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Why you should vote for someone who will lose this election
2016 Nov 1, 7:11pm 5,755 views 21 comments
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MisdemeanorRebel
2016 Nov 1, 7:27pm
If Hillary is elected, the Democratic Party will be the party of big business lead by the party leaders who are essentially the Republicans of the 20th century. Hillary is Dick Cheney. And every single election will be between Dick Cheney (D) and Ted Cruz (R). Of course, it won't literally be those two people, but instead people exactly like those two. You will have a heartless, evil villain who's only concern is his and his cronies' financial gains on one side, and a batshit crazy religious lunatic on the other. Is this the choice you want to have to make for the next 40 years?
Best evidence: The race was supposed to be Jeb! vs. Hillary. On all the economic issues: TTP, H1-Bs, massive immigration, weak job creation, etc. they were identical. Only in minor cultural points that effect the 1% very little was there any substantial difference.
Good read Dan. I can't believe I read the whole thing.
I am not sure if the system you describe can last 40 years; it may lead to violence fast than that.
Peter P
2016 Nov 1, 7:52pm
Trump supporters are not that bad.
Wearing a MAGA hat around Hillary supporters is infinitely more dangerous than wearing an "I'm with Her" pin around Trump supporters.
turtledove
2016 Nov 1, 8:25pm
Not sure if your plan will work, Dan. The pothead is starting to drop in the polls. His points appear to be going directly to Trump. If the tree-hugger's numbers go up, they would come out of Hillary's pool, not Trump's. Your plan could end up guaranteeing a Trump win.
I must admit... This whole thing has become so perverse... The corruption so absurd and deeply rooted... I just don't think we can come back from it. How could we go back to business as usual after all this?
justme
2016 Nov 1, 8:58pm
Correction: The seventh TWO-party system. And therein lies the whole problem.
Dan8267
2016 Nov 1, 9:32pm
I am not sure if the system you describe can last 40 years; it may lead to violence fast than that.
Which system? I described two. I think violence is a good possibility in the first system (Hillary wins), but unlikely in the second system.
In any case, party systems in America have consistently lasted around 25 to 50 years. That's the time it takes for a generation of voters to grow old and die and be replaced by completely different voters. This may be a coincidence, but I think there's a connection. From the link in the original post,
Look at the lifespans of the first five party systems in the United States: 24, 26, 42, 36, 32. None of these systems lasted more than a generation or two.
Trump supporters are not that bad.
There's plenty of documented bad behavior in both group of supporters, and they ferociously hate each other.
Of course, I'm not counting as supporters people who say they are going to vote for the lesser of the two evils, regardless of which one they think is the lesser evil. For example, Noam Chomsky states "you should hold your nose and vote Hillary". That's not really being a supporter.
Hopefully, most of the American population realizes by now that both candidates are terrible. I'm trying to get people to realize that determining what the seventh party system will be is far more important than who occupies the White House for four years.
If the tree-hugger's numbers go up, they would come out of Hillary's pool, not Trump's. Your plan could end up guaranteeing a Trump win.
Yes. That's the plan. Jill Stein has absolutely no chance of winning the election under current election law. Our election system is the mathematically optimally bad way to run elections. There are far better ways to run elections, but until this chances, third party candidates have no chance to win.
My plan is for enough people to vote for Stein that it costs Hillary the election and forces reform in the Democratic Party while blocking a Republican takeover of that party. I want Trump to win, not because his presidency would be good, but precisely because it will be disastrous and it will destroy the unholy alliance between big business and the social conservatives / religious right.
Trump's campaign has already greatly damaged the GOP and its propaganda machine. Even FOX is conflicted about attacking or supporting Trump. Four years of Trump would create a great rift between the religious right and big business.
While that's going on, the Democratic leadership will be force to concede to the wishes of the voters who supported Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, and Jill Stein. In order to avoid losing elections, they will have to distance themselves from big business and support the middle class, responsible environmental management, and the younger generations. Either Hillary loses the election or the Democratic Party loses its soul. As such, a Hillary defeat is better in the long term regardless of whether or not its much worse for the next four years. Sometimes you have to lose a battle to win a war.
Correction: The seventh TWO-party system. And therein lies the whole problem.
The only way to eliminate the dominance of the two major parties is to drastically change election law. This cannot happen under the sixth party system or variation Hillary Wins of the seventh party system. It could happen under variation Hillary Loses of the seventh party system, although not right away.
The current system is mathematically guaranteed to produce two dominate parties. This is well-known and well-documented. However, there are not technical obstacles to changing the current system to one in which representation is actually proportional to people's with different values and interests. The problem is one of political will, not intellectual difficulty or implementation hardship. Western European countries already have far superior elections, and we know enough of the math of elections now to do an even better job than western Europe.
But there is no solution to the problem you state other than to change election law. And doing so is only possible if the seventh party system forms with a Hillary defeat driving the Republican leadership into the Libertarian party rather than the Democratic Party. So if you really want to end the two-party dominance, vote Jill Stein knowing she won't actually win and will cost Hillary the race.
Peter P
2016 Nov 1, 9:47pm
Sixth party system or not, the Fifth Season of House of Cards is going to look lame in comparison.
Heraclitusstudent
2016 Nov 1, 10:13pm
Absolutely correct. People say that voting for the 2 other candidates is wasting your vote.
This thinking relies on faulty assumptions: first that Hillary and Trump don't both lose votes, in relatively equal quantities.
Second this is self-fulfilling reasoning: the only reason why Hillary and Trump get most of the votes is because assume that voting for the others is "wasting your vote".
This is democracy. People need to ignore polls and vote for who they think is actually the best candidate.
I am not sure if the system you describe can last 40 years; it may lead to violence fast than that.
Which system?
the one after a Hillary win
Well written!
I've heard rumors about black swans.
Just one nuclear weapon explosion in a conflict.
Financial collapse.
Sudden realization of the severe effects from global warming.
No one mentioned the timing!
Dan wrote a very astute, persuasive narrative, that contains many truths, IMO.
His reasoning for voting for Jill Stein could also lend credence to the argument that the U.S. would benefit from a parliamentary legislative system, that could legally cause the executive branch to fall in times of crisis ("no confidence").
Many of the problems Dan describes are rooted in a two-party only system, where both parties are controlled by the same exact corporations, industries, and globalists, and in having the "Unitarian Presidency" executive branch, whereby the legislative branch (congress, or alternatively, any parliament), is much weaker than the executive branch.
Dan8267
2016 Nov 2, 8:24am
the one after a Hillary win
That system would likely exasperate the violence we already see. However, the violent conflict would stand no chance of overthrowing the system just like it cannot now.
Sudden realization of the severe effects from global warming.
The effects of climate change are and will continue to be severe, but they won't be sudden, and that's the problem. Human beings are real good at assessing immediate threats like whether or not the neighboring tribe is going to kill you and steal your women. However, human beings are lousy at assessing long-term or gradual threats like climate change. Humans are like that frog in a pot that's slowly brought to a boil.
Dan8267
2016 Nov 3, 8:34am
Excellent video...
Jill Stein: Don't choose between a proto-fascist and the queen of corruption
If we get to five percent, it will be transformative. It will mean that there is a people's politics that can be no longer swept under the rug, that can be a rallying point. Whether it's Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in the White House, we're going to have to fight like hell to stop the next war, to stop World War III, to stop climate catastrophe, to stop the overtake of fascism over our country. We've got a fight on our hands, and we need a political for that fight starting on day one, the very day after this campaign. If we get to five percent, we will be much in conducting that fight.
She's 100% on the mark. She has a workable plan for creating change in the system, and it does not require her to even get close to winning the election. She just needs enough votes to make a point. Five percent isn't asking much even for a third party. Ten percent would be an unprecedented outcry for reform. The system can be changed without winning elections as long as enough people vote for Stein to definitively sway the election. The spoiler effect can be used to bring about reform.
First step should be fighting to introduce a runoff voting if no candidate gets 50% in the first round. Without this third parties will always be marginalized by "trowing your vote away" arguments.
This is very obvious, which is why I refuse to buy this argument. You don't want me to throw my vote away? Then fight to change the system.
I have always voted for the losing President (first vote in 1992). It's never been intentional, it's just worked out that way. I'm voting for Trump.
Dan8267
2016 Nov 5, 3:34pm
The DNC are shitting their pants for sabotaging Bernie. The polls are damn close now, and that's before the latest FBI scandal. Voting for Jill Stein can send a real message by costing Hillary the election in a very specific, and unignorable way.
Dan8267
2016 Nov 7, 7:09am
This Bernie Sanders supporter is proud to vote for Jill Stein
Only the Privileged Can Afford Hillary Clinton – “A vote for Jill Stein is not a wasted voteâ€!
Stein won’t win the presidency. But the movement can win several gains in this election.
The first is what third parties have historically contributed in American politics: to force demands into public debate that the two major parties have ignored. In this election, those demands include single-payer, defeat TPP, serious climate acton, a WPA-style public jobs for the unemployed, and military spending cuts with the savings devoted to uplifting struggling poor and working people. The bigger the Stein vote, the more leverage the independent political movement will have on these issues going forward.
The second is ballot lines. A Green ballot line for the next two or four years is up for grabs in 37 states, for 1% to 3% of the vote in most of them. Those ballot lines will enable the independent left to run competitive and winnable races at the local level, which is how an independent political movement will develop into a national force.
Third, 5% of the vote will qualify the Green Party for public funding for the 2020 presidential general election. This is a second presidential public campaign financing fund, in addition to the primary matching fund for which Stein qualified in this election, that starts at about $10 million at 5% and goes up with higher percentages. With Stein polling between 3% and 6% in most polls, this goal is within reach.
Fourth, the lists of supporters that Stein/Baraka campaigners develop canvassing voters during this election can be the base for post-election organizing, from stopping TPP in the lame duck session of conference to local independent Green and left campaigns for public office in the next election.
A vote for Clinton is not only a wasted vote for the status quo, it is a vote against the Green Party’s challenge to the two-party system of corporate rule.
Your vote is symbolic, so make is a symbol to demand reform.
Both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are terrible people and ridiculous candidates for president. Anyone with half a brain realizes this, so I won't go over the reasons why each is absurdly unqualified and downright villainous. Instead, I'm going to tell you what you don't know, the big picture.
As passionate as people are about who gets in the White House in 2017, the actual presidency does not matter. We have had the two worse presidents in the past 100 years serving four terms back to back for the past sixteen years. Bad presidents are bad, but is there far more at stake in this election. Either way we get a terrible president. Nick-picking over which turd smells worse is the wrong thing to do. The turds don't matter.
If you think it matters because Trump will start a war, well, Hillary is also a career hawk and is just as likely to start WWIII. Furthermore, the threat of nuclear war in the next four years is far less than the threat of such a war in the next 40 years, and that's going to be heavily influenced by the next party system.
If you think that Trump is a racist, well so is Hillary. Her policies on the war on drugs and "superpredators" have done great harm to minorities. If you think that having a first woman president will be good for women's right, you are dead wrong. Electing female Hitler will set back feminism by 40 years. She slut-shamed a 12-year-old girl who was raped so brutally the girl could no longer have children. Is that really the legacy of the first woman president you want? Nor is Hillary interested in protecting the middle class from evaporating. She's obstructed Elizabeth Warren's reforms and is a self-identified "Goldwater girl". Hillary is not any of the positive things you think she is. Nor is Trump, but first...
What matters is that we are in a transition to a seventh party system. You can read the history of the first six party systems. I'll skip right to the sixth party system. The past half century has been governed by the sixth party system in which the racists and religious fled the Democratic Party and entered the Republican Party under Richard Nixon's Southern Strategy. This unholy alliance has allowed social conservatives and big business to dominate policy for the entire lifetime of most people reading this.
Barry Goldwater predicted that the religious racists would tear apart the GOP, and that is exactly what we are seeing right now. Donald Trump is not the problem. His die-hard supporters are. Trump is merely a con artist riding the rise in xenophobic populism for his own personal profit. He has no intention of keeping any of his campaign promises, and even if he tried to, he would fail miserably because neither side of the aisle would support him. He won't get a wall built. He won't deport all the illegal immigrants. He won't bring outsourced jobs back to America. He won't and doesn't even know how to do any of the things he promised you.
The important thing to understand is that we are transitioning to a seventh party system right now because the demographics of the United States, and its voting population, have reached a critical tipping point where white Christian social conservatives no longer have enough numbers to force their outrageous bigotry and vile religion onto others. This scares the shit out of them, but it was inevitable.
The critical point is that the nature of the seventh party system hasn't been determined yet. There are two likely but opposing outcomes. Who wins the White House will greatly affect the probabilities of these two outcomes.
The transition from the fifth party system to the sixth was orchestrated by big business, which was motivated by the fact that they could not win elections any more unless they got the homogenous southern voting block. FDR New Deal policies and liberalism had gotten the upper hand and big business needed to make a devil's pack with religious racists in order to secure power. That is why they set up the system that most people today think has always existed and always will.
Now that the Southern Strategy is failing and cannot be saved with the current and future demographics of the U.S., big business has to jump ship, and the ship they want to jump to is the Democratic Party. The first possible outcome of the seventh party system is one in which the Republican Party retains its name, but is really the Tea Party and is controlled entirely by xenophobic, religious, social conservatives while the Democratic Party retains its name, but is really the Republican Party of the 20th century dominated by big business that wants to squeeze the middle class and turn America into a banana republic.
The entire Democratic Party establishment has been doing everything it can to get Hillary elected even sabotaging Bernie Sander's campaign using big money, media, the party's administration, and super delegates. They did this even though every single poll showed that Sanders would crush Trump in the general election and Hillary had only about a 50% chance of winning. Put simply, the Democratic Party leaders put their own interests and nepotism before the interest of the party or the nation.
Once the Sanders threat was eliminated, the entire message from the Democratic Party and their media allies has been "Vote for Hillary because no matter how bad she is, Trump is unthinkable.". Get use to this message because you are going to hear it every single election for the next 40 years if Hillary is elected.
If Hillary is elected, the Democratic Party will be the party of big business lead by the party leaders who are essentially the Republicans of the 20th century. Hillary is Dick Cheney. And every single election will be between Dick Cheney (D) and Ted Cruz (R). Of course, it won't literally be those two people, but instead people exactly like those two. You will have a heartless, evil villain who's only concern is his and his cronies' financial gains on one side, and a batshit crazy religious lunatic on the other. Is this the choice you want to have to make for the next 40 years?
Under this seventh party system, the Dick Cheney's of the world will rule the federal government winning almost every single election. The Republican (Tea) Party will be a small party that controls state and local governments but remains a minority in both houses of Congress where they will constantly filibuster what few good policies the Democratic (really former Republican) Party occasionally proposes.
The federal government will wholly sell out the American middle class to squeeze every dollar of profit they can for themselves. The collapse of the middle class will, if anything, increase the opulence of the rich as labor and human life becomes cheap. The police state will continue to grow and civil rights continue to erode. The batshit crazy leftist conservatives like Trigglypuff will be occasionally appeased by the Democratic Party just to distract them from the real issues.
However, this scenario can be avoided by making Hillary lose the election. Yes, unfortunately that means letting Trump win, but that's not important. Sometimes you have to lose a battle to win a war. Remember, Trump is not a threat. His fervent followers are, and they can be mitigated by making sure both houses of Congress are filled with Democrats.
If Hillary loses the election, particularly if she loses because enough people vote for Jill Stein, Green Party, then it will send a clear message to the Democratic Party that they were mistaken to assume that they could control votes by the mere threat of Donald Trump and that their decision to ensure that Hillary was the nominee was a foolish and losing strategy.
Jill Stein is one of the few politicians that actually has good policies and intentions, but that's not why you should vote for her. She has absolutely no chance of winning the election, but that does not matter. The reason you should vote to her is to force the Democratic Party to change strategies, embracing the Sanders supporters, reformers like Elizabeth Warren, and the middle class. If the number of votes that Stein gets exceeds the number of additional votes Hillary would have had to get to win the general election, then the Democratic Party leaders will be forced to concede to the values and desires of the Sanders/Stein supporters. This includes not letting the Republican Party leaders take over the Democratic Party.
Under this seventh party system, the religious racist conservatives will rule the Republican Party and dominate a few states and hold an ever decreasing minority in the House and Senate. They will still continue to filibuster and obstruct. There's nothing we can do about this, but they will slowly and continually die with their influence waning every year.
However, the Democratic Party and the Green Party will essentially join forces and the Democratic Platform will be similar to Bernie Sander's platform, but perhaps with a bit less social services. Nonetheless, the Democratic Party will be the party of the middle class and it will protect the middle class. You won't get mass deportation of illegal immigrants, but that's not going to happen under any system. You will get better economic policies that are in the interest of the working middle class and your finances and jobs will be more stable. Civil rights will slowly return and strengthen. Wars will become less frequent as will the waste of resources and taxes such wars consume. It won't be utopia, but it will be better than the sixth party system.
Big business and the Republican Party leaders will still jump ship, but the only ship they'll be able to jump to is the Libertarian Party. The Libertarian Party will grow slightly, but it will remain a small and impotent party unable to affect policy at any significant level. That party will find no allies in the new Democratic (pro-middle-class) Party or the new Republican (racists and religious nuts) Party. The Democratic Party will dominate the federal government and most state governments with each passing election adding more states to their alliance.
When the Republican Party dies off because their members literally age and die off and aren't replaced by new bigots and religious nuts, the Democratic Party will encompass most people and then will fracture as internal disputes and differences arise. This will cause the transition to the eighth party system, but I have no idea what that will look like.
To summarize, you should vote for Jill Stein to make sure that the Republican leadership doesn't take over the Democratic Party in the transition to the seventh party system. Stein will lose, but she'll take enough votes to prevent Hillary from winning and to force the Democratic Party to give no safe harbor to the Republican establishment. You should also vote Democratic for all House and Senate races to castrate the Trump administration. Trump will have four completely ineffective years during which his party will suffer greatly from every mistake he makes and every failure to enact one of his policies. Meanwhile, the Green Party will join with the Democratic Party and turn it into the party that the American middle class, especially those under 50, so desperately want.
Remember, the next four years don't mean squat compared to the next forty years. We cannot afford a bad seventh party system in which we are forced to choose between Dick Cheney and Ted Cruz in every election. Take a tiny hit now in order to prevent that far greater evil.
#politics #peopleAreGoingToHateThis #loseABattleWinAWar #BernieOrBust #drumpf #crookedHillary #orangutanDad #seventhPartySystem