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sc94597 on 27 September 2021
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JRPGfan said:

I think this is the best way a funktioning democracy works.
Theres something for everyone, whatever belief/views you have, and when you vote, then they group up and work together towards things.
FPTP that the USA and UK have, seem so much worse, you basically only have 2 parties (and both are more or less conserative in their views).

In the case of the U.S, where parties are actually weak (the concept of "party whip" exists only because members don't necessarily have to vote with their party, unlike in many other countries) you can sort of think of these coalitions as existing before the election, and people vote on which coalition should succeed. 

It is better to think of the American "parties" as more like coalitions, formed in broad primary elections before the general. 

You basically have a far-right nationalist faction which constitutes a majority of the Republican Party, a center-right liberal-conservative faction which represents a small minority (and the former plurality) of the Republican party (Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski)  -- some of them are in the Democratic Party (like Joe Manchin), an analogue of the FDP/mainstream European liberal parties in the right-wing of the Democratic Party represented by the Bloombergs and Hickenloopers of that party, who support conservative liberalism, to their left is the plurality of the Democratic Party which is its social liberal faction -- which prescribe "progressive liberalism" and "saving capitalism from itself", and then the last third of the Democratic Party are its social democratic faction, which has only grown to a third of the party since around 2016, but very rapidly so. Before then, this faction was probably about 15% of the party.

Since the U.S is shifted right-ward, more explicit socialists don't exist in national electoral politics -- but extra-electoral socialism (anarchism, communalism, cooperativism, libertarian municipalism, syndicalism, etc.) has had a presence in the U.S in the past and seems to becoming popular again. 

I still prefer there to be explicit ideological parties that form coalitions after the election, but it is useful to think of the coalitions as pre-built in the American form of FPTP where parties only have weak influence on their members' voting records. 

Last edited by sc94597 - on 27 September 2021