That’s a weird assumption. Many Jews strongly oppose it, including Bernie Sanders, Jon Stewart, Ben and Jerry from the ice cream, and probably millions of less famous Jews.

But it was their primary he lost!

Also, conceding and then not dropping out isn’t really conceding, is it?

I totally agree that primaries are far easier. Orders of magnitude. But you hold on to a lot of baggage that way. There’s something attractive about a fresh start, and there are very successful independent candidates. Bernie has good reasons not to be part of the Democratic Party.

And ranked choice isn’t the only thing you need; you need proportional representation in Congress. That’s the only way to actually represent all Americans. It’s always going to be hard to get one of the two parties in power to give up that power to share it with more parties.

But as I said, such a big third party is incredibly hard. The system is rigged against it, and the financing and media even more so. You’d have to have a very broad popular movement, more than just a party. There’s nothing like that but there are candidates for primaries.

That’s not going make me stop dreaming about a big third party, though.

And you’re not going to get ranked choice voting without a new party.

However, there are a lot of people who don’t vote, and a lot of people who are unhappy about both parties. There are Republican voters disappointed in Trump who still can’t bring themselves to vote Dem because of all the propaganda they’ve put in their heads. A jew party would be a fresh start.

A bigger problem is making it an actually big party, getting media attention, getting money to campaign with, etc. US politics runs on money. Because yet another Green or Libertarian Party won’t be helping.

Oh yes, very prolife.

I’m not so sure. There are a lot of people not voting at all, and there’s a lot of toxic hate towards the Dems. Unfair, based largely on lies, but that doesn’t change the fact that a lot of people vote against the Dems and their own interests because they believe the lies. A lot of Republicans are disappointed with Trump, but still unwilling to vote Dem.

A clean slate might actually do a lot of good. I do think you’d have to position the party not so much as Progressive, but as “fixing the broken democracy, representing the people rather than the corporations, fixing the overpriced healthcare system”, etc. Present a fact-based, people representing center. Offer sane compromises for the culture war issues (abortion access for rape, medical problems and the first 12 weeks, no abortions of healthy fetuses in the last trimester). That gives conservative voters something that sounds totally reasonable and the GOP can’t point out that this still legalizes 90% of abortions without revealing they always lied about late term abortions. Do the same with every other culture war issue, while driving home on the issues that actually matter and everybody overwhelmingly wants: cheaper, better healthcare, no corporate money in politics, etc.

I think if you do this big enough (but that’s the really hard part), then you might just knock one of the other parties out. Offer a better alternative to both of them, not a more extreme version of one of them.

Yeah, progressives need to take over the party. That, or start a new one without the baggage in order to really change the system, but that’s a lot harder. Not doing either of these is just giving up.

Don’t you see what kind of slippery slope this is? What’s next? Affordable housing? Free healthcare??

what I went through wasn’t an abortion

You’re ending a pregnancy, right? That’s all an abortion is: you abort the pregnancy.

Gold medal for mental gymnastics there.

The reason Kennedy left the Democratic Party and joined Trump, is because Kennedy is a dangerous idiot and Trump os a gullible fool, and Democratic voters don’t tolerate his idiocy.

Trump switched for the same reason. He said so explicitly: Republicans are easier to con.

The only thing he’s accomplishing is that people fondly remember Obama and want him back.

Not just Catholic. Most Christians understand very well that if God created the universe, he also created all the mechanisms within that universe, including evolution.

Seeing God as contradictory to evolution to me betrays a very small and limited view of God, as if he’s just some Slartibartfast creating just this one planet.

If heaven is full of those people, I really don’t want to go there.

Matthew 25 is pretty explicit about that that’s not where they’re headed.

Most blatant is the “Prosperity Gospel”, which blatantly and directly preaches the polar opposite of what Jesus said explicitly several times.

Exactly. It has nothing to do with following Jesus, and everything with cultural identity. They identify as Christian because they were raised that way, not because they actually care about anything Jesus said.

To explain and expand a bit on this: Frederick the Great was likely gay or at least somewhat queer, but also a military innovator who laid the basis for Prussia’s iron discipline. Back then units were most effective when in perfect formation, but moving around the battlefield disrupted formation, hence the invention of the goose step to rapidly move units around on the battlefield without losing formation. Invented by a gay king.

So today we’ve got homophobic dictators emulating that for pure theatre and looks, over a century after it has lost any military purpose.

I’m a big fan of fact-based optimism, and I think you’re right.

I see the lackluster parade as a victory for democracy. Democracies don’t have massive goose-stepping parades in glory of their dear leader. That’s a fascist dictator thing, and surely what Trump wanted, but what he got was the kind of parade that you get in a democracy where the military exists for defense rather than tue glorification of the generalissimo.

Well done, military peeps.

States rights are only for conservative states. Blue states don’t have any rights. Everybody knows that.

The US was absolutely the world leader after WW2. The entire system for global trade and finance has been designed by and around the US, and everybody played ball.

Obviously “leader of the free world” should come with some annotations about what they mean with “freedom”, and the US has absolutely been complicit in overthrowing some democracies and supporting dictatorships, but it’s indisputable that they’ve had a position of leadership among free and democratic countries; the US did often set the standard, and got what they wanted.

And for a long time, the things they wanted weren’t always just for the good of the US, but good for many countries and possibly the world, at least from some perspective. The US has pressured many other colonial powers to release their colonies, for example.

Of course they were also often wrong, and often disastrously so, but that rarely hurt their position of leadership. Until now. Actually until Bush started the Iraq war; that was the first real dent in US credibility. Obama did a lot to repair it, and then Trump flushed it down the toilet.