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[Xe4]

More democrats voted for W. than Nader. And more democrats are gonna vote for Trump than Gary Johnson or Stein.

It's time to stop blaming Nader and place the entirety of the blame on Gore for being a shitty candidate who picked a disastrous VP (who was seriously flirting with Trump last month, and endorsed McCain over Obama in 2008).

Nader absolutely may have spoiled the election. Not only did he quite possible give Bush Florida, he even more likely gave him NH.

And that doesn't absolve those democrats who voted Bush from guilt either. But at least in his case, Bush wasn't a god damn white nationalist. I will absolutely blame any democrat who votes Trump, especially if they live in a swing state.

Another perspective: Democrats and Republicans are going to get a four to eight year lesson for choosing such terrible candidates. They want you to blame their constituents to absolve themselves of culpability. Ya'll made your own duck soup.

And who would be better? Sanders, a socialist? Chaffee? LOL, the only person who I could assure doing better than Hillary was Biden and he didn't run because his son died.

The fact is most years the candidate running aren't that great. That's just a fact of politics. Most people are coming off Obama thinking that's the norm, when the fact is Obama is the exception, not the rule. Most candidates are not that great, Hillary included.

In this case though, a not great candidate is running against a white nationalist. So yeah, while the parties and candidates are not blame free, I'm damn well going to blame the voters who brought Trump in too.

 

[BlastProcessing]

GAF isn't really all that liberal, it's quite conservative. Can be almost rabidly pro-Democrat though.


It's the incoming House. That was part of reason for the 20th Amendment.

Thanks for the correction.

I don't think American democracy is healthy when Trump is taking ~45% of the vote. What happened in the UK was unexpected because the UK is not a multi-party system - it's been unable to form a majority government or unopposed minority government precisely once in the post-war era. What's more, the Liberal Democrats had massive incentive not to reveal who they would form a coalition with because if they said "Labour", everyone who was more Conservative-inclined would stop voting for them, and vice versa if they said "Conservative". In genuine multi-party systems, coalitions are an expected facet of life and you do have a good idea of which parties your party is or is not expected to negotiate with.

Even healthy democracies will have to deal with popular and dangerous demagogues from time to time. I judge Democracies by how they deal with them. I also specifically said relatively healthy, because I am not sure a representative democracy could ever be objectively healthy.

You are right that the UK is generally not a multi party system. I would point to that as a reason for its relative stability and health. I reached for it as an example because it was easy. That was probably a lazy mistake on my part. Better to talk about the time Belgium went 589 days without a government or the political stalemate in Spain. The trickiest part of democracy is creating enough consensus to allow legitimate governance. I think it's safe to say that that's a weakness of multi-party systems.

 

[benjipwns]

Thanks for the correction.

I also thought it was the way you said until recently when I re-read it and noticed that Amendment changed it so the two times the process was actually used aren't "true" examples for today in that one regard.

Technically I believe the outgoing Congress could, theoretically, if they wanted to destroy their political careers, intervene and pass all kinds of rules to fuck with it though.

 

[Not]

Tell 'em, Bernie.