Maybe, but I belong to a party because of their platform and their lean and the candidates the party faithful produce, and I don’t really want people who don’t buy into any of those things deciding who the candidate is instead. I guess it comes down to whether you think a party is a meaningful thing. I get that one of the parties is broken, but I think the answer isn’t really negate the other party.
It’s a mistake to think of a party primary as a general election. It is, or ought to be, a party exercise carried out by party members.
I 100% agree with RCV, 100% disagree with open or jungle primaries. If you want to stand apart from the hoi polloi and proclaim your independence, that’s 100% fine. But don’t expect to choose party candidates if you’re not a party member.
And jungle primaries are awful. Even when you get two Democrats (as always happens in my district) the office holder is selected by everyone so can undermine the majority of Democrats’ choice. And without RCV there are ample opportunities for shenanigans. Put 5 Dems on the ballot with 2 Reps and the Reps can sweep the primary even if the district is majority Dem.
Only if you assume that there’s no difference between, say, Roy Moore and Luther Strange. If you have a top 2 runoff between crazy QAnon person and generic asshat republican, how is that worse than having an election between the crazy person and a democrat with zero chance of winning? Basically, in order for your premise to make sense, you have to also assert that all republicans are equally bad no matter how centrist, that any chance of a democrat winning is therefore better than zero chance, regardless of its effect on the relatively likelihood of different republicans winning, and that the benefits of these non-zero chances in dominantly red districts outweighs the costs of them in dominantly blue districts.
I think the average voter does not agree with those premises, so the RCV with a runoff between the top two makes more sense.
Right, but the goal here is to dissolve monolithic parties by creating a system where the progressives, socialists, technocrats, greens, tea partiers, Trumpers, libertarians, conservatives, etc., all field candidates in a lot of districts and voters can express their preferences across those candidates. Under that kind of a system, the party could also hold some form of member survey or election to determine which candidates it lets into the jungle primary, but it wouldn’t have to be a sanctioned public election to anoint one person from each massive, death-by-compromise party.
The Democrat is going to lose anyway, and the Republicans can say the same thing about Oregon. When you get two people from the same party, the more centrist is going to likely win. It will push candidates towards the center.
Thus providing a perfect example of why you can never consider nominating someone as extreme as AOC for a Senate seat - you might lose to generic Republican783!
And the scandal that made Jones’s win possible only came out after the primary, so without that scandal timing we might well have Roy Moore in the Senate right now.
Are you suggesting an equivalence between AOC, whose positions don’t actually stray terribly far from the Democrat party platform, and Roy Moore, who is a loony bin pedophile?
No, I’m suggesting that the example of Moore will be used to show that nominating someone too extreme can cost a seat even in a “safe” state, and that a likely target of arguments like that is someone like AOC (please don’t try to argue that she isn’t viewed as extreme even by many Dems). Arguments of this sort are used constantly in primaries. Having a top 2 runoff jungle primary would make arguments like that pointless.
I think yeah, she’s an exemplar of Extreme™ from people who want someone to compare the extremists in the GOP (i.e. every GOP pol) with. BUT please find me a policy she supports that is “extreme”. She supports:
M4A: this is actually a mainstream position in the party even though the party platform pushes for a public option instead
free public college: this is part of the party platform (for families earning less than $125,000)
the Green New Deal: largely adopted by the platform. The GND’s explicit goals are more ambitious than the platform’s (e.g. net zero CO2 emissions by 2030 instead of 2050), but the policies are the same.
defunding the police: the package of reforms this effort typically implies is wrapped into the party platform: de-escalation training, divert funding to social services to handle some kinds of calls, federal rules for use-of-force and federal oversight to enforce them, etc.
BLM: explicitly supported in the party platform
higher federal minimum wage: explicitly supported in the party platform
the DREAM Act: compassionate immigration reform and a pathway to citizenship are part of the party platform
Her positions are somewhat left of the platform, differing in degree, not kind from what the party in general supports. If she supported nationalizing the internet or… hell I don’t even know what an extremist leftist viewpoint would look like. How is she an extremist?
Faced with widespread batshit insane extremism on the right, bothsiderism must invent batshit extremism on the left, and liberalism is what it comes up with. AOC’s slightly-more-liberal positions become the same as Moore’s insanity.
AOC has chosen to self-describe herself as a Democratic Socialist. That means that she supports social ownership of the means of production. That’s a fairly extreme position, one that goes beyond what most people believe. That’s more extreme than what many folks consider “cool socialism”, which is social democracy, the capitalist system that we see in the nordic model.
This is a weasely way of suggesting that she supports state ownership of the means of production, which is false. The DSA opposes central economic planning and most state ownership of industry. What they’re for is more worker ownership enterprises and less corporatism.
You can fit the number of people who buy into that distinction on the head of a pin. I know we had a discussion about it on this forum, but it’s not a distinction that means anything. “Socialist” itself is a content-less label in American political life and has been for well over a century.
In an exclusive interview with Business Insider in late December, Ocasio-Cortez broke down why the idea of democratic socialism isn’t so scary for her generation.
“So when millennials talk about concepts like democratic socialism, we’re not talking about these kinds of ‘Red Scare’ boogeyman,” she said. “We’re talking about countries and systems that already exist that have already been proven to be successful in the modern world."
During the Cold War, animosity toward the Soviet Union manifested into anxiety over the term “socialist,” which has since remained an often-misunderstood term in US politics.
Ocasio-Cortez has likened her view of democratic socialism to Scandinavian social democracy. The congresswoman’s progressive platform consists of a single-payer health care system that covers all forms of health care.
"We’re talking about single-payer health care that has already been successful in many different models, from Finland to Canada to the UK,” she said.
Ocasio-Cortez, who is still paying off her student loans, also believes in tuition-free public colleges and universities. Her platform includes guaranteeing Americans a living wage that maintains “basic levels of dignity so that no person in America is too poor to live,” Ocasio-Cortez said. "That’s what democratic socialism means in 2018, and not this kind of McCarthyism Red Scare of a past era.”
I.E. regardless of which order you put the words in, she’s talking about the Nordic model. She’s not talking about large-scale socialization of industries.
No, this isn’t the case. If she was a social democrat, she would be a social democrat.
Being a Democratic socialist is a thing. The DSA has a well specified platform. And it specifically supports exactly what I said it does. From their own page:
Social ownership could take many forms, such as worker-owned cooperatives or publicly owned enterprises managed by workers and consumer representatives. Democratic socialists favor as much decentralization as possible. While the large concentrations of capital in industries such as energy and steel may necessitate some form of state ownership, many consumer-goods industries might be best run as cooperatives.
When talking to the normies, Democratic Socialists pretend that they are capitalists, and merely want to push the nordic model.
But if that’s the case, then they shouldn’t call themselves democratic socialists. Because that term actually means something. And Democratic Socialism is very much an extreme position.
Democratic socialists have long rejected the belief that the whole economy should be centrally planned. While we believe that democratic planning can shape major social investments like mass transit, housing, and energy, market mechanisms are needed to determine the demand for many consumer goods.
