Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says something that I too have been saying for ages and should be repeated over and over again.
“We don’t have a left party in the United States,” the congresswoman said. “The Democratic Party is not a left party. The Democratic Party is a center or center-conservative party.”
“We can’t even get a floor vote on Medicare for All. Not even a floor vote that gets voted down. We can’t even get a vote on it. So this is not a left party,” she told interviewer, journalist and best-selling author Ta-Nehisi Coates.
I doubt that the political establishment and its media supporters will change their framing of the parties. They have a vested interest in limiting the range of political debate in the country and the best way is to pretend that the two parties represent full left-right range of acceptable political views, rather than what it is, a center-right, crazy-right spectrum.
(AD)
I would follow her.
Lets hope Washington does not corrupt that bright hope.
What was that joke?
This is the Republican Party. It’s the equivalent of the Conservatives here in the UK. And here is the Democratic Party. It’s the equivalent of the, uh, … the Conservatives here in the UK.
Note, I tend to see the NDP in Canada as centre-left, certainly not left.
One of the many things that puzzles me about the US political system is the--to a Canadian--is the incredible institutionalization of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the USA.
I read of puople being a “registered” XX. Where the blazes does on register and why?
I might have a party membership card somewhere but all it is a note to the party that I paid my dues and can vote in a nomination meeting or leadership contest.
jrkrideau@#3:
One of the many things that puzzles me about the US political system is the--to a Canadian--is the incredible institutionalization of the Republican and Democratic Parties in the USA.
I read of people being a “registered” XX. Where the blazes does on register and why?
I can’t tell if you’re playing dumb, or actually are enquiring, so I will attempt to answer since it’s interesting practice in political brevity.
The two parties each control their own ‘caucus’ or nominating process. So, for the democrat party, only democrats are allowed to participate. Voters must register for a party (or “unaffiliated”) and that allows them to participate in their party’s nomination and no other. In other words, if you are a democrat in a republican-controlled state, your participation prior to the election -- when the candidates are chosen -- is completely wasted. It is arguably a violation of the voting rights act, that people’s votes are controlled in this way but the argument is that their votes on the actual election are not controlled, and that party nominating processes are entirely party business. That’s how you can have obviously corrupt things like the democrat party brass trying to throw the nomination to Clinton -- because it’s the party’s business to decide the candidate and they can fuck the voters over because the voters’ participation is largely a courtesy.
For example, this year I registered as a republican, in order to reduce my likelihood of being struck off the rolls in some voter suppression program, and in case there was a challenger to Trump that I could vote for. I already know that the democrats are going to run Biden so that they can lose, so by being a republican for the next few years I have a chance that my vote will have some influence. That chance can be counted as “approximately a fart in a hurricane” but that is how things are done in the greatest democracy since Athens.
Decades ago, a prominent Democrat political leader in the US (it might have been Tip O’Neill, who served for years as Speaker of the House of Representatives) said that in any other country the US Democrats would be 3 or 4 different parties. That’s probably even more true now than it was decades ago. The Republicans have gone far right, and so the Democrats are expected to represent everything from center right to center left.
Addendum to Marcus @4:
“in some states” ought to be added to what Marcus wrote above. Some states have an “open primary” where anybody can vote in any primary. In some states, you can choose on election day which primary race you want to vote in, but you can’t vote in both. Some states use a caucus for primaries, where you have to spend most of the day in a high school gymnasium or similar place, and people keep switching bleachers until there’s a majority winner. In some states there is a state convention at the capitol, so only the people who can afford to take several days off of work and stay in a hotel have votes that count.
I live in a state where the parties decide which of the above methods to use for each nomination (with, of course, the elites choosing whichever method favors the candidate they want the most). So it switches from election to election.
Yes, it is all as confusing as heck.
brucegee1962@#6:
Yes, it is all as
confusingstupid as heck.Fixed that for you.
Key point is that strong attempts are made to keep those pesky voters’ opinions irrelevant so the party brass can do whatever they think is best
for themfor our great democracy.@ jrkrideau No. 2
The line, I believe, originated with Beyond the Fringe.
(Scroll to the bottom for the clip.)
I think what’s confusing is that in (most of?) the rest of the world, political parties are (generally*) private membership organisations -- you have to actually join a party (which usually involves paying membership dues and accepting the membership conditions**) in order to participate in internal party business such as the selection of candidates. The idea that such matters might be open to voters in general is completely alien, because political parties are not really part of the basic architecture of democracy.
* A recent innovation here in the UK has been the formation of things that look like political parties (such as the short-lived Change UK or the Brexit Party) but which are actually limited companies (or, more accurately, the shell of a political party joined at the hip to a limited company). This allows them to neatly circumvent most of the rules on funding and the declaration of donations.
** For example, a typical condition is that you agree not to support other parties -- although it’s rarely enforced in practice, and is largely unenforceable as far as rank-and-file members go. However, it does mean that members can be kicked out if they publicly advocate voting for somebody other than the party’s official candidates, at least in theory.
Allegedly the open primary process was supposed to make the system more democratic, but in practice it makes it more totalitarian because it’s not clear just where the voting public ends and the party structure begins, and so party leaders loudly bully their supposed constituents around as if they were their own private cadres bound to obey them. It’s made the political system sort of like a one-party state but with two nominally separate parties, the way Sparta had two separate hereditary kings sharing power.
@Marcus Ranum
Thanks for the explanation, I also really wondered what was the reason for being registered… in Canada the process for selecting candidates for political office is very different and party membership, as described by jrkrideau, is required for participation.
I just watched https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nashville_(film).
I urge all you Americans to vote for Hal Philip Walker of the Replacement Party.
Or at least watch the movie and listen to what he says.
It’s very odd to read this sort of thing because it all involves unstated assumptions that are very, very, different between countries.
Marcus makes the point “…because it’s the party’s business to decide the candidate and they can fuck the voters over because the voters’ participation is largely a courtesy.” above and seems to think it’s obvious voters ought have a say on who represents a party.
While people from other countries see quite clearly it’s the parties business who is their representative and it’s no business at all of voters in general.
That’s the weird thing -- it’s the U.S need to make party membership something known by others because they think it’s anyone else business.
Where as here (New Zealand) a political parties business is pretty much it’s own -- they pick their representatives to put up at election and if they let party members vote it’s no one else business (even though it;s obviously of much interest) who their party members are -- until they stand for election.
The publics only interest is who stands at election for the party, the general public has no business telling a party who to put up -- If you want to have a say in a parties selection, join the party.
And that’s the point which confuses people -- in the U.S people think voters should not only vote at an election but also (according to publicly declared affiliations) for who ought stand, where as many (if not most) other places think the picking of a candidate is the private business of a party, just as party affiliations and participation is also peoples private business.
fentex, Marcus is not that uninformed.
Specifically, your quotation did not include its setup: “the argument is that their votes on the actual election are not controlled, and that party nominating processes are entirely party business”. So, when he wrote what you quoted, your inference that he “seems to think” it is not applicable.
—
OTOH, you kinda said what I might have; I’m in Oz, and we too vote for candidates, not for parties (well, technically, one can vote for a party ticket, but in reality that’s the set of candidates endorsed by a party), and the parties themselves decide who has what position within them.
(On the
thirdgripping hand, the more layers of obfuscation, the harder it is to shift the course of the system)