Lovely way to start a Friday.\u00a0 I started looking at The Great Deformation yesterday, was thinking about the whole ObamaCare mess this morning, and am now reflecting on the political system in general, and the fact that ordinary citizens really have no way to make their voice heard \u2014 unless their point of view lines up with an existing pressure group to which they can send money.<\/p>\n
Maybe if\u00a0I was in a more \u201cpurple\u201d district or state \u2014 but my particular very Blue representative has such a gerrymandered district that the GOP didn\u2019t bother supporting the one candidate who tried to oppose her.<\/p>\n
The Tea Party?\u00a0 Maybe \u2014 but the Democrats sure succeeded in painting them as extremists.<\/p>\n
Illinois has a governor\u2019s race coming up.\u00a0 So far as I can tell, the GOP field consists of a bunch of cookie-cutter establishment politicians and a buy-the-election-type millionaire.<\/p>\n
In that sense, I find myself thinking that the German parliamentary system gives people more of a voice.\u00a0 If a third party crosses a 5% vote threshold, they\u2019ll get into parliament.\u00a0 (Members of parliament are chosen from districts, as is the case here, but any party with a greater proportion of the overall vote total than their directly-elected representatives get them, gets extra representatives.)\u00a0 And if the stars line up in your favor, you then have a chance at being the junior party of a coalition, with a formal coalition contract getting you some of your party\u2019s platform.\u00a0 The Greens started out as a fringe party, barely on the threshold of the 5% threshold, but in 1998, despite receiving only 6.7% of the vote, they became the junior coalition partner with the center-left SPD (the Social Democrats).<\/p>\n
In such a system, a reformist group could play a real role, splitting from the GOP, picking up like-minded independents,\u00a0promoting their message, and in the\u00a0case of a coalition, having real negotiating power.\u00a0\u00a0Instead,\u00a0our winner-take-all system locks us into a two party-system.\u00a0 <\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lovely way to start a Friday.\u00a0 I started looking at The Great Deformation yesterday, was thinking about the whole ObamaCare mess this morning, and am now reflecting on the political system in general, and the fact that ordinary citizens really have no way to make their voice heard \u2014 unless their point of view lines […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2209,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-821","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n