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  • 13 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 17th, 2023
  • Kellamity@sh.itjust.workstoUnited States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml•Socialism is not even radical
    2·
    1 month ago

    I see your point but again I’d say it’s because of the US’s winner-take-all system, as well as 50 states vs 650 seats

    Farage posed enough of a perceived risk to the Tories that they moved in his direction to avoid losing votes to UKIP. UKIP never would have won more than a handful of seats, let alone a majority, but by splitting the right vote Labour could have beat the Tories in swing seats

    And yes, that could be broadly true of a ‘spoiler’ candidate in the US presidential election, except that:

    1. Only 50 states, and therefore a tiny amount of swing seats compared to the UK

    2. more population per state than per British seat. By a whole huge margin. So its not enough to potentially appeal to 8,000 people to ‘spoil’ a seat

    3. The above leads to funding issues. Not only is there more money generally in the US elections, but because you have to flip a big state not a small constituency, you have to spend way way more to make an impact. You can’t focus a small budget on one tiny area and win a seat

    4. Winner-takes-all means that as long as a campaign thinks it will win a state, and then a presidency, who cares if some counties went to a spoiler candidate?

    I’d love to be wrong, and I do think that there’s probably also a cultural/historical element to the US’s two party dominance. But that said, its just a different system, different processes, different outcomes, different challenges than in the UK

  • Kellamity@sh.itjust.workstoUnited States | News & Politics@lemmy.ml•Socialism is not even radical
    82·
    1 month ago

    There are 650 MPs in the UK, and unlike ind the US it isn’t winner-takes-all; if you win one of the 650 seats you get to be an MP

    In the US presidential election, there are 50 states for a bigger population and even then winning one while losing the others achieves nothing

    In the senate and house elections, which are more analogous to the UK, independent candidates are viable, right? There’s at least a few. But it’s not comparable to the Presidential elections

    FPTP is fucked, but it’s only one element of why the USA is deadlocked into the two major parties being the only contenders. The electoral college, the winner-takes-all nature… all sorts

  • Kellamity@sh.itjust.workstoNot The Onion@lemmy.world•Let them eat Flakes: Kellogg’s CEO says poor families should consider ‘cereal for dinner’English
    7·
    9 months ago

    I think Occupy was really interesting, and part of the reason was the lack of a clear and actionable message

    I fully agree that the best and most effective protest movements are those with clear goals and demands, and Occupy wasn’t that

    What it managed to do really effectively was bring all kinds of people and ideologies together - there were the active leftists and anarchists, but also liberals and the middle class and all sorts. I’ve read articles and accounts that talk of just every kind of person spending time in that main/original camp, and it spawned a lot of similar events here in the UK

    Ultimately it had the same kind of energy as the ‘If you want it, war is over’ billboards of the late 60s. And absolutely thats frustrating from an activist p.o.v

    But on the other hand, it did in a lot of ways shift public perspective. I’d stop short of saying it changed the paradigm, but it definitely contributed to an anti-neoliberal, anti-free-market normalization

    So yeah, idk. It didn’t really achieve anything; the issues it tried to tackle are still omni-present. But maybe it did do something in some hard to quantify, nebulous ways. Its interesting at least 🤷‍♀️

    But yeah really not a blueprint of an effective protest in a majority of ways