The E wrote:n7axw wrote:First money in politics. Yeah, That's a serious issue. But I'm a bit less worried about it now than when the Citizens United came down from the Supreme Court. First, money only speaks so loud. It has been demonstrated that a good candidate with strong grass roots support can prevail, even with less money. Secondly, it has been proven that a host of small dollar donations can outmuscle the big donors. Again that happens with a good candidate with strong grass roots support.
That gets you some good candidates, but they, too, require exceptional circumstances, i.e. an exceptional level of personal charisma and an exceptional level of community engagement.Secondly, overall corruption of the electoral system... Actually, no. Our elections have a pretty strong record for integrity.
Yes, they do. That's not what I meant by corruption and damage.Usually the results reflect the public mood pretty well.
Yes, but if your electoral districts are gerrymandered to hell and back, it doesn't matter how well the election result represents the people in the district; the result will still be distorted.
Secondly, the winner-takes-all nature of most elections forces a binary outcome between the two largest parties; This is fine in a competitive district, but disastrous when there is an "eternal" majority for one or the other party; in those districts, and there are a lot of them, you have problems where candidates are either unchallenged or unable to be challenged from anyone but a more extreme candidate and more importantly, the people who are in the minority in those districts have no incentive to vote, let alone run for office, given the uphill battle they face.
This is something that is solved in democracies that treat political parties as an integral part of the system rather than an emergent effect of it; there are mechanisms available there to make sure that parties that can't gain a majority in any one district can still influence politics if they gain a large enough share of the overall vote, which leads to a more pluralistic and less polarized political climate.On the presidential level, we do have some issues...esp. the Electoral College. But still, we have had a series of good men elected to the office in my lifetime, the exceptions being Nixon and Trump.
I'm not going to argue that the system you have to elect your [s]king[/s]president is completely broken, but it, too, forces binary outcomes between the two largest parties and requires a level of financial support that is hard to obtain.
Which, again, skews the candidates available for election towards being more conservative and less willing to really change the status quo.Until Trump I never doubted that however vehemently I might have disagreed with policy, the man sitting in the Oval Office had the country's best interest at heart. We do have issues with voter suppression to deal with... and gerrymandering. But those problems are solvable.
Yes, they are .... or rather, they would be, if there wasn't a high level of institutional resistance against it. I hope that it happens, I really do, but ... there are many problems that need to be addressed in this regard.Finally, the effectiveness of protests... E has a point. Things can get frustrating when change comes so slowly. But change does come. African American people are better off now than in the 50s even though the journey ahead seems long. Martin Luther King said, "the arc of the universe bends toward justice." Yes, but it bends slowly. Nonviolent protest is an idea that King got from Ghandi. I have often wondered how nonviolent protest would have worked had Ghandi have been dealing with Nazis rather than Brits. I'm afraid that his accomplishment would have been to stack up bodies. Nonviolence assumes that the other guys have a conscience. When push came to shove, the Brits did have conscience. That's why Ghandi succeeded. I believe that we Americans have a sense of conscience as well.
Gandhi's and MLK's success was in making the establishment flinch, in building enough Empathy with their cause that to put their protests down with violence was seen as an impossibility. But... consider Standing Rock. Consider BLM. Even as protests about police violence erupted nation-, even worldwide, the police did not cease to be brutal. Quite the opposite, in fact; The number of recorded and verified incidents of unwarranted police brutality and subsequent coverups during these past few weeks alone is astonishing. There was little to no hesitation to use violence here; no indication of the same sort of willingness to step back from the brink on the side of the authorities that happened with Gandhi and MLK.
Change in these matters does come slowly, yes. But it doesn't come at all if the establishment is not occasionally reminded that they rule by consent, not by fiat.
I am a bit more optimistic than you are about the possibility of fixing things, but overall your post nails it. One thing I failed to mention has been the radicalization of the Republican Party starting with Gingrich. I hope they can fix it. But If they don't, I don't know what's coming. Possibly as evolution to a multiparty system?.. I don't know.
Don
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