Four Republican backbencher candidates who failed to qualify for the first 2024 GOP presidential debate this week slammed the Republican National Committee over its rules, with multiple contenders calling them “rigged.”
Four Republican backbencher candidates who failed to qualify for the first 2024 GOP presidential debate this week slammed the Republican National Committee over its rules, with multiple contenders calling them “rigged.”
Political parties exist for the sole purpose of rigging politics by disenfranchising the public. Their entire existence is a kind of corrupt, elitist caste system.
These organizations need to be treated the same way as corporations that get too big: they should forcibly split up. Force parties to form coalitions to get anything done, like in other parliamentary systems. Take away their corrupt levers - like FPTP voting (force RCV instead) and dark money, and return power to the people instead tolerating it in the hands of a couple private, invite-only cabals.
Political parties should be outlawed, not just split up. It should be a crime to include a party affiliation next to a candidate’s name on a ballot. (Or an indication of which is the incumbent, for that matter.)
The issue I always find in the proposal to ban political parties is: how do you stop people from just reinventing them under a different name?
It absolutely would happen. Even if we somehow wiped the idea from everyone’s mind, people would start to group up again because it’s simply more effective than going it alone. We learned that as a species a long time ago.
Obviously, you can’t stop people from freely associating (see the First Amendment).
But that’s not what’s important. What’s important is that the current two major political parties have been given a whole bunch of special privileges that make them quasi-official parts of the government, and all those need to be permanently stripped away.
Yes, like Seattle Seahawks, or Chicago Bears…
Politics really would become a contest between sports teams.