The idea is to have state-wide races where parties, not individuals, compete. Let’s take Washington State, as an example, because it has a nice and even 10 representatives. Instead of having district campaigns, you would have one big statewide election where each party puts up their best campaign, the people vote, and then the votes are counted on a statewide basis and tallied up. Let’s say the results are in and are as follows:

• Democratic Party: 40%
• Republican Party: 28%
• Libertarian Party: 11%
• Green Party: 8%
• Working Families Party: 6%
• Constitution Party: 4%
• Independents: 3%

For each 10% of the vote, that party gets allocated one seat. So Democrats get 4, Republicans get 2, and Libertarians get 1. The remaining 3 seats are doled out to whichever party has the largest remainder. So the Republicans and Greens with 8% get one more each, and the Working Families Party with 6% gets one. The Constitution Party and the independents will go home with zero seats.

The final distribution:

• Democrats: 4
• Republicans: 3
• Libertarians: 1
• Greens: 1
• Working Families: 1

There are two ways of determining which exact people get to actually go and sit in Congress: open list or closed list. A closed list system means that the party publishes a list of candidates prior to the election, and the top N people on that list are elected, where N is the number of seats won by the party. A simple open list system would be that everyone on that party’s list has their name actually appear on the ballot and a vote for them also counts as a vote for their party, then the top N people of that party with the most votes are elected, where N is the number of seats won by a party. In a closed list system, the party determines the order before the election (they can hold a primary). In an open list system, the voters determine the order on election day.

The main drawback of this system is that with a closed list system, the voters can’t really “vote out” an unpopular politician who has the backing of their party since that party will always put them at the top of the list, and open list systems tend to have extremely long ballot papers (if each party here stood the minimum of 10 candidates and 10 independents also stood, that would be 70 candidates on the ballot). It also forces the election to be statewide which means smaller parties can’t gain regional footholds by concentrating all their efforts on a small number of constituencies. Small parties in the US don’t tend to do this anyway, but it is a fairly successful strategy in other countries, like the Bloc Québécois in Canada or the Scottish National Party in the UK. That being said, a proportional system would still increase the chance that smaller parties have of obtaining representation. Small parties in the US have almost invisible campaigns but if they took it seriously, they’d only need to get 10% of the vote to guarantee a seat, and even with 6-7% they’d still have a good shot at getting one, which on some years they almost do anyway even without a campaign.

The other drawback is that it eliminates the concept of a “local” representative (oddly-shaped and extremely large constituencies notwithstanding), so if a representative votes for a policy that is extremely unpopular in their constituency, it is less effective to “punish” them for it within that constituency as long as the candidate or their party is still popular statewide.

Let me put it this way. Lemmy infamously only has four topics that people post about:

1. Politics
2. Linux
3. Star Trek
4. Porn

Any community that isn’t about topics 2 to 4 will eventually become one about topic 1.

I’m not speaking for anyone but myself. I view this post as an example of a very persistent problem with Lemmy as a platform. Namely, that it seems only have four topics that people ever post about:

1. Politics
2. Linux
3. Star Trek
4. Porn

There’s nothing inherently wrong with posting about these topics but it really seems like whenever there exists a community isn’t about topics 2-4, people will make it about topic 1.

Yeah, okay. But anger doesn’t make my life better. If I’m browsing this community I expect tips that can potentially improve the quality of my life, not just finding out about more mud on a dead 20th century dirt bag politician to be angry about.

Why are you posting this in YSK? How does this information improve anyone’s life in any way?

There is literally no-one here who doesn’t already think Thatcher was a piece of shit.

♂ + 👗 = 🏳️‍🌈

BUT

♂ + 👗 + 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 = 👌

I’m not even talking about the original screenshot any more. I went off on a tangent with some historical discussion that I hoped would be interesting but apparently people get offended when they’re told something in America happens to be older than something in their country. And no, I will not leave this hill just because you want to occupy it instead.

Of course I’m not going to tell you that, because I’m not saying the original commenter in the screenshot is right. You seemed to have missed that too.

My native language is Cantonese. Take that what you will.

You might be right on that count although I hope you aren’t. I think we’ll have to see what happens in the next three years before saying for sure though.

A country doesn’t need a constitution. But a state without a constitution doesn’t exist. A constitution is just a set of rules that explains how state power is exercised. Sometimes, it goes something like “the king decides everything”. Sometimes, it goes “Parliament can make any law except one that a future parliament cannot unmake”. Sometimes, it goes “We, the people… [+4 pages of text]”. All of these are constitutions, even if they aren’t documents calling themselves “The Constitution™”

Yes

I will admit, that originally read “the Nazis destroyed the Third French Republic” before I changed it hastily.

I think this (or similar) scenarios come up a lot in other histories as well, though. I think an analogous point would be the enactment of “An Act Declaring England to be a Commonwealth” by the English Parliament and the preceding trial and execution of Charles I. Both were retroactively deemed illegal by the restored monarchy (obviously) since the former lacked royal asset on account of the latter, which was deemed regicide. But it still happened and I think it is indisputable that the old Kingdom of England indisputably ended when the English Parliament declared a republic, despite the monarchy’s later restoration. A state can end not just by being dissolved according to its own rules, but since a state only exists in the minds of the people and is not a tangible object, it can also cease to exist when people just stop paying attention to its laws.

People can declare anything they like but it doesn’t change the reality of history. And I know this is splitting hairs at this point and the argument is starting to lose its meaning. But people have also tried re-declaring the Roman Republic twice as well.

And speaking of which, there are also questions like whether the Roman Empire was the same state as the Roman Republic (arguably yes but also arguably no), and whether the Byzantine Empire was the same state as the Roman Republic (ditto). And these are questions I am wholly unqualified to answer with any meaningful depth.

Nobody denies that the USA is a “child of Europe[an colonisers]”. San Marino I concede has institutions which have been longer than those of the USA. But the current iteration of the Swiss Confederation is not (and I refer to the state institutions, not the concept of Switzerland). The Old Swiss Confederacy was destroyed by Napoleon when he invaded and replaced by a so-called “sister republic” which governed Switzerland until his he got rid of it a few years later. What exists today is only as old as the Congress of Vienna, perhaps a little older than that if you consider the time that Diet spent arguing over the constitution.

Correct me if I’m wrong, but it was my understanding that the Third Republic’s constitution was abrogated by the Constitutional Law of 1940 which gave all powers of the state to Philippe Pétain. Pétain then established the Vichy regime as a collaborationist government and decided against writing a new constitution for his regime, and that lasted until the German occupation forces decided to just take over the rest of France and rule it directly.

Constitutions don’t make a country. People do.

I agree completely with this which is why I said basically the same thing in my comment. I’m saying that while 250 years old for a country is not very old, going 250 years without suffering some kind of complete collapse in state institutions is pretty long.

Did you even read the comment? I said that the US’s government institutions are quite old, but the country is young. Yes, there has been a country named “Poland” around for much longer. But Poland has also governed by a succession of states, most not lasting very long (which as you probably know, is related to the actions of the other country you mention). I’m not saying that the idea of the US as a country is old, I’m saying its government institutions are older than usual.

Did you even read the god-damn comment?

The concept of the US as a country is not very old

it’s true that there has been a country called “France” for hundreds of years longer than the US

Yes, the notion of France as a country is older than the US. But the French Republic is not. The institutions change, the country endures. The US is a young country but its institutions are surprisingly old. That’s the whole fucking point.

No, I did not say that. I said most European states are very young by comparison. And I made it very clear that this is not the same as saying that the country is very young. The American state is very old; the country is very young. Read more carefully next time.

Edit: While I’m not going to smear an entire country’s education system based on the reading comprehension of one person, I do think that your accusation of “American exceptionalism” does get frighteningly close to (or is) an example of reactionary “nobody is special-ism”. Every country has interesting history tidbits and is special in its own way and I don’t think dismissing things with the thought-terminating label of “American exceptionalism” is particularly fair.