[cleandreams]

This doesn't work, as shown by the last 30 years. It requires not only wiser elites than the ones we've got but also real political power for working people. "Ordinary" middle class working people have much less political representation than they did 40 years ago and there is no improvement in sight.

[taurath]

Campaign finance reform is needed before there can be any significant priority shift in the US from the wealthy elite and corporations to actual people.

[ende]

I'm not so sure about that. I'm a big advocate of electoral reform, but in the aftermath of an election where arguably the two most successful candidates were either self-funded or grass roots micro-funded, I'm having a hard time being convinced that campaign finance reform is the number one problem.

The larger problem seems to be that our political institutions are captive to a hyper-polarized two party institution that lacks the degrees of freedom to provide legitimate representation to society's myriad facets and interests. Any dualistic system is naturally going to orient itself in opposition to its other half, to the marginalization of all other considerations. The key to effective electoral reform is finding ways to fundamentally change the processes from which structural bipartisanship emerges from. Practically speaking this means increasing political diversity through non-partisan primaries, ranked choice voting, proportional representation, and purging the entrenchment of the two national parties from election commissions and similar bodies.

Transforming the political court from a 2-sided chess match to a multiplayer game is a necessary condition for realizing the true expressive power of a democratic society over concentrated interests. Such conditions have been the key to the establishment and normalization of wealth equalizing institutions in many of the European democracies, for example.

[taurath]

What keeps 2 parties going? Money. If an independent or third party candidate had as much “fundraising” power as a major party candidate you’d see a lot more diversity.

[tfehring]

Trump's victory and Bernie's popularity in the last presidential election seem like strong evidence that non-elites have more political power than it's often claimed. And I don't think policy changes that would benefit working-class Americans harmed by globalization, like job creation programs or expansion of the earned income tax credit, are any less politically viable than the tariffs that were passed in recent months.