[vintageseltzer]

"Representatives" in the U.S. government no longer represent the citizens at all — they represent the lobbyists that pay for their votes.

Logically, this behavior should result in the representatives being voted out of office.

However, the two party system combined with the unbelievably high cost of running for office makes it nearly impossible for representatives who don't fall in line with the status quo to receive the campaign financing necessary to be elected.

It's a rotten system and won't go away until campaign finance laws are reformed.

[mulmen]

Completely agree with you here. I also want to reinforce your conclusion.

I used to think the two party system was flawed because it is so hard to get anything done. I see now that is a feature and under the current administration we are lucky to be in such a slow moving system.

The solution here truly is in campaign finance and other forms of voting reform such as addressing gerrymandering. If we put the people back in charge of the government I think everything else will fall into place.

[Feniks]

My country has 20 parties in Parliament and the sky doesn't fall.

But that would mean an entirely different political culture.

[mulmen]

How much is spent on your elections and how are voting districts created and votes counted?

[nkurz]

This is a wonderful comment, but I fear you still might be underestimating the problem. Even if you replaced the two-party system with any other number of parties, you'd still never have a party dedicated to each issue. Voters will always be choosing a candidate who supports the majority of their views, and small issues such as this one will almost never be the deciding factor between the available candidates.

Making it worse, these issue-specific lobbyists don't really care which individual (or party) wins the election, just that the votes on the few bills that their funders care about go in their desired direction. So they can simply make it known after the election that anyone who votes in their preferred direction can expect to receive a "donation" funding their reelection campaign.

But helping the candidate get reelected isn't the only way that lobbyists can help a candidate. Instead, they could donate to the candidate's nonprofit family foundation, give the candidate's family members well paying board seats, wait until their retirement and overpay the candidate for lectures. Once word gets out that candidates who vote in a particular direction are given future preference of any sort, the lobbyists are pretty assured of getting what they want regardless of what the campaign finance laws say.

Short of finding some hidden trove of non-corruptible and non-self-interested politicians, I don't think there are any easy fixes for this. Unless you can find a way that "representatives" are unable to derive personal benefit from their votes and are compelled to put their constituents interests above their own, the system will be vulnerable to being swayed those able to offer that benefit.

[jacobolus]

The campaign finance laws won't change until the GOP loses control of the congress and presidency and/or the balance on the Supreme Court shifts (which is why stealing Garland's seat was a top priority despite all of Grassley et al.'s long history of sanctimonious pronouncements about the proud traditions of the Senate and blah blah; Gorsuch is even to the right of Scalia on all of these topics). There has been a decades-long effort on the right to shift power to moneyed corporate interests and away from the public (defanging regulators, opposing anti-trust action and promoting corporate consolidation across many industries, supporting binding arbitration, allowing unlimited anonymous political spending, privatizing public institutions and selling public assets, encouraging various kinds of tax dodges, taking the corporate side when ambiguous fine print in contracts borders on outright fraud, ...), tracking soaring levels of wealth/power inequality, and the party is all-in on it from top to bottom.

[aaronbrethorst]

Absolving one’s self of responsibility won’t fix anything.

[sincerely]

Sorry, I don't understand what this has to do with the comment you're replying to. Could you explain?

[dvtv75]

I think his point was that democracy is the responsibility of the people being governed, so if you don't like it then it becomes your responsibility to do something about it. (Although I could be mis-interpreting.)

[aaronbrethorst]

Yep, spot on.

[gdulli]

Except that "representatives" of one of the two parties is explicitly trying to help people here and the other isn't. So pushing the narrative of the two-party system being the problem doesn't apply here.

There's been one election cycle since the current administration took office and that party was punished for its hostility to citizens and failure to deliver on its promises. So while the system has severe flaws, it's working as intended in this aspect.

[colejohnson66]

Even if it is all just the Republicans (which it’s not), that doesn’t mean we can’t criticize the two party system