At best, you’d be exactly as unhappy in a democratic multi-party system. A stable equilibrium in any political system falls at the median voter and, like it or not, the median voter in the US is...
At best, you’d be exactly as unhappy in a democratic multi-party system. A stable equilibrium in any political system falls at the median voter and, like it or not, the median voter in the US is more like Biden than Bernie. If you want better policy outcomes and representation in the system we have, your best moves involve moving the median voter through persuasion or moving the party through coalition building and horse trading.
Bernie Sanders tries a hostile takeover model, which failed and in a dramatic enough way that its hard to see it succeeding with anyone of it couldn’t succeed with a national politician whose policies AND personal appeal top all the favorability polling.
It’s pretty clear the Warren approach (horse trading) has been far superior at actually winning outcomes in the electoral arena. The Sanders approach did some good at moving the median voter, but not nearly as far as he needed to. And insofar as his acolytes and campaign focused so hard on investing their entire policy program on his personal virtues and tearing down literally anyone else regardless of how close they were to him policy-wise they may have done enough lasting damage to their actual prospects to have cancelled out much of the good they did by moving the party leftward.
This is a quarrel with first-past-the-post, not single-party systems. The UK has multiple parties (labour, tory, UKIP, e.g.). Don't get me wrong, FPTP and single-party are both shit. E: regarding...
Another example, in the 2015 general election in the UK almost 13% of the population voted UKIP, and they got ... 1 seat (out of 650). I am not a fan of UKIP by any means, but this doesn't strike me as especially fair or democratic. In effect, almost 13% of the population has been denied their chosen representative because of the system.
This is a quarrel with first-past-the-post, not single-party systems. The UK has multiple parties (labour, tory, UKIP, e.g.).
Don't get me wrong, FPTP and single-party are both shit.
E: regarding your previous comment you linked: I think the election was influenced in big part by Comey dicking around with Clinton's emails. If memory serves, he basically said "ohh shit, hillary's emails!" a few days before the blessed poll and then said "ahh, sorry, false alarm" a few days after.
The level of partisanship we're seeing in the Republican party is pretty unusual in the context of American history. The parties haven't actually been this polarized since before the Civil War....
No one is in complete control, which is not a bad thing. To say that the majority party is in "complete control" in the US is a bit of an exaggeration, but they certainly have a hell of a lot more control than the largest party in the Netherlands (majority parties that get 50% of parliament are technically possible, but not something that has happened thus far).
The level of partisanship we're seeing in the Republican party is pretty unusual in the context of American history. The parties haven't actually been this polarized since before the Civil War. Generally the majority "party" doesn't have total control, the party labels kind of obfuscate how much factionalism exists within the parties. Parties have basically no ability to add or remove members, give members appointments, or really force people to do anything, so any individual member can basically do whatever they want as long as they have a big enough constituency to support them.
The reasons for the asymmetric polarization with the Republican party are manifold. It's a combination of hard right media pushing coverage, extreme gerrymandering selecting for the most hyper-partisan candidates, and the highly distortionary effects of money in politics such that a handful of billionaires have a big chunk of the system in their pockets. None of those have anything to do with party ID though.
Ideally, both the Bidens and Bernies should have their representation.
They DO. Bernie Sanders hasn't been exiled, he's in the Senate. Elizabeth Warren is too. Both of them got to have input on the party platform and Biden actually consulted them on cabinet and VP picks. In 2008, Barack Obama picked Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State for similar reasons. In 2004 Howard Dean ended up being chairman of the DNC after losing.
The media is so focused on horse-race journalism that they make these election races sound like the be-all-and-end-all of political activity but they're just not. The campaigns themselves buy into it, casting everything as a desperate last stand. But that's not really true either. It's just underpaid, underslept, overexcited campaign workers dialing all the emotions up to eleven but it doesn't really reflect how change and political action here actually happens.
Before Reagan, before Roe v. Wade even, there was Barry Goldwater and the Southern Strategy. Short of it, Democrats ruled the roost in the South, until the Civil Rights movement became a thing,...
It's hard to pin point when exactly it started, probably some time during the Reagan administration with the rise of the "culture war".
Before Reagan, before Roe v. Wade even, there was Barry Goldwater and the Southern Strategy. Short of it, Democrats ruled the roost in the South, until the Civil Rights movement became a thing, then the Southern Democrats ceded from the main party and joined the Republican bloc because "States Rights" meant that they didn't have to be held accountable to Federal standards, such as the Civil Rights act. Supposedly those two things are not related, they are.
Not that hard. In 1994 Newt Gingrich became speaker of the house and enacted a rule where committee leadership was ranked by party rather than pure seniority. Previously, regardless of what party...
It's hard to pin point when exactly it started
Not that hard. In 1994 Newt Gingrich became speaker of the house and enacted a rule where committee leadership was ranked by party rather than pure seniority. Previously, regardless of what party you were in, the most senior members got positioned higher in committees. After the rule change, the minority party in Congress was essentially frozen out of being able to do anything entirely. This created a framework for single-party control over the house and lack of consensus or negotiation between individuals in either of the parties. You also just can't put the toothpaste back in the tube because if the Democrats let Republicans on the committees when they're in charge, the Republican asshole caucus will just reinstate the Gingrich rule when the coin flips.
The Hastert Rule made this dynamic even worse, meaning you can't even pass legislation that a majority of your party doesn't support, even if you can create a majority of the chamber with support from both parties.
Who do I vote for as a secular libertarian? Many viewpoints are – and always have been – represented very limited; yes, there's the odd senator or representative here or there, so now I need to hope that another state or district elects a senator or representative to represent my views, such as Sanders or Warren? That doesn't strike me as very democratic.
Again, voting is an act of brand identification. It's appointing a person for a job. Your idea of having a voice in the system is parallel to the process of electoralism. You elect the person you think is more amenable to being pressured by people in your position, not the one who panders to you most effectively. Jim Clyburn understands this, which is why he's able to endorse Joe "I was best friends with Strom Thurmond" Biden and demand concessions from him in exchange.
Democracy isn't about you feeling like you have a voice. It's about forming governing coalitions based on a consensus of representatives. It's not about you, it's about the polity as a whole.
It's an outdated system from a time when politics were much more local. Those times are gone and are not coming back, and it's past time the system gets updated accordingly.
It's honestly way more realistic to reorient your political action to changing state and local politics than it is to dramatically alter the entire Constitutional system. It's not even close.
This assumes a level of policy oriented or ideological engagement with politics that isn't really borne out by how people actually vote. People seem to care a lot more about personal qualities...
It just seems fairer to me if people were able to vote for people who have views closer to their own and are able to "pressure" people on different aspects.
This assumes a level of policy oriented or ideological engagement with politics that isn't really borne out by how people actually vote. People seem to care a lot more about personal qualities like projections of competence and leadership, mastery of rhetoric, or historical records of being present for important things, moreso than policy focused or ideological ones. So most people are deciding who is closest to them based on who makes them feel more comfortable as a trustee in charge of looking out for them. It's very evidently not about who has the more compelling policy platform.
Sorry, but what a condensing remark.
Sorry, it wasn't mean to be condescending but that is what you're talking about when you talk as if the primary act of political engagement is electoralism. On campaign, politicians are professional panderers. That's what they do. Subdividing the parties just means you get more and more niche types of pandering.
So? How is that relevant? How is it relevant here? Is being friends with someone you disagree with now fodder for off-hand personal attacks? Pfff
In the case of one of the leading lights of the segregation movement. . . yeah it is. Jim Clyburn is the most influential member of the Black Caucus and a senator from South Carolina, as Thurmond was. You can imagine they had plenty of reasons to dislike each other being as how Thurmond was the great enemy that Clyburn spent his early political career fighting against. And yet he got behind Biden over anyone else despite Biden's general coziness with that entire movement.
In a multi-party system, you'd basically have the Black Caucus splintered off into a party on its own, with no ability to work with the Joe Bidens of the world. It's hard not to see how that's relevant hear, if we want to talk about a counterfactual scenario where the US splinters into multiple parties.
This argument shows that the US are sometimes a lot more like the EU than a single country. For the EU, we can only vote for parties from our own country. They often form coalitions though. As a...
Ideally, both the Bidens and Bernies should have their representation. I know Bernie is an elected representative of Vermont, but what if I live in, say, Ohio? How do I get to "vote Bernie" and be represented? Basically, you don't. But with my vote on the small Party for the Animals vote I still get represented. I think that's a good thing.
This argument shows that the US are sometimes a lot more like the EU than a single country. For the EU, we can only vote for parties from our own country. They often form coalitions though.
As a fellow Dutchman, I see our system as one of the fairest in existence. Most groups are represented and they keep each other in check.
Who says stable equilibrium is reached? You end up with negotiations between groups to achieve common goals - which means you mitigate the impact of wedge issues flipping people between red and blue.
Who says stable equilibrium is reached?
You end up with negotiations between groups to achieve common goals - which means you mitigate the impact of wedge issues flipping people between red and blue.
Very few people flip between red and blue in our system. Things mostly hinge on getting marginally involved people to show up in greater or fewer numbers. That is basically how things worked here...
You end up with negotiations between groups to achieve common goals - which means you mitigate the impact of wedge issues flipping people between red and blue.
Very few people flip between red and blue in our system. Things mostly hinge on getting marginally involved people to show up in greater or fewer numbers.
You end up with negotiations between groups to achieve common goals
That is basically how things worked here because we have a soft party system. The US hasn't seen strong partisanship like on the Republican Party since before the Civil War.
I've read the first part of your comment right before my morning shower. Prepare for shower thoughts: The stable equilibrium of a two-party system does that. In otherwise, the political spectrum...
I've read the first part of your comment right before my morning shower. Prepare for shower thoughts:
At best, you’d be exactly as unhappy in a democratic multi-party system. A stable equilibrium in any political system falls at the median voter and, like it or not, the median voter in the US is more like Biden than Bernie.
The stable equilibrium of a two-party system does that. In otherwise, the political spectrum is multi-dimensional. In a two party system, the ideal counter to Donald Trump is only a slight variation of trump: Less corrupt, less authoritarian, less racist. But only by a little. Everyone who hates corrupt, racist authoritarians will vote for your better version, and you'll split Trump's base. Think of it this way: If you bet "whoever gets the closest to a random number [0..100]", and your opponent says "61"[1], why would you say anything but 60? By inching very close, you rob him of his base. Every bit of space between you and your enemy gets split down the middle.
How will this shake out in a multi-party system? First off, the game of "inch close to your enemy" doesn't work as easily with multiple parties. Some of the others haven't set their policy in stone yet, so you can't afford to pick the greedy-rational position, because that way you're going to end boxed in. Or in other words: If Trump picks 61, I won't pick 60 because I know the next guy will just pick 59. Maybe I'll pick 40. Maybe I'll make a principled stand because I can't game the system anyway and pick 42. Faced with no way to play the system, you resort to standing for what you believe in. Crazy, right? Beyond that, we have multiple dimensions. That further complicates gaming the system. Compare the german political compass e.g.: Even if you knew how people voted, you're not going to be able to tell who the median voter is. By restricting a multi-dimensional problem to two points (D and R policy), you restrict yourself to the current principal direction, and everyone who is "off to the side" just won't care at all.
Having more parties increases turnouts. I don't have studies to prove this claim, but it seems only natural, considering Sanders was mobilizing people to get involved in the democratic party that didn't even bother before. Consider the above example in one dimension again: If counter-trump's policy is a solid 60 and Trump's is a 61, what do I, a 3, care? They're both shit and their policy differences barely even matter; probably not enough to get me to go to the polls.
The stable equilibrium also is usually not reached because everyone has imperfect information. I.e. people didn't know just how corrupt trump would be, both because he hadn't done corrupt stuff in office yet and because of disinfo. Likewise, do you think the laws and policies of the US govt are each supported by the majority? Patriot act, border control, coronavirus response. Do you think these are issues where the govt. enjoys 50%+ support?
Related to the last one, propaganda alike to fox news is much more easy to pull off if you have a simple us-vs-them mentality brought on by there only being two choices. If fox news is Republican News, and CNN is not, how can it be anything but Democrat News? The polarization of the US media landscape is completely unfathomable to this german. I hazard the guess that Fox News could not exist here or at least not with any degree of impact.
Conclusion: I don't think you'd be exactly as unhappy. That is merely the worst case. You're more likely to find a party closer to your opinion who might get your voice heard. The process to finding the majority-preferred policy is also more robust.
[1] I've chosen 60/61 here because I don't think anyone knows quite where the median is, so we go with guesses. Think of the game as not having fair dice. You might be more likely to roll a 70 than a 40, e.g.. So the actual ideal pick depends on ones opinion of the distribution.
Sure it does. You just do all the negotiation after the fact, once the election's been decided, than beforehand. The policy outcomes still converge around where a median voter would have...
First off, the game of "inch close to your enemy" doesn't work as easily with multiple parties.
Sure it does. You just do all the negotiation after the fact, once the election's been decided, than beforehand. The policy outcomes still converge around where a median voter would have preferred.
But you're also making the mistake a lot of Europeans make about the American system where you assume our political parties actually do a lot more than they really do. The parties in America are basically just fundraising and candidate recruitment machines. They have very limited ability to whip votes, they have almost no scope to kick people out for being bad. Nobody's paying dues. These are just brand identities and caucuses. There have been times were a Democratic Congress, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic President have had legislation come apart because they weren't able to agree on things. Nobody gets to just decide what the platform is off the bat. What actually ends up happening is a consequence of a legislative sausage making machine where everyone from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin all have to agree on a piece of legislation to push it forward.
considering Sanders was mobilizing people to get involved in the democratic party that didn't even bother before.
It's not actually looking like he mobilized a great many new, people and what "new people who haven't been involved before" effect there was looks more like a consequence of targeting young people than anything else (since, by definition, they haven't had as much time to get involved in anything).
Related to the last one, propaganda alike to fox news is much more easy to pull off if you have a simple us-vs-them mentality brought on by there only being two choices.
How do you explain Brazil then? Or India? or Israel? The "us vs. them" Fox News is peddling is only incidentally Dems vs Reps. It's actually Rural and Southern Whites vs. Ethnics. The in-group/out-group play is still there, it's just a question of whether it happens between two parties or invested in a majority coalition of parties. In fact, the India and Israel cases are good counterexamples. In both cases you have a broadly unpopular right wing party in charge, but it has very intense support from a plurality of people. The opposition simply can't consolidate because they're fragmented across multiple competing parties instead of being under one big-tent party like the Democrats. The Indian National Congress used to be a big-tent party, but ever since it became a personality cult around the Gandhi-Nehru family it lost the ability to hold a coalition together.
That is merely the worst case. You're more likely to find a party closer to your opinion who might get your voice heard.
This is again, like I mentioned about Europeans imposing their ideas about how parties work on the US system. Our system revolves around individual personalities rather than parties. The only way you get your voice heard is by running or being involved. Voting isn't an act of self-expression or whatever, it's hiring a person to do a job wherein you entrust them with authority to make political decisions on your behalf and have periodic performance reviews to kick them out if they're a bad trustee. Campaigns for change happen outside of, and parallel to the electoral system. They rely on concerted activism instead of voting for a messiah figure once every 4 years and then being mad when they can't fix everything on their own.
This article is particularly demonstrative of this: Sounds a lot like the situation the GOP has brought us to since around 2010. The article later points out that the public is far from being...
Back in 1950, when both major parties were broad and moderate with overlapping appeals, many of America’s leading political scientists wrote a report in which they bemoaned this state of affairs.
In a report, “Toward a More Responsible Two-Party System,” they saw two national parties that were but loose confederations of state and local parties, incapable of bringing forward coherent programs to the voters and carrying them out when they got into power.
If the American political parties failed to heed their advice, the authors issued a dire warning:
If the two parties do not develop alternative programs that can be executed, the voter’s frustration and the mounting ambiguities of national policy might also set in motion more extreme tendencies to the political left and the political right. This, again, would represent a condition to which neither our political institutions nor our civic habits are adapted. Once a deep political cleavage develops between opposing groups, each group naturally works to keep it deep. Such groups may gravitate beyond the confines of the American system of government and its democratic institutions.
Assuming a survival of the two-party system in form though not in spirit, even if only one of the diametrically opposite parties comes to flirt with unconstitutional means and ends, the consequences would be serious. For then the constitution-minded electorate would be virtually reduced to a one-party system with no practical alternative to holding to the “safe” party at all cost.
Sounds a lot like the situation the GOP has brought us to since around 2010. The article later points out that the public is far from being 'constitution-minded' and so the only safeguard holding this nonsense together is a lie.
Yup. This right here is the main reason myself and many other Bernie supporters were so passionate about him. Bernie's plans are what it will take to undo the damage caused by the chief orangutan...
Yup. This right here is the main reason myself and many other Bernie supporters were so passionate about him.
Bernie's plans are what it will take to undo the damage caused by the chief orangutan and mitigate the general slide towards doom that kicked into high gear in the 80s. Denial of this will result in inadequate action taken and every delay makes the problem worse.
Biden's 'return to the status quo' platform might stop things from getting worse faster, but isn't exactly going to right the ship.
The status is not quo. This was the best possible time to get a progressive in office, when 'vote blue no matter who' means more than ever. Sending in another average politician pitching mundane versions of the ones progressives came up with years ago isn't going to cut it.
On the bright side, if Congress gets its act together and actually passes something big, do you really think Biden's going to veto it? In a stalemate situation, it's all about removing obstacles....
On the bright side, if Congress gets its act together and actually passes something big, do you really think Biden's going to veto it?
In a stalemate situation, it's all about removing obstacles. At this point we should probably be paying more attention to the Senate races. Getting a majority there would be interesting.
He wouldn't...but I also don't think he'd advocate and push Congress to do these things the way Bernie would have. I think Bernie would have made far better picks for his cabinet and heads of...
He wouldn't...but I also don't think he'd advocate and push Congress to do these things the way Bernie would have. I think Bernie would have made far better picks for his cabinet and heads of various agencies, and we might finally have gotten away from the 'foxes watching the henhouse' appointees of recent years. I think Bernie would have been more willing to stack the Supreme court to neuter the Bush/Trump picks.
However, I definitely agree about Senate races being 1000 times more important...but the rub there is that the Republicans have a distinct advantage there because the Senate is determined by arbitrary boundaries and not any distribution of population, so rural states have an immense advantage when the majority of society is consolidating around cities.
I just finished reading his NYTimes op-ed, thinking "yeah, it's not rocket science. Compared to the current Admin, even this guy sounds great" ... then I read this. Just like 2016, Americans have...
I just finished reading his NYTimes op-ed, thinking "yeah, it's not rocket science. Compared to the current Admin, even this guy sounds great" ... then I read this.
Just like 2016, Americans have been given a choice to vote for either herpes or AIDS.
Addendum: For the record, Sanders has been my #1, and Warren my #2 choices — both since 2015 ... but I have also been an outspoken "any Dem but Biden" proponent, since 2 months before he declared, and I would have been pretty content with practically any other of the 93 candidates that ran.
You're not wrong, but the comparison is fairly apt in this case. Biden is like herpes... is relatively harmless, but nobody really wants it. Trump is like AIDs...it's going to kill you.
You're not wrong, but the comparison is fairly apt in this case.
Biden is like herpes... is relatively harmless, but nobody really wants it.
Does herpes protect your political project from having to spend the next 40 years fighting uphill battles against a hostile supreme court and forcing you to make do with a terminally maimed...
Does herpes protect your political project from having to spend the next 40 years fighting uphill battles against a hostile supreme court and forcing you to make do with a terminally maimed federal bureaucracy? Asking for a friend.
Every comparison breaks down if you overanalyze it. The weakest remotely plausible candidates for the Democratic party (starting from the worst) were Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Biden. Biden coasted...
Every comparison breaks down if you overanalyze it. The weakest remotely plausible candidates for the Democratic party (starting from the worst) were Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Biden.
Biden coasted to his primary win by riding the coattails of Obama's presidency. Remember 2008? Biden was an also-ran in the primaries. He got lower percentages of votes in 2008 than Amy Klobuchar did in 2020.
Obama nostalgia will only carry him so far, esp since 2012 was not as kind as 2008 was.
For the record ... I am absolutely voting for herpes this year, largely because I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that, in 2016, Americans voluntarily chose to infect themselves with...
For the record ...
I am absolutely voting for herpes this year, largely because I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that, in 2016, Americans voluntarily chose to infect themselves with AIDS, and now, 3 years later 40+% of them are still happy with that decision.
That's pretty much Biden's whole platform. "Oh you don't like me? Well your alternative is Trump so what are you gonna do about it?"
At best, you’d be exactly as unhappy in a democratic multi-party system. A stable equilibrium in any political system falls at the median voter and, like it or not, the median voter in the US is more like Biden than Bernie. If you want better policy outcomes and representation in the system we have, your best moves involve moving the median voter through persuasion or moving the party through coalition building and horse trading.
Bernie Sanders tries a hostile takeover model, which failed and in a dramatic enough way that its hard to see it succeeding with anyone of it couldn’t succeed with a national politician whose policies AND personal appeal top all the favorability polling.
It’s pretty clear the Warren approach (horse trading) has been far superior at actually winning outcomes in the electoral arena. The Sanders approach did some good at moving the median voter, but not nearly as far as he needed to. And insofar as his acolytes and campaign focused so hard on investing their entire policy program on his personal virtues and tearing down literally anyone else regardless of how close they were to him policy-wise they may have done enough lasting damage to their actual prospects to have cancelled out much of the good they did by moving the party leftward.
This is a quarrel with first-past-the-post, not single-party systems. The UK has multiple parties (labour, tory, UKIP, e.g.).
Don't get me wrong, FPTP and single-party are both shit.
E: regarding your previous comment you linked: I think the election was influenced in big part by Comey dicking around with Clinton's emails. If memory serves, he basically said "ohh shit, hillary's emails!" a few days before the blessed poll and then said "ahh, sorry, false alarm" a few days after.
The level of partisanship we're seeing in the Republican party is pretty unusual in the context of American history. The parties haven't actually been this polarized since before the Civil War. Generally the majority "party" doesn't have total control, the party labels kind of obfuscate how much factionalism exists within the parties. Parties have basically no ability to add or remove members, give members appointments, or really force people to do anything, so any individual member can basically do whatever they want as long as they have a big enough constituency to support them.
The reasons for the asymmetric polarization with the Republican party are manifold. It's a combination of hard right media pushing coverage, extreme gerrymandering selecting for the most hyper-partisan candidates, and the highly distortionary effects of money in politics such that a handful of billionaires have a big chunk of the system in their pockets. None of those have anything to do with party ID though.
They DO. Bernie Sanders hasn't been exiled, he's in the Senate. Elizabeth Warren is too. Both of them got to have input on the party platform and Biden actually consulted them on cabinet and VP picks. In 2008, Barack Obama picked Hillary Clinton to be his Secretary of State for similar reasons. In 2004 Howard Dean ended up being chairman of the DNC after losing.
The media is so focused on horse-race journalism that they make these election races sound like the be-all-and-end-all of political activity but they're just not. The campaigns themselves buy into it, casting everything as a desperate last stand. But that's not really true either. It's just underpaid, underslept, overexcited campaign workers dialing all the emotions up to eleven but it doesn't really reflect how change and political action here actually happens.
Before Reagan, before Roe v. Wade even, there was Barry Goldwater and the Southern Strategy. Short of it, Democrats ruled the roost in the South, until the Civil Rights movement became a thing, then the Southern Democrats ceded from the main party and joined the Republican bloc because "States Rights" meant that they didn't have to be held accountable to Federal standards, such as the Civil Rights act. Supposedly those two things are not related, they are.
Not that hard. In 1994 Newt Gingrich became speaker of the house and enacted a rule where committee leadership was ranked by party rather than pure seniority. Previously, regardless of what party you were in, the most senior members got positioned higher in committees. After the rule change, the minority party in Congress was essentially frozen out of being able to do anything entirely. This created a framework for single-party control over the house and lack of consensus or negotiation between individuals in either of the parties. You also just can't put the toothpaste back in the tube because if the Democrats let Republicans on the committees when they're in charge, the Republican asshole caucus will just reinstate the Gingrich rule when the coin flips.
The Hastert Rule made this dynamic even worse, meaning you can't even pass legislation that a majority of your party doesn't support, even if you can create a majority of the chamber with support from both parties.
Again, voting is an act of brand identification. It's appointing a person for a job. Your idea of having a voice in the system is parallel to the process of electoralism. You elect the person you think is more amenable to being pressured by people in your position, not the one who panders to you most effectively. Jim Clyburn understands this, which is why he's able to endorse Joe "I was best friends with Strom Thurmond" Biden and demand concessions from him in exchange.
Democracy isn't about you feeling like you have a voice. It's about forming governing coalitions based on a consensus of representatives. It's not about you, it's about the polity as a whole.
It's honestly way more realistic to reorient your political action to changing state and local politics than it is to dramatically alter the entire Constitutional system. It's not even close.
This assumes a level of policy oriented or ideological engagement with politics that isn't really borne out by how people actually vote. People seem to care a lot more about personal qualities like projections of competence and leadership, mastery of rhetoric, or historical records of being present for important things, moreso than policy focused or ideological ones. So most people are deciding who is closest to them based on who makes them feel more comfortable as a trustee in charge of looking out for them. It's very evidently not about who has the more compelling policy platform.
Sorry, it wasn't mean to be condescending but that is what you're talking about when you talk as if the primary act of political engagement is electoralism. On campaign, politicians are professional panderers. That's what they do. Subdividing the parties just means you get more and more niche types of pandering.
In the case of one of the leading lights of the segregation movement. . . yeah it is. Jim Clyburn is the most influential member of the Black Caucus and a senator from South Carolina, as Thurmond was. You can imagine they had plenty of reasons to dislike each other being as how Thurmond was the great enemy that Clyburn spent his early political career fighting against. And yet he got behind Biden over anyone else despite Biden's general coziness with that entire movement.
In a multi-party system, you'd basically have the Black Caucus splintered off into a party on its own, with no ability to work with the Joe Bidens of the world. It's hard not to see how that's relevant hear, if we want to talk about a counterfactual scenario where the US splinters into multiple parties.
This argument shows that the US are sometimes a lot more like the EU than a single country. For the EU, we can only vote for parties from our own country. They often form coalitions though.
As a fellow Dutchman, I see our system as one of the fairest in existence. Most groups are represented and they keep each other in check.
Who says stable equilibrium is reached?
You end up with negotiations between groups to achieve common goals - which means you mitigate the impact of wedge issues flipping people between red and blue.
Very few people flip between red and blue in our system. Things mostly hinge on getting marginally involved people to show up in greater or fewer numbers.
That is basically how things worked here because we have a soft party system. The US hasn't seen strong partisanship like on the Republican Party since before the Civil War.
I've read the first part of your comment right before my morning shower. Prepare for shower thoughts:
The stable equilibrium of a two-party system does that. In otherwise, the political spectrum is multi-dimensional. In a two party system, the ideal counter to Donald Trump is only a slight variation of trump: Less corrupt, less authoritarian, less racist. But only by a little. Everyone who hates corrupt, racist authoritarians will vote for your better version, and you'll split Trump's base. Think of it this way: If you bet "whoever gets the closest to a random number [0..100]", and your opponent says "61"[1], why would you say anything but 60? By inching very close, you rob him of his base. Every bit of space between you and your enemy gets split down the middle.
How will this shake out in a multi-party system? First off, the game of "inch close to your enemy" doesn't work as easily with multiple parties. Some of the others haven't set their policy in stone yet, so you can't afford to pick the greedy-rational position, because that way you're going to end boxed in. Or in other words: If Trump picks 61, I won't pick 60 because I know the next guy will just pick 59. Maybe I'll pick 40. Maybe I'll make a principled stand because I can't game the system anyway and pick 42. Faced with no way to play the system, you resort to standing for what you believe in. Crazy, right? Beyond that, we have multiple dimensions. That further complicates gaming the system. Compare the german political compass e.g.: Even if you knew how people voted, you're not going to be able to tell who the median voter is. By restricting a multi-dimensional problem to two points (D and R policy), you restrict yourself to the current principal direction, and everyone who is "off to the side" just won't care at all.
Having more parties increases turnouts. I don't have studies to prove this claim, but it seems only natural, considering Sanders was mobilizing people to get involved in the democratic party that didn't even bother before. Consider the above example in one dimension again: If counter-trump's policy is a solid 60 and Trump's is a 61, what do I, a 3, care? They're both shit and their policy differences barely even matter; probably not enough to get me to go to the polls.
The stable equilibrium also is usually not reached because everyone has imperfect information. I.e. people didn't know just how corrupt trump would be, both because he hadn't done corrupt stuff in office yet and because of disinfo. Likewise, do you think the laws and policies of the US govt are each supported by the majority? Patriot act, border control, coronavirus response. Do you think these are issues where the govt. enjoys 50%+ support?
Related to the last one, propaganda alike to fox news is much more easy to pull off if you have a simple us-vs-them mentality brought on by there only being two choices. If fox news is Republican News, and CNN is not, how can it be anything but Democrat News? The polarization of the US media landscape is completely unfathomable to this german. I hazard the guess that Fox News could not exist here or at least not with any degree of impact.
Conclusion: I don't think you'd be exactly as unhappy. That is merely the worst case. You're more likely to find a party closer to your opinion who might get your voice heard. The process to finding the majority-preferred policy is also more robust.
[1] I've chosen 60/61 here because I don't think anyone knows quite where the median is, so we go with guesses. Think of the game as not having fair dice. You might be more likely to roll a 70 than a 40, e.g.. So the actual ideal pick depends on ones opinion of the distribution.
Sure it does. You just do all the negotiation after the fact, once the election's been decided, than beforehand. The policy outcomes still converge around where a median voter would have preferred.
But you're also making the mistake a lot of Europeans make about the American system where you assume our political parties actually do a lot more than they really do. The parties in America are basically just fundraising and candidate recruitment machines. They have very limited ability to whip votes, they have almost no scope to kick people out for being bad. Nobody's paying dues. These are just brand identities and caucuses. There have been times were a Democratic Congress, a Democratic Senate, and a Democratic President have had legislation come apart because they weren't able to agree on things. Nobody gets to just decide what the platform is off the bat. What actually ends up happening is a consequence of a legislative sausage making machine where everyone from Bernie Sanders to Joe Manchin all have to agree on a piece of legislation to push it forward.
It's not actually looking like he mobilized a great many new, people and what "new people who haven't been involved before" effect there was looks more like a consequence of targeting young people than anything else (since, by definition, they haven't had as much time to get involved in anything).
How do you explain Brazil then? Or India? or Israel? The "us vs. them" Fox News is peddling is only incidentally Dems vs Reps. It's actually Rural and Southern Whites vs. Ethnics. The in-group/out-group play is still there, it's just a question of whether it happens between two parties or invested in a majority coalition of parties. In fact, the India and Israel cases are good counterexamples. In both cases you have a broadly unpopular right wing party in charge, but it has very intense support from a plurality of people. The opposition simply can't consolidate because they're fragmented across multiple competing parties instead of being under one big-tent party like the Democrats. The Indian National Congress used to be a big-tent party, but ever since it became a personality cult around the Gandhi-Nehru family it lost the ability to hold a coalition together.
This is again, like I mentioned about Europeans imposing their ideas about how parties work on the US system. Our system revolves around individual personalities rather than parties. The only way you get your voice heard is by running or being involved. Voting isn't an act of self-expression or whatever, it's hiring a person to do a job wherein you entrust them with authority to make political decisions on your behalf and have periodic performance reviews to kick them out if they're a bad trustee. Campaigns for change happen outside of, and parallel to the electoral system. They rely on concerted activism instead of voting for a messiah figure once every 4 years and then being mad when they can't fix everything on their own.
Brazil has 33 parties. It’s a shit fest too.
This article is particularly demonstrative of this:
Sounds a lot like the situation the GOP has brought us to since around 2010. The article later points out that the public is far from being 'constitution-minded' and so the only safeguard holding this nonsense together is a lie.
Yup. This right here is the main reason myself and many other Bernie supporters were so passionate about him.
Bernie's plans are what it will take to undo the damage caused by the chief orangutan and mitigate the general slide towards doom that kicked into high gear in the 80s. Denial of this will result in inadequate action taken and every delay makes the problem worse.
Biden's 'return to the status quo' platform might stop things from getting worse faster, but isn't exactly going to right the ship.
The status is not quo. This was the best possible time to get a progressive in office, when 'vote blue no matter who' means more than ever. Sending in another average politician pitching mundane versions of the ones progressives came up with years ago isn't going to cut it.
On the bright side, if Congress gets its act together and actually passes something big, do you really think Biden's going to veto it?
In a stalemate situation, it's all about removing obstacles. At this point we should probably be paying more attention to the Senate races. Getting a majority there would be interesting.
He wouldn't...but I also don't think he'd advocate and push Congress to do these things the way Bernie would have. I think Bernie would have made far better picks for his cabinet and heads of various agencies, and we might finally have gotten away from the 'foxes watching the henhouse' appointees of recent years. I think Bernie would have been more willing to stack the Supreme court to neuter the Bush/Trump picks.
However, I definitely agree about Senate races being 1000 times more important...but the rub there is that the Republicans have a distinct advantage there because the Senate is determined by arbitrary boundaries and not any distribution of population, so rural states have an immense advantage when the majority of society is consolidating around cities.
https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/10/biden-says-he-wouldd-veto-medicare-for-all-as-coronavirus-focuses-attention-on-health.html
Turns out his actual quote is much less inflammatory than the headline.
This is pure mealy-mouthedness to reassure cagey centrist voters.
Yeah, okay, but I still don't believe he would really do it, if it came down to it. Not that it will ever get that far.
I just finished reading his NYTimes op-ed, thinking "yeah, it's not rocket science. Compared to the current Admin, even this guy sounds great" ... then I read this.
Just like 2016, Americans have been given a choice to vote for either herpes or AIDS.
Addendum: For the record, Sanders has been my #1, and Warren my #2 choices — both since 2015 ... but I have also been an outspoken "any Dem but Biden" proponent, since 2 months before he declared, and I would have been pretty content with practically any other of the 93 candidates that ran.
You're not wrong, but the comparison is fairly apt in this case.
Biden is like herpes... is relatively harmless, but nobody really wants it.
Trump is like AIDs...it's going to kill you.
Does herpes protect your political project from having to spend the next 40 years fighting uphill battles against a hostile supreme court and forcing you to make do with a terminally maimed federal bureaucracy? Asking for a friend.
Every comparison breaks down if you overanalyze it. The weakest remotely plausible candidates for the Democratic party (starting from the worst) were Bloomberg, Buttigieg, and Biden.
Biden coasted to his primary win by riding the coattails of Obama's presidency. Remember 2008? Biden was an also-ran in the primaries. He got lower percentages of votes in 2008 than Amy Klobuchar did in 2020.
Obama nostalgia will only carry him so far, esp since 2012 was not as kind as 2008 was.
For the record ...
I am absolutely voting for herpes this year, largely because I still cannot wrap my head around the fact that, in 2016, Americans voluntarily chose to infect themselves with AIDS, and now, 3 years later 40+% of them are still happy with that decision.
Agreed. Not thrilled with it (although I feel better since seeing the news about the coalitions), but is far and away the lesser of two evils.