I’d argue the US does not have a leftist party. When I was young, we had a centrist party and a right party. I’ve watched in my lifetime the right decide to go further right, and the centrist party go right to chase some purported ‘balance’. (This was all Bush/Obama era, before Trump/MAGA entered the game)
We do not have a leftist party. We have the right and extreme right parties. And we only have two because of a mathematical flaw in the iterated first past the post electoral system.
And we might not even have two parties. The DNC and RNC have so many overlapping funding sources and so many behind the scenes organization that they could be seen as two divisions of the same team. Even if no explicit link can be found, despite the theater the two organizations have a healthy symbiotic relationship - each preferring the devil they know over any third party upset.
With all of the above, many intelligent people have checked out - the marginal benefit of supporting the D’s over the R’s just doesn’t justify propping up a system that is fundamentally broken at it’s core.
(P. S. I personally don’t agree with that conclusion and will swallow my pride to vote for the best available candidate, but I think painting the people that don’t agree as wholesale fools is a very unhelpful way of framing things.)
I’d argue the US does not have a leftist party. When I was young, we had a centrist party and a right party. I’ve watched in my lifetime the right decide to go further right, and the centrist party go right to chase some purported ‘balance’. (This was all Bush/Obama era, before Trump/MAGA entered the game)
We do not have a leftist party. We have the right and extreme right parties. And we only have two because of a mathematical flaw in the iterated first past the post electoral system.
And we might not even have two parties. The DNC and RNC have so many overlapping funding sources and so many behind the scenes organization that they could be seen as two divisions of the same team. Even if no explicit link can be found, despite the theater the two organizations have a healthy symbiotic relationship - each preferring the devil they know over any third party upset.
With all of the above, many intelligent people have checked out - the marginal benefit of supporting the D’s over the R’s just doesn’t justify propping up a system that is fundamentally broken at it’s core.
(P. S. I personally don’t agree with that conclusion and will swallow my pride to vote for the best available candidate, but I think painting the people that don’t agree as wholesale fools is a very unhelpful way of framing things.)