Gary Johnson wins Libertarian Party Nomination for President

I thought this was interesting:

 

I don't know about the Paulites, but I will be.

 

I would, between Obama/Romney I'll vote Johnson.

 

I feel like he'll be a small wedge in the support for Romney and not affect Obama that much. Much of the left has already closed around Obama, but libertarians on the Republican side will definitely be up for grabs.

 

To each his own, I say, and I'm fine with the idea that some guys vote for johnson. But personally, I never vote for johnson. It's just not my preference.

I would think a lot of women would vote for johnson actually.

 

I live in Texas, my electoral votes will go to the Republican Rominee regardless of my wishes.

 

He said something along the lines of, I would rather be tortured to death than vote for either Romney or Obama.

I really like Johnson, I met him last year. Great guy, seems very smart. Probably one of my favorite politicians.

But I'm not going to waste my vote.

 

possible campaign themes:





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Totally but dont use it as an excuse not to vote at all. The state legislative races are way more important than the presidential ones anyway. (and considering how awful the current legislature is, its more important than ever to vote)

 

Link

I'd rather just not vote at all.

 

If you are not in the 1%, your only option is to waste your vote. A social protest vote is more influential than your vote for Romney (or Obama).
Romney is the most conviction-less, non-thinking political opportunist I've ever seen run for President. (that's since 1964) Obama is pushed and directed by the tide of money, Romney would be washed away.

 

The 40 million Americans that will, for the first time, get a chance to have health care and not live in fear of bankruptcy if they get ever sick probably would disagree. So would the many gay members of our military who are going to get a chance to not live a lie. And I imagine many others as well that have been affected by GOP and Democratic policy decisions over the many years.

 

If we ever had a third party threaten the status quo then you would see some real social progress. But in a two party system where both parties are subverted by the same moneyed players very little if anything actually changes.

Notice Obamacare benefits the insurance companies and is not a single payer system. That would be real progress. And Mr. Obama has not signed an executive order to end sexual orientation discrimination in Federal contracts.

 

I agree with this. But the lack of a 3rd party is not really just because people don't vote for them - it's what our system is designed to create. You'd have to rip up the Constitution and start over to really make a 3 (or more) party system work in the US. As it is now, if you had a 3rd party succeed, they would eliminate one of the current two parties and you'd end up in the same situation, with different names. We've seen it a number of times throughout US History.

Similarly, our system (and democracy in general) is designed for incremental rather than radical change. It doesn't change the fact that many millions of people's lives are very different as a result of the vote for President. Even more so if you look at 2000 or 2004, when a few hundred votes a different way would have changed the lives of thousands of American soldiers and led us to a very different world, good or bad. That's far more of an effect than a protest vote will ever have.

Just about every radical change we have had in our history started as incremental change. Notice that the freeing of slaves did not give him equality, either. That's just not how the system itself works, but it's not a reason to ignore the immense value of the incremental change.

 

...and that's probably why most countries writing constitutions nowadays expressly avoid writing them like the US version...

 

There is no Constitutional prohibition for third parties. It's just the natural coalescence of people into Us and Them, aggregating power. No Congressman or Senator can advance legislation without the blessing of the party leadership. A third party could build elective power, but for the first decade or two you would have to elect people knowing they would be essentially powerless. That's why it always feels like they a wasted vote.

And, the people that control the parties are going to do everything they can to keep it the way it is. They control campaign finance, lobbying money, political advertising, agendas, the news cycle ..... but they are losing control of alternative information.

 

But this is because the system is antiquated and allows for power to coalesce around the status quo; even worse, the process by which it can be changed is basically non-functional to nonexistent insofar it's even more vulnerable to corruption by the status quo.

I think it's time to admit that our constitutional amendment process is obviously broken. We haven't had one in over 4 decades. (the only other time with a similar gap that i can see is the period of time right before the Civil War....ooops...)

And it can't really be fixed in its current form, since any attempt to fix it would require a constitutional amendment, which requires directly/indirectly many elections subject to the influence of the status quo.

Basically, it kind of seems like the founders ****ed up when they made it hard to amend the constitution, at least in the current era.

 

Very true. Though the flipside benefit of having a two party system is that you avoid the mess that Greece is in - 10 parties, none with the ability to form a coalition government, and thus we had elections this past weekend and will likely have a repeat next month and on and on until they figure out how to form a government.

Dubious - I wasn't necessarily referring to a Constitutional prohibition. Just that our system is designed to have a majority and an opposition, rather than a multitude of parties. So if you do successfully get a 3rd party, they will just replace one of the previous parties and end up doing the same thing, controlled by the same people. You saw, in high speed, this in the tea party. What might have been an independent movement immediately saw that to gain power and influence, it made more sense to become a wing of the GOP and it just got eaten up by them.