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[WealthyRadish]

Re: Third parties

When people disparage third parties as irrelevant, they're absolutely correct, except in the well-known case of a spoiler in the election. Over the entire country's history, there have only been a handful of congresses during which they held any direct political influence at the federal level (outside of the spoiler effect). Since the civil war, any direct influence has essentially disappeared.

Spoiler: Political control of Senate and House, 1867-2017 (click to show/hide)

A couple things to take away from these graphs:

1) Independents have been essentially extinct in the federal legislature since the 75th congress (1937-39)
2) The periods when they did hold any number of seats were when one party was very dominant; there has never (since the civil war anyway) been any real need for the ruling party to form anything resembling a coalition with them

The reasons for this are numerous, and have almost nothing to do with the quality of the two parties or the quality of the third party options, and almost everything to do with how the elections are structured. It's not one of those things where if everyone just believed in magic and stopped voting strategically we could have a multiparty legislature; that could only really happen during the midst of one party's catastrophic collapse, and only very briefly. This is a good UN-affiliated site to look at different election systems and what effects they have on elections, with historical examples:

aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/default

In essence, it's the FPTP system that ends up "wasting" votes that aren't cast for whoever gets a plurality in their district, an effect magnified by us having extremely large districts (the 2010 apportionment gave an average of 700,000 people per district, compared to around 30,000 in the early 20th century). If all the votes were tallied at the state or national level instead and given seats based on the actual proportion of votes (i.e. "proportional representation"), the two-party system would die almost overnight (and we'd stop having irregularities where the party with fewer national votes ends up with more seats due to things like gerrymandering and the apportionment process between the states).

And I say all this as someone who usually votes third party in federal elections; it is throwing your vote away, but the real joke is on the people who vote for one of the other parties without realizing that they're also throwing their vote away. Only a small fraction of congressional districts and senate elections are actually competitive, and your vote dies in whatever district you're stuck in. Voting against whoever's locally dominant is just as pointless as voting third party, and likewise tossing your vote on the winning avalanche doesn't make any difference either. Now, if you live in a district or state where the election is not decided in the primaries and nobody knows how it'll turn out, then by all means you should vote for one of the two parties. But if like most people in the country you live in some Lordship's hereditary incumbency that will only be interrupted by death, redistricting, or the intervention of God, you really may as well be voting Mickey Mouse.

Or at least at the federal level, local and state elections are usually less hopeless (but only really because they have smaller district sizes, you're still stuck with whatever is put on your plate).

Edit: And it should also go without saying, the system that determines which parties can win in the most powerful body (the national legislature) will also determine who can win in the similarly structured state elections, and ultimately other offices like the president. It's only at the local level that the electorate is small enough that they can deviate from the national norm and have interests/positions/ideologies that are politically viable there but not at the national level.

[hector13]

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?"

Your president, folks.

Also, just answered your own stupid, stupid question, Donald.

[sluissa]

Re: Third parties

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

When people disparage third parties as irrelevant, they're absolutely correct, except in the well-known case of a spoiler in the election. Over the entire country's history, there have only been a handful of congresses during which they held any direct political influence at the federal level (outside of the spoiler effect). Since the civil war, any direct influence has essentially disappeared.







A couple things to take away from these graphs:

1) Independents have been essentially extinct in the federal legislature since the 75th congress (1937-39)
2) The periods when they did hold any number of seats were when one party was very dominant; there has never (since the civil war anyway) been any real need for the ruling party to form anything resembling a coalition with them

The reasons for this are numerous, and have almost nothing to do with the quality of the two parties or the quality of the third party options, and almost everything to do with how the elections are structured. It's not one of those things where if everyone just believed in magic and stopped voting strategically we could have a multiparty legislature; that could only really happen during the midst of one party's catastrophic collapse, and only very briefly. This is a good UN-affiliated site to look at different election systems and what effects they have on elections, with historical examples:

aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/es/default

In essence, it's the FPTP system that ends up "wasting" votes that aren't cast for whoever gets a plurality in their district, an effect magnified by us having extremely large districts (the 2010 apportionment gave an average of 700,000 people per district, compared to around 30,000 in the early 20th century). If all the votes were tallied at the state or national level instead and given seats based on the actual proportion of votes (i.e. "proportional representation"), the two-party system would die almost overnight (and we'd stop having irregularities where the party with fewer national votes ends up with more seats due to things like gerrymandering and the apportionment process between the states).

And I say all this as someone who usually votes third party in federal elections; it is throwing your vote away, but the real joke is on the people who vote for one of the other parties without realizing that they're also throwing their vote away. Only a small fraction of congressional districts and senate elections are actually competitive, and your vote dies in whatever district you're stuck in. Voting against whoever's locally dominant is just as pointless as voting third party, and likewise tossing your vote on the winning avalanche doesn't make any difference either. Now, if you live in a district or state where the election is not decided in the primaries and nobody knows how it'll turn out, then by all means you should vote for one of the two parties. But if like most people in the country you live in some Lordship's hereditary incumbency that will only be interrupted by death, redistricting, or the intervention of God, you really may as well be voting Mickey Mouse.

Or at least at the federal level, local and state elections are usually less hopeless (but only really because they have smaller district sizes, you're still stuck with whatever is put on your plate).

Edit: And it should also go without saying, the system that determines which parties can win in the most powerful body (the national legislature) will also determine who can win in the similarly structured state elections, and ultimately other offices like the president. It's only at the local level that the electorate is small enough that they can deviate from the national norm and have interests/positions/ideologies that are politically viable there but not at the national level.

Congratulations, you're the 10,000th person to give us a good reason to ditch FPTP in an AmeriPol thread.

Here is your prize:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Frumple]

Third highest turnout in the last half-ish century, mate.*

For Trump! Millions more Republicans came out to vote, because Trump was interesting to them! Clinton didn't even beat Obama's 2012 numbers!

By numbers it was less than 100k even as total share dropped (which isn't exactly bad for a post two term presidency, near as I can recall), and that compared to one of the largest turnout drivers we've seen in a while (i.e. obama); percentage was more of a slide, but trump lost ground on that front. That interesting lost the GOP vote share. Which is a something approaching neat party trick, considering he did get a couple million more votes than romney in the raw and the dem share dropped, too. Trump was apparently less interesting than goddamn romney to this country despite our total pop going up enough to net him more voters in terms of raw numbers.

Is it really not getting across that moving in trump's direction in terms of rhetoric is seriously bloody risky at best, regardless of how fucked our electoral system got in 2016? That shit got him the EC (and there's zero guarantee it'd do the same for dems, considering what we now know of the voting impetus behind his voters, and doubly so if after the next few years it doesn't work out for them). It lost him the popular vote. It lost him ground on percent of the population, when he had more going for him (except himself, anyway) than just about any GOP candidate in history. It's ended up giving us what's already one of the biggest shitshows of an administration in living memory at a minimum. It's made him fucking incredibly disliked, very much notably so among democrats. I would not give good odds a pivot towards that style would end well for left-wing politics in the US, particularly after another three years of being exposed to the results.

Something in obama's direction in terms of speaking would probably help (and it'd be real damn great if my generation or the next pulls a rabbit out their hat on that front in the next few years), but a great deal of the democrat party has a helluva' lot of concern about that nerd bullshit and are just a wee goddamn titch sketchy about what starts happening when populism's stuff and that hyperaggression bullshit starts showing up.

The democrat party and left wing americans in general are not the GOP, and a lot of that villain fuck the other tribe shit doesn't resonate nearly as well, especially without the decades of priming right wing media has been hammering the GOP base with. Maybe that'll change in the next few years, but if it doesn't going that route would screw us sideways about as fast as straight up running trump as a dem candidate would at this point.

[Folly]

"Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?"

Your president, folks.

Also, just answered your own stupid, stupid question, Donald.

You have to look at it from Donald's Trickle-Down point of view. Rather than allowing shithole countries to bring their shit into America, he wants to bring immigrants from already privileged countries, so that their privilege can overflow and sprinkle down to the shitty countries, somehow making them less shitty.
It makes perfect sense if you don't think about it.

[Egan_BW]

So basically our president is obsessed with the rich trickling down onto shit?

[McTraveller]

I feel like being tangential tonight.  Probably work stress and weariness and beer.

A) I have noticed that it seems that most political discussions (regardless of persuasion) tend to somehow extend "I don't like X" into "It's a catastrophe!"

I basically don't like anything about the current administration, but I don't feel the catastrophe... my "inner peace" doesn't depend that much on  circumstance.  Am I an anomaly?  Or is it because I'm privileged enough to not suffer much?

B) Please don't take this next bit as an endorsement for policies that add more power to elite groups.  It's purely a thought process on the sheer numbers... not what those numbers are doing.  I'm trying to wrap my head around sentiment like "a few people benefit while many suffer", generally in the context of economics and "the 1%".  The 1% in the US is over three million people!.  That is not a few people at all.  Yes, it's a small percentage, but it's not a small absolute number.  It changes the feeling of the old "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" adage into something stranger.  Do the needs/wants of a stupendously large number outweigh the needs/wants of the merely huge number?  If you don't like the 1%, what about the 5% (I actually fall somewhere around the 5%).  That's like 15 million people - more than quite a few states in the union (my state, for instance, only has around 10M people in its borders).  It's easy to "do the calculus" to make a personal sacrifice to help a dozen people.  But it feels less clear to ask an anonymous million to sacrifice to benefit an anonymous 100 million (the same 10:1 ratio).

But why does it feel less clear? Is that an artifact of culture or upbringing? Or should it really just scale up like that... or is the anonymity the problem?  Especially when it is almost universally considered bad if you ask the 100 million to sacrifice something for the 10 million. Except in times of natural disasters? Is that OK?  It's just the strange asymmetry of the situation...

[Folly]

Do the needs/wants of a stupendously large number outweigh the needs/wants of the merely huge number?

Yes. That's just basic math. More is more than less, and less is less than more.

Also, you talk a lot about sacrificing for the greater good. The stance of the left generally is not that anything should be taken away from anyone, but rather that new resources should flow towards those who need them.
If there's a table with 99 starving people with empty plates, and 1 fat guy whose plate is overflowing with food, and you bring in a cart full of food and just park it next to that fat guy, and you don't see anything wrong with that picture, there is something wrong with your moral compass.

[misko27]

It's like blackout, except instead of being unable to stay conscious you're unable to be interesting.

Ahh, I see. My father has a really bad case of beigeout pretty much all the time. (You'd think someone so completely devoid of positive characteristics would be interesting, but no, apparently "not incredibly boring" is a positive characteristic, so my father doesn't have it.)

Oh, I definitely think Sanders is our man. And the importance of narrative resonance isn't an excuse to forget about policy, which is one of hundreds of reasons Oprah cannot be allowed to be the candidate. Or god forbid, Zuckerberg. If 2020 is Trump vs. Zuckerberg I might actually just join RedKing in Maoist guerilla insurgency.

man why do the maoists hog all the insurgency this is ridiculous. I believe in the moderate's right to set up roadblocks and begin the revolution just as much as anyone.

Splitters.

[WealthyRadish]

There'll be plenty of insurgency for everyone in the year of Winfrey/West v. Trump/Jones.

[Frumple]

No, no. That year, there will be no insurgency.

That year, there will be only fire. Only fire. Nothing else. Even the ashes will burn.

... and not just all of california for the nth time.

[Max™]

Inequality is bad for societies, eroding the trust people have in social contracts makes them less likely to abide by them. Eroding the actual mechanisms by which society works to the benefit of all makes this sort of thing into a powder keg in a dusty warehouse full of creaking rusty machinery prone to kicking off sparks. Laughing about the situation of those who are getting shat on while being closer to the top of the pile of shitters tends to engender fairly understandable anger. There are far more people who have been at or under the poverty line than the number who gained from shit like the recovery since the recession, and I doubt those who have been hungry and forced to choose between basic necessities would shed a single tear if certain folks started getting lynched. That's not a safe situation for a nation to be tapdancing on the brink of oligarchy.

There'll be plenty of insurgency for everyone in the year of Winfrey/West v. Trump/Jones.

DON'T YOU DARE SPEAK THOSE FORBIDDEN WORDS GODDAMN YOUR EYES!

[martinuzz]

The US has finally distanced itself from remarks made by their embassador for the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra.
In 2015, Pete Hoekstra had spread fake news over his official media channels, claiming that there are no-go sharia zones in the Netherlands, and that politicians have been set on fire.
Both stories are completely untrue.

It took them 3 years, but after long protest, the US now acknowledge he was wrong. Pete Hoekstra himself has now said he regrets spreading fake news, and will publicly apologize on Dutch television. For the past three years, he has been refusing to admit that it was fake news.

How the f did that guy become embassador in the first place?

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Ambassadorial positions are one of the few that are still strongly a part of the spoils system. As the US generally strives to have relations with every nation in the world the amount of diplomatic positions that need filling are massive, and tend to change between Presidents who also want their appointees to be loyal. The Netherlands is a nice place to live and does not have high tensions with the US, so the ambassador there in a normal Presidency is going to have some chops but also definitely be a friend of the administration too. In the standards of Trumpworld, you get...well, this. Though at least he said all those things before he was ambassador.

Don't even ask what the standards are like for ambassadorships in tropical nations the US is apathetic towards.

[SalmonGod]

The US has finally distanced itself from remarks made by their embassador for the Netherlands, Pete Hoekstra.
In 2015, Pete Hoekstra had spread fake news over his official media channels, claiming that there are no-go sharia zones in the Netherlands, and that politicians have been set on fire.
Both stories are completely untrue.

It took them 3 years, but after long protest, the US now acknowledge he was wrong. Pete Hoekstra himself has now said he regrets spreading fake news, and will publicly apologize on Dutch television. For the past three years, he has been refusing to admit that it was fake news.

How the f did that guy become embassador in the first place?

I saw a video not too long ago of a reporter confronting him about that.

Politicians make shit up like this all the time, but... it's on a completely different level to be the dedicated official associated with a specific place who we should be able to expect reliable first-hand knowledge of that place from, and to abuse that position to spread made up inflammatory shit on an international stage.  It's beyond reckless.  It's actively destructive behavior.  Serious consequences should be in order.