- cross-posted to:
- socialdemocracy@lemmygrad.ml
- cross-posted to:
- socialdemocracy@lemmygrad.ml
While the title is a bit click-baity, from the perspective of many other existing bourgeois democracies it’s basically true.
A longstanding concern on the US electoral left is the issue of “candidate accountability” – if we elect a left-wing candidate, how can we be sure that he or she will stay true to our politics while in office? It’s a big problem. One solution regularly proposed is that the left needs to break with the Democrats and build a third party. Rather than continuing to run candidates on the Democratic ballot line, the left should create its own party; such a party could endorse only candidates fully vetted by and accountable to the party membership, and could discipline candidates–even revoke their party membership–if they moved right in office.
This is an appealing idea. Unfortunately, here in the United States, creating a formal political party which exerts this kind of control over candidates is illegal.
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This kind of party-first thinking is how we got here in the first place. Complaining that it’s not even worse is absurd.
Politicians used to be looking out for their own constituents first, before the concerns of the party. That’s the whole purpose of having representatives.
The consolidation of power of the individual parties is what has gridlocked our government into not doing anything to help the people, which in turn lead to an increase in people using these positions that can’t actually get someone done as a means to enrich themselves with only performative “I tried” half assed actions being used to keep their seat
most of this country’s founding fathers also didn’t want political parties either; but they backed off when people started abiding by those wishes.
things change and the parties ended up becoming a thing anyways.
Politicians used to be looking out for their own constituents first, before the concerns of the party.
This sounds like belief in a mythical past when the system was more democratic. Previously:
The US government was never not captured by the bourgeoisie, because the US was born of a bourgeois revolution[1]. The wealthy, white, male, land-owning, largely slave-owning Founding Fathers constructed a bourgeois state with “checks and balances” against the “tyranny of the majority”. It was never meant to represent the majority—the working class—and it never has, despite eventually allowing women and non-whites (at least those not disenfranchised by the carceral system) to vote. BBC: [Princeton & Northwestern] Study: US is an oligarchy, not a democracy
