politics
Welcome to the discussion of US Politics!
Rules:
- Post only links to articles, Title must fairly describe link contents. If your title differs from the site’s, it should only be to add context or be more descriptive. Do not post entire articles in the body or in the comments.
Links must be to the original source, not an aggregator like Google Amp, MSN, or Yahoo.
Example:
- Articles must be relevant to politics. Links must be to quality and original content. Articles should be worth reading. Clickbait, stub articles, and rehosted or stolen content are not allowed. Check your source for Reliability and Bias here.
- Be civil, No violations of TOS. It’s OK to say the subject of an article is behaving like a (pejorative, pejorative). It’s NOT OK to say another USER is (pejorative). Strong language is fine, just not directed at other members. Engage in good-faith and with respect! This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban.
- No memes, trolling, or low-effort comments. Reposts, misinformation, off-topic, trolling, or offensive. Similarly, if you see posts along these lines, do not engage. Report them, block them, and live a happier life than they do. We see too many slapfights that boil down to "Mom! He's bugging me!" and "I'm not touching you!" Going forward, slapfights will result in removed comments and temp bans to cool off.
- Vote based on comment quality, not agreement. This community aims to foster discussion; please reward people for putting effort into articulating their viewpoint, even if you disagree with it.
- No hate speech, slurs, celebrating death, advocating violence, or abusive language. This will result in a ban. Usernames containing racist, or inappropriate slurs will be banned without warning
We ask that the users report any comment or post that violate the rules, to use critical thinking when reading, posting or commenting. Users that post off-topic spam, advocate violence, have multiple comments or posts removed, weaponize reports or violate the code of conduct will be banned.
All posts and comments will be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. This means that some content that violates the rules may be allowed, while other content that does not violate the rules may be removed. The moderators retain the right to remove any content and ban users.
That's all the rules!
Civic Links
• Congressional Awards Program
• Library of Congress Legislative Resources
• U.S. House of Representatives
Partnered Communities:
• News
view the rest of the comments
US mentality is weird. Most countries we understand that a "party" stands for certain principles, and so if you don't like the party, you vote for a different one. It makes no sense to demand that the party change to accommodate the voter, that's not the role of a party. The role of a party is to try and change the minds of the population to support the principles of the party. A party exists to convince the masses to accommodate them, not for the masses to accommodate the party.
But Americans always vote for the same parties and always insist that the parties should violate their principles that they are very explicit about and openly declare all the time in order to accommodate the people. When the party inevitably does not do this but instead tries to explore new strategies to win over the population while adhering to their principles, Americans act surprised that the party isn't bending to their will, but then vote for the same party again anyways.
I see this all throughout bizarre American commentary, where American leftists like Hasan will constantly call the Democrat party "stupid" for not abandoning their principles and running on an entirely different platform. But this, again, misses the whole point of a party. They are not "stupid." They have a set of principles and want those principles to win, and it defeats the whole purpose of the party of they entirely abandoned their principles.
I mean, let's say you live in a very racist country but have an anti-racist party, and then the anti-racist party decides to become racist to win the election. Did you really "win"? At the end of the day, the racist party still won, because you would have abandoned your principles to win, so it defeats the whole point of "winning."
Democrats have a set of principles and want those principles to win, so naturally, as rational actors, they will not run candidates who oppose those principles while also try to push out people who infiltrate the party with ideas that oppose their principles. In any normal country, this is no problem because people understand that it just means you need to vote for a different party with different principles.
What's even weirder is the Americans who delude themselves into believing the Democrats hold principles they literally do not. They are very open about being a neoliberal nationalist party, but I have encountered weird Americans who tell me things like Democrats all support universal healthcare / "Medicare for All" and they will argue until the cow's come home that this is true and all evidence to the contrary is Russian propaganda.
Even here on Lemmy, criticizing Democrats by pointing out how they are right-wing can get you downvotes from weirdo Americans who are convinced they are a truly left-wing party. There is a huge delusion among Americans that Democrats are all secret far-left socialists who are just so incompetent that they constantly fumble the ball and mess up getting their policies across and so that's why they never achieve the working class utopia. If you point out that there is no evidence that the overwhelming majority of Democrats even want these left-wing policies in the first place and they openly say they want the opposite, they will get very defensive and upset with you.
Other countries have voting systems designed to support a multi-party system. Before we can have this we need something like ranked choice or STAR voting or approval voting. Otherwise if you vote for a third party right now you end up supporting the politician you like least due to the spoiler effect.
Note that reading https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spoiler_effect it kind of seems like RCV only helps reduce the impact of spoilers but does not fully eliminate it.
This is also a great article: https://effectivegov.uchicago.edu/primers/ranked-choice-voting
What's the relevance? The point of my post is that you are voting for a clearly right-wing party and the expectation that they will become left-wing is irrational. The existence of a spoiler effect does not negate this reality. It is incredibly incoherent to say, "we should vote in the right-wingers because we're afraid of the spoiler effect," then turn around and say that the right-wingers are "stupid' for not running left-wing candidates as a right-wing party. It makes no sense. If you think you should never vote for a left-wing party out of fear of the spoiler effect, then you are really conceding that a left-wing government is impossible in the USA under its current form, and only maybe hypothetically in the far future if we ever have a different form, maybe with RCV, would it be possible.
you rn
You are literally upset that I pointed out a giant contradiction in your worldview.
Yes, I hold both positions in my head simultaneously and you do not.
You're apply logic and rules from completely different nation's systems and calling the US's version "weird" because it doesn't match how other countries do it?
Perhaps in your country it isn't, but in the US, it is. During the convention of the party, the party chooses its "planks" for its platform. These are chosen within the party itself, and they absolutely change. You can see the 2024 Democratic party platform here if you want to. Here's the 2020 version.. As you can see there are some large differences. The GOP used to do this same process before it was consumed by the cult of trump.
In your system perhaps. Not in the US system. It doesn't make the US system "wrong". Does it have shortcomings? Absolutely, all systems do. Are these various shortcomings equal to each other? That's subjective. I personally would like more aspects of European-style politcal parties, but not everything that I see with parties there. We, as humanity, have yet to find the objectively "best" system.
I'm losing faith in your arguments because you're painting a picture that all members of a party share the same beliefs. Again, maybe that's an ideal from your own country's party system, but it isn't in the USA. I would be surprised even in your own party if you have universal agreement on all policy positions.
There are individual Democrats that support Medicare for All. Here's one example:
Hilary Clinton, as First Lady at the time, lead the creation of the Clinton Healthcare plan of 1993. This was absolutely a universal national healthcare plan:
"The task force was created in January 1993, but its own processes were somewhat controversial and drew litigation. Its goal was to come up with a comprehensive plan to provide universal health care for all Americans, which was to be a cornerstone of the administration's first-term agenda."
Does this mean that every Democrat believes in universal healthcare? Of course not. But to claim that none do, as you are, is equally untrue.
You're going to have to be more specific with an example post, because most of the downvoted posts I see close to this are "both sides are the same!" garbage. Also, I don't believe many believe the US Democratic Party is "truly left-wing" as would be defined in, lets say, Europe.
Because y'all demand people support the entire party. "Vote blue no matter who." Canada does not have ranked-choice voting. They don't even do that proportional voting thing where they hand out seats based on proportion of who votes for what party. There is a third party because people just vote for that third party.
The US doesn't have a system that prevents this, it's just a myth used to prop up the Democrats. If you do like a very specific Democrat, that doesn't negate voting for a third party in places where the Democrat is awful. There is nothing built-in the USA's system that would prevent it from getting seats to a third-party, and Canada is proof of that. It's just a myth perpetuated to rally people into "voting blue no matter who" even when the Democrat clearly does not represent your values.
You're conveniently ignoring the entire primary voting process. During the primary you vote for the specific candidate among all running for the position in the party. Policy positions, experience, temperament do vary between the candidates. This is the chance to vote for, among many, that closest resembles your own choices. After the primary however, nearly any Democratic candidate would be preferable to a GOP one to most Democratic voters. So if your own preferred primary candidate doesn't win the ticket to the general election, it is highly probable that the one that did win would be a closer fit than the GOP candidate. The "vote blue no matter who" isn't dogma, its usually pragmatic advice. I doubt many left leaning voters that voted trump or withheld their vote feel their assistance in getting trump into office is helping their own policy positions.
A perfect example of the primary system working pretty well is the recent New York Mayor's race. A legacy previously elected Democratic governor ran and lost to the proudly open farthest left-leaning Democratic Socialist. That Democratic Socialist when on to win the general election for mayor of New York City.
Third parties in the USA have historically fielded pretty weak candidates. For the 2024 Presidential election, the next most leftist candidate on the general election ballot was Jill Stein. Prior the run for President of the United States Steins highest held elected office was in 2005 she successfully won the election for one of the 7 Lexington Town Meeting seats (a small municipal office). If third party candidates want to be seriously considered, then I would recommend they start with smaller office positions to actually build a party that demonstrates is can govern.
If you run for the Racism Party™ as a person who has an anti-racist position, do you think you will be nominated? Maybe in an incredibly fringe case, but most of the time you will not be. And then what do you do when you're not nominated?
It's literally a dogma by definition. Saying that you would do something as a matter of principle under all possible conditions without ever considering a different strategy is a dogma.
Your "advice" is based on extremely fringe. Sure, in a country of hundreds of millions, it may happen a couple times. But what about all the rest of the times it does not? You pretend it is a "victory" that one leftist gets into a position of power where they can hardly do anything at all because they are surrounded by extreme right-wingers, then you try to sheepherd everyone in to backing the extreme right wingers that are the very same people blocking them from getting anything done.
If your position was just "you should vote for leftists if they are in the primaries, then vote for them as Democrats if they win their primaries," I wouldn't have an issue with that. But that's not your position. It's "you should vote for Democrats no matter what." Even if they're a genocidal fascist far-right freak who is going to do everything in their power to block an edge case like Mamdani from every making any positive change, we should apparently still support that.
Most should be strung upside down like Mussolini.
Okay then field strong candidates.
Would you actually vote for them if they did or just shame people for not voting blue no matter who?
Well, I'm not sure why I'd even be running for a nomination to your "Racism Party™", but I would be pretty unsurprised when I didn't win.
I don't understand why you'd have me running in that party in the first place so I don't know what answer you're fishing for here.
Why did you skip over the part where I showed consideration of how weak and bad the third party candidates are and the other strategy of not voting at all before arriving at the blue candidate?
Now you're just straight up strawmanning.
I actually have voted third party, and it got us the 2nd Iraq war. You're welcome. So you can see when I advocate against weak third party votes, its because I don't want a repeat of arguably the USAs first 21st century geopolitical catastrophe and millions of lives lost needlessly in Iraq.
Oh shit! So easy! Why didn't I think of that?!
When I read your first post here, I saw your line of thought was pretty thin, but there might be something of substance there. I can see what I thought was substance in your post was a mirage. It was a mistake to waste my time engaging with you.
Have a nice day.
no. al gore won that election. voting for the so-called third party had no bearing on the outcome.
It's not that weird if only two parties stand a chance. Pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction. Your comment is a long-winded way of saying that the two-party system should be abolished.
No, I am saying that "pick the closest one of the two and push it in your favored direction" makes zero sense. It is like voting for the Racism Party™ and expecting them to run anti-racism candidates, or that you will "push" the Racism Party™ to be anti-racist. That isn't gong to happen. The Racism Party™ would exist to push racism, it would exist to convince you to support its platform and vote for it.
The internet exists these days. We can all pull up videos going back decades to back when they were black-and-white of people talking about the needs of "pushing Democrats to the left" and yet generations later they are still a right-wing jingoist genocidal party. There is an old saying, "the definition of insanity is dong the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." The same strategy is used for decades with everyone insisting that it's the only strategy that can ever work yet it never works.
How much longer do we have to wait before this strategy works? Will Democrats become a left-wing party election, the election after, the one after that? I guarantee you that everyone will listen to you as they do every election cycle and your strategy will continue to be the one used again, again, and again. So I am just curious in how long you think it will take for your strategy to bear fruits.