that’s always the hard part of electoral reform. you are trying to change the system that has elevated the putative changers. and yet globally it does occur, not so infrequently. optimistically we are in the process of exhausting all the alternatives before maybe finally doing the right thing. 1/
it will take a popular movement, popular pressure though. the public does understand it hates a system run by these two parties. /fin
i don’t think that’s true at all. tommy tuberville is not who most alabamians would choose as their representative, even if under the current party system they do prefer red to blue. 1/
our current party system is an artifact of our electoral system, and even within that system the derangement of the people and structures that emerge is an artifact of primaries and binaries (demonizing the other guy is safer than and just as effective as taking any positive policy risk). /fin
these are all incremental things. it would take only acts of Congress to insist Senators are chosen by approval vote, Representatives by PR. 1/
getting in the habit of reforming our electoral system (and supreme court, and legislative structure) allows incrementalism that our current sacralized sclerosis denies. /fin
approval voting for Senators largely addresses that. it doesn’t eliminate the misbegotten compromise, but replaces a Senate filtered by primaries to include extremists who capture 50%+1 of (relevant, major party) votes with people who might be no one’s first choice but nearly everyone can live with.
no. Israel is a catastrophe of a parliamentary system, binary coalitions governed by tiny marginal fringes. France is a weird presidential system. 1/
Nordics and Germany are struggling with a global recrudescence of fascism like everyone else, but they are doing better than most places at simultaneously representing that tendency and marginalizing them to their actual support levels. 2/
no contemporary parliamentary democracy that i know of has sufficiently addressed gridlock/status-quo bias and collapse to coalitions. the threat places like Germany face is voters give AfD a chance because the negative coalition of a cordon sanitaire proves too dysfunctional. /fin
i don’t think what the public expresses can exist independently of some set of procedures by which they express. some sets procedures will encourage outcomes that approximate functional, deliberative representation. then there is what we have.
i don’t think that’s clear, but if it is i’d rather we have an overt we’re-the-racists party to hold accountable rather than 2 structurally-50/50-in-natl-influence coalitions whose voters’ motivations r so obscure + heterogeneous they don’t even have clear accounts for themselves of why they choose.
there are aspects of parliamentary systems that encourage tacit collapse to binary coalitions, but those shld be addressed rather than taken as inescapable. electoral systems tht tolerate multiple parties at least do give voters opportunities to express affirmative preferences in ways ours does not.
i’m very strongly of the view that representative bodies should be chosen by some form of PR, single-winner elections should be something like approval voting, and legislative procedure should be reformed to discourage collapse to stake binary coalitions.
can i interest you in approval voting?
a thing about the American electoral system is voters are given so few choices, it’s impossible to distinguish the degree to which votes represent preferences aligned with those they vote for vs dyspreferences against the few (most often one) meaningful alternatives.
the guilty massacre the guilty. and then the tables are turned.
if you define victory in term of destruction of the other side, then war becomes a positive sum game, both sides simultaneously can be victors!
july 4, 2026 would be a great day to convict and remove. see @cathygellis.bsky.social ht @davidakaye.bsky.social
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very much agreed. everything is terrifying.
if the alternative is escalation, i could eat TACOs every day.
(i don't think anything in this thread is intended as endorsement. just trying to make sense of how our, um, leadership might understand things, why they might think the awful things they do are "smart" or whatever.)
Word of the day: “agnotology…the study of deliberate, culturally cultivated ignorance or doubt, typically to sell a product, influence opinion, or win favour, particularly thru the publication of inaccurate or misleading scientific data.” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agnotol... via @kevinbaker.bsky.social
To when would you date the beginning of the US turn to revisionism? I say it predates Trump, that a bit ironically the “people for a new american century” became its pioneers. When they thought they were asserting American power, they were undermining it.
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surrealism hasn't usually been so bleak.
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sometimes when you rip off the bandaid you just bleed out.
