661: Two-Party System
| Two-Party System |
 Title text: I favor approval voting or IRV chiefly because they mean we might get to bring back The Bull Moose party. |
Explanation
This girl is running for class president, but gets shouted down by Billy the Political Activist, or at least, he thinks he might become one one day. Someone on the Internet must have told Billy that all he has to know about politics is that America's two-party system is broken. But, you know the problem with believing what you read on the Internet.
Transcript
[A girl stands at a podium, giving a speech.]
Girl: And if I'm elected, I'll try to fix some of these problems.
Boy, off-panel: Yeah, right!
[A boy in the audience is standing on his chair.]
Boy: The REAL problem is the corporate-run two party system. Until we fix THAT, we'll have no real change!
Girl: Billy, I'm running for class president. We don't even have political parties.
Boy: That's because the two-praty, uh ... estab ... uh.
Girl: Billy, did you learn about politics from the internet?
Boy: I thought that one reply was all I ever needed!
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refresh comments!Discussion
People in Europe (and Billy) usually don't realize that the US parties are not anything like the European parties. The European parties have a rigid pyramidal structure, with the party leader (or a regional version thereof) being the election candidate. If the US parties were like this, the US system really would be two-party. However in reality the US parties have hardly any structure. Pretty much anyone can become a candidate from a US party, it's more of an endorsement. So the primaries act as the first round of the elections, deciding who will get the endorsement from the party. It's possible, and had happened in the past, for the same person to participate in the primaries of both major parties, and even to be nominated as the candidate from both parties (though some places now have laws against the last part)! In the local elections, it's also not uncommon to have multiple candidates with the same self-declared party affiliation. 108.162.245.111 21:05, 13 January 2014 (UTC)
- Thanks for the elaboration! Mumiemonstret (talk) 14:37, 13 October 2014 (UTC)
- The problem with such a format for democracy is that the anyones involved in US politics have to be steeeeeeenkeeeen rich. And of course the problem with the alternative version of democracy is that it isn't a democracy. Oh wait, neither is...
I used Google News BEFORE it was clickbait (talk) 02:15, 28 January 2015 (UTC)
