Strategic Party Affiliation

[PPQ_Purple]

I still do not get it. Can you reference something that could be described as "textbook"? Can you explain the axioms on which that statement is based? Can you explain how the world is worse off if you do this? What "rules and laws" are being ignored?

Cheating is bad.

 

[Samson]

Cheating is bad.

You are doing a pretty good job of convincing me you do not have a good argument.

 

[Farm Boy]

There is no spirit of the law, only what one can get away with. In fact, if nobody is watching, there is no law at all.

 

[Arwon]

Cheating is bad.

Nah if you're going to have radically open party pre-selections, facilitated or enforced by the State, that really means sabotage and general entryism by motivated members of the broader public are an expected feature of the system.

You make something an entirely open vote, you no longer get to dictate what reasons for voting are legitimate and illegitimate.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

You are doing a pretty good job of convincing me you do not have a good argument.

You asked me for a moral axiom and I gave you one. The axiom that cheating is morally wrong.

There is no spirit of the law, only what one can get away with. In fact, if nobody is watching, there is no law at all.

That is the exact thing I disagree with. The way I see it the difference between a good and a bad person is that a good person cares about right and wrong and NOT about whether he can get away with doing something. When I choose not to murder my neighbor I do so not because I am afraid of punishment but because I consider murder to be a bad thing.

Equally, when faced with the choice of obeying a rule as intended or doing something technically legal but in obvious violation of the intent of said rule a good person understands that doing the first is wrong on a fundamental level because it is cheating.

 

[Farm Boy]

Yeah, I'm inclined to agree, but they're going to think anyone who disagrees is simply a fool. Then again, this is predicated on strategic with 1/150,000,000th of the picture, so I don't think I'm wrong. Nor are you.

 

[Samson]

You asked me for a moral axiom and I gave you one. The axiom that cheating is morally wrong.

Fair enough, but if that is the only thing to balance against getting the right person to run the country I am sure you understand if I do not put that much weight on that particular reason.

 

[Crezth]

It's also massively more open, less controlled by parties, and more bound up in state law, than basically any other country's candidate pre-selection process that I'm aware of.

For a comparison, in this country, the process of parties choosing a candidate is entirely in the hands of party members - people who actually pay to be members - or sometimes even just elected party officials. Labor for instance have about 40,000 members which is an average of about 260 members per electoral district. Pre-selection of candidates is voted by those members. For the Liberal Party too, many candidates are chosen by votes numbering in the dozens.

Even then, quite often the choice is constrained by specific union arrangements and by deals between formalised Labor factions or by less formal factional tendencies in the Liberals. Member votes have regularly been overturned and head office candidates imposed, to meet factional balance objectives, get a high profile person into a winnable seat, achieve alternative action goals, remove unwanted candidates, etc.

In the Greens, I'm one of about 10000 paying members nationwide, so we have no more than a few hundred members in Canberra voting on all our candidate choices (everyone votes on all seats, not just the area we live in). Head office doesn't interfere in our case (there isn't really such a thing in the same way as the old parties) but there's a vetting committee to screen for candidate quality and alignment and a vetting committee report they send out with the ballots.

In all cases it's still entirely a matter for the voting members mediated by internal rules, a private affair for private party organisations, a small sliver of the general population. Certainly nothing like the effectively public votes the US parties undertake.

Worth nothing in many cases the US primary system is a tool of maintaining ballot access restrictions - the two dominant parties subject themselves to theoretically open primary rules via state law, which must be met to get on the actual election ballots, and then other parties failing to meet those rules can't be on the ballot. The "jungle primary" systems look like an example of this, usually pretty effectively restricting general election ballots to just the major parties.

A beautiful and strident case against the pieties of liberal democracy.

I appreciate you taking the time and I take your point well. The artifice of state law is how the US has managed its federated source of authority basically since inception. You might say it’s the key feature of US politics because it was the key draw to scores of European businessmen who chose to settle down here. You’re telling me I can get all this lane cheap and do what I want with it and pay less in taxes and have my own local state senator in my own pocket? Then your “sovereign state” has all this special sovereign authority to determine the rules of its own political engagement and republicanism and still ends up controlled by a machine that always votes for the same party for decades anyway.

I would actually argue a system led by parties and controlled more tightly by parties per se would vest too much power in the masses that the American leadership fears and hates. The point is that the parties themselves become some kind of sovereign. But who exactly does it help for the states to have that sovereignty instead? To my view… landowners, big business interests, old gentry. Rather than the politically motivated masses. In fact the DNC and the GOP don’t really make sense as parties in say the Australian sense. But they do really make sense as opposite voting blocs by opposing alliances of landowners, who by government ritual are required to harvest signatures from the peasants in order to keep the affairs of state going.

 

[Hygro]

Seemingly, indeed; in reality, through a great deal of smoke and mirrors, the primary system is adequately designed to allow a small group of party insiders to reproduce the terms of their own reappointment & to appoint successors all on their own terms. I guess the DNC superdelegates have come up before. The GOP system meanwhile is in the claws of giant landowning interests. It's really remarkable honestly how we've institutionalized the primary system to such an extent that both parties have unlimited and effective permission to count the votes however they like.

People, as in “the”, want this.

Still, it’s much more true in some states.

 

[Crezth]

People, as in “the”, want this.

Still, it’s much more true in some states.

I really don’t consider arguments like that persuasive because literally every state, and I mean national government, nowadays claims the People are behind them even when that is not obviously true. Or it might be true 51% of the time. Or 30% of the time with a really strategic victory. Not getting into the integrity of the glorious Democrats, we know for a fact a large swathe of the southern states are effectively in permanent political subjugation to the white majority interests. The “people” want their own oppression I guess. It doesn’t even make sense to claim you’re a democracy when this is true but the issue is actually significantly magnified because entire cities are marginalized by the senatorial authority of the prairie landowners and yeomen. I think historically “People” in this country, as in “We the,” are actually just landowners; and the urban workers are just no more than hustling grinding bad-asses.

 

[PPQ_Purple]

Fair enough, but if that is the only thing to balance against getting the right person to run the country I am sure you understand if I do not put that much weight on that particular reason.

No, I really genuinely do not. Just because you believe your goal to be righteous does not give you the right to employ unethical means to achieve it. All those Trump supporters that stormed your capital also believed them self to be in the right after all.

And this is especially dangerous with elections. If you cheat in any system you undermine that systems legitimacy. Do that enough times and nobody is going to care any more about what the system says. At the end of the day when it comes to elections if you are unable to win honestly than you MUST loose. Because if you don't, or you loose but refuse to accept the results, you are creating an environment where next time around the other side has a legitimate and valid reason to do the same.

Looking at this from the sidelines in Europe I think that it's not at all a stretch to say that the reason Trump got so much support for his revolt and managed to get so much traction for the whole idea of a stolen election is precisely because his opponents refused to lay down when defeated and instead tried everything in their power during his term to oust him, sabotage his reign and generally obstruct everything to the point where his supporters have a legitimate claim that he newer had a fair shot at actually ruling. Which in turn gives them a convenient excuse to dump all his failings on.

If you want to win and that win to stick it has to be as clean as possible. Otherwise you are just undermining the republic you purport to protect. And that's one European tradition I think you'd be ill advised to copy.

 

[stfoskey12]

I guess part of how I see it is that in a two party system, it doesn't make sense to be affiliated with a third party, because they will never have any electoral success. Some US states, however, are effectively one-party states, as the other of the two parties has little hope of winning statewide office. So it makes sense for everyone to be affiliated with the party that wins, because that is the only way someone can have any hope of influencing policy (unless they're in one of the minority of districts that typically goes for the other party). That doesn't apply to presidential elections, where things are close to 50/50, but for everything else often only one party has a reasonable shot of winning a seat.

 

[Gorbles]

Looking at this from the sidelines in Europe I think that it's not at all a stretch to say that the reason Trump got so much support for his revolt and managed to get so much traction for the whole idea of a stolen election is precisely because his opponents refused to lay down when defeated and instead tried everything in their power during his term to oust him, sabotage his reign and generally obstruct everything

Looking at this from the sidelines, also in Europe, I think this is absolutely a stretch predicated on believing what Trump and his supporters claim to be the truth, rather than what is actually the truth. Bit amusing given the prevalent "moral axiom".

 

[amadeus]

Two cent thought coming in, but the “deep state” mechanisms that hamstrung Trump also did so to his predecessors, not out of a conspiratorial malice (there may have been some malice!) but just the way systems work as designed, even if not the intent is as such—I would extend the same thoughts to any organization, public or private, and I enjoy run-on sentences.

 

[Gori the Grey]

his supporters have a legitimate claim that he newer had a fair shot at actually ruling

US presidents don't "rule," though.

This doesn't speak to the key point at issue, I realize; but I still wanted to say it.

 

[Farm Boy]

Nor do they reign.

 

[Birdjaguar]

I still do not get it. Can you reference something that could be described as "textbook"? Can you explain the axioms on which that statement is based? Can you explain how the world is worse off if you do this? What "rules and laws" are being ignored?

Just look at how Trump has abused our legal system to avoid going to trial. Oh and on Jan 6 too. Both are textbook cases of using money and power to exploit loopholes in the legal system to keep delaying his trials

 

[Crezth]

Getting into the Presidency in the first place is the really gaping sore and I guess you could say "smoking gun," however. The rest is just details.

 

[Snowygerry]

Isn't the prevailing theory that Democrats want Trump to run against Biden, because he has already beaten him, so can be expected to beat him again ?

Haley would actually be a stronger candidate, younger, female and generally less repugnant.

At least what experts of the genre here tell me

 

[EgonSpengler]

Isn't the prevailing theory that Democrats want Trump to run against Biden, because he has already beaten him, so can be expected to beat him again ?

Haley would actually be a stronger candidate, younger, female and generally less repugnant.

At least what experts of the genre here tell me

Yes, some polls show that Haley does better against Biden than Trump does, in a theoretical head-to-head.