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Comment by aritmo | Hacker News Reader

Trump is just a puppet. As soon as he goes, the Republican party will replace him with someone equal.

Isn't the case that they cannot abandon him without losing face? As a European this what our news media tell us mostly.

They don't want him gone. They are actively helping him dismantle democracy in the hope that he succeeds. If he fails in a decisive way, they will be on fox gaslighting the country about how they never supported him and tried to work against him, and it was all the Democrats' fault that he remained in power.

I think if Pence could handle it, they would replace Trump. But Trump is the person that will take down the whole Republican party if they try to remove him.

I'm a Republican. I favor smaller government and more individual freedoms. (Ok, so maybe I'm almost a Libertarian.)

I think Trump was a necessity. The Democrats successfully smeared several past Republicans as racists or idiots, both lies. (i.e. Mitt Romney was a gentle Mormon who successfully goverend a liberal state and even implemented a nice health care system. Still, he was painted a racist and a misogynst. By the party of the Clintons!) So Trump was necessary, because he could out-shout the misinformation from the other side.

In truth, the Republicans will replace Trump with someone like Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, or Nikki Haley. All these are really good people, but they will be smeared once they emerge as a front-runner.

It's time to reduce the amount of misinformation in American politics. The other side (no matter which side you are on) is not all bad.

Libertarians are what I wish 'the other side' were. They're clear and honest about what they believe in, and not only when they think it benefits "their" people.

Exhibit A: Justin Amash. He kept his head held high and didn't kowtow or demean himself to Trump, like the other 'very fine people' you mention, who lack the backbone to stand up to him when he does things they disagree with.

One silver lining about this whole sordid ordeal: if our democracy survives, I'll maintain a lot of respect for people like these: https://lincolnproject.us/ despite continuing to disagree with them on a lot of policy issues. It takes guts to stand up like that.

Outside looking in:

> The other side (no matter which side you are on) is not all bad.

The two party system is terrible. It seems to entrench views and force opposition rather than build consensus. Parties working together is something that has to happen in some systems.

Proportional representation has plenty of warts, but I’d take them over first-past-the-post (and the complex variation on that which the US uses).

I lived in Italy for a number of years and got to see proportional representation's warts up close. I'm not convinced it's a whole lot better. I really don't like how much parties control who is actually elected.

Also it's a bit far fetched in the US, whereas something like Ranked Choice voting seems to be gaining a bit of traction.

Good example against. The political scene in Italy is not one that anyone would likely want to replicate. I had New Zealand’s system (mine) in mind when posting.

Italy - and Belgium - are two of the most corrupt countries in the first batch of countries in the EU. Either of those would serve as examples that proportional representation can be messed up as well. But it's a lot harder than in fptp and similar systems and in those places where it works well (mostly: the rest of Europe) it works as long as you don't have an absolute majority that is heading for the cliffs. After that all bets are off.

Israel is another example of it not working out very well.

It's not just the corruption, it's the disproportionate power that small parties get, like the time the Communist party in Italy took out the center-left government because the government wasn't giving them everything they wanted. The party that gets 10% of the vote and is in coalition with the party that got 45% can hold the much larger party "hostage". This led to yet another Berlusconi government.

Also, I do appreciate in the US having a representative that is beholden to me, in my district, rather than 'the party', as occurs in many PR systems.

I agree with the thought here.

In 2016 I voted for Gary Johnson (Libertarian) after striking a deal with a left-leaning friend who also voted for Johnson. We both disliked Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, and both of us wanted third parties to be more influential.

But I don't really see a way for 3rd parties to gain a strong foothold in the US. I hope I'm wrong.

Have you checked out https://www.fairvote.org/ ?

People can and do argue about the math behind it, but it seems an improvement over our current system, and is being implemented here and there, so it's not some utopian impossibility.

Johnson would have been so much better than what we have.

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