The democrats have failed to deliver on their promises. Plain and simple. What have the Democrats accomplished in the last 12 years? They are a centrist party. A very shitty one. I could imagine a centrist party that ends the patriot act, cuts spending, ends the bush tax cuts, ends the war in Afganistan, protects gay rights. Some of these are popular ideas among the people but the Democrats have failed on every single one of these.
Not so Will. The first 2 years of the Obama administration had the most productive Congress in Post War history. That’s not hyperbole: it’s simply hard to pick out an alternative (largely because Civil Rights legislation during the 1960s was passed in 2 consecutive congressional sessions).
The stimulus package and the Affordable Choice Act were 2 historical pieces of legislation passed during the same Congress. The stimulus package worked, as evidenced by every major economic forecaster in the US. The Affordable Choice Act cut the long run deficit and received plaudits from health care analysts as it ended insurance company abuses such as rescission – if you pay your insurance bills, you can’t have Blue Cross yank away coverage on a technicality just because you came down with an expensive illness. These are solid, responsible policies.
The troops are out of Iraq. Bin Laden is killed and his records are captured. Ending the War on Terror as a matter of rhetoric left Al Qaeda flummoxed: in the end Bin Laden was grasping at straws, hoping to rebrand his organization which had become poison during the Obama administration. When the Arab Spring appeared, their presence was trivial.
Student loans were overhauled: no longer could banks capture huge and pointless administrative fees. The Lily Ledbetter Act was passed. Dodd-Frank passed Chairman Volker’s proposal. And the auto industry was saved in the teeth of libertarian whining.
All of those accomplishments were made without an ounce of Republican cooperation – their sole contribution was economic sabotage. Subsequent to 2008’s worst financial crisis in Post War history, Republicans wouldn’t seat mid-level members to the US Treasury for longer than a year! And it wasn’t due to any problems they had with the appointees. It was just because.
I’ll just say that I’m shocked, shocked, to see Tom Friedman proven wrong.
The next six months will be crucial, though.
Okay, once again, if you don’t like the two-party duopoly, there are better things than Americans Elects’ way that you can do about it!
The problem with our present system for electing Congresscritters or members of any multimember policymaking body, from any third-partisan’s point of view, is that a first-past-the-post single-member-district system naturally forces a two-party system. Consider: Suppose, in your state’s next election, 10% of the voters vote Libertarian (or substitute Green, or Socialist, or Constitution Party, whatever, same mechanics apply) – how many Libertarians get elected? None, because there are not enough Libertarians in any one district to form a plurality (majority = 50%+; plurality = more votes than any other candidate gets – which is all you need to win). No political party, therefore, can make it save by being a “big tent” party – which leads to the confusion as to, e.g., just what the GOP stands for these days, when it includes libertarians and paleocons and neocons and theocons and bizcons and those factions don’t always see eye-to-eye. That is why America has always had a two-party political system, except when it had a one-party system. There is no room for more than two.
If you don’t like that, join FairVote and fight for proportional representation. Under a PR system (which most of the world’s democracies use, in one form or another), if the Libertarians get 10% of the votes, they get (more or less) 10% of the seats.
See also:
Instant-Runoff Voting: For filling a single seat, presidency, governorship, etc.; though it could also be used to elect legislators. The way it is now, if there are more than two candidates in the race, you have to pick just one – which presents the “spoiler” problem – in 2000, a vote for Buchanan was a vote for Gore and vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. With IRV, you get to rank-order the candidates by preference; if your first choice does not get a majority, your vote still counts to elect your second choice. E.g., you could have voted “1 – Buchanan; 2 - Bush; 3 - Gore; 4 - Nader”; or, “1 - Nader; 2 - Gore; 3 - Bush; 4 - Buchanan”; or whatever order-of-preference seems best to you.
(The similar approval voting or Condorcet system, where you just vote “yes” or “no” as to each of several candidates, does offer certain abstruse-to-all-but-polysci-nerds-even-worse-than-I advantages over IRV. But, I’m thinking IRV is better for America, because, 1) it’s an easier sell – the chances to rank-order the candidates is more psychologically satisfying to the voter; and 2) the results, how the voters rank-order the candidates, produces information of greater civic value.)
Electoral fusion: Simply, one candidate running as the nominee of more than one party (and, perhaps, on more than one ballot line). This strengthens a third party by putting it in a position to offer its endorsement to a major-party candidate (conditional, presumably, on the candidate adopting public positions somewhat closer to the third party’s), which could make all the difference in close races. Fusion is now illegal in most states, however.
Nitpick: Approval voting and Condorcet voting are two different things. Approval voting is as you describe, while Condorcet looks similar to IRV in the voting booth: You rank-order all the candidates, but the results are tallied in a different manner from IRV.
Well, if Condorcet and IRV are the same from the voter’s POV, that’s what matters most, I guess.
…except that the Condorcet system is difficult to explain. And it furthermore doesn’t always give a result – for that you need a backup method such as Borda. (Combining the two gives you the Black method, designed by the late economist Duncan Black, no relation to Atrios.)
I see that Approval methods are often not compared with Condorcet, probably because the latter is intrinsically ordinal, which approval has a difficult to characterize cardinal aspect. (Cardinal scales are compatible with multiplication: you can say that one tomato weighs twice as much as another for example. In contrast, temperature is a purely ordinal scale: in no meaningful sense is it twice as hot when it is 40 degrees than when it is 20 degrees.)
Boil all that down to something that can fit on a bumper-sticker, and we’re ready to go.
Approval voting has the massive advantage that it’s simpler for the voter to understand. A secondary advantage is that it scales well to multiple-member constituencies. You don’t have to bother ordering your candidates. Just vote for the ones you like and the most popular candidate wins. Rank-ordering is IMO not a sell for IRV because it’s too difficult for many people once you get more than a few candidates and if there are more than a few concurrent elections.