The following discussion clip is from the Occupy Wall Street demand discussion list.
On Oct. 12, occupythegreenparty posted the following point:
“I think people shouldn’t be afraid of several parties. The goal of the party is to run a candidate and win. If you are saying the same thing as someone else, you’re going to lose as people are trying to decide whether to follow you or the other party. Also I’ve seen brochures and test booklets that have LOTS of choices on them. We have the ability to accommodate hundreds of choices. We need to think of this as so important it has to be done.” ( I repeated it here because it didn’t have a reply link.)
Think about this based on a Plural Democracy approach. Under Plural Democracy, the goal of the party is no longer getting their candidate elected to take a leadership, winner take all, position. The goal of parties would be to propose new ideas which truly solve problems, and offer candidates who can promote and implement the concepts in a Plural Democracy structure. The reason this works is, the new idea will ALWAYS be implemented to some extent, in any new laws. The people who freely adopt it will directly experience the value of the method as well as bear the burden of the method fails. If a party supports poor ideas, and presents poor candidates, they will develop a poor performance record. In such a society, there can be hundreds of parties, each supporting special issues. ( See more about this at http://A3society.org under the Democracy tab – plural democracy )