Dutch political spectrum looks roughly like this: (from left down to the right)
SP (socialist party, the former leninists) Groenlinks (green left, an amalgam of former splinter parties such as the pacifists, the communists, the environmentalists. Is now very much a mainstream party with a strong environmentalist agenda) PvdA (labour. The social democrats. Used to be very large and almost always a coalition partner. They sold out much of the country in the 90s when in a coalition with VVD which has cost them dearly. Almost a splinter party nowadays) CD (christian democrats, a small christian confessionalist party that takes a fairly economically leftist view of christian values. Is far smaller than their recent political influence would suggest) D66 (a democratic reform party started in the 60s. They ended up being the leftist liberals.) CDA (another confessionalist party. Has always been a huge factor. Slightly to the right of the center, but always in power. They (used to) represent those who want stability so are pretty conservative in the cultural aspect.) PSP ( another christian splinter, but on the conservative side. Used to be national laughing stock) VVD (the corporate liberals. representing those who have money and use it to make more money. So liberty for the corporation, but more police surpression for the street) PVV (a oneman fascist offshoot by a dude who got ejected from the VVD for being extremist and loud. You might know the asshole, he has weird yellow hair too, just like that other fascist blowhard. His name is Wilders.)
Now I know there are those within the American democratic party who would be more at home in the Dutch D66 or even PvdA, but my take on it, from viewing the goings on from afar, is that most of 'em would align with our VVD.
Notice how I use a lot of past tense in my descriptions. The rise of the extreme right and the concurrent failure of the left to find a voice outside of marginalised minorities has completely upended things. It led to shit like the OP, where a family who should have voted socialist ends up voting in favor of their corporate overlords.
This shit makes me want to fight, but I wouldn’t know where to start or who to punch.
I think that take is wrong. If you look at where democratic voters stand on the issues, I’d say the majority would be in your PvdA or CD or D66. They generally trend far more liberal than the people who end up representing them.
so those voters are misrepresented then by corporate figureheads like the Clintons.
You guys should get more parties. Yes forging coalitions is fucking arduous and can take forever. But at least everybody gets a proper chance to be represented and the reason for the impasses are true. Two party system with capitalist liberal on one end and christian conservative on the other is no true democracy. You call that freedom. Pah. Humbug!
Yes, that’s right. Voters sometimes have to choose between the candidate that wants to e.g. privatize (destroy) social security and the one who only wants to cut it a bit. It’s a shitty choice, but there isn’t any actual voter constituency on the Democratic side for ending or cutting social security.
If only. My personal view on this is that our Constitution makes us a two-party State. Not explicitly, and maybe not even deliberately, but that’s the effect. The executive branch is not run by the coalition that won power in the legislature; it is run by someone who was elected independently of the legislature. Thus there is no incentive to form coalitions between several parties because the minority party can’t gain power that way.
I voted D66 when I was still living in the Netherlands.
That being said, there are a ton a tiny local parties. My mother was on the list for the Women’s Appeal Party, but she was so far down the list that it was almost 0 chance to get in.
It’s pretty cool. If I recall correctly, you vote for a person on a party list. The number of votes that a party gets determines how many seats they get. The individual with the most votes gets those seats first, and then it’s in order of how they are listed on the ballet.
Sometimes, ‘famous’ Dutch people run for a seat in a party but resign after the election. Their votes don’t count for themselves, but do count for the party. It’s well known which celebraty is just running to pull in votes though, so it doesn’t feel like bait and switch.
Yeah. I don’t remember seeing the celebrity thing you mention, but then we aren’t as big on celebrity culture as bits of the US are…
There was this thing last election where a media person started a new splinter with a purely cultural leftist agenda and she got a metric shit ton of brown shit poured over her from the unwashed masses following the yellow haired dude. Is that what you are referring to?
That thing has a whole slew of amendements tacked to it, don’t it? Perhaps while you guys are doing something about that crazy shit with the guns some political restructuring might be in order… But that is never going to happen is it? That scene at the start of Planet of the Apes is more likely :P
Probably not. The last meaningful amendment to the constitution was ratified in 1971 (making the voting age 18). There was another rather trivial one ratified in the early nineties, but that one was proposed in 1789.
EDIT: Shoot, I see this was posted in another thread. But I don’t care. As someone who grew up in Wisconsin, this deal is absolutely disgusting, and the entire Republican party should be ashamed of itself. Helping out the uninsured? No, fuck you Americans. Giving free money to billionaires? Sign us up!
Living in Wisconsin, a state that shocked a lot of people by going for Trump, I can at least give some reasons my state went the way it did. And by “my state” I mean my neighbors in the white suburbs who are the ones who actually did the voting:
A feeling that Hillary and the Dems were ignoring their problems and concerns. A feeling that the Dems cared more about transsexuals getting to choose which public restroom they could use than they did about their jobs. This was greatly exacerbated in Wisconsin by Hillary’s failure to campaign here, while Trump visited the state several times. In other words, “She doesn’t give a damn about us.” Thus, my neighbors went to the polls, while the Dems in the cities stayed home.
Fear of the other. Not so much direct anti-black, anti-Hispanic, or even anti-Muslim prejudice, although there was certainly more than enough of that, as an overall fear of anything “alien,” which the Republicans have always been masters of exploiting and which Trump thrives on. And, of course, when you have the voters who normally aren’t predisposed to this staying home as above, that just gets more concentrated in the vote.
So contrast the presidential election, with our recent mid-term, which kicked Scott Walker out of office. The Democrats were motivated big time to get to the polls and it looks like a different Wisconsin.
This is the crux of it. Because nobody cares about actual policy. They preferred Trump’s cozy lies to Hillary’s concrete proposals, and in the mix ignored the GOP’s long history of favoring the wealthy over everyone else.
So you get what we had here in 2016. Which is the way they want it. Well, they get it!
