Supporting candidates and platforms in a healthy multi party system
In America right now, the two near certain frontrunners for the presidential election in November are Donald Trump and Joseph Biden. Joe Biden came out of a very contested Democratic primary with a huge host of candidates, Donald Trump came out of a hotly contested primary in 2016 (where hilariously he also didn't get an absolute majority of the votes, he did get a plurality of them though).
Many of you are likely not enthusiastic about those candidates. Donald Trump had a bunch of people seriously accusing him of sexual abuse of varying forms in 2016's election, and an audiotape of him with Billy Bush; Biden has Tara Reade accusing him as well. Biden is exactly the kind of candidate you associate with the status quo of American establishment politics and connections with the status quo. Donald Trump isn't really a status quo guy but he is representative of the idea of wealth and power, connections to business, in government.
The veracity of things like Tara Reade's claims aren't actually as relevant to the point of voting for or against someone as prima facie they might seem to be. Even if exonerated, it sticks with you and has put a sour taste in many voters who often want to believe those who seem powerless against an establishment. If guilty, that could potentially mean criminal charges or a civil suit but most likely that just puts him in the same boat as others who have been seriously accused and in all probability, ends up in the Oval Office anyway. If you are opposed to Donald Trump, and don't consider voting for another candidate such as an independent or Jill Stein or whoever the Libertarian candidate is going to be, and don't want to just sit at home and not vote, you basically only have one option. It feels like it's a choice, that you don't stand for the present administration and want change, but at the same time, it feels forced, that you can't influence which kind of change. That you might be opposed to an incumbent doesn't say anything about who you want instead (which is also an important point when considering many other countries and why fractions of the population don't vote for say the Russian opposition candidates).
In a true multi party system, this is much less of a strict sense of voting for or against someone. You are likely to have a lot of different candidates even within the same party, as would be the case in say single transferable vote as I've defined before. Another party has much less leverage, they couldn't point to one candidate, provided that the receiving party seriously takes the complaint and perhaps suspends their support for a candidate while leaving the rest in place. Assuming they do this, there is little for another party or candidate to do other than to actually find their platform and go through it to find where there are genuine problems with it. While voting in either the Democratic primary this year or voting in the Republican primary in 2016, did you actually go to their websites and find their published platform, or did you vote based on who you knew these candidates were representative of in general? During a general election, have you actually decided who to vote for based on their published platform or were you unable to contemplate voting for one party's candidates and ergo voted automatically for the other's?
This kind of discourse and support for groups not based on what they actually have to seriously offer as a coherent plan is seriously damaging to a society. A congressperson or a president will come and go. But what they enact as laws and rules will stay behind. A good political system rotates these people out, and chooses them in a process which checks them vociferously, and frequently leads to say new majority leaders, minority whips, speakers, presidents, and cabinet members who don't need to have all of their personal baggage or what they've personally done, as all of what could corrupt them has been checked out and rejected before and is independently and honestly investigated and tried if a new allegation comes forth, without accusations by cultist supporters about how an establishment or deep state is conspiring to take them down meanwhile those who hate them say that the same system is conspiring to keep them in power against the interests and treasonous vs the will of the people.
This is in part why you've probably not been very aware of many of the names in many other healthy political systems. Everyone is assured their fair turn, and power is larger than any of them. Most people can't name a Roman consul who took power before Sulla other than Marius and maybe a couple from the Punic Wars perhaps, much less a praetor. You probably can't name many Athenian politicians other than maybe Solon if you really know things, plus Pericles and Themistocles and the latter is more so known for the Persian Wars, despite the system of democracy surviving from 590 BCE to the time when Octavian, later Augustus, ended Athens' autonomy into the new empire.
Many of the presidents and prime ministers across Europe and the world in the healthiest democracies are likely unknown to you, even if you are fairly close to them, and anyone who isn't either the prime minister or president is probably someone you haven't ever heard before. Few people in Canada can name their Supreme Court judges despite their adorable Santa Claus outfits, whereas in the US they are much more known personally. Most in the Cabinet of any given country remain anonymous, whereas many in Trump's cabinet have acquired major reputations now. When it matters not who is the prime minister of any given country, you know the institution is safe, knowing things like very well contested elections, strong anti corruption courts and police, open primaries or conventions to elect party leaders or chairperson as well as the party lists or candidates, and strong campaign finance laws, independent and well vetted court judges, and politicians with few conflicts of interest, keep personal favours away from how well your political system works.
V for Vendetta, the anarchist in the graphic novel turned movie in 2005, has a famous line: "Ideas are bulletproof" and less literally, you cannot kill an idea. That is true. But if your system depends on the individuals, as individuals are all humans, flawed, with biases and the need for self satisfaction and secrets that all humans want for their privacy and for their corruption, then you can certainly kill the human, or lock them up or slander them. When you vote for an idea, a party that has a consistent message that depends on the consistent belief of a mass membership and resolutions they pass to control their own party, and those parties must cooperate and agree on platforms mutually to remain in coalition, such as the SPD in Germany approving by a vote of their members the coalition agreement with Chancellor Merkel's party the CDU/CSU, remains a platform that you can actually test the ideas of, you can take a policy piece and question it, run experiments to see if what they stand for is true. A human can't be experimented on this way as humans always change, subtlety and dramatically, their will changing even within a single sentence in some cases.
Humans also have a very strong natural desire to be right, and to not be proven wrong. When everything you know about a person or yourself is demonstrated to have flaws even by the most impartial people, you are very likely to abandon truth and keep what you value about yourself or the one you have developed affection for, even when this person might be a presidential candidate. You will yell and encourage your supporters to yell at anything you think might be hindering you or the methodology itself, or the messengers. Meanwhile, a political party's platform can be distanced from or amended by a vote, provided there is general agreement among memberships that continue to hold some degree of consistent values, you can leave what is wrong and oust ideas that are bad, knowing that there are impersonal consequences for failing to do so. In a world where there might be over a dozen parties to pick from, many of which contain platforms that you still find close to what you value but may leave out what is shown to be the most problematic; you don't need to give up everything about yourself to continue to be on the side of truth and impartial judgement.
An election is just one part of a free society. The rest of society's liberties come from everything else, including whether you can have your president say that it was a sunny day while standing in the rain.
Many of you are likely not enthusiastic about those candidates. Donald Trump had a bunch of people seriously accusing him of sexual abuse of varying forms in 2016's election, and an audiotape of him with Billy Bush; Biden has Tara Reade accusing him as well. Biden is exactly the kind of candidate you associate with the status quo of American establishment politics and connections with the status quo. Donald Trump isn't really a status quo guy but he is representative of the idea of wealth and power, connections to business, in government.
The veracity of things like Tara Reade's claims aren't actually as relevant to the point of voting for or against someone as prima facie they might seem to be. Even if exonerated, it sticks with you and has put a sour taste in many voters who often want to believe those who seem powerless against an establishment. If guilty, that could potentially mean criminal charges or a civil suit but most likely that just puts him in the same boat as others who have been seriously accused and in all probability, ends up in the Oval Office anyway. If you are opposed to Donald Trump, and don't consider voting for another candidate such as an independent or Jill Stein or whoever the Libertarian candidate is going to be, and don't want to just sit at home and not vote, you basically only have one option. It feels like it's a choice, that you don't stand for the present administration and want change, but at the same time, it feels forced, that you can't influence which kind of change. That you might be opposed to an incumbent doesn't say anything about who you want instead (which is also an important point when considering many other countries and why fractions of the population don't vote for say the Russian opposition candidates).
In a true multi party system, this is much less of a strict sense of voting for or against someone. You are likely to have a lot of different candidates even within the same party, as would be the case in say single transferable vote as I've defined before. Another party has much less leverage, they couldn't point to one candidate, provided that the receiving party seriously takes the complaint and perhaps suspends their support for a candidate while leaving the rest in place. Assuming they do this, there is little for another party or candidate to do other than to actually find their platform and go through it to find where there are genuine problems with it. While voting in either the Democratic primary this year or voting in the Republican primary in 2016, did you actually go to their websites and find their published platform, or did you vote based on who you knew these candidates were representative of in general? During a general election, have you actually decided who to vote for based on their published platform or were you unable to contemplate voting for one party's candidates and ergo voted automatically for the other's?
This kind of discourse and support for groups not based on what they actually have to seriously offer as a coherent plan is seriously damaging to a society. A congressperson or a president will come and go. But what they enact as laws and rules will stay behind. A good political system rotates these people out, and chooses them in a process which checks them vociferously, and frequently leads to say new majority leaders, minority whips, speakers, presidents, and cabinet members who don't need to have all of their personal baggage or what they've personally done, as all of what could corrupt them has been checked out and rejected before and is independently and honestly investigated and tried if a new allegation comes forth, without accusations by cultist supporters about how an establishment or deep state is conspiring to take them down meanwhile those who hate them say that the same system is conspiring to keep them in power against the interests and treasonous vs the will of the people.
This is in part why you've probably not been very aware of many of the names in many other healthy political systems. Everyone is assured their fair turn, and power is larger than any of them. Most people can't name a Roman consul who took power before Sulla other than Marius and maybe a couple from the Punic Wars perhaps, much less a praetor. You probably can't name many Athenian politicians other than maybe Solon if you really know things, plus Pericles and Themistocles and the latter is more so known for the Persian Wars, despite the system of democracy surviving from 590 BCE to the time when Octavian, later Augustus, ended Athens' autonomy into the new empire.
Many of the presidents and prime ministers across Europe and the world in the healthiest democracies are likely unknown to you, even if you are fairly close to them, and anyone who isn't either the prime minister or president is probably someone you haven't ever heard before. Few people in Canada can name their Supreme Court judges despite their adorable Santa Claus outfits, whereas in the US they are much more known personally. Most in the Cabinet of any given country remain anonymous, whereas many in Trump's cabinet have acquired major reputations now. When it matters not who is the prime minister of any given country, you know the institution is safe, knowing things like very well contested elections, strong anti corruption courts and police, open primaries or conventions to elect party leaders or chairperson as well as the party lists or candidates, and strong campaign finance laws, independent and well vetted court judges, and politicians with few conflicts of interest, keep personal favours away from how well your political system works.
V for Vendetta, the anarchist in the graphic novel turned movie in 2005, has a famous line: "Ideas are bulletproof" and less literally, you cannot kill an idea. That is true. But if your system depends on the individuals, as individuals are all humans, flawed, with biases and the need for self satisfaction and secrets that all humans want for their privacy and for their corruption, then you can certainly kill the human, or lock them up or slander them. When you vote for an idea, a party that has a consistent message that depends on the consistent belief of a mass membership and resolutions they pass to control their own party, and those parties must cooperate and agree on platforms mutually to remain in coalition, such as the SPD in Germany approving by a vote of their members the coalition agreement with Chancellor Merkel's party the CDU/CSU, remains a platform that you can actually test the ideas of, you can take a policy piece and question it, run experiments to see if what they stand for is true. A human can't be experimented on this way as humans always change, subtlety and dramatically, their will changing even within a single sentence in some cases.
Humans also have a very strong natural desire to be right, and to not be proven wrong. When everything you know about a person or yourself is demonstrated to have flaws even by the most impartial people, you are very likely to abandon truth and keep what you value about yourself or the one you have developed affection for, even when this person might be a presidential candidate. You will yell and encourage your supporters to yell at anything you think might be hindering you or the methodology itself, or the messengers. Meanwhile, a political party's platform can be distanced from or amended by a vote, provided there is general agreement among memberships that continue to hold some degree of consistent values, you can leave what is wrong and oust ideas that are bad, knowing that there are impersonal consequences for failing to do so. In a world where there might be over a dozen parties to pick from, many of which contain platforms that you still find close to what you value but may leave out what is shown to be the most problematic; you don't need to give up everything about yourself to continue to be on the side of truth and impartial judgement.
An election is just one part of a free society. The rest of society's liberties come from everything else, including whether you can have your president say that it was a sunny day while standing in the rain.
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