“What’s funny about that is they assume my ambition is positional. They assume my ambition is a title or a seat. My ambition is way bigger than that. My ambition is to change this country. Presidents come and go, elected officials come and go, single payer healthcare is forever.”
I don’t even know if that’s a thought. This country has little hope of a third party without radical changes to how we vote.
But keeping loud progressives in the party where they can be seen and heard is good to keep progressive voters engaged. Note that Bernie, AOC, and the more outspoken libs are given more airtime come election years whereas they only get minor sporadic coverage the rest of the time. So the Dems attract the progressives by amplifying convenient voices when it suits them, but otherwise progressive policy is essentially nullified by neo-lib willful failure to block shitty conservative policy.
The only way a third party gets in is if there’s a coup. The Big Two aren’t going to let anyone else at the table willingly.
The US system is similar to the UK as far as I can tell, and our two party system is starting to collapse.
The third party in question is actually even fucking worse, but at least it’s no longer a two horse race.
I think any system of government where one party can end up with an overall majority over everything is fundamentally flawed. Policy needs discussion and compromise, not just shoving through because “we won you lost get over it”
Not really since UK has a parliamentary system, which is far more hospitable to third (and fourth and fifth…) parties.
We’ve never been as two-party solidified as the US and our system isn’t thaaat similar really imo
They elect the president by state, with senate and house seats separately
We elect our priminister by voting in mps in constituencies and then the leader whichever party if any has enough mps to vote down the other members is the prime minister
It’s more like, for the US, if the leader of whichever party wins the most members of Congress appoints the president but there’s way more congressmen and smaller constituencies and the senate isn’t a thing
We’ve had hung parliaments and coalition governments - both recently and in the 40s, 10s, etc - and that just doesn’t exist in the US
Don’t get me wrong, our version of FPTP is bollocks and leans toward a two party system, it sucks
But I don’t think it’s really comparable to the US
People doom way too much about the two party duopoly. It’s a deeply ahistoric and defeatist narrative.
Yes, you can’t have a stable three party system in the US, but independent candidates can win and the parties in the duopoly can be swapped out for one another. Ross Perot almost won in 1992, losing only because he suspended his campaign for a time. And the Republican party was itself originally a third party. Abolitionists got tired of do-nothing centrists dragging their heels on slavery. Ultimately they found it was easier to start a new party rather than to work within the existing power structures that had been thoroughly captured by slave interests.
One thing i never see coconsidered is in the two part system, which two parties does it have to be? Third parties in our system will never work, but who said those two parties need to be dem or gop? There used to be different parties.
At some point, if traction cant ve made to cha ge the parties, then we may have no cboice but to replace them. Not with an unserious party like the green party, but a real party
This is literally how the Republican Party was formed. Slaveholders had captured both parties. Abolitionists found it easier to create a new third party rather than working within the other two.