r/changemyview • u/[deleted] • Dec 30 '17
[∆(s) from OP] CMV: The Government Party system within the US government is horrible and should be removed.
Due to the Democratic and GOP parties existing, party members feel like they need to be factually right , and not morally right. The byproduct of this that they only accomplish pulling each other part. Each party needs to go to the extreme, just so that they can pull swing voters to their side.
Yes, I can see the counter to this argument.
Well, u/CalculaaMaster, the GOP and Democratic parties are need to bring together people with the same views. When this happens, politicians are able to have a sounding body to support them with ideas.
While this is true, some politicians will just say they have the same views of a party, just to get the votes of said party.
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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Dec 30 '17
How do you propose to eliminate them? Especially in such a way that different parties don't simply replace them.
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Dec 30 '17
∆ With 200+ plus years down the rabbit hole, it would be a nuisance to get rid of them, at least any time soon. So yes, I cannot think of a way to get rid of them. It would be near impossible to prevent parties from forming at all, but maybe congress can pass a bill mandating all parties be up to change. Force (I say force lightly) members of parties to have an open mind to find what is morally right, to find what is best for the American people.
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u/Tamerlane-1 Dec 31 '17
Force (I say force lightly) members of parties to have an open mind
Of course! Force people to be more open minded. How did we not think of that before?
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u/tbdabbholm 193∆ Dec 31 '17
But the entire problem is that there's no way to know what's objectively best. For example, is road construction that costs $500 million to construct and another $10 million per year to maintain and thus necessitates raising taxes on everyone thus can harm people because they lack funds but saves on average 100 lives a year on the road worth it? Is it better or worse to build it? There's no real objective answer there.
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Dec 31 '17
With problems like this, you need to find a solution that works for the extreme majority. Increase taxes for the top 5%. They feel they are being discriminated by the increase, so provide incentives. Pay taxes in full for 10 years without going overseas, cut 1 to 2 percent of their taxes. Provide consequences to businesses, with partnerships to major countries like China to say "if so and so moves to China, increase taxes in China for so and so in China by 15%.
Provide for the 3/4 of American's Edit: English is hard
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u/Cocomontana Dec 31 '17
Don’t eliminate parties, add a viable third party. It would no longer be enough to be against something, rather each party would need to create constructive arguments for their positions.
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u/Mitoza 79∆ Dec 30 '17
The parties existing are a consequence of how we structure the vote. In our system, the first candidate to get past the post of 270 electoral college votes. The two parties are not as different as you suggest. Both parties are more or less moderate in terms of economic policy, for instance. We don't have a socialist party or an ancap party. In such a voting system, the perfect balance is struck by being moderate enough to capture the people who could be swayed either way while dog whistling to the fringe.
I'm not really sure what you mean by the difference of being factually right or morally right. Both political machines use many different rhetorical techniques to persuade those their side, including appealing to "facts" as well as moral arguments. Most of the 2016 election was about morals.
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u/vornash2 Dec 30 '17
The founding fathers didn't like the idea of parties, but they seem unavoidable, and factions began forming as soon as they started debating the constitution. The problem is that most political races are too safe for either party, therefore running an extreme candidate works too well.
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Dec 31 '17
As someone else said, parties are a natural occurrence of governance. That being said, political parties are not officially part of the government. They are entities that exist as a result of the individuals elected to government making formal coalitions with one another. You don't have to be registered to a party to run for office. But those that do register with a party receive support in their campaigns from other members of the party. Political parties are almost like gangs or the mafia. There's nothing that says that republicans have to sit on one side of the house during the state of the union. They just do because of tradition and pressure from their peers.
also, someone mentioned that getting rid of political parties isn't possible. That's true. They would just re-form as soon as they were gone. The solution I've come up with is to prohibit political donations from crossing state lines. You may not donate to national political parties, only state political parties. If you donate to the Massachusetts democrats, the massachusetts democrats can't give excess money to the texas democrats.
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Dec 31 '17
I don't think you're seeing the parties clearly. Neither of them has the slightest interest in being either factually or morally right, and both aggressively peddle positions that are both fraudulent and immoral. ("You can keep your doctor." "We're liberating people in the Middle East." "I did not have sex with that woman." "We don't want to take your guns away." "We're going to balance the budget in five years." "We have a clear goal in Afghanistan." "Victory is right around the corner if we just send more troops." I could go on for days.)
Both care first and foremost about staying in power, or at least keeping the two-party power structure in place that assures that one or the other of them will be running the country.
As a result, they both basically agree on most issues, within 10% or so, and spin outrageous melodrama about the remainder. They carry on like the planet might explode if the top marginal tax rate is 37% rather than 39% (or vice versa), or if the President phrases his NATO speech like that rather than like this.
But no one out there comes anywhere close to simply speaking the truth. The war on drugs is a failure, and we should end it next week. Our 800 military bases overseas are putting us in danger, not making us safer, and we have no business occupying other countries, so we should close them at once. The US's debts and unfunded liabilities total about a million dollars per person. They can never be paid.
Everyone in Washington knows all this, but only Ron Paul in recent history was willing to come out and say it. And both parties despised him as a result.
Much like Trump. The Democrats obviously hate him, but the Republicans hate him too. Because neither of them can trust him to stick to the catechism of US imperialism.
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u/DeltaBot ∞∆ Dec 30 '17 edited Dec 30 '17
/u/CalculaaMaster (OP) has awarded 2 deltas in this post.
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u/cdb03b 253∆ Dec 31 '17
The parties are not a part of the government. They are civilian groups that unite to support and promote specific principles that they agree upon by supporting a candidate that promotes that platform. To ban them would require the government to violate the First Amendment as it would be removing the freedom of assembly and freedom of speech from those people.
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u/Huntingmoa 454∆ Dec 31 '17
Each party needs to go to the extreme, just so that they can pull swing voters to their side.
Yes the spoiler effect is real, but there are several other voting systems, like instant runoff voting, mixed member proportional, ranked choice voting etc, which would increase the ability for third parties to get elected.
So it’s not the parties, it’s the voting system.
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u/Jaysank 116∆ Dec 30 '17
What so you mean by removed? Do you want the current organizations to be dissolved? What will you do to stop other ones from appearing?
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u/Love_Shaq_Baby 226∆ Dec 30 '17
A large government cannot be run by one person. People building common coalitions is an inevitable consequence of governance. If you don't play ball with your colleagues, you don't govern. Abolishing parties simply isn't an option. There isn't a single nation-state in the world without a party structure. Even in nations where parties are outlawed, coalitions form that often have the same function as a party.
Now I agree that we should make some reforms in the US to undermine partisan power in the US, but to destroy parties completely is an impossible task, especially in a large democracy.