You have to go vote for the better of the two parties, because they are substantially different
South Park was a bit ahead of the curve, but they put it quite well: you’re voting between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Neither of them are what you want, but you’re stuck picking one of them.
While the current Democratic Party is still leagues ahead of the Republican Party, they’re not a party that actually cares about the layman either. They spent the last election trying to court conservatives, they refuse to act as an opposition party to Republicans, and the leadership keeps fucking over progressives.
What we need is to throw away the winner-takes-all voting system that created a two-party system where neither party has to care about representing their voters. First past the post crushes any chance of a real opposition party from being successful, and both Republicans and Democrats benefit from that.
Voting for the lesser evil is a moral obligation, but don’t forget that you’re still voting for an evil.
Great idea! Totally impossible to get there from here though. We need to envision and communicate actionable steps people can actually get behind with individual action.
“tear down and replace the US electoral system” is not such a step.
Yeah, that’s the problem unfortunately. Tearing down and replacing FPTP with PR on a national scale is not going to happen when the only parties capable of changing it benefit from not doing so.
I would like to hope people can put their differences aside for long enough that they can build up grassroots movements leading to a third party that actually wants to fix the system. With everything going on recently and decades of politicians intentionally sewing division between the working class to strengthen their own positions, I’m not so optimistic though.
South Park was a bit ahead of the curve, but they put it quite well: you’re voting between a giant douche and a turd sandwich. Neither of them are what you want, but you’re stuck picking one of them.
While the current Democratic Party is still leagues ahead of the Republican Party, they’re not a party that actually cares about the layman either. They spent the last election trying to court conservatives, they refuse to act as an opposition party to Republicans, and the leadership keeps fucking over progressives.
What we need is to throw away the winner-takes-all voting system that created a two-party system where neither party has to care about representing their voters. First past the post crushes any chance of a real opposition party from being successful, and both Republicans and Democrats benefit from that.
Voting for the lesser evil is a moral obligation, but don’t forget that you’re still voting for an evil.
Great idea! Totally impossible to get there from here though. We need to envision and communicate actionable steps people can actually get behind with individual action.
“tear down and replace the US electoral system” is not such a step.
Yeah, that’s the problem unfortunately. Tearing down and replacing FPTP with PR on a national scale is not going to happen when the only parties capable of changing it benefit from not doing so.
I would like to hope people can put their differences aside for long enough that they can build up grassroots movements leading to a third party that actually wants to fix the system. With everything going on recently and decades of politicians intentionally sewing division between the working class to strengthen their own positions, I’m not so optimistic though.