WYSK: There funded by dark money PACS, but some good reporting has brought out these names: David Koch, Peter Thiel, Reid Hoffman, Mark Cuban, Harlan Crow, and Michael Bloomberg. Some of there members are most famous for stopping big bills. Joe Leiberman, for example, single handedly stopped the single payer portion of the ACA. Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsen Simena kept the John Lewis voting rights act from passing, and famously kept the senate from repealing the filibuster.
Edit: please note that I made at least one mistake here (as well as some kind of boneheaded comments later). FPTP, even in the US, does not require a 50% majority, just more votes than anyone else (a “plurality”). It can still benefit parties to get to 50%, since it makes their winning more likely, and so in the absence of any drawbacks, most successful parties will still aim for it, but it isn’t strictly necessary, as has been sometimes demonstrated in the UK. Thanks to squaresinger for linking a YouTube video that mentions this below. /Edit
I just want to share my thoughts on this. It started as a response to one comment, but I realized that there’s a lot more that can (and I think should) be said, so here goes.
First, for those who don’t know, FPTP stands for First Past The Post, meaning a system where everyone votes for a single candidate and whoever gets more than 50% (i.e. “past the post”) wins the entire election (the losers get nothing). For many Americans, this might be so familiar that one would wonder how it could be any different (in a small-d democratic system), but there are in fact many alternatives: ranked voting, proportional representation, Condorcet method, etc.
They all have strengths and weaknesses, but for FPTP, and other similar systems, there’s a result in political science called Duverger’s law that says FPTP-like rules tend to cause a two-party system, essentially because because even if you don’t team up with a larger party you may disagree with on many issues, to get a majority, others will, and then they’ll win and you’ll get nothing. And since getting significantly more than 50% consumes party resources that might better be used elsewhere, but gives no reward, 50% (plus a small “safety margin”) is what all the successful parties will eventually aim for, and thus you get two roughly equally-successful parties. Tiny swings in voting then lead to massive differences in outcomes, which threatens the stability and security of everyone (even America’s “enemies”).
So saying “just vote for third parties” (like I see some calling for here) is tone-deaf at best, or part of a cynical ploy to fracture the opponent’s party at worst. Even if a “third party” does win, the best that can be hoped for under FPTP is they just end up replacing one of the two parties, becoming one of the two parties in the “new” two-party system. And the two existing parties have likely spent far more time and effort researching ways to stop even that from happening than any of us ever will.
If we, as Americans, or others with a stake in what America decides to do, want to change this (and I personally do), then we need far more fundamental changes to how the system works. Just choosing a candidate we like (whether they have any chance of winning or not) won’t cut it. I don’t know what’s the best voting system to use, but I know I’d like to scrap the Electoral College, for a couple reasons:
Even though one might argue that Congress and the Supreme Court are more essential to reform, it’s hard to deny that the President has a very large leadership role today.
One might argue that relying on a convoluted/Byzantine method for choosing the President makes it harder to manipulate, and that’s probably true, but the two parties have shown that it being difficult is not a deterrent to them doing so: in fact, they likely both benefit from it by keeping smaller parties that can’t afford to do it out.
It reminds me of the fallacy in computer security of “security through obscurity”: if it’s possible to break into the system, and large numbers of people can benefit substantially from it, then someone eventually will, no matter how hard we make it to exploit. We need to change the system, not only so that it is prohibitively difficult for anyone to exploit the system, but also to get rid of a lot of the corruption that makes most people want to exploit it in the first place.
All of this is much easier said than done, I know, but we need to explain clearly to the public why “quick fixes” won’t work, before we can convince them of the need for more fundamental changes. We still need to work on figuring out the details of the best changes, but unless we can show people the reality of the deep structural problems that acually exist, why they exist, and how we know we’re right about what we’re saying, we’ll never convince most people to change anything.
You are totally right. The problem isn’t zqthat such a change from within the system can only happen from a position of immense power. So to actually fix these bugs you need to
Now, to make matters more difficult, representative democraties usually spread that power over hundreds or thousands of people. So not only you need to fit the bill above, but also the top few hundred politicians in your country need to agree to potentially losing their power.
So what tends to happen is the opposite: Politicians amass power and make it harder and harder to replace them, until a war/civil war/revolution happens and the next crowd tries to make it better.
The US has had centuries to concentrate power, contrary to many European nations that were re-founded after wars in the last century.
So unless the US as we know it collapses, there won’t be significant change to the better for the political system.
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Sadly it is just as easy to just squash the protest and be done with it. France has major problems with riots since a while. Mostly because of racism, police violence and inescapable poverty.
So who does Macron blame for the riots? TikTok and parents who didn’t teach their children how to behave correctly.
What does he do? Kart in more police with heavier anti-riot gear.
Same with Russia, Turkey or Poland. People don’t like the government? No problem, just grad random people from the protests and send them to a gulag. The rest of the protesters will get scared and fall in line. Done.
Sure, at some point a tipping point might come. Then you get a revolution or a civil war, and then the dice are in the air. Could be you get a new, super democratic government that tries to fix the system. Or you could get a military dictatorship. You never know.
Sorry, I am pretty disilusioned by all this. Representative democracy just makes it too easy for populism to blind the electorate (“Don’t look at me, while I shovel lots of government money into my pockets, look at the evil immigrant over there!”), and there is far too much temptation for corrupt politicians to extend their power.
And there are no real checks and balances in any system I have seen so far.
E.g. the USA: Yeah, the house, the senate, the president, the surpreme court and all, they should separate the power and they should check and balance eachother. Problem is, the writers of the constitution totally forgot that parties could be a thing. And the checks and balances just plainly don’t work if all these offices are dominated by the same party.
Yeah, my last response was way too half-baked, I didn’t really put as much thought into it as I thought I had, and I didn’t like how close I was getting to sounding like I wanted violence (even though I don’t). So I deleted it, to avoid spreading these worrisome comments (to myself, anyway) any more than I already did. I’m not sure exactly how effective “deleting” really is on a federated network like this, which I’m very new to, and I also don’t want to annoy people by deleting comments after they reply to them. So I’m sorry for being annoying, if I have been, and hopefully I’ll have some better takes once I get more used to being on Lemmy.
Relevant video regarding the UK, which is in a similar situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YoLJ1ggJ3P0
That was an interesting video, and I either didn’t realize or it just didn’t “click” in my head that it was possible for FPTP to lead to wins with even less than 50% of the vote. Now that I think about it, I looked up the US situation on Wikipedia, and yes, in most states FPTP is used but it’s possible to win with a “plurality” (largest number of votes in the state or district, but not necessarily 50% or more)! The point about there being no advantage to getting more than 50% (of votes, not seats) still stands, and it still can be advantageous up till that point, but confusing plurality for “majority” (strictly 50% or more) still bit me. I’ll add a note to my original comment to reflect that. Thanks for the good link!
I really like TLDR news. They are good!
Yeah, while you are at at, look up Gerrymandering. That’s drawing electoral districts in a way so that your own party gets ~55% in most districts, with the opposition voters bunched up in few districts, so that they ideally get >90% of the votes in these districts. In FTTP systems, every vote above 50% is lost, so that way you can make the opposition lose lots of seats.
And that’s only one way to hack the system, when you are in power. Another option that is widely used is vote suppression. If e.g. the opposition voters tend to be poor, and tend to not have any photo ID (as is the case in many areas in the USA), then you can just introduce a law that makes it mandatory to have photo ID, so that many opposition voters cannot vote.
Or you can make a certain level of English knowledge mandatory, to prohibit some minority groups from voting.
And if you have a look at the US presidential election, this becomes more striking. The last time a republican actually won the popular vote was in 2004, when George W. Bush was re-elected. But even when he was elected for the first time, in 2000, he did lose the popular vote.
The last time a republican came into the office winning the popular vote was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush came into office.
If the US had a popular vote system, the democrats would have won 7 of the last 8 elections, instead of 4 out of 8.
One of the biggest problems with making this change is that in areas where one party is dominant, voters of that party are afraid of changing the system because they fear it’ll mean that they won’t dominate anymore.
In Canada our current prime minister had campaigned on changing us from a FPTP to something else. In the end he commissioned a team to discuss feasibility of changing and they came back with the result that it’s not worth. Probably because of all of the reasons outlined. We also need electoral reform, especially at a provincial level. Our federal elections have 5 main parties that receive votes but only 3 that are actually contenders for PM. But at a provincial level it’s way more likely to be 2 parties FPTP. At least those have been my observations as an Albertan. I may be a bit off on some things, if I am I’m sure someone will point it out 👍.
I like your pm