I share your frustration. I worked on election and voting issues for a decade, fulltime for two years. I was slow to realize that my Mr Smith Goes to Washington folk theory of politics has no basis in reality. The only successes me and mine achieved were thru bringing pressure.
I highly recommend Camp Wellstone's training for organizers. (Please share recommendations.)
Electeds, leaders, and partisans to effect change is a misunderstanding of what they do. They are in a neverending knife fight for power. Any actual policies are merely the playing cards in the game. Sure, many pols do hold one or two firm positions, for which they will expend "political capital".
Leah Stokes' recent book Short Circuiting Policy is a very good, data driven explanation of policy formation. I collect books about politics, policy, etc. Mostly to better understand and learn from own experiences. Many very good.
That said, Stokes most closely matches my understanding of how legislators behave wrt policy.
I think the article neglects this fact for some reason but the actual tax legislation that was passed was written by Democrats, not us, and they try to frame it as their own idea... but the reality is they passed it literally the day after we announced we had enough signatures to put our somewhat larger tax on the ballot, in response to it.
https://www.socialistalternative.org/2020/07/09/amazon-taxed...
There's a droll quote from a political to the effect "I have to find out where my voters are going, so that I can lead them."
As you know, waterdowned legislation is sometimes passed to blunt or diffuse a competitor's initiative. And the rest of Seattle absolutely does not want Sawant's name in headlines.
Other Councilmembers may not like Sawant, but they absolutely respect her as a politician, especially noting that she does a great job representing her constituents. (Source: served on local Dems e-board, have had many sidebar convos.)
For my part, I'm really uncomfortable with the notion of backseat drivers. I expect the person I vote for to do the work. But given her successes, I need to reassess Sawant's decision making process. Thanks for nudging me.
> I'm really uncomfortable with the notion of backseat drivers
I assume this is referring to her being accountable to Socialist Alternative? I understand why this sometimes seems weird to people. But it's impossible get anywhere as a politician without a base of support. Kshama is open about who hers is. Corporate Democrats (and Republicans of course) are not, and tend to surprise people after the fact with their governance when they refuse to, for instance, tax the rich, or hedge on the question indefinitely. I think Kshama's ability to campaign for things and then consistently fight for them after getting elected is closely related to having SA, to not just do necessarily collective political analysis, but also do the work of mass campaigns. By contrast, traditional politicians also offload a lot of political work, but to an array of personally appointed policymakers, lobbyists, private-company executives, and others; while SA is democratically run, the corporate lobbying groups are only accountable to capital. I don't think there is a sustainable path in between these two options.
Now that I've played the game a little bit, I don't understand the Corporate Democrat label. As Jesse James said, he robbed the banks because that's where the money is. Same for fund raising. That's been slowly changing on the left as parties wane and interest groups rise. That guy from QuarkXpress was an early pioneer of this model.
I now think of The Struggle as entities defending the status quo (establishment, duopoly) and everyone else storming the castle. That's neither bad or good; it just is.
And per Francis Fukamaya's vetocracy thesis, the connection between our party system and the widespread dysfunction in governance is fairly loose. Right now any one can do anything without much fear of repercussions, esp on the left. Said another way, I agree with Ezra Klein's thesis that if we make the (lowercase) democratic reforms to enable majoritarian rule, then the party system can grow to actually mean something.
I recognize that I'm way to the left of most participants. I have strong affinity for MLK, David Graeber, Jonathan Rawls, and maybe some others. I started as a Green and still (probably) believe in its platform. But Nader nuked that party. (I'm still mad.) And like most Democrats, I joined with the intent to oppose Republicans. aka Negative partisanship. I think this setup is terrible.
Back when I was attending all the third party meetups (Greens, Socialists, Libertarians), I was struck that those members were making an affirmative choice, standing for what they believed in. That's a much more healthy approach.
To feel that vibe, I've focused more on issue based orgs, vs party politics. Gay marriage, weed, sustainability, etc.
So I thank you for sharing some of your Socialist Alternative experiences. I need to go check them out.
And also because ranked choice usually comes along with instant-runoff here in the US, which is possibly the only system with worse outcomes than first-past-the-post.
Note that the two weird graphs are always plurality, aka first past the post, and Hare, aka instant runoff. Also note that there's no obvious difference in any of the graphs between approval and Condorcet, even though Condorcet is ranked.
That said, I agree that approval seems to strike the best balance between simplicity and outcome, with the caveat that where possible we should also have proportional representation rather than winner-take-all districts, e.g. https://www.fairvote.org/fair_representation
But even with IRV, I would be happy I could finally throw some votes at third-party candidates whose platform I align with, without throwing away my entire vote.
Whether or not that is justifiable by the level of offense (which I think it is), I don't see any indication that it would be tactically smart in the current context, and actually a lot of reasons to the think it would be catastrophically counterproductive.