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I'm asking this because america often represents the very opposite pole within the bounds of democracy, which makes it a bit interesting.
I was thinking about the limitations of the swedish democracy, the fact that we only have 8 realistic political parties to vote for, each with a package of opinions that we need to "buy" with our votes, and outside of those 8 options nobody is near getting into the riksdag (combined senate/whitehouse/congress).
So basically the majority votes can go to parties that in large have ideas are most of their voters can technically be against but still vote for them because they are with them in enough other cathegories...
Then it occured to me that americans are basically stuck with just 2 options, democrat or republican.
you can shift which persona should represent the challenger party in the primaries, but it still just 2 parties.
So when dems are for suggestions "a-e", but you are against "d" and "c" and republicans are against everything, you are in fact largely voting against yourself on a number of issues no matter how you vote.
are you not bothered with this?
Personally I'd like to see a system where highly controversial matters (like nuclear power, imigration, FRA(swedish NSA), allowing foreign mining prospecting or not, etc) have a paralell voting to the votes for office, so that for example the ruling parties can't be good enough with some stuff to be voted in, and because of that be able to pass down too much crap along with it.
Last time we had a nationwide vote that wasn't about who should rule the country was about nuclear power in 1980.
I'd like to see more of those elections in the large questions like that in sweden,
FRA was also a huge debate, while anyone smarter than a banana can understand why the U.S. needs NSA to monitor datatraffic etc, there is very little understanding for why Sweden would be one of 10~countries in the world to run a topsofisticated system for monitoring the entirity of all data and signal trafic traveling our borders(per proxy watching most of northern europe including the russians across the lake due to how the net is physically built...)
The public was never asked, nor informed of what this really means, includes and excludes...
would you like to have elections over large questions like that in america?
Then it occured to me that americans are basically stuck with just 2 options, democrat or republican.
No, that's understandably a common mistake made by people not familiar with the US system.
There is no law regarding political parties.
A two-party system is what evolved, because that's what Americans wanted, and whenever Americans so choose, they can evolve it into something else.....but Americans have to want to do that.
Since the issue cannot be dumbed-down into a 30-second sound-bite sandwiched between 60-second commercials, or TapTalked into a text message short enough to send, Americans will do nothing very slowly.
Historically, 3rd Parties in the US have been one-plank/one-issue populist parties, meaning that the campaigned on one and only one issue that appealed to the masses.
Since the the days of McGovern, and later John Anderson, Americans haven't really done much except talk.....so for the last 45 years there's been nothing but lots of long-winded feel-good talking, but not much action.
This issue comes up every year, and every year, I say the same thing..........put your money where your mouth is....start a political party and field candidates in local elections for school boards and township trustees and villages and towns, because if they can't handle that, then the lights and sounds of Washington DC will put the zap on their heads.
So...here we all are....45 years later....still talking about 3rd Parties....and there still aren't any.
I'm all for people emigrating to Sweden if they prefer its government.
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