9th May 2016, 11:33 PM
Dark Jaguar Wrote:That's my point exactly. Having a family connection may be a "proven way to get an edge", but it SHOULDN'T be! It's a stupid way to pick someone, and it's one the US supposedly abandoned when they rebelled against the British Crown!It's a natural human reaction, though. How could you possibly keep people from thinking about connections between people? It's one of those things we instinctively think of. And we don't have royalty that lasts -- think of how, so far in American history, there have not been more than two people from the same family who became president. Several families have two, none three.
Quote:It's not the "voting" part that's in doubt, it's the "people" part. The two big companies (sorry, "parties") currently in charge of US politics always end up deciding exactly who we get to pick from, and how we go about picking from them.Actually all public officials are chosen in primaries or caucuses, they aren't just appointed. Sometimes you do have a nobody face a sitting member of congress and win, it's not impossible, just rare...
Now, our campaign finance system is totally, horribly broken, that's for sure. Members of the House spend an INSANE amount of time fundraising, and corporations have a horrendously large influence over policy and who gets elected (through mountains of dark-money TV ads and such). We need to get rid of Citizen's United, that should be a key priority for the next administration, and ideally redo the whole campaign funding system, because it really does not work. But this is a different issue from what you're talking about. (Oh, and gerrymandering reform, to get rid of the mostly right-wing gerrymanders that make Democrats winning near-impossible in many states, is vitally important as well!)
Quote:These primaries are unique in that they've gone on for about a thousand years now and let far more states than usual actually get a say, but that say is "tainted". Way too many are picking the candidate they think will "win" the primary instead of the one they actually WANT to win the primary. It's insanity.It's not just about "think" versus "want", choosing which candidate to support in a primary is often hard... you need to consider who you agree with most on the issues, sure, but which issues? In most cases one candidate is better on some issues, and the other on others. That's certainly true in this race with Bernie and Hillary, I agree with one more on some issues and the other more on others. And while Bernie is great on some issues, his lack of details is a real problem; too many vague statements, not enough details. Hillary's the other way around on that of course, but I, at least, like her focus on details.
But also, but voting for who you think can win IS valid, because if you get an unelectable person as your nominee, it makes it much more likely that the worst result will happen, the other party winning. Think of Republican Tea Party senate nominees in the last couple of cycles who said really dumb things and lost in the general, after getting nominated because of their super-far-right stances -- Republican primary voters voting for purity helped Democrats win later. And that's good for us, but it does show who electability matters.
Quote:Regardless of whatever else happens, I'm very much convinced that the system is broken and in dire need of repair. A start would be flushing the two parties away and starting fresh. It'd force us as citizens to take a much more active role. Sometimes, you need destruction of something before something new can be built.The Republican Party sure could use some rebuilding (to become a functioning party again that believes in the concept of government), but you're going to have political parties, people have to organize their political actions with others somehow. You can't have a true democracy in any society with more than a small population, you need representative democracy, and this means parties.
Now, it would be nice if we had a electoral system that allowed for more parties. Yes, multi-party systems mean messier governments with sometimes fragile coalitions, but it's a more interesting and representative system, and America probably would be better off with some system that wasn't just our strict first-past-the-post design that ensures we must have two and only two parties in order for anything to function. But you're going to o far when you say 'the parties need to be destroyed', unless you have a better explanation for what you wish could be done.
Quote:P.S. That photo is a big example of the problem. There's "the elites" and then there's us. When was the last time someone born into poverty actually won one of these things?Bill Clinton grew up middle-class in a troubled home. Hillary was also middle class, though she didn't have a troubled family like Bill.