Community for asking and answering any question related to the life, the people or anything related to the USA. Non-US people are welcome to provide their perspective! Please keep in mind:
First past the post:
Https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
They'd be handing the extremists on the right an easier win. They need enough energy to grab the Democratic party by the balls.
Basically, you need a voting system that goes "choice number one: Bernie, choice number two: Kamala" etc. At that point, go nuts.
The easiest switch is Approval Voting, which every tabulation machine in America can handle right now without any issue. Plus, it's very easy to adapt to Sequential Proportional Approval Voting, and proportional representation is the thing that will actually break up the two party system.
You can't get more than 50% of popular support without compromise. The people who hate the democratic party to the point they'd rather organise a new party are A: too few and B: bad at compromising
But if you believe in it go for it.
Just make sure that you give up and endorse the democrats if you're polling lower than 50%, or you'll be an effective supporter of Trump
Nah, I don’t agree with. Just wondering why they don’t.
Because leftists hate each other almost as much as they hate "libs". They can't organise shit.
True
short answer: the u.s. have a winner takes all voting system. splitting the left/liberal would ensure victory for the right.
It's a turducken of hopelessness.
Turkey layer: Most of the United States has a first-past-the-post winner-take-all system of voting. There's a great if old video by GCP Grey about this where he uses the animal kingdom as a somewhat cartoonish example. That if you start out with a cheetah, a tiger, an owl, a turtle, a gorilla and a chimpanzee all running for the office of King Of The Jungle, and all animals vote for their species, gorilla ends up elected with 19% of the vote. So 81% of the animals in the jungle now have a king they didn't vote for. So the owl and the turtle drop out of the race, now you've got two cat parties and two ape parties, those who would prefer owl or turtle win have to either pick one of those to vote for or none at all. Then Cheetah voters get an idea: Yeah we'd like the Cheetah candidate to win, but Tiger is more likely to win than Cheetah, and we'd prefer Tiger to either of the two ape parties. So what if we vote for Tiger instead? The vote goes 40% to Tiger, 30% Gorilla, 30% Chimpanzee. More animals voted for apes but the tiger won because the apes split their votes across two candidates. This is called the Spoiler Effect, and you can see it in real life if you look at certain races in red states where a Democrat won pretty much entirely because a Libertarian ran and some people who would have otherwise voted Republican voted yellow instead of red.
Forming your own political party that is further to an extreme than one of the two major ones means handing more elections to the opposite side.
Duck layer: That assumes you're allowed to create a party in the first place. Yes, the right to peacefully assemble enshrined in the first amendment of the constitution means that groups of people can hold meetings and say they're the Leftist Party and whatnot, but the Republican and Democrat parties have inserted themselves into the workings of our government in much the same way a tick does. They have control over things like who gets to put candidates on ballots. "As duly elected person who decides these things, I decide to do things in the way that keeps me in power and you out of power."
Chicken layer: A Leftist party is going to meet exactly once, the meeting will immediately devolve into a hair pulling match over identity politics and no platform will be built or second meeting scheduled. The American Left can do nothing but argue about whether it's feminist or not to hate trans women or which ethnicity should the group feel most offended in behalf of?
That third one in particular is why there isn't, in any practical way, an American "left".
Two party monopoly.
Yep.
On my voting ballet, I had 7 people running for presidency from seven DIFFERENT political parties. Yet the news only talks about two (well three... Fucking Jill Stein.)
We have a billionaire class that controls the media.
America went through huge population shifts, and changes of economy the last two generations which was much greater than the original Industrial Revolution in the 1700s.
It sort of broke the neighborhoods being sociable places, destroyed grassroot movements, and prevented new parties from developing.
Politics that is new, these are created in the communities and transition from the local to regional so to national.
New parties cannot be developed on the internet.
In addition to the practical realities of a 2-party system as others are pointing out, there's the fact that the Left eats its own. Nobody is ever good enough, and compromising with "the enemy" is "bad", hence people can either keep their moral purity and lose, or else compromise their ethics in order to move forward, but not both. For example, Biden reached across the aisle and managed to get a ton of shit done - but who even cared? To anyone not on the right it wasn't enough, while to the right itself it was all (claimed to be) bad to begin with, hence the message of "BoTh SiDeS sAmE" won out and thus the puppetmasters wanting to influence the election got their desires met.
As long as people choose to remain in their ignorance, we can't influence outcomes for either better or worse.
True
Problem: there are two competing political parties.
Creates new political party
New situation: there are two competing political parties.
Yeah, with the current political system in the US there is simply no way to get a third party any real traction.
Abolish first past the post and the electoral college, then you will see (slow) change, as it stands now, FPTP will only serve to maintain this two party system.
There already are multiple leftist parties in the US. The Green Party is the main one, but there are others.
The issue is that they don't get much press coverage, and a lot of people use the argument that if leftists split off from the Democrats and divide, then the Republicans will win. That keeps a lot of people from voting for those parties.
Your greens are heavily compromised, if I’m not mistaken.
Jill Stein has had dinner with Putin, so yeah, just a wee bit.
Ranked choice voting could help with this.
A couple of states do have ranked choice voting, but it definitely should be implemented for all.
A bit, but Star Voting is better in every way (except awareness).
Even Leftists hate other Leftists due to the aggrandizing resource depleting insufferability of micro causes
Please explain like I’m five.
They will abstain from voting for a candidate that agrees with them almost completely because they disagree on one single issue.
This can best be seen by how labour is treated in the modern "left".
Labour has been the backbone of leftism before leftism was even a thing. Think about every major revolution that overthrew an authoritarian and brutal government and you'll find the working class acting as the shock troops and the stalwart base of it (even if the leadership is the educated middle class). Leftist causes have succeeded in the past because the working class literally put their bodies on the line for things.
But now, in this era of the "identity left", the working class are too flawed to be treated well. They're treated, indeed, like they're the disease as the simpering intellectuals (pseudo- or otherwise) of the middle class sit in their comfortable lives and contrive complaint after complaint about every little "micro cause" (I like that term and will be stealing it) that catches their fancy while shunning the only people in history who've shown they're willing to put their bodies into causes.
Surprise! They've become ineffectual! And the working class, having been abandoned by the faux-left, and indeed being despised by them, turn to the other side in the (sadly vain) hope that SOMEONE will give a shit about them.
They have. They can't get any traction. The major political party closest to them is the target of constant derision and they would rather feel morally superior than be successful
I see what you mean.
Our voting system favors 2 parties, so successful parties must do the coalition building before elections. And if coalition building is required to get a majority, then leftists aren't popular enough to do it on their own.
Compromise. No matter what voting system you have eventually you need to vote on some bill. If you can't work with those who partially agree with you they will find moderates on the other side to work with and thus get their agenda passed not yours.
Because actual leftists reject the entire existence of the state, and therefore its institutions. We know that electoral politics are nothing but theatre that is corrupt by design and exists solely to provide the illusion of choice to placate the public, and manufacture consent for our own oppression and that of others. Even if we thought there was any sort of merit to it, we know that no one who threatens the system will ever be allowed to get to the top of said system to "change it from within", that's just another lie perpetuated to maintain the status quo (as long as people believe that elections are the only way to change things, and keep trying that despite all evidence pointing to the contrary, those in power get to keep it).
If you genuinely care and want to know more, you could start here:
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/the-anarchist-faq-editorial-collective-an-anarchist-faq-full (for some reason I can't link to specific sections of the document, it's a bit overwhelming, but looks like sections B.2, H1.5, H.5, and J.2 would be a good place to start, though it really is worth working your way through the entire thing)
Both sides of the spectrum have probably thought about it. But if a party splits they don't have the numbers so they don't risk it.
So an example election result is no longer 50/50 where there's a decent chance to win. Split those voters with two parties. At worst it would be 50/25/25. Your opponent wins all the time. So they wait for the other side to break apart first.
There are "actual" leftist parties in the US.
Huh?
Other commenters have listed some.