The GOP has a master plan to criminalize LGBTQ people ( www.damemagazine.com )

voodooattack , 10 months ago

I always found it extremely strange that a nation which enjoys true representative democracy has locked itself in a two-party system. And worse, they can’t even successfully launch a new, fiscally conservative party without all the batshit insanity and the prevalent bigotry associated with the GOP.

darq , 10 months ago

I always found it extremely strange that a nation which enjoys true representative democracy has locked itself in a two-party system.

That's because the US doesn't enjoy a true representative democracy at all. The US electoral system is awful.

First of all it's a First-Past-The-Post plurality voting system. Widely regarded as pretty much the worst "reasonable" voting system around. It is not very representative, it makes voters vote strategically, and it is basically guaranteed that it will devolve into a two-party system.

Then on top of that they have the Electoral College, which takes an already non-representative system, and makes some people's votes worth more than others.

And then on top of that they have legalised bribery in the form of "lobbying".

mycorrhiza OP , 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

The US doesn’t enjoy a true representative democracy at all

Pretty much. A 2014 study put it like this

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence.

and later, more bluntly,

In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule — at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites and/or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.