(06-19-2011, 01:16 AM)Jester Wrote: Had Ralph Nader and the greens not taken roughly 2.75% of the vote in the 2000 election, Al Gore would have almost certainly been elected president. Power is not just winning elections, but influencing their results, as anyone with the smallest inkling of European politics can tell you. The US has a monolithic system dominated by two parties, but by and large, this is the result of peoples' choices. When other parties are defeated, is it their lack of access to funds? Or the unpopularity of their platforms and candidates? Surely some of both, but even in the most diverse countries, voters still display something at least resembling the left-right split in the US. This is a generalized phenomenon. There is no great mass of popular opinion waiting to rally behind a radical party, only a whole lot of people with a whole lot of different opinions.
-Jester
This is an interesting point though. Some time ago I read an article about some journalists that explained to a group of Americans certain laws and regulations and systems which were implemented in Sweden and the US ....without telling them where they were from. It turned out that a majority (I believe large*) favored the Swedish system over the American one.
Once you have a quasi two party system there is no turning back. You end up with two parties on each side of the middle with lots of career politicians whose only real goal it is to keep their job, and other types of personal gain.
Even when a considerable part of the voters actually wants something else, people will vote for the least bad party....just so that the worst party will hopefully not win.
* to make sure kandrathe doesn't come back to me with one of his websearches and tells me it was actually not a large majority)
ps this thread became really spectacular!!
I was planning to write a reply on kandrathe's story about raising cows, but I don't know what that really was about.