China #1

Best friends with the mods at c/worldnews@lemmy.ml

If you’re reading this, I’m already banned.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • A nation of toddlers all screaming for something different and being unable to come together on a single point.

    Edit for the downvoters: Without parties, you’d likely face some serious problems.

    Coalition-building becomes nearly impossible. Right now, parties help aggregate different interests and forge compromises between, say, fiscal conservatives and social conservatives, or between labor unions and environmentalists. Without that pre-existing framework, every single issue would require building coalitions from scratch among hundreds of individual legislators.

    Voters would be overwhelmed. Instead of choosing between a few party platforms, they’d need to research dozens or hundreds of individual candidates’ positions on every issue. Most people simply don’t have the time or expertise to make informed choices at that level of granularity.

    Legislative chaos. You’d essentially have a legislature full of independents trying to form temporary alliances on every vote. Look at how difficult it becomes when even a small number of members break from party discipline, and now imagine that as the permanent state of affairs.

    Accountability becomes murky. Parties provide a way for voters to hold someone responsible for governance. Without them, when things go wrong, who exactly do you vote against?

    The irony is that even in a “no-party” system, informal factions and coalitions would likely emerge anyway, but they’d just be less transparent and accountable to voters than formal parties are.