Jonah Goldberg has just written a piece for his publication, The Dispatch, that says the U.S. would be better off if there were no publicly-administered primaries. He says, “I think it’s madness that we are the only advanced democracy where the parties can’t pick their own candidates.” Electionlawblog links to the entire piece, but I have chosen to link to Electionlawblog because it highlights the remarks about primaries. The Dispatch piece itself has a lot more to say about other subjects as well.
He says, “I think it’s madness that we are the only advanced democracy where the parties can’t pick their own candidates.”
His statement brings up an interesting dichotomy among those who would abolish primaries. On the one hand, are those like Goldberg who think that primaries limit the power of parties to pick their own nominees. Yet, on the other hand, are those who think that primaries give parties too MUCH power to pick their own nominees.
The Independent Party of West Virginia agrees. Refer to their platform position 10a) https://ipwv.org/
One more MORON idiot.
Democracy = majority rule — as compared to minority rule monarchs/oligarchs.
Primaries = extremist factions picking general election candidates – plurality/minority or even runoff majorities.
NOOO primaries.
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Equal nom pets
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
https://www.newamerica.org/political-reform/statements/statement-of-concern/
more moron profs unable to detect the remedy for the ROT
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
Tell that to Bernie supporters and see how well that goes over. They think he got screwed in 2016… under this he would have NEVER had a chance.
So what? They should have gone Green or started their own party to begin with. Goldberg is right.
It’s something to think about.
I think it depends on what is meant by a party.
A procedure run by the state with some attached aspects of private activity is not a party in a traditional sense.
In Texas, voters go to the polls and pick a door marked R or D (those for L or G are covered by vines and accessed through a manhole). Those who run follow the same rules. The key is the state enforces the decision. Lose in the primary and you are out of the general election.
Has anyone besides me noticed that it’s very easy to get on a Presidential primary ballot, and rediculusly hard to get on just about any other primary ballot anywhere? No state wants to be “snubbed’ by any Presidential candidate, so they basically open the floodgates to just about any candidate. Vermin Supreme could never have gotten noticed if it weren’t for Presidential primaries.
Thus, we get absurdly crowded Presidential debates, and strings of inconclusive primaries, which result in unsatisfactory nomination outcomes.
@Scott And then the corporatist media wouldn’t have had him on TV. He literally made this exact statement when he was asked “why run as a Democrat” in a town hall on MSNBC (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=2rl0uD-UXaU). The media is accountable only to the Republican and Democratic parties…. any coverage of anybody else is the media (aka the Repubs or Dems) thinking it will “hurt the other side”…. It’s why CNN and MSNBC both covered Johnson but hardly chirp from Fox, and Fox actually had Stein on constantly (https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NmYfgrSJeec) … MSNBC and CNN next to nothing.
WZ –
The commie/fascist statist MONSTERS who get into POWER love the nomination/election systems —
no matter how extremist and anti-Democracy such systems are.
M-O-R-O-N media loves the sports stuff analogy – winners/losers.
———
NOOO caucuses, primaries and conventions
ONE election day
equal nom pets >>> fewer ego stunt/freak morons on ballots.
PR
APPV
TOTSOP
Walter, it is not that easy to get on all of the presidential primary ballots. I know that the Tulsi Gabbard campaign spent well over $353,000 to get on the ballot for the Democratic Party’s presidential primaries in 2020, and I know that Michael Bloomberg spent a heck of a lot more than that for the same thing.
Sure, some states are easy for this, but some are pretty difficult.
@ Andy:
You are correct. It’s not uniformly easy to get on a primary as a Presidential candidate. But, it seems consistently easier than other offices. This strikes me as a curious imbalance. It seems strange that the highest office has easier entrance requirements than other, lesser offices.
IMO, this indicates an unhealthy obsession that many Americans have gotten about the Presidency. The office has gotten clearly too powerful.
WZ-
See the killer monarchs in the END of the Roman Republic 120 BC – 27 BC – various civil wars
See the killer monarchs in WW I and WW II.
USA totally infected with lawless tyrant monarchs — esp Prezs with their ILLEGAL acts of WAR in foreign regimes – esp since 1950 Korean War.
Commie/fascist media LOVES such commie/fascist Prezs — O-U-R/USA killer Prezs fighting those rotted foreign regimes — until the USA DEAD body count gets too high — as in the Korean War and Vietnam War.
Various legis bodies almost DEAD – due to exec admin law / regs – all sorts of *emergency laws*–
max exploited by the top monarch execs.
If there were IRV elections in November, there would not be a need for primaries. Parties could still choose a candidate to back, or could endorse several candidates to encourage voters to give top ranking for that office. Ballot access would be uniform, though some candidates might have party resources to meet the requirement.
This would reduce election cost by roughly half, and would increase voter turnout. There would be less burnout of voters from frequent elections and confusing rules about who can vote for whom, and when.
(((Jonah Goldberg)))
Are libertarians anti-semitic? I didn’t know but that does make sense since they are far right assholes and most of them are incels and assburgers.
The Constitution does not authorize states to conduct elections to disqualify candidates who meet the qualifications for office stated in the Constitution. The Supreme Court has ruled against states adding or subtracting from constitutional qualifications on one narrow issue (term limits), but has not applied it consistently to election laws considered in their totality.
For example, so-called “sore loser” candidates in primary elections should not be denied access to voters in the general election.
All voters in all states have the constitutional right to cast write-in votes for any candidate they please for any and all offices, but the Supreme Court is biased toward the duopoly parties.
Taken as a whole U S elections are unconstitutional in multiple ways.
All ballot access laws which censor voter choice should be abolished.
Makes sense to me.
1) Remember, it was the Progressive Theodore Roosevelt who championed primaries in 1912 when he knew the party machinery would choose to re-nominate President Taft. 2) At least Trump registered in the Republican Party when he
ran in 2016. Sanders refused to register Democratic & so it’s their own fault for letting THAT outsider even participate in both their 2016 & 2020 Presidential nomination campaigns. 3) The United States does a number of things differently than nearly all of the rest of the World, so why shouldn’t we choose our President differently. After all, we do use the Federation-based Electoral College which no-one else uses. 4) Paradoxically in a way having to compete in so many primaries nowadays does give the Major & Minor party nominees a dry run (in a manner of speaking) for the Fall General election.
It is absolutely none of the government’s business how parties choose their nominees.
Isn’t Spike Cohen Jewish?
Is he a self-hating Jew like “Mr. Libertarian”?
I don’t think Murray Rothbard was self hating. I think he just had intellectual integrity, something a lot of people lack.
Sure he was self hating. He supported every antisemite from Strom Thurmond to Richard Nixon, Pat Buchanan and David Duke, with a weird side trip to an alliance with radical Marxists and their automatic support for the Arab cause in between.
As for intellectual integrity, I don’t think so. He twisted his positions on issues like immigration and abortion to suit his alliances, practiced pseudonymous personal attacks and general bigotry, stirred shit wherever he went, etc. In many ways he was a prototroll, leaving a poisonous legacy. His approach to politics was “Leninist vanguardism” complete with soviet style twisting of history, ideas and facts that’s the exact opposite of intellectual integrity.
@Karl…. what do you mean by self-hating Jews? Jews that are anti-Zionist?
Have a look here then: https://www.nkusa.org/
No, self hating Jews, the kind that lend support to the likes of David Duke, for example. Lots of Jews ranging from run of the mill progressives to ultraorthdox Jews who believe the modern nation state of Israel is not legitimate because the messiah has not arrived yet are not either Zionist or self hating.
Who said I was talking about Murray Rothbard? He may have been a self hating Jew too, but I was only referring to the Jew cyberpig, who trolls as “Mr. Libertarian” here.
I thought Jeremy Cohen is a neocon Zionist.
Spike is not a neocon any longer. He’s an anarchist, and doesn’t support any nation state, Jewish or otherwise.
He is now a blm (burn loot murder) Marxist to please his schwartze shikse wife.
Murray Rothbard was actually not that bad for a Jew.
Wasn’t Murray friend, Ayn Rand, Jewish, too?
Time for some comic relief:
https://existentialcomics.com/comic/234
That wasn’t funny.
His friend? Are you sure? This doesn’t sound very friendly.
https://dangerousminds.net/comments/mozart_was_a_red_a_one_act_play_about_ayn_rand
Rand did correctly dismiss libertarians as worthless right wing hippies, which is one of the few things she ever got right.
The article cited above points out that although both Rothbard and Alice Rosenbaum O’Connor (“Ayn Rand”) were born Jewish, Rothbard was an agnostic and Rosenbaum was an atheist, and neither one married a Jew. Interestingly, Rothbard supported many theocratic Christian politicians, and made a “paleolibertarian” alliance which included many of the same. They even have an odd fetish for pre Vatican II Catholicism, when the church was rampant with antisemitism and blamed Jews for killing Jesus.
For her part, O’Connor, despite her evangelical atheism, supported the Republicans, including their Christian conservative elements as a necessary part of a winning coalition.
Both Rosenbaum O’Connor and Rothbard were mainly overreacting to communist domination – in Rothbard’s case, among left wing Jews in his native NYC, in Rosenbaum’s to the Soviet revolution in her native Russia – while emulating many aspects of the communist approach, ranging from atheistic/agnostic materialism to soviet propaganda techniques, cult of personality, Randian realpolitik and Rothbardian vanguard Leninism.
I recall when Rand once said that Beethoven was a genius, but one with a malevolent sense of life.
If those four Jews had indeed been shipwrecked, the world would have been better off, especially if it happened before they became famous.
I sometimes wonder how many geniuses and villains were lost to the world during the Battle of the Somme, one of the deadliest battles in history. How different the world might have been if they survived.
(Hitler was actually wounded in that battle, but survived.)
Good question.