Anti-Freedom Conservatives and Anti-Liberty Conservatives

Smith should have known he was in trouble when Michael Goldfarb was embracing his term. [Recent Goldfarb antics].

Thank you for this, Professor Holbo.

Please advise all readers to enjoy a pairing of this OP with a recent Vox piece on the moderate voter myth.

The two articlestogether are producing a zesty intellectual frisson.

Makes me contemplate…something about the abiding internal organizational logic of social institutions in relation to a chimeric self: one who interacts with individual and meta-individual behavioral impulses….

What a world.

I think this is a perfect example of how the post war professional media model is incompatible with truth. Why is Smith drawn to “a perfect storm of incompatible and unadvisible goals”? Because he is a trained journalist.

If you imagine that he started with a proper analysis and then ran it thru a “objective journalism must be fair to both sides” machine, you get his result.

The real problem here, of course, is the silliness of the right’s belief that “freedom and liberty” are self-evidently a win/win thing. As if, when you point the arrow in favor of a boss, you don’t point it against his or her workers.

They seem not to recognize the existence of conflicting interests and claims, or differences in power dynamics, which obviously mean the key is always going to be “whose liberty?” and “whose freedom?”

That conversation becomes even more frustrating when the discussant is a propertarian (right-libertarian). They simply refuse to acknowledge the possibility of built-in conflicts, especially of the economic kind.

Fascinating. It has all the superficial form of a joke, but none of the humorous content.

#6

Somehow other times I’ve heard the same joke it was a lot funnier.

Like:

Joker: I’ve got this great Norwegian joke. Ah, you aren’t Norwegian, are you?
Norwegian: [after a long pause] Yes. … Yes. … … I am Norwegian.
Joker: OK, then, I’ll tell it reeealll sloooowwww.

Or there was this one I heard at a science fiction convention:

Costumed fan #1: Hey, you wanna hear something about humans?
Costumed fan #2: OK, sure.
CF1: Well they started figuring out physics, nothing special, but when they started to work out about electricity and light they decided that space contracts and time dilates!
CF2: What? [laughs] Really?
CF1: They still say it a hundred years later! And then there’s economics. They have pretty normal economic systems, nothing special, but they got this idea that economic systems optimize something! They think there’s something in particular that gets optimized!
CF2: [laughs] How could they believe such a thing! It sounds like something you’d expect from people who had religions.
CF1: Oh, religion. Let me tell you….
Me: Hey, space contraction? What do you believe instead?
CF1: Are you human? Oh dear. I’m so embarrassed. [walks away]

I noticed this about the Liberty Republicans: for some reason they ignore the condemnation of King George’s anti-immigration stance in the Declaration of Independence:
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

I notice most everyone forgets to note most times that the Declaration of Independence makes a good example of how people can engage in rhetorically agitating for ‘freedom’ or ‘liberty’ so as they can continue in their harming of and taking of the land and resources of other people (also nature etc) (And if people say it was because of the ‘times’ and they couldn’t know better they should read Montaigne)
Also an example of people who know better engaging in a deliberate rhetorical strategy of blaming a person who is not the person/s most responsible – ie. blaming the King despite the American Revolution taking place Post- ‘Glorious’ Revolution

“He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

“The GOP (the party bureaucracy) is perfectly rational. Its long-term strategy has been to use billionaire resources to harness southern white insecurity to win elections. Its worked pretty well since Nixon. I think their plan is to ride that horse til it drops, then get off and drag it. At least, that’s what it looks like from the outside.”

Likewise, I’d say that the Democratic party is rational: Your long term strategy is to exacerbate income inequality, because concentrating wealth in a small minority of extremely wealthy people enables it to be skimmed more efficiently, and reduced the number of control points. While maximizing dependence in the population makes it easier to buy enough votes to maintain control in a nominal democracy.

The plan is to push this until you achieve a one party state. You believe you’re approaching this goal, so some of the masks are coming off, and you’re openly moving to abolish freedom of speech by amending the 1st amendment, while implementing a panopticon surveillance system to keep an eye on dissenters.

The main problem you’re encountering is that you’re fairly incompetent at actually governing, and the more you concentrate power, the more obvious this becomes. For example, you move to take over health care financing, and utterly screw it up.

But you soldier on, the end game in sight, and the cover stories get thinner and thinner, because you care less and less if they’re believed, thinking yourselves on the verge of irreversible power.

At least, that’s what it looks like from the outside.

Your long term strategy is to exacerbate income inequality, because concentrating wealth in a small minority of extremely wealthy people enables it to be skimmed more efficiently, and reduced the number of control points.

Ahahahaha yes, the people constantly railing against income inequality are the very people interested in increasing income inequality because REASONS.

The plan is to push this until you achieve a one party state. You believe you’re approaching this goal, so some of the masks are coming off, and you’re openly moving to abolish freedom of speech by amending the 1st amendment, while implementing a panopticon surveillance system to keep an eye on dissenters.

Liberals who criticize the surveillance state are the real racists NSA.

The main problem you’re encountering is that you’re fairly incompetent at actually governing, and the more you concentrate power, the more obvious this becomes. For example, you move to take over health care financing, and utterly screw it up.

This has been another edition of Reports From Counterfactualland. PS I AM NOT A CRANK.

Did you get banned from RBC or something that you felt compelled to bring your libertarian fantasies over here?

Conservatism is one hell of a mind-altering drug.

A correlation between use of a particular drug and insanity could be because taking the drug makes you crazy, or could be because only a crazy person would want to take it.

#17

Likewise, I’d say that the Democratic party is rational: Your long term strategy is to exacerbate income inequality, because concentrating wealth in a small minority of extremely wealthy people enables it to be skimmed more efficiently, and reduced the number of control points.

I tend to disagree with you on most of the details, but those don’t matter so much. The big picture is that both parties have a sort of ideology available for people who care about that, but then they mostly ignore that when they actually do stuff.

Then, you believe that both parties have a “High Command” which has a long-term plan for the nation and the world, which they carry out independent of what the voters want.

I tend to agree that both parties have ideologies that they give only lip-service to. This might be appropriate for them. We have a lot of trade-offs where it doesn’t work to be all absolute on one side. We do need some security even while we need civil rights. It would be ridiculous to be 100% anti-business or 100% pro-business. Etc.

You wouldn’t want a thermostat where two opposing ideological forces competed to raise the temperature as high as possible versus lower it as low as possible. That would probably not give you the temperature you want.

So maybe when they’re actually trying to govern, the different parties actually try to keep things balanced and make lots of small incremental changes to improve the balance, even while they spout doctrinaire ideologies.

The GOP talks as if they want to stop government from happening while Obama is in office, to block everything Democrats try to do, as if they want the government to be destroyed and replaced by something else. But in practice the government does not fall apart, the GOP cooperates well enough to keep things running smoothly even while they make a big show of blocking everything that the media notices.

And of course fanatics who support some particular ideology get upset that the people they voted for do not in fact uncompromisingly reject everything in government that does not fit their doctrines. But so what?

About the high commands, I don’t know. Such things would naturally try to keep a degree of secrecy. If a political party has a High Command that ignores its voters, it wouldn’t want the voters to find out. On the other hand, people who appear to have some power will tend to exaggerate it so that people who want to make deals will come to them. I can imagine that each party might have several High Commands, none of which actually have much control.

Even more, I can imagine a culture that runs on favors. A US Senator does you a favor, later he calls the favor in and expects you to do a particular something for him. One favor that legislators can do is to cast their personal vote for or against a particular bill, and that vote could count as favors to multiple people who all happen to want the same thing. Or he could promise multiple votes, the implication being that he will call in favors from people they can’t reach other ways. And then he gets credit for the ones who do vote as needed whether he actually caused it or not. And in this chaotic mess of petitioners trying to get their own individual needs met and legislators jockeying for position, there could be many High Commands who have varying amounts of influence, even while probably none of them can actually control very much.

And in the welter of thousands of proposed bills with many thousands of amendments, more detail than any small staff of hundreds could follow, are there really any long-term plans? Or is it mostly just muddling through….

I can imagine that particular administrative departments might have long-term plans. Like, the army had a big plan for hi-tech modernized stuff, but then the wars diverted most of the budget and the spending cuts have postponed most of the rest.

Lots of people have long-term plans but everybody’s plans depend on stuff they can’t control, which can require a lot of adaptation.

It works for everything, don’t it? Party politics is about parties, issues are just shibboleths, it doesn’t matter what you say as long as you pronounce it properly. Which turns out to be great for social organization although not so hot for resolving issues. BUT it turns out that humans are so good at social organization that so far there has been no really pressing need to confront issues. That may change. This is progress.

Note that it is not Republicans who are proposing to remove the 1st amendment’s protection of political speech. Note that it is not Republicans who are defending the use of the bureaucracy as a policical weapon, or the destruction of evidence which was legally mandated to be preserved. And, who is rationalizing that Presidents are entitled to violate the law? Not, today, Republicans.

The “today” is the giveaway. Those of us with a few extra rings on our trunks and even some remaining short-term memory would have no trouble saying the same thing except for striking the “nots.” And every reason to think it would be equally true if the Republicans’ hands were on the controls today.

“And, who is rationalizing that Presidents are entitled to violate the law? Not, today, Republicans.”

Really? Which Republicans are calling for criminal investigations into George Bush’s violations of the law? We know the violations occurred – a Court dominated by Republicans has told us they did. All I hear from Republicans about those particular violations are rationalizations. Isn’t that right?

You guys are giving Brett too much credit:

“Note that it is not Republicans who are proposing to remove the 1st amendment’s protection of political speech.”
Corporations are not people and are not entitled to any free speech rights under any sane reading of the constitution. Plus money doesn’t equal speech under any sane reading of the constitution either.

“Note that it is not Republicans who are defending the use of the bureaucracy as a policical weapon”
If this is referencing the IRS “scandal” then you are an idiot. There is no scandal, simply another made up issue by republican nut jobs. Next you are going to bring up Benghazi.

“the destruction of evidence which was legally mandated to be preserved”
A computer hard drive failed and emails were lost. This has happened before and it has happened again. There is no evidence of any wrong doing.

“who is rationalizing that Presidents are entitled to violate the law?”
Most republicans supported these exact same activities when it was there team doing it. Anyway, a big chunk of Democrats oppose them even with a Democratic president.

I like your observation that marketing categories don’t make good poli-sci categories. And Ben Smith thinks that there’s a straight line from the Declaration of Independence to any libertarian faction? What has he been smoking?

I break down the major factions (from right to left) into Tea Party Republicans, Wall Street Republicans, Conservative Democrats, and Liberal Democrats. On The Raven’s scale, going from Grover Norquist on the right at one to Noam Chomsky on the left at five, the factions measure at 1, 2, 2.5, and perhaps 3.5. Distressingly, the politics of the public fall in somewhere between 3 and 3.5.

Democracy: We’re Doing It Wrong.

I suppose in some Boolean parallel dimension of politics, the Democratic Party is “the party of government”.

Or did autocorrect change that from “governance”, which would still be a binary opposite of the Republican Party’s stance?

I found the ‘Count’s occasional murderous fantasies a bit offputting, too.

The ‘Count (sic) does not spew at RBC. Brett, ‘self-retired’ from Obsidian Wings, not RBC. I imagine, with all his commenting, he gets a bit confused at times.

I suspect he’ll return. So many liberals to piss off, so little time.

“So much for press freedom, with every newspaper in the country published by a corporation.”

Are corporations people? Yes or no please. If yes, how can they be people if they cannot die?

“As they say, denial ain’t just a river in Egypt. The IRS came right out and admitted that it had treated conservative organizations differently.”

http://www.salon.com/2013/07/08/how_the_media_outrageously_blew_the_irs_scandal_a_full_accounting/

“But now, almost two months later, we know that in fact the IRS targeted lots of different kinds of groups, not just conservative ones; that the only organizations whose tax-exempt statuses were actually denied were progressive ones; that many of the targeted conservative groups legitimately crossed the line; that the IG’s report was limited to only Tea Party groups at congressional Republicans’ request; and that the White House was in no way involved in the targeting and didn’t even know about it until shortly before the public did.”

The real scandal is that any Tea Party groups were granted tax exempt status at all.

“A computer hard drive crashed, and emails subject to discovery in an ongoing lawsuit were lost from the computer. Fine, that can be an accident.”

Thank you for admitting that. I am sure you were just as mad and certain of wrong doing when the Bush Whitehouse “lost” 22 million emails. Right?
http://crooksandliars.com/2014/06/issa-blamed-ibm-software-loss-22-million

I am a Canadian and am not a member of any American political party. I can however identify nuts. And the Republican party is Chock full o’Nuts.

“The IRS came right out and admitted that it had treated conservative organizations differently. ”

This is simply false, a canard you repeat whether wittingly or not.

“That’s spoliation of evidence.”

Almost as if there were videotapes of the crime; which videotapes were willfully destroyed by senior administration officials, who freely admit carrying out the destruction, or approving it, or acquiescing to it being done. Only this crime involved torture and death; not the stunningly obvious fact that the IRS has a duty to scrutinize overtly partisan political organizations on both sides who appear to be gaming tax law.

Isn’t it odd where you choose to point your outrage?

“So much for press freedom, with every newspaper in the country published by a corporation.”

Freedom of speech and freedom of the press are two different things. That’s why they’re both in the 1A.

“If we had a Liberal party that consistently got around 40% of the vote, and a GOP that got about 40%, and a Democratic party that was smack in the middle that got 70% of the vote, I wouldn’t have a lot of complaint.”

Well, I’d certainly wonder about a system which produced a vote tally representing 150% of the vote. Just sayin’.

Yes, exactly. If we had a system where you vote for every candidate you think is good enough to suit you, we could have a lot of liberal-types who vote for the Liberal party and also the Democrats in case the Liberals lose. And if the Democrats were a real center party with Liberals off to the left, we might get a lot of right-leaning moderates who vote Democrat and GOP both, but not Liberal.

We could also have a Green party getting 20-30% of the vote, pro-drug party getting 10-40% of the vote, the NRA could have its own party and maybe get 40% of the vote, etc.

You vote for everybody you think is OK, and the one with the biggest majority wins.

If we voted that way, the best center party would tend to win but if they sleaze off too much then somebody else starts beating them out, somebody that a whole lot of people think is good enough.

He’s arguing that the Democratic Party and Obama’s administration are not as virtuous as they ought to be.

No he isn’t, because pretty much no one who comments here thinks they’re “as virtuous as they ought to be.” The difference of course is that the CT commentariat critiques Democrats from the left, while Brett Bellmore is a delusional libertarian who lives in fantasyland. I can assure you that the consensus version of virtue obtained from a CT poll wouldn’t please BB any more than Obama does.

@48 When pushed, my 83 year old neighbor frequently refers to a short story published in the New Yorker called “The Lottery”. Why would everyone in the building say that she’s crazy? She only wants us to admit that we are as fallible as she is? The answer, she suggests, is that lacking any commonality between us, we have created a community based on a mutual animosity toward herself.

It’s possible, I suppose. But Occom’s Razor points to the “she’s delusional” theory.

> You vote for everybody you think is OK, and the one with the biggest majority wins.

Condorcet-type methods — your proposal isn’t condorcet, but has a lot of similar properties — run into the problem that they always invariably elect a “centrist” “compromise” candidate… but not everyone is a “centrist”, and always electing a “centrist” is thus pretty unrepresentative: the median is not the distribution.

The choice to run single-member electorates is the rejection of the possibility of representing the full range of political opinions in any particular election. You can either ignore this — but if you don’t want your elections to be representative why even run them? — or you can set up your electoral system to add some erraticness so that it’ll at least be somewhat representative over time.

They actually do this deliberately in digital signal processing, inject some randomness so that the errors created by the finite detail of digital signals manifests as random noise rather than distortion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_audio

tldr: condorcet and approval voting are terrible if there’s any diversity of opinion in the voting population you want represented. Probably why libertarians like them so much.

Condorcet-type methods — your proposal isn’t condorcet, but has a lot of similar properties — run into the problem that they always invariably elect a “centrist” “compromise” candidate… but not everyone is a “centrist”, and always electing a “centrist” is thus pretty unrepresentative: the median is not the distribution.

I’m totally baffled by your objection.

It seems to me that the candidate who gets the most votes ought to win.

The choice to run single-member electorates is the rejection of the possibility of representing the full range of political opinions in any particular election.

What voting system would you prefer? I figure that with approval voting there’s nothing wrong with a single party running mutiple candidates because they aren’t running against each other. Everybody can vote for as many of them as he likes.We can have as big a range of political opinions in the election as we like. Of course, the winner will be somebody that a lot of people vote for. That goes with the territory.

They actually do this deliberately in digital signal processing, inject some randomness so that the errors created by the finite detail of digital signals manifests as random noise rather than distortion: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dither#Digital_audio

Yes, but … say you’re electing a president. I have no idea how you’d elect a president who represented everybody, unless he was full-blown old-fashioned multiple-personality schizophrenic. I guess if you had somebody who was so well-liked and so center-of-the-road that everybody voted for him….

Some voters are going to lose. Their stands are unpopular. Things won’t go their way. It’s supposed to be like that.

For legislatures, we elect people to represent specific geographical areas. If your unpopular opinions are popular in one of those areas, then those opinions will be represented in the legislature. But if you’re spread evenly, say you have 5% in every voting district, and 60% of the people have heard of you and disapprove? Then you won’t get a voice in the legislature. Though if you did have a voice you’d likely still get voted down every time. So what difference does it make?

I’ve thought of ways to change that. Like, we could run elections kind of like corporations. You give your proxy to whoever you trust, they pass it on to whoever they trust, eventually you have the legislators voting however many proxies they have. Then nobody goes unrepresented because his geographic area voted for somebody he doesn’t like. Everybody gets represented by somebody they chose, or if they choose somebody to choose for them, by etc. I think it would take a great big Constitutional amendment to get that one through, though. Or maybe not.

I don’t see the DSP analogy yet. Somehow I find myself imagining 2008 and the voting guys announce “Obama won the popular vote and the state votes, but we have randomly randomized the results so that McCain won, because we have decided a wider range of opinions needs to be represented.”

I apologize if it seems like I am ridiculing your idea. The truth is I don’t understand it yet and as a result it doesn’t make sense to me at all, yet.

I don’t see why we’re supposed to elect the full spectrum of opinion. To my way of thinking, democracy is a cheaper alternative to civil war. When the majority wins a vote, that’s an indication they would likely win if sore losers refused to accept the vote and chose to fight. If the voting rules are reasonable and a minority can’t win an election, that’s an indication they probably wouldn’t do well in a fight either.

And that’s related to my concern about approval voting. If there are a whole lot of extremists and they really want to fight, approval voting may get us a moderate who will try to keep the country together, even though the majority of the public wants to fight — because while the majority agrees they don’t like him, there’s nobody they can agree on in his place.

@52 “…and Nixon secretly threatened Hanoi with nukes. There is NOTHING Nixon didn’t dream of.”

That’s actually the standard US foreign policy mantra, including, of course, the Obama administration: “no options off the table”. It’s just that you choose not to pay attention: ‘of course our guy couldn’t mean that‘.

“The TEA party represents this impulse in the Republican party. They’re not holding the GOP leadership to a standard YOU like, naturally. They’re the other side’s base. But they’re holding it to what they view as a higher standard…”

If the Tea Party wants to raise the level of the Republican Party to the higher standard of racist, ignorant, government- and economy-wreckers, then you’ve already made it perfectly clear who’s worse. That must be why you decline to answer any of the questions put to you in this thread, huh?

“There’s a lot of fun to be had with

the possibility of representing the full range of political opinions in any particular election

It’s nearly impossible to elect a candidate who is representative of the full range of political opinions, ”

Of course it is. That’s why you go with multi-member districts, or at large elections. There’s no reason any candidate for a legislative position has to “lose”. Just weight their vote in the legislature according to the percentage of the vote they get, and seat every one of them.

Naturally, this can’t work for executive positions, where inherently one person is required. That’s a good place for instant runoffs. But making sure the full range of political positions is represented in a legislature is dirt simple.

“Turning an election into a perfect smorgasbord could have some alarming results, like a Senator with a mandate to liberalize immigration, legalize marijuana, investigate chemtrails, and restore the gold standard.”

Aside from the fact that the first of these is unlikely to happen in a genuinely democratic election, given public opinion on the subject, so what? Marijuana is already being legalized, investigate away, (All you’ll find is that they’re fictional.) and we could use a break from inflation. What’s alarming here? That views you don’t like could get represented in the government? That’s a feature of any real democratic system.

Imagine that you’re running a small town in anywhere, USA. Religious demographics are
55% baptist
30% catholic
10% other protestant [largely episcopalian, you call them]
5% other or no religion.
A prayer service or equivalent is called for before each municipal meeting. Currently, 100% of prayer services are taken by the local baptist preacher: is this optimal, or are improvements possible?

It depends.

I’ll do all percentages as percent of total, so if I say 5% of baptists I mean 5% of the total, who are baptist.

If I’m running the town I get to listen to people’s complaints and decide what to do. Then I’ll do whatever seems to please people generally.

If instead it’s subject to vote, and baptists are sure they want a baptist prayer every time, that’s how it goes. Maybe it causes resentment among catholics etc. Tough.

If it’s up for vote and 45% of baptists want it this way while 10% of baptists are liberal enough to want some other arrangement, and those 45% of baptists bribe the 5% with no religion and some of the 10% others who wouldn’t get their way much regardless with other things they want more, so they go along, so the majority says 100% baptist prayer, then that’s how it goes.

On the other hand possibly the 30% catholics get the 10% of liberal baptist support and bribe the other nonbaptists to go along, maybe it winds up 100% catholic or 50:50. Again, the majority gets what they want. The no-religion people for example get help with something they care about in exchange for this trivia they don’t care about.

If a lot of people are reasonable, they might get an agreement that the guy who gives the prayer will cycle, the same guy never does it twice, and whoever does it is supposed to give a nondenominational prayer for everybody. I like it when people back down from their doctrinaire positions and do something that’s adequate for most people.

Even if I’m in charge I want to find something that’s at least acceptable to the majority. If I won’t give them something they want, I’ll try to give them some substitute. If the majority wants something I think is bad then I’ll try to persuade them to want something better instead.

A 55% majority that alienates everybody else is not very good, they aren’t that strong. If they head that way I’ll try to persuade them not to. But for binary yes/no decisions, I can’t think of an adequate replacement for majority rule. Even if they do it badly, getting people mad at them, a minority that rules and gets people mad at them is worse. I sure don’t want to be that minority all by myself.

Condorcet methods always reliably elect a “centrist” [==unrepresentative] candidate: methods that are more “erratic” elect a wider variety of candidates that means that over time — elections are not once-off, the time dimensions matter — the office-holders you get better represent the distribution of views within the population. Sometimes you get faction 1, sometimes you get faction 2.

I don’t right off understand the allure of this. If we put all the votes in a hat and pick one at random, then we’ll get winners proportional to the votes. If a party has 5% of the votes then they have a 5% chance to win.

This has the advantage that it lets people with good ideas that they haven’t been able to persuade the majority of, to try out those ideas.
It has the disadvantage that it lets people with terrible ideas that they haven’t been able to persuade the majority of, to try out those ideas.

If you want the government to do something and the majority of the public is against it, why not work harder to persuade them?

All-centrists-all-the-time will cut out almost all the population from the driver’s seat, which… I’ve got to ask why you’re even bothering with elections, in that case.

If the guy with the biggest majority of votes wins the election, it seems to me that the smallest minority has been cut out. If you want assume people don’t actually want centrist candidates, just persuade them not to vote for them and the problem is solved.

What do I like? STV works well in australia, but it works fairly badly in ireland. Cultural issues and details of implementation, yes, but we don’t for sure know which, exactly… and since these are the only two places that use it I don’t like the odds recommending it to other people.

I have no objection at all to STV. It’s harder to describe, but I’ll gladly support whichever of approval voting or STV gets traction easiest.

[but modulo specific cases [condorcet, approval, chilean two-member “proportional”, winner-take-all multi-member] most systems can be made to work adequately.

Yes, given the will and favorable conditions, people can get by with almost anything including monarchy. I want a voting system for the USA that breaks us out of simple two-party rule. I don’t like having only my choice between Democrats for mostly-status-quo, Republicans for something crazy, or throw my vote away expressing my disapproval. I want to vote for something else and not throw away my vote.

I want to vote for something else and not throw away my vote.

Ah.

In that case you want to have a look at the US’s nomination process: good keywords are “ballot access”. The US has serious problems here, with a government-run vetting process that dramatically narrows the options available to vote for and increases costs for unapproved organisations.

By the time the actual “voting” comes around the fix is already well and truly in.

“I want to arrange it that a vote for the Green party is not in itself a vote against the Democratic party and for the GOP. You should be able to vote Green and if that doesn’t work out you can vote Democrat too.”

In Australia we currently have compulsory preferential voting for both lower and upper house , eg. If there are 4 candidates you must number them 1, 2, 3, 4, according to your preferred order. There was a case in the 1990s where a man was gaoled for encouraging people to interpret the law at that time as being for voluntary preferential voting in the lower house – eg. to vote 1, 2, 2, 2 if there were parties (in his case the 2 major parties) that you didn’t wish to give preferences to. The law was changed to specify compulsory ordered preferential voting.

The upper house is composed of senators from the electorate of the states and territories – each state elects 12 senators and the territories elect 2. The Senate tends to be more diverse because there are 12 senators elected – if a candidate from smaller party gets around 10% of the vote then they should be elected to the upper house.

The 2013 election had a great number of candidates including many from smaller parties. The newspapers did not give very much information on the non-major party candidates – and some smaller parties had not done very much complex policy work. A group of small parties (“micro parties”) exchanged preferences (in our senate paper you can vote above the line and agree to the preferences of the party you choose above the line, or you can vote below the line and number all candidates, say 1 to 75, yourself by your own preferences – or guesses if you don’t know much about the smaller parties and independent candidates). The number of senators from non-major parties has caused consternation – as has the fact that not much us known about some of the smaller parties that now have balance of power in the senate., and people might have accidentally preferenced a candidate they didn’t want by voting above the line.

The senate and senate voting are now under review – with changes possibly being optional preferential voting, limited preferential voting (ie. you can only preference up to, say, 10 candidates), voter ID, electronic voting, higher fees to stand as a candidate, and higher numbers of members to register as a political party.

IMHO, there is no hope for capitalist democracy: no matter which way you turn it, money controls everything. It already produced the best it could (in finlandized states during the Cold War), and it’ll only continue to deteriorate from there.

Not everybody on this list is a Democrat. Of course, the Greens haven’t committed many crimes because they’ve never been in power, but still…

Not everybody here is from the United States. For me, a Canadian (with US citizenship, but not exactly by full choice) a lot of the bullshit that happens is characteristic of Americans, not any particular flavour of Americans. (See racism, subtle. Canadians and Europeans are racist as hell, but not in exactly the same ways as white liberal Americans.)

Still, two words about Obama/Nixon: Henry Kissinger.

Those of us who have enough rings on them remember when the Dems were the experts at voter suppression in minority communities. They were better at it, but then some of the smarter Dems evolved to the point where they didn’t get peeled off by Reagan and Atwater.

overrated.