OK, you’ve been consistent on this for years. So have I.
Issues are not ideologies. They never should be. You don’t change ideologies from election to election and office to office. You don’t even have positions on most issues - if you think you do I’d advise you to flip through the Congressional Record and the Federal Register. Ideologies can change over time, but putting them at the center of a party creates fanaticism because it is almost impossible to compromise on ideologies. Politics is compromise. This difference between ideology and issues is at the core of my disagreement with you.
Optics, optics, and optics. If you think the perception of third party supporters is incorrect, then you need to work to correct that. The Internet isn’t doing much to help you, though. While you’re at it, show me the support that minorities have for leaving their power base in the Democratic Party to push their ideologies through third parties. Don’t try to convince me; try to convince them. (I live in New York, where the Working Families Party doesn’t even rise to the level of the Very Silly Party in influence.)
I don’t think the Elections forum in the Dope - a notorious bastion of white males - is going to do much for winning over minorities. Besides, if you can’t win over white males, then you have a lost cause indeed.
You seem to be saying that it’s a lose-lose, that what appeals to white males will alienate everyone else and vice-versa. I hope that’s not what you’re saying. If it were true, nothing in politics would ever get done at all.
No, first you show me the same WRT “white males.” And how is what you’re saying relevant anyway? As I made clear in the OP, the greatest obstacle to PR in America is that nobody knows what it is, a situation I am trying in some small way to correct. If they don’t know about it, then of course there is no “support” for it.
BG, you’re wrong with this one. The way to get PR (proportional representation) going is to find people who are now voting for GOP and Dem candidates but want a way to make them more accountable. You don’t get that by a coalition of the “crazies,” as much as by convincing people who don’t vote for third parties now to support a system where their vote counts for more. Cast PR as a way to break gerrymandering, as a way to make votes count for more–including votes for GOP and Dems. Because for most of us, that’s what it will be.
Ravenman, we already have partitocracy in this country. The political parties make people’s careers and extort votes. Weakening the major parties by creating a climate where there are a greater number of viable parties is a way to weaken the abusive party power you decry.
Think of it like this. Opening a competitor to Wal-Mart isn’t, “helping retail,” let alone, “helping Wal-Mart.”
Exapno Mapcase, for what it’s worth, the OP of this thread is wrong, as I said above. But some kind of PR (proportional representation) is a good way to get racial minorities in office, without trying to gerrymander districts where the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Forget the Commies and the minor issue-based parties; they’re not important, and they won’t be. There are more Hispanic voters than Libertarian voters. If someone wants to vote his ethnicity–or his religion, or his taste in cheese–PR lets him do that. So a Chicano in Jasper County, Missouri can vote for a Hispanic or pro-Hispanic candidate on that basis, and get that candidate in office, if that’s his choice. As it stands now, everyone in Jasper County is represented by some white Anglo who probably got the job through making pledges to the GOP and Grover Norquist, and nobody’s vote means a thing.
If the law were to recognize that brick and mortar stores are the official place to buy retail goods, I’d complain that shopping online is a better deal. If you want proportional representation, you get it one of two ways: strengthen parties to create slates, or create large multimember districts. I think both systems suck.
Once again, I’m asking you how it will look to people who are not ideologues of your stripe. If it is seen as a way to prevent minorities from gaining the power that seems within their grasp, it will fail even if it is a good idea. It’s not a good idea, IMO, but that’s irrelevant. You’re a utopian who sees only a total change of the system as a way to cure it. I see utopians as people who doom us to the status quo. They call for total change as step one. And that insures that nothing in politics ever gets done at all.
But that’s what I mean - and you mean - by de minimus. A minimum amount of the vote you have to get. Just don’t set it at the ridiculously high 30 percent, and you’ll be set. Otherwise it’s not PR.
Maybe, but today’s political climate is a product of the system too. Ultimately, party is an irrational way to vote, since candidates within parties may disagree as much as between them. There are still moderates and extremists.
You know what I’d really like to see? Monte Carlo democracy. Choose all of the members of, say, the House of Representatives by lot. Or leave a minimal amount of choice in it: Say, choose 435 registered voters completely at random as electors, and then each of those electors can choose anyone they want to fill a seat. Electors could pick established politicians, or that guy down at the bar who always seems to know what he’s talking about, or themselves if they wanted. This way you’d be guaranteed, on average, to be exactly representing the nation, across every demographic detail, without any of the paradoces of voting. Yeah, you’d get the occasional cranks, idiots, and crackpots chosen, but in a large enough body, their voices shouldn’t be too significant.
Let me state this a clearer way that I should have thought of before: my standard saying that a political party is full of kooks is a qualitative judgment, not a quantitative one. There is no de minimis percentage beyond which a political party is legitimized in my view.
That is known as demarchy, or selection by sortition. It certainly produces a true representative sample of the general public. The downside is that if we elected Congress that way, we would not have a Congress, we would have a focus group; it would be incompetent to do anything but vote up-or-down on proposals from the executive branch. Government is not jury duty; anything as complicated as government should be left to career professionals.
That you can’t see this even as a possibility says a lot.
Utopians are like that. They believe that everybody will see the wonderfulness as soon as it’s explained to them. But the real world doesn’t work like that. Whatever you do makes it worse for some people, partially because utopian schemes are insane*, partially because they look at the world in an entirely different way.
But you need to remember that I’m not trying to convince you of anything.
*Am I really saying that all utopian schemes are prima facie insane? Yes. I’ve spent a great deal of time studying utopias and that is my considered and informed opinion, albeit only an opinion.
You’ll note that I only proposed using it for one of the two houses. In practice, I expect that the representatives so chosen would end up loosely aligning themselves with parties, and that the party functionaries would do most of the actual work, plus of course the Senate could still draft bills and toss them over to the House in the same way they do currently.
PR is not a “utopian scheme,” it is a system which most of the world’s democracies/republics use in one form or another. It works. (It does present problems when combined with a parliamentary system of government – usually an election returns no majority-party to parliament, so you have to get two or more parties in coalition to “form a government” – but that problem does not arise under an American separation-of-powers system.)
I’m still waiting for your explanation as to how PR could imply, or serve, or be perceived as serving, a “white male” agenda. I’ve encountered all kinds of objections to it in my time, but never that. (Usually the reverse of that, in fact.) Once again, where are you getting this, please?!
PR is hardly a “utopian scheme.” It’s simply a different way of electing a legislature. Versions of it are used by about 50 or more countries today. Just stop this stuff please, and discuss it.
