that is, getting the best outcome attainable in terms of leader or policy chosen—is more important than expressing opinion.
Now, ideally, the electoral system would aggregate opinions well such that there would be nomdofferenve between optimizing for outcome and optimizing for accurate expression of opinion. But you go into the ballot box with the voting system you have, not the voting system you wish you had.
Voting to express your opinion is ridiculous. Expressing your opinion by voting has as much effect as expressing your opinion by shouting at a cloud.
If you want viable third parties you have to change the system. The way it's designed now, viable third parties are impossible. Doesn't matter how much you vote for them. If by some chance you manage to make a third party into a viable national force, they will just displace one of the current major parties and you'll be back to a two-party system with slightly different labels.
I had written some more explaining why, but the simple fact that you'd need to convince roughly half of US states to vote to give themselves less power means this would never happen. We can't even get reforming the Electoral College through enough blue states, and the President is supposed to represent all states.
Candidate centered more proportional systems with multimember districts (e.g., STV) could be implemented without substantially changing the state based structure or apportionment of legislative power (if you go with fixed five-member districts for the House, you'd need to increase the quantum of apportionment to 5 seats, which would somewhat shift power unless you quintupled the number of seats.)
This would leave the regional distortions in place, but address the limited-time problems of duopoly.
To the degree that the US government really is disconnected from the people it represents (which I hope it is, because the alternative is much more hopeless), the solutions are getting money out of politics as much as possible, and adopting systems of voting which make it easier for third parties to be successful (or at least, constructively influential).
Once things are back to being normal-broken (instead of meta-broken), I'll get back on the wagon.
I only don't mention Obama because, despite his mass expansion of drone warfare, erosion of civil liberties, total corruption in the face of wall street destroying the economy (and in response to Occupy), flawed healthcare law, military interventionism, and botched promises (nice job closing gitmo) Bush was so bad that it basically just maintained a status quo badness throughout his administration by shifting the bad from the absurdly bad (extreme torture, geneva violations, letting entire cities sink) to just normally bad (including letting a city parch itself on toxic lead water, which is still happening by the way).
It is also valuable to consider that the more broken it gets, the harder it is to correct. The more power the oligarchs have, the more rules put in place to prevent protest and revolution. Gerrymandering has (on average) only gotten worse. The longer you wait to realign reality against neoliberalism the more traumatizing the correction is (and the more people that suffer and die under the regime, either from lack of healthcare access to being blown up by tomahawks).
This doesn't feel like different teams playing a game, so much as it seems like failures in the social fabric that allows the games to happen in the first place. This isn't a music festival with shitty bands. This is the Fyre festival and you're just wondering where to sleep and how to get home; it's already a given that there will be no bands.