>No third party, including libertarian, can win in the current environment.
It has nothing to do with the "current environment" unless by current environment you mean the first past the post voting system.
People who talk about "vote for X party" are just deluding themselves. Parties aren't based on ideologies, they're based on coalitions. To win you need to get a controlling majority of the seats in the legislature, not "be a small government conservative" or "advance the cause of criminal justice reform" or whatever thing you think would fix everything if people would just make decisions based on that. The only reason any party does anything is that they think it will keep them in power.
So that's how you fix problems. You make it so that the candidate who doesn't advance your cause doesn't get reelected -- and you make sure they all understand that before it happens, so that they do advance your cause.
Which is why the drug war has never been fixed. Because we haven't cared enough about it to move the needle. When things like this happen, do you all go out and write your Congressmen a letter that says "fix this or I'm voting against you"? Do media organizations whose lazy government-sources-only coverage favors prosecutors and law enforcement in cases like this get an explosion of phone calls from regular people complaining about biased reporting? No. Which is why it hasn't been fixed.
It has nothing to do with the "current environment" unless by current environment you mean the first past the post voting system.
People who talk about "vote for X party" are just deluding themselves. Parties aren't based on ideologies, they're based on coalitions. To win you need to get a controlling majority of the seats in the legislature, not "be a small government conservative" or "advance the cause of criminal justice reform" or whatever thing you think would fix everything if people would just make decisions based on that. The only reason any party does anything is that they think it will keep them in power.
So that's how you fix problems. You make it so that the candidate who doesn't advance your cause doesn't get reelected -- and you make sure they all understand that before it happens, so that they do advance your cause.
Which is why the drug war has never been fixed. Because we haven't cared enough about it to move the needle. When things like this happen, do you all go out and write your Congressmen a letter that says "fix this or I'm voting against you"? Do media organizations whose lazy government-sources-only coverage favors prosecutors and law enforcement in cases like this get an explosion of phone calls from regular people complaining about biased reporting? No. Which is why it hasn't been fixed.