[ SECRET POST #2111 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2111 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

01.


__________________________________________________



02.


__________________________________________________



03.


__________________________________________________



04.


__________________________________________________



05.


__________________________________________________



06.


__________________________________________________



07.


__________________________________________________



08.


__________________________________________________



09.


__________________________________________________



10.


__________________________________________________



11.


__________________________________________________



12.


__________________________________________________



13.


__________________________________________________



14.


__________________________________________________



15.


__________________________________________________



16.


__________________________________________________



17.


__________________________________________________



18.


__________________________________________________



19.


__________________________________________________



20.


__________________________________________________



21.


__________________________________________________



22.


__________________________________________________















Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 05 pages, 124 secrets from Secret Submission Post #301.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 1 - repeat ], [ 1 - posted twice ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Southeast Asian looking at no. 16

[(Anonymous)]

There are third parties, but it's extremely difficult for them to get any traction because of certain factors of the American political system, and in particular, it is almost impossible for them to ever win a Presidential race.

Because the Presidential race is contested as a national vote, and America is freaking huge - and because the legislature has no say in determining who the President is (except in weird, uncommon cases), so it's not like parliamentary politics, where you can play coalition politics - only candidates from the two most popular parties would ever have a shot at getting elected - partly because they have the money and resources to sustain a campaign, but mostly because there's no benefit for coming in third. If you're a third party, and that means you're number three in popularity, it's just almost impossible for you to surmount that popularity gap and win. And so your being in the race just has no effect.

You could pretty easily have effective third parties in local politics or in the legislature - but it's rare. And that's probably because of a combination of factors. For one, the Democratic and Republican Parties take up an enormous amount of mind-space - people just tend to go along with the idea that they're the only two parties that matter. For another thing, they are very wealthy and well-funded and well-organized, which makes them fairly difficult to displace.

There do exist some third parties, and there have been others in the past. The Republican Party actually started out as a third party - way back in the day, like in the early 1800s, you had the Democrats and the Whigs. And then the Whigs divided over the issue of slavery (the Democrats were mostly pro-slavery), and the Republicans were founded as a party opposed to slavery and basically supplanted them. And then the Civil War happened. (Yes, the Republican Party was originally a liberal, anti-slavery party. It's not any more - the vicissitudes of American politics led the two parties to essentially switch positions after the Second World War).

The third parties today - the two biggest are the Green (left-leaning, environmentalist) and the Libertarian (libertarian, somewhat right-leaning). They run presidential candidates but they barely get any of the vote, although sometimes they can act as "spoiler" and effect the election. The place I live in, in local politics, is actually kind of an exception - I live in a very left-leaning city, and here, the local politics are mostly divided between the Greens and the Democrats (the Republican Party is a third party here). But that's very much the exception to the norm.

I hope my verbose ranting has answered your question! I love explaining this stuff, probably too much for my own good.