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BadmanDan @lemmy.world

What's stopping leftist from SERIOUSLY creating their own Party?

Context, I’m a liberal, who’s voted Democratic every election I’ve been able to.

I’ve constantly see you guys complain and bash Democratic politicians pretty much since the rise of populism with Sanders in 2016.

I just want to know if populism is so great and Democrats are out of touch, and if you ran on just economic populism, and ignore social issues (which the right won’t), you’d easily win every election right? So by that logic, gaining massive support from all sides of the political spectrum should be easy right? Everyone says it’s all about messaging and vibes. And the Dems are failing at both, so wouldn’t right now be the best time to seriously back a fully populist leftist party? If a majority of the country polls high for Medicare for All, by proxy, they should vote for the candidates promising that, and they don’t talk about social issues that might scare off right wingers willing to vote for them.

I just don’t understand the mindset of constantly infighting with us liberals and protest voting hurting our causes. Just start your own party and beat us within YOUR system. We’ll never fully drop social issues, so we’ll never win a fair amount of conservatives, but you guys can.

11 comments

  • You'd need to vote for proportional representation first. First-past-the-post creates 2 extremely strong parties, and all other parties have a very hard time being perceived as a viable choice that makes a chance.

    • Not only that, but FPTP mathematically will always pull the two parties to the center, a hair's breadth apart from one another, because anyone who wanders off into "their" territory will start to lose elections because of it.

      I mean... well, that's how it works mathematically. It's not even really applicable to modern US politics. What's happening in modern US politics is that:

      1. The voters are so addled by propaganda that they can't even really tell what's going on, and mostly make decisions based on pure engineered fantasy instead of based on anything that's actually happening ("Immigration is a problem! Trump is going to fix that problem!" and similar beliefs)
      2. Even through the fog of propaganda, there are some things that they're able to figure out (health insurance companies are a massive problem and we shouldn't let billionaires keep all of our work output while we're struggling to pay rent and buy eggs). But, the people in Washington by and large don't support fixing any of those things, because the people who pay their bills don't agree with the obvious solutions that 85% of the people would support.
      3. Party machinery and media monopolization (and now, social media propaganda) prevent anyone who's invested in those popular things -- the "center" that FPTP math would normally be pulling the politicians towards -- from gaining any traction or being able to put anything better than a cruel caricature of it into practice (see also the ACA).

      Basically, we fucked. But, if we someone managed to unfuck those massive problems, then we'd still be faced with FPTP pulling everyone to "the center." But, on the other hand, "the center" would be way better than the current American system of one conservative party running against one openly fascist party and like 5-10 rabble-rousers on the left running around Washington and making noise about how really in a perfect world it shouldn't be like that.

  • Lack of ranked choice voting. First past the post means we will always be voting for the “lesser of two evils”.

    • Ranked choice would also address the whole treating a party as a team sport and other stupid reasons that don't anything to do with which party currently matches what they want.

11 comments