If someone won $500,000,000 in the lottery, what would be the most effective way to spend it to change the political situation in America?
Edit: Asking for a friend. Also; as much as I appreciate the violent suggestions, I’m thinking more positively focused.
Look at what the justice Democrats have done. They put highly progressive people in power. It’s not a simple task.
You have to find the right candidates to put the money behind. Cover the expenses and make sure they can put all their time in their campaign.
Buy citizenship out of the US and build a better country abroad with your foreign investment. Not much to do with the way things are going, but you can make Ireland or Monténégro a better place.
Buy yourself a couple of supreme court judges. They’re a bargain these days.
You’d start by attending $10,000 plate dinners, and shaking hands with candidates and expressing views. Hire a few $60k a year idealists for a think tank to publish papers. Pick 1-2 issues and hammer them. Pay lobbyists to set up meeting and propose/write legislation and amendments.
As some of your (hopefully idealistic) candidates win, you ask them to help drive your issues through. Get them to make concessions to other people’s proposals for support on theirs, helped by your lobbyists. Use your think tank to drove issues and provide talking points and legislation.
That’s the traditional view. A better approach might be to create a 501c3 and run positive message ads that give you a warm feeling about america in general, say nothing of substance, and include a candidate you like’s name sometimes. Then another pac showing pictures of the candidate you don’t like and chanting “hate hate hate” behind them. Play to your audience.
The fundamental cause of America’s problem is the two-party system. If you want to get rid of that you have to switch to a proportional representation system. I would suggest working at the local or state level. I do not know of any organization working on this issue. You would likely have to start one yourself or hire someone else to do so.
If you’re genuinely going to do it, any suggestion I make here about specifics would be pointless, as you should do significant research before deciding on what flavor of proportional representation to push and where. But, the key is to adopt a system known for accurate and small party representation. If a party gets enough votes to win a single seat, they should be awarded a single seat. If they get a third of the votes, they should get a third of the seats.
Let me know if you want to talk specifics.
I used to say this too, but living in a multiparty country for 20+ years now (NL) I don’t see it as an advantage when you need to govern so large a country. It sounds like an easy solution until you try to get agricultural and city people to agree, and then now try multiplying it by 50.
Unfortunately, a two-party system will likely work best as you’ll need a common consensus to move the country in a single direction.
Not sure why the downvotes on OP, it’s a reasoned opinion and worthy of discussion.
I think you’re saying that if you have too many political parties then the whole system gets watered down so much that nothing happens and the direction of the country can change at any time because there’s no unified agenda. Isn’t there a system to elect a leader who’d set the agenda and coordinate?
One would hope that through conversation we’d have more reasoned information but it appears camping on a platform is where people go to “win”.
We’ve dozens of parties trying to win to form a coalition, so sheer numbers don’t help. You can easily argue that our politics have grown stale and ineffective here in the recent years, and there’s a growing need for change.
For instance we’ve already had a few elections where a farmers collective party and the far right party have won their elections, but immediately afterwards (sometimes within a day, as in the farmers (BBB)) they’ve abandoned key parts of the platform that helped get them elected. Or their positions are so vile that no other party will work with them.
I’d argue that there are the side effects of taking a position first and wanting change at any cost. This is the cost - only more stagnation.
My point is “more” does not mean “better” - often, it’s just more of the same. Vote for and demand “Better”.
Just imagine if all we had were FvD and VVD. Because that’s what the US has. You can vote between far right, and regular right.
Yeah, we don’t exactly have the best government here right now, but at least we have options. There’s a surprising amount of fluctuation in dominant parties over the years, something you’ll never see in a two-party system.
There is no such thing as a one party system. I think the word you’re looking for is “dictatorship”.
People seem to want to have more choice, but what they really need to do is choose better.
When I hear “our family always votes…”, that’s where democracy is failed.
