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They punch left to protect and defend the right (lemmy.world)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/politicalmemes@lemmy.world
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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/51582749

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[–] 1 point 2 months ago (4 children)

Without a true parliamentary system or ranked choice voting, there will always be a 2-party system. It's an unavoidable feature of our voting and legislative system. And both parties benefit from keeping it as a 2-party system and will never support legislation that changes it. It would require a fundamental change that I support, but is politically impossible for the foreseeable future.

In the meantime, supporting third parties I agree with results in wars of choice and gestapo. So I instead support candidates as nominees for the party that is less harmful.

Changing the 2-party system is essentially impossible. Changing the parties themselves is easy. Look at how much worse the GOP managed to get in just the last 20 years.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (3 children)

    It’s an unavoidable feature .... I instead support candidates as nominees for the party that is less harmful.

    Not unavoidable, not impossible and you are just pushing the problem down the road in the best case. You are at the end of that road, your midterms will let us all know if you even have the ability to vote them out (I assume its not going to go as well as anyone hopes).

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (2 children)

    Name a country with a legislative and electoral system like the US that hasn't broken down into a 2-party system. The US's system was designed specifically not to give parties power, and it broke into a 2-party system in the first month's of the first Presidential administration.

    Yes - the specific parties have changed, but not since before the Civil War, because it's easier to change the existing parties than to get new ones off the ground.

    Hell - the Republicans used to be the progressive party while the Democrats were the Southern slave-owning racist shitheads. Texas - the solid Republican stronghold - has only had 5 Republican governors in its history (one of which shouldn't really count since it was a Reconstruction governor), but has had 38 Democrats, and sent its first ever Republican-majority US House delegation to Congress in 2004.

    It's not because Texas became super conservative. It's because the parties changed.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    You are projecting your issues on other nations, The 2 party issue is almost only an american issue (one you tend to try to spread).

    Even places that have 2 main parties don't have the same issue since they let other parties exist, the us does not. I can't think of another nation (that is not a single party state) with something as stupidly restrictive as the electoral collage and us style party system.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago

    The electoral college has been an issue from the beginning. We had an electoral tie just 12 years into the process, and the 1876 election was the biggest electoral clusterfuck in American history.

    But the problem we've had all along is how to address it. Constitutional Amendment is the solution, but that would require the parties who benefit from the system to change it, and that simply isn't going to happen. The most-recent Amendment (27th) was ratified by Maryland in 1789 and became law in 1992, and it was a no-brainer prohobiting Congress from giving themselves raises that took effect prior to the next House term.

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