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this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
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politics
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I lived through all of that and you put it just right: They kept failing forward. If they weren't the only alternative to the Republicans the party would have died after 1984.
It's probably obvious we need more choices but how?
It’s the system, honestly.
The U.S. government was always designed so that it would be ruled by ‘the top’. Through failures of imagination, inability to build in flexibility, and the entrenched powers doing what they can to grow their power, we’ve wound up with a system where money is power and people are merely numbers that can be shuffled to produce desired end results.
I’m quickly approaching a point of throwing up my hands, but if there is a needle that can be threaded by ‘the people’ to stitch back together our fraying democracy, it’s this —
A state-by-state ballot initiative effort to remove political drawing of electoral maps.
Changing voting (likely also ballot initiative) to remove the first past the poll system, so that we use instant run-off (aka ranked choice) to give people the opportunity to vote for who they want without throwing their vote away.
Removing barriers to voting and establishing a national holiday during election days.
Overturn Citizens United. Overhaul campaign finance. Eliminate unknown funding sources from politics. Eliminate business contributions and PAC’s entirely. Narrowly define acceptable lobbying, and broadly define what lobbying can’t be.
Strong consumer privacy laws that have teeth, so that micro targeted campaigns can’t be used to manipulate people into swinging elections. Case in point - Trump only won the swing states by 11,000 votes (total) in 2016.
And using ballot initiatives to have enough states join the national popular vote interstate compact to render the electoral college moot.
Primaries. The people have to show up and actually vote for what they want into the primary (rather than trying to vote according to political strategies). With enough sustained effort and time a coalition of like-minded representatives could be built up to slowly change the system to a more representational one.
I've been doing this for 24 years and have the "Kucinich for President" bumper sticker to prove it.
When should I expect it to start working?
Same. Tons of Bernie merch.
You won't make it alone
You shouldn't. Your thinking is linear and deterministic, but elections and society structures are not. Voting for X over Y period is not a guarantee of X. It's a chance at X, assuming an entire host of other people vote with you and a number of other factors fall into place, but not a guarantee.
In other words: I am too weird to ever be satisfied with the results of an election.
Be the change you want to see friend. Organize, distribute literature, engage others in honest and open dialogue (like you're doing), and encourage those around you to vote in every election and primary, or to run if able.
Really though, we just gotta last another 15 years or so and then the climate change feedback cycle will take care of everything
I think learning how to survive the collapse is a better use of my time at this point.
My state is one of the last to vote in primaries. Biden was the only candidate left by the time I voted in 2020.
Vote for third parties?
Doesn't work in our system. To do that we'd need to use the same broken system we have to implement some other kind of voting system. But for it to work in time we would've had to have started in the 80s.
Not necessarily:
https://www.elections.alaska.gov/RCV.php
Alaska implemented ranked choice voting after voters approved the measure in 2020