I have an answer for 1. and that answer is “Never”. a third party is never viable as long as we have First Past the Post voting.
As for 2, you don’t put any effort into third parties until after we fix the voting system. You work within the system and push for voting reform, or else it will never happen, and we’ll be stuck with First Past the Post forever.
The game plan is to push for one of two options, either Approval or STAR. Those two voting systems are the only Condorcet compliant systems that can fix our mess of an election system. There are some other fixes that come afterward, like ditching Primary elections (they’re not needed under Approval or STAR) and ditching the electoral college, but those can come after we fix the core problem.
To reiterate, you cannot solve anything of the problems of our system from outside it. You must hijack one of the two parties and use that to fix things. The same way the Evangelical racists hijacked the Republican Party in the 70s and 80s.
you cannot solve anything of the problems of our system from outside it.
So, so many people simply can’t grasp this. They want to use some imaginary cheat code to get what they want, immediately. That’s not how this, or a lot of things in life, work. Change in politics comes from lots and lots of effort from within the system to change the system. That or violent revolution. But the catch with violent revolution is that in the chaos that ensues, worse forces can fill the vacuum. Not to mention all the dead people.
I’d argue that violent revolution never results in something better. Those worse forces will Always move to seize power.
Violent protest is good, that coupled with people talking shit out like reasonable adults can result in something good, but there’s always that point where some unelected jackass comes in to murder the old guard, and then slaughter anyone who was working within the system to make things better.
I have an answer for 1. and that answer is “Never”. a third party is never viable as long as we have First Past the Post voting.
As for 2, you don’t put any effort into third parties until after we fix the voting system. You work within the system and push for voting reform, or else it will never happen, and we’ll be stuck with First Past the Post forever.
The game plan is to push for one of two options, either Approval or STAR. Those two voting systems are the only Condorcet compliant systems that can fix our mess of an election system. There are some other fixes that come afterward, like ditching Primary elections (they’re not needed under Approval or STAR) and ditching the electoral college, but those can come after we fix the core problem.
To reiterate, you cannot solve anything of the problems of our system from outside it. You must hijack one of the two parties and use that to fix things. The same way the Evangelical racists hijacked the Republican Party in the 70s and 80s.
So, so many people simply can’t grasp this. They want to use some imaginary cheat code to get what they want, immediately. That’s not how this, or a lot of things in life, work. Change in politics comes from lots and lots of effort from within the system to change the system. That or violent revolution. But the catch with violent revolution is that in the chaos that ensues, worse forces can fill the vacuum. Not to mention all the dead people.
I’d argue that violent revolution never results in something better. Those worse forces will Always move to seize power.
Violent protest is good, that coupled with people talking shit out like reasonable adults can result in something good, but there’s always that point where some unelected jackass comes in to murder the old guard, and then slaughter anyone who was working within the system to make things better.