LT parties anyone?

I wrote up my thoughts on Local Third parties over at Daily Kos yesterday.

This is something that would not require any electoral reforms to work in terms of making our "democracy" work, as in giving more voice to more people on more issues! The bottom line would be to gird our loins to focus our time and energy on more MLKjr-style civil disobedience-like activism and/or to contest only local (potentially) winnable elections.

Having said that, it still would be in the interest of LTs to strategically contest local elections initially in order to get them to adopt the use of three-seated proportional representation elections that would help them to win seats in the future. This would be an eminently practical/USAmerican approach to electoral reform, since it would not decry the status quo of the US's electoral ssytem in its entirety. Instead, it would advance a solution to a significant problem: how to make local elections more competitive and interesting for voters, while letting them vote for the candidate not the party and maintaining the constituent-representative relationship.

As such, my vision is that if US LT parties proliferated and focused on this issue (not wholly to the exclusion of other issues, of course) then they might help to bridge a wide set of ideological differences in the name of increasing the pluralism/dynamism of the US's democracy!

dlw