George Washington eschewed political parties because he didn’t want to establish a precedent where his choice as first president set the standard everyone else had to conform to, and there’s a little irony in people holding him up as an example in that light more than 200 years later.

He, and the other founders largely, disliked political parties in their entirety, not just having some specific number of them.
They also built the system that enshrined the two party dichotomy as the only option, actively sought to ensure that the “right” people could override the will of the people if needed, and founded the parties they had previously argued against.
They are far from infallible bastions of correctness in this matter.

See, you’re talking partisan politics, I’m talking “you literally have to pick someone”. We’ve had these candidates before. You already know which one you’re going to vote for. You picked your side four years ago when you were asked the same question.

Beyond that though, there’s “parties” and then theirs “sides”. One side is xenophobic, homophobic and actively wishes harm on a lot of people. The other side doesn’t, for all their flaws.
There are more parties than there are sides in the past few elections.

By saying you think you should vote for someone who will be good for everyone, you’ve picked a side. The side that doesn’t want to do good for only the “right” people, or make sure only the “right” people get hurt.
The only question is if you’ll vote for that side to win, or if you’ll let idealism or anger drive you to vote otherwise.

They’re both right wing, but moderate right wing bought by corporate interests isn’t the same as fascist. It’s trending towards fascism, sure, but it’s less likely to go on a killing spree.

bOth ARe tHe sAMe!!!

You have no idea what fascism means. Stop making yourself look dumb.

I am pro term limits, but you’re kinda making a good counter point. Eight more years of Obama instead of Trump and Biden… Doesn’t seem that bad. The conservatives went ballistic anyway, at least we’d have reproductive rights and better healthcare. I’m certain Obama would have been a lot better at managing COVID and the BLM protests. He was pro ceasefire in Gaza way before Biden too. Idk, for all his flaws, Obama seems better than what we got in his place.

So what were the advantages?

Debbie Wasserman Schultz, chairwoman of the Democratic Party, was found to have sent an email during the primary election saying Mr Sanders “would not be president”

There were six primaries where ties were decided by the flip of a coin — and Clinton won every single one. The odds of that happening are 1 in 64, or less than 2 percent

The usual one I hear listed is superdelegates, which doesn’t matter if more people voted for the winner,

superdelegates system favoured Clinton by pre-announcing their support, giving Clinton a massive early lead.

or that they didn’t proactively inform his campaign about funding tricks that the Clinton campaign already knew about.

Clinton bought the DNC by paying off the debt created after Obama.

Are you saying that Clinton was an independent who just happened to align with the party for her entire political career?

I’m saying she doesn’t align and would happily run as an independent if she thought she would be elected.

The point of a primary is to determine who the candidate is, not who the party is more aligned with.

“The party” is the people who vote in the primary.

Party leadership will almost always be more aligned with the person who has been a member longer, particularly when that person has been a member of part leadership themselves.

Party leadership is not the party.

It’s how people work. You prefer a person you’ve known and worked with for a long time over a person who just showed up to use your organization, and by extension you, for their own goals.

Exactly. This is why the primaries were rigged in Clinton’s favor and Sanders and his supporters were right to claim unfairness.

We have rules to make sure that those unavoidable human preferences don’t make it unfair.

Those rules were broken. Debbie Wasserman Schultz has to resign.

The Obama campaign is a good example.

Of fairness (or a super strong candidate beating stacked odds).

So what rules did they break for Clinton?

• Campaign finance
• Debate questions
• Impartiality

What advantages did she have over Sanders that she didn’t have over Obama?

I haven’t researched how unfair Obama had it so I can’t compare.

Which of those advantages weren’t just "new people to the party didn’t know tools the party made available?”

Hilarious you refer to a 76 year old career politician like Sanders as a new person.

You are looking for a Great Man of history to pin this on. You’d rather believe someone nefarious is in charge and pulling the strings from an ocean away, than to see this for what it is; an empire with no real conscious oversight. A pile of self-interested businessmen, politicians, and militarists doing whatever they can to line their pockets, profits above all else.

The US has, per capita, the largest prison population and, outright, the biggest military on the planet. If there’s a road to ‘unfreedom’, we traveled down it a long time ago.

Scandinavia has always been very left side

Maybe from a hard neo nazi perspective. Denmark and Sweden especially have right-wing extremist parties (Denmark Democrats + New Right + Danish People’s Party together ~= 14.3%, Sweden Democrats 17.5%) with a voter base that has been established over a longer time. The German right wing populists have risen to that level only in recent elections, which is frightening. Geert Wilders is not “the new guy” from the Netherlands, he’s been a populist rightwing piece of shit for decades. Unfortunately, the average Dutch person over 40 / outside university towns is also quite racist under the surface - I lived there for 4 years, speak fluent Dutch with a German accent and since they felt “safe” with their bigotry around me, I have heard enough racist and sexist bullshit from “average middle class” Dutch people that I didn’t feel comfortable in that country anymore. The young people in urban centres are okay, but unfortunately those are not a large enough demographic.

As for comparing with the US - maybe not a good idea: Even young US americans see the democrats for the corporate shills they are, and know that they have to vote for them just to prevent a Handmaid’s Tale Season 6 becoming a documentary.

The US are the scary example for Western Europe as “this will happen here if you don’t pay attention”. No one in Europe will be able to say “I didn’t know” when we slip into a totalitarian regime filled with hate and controlled by corporations, because it might be happening in front of our eyes with a ~10 year headstart in the US. I just hope that’s not what is going to happen in the end, but things have progressed far too much into the worst dystopian future thinkable for this century.