tldr; Vox talks about multi-party systems where coalitions of many groups (not just two) can join together to defeat anti-democratic candidates – but then thrusts the U.S. in the mix as if it is comparable, and it is not. It is just another lazy commiseration, “Woe is us! Woe is us! Throw Joe Biden under the bus! We don’t like Trump! We say it loud, – but another change is not allowed! We’ll only fight with our own kind. So right moves forth. And left? Behind.”
chunks FTA:
In particular, the winning parties in both the UK and France won by realizing that the nature of their systems required that they sacrifice some specific candidates in order to defeat the right.
Unlike France and Britain, the United States only has two viable choices on offer: the center-left Democrats and the radical right Republicans.
Biden can’t count on help from other parties to boost him the way it helped Labour or the NFP; polling suggests he actually does slightly worse when third parties are on the ballot.
In their systems, the French and the British had a strategy for addressing their problems: sacrificing marginal legislative candidates in service of the greater good of defeating the right. But in the American system, sacrificing marginal candidates won’t be enough to overcome the effects of general public discontent and anti-incumbent sentiment.
Here, the ticket is defined by the president — a man increasingly seen as too old for the public to trust in addressing their concerns. Defeating the right might very well require the center-left in America to make a more radical kind of political sacrifice: a change at the very top of the ticket.
FU, Vox! The comparison is invalid. This COULD have been an article on why the U.S. needs to change its voting system, but instead it was just another take-down of Biden. removed about Biden and wringing your hands about Trump is EASY. Worse, it is stupid and LAZY. We already know the anti-Biden arguments. We need an alternate playbook. Something like a 2025 plan for the left where as soon as a Congress can do it, they pass new laws invalidating the idea of ‘Presidential Immunity’, taking back rights that the Courts have revoked, and fixing what has been broken by years of deregulation and underfunding (fund the IRS, fund health/food/safety inspectors, and pay them through tax rates of America’s Golden Age of the 50s/60s).