For as long as you have a Chief Executive in government as one branch, and for as long as that entity gets to select and nominate lifetime appointments to the supreme court of the judicial branch (third of three branches of government), you are going to end up in a 2-party system, regardless of what you call those two parties or what they officially or unofficially stand for. And unfortunately, no style of voting (such as ranked choice, or whatever) will solve the organic devolution to a two-party system for as long as this remains the case.
The only way I see a third party ever being remotely viable is via the centrist play. The only way to not just spoil your side is to be able to take roughly equal amounts of voters from each side. They’d have to explicitly be advertising themselves as a party that doesn’t even nominate a Presidential candidate but is solely focused on getting Legislative candidates that can be kind of a Joe Manchin party of tie-breaker compromise people that will work with whatever party has the White House. I’m sure there are a million practical issues why that could never work, but there it is.
I’m not sure they were ever skewed, but anyway, Al Jazeera is high quality news. I watch it often when I’m actually interested in world news, and not what passes for that on US and most UK cable news shows.
I seem to recall them being portrayed as skewed in certain English-language corners during the earlier parts of the Bush administration, but, you know.
There’s definitely been a long time campaign by the right wing media to paint Al Jazeera as skewed. In addition to the general right wing attack on the “mainstream media” there has also been a pattern of claiming Al Jazeera supports terrorism, etc.
As an example, in the book on which Netflix’s new $200 million movie is based, The Gray Man, an Al Jazeera reporter is shown celebrating the killing of American military personnel by terrorists and actually dancing in the streets in joy, with the terrorists. And now that shit has been pasteurized and pumped into tens of millions of homes in America (presumably they took the Al Jazeera scene out of the movie, but I haven’t watched.)
In any case, that slanted attack has been out there since 9/11 at least, perhaps before.
Yeah, Muslims were the “commies” of the day so everything related to them was suspect (and they were going to impose SHARIA LAW in AMERICA!). An Arab news channel? squints eyes suspiciously.
Why wouldn’t ranked choice allow viable third parties? Imagine progressives being able to split from Democrats, but list the Dem candidate as second choice on their ballot. I would do that if ranked choice were a thing. I don’t dare do it now. Australian politics has ranked choice and is dominated by two parties, but there are a variety of smaller parties who represent more fine grained interests, win seats in parliament, and form coalitions with the dominant parties.
Triggercut is talking about the dynamic of having an executive separate from the legislature, an executive that has the power to appoint the judiciary. That’s a different scenario than a Parliamentary system. If we had a Parliamentary system, ranked choice could possibly do some good but for the Presidency, anything than other than a vote for the Dems is at least half a vote for the destruction of our Republic. Ranked choice would be irrelevant in that scenario.
So, apparently from what I’m reading the Forward Party doesn’t even have policies yet? So they are just a mushy wish for moderation with no actual ideas?
If people could have voted Jill Stein first choice and Hillary second, with instant runoff RCV, more people would have and it wouldn’t have hurt Hillary at all. It would make voting Green a viable choice and you wouldn’t be splitting the Dem vote by doing so.
I mean, the essence of devoted centrism is to be against what the ‘extremists’ are for. Center fetishists don’t need policies, because they have anti-policies.
Yeah definitely not. I think it does make 3rd parties more viable, but we’d still be a largely 2-party democracy. And before we get RCV for presidential elections, we really need a national popular vote first. That actually would solve more. Dems have an entrenched popular advantage that we can’t leverage.
To me, the key difference between American democracy and parliamentary democracy is that, with parliamentary democracy, the party (or parties) that win the legislative election get to govern. With American democracy, that outcome is always far from certain. And a third party does nothing to change that.
But why would they? Everyone who voted for Stein knew she wasn’t going to get elected - they were doing it to spite Clinton and the Democrats. They would just leave the second choice blank.
To me, the biggest difference between American democracy and parliamentary democracy is that in American democracy, individual voters must form their own coalitions and in a parliamentary democracy, the elected representatives of differing parties form their coalitions.
Parliamentary democracy is EZ mode from a voter’s standpoint. I can go happily vote for the Socialist Utopia Party in my local parliamentary elections and feel like I got the full weight of my individual leftist vote…while knowing full well that should the SUP party candidate from my district win, she or he is going to actually join a coalition that is likely to have only a marginal relationship to socialist utopia precepts.
In the end, most democracies tend to end up with a ruling party coalition, and an opposition coalition. Two parties. In the US, those coalitions of ruling/opposition flip back and forth between Republicans and Democrats…but it’s basically who’s in power, and who opposes them.
