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Ocasio-Cortez endorses Biden's reelection campaign, sending a strong signal of Democratic unity
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2023
514 points (95.4% liked)
politics
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Like I get that is what we probably are getting, and fine, he is better than whatever the republicans are putting forward, so I'll vote for him.
But
Come on
I wish, so much, we had a better candidate
You need a better voting system.
Any single-winner system is inherently flawed, which is why presidential systems are just straight-up worse than parliamentary ones. They're by their nature going to be less representative. A system where the president is largely a figurehead is far better, along with a legislature which is elected proportionally using something like Mixed-Member Proportional, Single Transferable Vote, or party-list PR.
But failing that, the bare minimum to call your system democratic is to use Instant Runoff Voting. First Past the Post is just straight-up not democracy. It's a farce. The idea that two candidates with similar views both being very successful actually makes it less likely that either will win is an obvious complete failure of the system. (And, fwiw, you could have IRV presidential elections for a powerful POTUS while also improving congress by making it proportional, if you want to go a step further than just making Congress & President both using IRV, but not as far as the fundamental constitutional change required to make the president a figurehead.)
And how do you expect us to do that, revolt? Because it turns out elected officials are reluctant to make significant changes to the system that elected them from which they profit handsomely.
Suspending reality, it would be interesting if enough progressives moved to states like Wyoming (pop 580k) and the Dakotas (780k and 890k) to move them blue. Then vote in progressive senators. For reference, NJ alone has a population of 9.2m.
If that could happen It would be great to link senators to state population.
I agree with you but it'll never happen. That would require a constitutional amendment and that bar is so high it can only be cleared under the threat of national revolt (like when the voting age was lowered, or prohibition was repealed). States would not be so eager to give up their power, and three fourths of them would have to agree.
I don't know how you achieve it, but if you haven't got at least IRV, then electoral reform should be the top issue people push their elected representatives for. As I understand it, some states have already done it in some elections, so it's not like it's impossible. Without a functioning democratic system, you can't ever get good outcomes on the things that actually matter. And with FPTP you don't have a democratic system.
A parliamentary system with fully proportional representation would be best. The US is big though, so I think an electoral threshold of 4% may be needed. That, or require parties to fulfil the below condition before being able to participate in elections.
• They need enough support through party membership from the area's population, as a % of the latter. On counties, this would be about 4%. On a state level, that would be 1%. On a national level, 0.25% would be enough.
You might think, why lower with each level? But the larger the population size is, the smaller the membership can be while remaining representative. This also stimulates smaller parties since now they have a chance to actually grow.
Electoral districts also need to be thrown away -- counties, states, and the entire country, are where the elections get held in. Because of proportional representation, it doesn't matter however you were to divide up areas: 25% of votes on one party means 25% of seats.
Lastly, force the Democratic and Republican Party to break up into separate parties with each no more than 20% of all seats. Or tell the parties that putting through with proportional representation as an agenda point will give them more votes. The Dems can argue, "One man, one vote", the Reps can argue "America NEEDS to keep it Great! Vote the Dems away, get Proportional!". Both should have this as agenda point.
I also think it critical that the supreme court of the US isn't 7 judges. It worked for a country with 2 million people, but you lot are a country of 300+ million now. You need something like 100 members, and make the supreme court appointed by the judges themselves, who are chosen by multiple random ballots themselves.
The US Congress also could be expanded. Make the House go from 435 to 500 members, and the Senate to 250. They need to be updated for a big country.
It also makes it harder to manipulate politicians, since there are far more needed to bribe.
I have a whole writeup, if anyone is interested. I think that both Dems and Reps and anyone else can find themselves in it.
I have absolutely no problem with such a threshold.
Okay so here's a really controversial take. I think the problem with the SCOTUS actually stems from there being too many rights enumerated in the American constitution. I should note that I'm not a legal scholar, but I've read a lot of opinions from non-American lawyers who have explained this viewpoint, and it makes sense to me.
Where I live in Australia, our constitution is largely uncontroversial. It doesn't say what rights people do and do not have, but really just lays out the basic functioning of our democratic institutions, like how elections work, how Government works, how the Commonwealth interacts with the States, etc. Rights are left to Parliament to implement. This has the interesting difference from America in that it means that our High Court decisions are largely far less political than SCOTUS's. Because the High Court of Australia doesn't get to make the inherently political ruling of deciding how to interpret individuals' rights as laid out in the constitution. By putting the right to bear arms in the constitution, SCOTUS is inherently given the power to decide what should be a legislative matter of how much people are allowed to own guns. It's what lead to the morally-good but legally-nonsense decision that lead to Americans having the right to abortion*, which itself stopped the legislature from ever feeling like it needed to do its job in relation to abortion protections, which is in turn what made the disastrous outcome of Dobbs possible.
This is, obviously, something so deeply ingrained that it would be basically impossible to change. Americans view their constitution almost like a religious text. Even though some of the founding fathers supposedly thought a constitution is something that should be basically rewritten from scratch every few decades, Americans view it as written in stone and as something that must not be changed except perhaps to enumerate more explicit rights. But fundamentally, a less politicised constitution would lead to a less politicised judicial system, which would allow each branch of government to do its part without encroaching on the others like they currently do.
I'm with you on increasing the size of the legislature though. 2 senators per state is far too few (and makes it impossible to reasonably add in a proportional system on a per-state basis). I have much the same feeling about my country. I'd like to see our Parliament almost doubled in size, especially if we were to move to a more proportional system (we currently have a proportional Senate, but use IRV for our House of Representatives).
* legally nonsense because if you look at how SCOTUS justified it in Roe, it just doesn't make sense, legally. Somehow the right to an abortion is derived from...a right to privacy? That doesn't make sense. And it makes even less sense when you consider that the right to privacy itself is somehow derived from the right to due process and equal rights under the law.
My only real misgiving with Biden is age, but I do still agree. With how crazy and dangerous Republicans have become however, we can't afford to take any risks. We don't just need to beat them, we need to beat them by the largest margins possible. We need to send a sharp condemnation. Biden's incumbency advantage is indispensable for this.
The problem is really that the whole system is fucked up.
Elections being about "the lesser evil" instead of voting FOR what you actually want is just horrible - no wonder so many people are losing faith in democracy over there...
What exactly has Biden done wrong? He may not be as crazy left wing as you'd prefer, but really I don't see why so many on the left are saying he's so bad
Although I think Biden has overall done a good job I am disappointed that they're running someone who is 80 years old. I would also like to see a general shift to the left, but at the same time I realize that the increased political division in the US makes this unlikely in the near term.
Giving up the incumbent advantage at a time like this is short sighted at best, and destructive and dangerous at worst.
Because he's ancient. He's a half century older than the majority of the voting population.
This comment will stay in the negatives, but anyone who is looking at this objectively knows you're correct. They just don't like it.
It's getting downvoted for the "crazy left wing" part, not the "what has Biden done wrong" part.
He ran on getting kids out of cages and there is still a giant open-air prison for refugees on the border. He busted the railroad union. Those are two pretty big issues for the left. He's further right than Obama, and probably futher right than Nixon, if you compare their platforms. Fighting fascism by moving further right is a really bad way to fight fascism.
Biden has been great. The most transformative policies in 80 years. Great for the world.
dafuq are you on about? Do we already have political shill bots on here?
How is RFK Jr. the primary opposition? I know he wasn't, but it feels like he was put there by the dem establishment as a threat. When I'm feeling like I would support any other democratic candidate to run in place of Biden, this barely younger absolute crank leans in and goes 'anyone?' Ah fuck, let's go dark Brandon... if i have to... I guess.
Hahahahahaha, no. He's been entirely enabled by those on the right and their hangers-ons in the podcast dork-o-verse. He's an entirely artificial candidate that only appeals to the fringe 5% or so that would have otherwise voted for Nader, or Jill Stein, or Kanye West.
Don't lump Nader in with those kooks. He would have been a decent president. There's no way he could have won, but he would have done the job fairly well.
I think he was actually bankrolled by Bannon and the like. I'm not sure why they thought a far right loon like RFK would weaken Biden. Like you said, his candidacy feels like a purposeful Biden advertisement.
Because they fundamentally don't understand how left-leaning people think, which means they don't understand what we want in a candidate. These are the same geniuses who convinced Kanye to run for president in 2020 because they thought he'd peel away the Black vote from the Democrats just because he was Black. (Did I mention they're all racist AF, too?)
Newsom? I guess? Though I suppose he will run next cycle when his term as governor is up.
Yeah, the Democrats really fucked up by uniting against Bernie in 2020, and Warren fucked up by not getting behind him.
So we're stuck with Biden, who aims too low on all our critical issues.
But it's vital to understand that we ARE stuck with him. There's no path to victory for anyone else in the party.
So it's Biden or ... A fascist takeover of the country.
Easy choice.
Painful. But easy.