At 21:07 30-10-00 -0500, John Giorgis wrote:
> >Oh yeah, great. With the current flawed system, the government is made up
> >of one right-winged party and one even more right-winged party. Since that
> >leaves anyone out whose views are in or left of the center, I even dare
> >call your system not entirely democratic. :(
>
>Maybe you could dare consider that we Americans are not European, and look
>at things differently. We *had* a very left wing party, the Democratic
>Party of the 1930's through 1970's. That Party was defeated soundly over
>the course of the 1980's, forcing it to reinvent itself as a slightly
>left-of-center Party in 1992 to avoid losing power completely at the
>national level. America is a right-of-center nation, and our *democratic*
>system returns right-of-center governments fairly consistently. You may
>think of them as extremists, but they're our extremists. Calling them
>undemocratic, however, is stooping into the gutter.
I didn't call the US government undemocratic -- I called your *political
system* undemocratic. The two-party system is democratic in so far that it
gives you a choice between parties, but it doesn't give parties/people on
the left of the Democrats a chance. *That* is what undemocratic about it.
BTW, I called it *undemocratic*, not *extremist*.
> >>The last thing I want is a proportional vote system where tiny minorities
> >>at the extremes, like the Greens hold the balance of power.
> >
> >First, the fact that other parties have a presidential candidate that the
> >American public knows about proves that they are not "tiny minorities".
>
>For sufficiently small definitions of tiny.
Then what is your definition of "tiny"? A constituency of one million? Two
million? Five million?
> >>The last
> >>thing I want is a system that would enfranchise all of these people on the
> >>fringes, from Ralph Nader to Pat Buchanan to Harry Browne.
> >
> >But isn't that what democracy is all about: giving a voice to everyone,
> >even though you disagree with them?
>
>Voice? Yes. Power? No. Not unless you can get something approaching
>a majoirty.
In other words, a *single* party must win at least 45-50% of the seats in
Congress to be allowed in? What if two smaller parties (say
Social-Democrats and Greens) would both win 20%? Neither of them is exactly
a majority, but if they cooperate they will be well on their way to
becoming one. Throw in a few votes from the leftist part of the Democrats,
and you have a majority.
Unfortunately, this will not happen because your system denies them their
place in Congress.
Re: power: In European countries, power is very relative because a
political party rarely (if ever) has an absolute majority. The only way to
get a majority is through forming coalitions with other parties.
Jeroen
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