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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
@ Capsase:
How about a primary election where only paid-upnote party members are eligible to vote?
edited 30th May '16 11:56:32 AM by Greenmantle
Keep Rolling On
That would have probably helped Sanders this cycle for the same reason he tended to do better in caucuses, since it would tend to favor the candidate with the most enthusiastic supporters rather than the most numerous supporters.
So I doubt they'd do that.
edited 30th May '16 11:58:15 AM by CaptainCapsase
Yeah. That kind of voter suppression is completely unreliable in primaries, since the voter coalitions that form can and do vary from cycle to cycle. Pay-to-vote would suppress the youth vote, as well as less affluent minority populations and poor whites. Now upon reconsidering my statement, it's difficult to say how that would have effected this primary season since Sanders got youth voters while Clinton got blacks and Hispanics, but that sort of system absolutely would have hurt Obama quite badly, since he had both youth voters and blacks/Hispanic minority voters.
Edit: To add in a third factor, that would also entail making all primaries closed, which definitely would've hurt Sanders and Obama even more because of the lack of independent voters.
edited 30th May '16 12:07:47 PM by CaptainCapsase
To get into the conversation from a few pages ago, Trump could well be the most hawkish candidate out there, but (to his credit) he's not beholden to very many, if any, of the Foreign Policy Establishment's Sacred Cows. His willingness to fuck conventional wisdom on foreign policy puts him into "stopped clock" territory on a few issues where Washington as a whole is stuck in a rut due to political-diplomatic inertia or the capture of elite special interests.
So you get him saying supremely dumb shit like maybe Japan should have nuclear weapons instead of staying under our umbrella, but you also get well-needed skepticism of the old bipartisan idea that we have to make the world "Safe for Democracy."
I wouldn't call that "superdumb"; certainly not a good idea, but not entirely indefensible; Japan already has a fairly sophisticated missile defense system built to counter Chinese and North Korean missiles, and the sheer mismatch of the size and sophistication of the Chinese nuclear arsenal (one is a reasonable deterrent, the other is apocalyptic) versus that of the US is enough that a Japanese missile crisis just flat out wouldn't be able to happen. What, if anything the US gains by doing that is debatable (next to nothing), and another nuclear state means another potential point of failure for a weapon to fall into the wrong hands or a false alarm to trigger a nuclear exchange. There's also the fact that you'd have to cut a deal with Russia to prevent them from backing the Chinese, and that would likely entail recognizing their annexation of Crimea.
edited 30th May '16 12:34:03 PM by CaptainCapsase
X3 Welcome to her the rest of the world tends to do it. You want a vote in a party primary you have to be a member, you want to be a member you have to pays fees (sometimes as little as £1 a year if you're a student, armed forces or in certain other categories). Why have membership fees? Because then the party gets its funds from the membership rather then from big money donations.
I'd argue that's a terrible idea-the people it would drive out are the moderates, not the ideologues.
Leviticus 19:34Yes but the change in funding would give a lot more power to the people, moderates could push the party to speak to them by joining or not joining the party, instead of trying to vote but knowing that in the end big money always wins.
That and even with FPTP you'd end up with more then two parties, meaning moderates would have a lot more choice.
The serious ideologues would be driven out by the fact that they could be kicked out of the party and dennied the right to be members, alongside this many would found their own parties anyway.
edited 30th May '16 2:02:15 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran
It'd be a bad idea in the context of the American system as it currently functions, however; the degree of autonomy different states' divisions of the parties have means that individual states would almost inevitably get to set their fee to whatever they want, which would be abused to suppress certain demographics based on wealth, probably by both parties.
edited 30th May '16 3:39:54 PM by CaptainCapsase
To end this particular line of discussion... Having to pay a fee for one's vote to matter in the Democratic or Republican primaries sounds far too much like a poll tax to be tolerated for the simple reason that, historically, poll taxes were used to disenfranchise African-Americans in the Southern United States, and was so much of an issue that, in 1964, the Twenty-Fourth Amendment was passed to say, "No, you can't have a poll tax on elections." While the DNC and RNC are nominally private organizations, the association of poll taxes with racism make something like this idea not only nonviable, but possibly also unconstitutional.
edited 30th May '16 5:02:14 PM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food Badly
X3 That only works if the primary is a publicly funded public election, and not a privately run, privately funded internal desicion making process for a private institution.
A poll tax would have to apply to an election, a primary isn't an election, it's a primary.
edited 30th May '16 5:07:52 PM by Silasw
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranPrivate organizations that obstinately has ties to the federal government and uses voting machines supplied by the federal government. That being said, we already see the effect of having even an indirect fee to vote causes through Voter ID Laws and it disproportionately affects minorities more often than not. The same Voter ID Laws that affect general elections also generally apply to primaries as well.
edited 30th May '16 5:14:15 PM by GameGuruGG
Wizard Needs Food BadlyThe Supreme Court did decide that primary elections have to be open to all party members without discrimination on other grounds, despite the parties nominally being closed entities. Makes me wonder if black folks or other minorities could show up and troll a white nationalist political party's primaries.
You can argue that "technically, it isn't really a poll tax" until you're blue in the face. But if it looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, and quacks like a duck, people are going to call it a duck, even if it's not, strictly speaking.
If you have to pay to vote, the public would likely raise such a stink over it, that it wouldn't be implemented. Never mind the facts, you know how much they matter when there's an emotionally-charged issue on the agenda...
edited 30th May '16 5:23:28 PM by pwiegle
This Space Intentionally Left Blank.Hydra is recruiting Trumpists...
◊
X5 Sure, but then the question becomes why do they have such close ties to the federal government and get their voting machines supplied by the federal government? It's weird how close your political parties are to the government.
X4 Has it ruled on how party membership is defined? If you're only a party member if you pay a membership fee but then you get your vote easily I think it would meat the requirements.
X3 But why? Why do the American public feel that they are entitled to free membership of private organisations? If it's that they're publicly funded organisations then that makes sense, but what if that changed? Do folks get angry that they can't vote at the meeting of their local golf club unless they join the club and pay the membership fees?
It's because the two parties have government-recognized privileges that affect the election. In Oklahoma, for example, it is a matter of law that only the two parties get on the ballot. It's similar, if not as restrictive, across the majority of the US states - the two parties get on the ballot automatically, anyone else needs to jump through hoops that were written by the two parties.
If a party has privileges granted to it by the government, then it is not a private organization.
edited 31st May '16 3:24:40 AM by Ramidel
In fact no political party should hold any privileges whatsoever. They are tools, a means of political participation, not an end unto themselves and they should neither be the only means of such participation nor the most important. Yet both "democrats" and "republicans" dominate the institutional and organic framework of both the states and the union.
edited 31st May '16 4:19:02 AM by germi91
"It is true that we are called a democracy, for the administration is in the hands of the many and not of the few."Found what I thought was a pretty insightful editorial
about Obama's trip to Hiroshima.
But unless you are amoral, you also acknowledge the human capacity for self-delusion and selfishness. People are quite capable of justifying the utterly unjustifiable by draping their immoral actions behind sweeping ethical claims.
And if you are a responsible political leader, you must recognize both sides of this moral equation and still not allow yourself to be paralyzed.
As a student of Reinhold Niebuhr, the great theologian who was at once a liberal and a realist, President Obama has spent many years pondering this tension. He has sought out occasions on which he could preach about the ironies and uncertainties of human action — and also our obligation to act in the face of them.
This habit can annoy those who prefer to see a world in which good guys with few flaws confront bad guys. Obama is constantly being criticized for “apologizing” for the United States when he is in fact attempting to hold us to the very standards that make the United States the “exceptional” nation his critics extol. Judging ourselves by our own standards is the best way to prove that our commitment to them is real.
It is thus not at all surprising that Obama chose to be the first sitting president of the United States to visit Hiroshima, where our country dropped the first nuclear bomb used in warfare — where, as Obama put it, “a flash of light and a wall of fire destroyed a city and demonstrated that mankind possessed the means to destroy itself.”
His speech was powerful precisely because of its moral realism. He made no apology for Harry Truman’s decision to use the bomb and instead put it in the context of all the destruction wrought by World War II: “Sixty million people would die. . . . Shot, beaten, marched, bombed, jailed, starved, gassed to death.” Inherent in these sentences, with their reference to forced marches and the death camps, was the explanation of why the allies fought the war in the first place.
Obama got at both why wars are inevitable (“We may not be able to eliminate man’s capacity to do evil, so nations and the alliances that we form must possess the means to defend ourselves”) and why we should nonetheless strive mightily to avoid them (“The irreducible worth of every person, the insistence that every life is precious, the radical and necessary notion that we are part of a single human family — that is the story that we all must tell”).
And in good Niebuhrian fashion, he urged that even those who believe they are fighting for justice be wary of “how easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.”
Remaining aware that even the righteous can do both good and evil is central to Niebuhr’s project. Back in 2007, Obama greatly impressed my friend and fellow columnist David Brooks with this off-the-cuff statement of what he had learned from Niebuhr. It was remarkably true to the theologian’s core insights:
“I take away the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away . . . the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naive idealism to bitter realism.”
Obama’s critics typically see him as setting too high a bar for American intervention or argue that he is far more a realist than an idealist. The simple truth is that moral realism is hard because it means being hard on ourselves and accepting tragedy. Actions undertaken in the name of legitimate goals and actions avoided for prudential reasons can both have appalling outcomes.
Niebuhr himself was deeply ambivalent about the bomb, initially signing a Federal Council of Churches statement declaring that the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been “morally indefensible,” but later concluding that he and his colleagues were perhaps too harsh on “statesmen . . . driven by historic forces more powerful than any human decision.”
It’s not hard to identify with Niebuhr’s moral reticence. A humble ambivalence may be the proper response to a horrifically destructive act undertaken in the name of avoiding even more destruction.

If you want an actual answer to how fox would expect the DNC to clamp down on future leftist candidates, you'd have to ask him or her. I don' really see any way to accomplish that without actively working to make the party less inclusive, tampering with elections, or throwing out the popular primary system altogether in favor of a vote solely among the party brass.
Now to continue with that topic I was angling towards, I disagree with the notion that the democratic party has nothing to worry about going into the future. To be frank, Hillary Clinton (Sanders would do no better) is most likely going to accomplish very, very little in office; the Republican presence in congress is going to ensure that. In all likelihood, we'll see a continuation of the political paralysis that's crept in the system near the end of Obama's time in office. The Anti-establishment sentiments that manifested in this cycle aren't going anywhere without a period of major reform, and without a cooperative congress, questions of whether or not the people in power actually want to go through with said reforms are largely academic.
edited 30th May '16 11:53:35 AM by CaptainCapsase