You cannot defend the system and blame the outcomes at the same time.
Proportional representation aligns power with votes.
Wdym “keep out”?
Yes, at this point, it is clearly designed to keep in the extremists by leaving no path to escape them. Some serious Kang and Kodos efforts going on these days.
How does first part the post keep out extremist? From my perspective it lets extremist play the system
With winner-takes-all systems, parties that aren’t able to win in any electoral district aren’t able to gain any influence in government.
The proposition is that, because of those gatekeeping properties, no “extremist” minority will ever have any power. The reality is that it only serves to entrench existing parties and stifle out opposition, ultimately leading to a 2-party system where bad actors can influence both parties into furthering their goals regardless of which one wins.
I used to subscribe to that idea, in that I didn’t want extremists to have a platform, but it seems like they got one anyway.
Now I’m of the mind we need to lean further into democracy. Some thoughts:
I think part of democracy is concensus building - how can we build large majorities around policies we care about? The media does somewhat ‘naturally’ gravitate towards wedge 50/50 issues. We should be putting these aside until we reach larger agreement, and focus on the issues more of us agree on, I find it hard to believe there aren’t enough of these to keep folks busy.
We need to accept that democracy has cost and can be slow - but it is the way regardless.
Federal government should probably be handing some powers down to provinces, provinces should be handing powers down to municipalities (or giving them back in some cases). Instead of a thin pool of insiders, a broader pipeline of leaders.
We need to ask more of our politicians but also give more.
And yes electoral reform.
Im not familiar with promotional system, it does seem weird to me that you vote for a party and then that part picks a person for government position.
The way I see it is that the two established parties have no opposition and can adopt any position they want and say “look at this other guy his position is awful vote for me to prevent them, don’t vote third party its a vote for them” they both do it till forever
