When I hear people bitching about other people voting third party, I wonder why they can’t grok the idea of “neither major party represents me.”
Both major parties want greater control over major aspects of society and my personal life that I do not wish them to control. They only differ on which aspects. I will not throw a vote to either just so (general) you can feel like your party is a little closer to winning.
Even to keep a demonstrably incompetent, untruthful and corrupt person out of the Oval Office?
I am doing that by not voting for him.
Voting for your guy just because he isn’t Trump would mean betraying myself.
FTR, Democrats and Progressives telling me how awful Trump is are wasting their time. I’ve known that since Reagan was POTUS. I didn’t vote Trump last time and have no intention of doing so this time. If you want me to vote for Joe “Peckerhead” Biden, or whoever you end up running, you have to convince me how wonderful s/he is.
For me, anyone not as corrupt, immoral and incompetent as Trump needs our full support. They don’t have to be “wonderful.” If Jeb Bush somehow got the Democratic nomination, he’d have my vote and a check to his campaign on top of it. In my view, it’s not the time to worry about who will give me the best gun policy, or the best health care plan. It’s time to get rid of the vile man in the White House. We can worry about policy later. First, lets try to save what’s left of the soul of our nation.
When I hear people bitching about “neither major party represents me” I wonder how entitled one must be to assume that one of the parties must align perfectly with their own personal views. Guess what, you are one of over 300 million of us. Nobody gets their own personal party that aligns 100 percent with us. Nobody. Why are you special?
Put me down as another in-between and wishes the two parties would get less extreme. Healthcare for all, sure. Legalize marijuana, sure why not, people shouldn’t be in jail for smoking plants. LGBT/minority rights, yes, everyone should be treated equally. But I have never understood why Democrats support all the Constitution except the 2nd Amendment.
Christ, neither one represents me either. I can’t stand the lot of them. When I vote for the Democrat, I’m not joining their shitty team, I’m not giving them a trophy, I’m not high-fiving them. I’m pushing the trolley onto the less shitty of the tracks it can go onto.
It’s not about you. Your ego, your self-betrayal, shouldn’t factor into it. When third-party voters do this, when they make it about their own purity, about some cosmic “Be true to yourself” nonsense, it results in people getting hurt. It’s the same error a pacifist makes when deciding not to stop a violent crime, because they don’t want to betray themselves.
Idealism is nice for them as can afford it.
And I never understand how people can sacrifice everything else that makes America what it is at the altar of the 2nd Amendment. Considering there will never be enough pro gun control Senators that are extreme enough to pass anything close to the paranoid fever dreams of a disarmed populace that I keep hearing about. It seems, to be honest, kind of insane to me.
I’ll grant that, for example, Oakminster’s fidelity to a policy that no electable politician holds, at the end of the day, just disenfranchises him from holding any political power.
But it is worth noting that the current way we vote and the parties are all real bad. I mean, the last election was between corrupt and stupid-corrupt. The next election is looking to repeat the Gore experience and put up Ivory Tower idealism against stupid-corrupt.
People say that the parties can’t capture the middle because the middle don’t stand for anything. There’s no policy that you can pick that they all agree to and will glom onto. But, like, if you go to a group of people and say, “Hey everyone, I know what: Let’s all buy green Honda Civics and everyone will drive those to work!” Err…why we are limiting ourselves to “green Honda Civics”? Why are you confused that some people seem excited about that and most don’t?
Parties are, fundamentally, groups of people who don’t understand the idea that there’s more than one way to skin a cat and that people are different. A reasonable person will agree that a Honda Civic is a perfectly reasonable car. Yes, it would just fine for going to work in. However, I want a BMW and I can afford a BMW and there’s no real reason for me to not have a BMW. Why are you telling me that I need to select one - yes it’s a reasonable one that will function, but that’s still stupid - and why in the world do you think that I’d be excited by the idea and that most people would be excited by the idea?
Independents aren’t weird and inexplicable. They’re just normal. Actually normal. They realize that there isn’t one magical solution that will solve everything. They care more that you seem like you’re not a crank than that you are trying to sell them with some particular piece of policy, dangled on the end of a stick. There are different policy options, with different pros and cons, and no one expects otherwise and it’s silly to think that there would only ever be two policy options for every issue nor that those two are magically going to be perfect - except crazy partisans.
And everyone has lost sight of that and come to accept the idea that the parties are selling something worth buying and that you should be choosing between Green Honda Civics or Red Jaguars (AND THERE ARE NO OTHER OPTIONS! THERE ARE ONLY THOSE TWO OPTIONS!!!)
You are disenfranchised by leaving the big two.
But accepting the big two is basically accepting greenlighting irrational people to lead everything.
We’ve reached the end point of feasibility for that strategy.
Simple: Democrats don’t support all the Constitution except the 2nd Amendment. First, a lot of Dems support the 2nd amendment as they read it, and as 4 of the 9 court members read it in Heller.
Second, what Democrats support the 3/5 compromise?
There’s zero reason why we should treat the Constitution like a holy book. It was written by a bunch of extremely smart, extremely wise, extremely racist, extremely wealthy dudes, folks who couldn’t imagine cars, much less wifi. Of course folks should think critically about this document just like they do everything else.
I agree. Earlier I said it was a trolley problem, and we have one of two tracks the trolley could be pushed onto, and lots of much better tracks it won’t get pushed onto.
On election day, if you’re not helping to push the trolley onto the less-harmful of the two possible tracks, you’re fucking up.
And if you’re not trying to build a better set of tracks for the rest of the time, you’re also fucking up.
I’m 100% in favor of making stronger third parties all year long. But when it comes to election day, if an election is anywhere close, ya gotta vote for a possible winner.
All you are offering me is that I get to elect the people who I know in advance are going to do things that I don’t want them to do. Fuck that.
Hilariously, on right-leaning boards that I visit, they rail at 3rd party voters in almost identical words to yours.
If you have no core beliefs and principles that you are unwilling to betray, what do you care who is elected anyway? Either one should be fine with you.
As somebody who has private insurance:
Medicare-for-all would have to try REALLY hard to be shittier than my insurance.
I used to be a Green Party member simply because I saw the Dems and Reps as not too different from each other, but I got an important lesson early on in 2000 when Nader threw a wrench in the election (I was a Floridian back then which made it worse). We are a two-party system and it would take major changes to our electoral system to change that. After that I voted straight Dem, not out of any love of the Democratic Party, but because they were the only thing stopping the Reps.
The difference is these days the Dems actually have people that share my views, like Sanders, Warren, and AOC. And stopping Trump should be the most important factor.
“I get to”: you’re doing it again. This isn’t about going down to Chucky Cheese and getting to play the Star-Wars themed Skee-ball game. “Get to” has jackshit to do with it.
Of course those sonsabitches are gonna do things you don’t want them to. They’re terrible people.
It’s not about that. It’s about taking your ego out of the decision, knowing that whoever gets the power is gonna do something awful with it, and giving that power to the assholes who are slightly less awful.
If you don’t get your hands dirty, it might go to the more awful assholes.
How you can feel good about yourself because you let the worse assholes get it, I don’t understand.
This profoundly misunderstands what I’m saying.
No, I understand you perfectly. I don’t agree with you. That, I think, is where I will stop.
You said, “If you have no core beliefs and principles that you are unwilling to betray,” implying that I have none. The charitable conclusion is that you misunderstand me.
To be precise, I actually told Oakminster…
You do you. If the only possible reason a person could disagree with you is that s/he doesn’t understand you, then you take that and run with it. Run wild and run free. I am done discussing the matter with you.
What is insane to me is voting for someone who says he supports doing something I do not want done. Dude says I will do X. I find X unacceptable. It matters not whether the current congress critters are likely to pas X. There will be more congressional elections during this guy’s term, and those may go in the direction of X. Therefore, I won’t vote for Dude. Don’t give a damn what other people think I should do with my vote. Really. Look at me. This is me not giving a damn what anyone thinks about how I vote. I might even shake my booty while I’m busy not giving a damn…and voting for whoever I please, from any party…even a party unlikely to win.