Reply With QuoteSo your responsible for the Iraq war. I'm surprised you're so blasé about it. That you still believe voting for a third candidate is a good idea just reinforces my prejudice that you and your kind are useful idiots for the Republicans.
You're welcome to dismiss whoever you'd like, but your simplistic analysis leaves out the option of voting for a third party. If you don't like Obama's stance on civil rights, & recognize Romney would be worse, you can vote for the Green party candidate (just an example; I'm not sure what her position on drones is).Originally Posted by Ed Solomon
To me, that's a way to push for your values, & is better than not voting at all. The downsides are that: 1) your candidate has no way of winning this election, 2) people voting for the major parties will let you know that by throwing your vote away, you are allowing the socialists/fascists to win (there will also be something about how you're ignoring the Supreme Court implications of this election, which are always the most crucial in American history). So you may decide to compromise and vote for one of the major candidates.
I believe third parties serve as a way of highlighting issues currently ignored by the major parties. Whichever candidate loses, I suspect strategists for that party will be looking at third-party vote numbers & thinking of ways to incorporate some of their core principles into the mainstream Republican or Democratic talking points in future election cycles. So a third-party vote is a way to influence major party positions over the long-term. It may not appeal to most people, but if you have a strong conviction in an area that isn't currently of great concern to most Americans, I think it sends a stronger long-term message than simply not voting at all.
Full disclosure: I'm the voter who cost Democrats the 2000 election because I went for Nader. Sorry about that; folly of youth and all.
So your responsible for the Iraq war. I'm surprised you're so blasé about it. That you still believe voting for a third candidate is a good idea just reinforces my prejudice that you and your kind are useful idiots for the Republicans.
This is true, and has been a feature of American politics practically as long as American politics have existed. A two-party system is almost guaranteed by our Constitution's use of winner take all voting and an independent executive branch. Third parties occasionally supplant major ones when they die out (Republicans replacing Whigs, for example), but more often the issues they champion are co-opted by one or both of the major parties when they feel threatened by growing third party strength. Opting out of the Kodos/Kang or lizard false dichotomy is therefore a legitimate way to work for change.
In my eyes, Romney's the wrong lizard, but Obama's still a lizard. I'm not voting for either.
Full disclosure: my Presidential voting record up until this election cycle was Reagan/Bush/Clinton/Clinton/Gore/Kerry/Obama.
Last edited by Dave Markell; 08-13-2012 at 01:05 PM.
Why is the message sent here necessarily "We should incorporate some of these third party viewpoints into our base" instead of "We should move to nab more of the Democrat/republican intermediate base to make up for the nutballs who are okay with the elderly eating dog food as long as the spotted owl gets saved?"
It's entirely unclear to me that small scale support of what are essentially "extremist" positions is in any way, shape, or form constructive.
I don't think it's accurate to label a minority position as "extremist." For example, I believe both major parties are ignoring areas such as erosion of civil rights and enhanced regulation of the financial sector. Republics & Democrats are ignoring these issues because most Americans are currently more concerned with other areas.
Placing a high value on increased Wall Street oversight is a niche position right now, but it doesn't necessarily make it an extreme one. Increased future attention to the issue, IMO, won't take the Democratic party down a crazy ideological path.
Sidd, I'm sad to see no serious person has had the talk with you so far. Ideas are formed when a multi-billionaire and a think tank love each other very much.
Bush was responsible for the Iraq War. And since the margin of victory in his election was >1, there was nothing Sidd_Budd could have done to stop him. So it makes perfect sense for him to vote his conscience, rather than waste it on the losing candidate or waste it on a useless buff for the winning candidate.
There's pretty much no actual evidence that support for third parties has any kind of effect on the two major parties.
Off the top of my head the party system in the US looks something like this, historically:
- Founding to the early 19th century: two parties, Democratic-Republicans (later Democrats) and Federalists. The Federalists die out.
- Era of Good Feeling: a single party system. Inherently unstable for various reasons; doesn't last long.
- Whigs vs. Democrats: the Whigs come together with a pretty coherent policy agenda (internal improvements, etc) and are quite competitive for about twenty years. They have the misfortune of having both Presidents they manage to elect die within months of taking office. (William Henry Harrison made it like a month, Zachary Taylor made it like six months). Taylor's VP - John Tylor - was actively hostile to the Whig agenda. Srsly this party was cursed.
- Post Whigs: it takes a few years for things to shake out. You've got Free Soilers as a pretty coherent party now, as well as the Know Nothings.
- Republican vs. Democrats: Of course in the wake of the destruction of the Whigs, the Republican party coheres. It manages to successfully coopt the Free Soilers and the Know Nothings; and of course in 1860 we had our first Republican President.
Here is where things get fun. From 1865 to the modern day we have a two party system, Republicans vs. Democrats. However there are a couple of major shifts during that time period. To start with, the parties are very, very regional. Republicans run in the North, Democrats in the South. Come the Progressive and Populist movements in the late 19th / early 20th century you see Democrats becoming increasingly competitive outside the South. Probably this is the one time in our history that a genuine third party movement had an impact on the political landscape. I think it's arguable that the Democrats weren't a truly national party until this period, and that the incorporation of Populist and Progressive ideas was less a matter of a third party influencing one of the two major parties and more a matter of a regional party taking itself national.
Of course during the early 20th century you get a few examples of third parties shaking things up in individual elections (Bull Mooses, anyone?), but they fail to have any kind of lasting impact in terms of shifting party ideology.
The Great Depression ends up shaking things up drastically; basically it discredits the Republican party for the better part of a generation. Democrats are ascendant, combining the New Deal with the virulent racism of the South to form a dominant national party. Remember that at this point the Republican party is still persona non grata in the South, even though they're at least arguably more ideologically suited to the region's general conservatism.
Come the late 1950s and into the early 1960s things start to shift. Conservatism begins to make a comeback. Up through the 1950s the GOP was basically Democrats light: they didn't really claim any ideological differences with the Democrats in terms of the New Deal and the welfare state, they just promised to do a better job of managing it. However behind the scenes, grassroots activism was actively working to bring the GOP around to an ideology that we recognize today as movement conservatism: small government, low taxes uber alles, etc. Note that this is a tectonic shift in the two party system, and a third party had nothing to do with it. It was entirely activism from within the party. This culminates, of course, in the disastrous nomination of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Oops.
Conservatism might have died there, except then LBJ signed a bunch of civil rights stuff and gave the GOP an in in the South, which had as its top priority the preservation of a system of white supremacy. Southern Democrats defected from their party, and suddenly the Republicans were nationally competitive in a way they never were before, fusing northern business interests with Southern racism.
Over the next thirty years, we saw the parties become increasingly more ideologically well-sorted. For a while the Republican party featured a liberal wing of Northeast Republicans like Nelson Rockefeller - conservative in the old Burkean sense of the word - and the Democrats had a conservative wing: Southerners who were, for various reasons, not willing to leave the party. Slowly but surely though this situation resolved into the modern party system we have before us, culminating in the 1994 midterms and then again in the 2000 and 2002 elections. Note that over this time period, Democrats became increasingly conservative in response to a series of electoral shellackings they endured during the 1980s. Overall, American politics shifted rightward.
Today the parties in Congress are perfectly ideologically well-sorted. The most conservative Democrat is more liberal than the most liberal Republican. This is actually a feature of most legislatures around the world; bipartisanship is quite rare.
Anyway what's the point of this long history lesson: there's really no good example of a true third party changing the course of American politics. At best you get them influencing the outcomes of individual elections (Bull Moose, Ross Perot) with no lasting impact. At worst they're ignored. On the other hand, this system has a very clear and contemporary example of a party undergoing a dramatic ideological shift: the Republicans during the back half of the 20th century. Insofar as history provides a guide on how to push a party in a particular direction, that's it: sustained internal pressure over a lengthy period of time. And I mean lengthy. The conservative movement in America got going in the mid 1950s and while they did manage to nominate one of their own in Barry Goldwater, it took them over twenty years - until the Reagan presidency - before they were really influencing public policy in a meaningful way.
Of course this story is a lot more complex than that (Perlstein has written like 1200 pages on just the 1955-1975 era and he's working on a third book as we speak) and I've left out all sorts of stuff about the influence of modern Christianists on the GOP (a phenomenon that began in the late 70s) and the rise of neoconservatism. Likewise I glossed over the Democrats' rightward shift.
tl;dr: voting for a third party may be satisfying as a form of protest (and while I sound like I'm discounting that I'm not), but in terms of meaningfully changing the direction the country is going it's probably a waste of time.
Last edited by jeffd; 08-13-2012 at 06:21 PM.
To one who is considering a third party vote: It's your right to vote however you see fit, of course, so vote for third party candidate for President if you wish to express your displeasure with Obama and drone strikes etc., but unless you're doing so in a state that's safe for Obama (or a lock for Romney), keep in mind that you may be shooting yourself in the foot (if there are domestic issues on which you lean Obama's way more than Romney/Ryan's way, and which you actually care about). Remember that our Presidential elections are 50 separate but nearly simultaneous state elections, not one big national vote.
Interestingly enough, that voting record perfectly matches my record. But living in Ohio, a swing state, I'm voting Obama. I'd like to vote for Tyrion, or Theseus, maybe Thor is I was feeling ornery, Bombadil for the Green party, etc. It's all just a race to the bottom and we're still months away from Nov.
Since we're disclosing: I first voted for President in 1980, and voted for Barry Commoner, the Citizen's Party candidate that year. That was about as fruitful as you can imagine (in my defense, I was a callow 19-year-old). Ever since then I've voted for the Democrat--Mondale, Dukakis, Clinton, Clinton again, Gore, Kerry and Obama. I plan to vote to re-elect the President this November.
I almost perfectly match Dave Markell, except I was too young to vote in the Reagan vs. Mondale election, and in 2000 I voted for Nader (to my eternal shame...I only did it because fuck Tipper that's why, record censoring twat). I will vote for Obama this term.
Did you cast the deciding ballot in any of your major party votes? If not, then all of your votes have been equally fruitful.
No doubt that, taken by itself, my major party vote wasn't especially fruitful, but collectively with those who voted the same as I did it was--even when Dukakis, Gore and Kerry lost, I helped keep G.H.W. Bush and his useless son from winning my state of Oregon.
That's magical thinking. Voting is private, it does not affect the votes of others. It is not a team effort with emergent properties, like fundraising or canvassing. Its effects are completely quantifiable at a reductionist level. Thus, your votes have had no effect on the Oregon electors. And with confidence, I know that my vote will not affect the outcome of the presidential election even though I live in a key swing state.
Once you see through the illusion that the immediate fate of the union depends on which lever you pull, it becomes easier to see why voting is important. Not for its short term tactical effects, which are zero. Rather, for its long term effects as the only officially sanctioned form of feedback.
The state doesn't have to respond to e-petitions or letters to congressmen. But it does have to evolve according to popular opinion expressed in voting results. And since the long term effect of this feedback is difficult to predict, I prefer to be as honest as possible with mine. So the state wants to know who of these three or four guys I really think should lead the nation? Ok, I'll say what I really think.
Last edited by magnet; 08-18-2012 at 07:25 AM.
Voting may be a private activity, but election campaigns and discussions among voters (especially those bound by family and friendship) are not. It's quite likely that I'll be letting my family and friends and even a couple of people at work know that I'm planning to vote for Obama in November, and I would venture to say that that applies to most of us here. How your family and friends are planning to vote probably has some influence on how you will (unless you think your family is made up of cretins, and if you thought your friends were you probably wouldn't be friends with them).
If you live in Mississippi or California or Texas or Hawaii, I say knock yourself out voting for the Black Lesbian Communist Freedom Party candidate or whatever. If you're in a key swing state where it's neck and neck per the polling and just a couple of hundred votes could decide it, IMHO it's irresponsible to go around telling people "just vote for the guy/gal you really want even though you know it'll never happen, and if the much greater of two evils wins the whole shebang, too bad." It's thinking like that that got us the first and thus the second term of Bush/Cheney, the Iraq War, skewed tax policy etc. etc. thanks to Florida (with a little help from the Supremes).
I agree that your vote and your political activity, including casual conversations, are completely different things. People who want to influence the vote of others really do need to take a more tactical approach. On the other hand, if you keep your ballot secret then nobody has any right to question your choice.
Number 13 is pretty good. I like winning, too.
I think "basesball" is just the perfect touch.And while it may surprise you to learn that I was not a sporting person, I did feel some kinship with the Boston Red Sox of this period (a basesball team), because they were perpetual underdogs, which is to say: LOSERS
Ow. That's gonna leave a mark...
My favorite part of Mitt's quote is "So our message of low taxes doesn’t connect..."
Yes, Mitt, your message is connecting, because for those people your message is that they should have to pay more taxes. And guess what? They like it about as much as you do.
I bet there's enough ammunition from Romney's own mouth to fill up the rest of the 90 days, if they look around a bit.
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