It's The System, Stupid


‘The Far Left Is the Republicans’ Finest Asset’

The Democratic Party represents an enormous group of competing constituencies, running the gamut from trade unionists to feminists, from minorities to environmentalists, from secular Americans to LGBT advocates, a list that can be extended to multiple pages, with many people in the party answering to several of these descriptions, further complicating matters.

Yeah, that's a challenge. Because we have just two parties that matter in the US today. One party is batsh*t crazy, greedy and selfish to the point of nihilism, has abandoned all pretense of having a value system, and has now shown willing to burn the country down (or at least its democracy, its heart and soul) rather than surrender control over it. And on the other side, we have the Democrats. The party of everyone who isn't crazy. Well, you can't put all the rational people under one roof and expect them to agree on everything.

This problem partly exists because the GOP morphed from a political party into a criminal enterprise. But another, important reason is that THE SYSTEM IS BROKEN.

We should not be forced to choose between two parties in the first place. The country's founders were wise dudes, but their wisdom had limits. They disliked political parties, but gave us a first-past-the-post voting system that guaranteed we'd end up with two parties.

We need changes at the state level, changes to how our elections are run. We need open primaries, and ranked choice voting, so that a vote for a third party would no longer be a "wasted vote" in game-theory terms. That'd give us the freedom to split the Democratic Party into smaller groups, without worrying that it would benefit the GOP in every election. When the choice is between "centrist", "mildly progressive", "strongly progressive", and "GOP criminal", the GOP will become an also-ran. We might even see a return of the genuine conservative, currently hiding under a rock waiting for the Trumpers to go away.

Original Facebook post

Location: Waikoloa Village, HI, USA

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The alien meets Kenny Rogers

Image
I have a buddy who’s an alien. I don’t mean an “illegal alien”. I mean that he’s not from this planet. You can picture him as tall and green-skinned, but if you do, just know that “green-skinned” is kind of a racist way to picture an alien. In this case it happens to be true. I’m just saying it was rude of you to assume. I’ll call my buddy Allen, not because it’s his name (although it is) but because it’s almost the same word as “Alien”. Allen has studied English and developed a pretty good vocabulary. He’s having a harder time getting a grasp on our culture. He visits periodically in his spaceship, which used to be silver before he watched “Barbie” and got the idea of painting it bright neon pink, and he picks some bit of media he’s absorbed and asks for my help to understand what it’s about. He’s rather methodical about this. He wants to understand everything. When it’s a movie, we sit down to watch it together, and he has questions about nearly every scene. When it’s a song, we pick...
Read more

Can a former US President ever face justice?

Image
Franklin described our system as “A Republic… if you can keep it.” Any system of government only survives if it proves able to stand up to the endless series of challenges. If it fails those challenges, it doesn’t die or disappear; it mutates into something else. The Stormy Daniels case against Donald Trump isn’t about to topple America’s democratic institutions overnight, but it could, depending on its outcome, deepen some pre-existing cracks in the foundation. The details of the case aren’t terribly relevant here. It’s not about the events of January 6th. It’s not about Trump’s attempts to “find” more votes, or putting pressure on public officials whose job is to determine the outcome of an election. Nor is it about suggesting to the President of Ukraine that he “do [Trump] a favor” by digging into his political rival. All of those actions are much more central to the operation of our democracy. The Stormy Daniels case isn’t really about the porn star, or paying for sex. It’s about c...
Read more

Buckle up

Image
I’m writing this in 2023. I figure, if you’re too young to be President of the United States (less than 35 years old), you probably can’t imagine what it was like before the Internet. I’m a 1974 model. When I was six, my grandparents left their TRS-80 home computer at our house, to watch it for them while they went on vacation. They also left the manual. I read it. I learned how to use BASIC to write a program. That was it. I was hooked. My first computer was a Commodore VIC-20. My parents bought it for me shortly after my encounter with the TRS-80, because they could see how entranced I was. Obsessed, really. For whatever reason, I got computers. The goal was always to push the machine’s boundaries, to see what I could make it do. Even on these very early machines, whose capabilities were laughable by today’s standards, their possibilities seemed endless to me. There was a universe contained inside a small box. I would invent a project for myself, then another. Most went unfinished, ...
Read more