During the Obama years, some of the Republican Party’s leading finance wing bosses started playing with fire. The Koch Brothers poured a fortune into the creation of the Tea Party, a hardline group that made it clear that the would rather lose elections than lose the culture war. They primaried career GOP politicians and replaced them with swivel-eyed loons (and normie politicians who were willing to vote like swivel-eyed loons).

These hardliners changed the conservative coalition’s balance of power. By making it clear that they would rather see Democrats in office than Republicans who reneged on their culture war promises, they put the fear of (an evangelical) God into their leaders.The Tea Party marked a turning point for the US conservative movement and then conservative movements around the world.

Hardline conservative policies — total abortion bans, groomer panics, institutionalized racism, historical revisionism, support for white nationalist — are not popular.

Ideas like universal medical care, expanded transit, humane immigration policies and infrastructure spending enjoy commanding majority support among both Republicans and Democrats.But the hardliners threw the steering-wheel out the window. They’ve made it clear to GOP party bosses that they would rather lose elections than lose the culture war.

- The Right's Hardliners Would Rather Lose Elections Than Culture Wars: and the finance wing knows it

I'm begging y'all to understand this:

The U.S. mostly has a first-past-the-post voting system. The candidate with the most votes wins and there are no prizes for second place. If a district goes 49% Democratic and 51% Republican, the Republicans win the district

This makes a two party system almost inevitable because in a system with more than two parties, the instant one party gets the support of over a third of the population, the other parties cannot compete unless they join forces

And a two party system means, crucially, that if you want to get more voters, there are only two ways to get them:

Get more people to vote that ordinarily wouldn't vote at all.

Take voters from the other party.

That's it.

The reason Democrats are "not radical enough" is that, if they can't turn non-voters into voters, to get more people to vote Democratic, they have to appeal to Republicans enough to convince them to change sides. There's nowhere else to get people from.

The reason the country seems to "skew" Republican over time is not because of Democrats caving to goalpost moving, it's because of gerrymandering and our system prioritizing land area over people's votes

If 51% of voters in my district vote Republican, it's a republican district. If 51% of districts are Republican districts, the state is a "red state." That state can end up with all republican representatives even if there are barely more Republicans than Democrats

Being more spread out makes it easier for Republicans to dominate districts, too. It's like the land is voting instead of the people.

Hot take, but if you're sick of voting for the lesser evil in the US, you gotta look into the movement to push for ranked choice voting.

Like, legit, "first past the post" as a concept is one of the big reason most major elections in the US have no viable alternatives beyond "the fascist party" and "everyone else, but headed up by corrupt neoliberal weenies" in most main elections, and if that were to change in a major way, it would be so much better on all levels.

Like, legit, look up the efforts in your state and see what you can do, especially if they're trying to get this issue on the ballot in 2024 like this group in my state is, it's an underrated issue but one I think is vital.

First Past the Post needs to die. This is so absurd it borders on comedy.

The Ontario NDP and Liberals both are polling/projected at around 25%, the Ontario NDP has a lower % than the Liberals but is expected to win 13X more seats than the Liberals.

The Greens have 6% support but would be expected to win 1 seat (0.80% of the seats).

The Conservatives are at 41% but are expected to win 76% of all seats.

🙃🙃🙃

Tagging: @politicsofcanada

USA's two-party system is an abomination.

Consider Republican party. The fact that there are only two parties forces all of these to band together in support of it:

-Evangelical Christians

-Proud ideological sucessors of Nazis

-Rich assholes and wannabe rich assholes (libertarians)

-Professional con men (also libertarians)

-Incels

-Paranoid uneducated rural people who both feel underrepresented at the federal level and buy into "the Left wants to legalise pedophilia!1!" bullshit

-Cultured, intelligent, kind Catholics who love their neighbors no matter their race or income, and may even be weakly supportive of LGBT; who would have been otherwise stauch enemies of the GOP and all of the groups above... if they weren't brainwashed into feeling they have a moral obligation to protect the lives of the fetuses more than the actual human beings

The latter two groups are the most disgusting to me precisely because I can see they are not entirely bad people deep down, and seeing them destroy their potential for goodness like that is... The two-party system must be destroyed just so these people could have a better choice than to team up with neo-Nazis.

So its important to understand that the US has always had a two party system, starting right after George Washington's election our politics have been dominated by two major political groups. Federalists vs. AntiFederalists, Federalists vs. Democratic Republicans, Democratic Republicans vs. Democrats, Democrats vs Whigs, Democrats vs. Republicans, and then the two parties changing what Democrat and republican meant for about 150 years. And its due to our voting method, we have a First Past the Post Voting system, which means that to win an election you don't need a majority of the votes, just a pluroality.

So lets say that the 2024 presidental election comes down to AOC, Biden, and Trump (ignoring the electoral college) The people who would vote for AOC are likely people who would have otherwise voted for Biden, which splits the vote. So Trump wins lets say 40% of the vote, while Biden wins 38, and AOC wins 20%. Despite the fact that only 40% of the nation voted for him, Trump because the president, nevermind the fact that literally 60% of the nation voted against him. So in that scenerio, it would be stupid to vote for AOC, even though she is objectively the better choice. Its basic mathematics, voting third party in a First Past the Post System is self destructive.

So all that being said, I think that the Gop has been losing the last group for awhile now, anybody who is still with them at this point I don't think are really kind

This distinction between the ‘metropolitan multicultural bubble’, and the ‘left-behind post-industrial town’ is a trope that captivates pundits across the political spectrum despite the fact that age, profession and home ownership work as much better predictors for voting patterns. Depressingly, these lazy binaries between city and town, multicultural and white, thriving and forgotten, have been echoed increasingly by people associated with the Labour Party in the wake of the 2019 December election. To the extent that such distinctions between city and town hold, they are an effect of the UK’s constituency-based, first-past-the-post electoral system, wherein voters in marginal seats hold all the electoral sway. Rather than critiquing this system, and the limitations it sets on the formation of left-wing constituencies, these commentators have decided to reinvigorate tropes about the ‘left behind’ and their ‘legitimate concerns’, joining the chorus of politicians floundering to resolve the issues in ‘towns’ and ‘heartlands’.

Empire's Endgame: Racism and the British State

Absolutely hilarious that they're trying to pull this line about an election where the Democrat got 48.77% in the first round against two republicans who combined got 49.08%

Like, guys, do you really think either R would've gotten literally 98.8% of the other R's votes?

Canada needs electoral reform at every level. One of the worst things about First Past the Post (FPTP) is being pressured to vote strategically.

Must be a Sugondese joke.

What Canada really needs is senate reform!

All of the major political parties have scuffed policies when it comes to the senate!

For example, the NDP and Bloc want to abolish it, the Liberals want to appoint liberals disguised as independents to the senate, and the Conservatives want it to be business as usual while they appoint "conservatives" to be senators.

Canada's upper house is based off of the UK's House of Lords but why must we take the bad aspects of it?

Canadian's deserve a senate that is:

Of the people

By the people

For the people

Canada needs an elected senate!

it’s always “your redemption is something you have to work towards for the rest of your life” and never “how was the unhinged spiral into evil? the unhinged spiral into evil looked fun”

It’s true that the Democrats’ finance wing is just as invested in not paying taxes or workers and just as committed to despoiling the Earth as their Republican counterparts.

Sure, they pay lip service to social progressivism, but it’s the anemic form of progressivism that promises to replace a world where everything is run by 150 white, male CEOs with a world where half of those CEOs are people of color, queer, and/or women.

But there is a crucial difference between Republicans and Democrats: Republican party bosses hate their base, but also fear them. They know that the base would rather give an election to Dems than elect Republicans who sell them out.By contrast, the Democratic Party’s grandees have zero fear of the base or the party’s left wing.

For decades, they simply assumed that union members, people of color and progressives would Vote Blue No Matter Who. They sold us out and told us they had no choice, and we just ate shit.

- The Right's Hardliners Would Rather Lose Elections Than Culture Wars: and the finance wing knows it

Some thoughts on our voting system, 3rd party voters, and my internal struggle between my understanding of 3rd party voters frustration, and my red-hot anger at them for splitting the Democratic vote when we have literal *FASCISTS* running within the other party:

Going to start this by saying I literally do despise people that ignore the dangers of the spoiler effect. But I also understand being frustrsted with both parties. I don't like Biden *that much*. I don't hate him, but I'm constantly frustrated by his refusal to be harder on the other side, and play hardball. I'm tired of him doing things that don't work when the other party is literal fascists, and right now we do not need a compromiser, we need a *fighter*. But that being said, we don't have any choice other than him atm, because either Trump or DeSantis will be the Republican nominee in 2024. And a similar situation of milktoast Democrats versus literal Fascist Republicans will be the case in future elections as well. That's just the reality of things. But that doesn't mean I don't have an idea for a solution to the problem. It just means my solution isn't something that we can accomplish by voting 3rd party in the short term.

To start with, while I hate that we have to vote for the lesser of 2 evils, the solution to that is (just to stress that earlier point even more) a bit more complicated than just voting for a 3rd party. Unfortunately it's very hard to overcome the 2 parties in a First Past the Post voting system. There's a lot we need to change, our voting system included (and not just the Electoral College, but *fuck* does that need to go). We need to adopt a Ranked Choice voting system to make it more competitive for 3rd parties, without such a massive risk of creating a spoiler effect.

Problem is, neither of the 2 major parties wants to do so, and voting for a 3rd party has that spoiler effect risk. So what's the solution that's most likely to work? You build support for Ranked Choice inside not just 3rd parties, but even more so inside both major parties, til even the politicians running in said parties can't ignore it. It's a solution that takes longer, but it's a much safer option that's more likely to work, without people risking an Election of 1912 scenario in which someone wins the Presidency that nearly 60 percent of the population doesn't want them to win. People don't want a plan that takes patience, and they want something right now, but that's the only real way to get rid of the 2-party system.

Sure, it's possible for a 3rd party to win elections on a massive scale and end up winning the Presidency, but that always comes after one of the 2 major parties becomes so badly divided that it offshoots into a 3rd party that most of that said major party joins, and also enough of the other major party, and it results in the dissolution and replacement of the first major party. And then the cycle of the 2-party system repeats.

In conclusion: You can't get rid of First Past The Post *permanently* just by voting 3rd party, and more often than not that tactic just backfires in your face. Build support for Ranked Choice within the entire populace on both sides of the aisle and within both major parties til politicians on both sides have no choice but to support it to win their primaries and the parties themselves have to add the adoption of ranked choice to their overall platforms, and it's much more likely to change our voting system to one which favors 3rd parties in the long run. The "lesser of 2 evils" voting will never cease to be a thing unless we get rid of our First Past The Post voting system itself, and what I described above is what I believe to be an actually viable solution.

P.S. I am really not looking to be ganged up on by 3rd party voters and people that *really support* one of the 2 major parties, and will probably turn off notifications on this post (if Tumblr has that feature). This is just a solution that I believe is the only viable one available to us. I realize my wording on despising people that ignore the spoiler effect will make some of you angry, but try to look past that part and think about the logic of my solution itself. Call me an asshole if you want, that's fine, just consider the idea itself too.

https://lnkd.in/eMv2rX8j https://lnkd.in/erHmeXcn Explain how and why the Conservative majority UK Parliament at Westminster, London and beyond is no longer fit for purpose. AI Open Source GPT Chat Llewelyn Pritchard MA 27 April 2023 

was supposed to be a valentines day post but i needed a bit more time to finish the coloring. anyways, yes, SU reference :]

[ID in ALT] I've made posts before about Talia/Dick co-parenting Damian moments (will never happen but let me dream) and this came to me in a vision. Took me ages to finish for some reason 😭 and then even longer to post