Quoting Trent W. Buck (trentbuck@gmail.com):
Russell Coker via luv-talk wrote:
http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/10/20/1584963/-Donald-Trump-calls-on-Hi...
What's wrong with that country?
WRT their elections[*], the main problem is that they're badly broken.
See e.g.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2013/01/14/the-most-depressing-g... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law (as Rick Moen has repeatedly mentioned here) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_past_the_post#Criticisms https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Electoral_College#Criticism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Ruins_Everything (S1E7, populist version) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerrymandering_in_the_United_States
Apparently the last major reform they had was to take control of presidential debates away from the suffragettes - a NON-partisan group - and instead give it to some BI-partisan group. i.e. any growing third party is now explicitly told to Fuck Right Off WRT debates. Not an improvement.
[*] at the federal / state levels, anyway. Apparently some e.g. mayoral elections actually use STV.
Spot-on, sir. I also had somehow missed League of Women Voters having been replaced starting 1987 by a conspiracy of^W^W commission co-founded by the two major parties. That is indeed very annoying. Attempting to face Russell's question straight-on, near as I can tell, what's wrong is that one of the two major parties has been going gradually crazier for 20 years, building a constituency of deranged citizens, leading to the current asymptotic spike of craziness and possible near-term disintegration of that party. I say that with cheerfully acknowledged bias, having been registered as a Democratic Party voter for 40 years -- and yet it's nonetheless true. (As a point of clarification, there is no membership fee to register for a USA political party, and you cannot be ejected for opposing the party's tenets, in marked contrast to the setup in most parliamentary countries. All I really am saying by registering Democratic is that I opt to vote in that party's primary elections, rather than primaries of one of five other parties qualifying for the California ballot.) As Adam Conover points out (as do I on http://linuxmafia.com/~rick/election-2016-11-08.html), as a voter in one of the bluest (most liberal) of the blue US states, I might as well not bother voting in the 2016 presidential general election, but will nonetheless cast my vote for [a slate of 55 electors pledged to vote for] Clinton and Kaine, nonetheless, because why not? Getting back to the Republican Party, its slow descent into psychosis was initially difficult to see because I'm a Californian, a state where Republican office-seekers partially ignored the national trend. But in a nutshell, the national GOP took some of Ronald Reagan's worst notions, put a sprinkling of sexism, racism, xenophobia, and paranoia on top, and fed that to their 'base', which then reflected it back and amplified it. Before Trump, all of that unsavoury racism, sexism, etc. was confined to deniable 'dogwhistled' appeals to extremist elements to secure their vote, with the extremists not getting anything from the candidate once elected, but Trump has brought now all of that ugliness out-front -- mainstreamed it. It's going to be interesting to see what happens to the Republican Party after Trump's defeat. It's _not_ in any way guaranteed that it'll reform itself and divorce the crazy, because the crazy are now arguably a significant constituency.