> >In Australia, minority interests and political views are permitted to
>>form political parties which can stand candidates in elections.
>
>So does the US. Jesse Jackson ran for President in 1988 representing a
>range of left groups, just as Pat Robertson ran for President the same year
>representing the religious right.
>
>It's is actually quite easy for groups to run candidates for office in the
>United States in the primaries of either party.
That's the problem. People who oppose the platform of the party (if it had a platform) can try to hijack the party. This isn't a bug, its the purpose of the system. This has happened many times in recent history.
For some reason you seem to believe that this is a desirable feature, that members of a political party are entitled to no more say in who the party's candidates for office should be than anyone else. But as I say, this means that the party also has no control of its political platform and ultimately it means that political parties are irrelevant to the electoral process.
It is nonsense to talk about building political movements in the US, at least in the context of elections. You could spend years building a cohesive political party with an electorally attractive set of policies, then have the entire thing hijacked as soon as you try to put that political manifesto to the voters.
In that sense it is a sick joke to even call the US a democracy.
>-You don't really understand. When you assert that "primaries are
>-often closed", I take it you mean to disparage the concept of a
>-political party having the right to select its own candidates for
>-elected office according to its own rules? But of course if a
>-political party is not permitted to select its own candidates it
>-can't even have nominal control over its political platform.
>
>Who is "the party" controlling entry in your version? In the US, it's
>voters in each party deciding who will represent them.
In the democratic world its the members of the party who get to determine what the party's political platform will be and what individual candidate will best represent those policies. they do it in different ways of course, some political parties elect their candidates through a direct vote of members, many have more controlling and less democratic internal structures.
But only in the US these crucial decisions are taken completely out of the hands of the party.
> Yes, this is a more
>open process and I'm not saying the European closed list, when combined
>with proportional representation, is necessarily worse, but minority
>interests have plenty of play to run candidates.
>
>If you survey the range of candidates running for Congress in the US, from
>socialists like Major Owens in Brooklyn to rightwing crazies like Tom
>Coburn and Alan Keyes running for Senate in Oklahoma and Illinois, the US
>probably has a broader political spectrum of elected politicians than most
>of Europe at this point.
These are all individuals, which is my point. A socialist can hijack the primary system and get himself onto the ballot as a Democrat. So can a Nazi. Precisely because the Democrat party has no say whatsoever in who will represent it as a candidate. So the Democrats can never be a cohesive political party, it can never stand for anything in electoral terms. Neither can any other political party.
Its not a serious problem for a party which is merely a vehicle for defending the status quo, but it will always be an insurmountable obstacle to any reformist, let alone radical, political party. Imagine trying to present a socialist platform under such an electoral system. If it ever becomes a serious electoral threat the ruling class can simply hijack the primary process and substitute non-socialists as the candidates of the Socialist Party.
Mouthing platitudes about it being "a more open process", as if that was a good thing, is farcical. If you want a process that is "open", then allow independent candidates to stand in their own right. Instead of standing as the candidate for a party whose political manifesto they openly reject.
> >A political party
>>can still have a manifesto, but there is no mechanism through which
>>to present that manifesto to the people at an election.
>
>"manifesto"-- like the Republican "Contract with America" in 1994? Or the
>"Fair Deal" run by Truman in 1948? Or the "Great Society" program of
>Lyndon Johnson in 1964? Or the "Reagan revolution" of 1980?
You just don't get it, do you? These were all (at best) political manifestos of INDIVIDUAL CANDIDATES, not of political parties. In most cases they are also mere slogans, rather than policy platforms. You merely emphasise my point.
> Elections
>in the US have actually pretty clear differences, and often greater policy
>differences than in Europe at this point.
Sure, even though political parties are effectively excluded from the electoral process, there will be differences.
>The Democrats and Republican positions on a range of policies are far more
>different than say the Social Democrats and Christian Democrats in Germany,
>for example. I can name ten issues where the GOP and the Dems have clear
>and stark policy differences. I wonder if you can do the same for the
>major opposing parties in Europe at this point?
There are more than two parties involved in electoral politics in Europe and elsewhere though. there are more radical parties, who are able to field candidates and a cohesive political platform at a national level. Even in the UK, which shares the first-past-the-post electoral system, there are more than the bare minimum of two political parties that the US system manages.
Of course the difference is that in these countries a political party is a meaningful thing in the context of the electoral process. In the US, political parties are mere window-dressing. There has to be two, since there has to be a least two candidates to have an election. But aside from window dressing there is no need for two political parties in the system. It doesn't matter what the parties stand for, it only matters what the candidates stand for and the candidates aren't selected by the party.
Elsewhere the candidates are selected by the party, so it matters what the party stands for.
Bill Bartlett Bracknell Tas
>
>-- Nathan Newman
>
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