*than
It's funny. I somehow read what you wrote as "I have no argument to the contrary"
I think it's an acceptable course of action to vote 3rd party if you are in a solid red or solid blue state. However, I think the way you phrased it got people's hackles raised.
Thanks for agreeing. 🤝
How would you have phrased it?
Yeah, it's not a terrible idea. Another idea is to send the message that the Republicans will continue to lose the popular vote by 10+ million votes if they don't start putting forth solutions to the real problems that Americans are concerned about.
I agree. My distant hope is that the republican party will weaken to the point that the left-wing of America will be able to take advantage of the Vaccum left behind. The events talking place in the GOP are remarkably similar to what the whig party did right before they became irrelevant.
Spelling/grammar fixations are a way to be biased against people with less education, less experience with English... it's obnoxious and rudely dismissive.
Honestly kind of feel like crying seeing the comment section. I like the articles on Lemmy, but the attitude of the commenters is so mean. I don't know how anyone decides that the best thing to do is to belittle someone for a typo, and how it's so upvoted. That's not praxis, it's elitist and bullying someone when you don't know if they have a disability, less access to education than you, maybe they're just tired.
Thanks you strangers ☺️. I didn't have a good education growing up. I actually grew up in a cult. I managed to leave on my own when I was 16. Since I've gotten myself a degree but I've never really gotten spelling and grammar completely figured out. There are a lot of things I honestly just missed out on basic education wise.
I always assume the people focus on that have no way of reasonably disagreeing with me. I guess they just get mad they're wrong 🤷. Just a bunch of classist elitist assholes who couldn't think their way out of a paper bag.
I mean, by your logic, wouldn’t that turn every state into a swing state after the election? And does your advice only apply to a small group of people? Because, well, if it applied to everyone with problems with Biden (which is nearly everyone), it wouldn’t track logically.
How would that turn every state into a swing state? 🤣
Do you think I'm going to change the mind of every single person who would vote for Biden? Despite how almost every single person that sees this idea reacts extremely negatively. Getting a viable third party is a long-term strategy. It's an important, long-term strategy. But it's not going to happen this election lol. What I'm hoping for this election is a third party candidate gets enough votes that their third party becomes more mainstream and that over time we will have better options.
I’m just saying, your logic only works if enough people dont follow it. That kind of makes it bad advice.
When you’re aligning yourself with pro-fascists—or at least have the exact same tactics (minus an exception), you cannot be on the right side of history.
I’ve been wrestling with this for my whole life. I was a young anarchist, I’ve been a third party voter most of that time. Now I’m an adult anarchist. And…I just can’t bring myself to do exactly what pro-fascists are pushing for people just like me to do.
We all get it. The system is broken. Two party systems are doomed to be a road to fascism. We are reaching the end of that road. None of us can stomach what’s happening in Gaza. But gambling with an even more pro-genocide candidate winning just…can’t be tolerated. It doesn’t make emotional sense. Because we can’t stomach supporting someone who is participating in genocide. It hurts. But it’s kind of on us to bear the brunt of that conundrum because we are fighting bald-faced fascism. Getting to hold your head up high because you didn’t support the guy aiding in a genocide is a pretty small victory for gambling with the lives of Palestinian people. Trump wants to “finish” the situation in Gaza. And not in a good way.
It’s a shitty situation for us to have to negotiate. But we’re not the ones gambling with our own lives. We’re gambling with the lives of trans people, women who need abortions, those living in poverty, the environment…just so we can “send a measage?”
The system is arranged to keep third parties from being viable. Voting for them just doesn’t make sense, because there is no changing that without changing the system. Especially in this election. Because we are staring down the barrel of fascism, for one, and secondly, there isn’t enough support for the idea to really have the impact you want. It can only go bad. Waiting until the day of the election to send that message or put some plan to change things in place is so incredibly foolish when you consider all you’re gambling with. You want to change things? Put in the groundwork, year in, year out.
All you’re doing is throwing extra danger into the pot and supporting the people who are pushing your same messaging in order to see trump win. Just…how can you justify it?
So.. What is a two party system again? What's the difference to other systems? Also why are only Republicans and Democrats so popular?
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two party system is kind of a misnomer, there's plenty of other parties and potential parties in the US, a lot of which would theoretically correspond to larger parties in more healthy democratic states. The difference is that since the US operates on plurality voting, only two parties are ever going to have major influence in any electoral area, some countries like Canada and the UK have more diverse political ecosystems, but that's born more out of the ability of parties in both to form voting coalitions. In the US the Democrats and Republicans each encompass big tents that hold several groups that would otherwise be their own political parties.
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It's less that they're both popular and more that nobody is capable of organizing a meaningful alternative unless it happens to be during the one time of the political season when you really should have the alternative well established already. Both parties have been around for over a century now and have proven ideologically flexible enough to avoid the doom of prior parties like the Federalists, Democratic-Republicans, and Whigs that had previously held one of the two top spots.
I see a likely future where some great mechanism of upheaval will bring about a nation spanning voting reform in the US, and when that happens the Dems and the Republicans will likely remain as the two top players but now amidst a large field of options that are able to compete with one another without spoiling elections for the overall wing of the political spectrum they lay within, longer term would be harder to predict as those kinds of democracies haven't existed for long enough to observe how parties shift change and move forward and backward relative to one another over a more extended period than a few decades.
This is the important part to understand the difference between lets say the „European system“ vs. the „US system“:
In the US the Democrats and Republicans each encompass big tents that hold several groups that would otherwise be their own political parties.
The US negotiates the different political streams within one of the two parties before the elections. Whereas in most European countries these negotiations happen after the elections in coalition building. Have a look at scandinavian elections and you will see blocks that can be interpreted as a hybrid form.
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Stranger,
I'm happy to discuss and already biased into thinking you're a nice person because you didn't start off by being rude to me.🙂
I would prefer if you told me what you think directly without leading questions. Is that possible?
I also want to clarify, I know no third party candidate has a chance to win this election. But I believe the only nonviolent path we really have to get out of this two-party system is to elect 3rd party leaders. That is a long term strategy that will take many elections but the only way to get that ball rolling is to slowly build up the membership and votes for third party candidates. The safest way to do that is to encourage people in non-swing states to start voting for them.
That is my thought process.
