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from the when-times-are-forced-to-change dept.
When trying to understand the two bad choices we have now, it can help to look into the past at where they came from. In this article, Matt Stoller at The Atlantic provides a deep dive into a transformation the Democratic party underwent in the late 1960s onward. In it we see how the Democrats morphed the anti-big-business politics that had powered it for over a century into the big-government politics that define the political conversation today.
Modern liberals tend to confuse a broad social-welfare state and redistribution of resources in the form of tax-and-spend policies with the New Deal. In fact, the central tenet of New Deal competition policy was not big or small government; it was distrust of concentrations of power and conflicts of interest in the economy. The New Deal divided power, pitting faction against other faction, a classic Jefferson-Madison approach to controlling power (think Federalist Paper No. 10). Competition policy meant preserving democracy within the commercial sphere, by keeping markets open. Again, for New Deal populists like Brandeis and Patman [ed: links mine], it was democracy or concentrated wealth—but not both.
[...] The story of why the Watergate Babies spurned populism is its own intellectual journey. It started with a generation of politicians who cut their teeth on college-campus politics. In their youth, they saw, up close, not the perils of robber barons, but the failure of the New Deal state, most profoundly through the war in Vietnam. "We were the '60s generation that didn't drop out," Bob Edgar, a U.S. representative from the class of 1975, told me. The war in Vietnam shaped their generation in two profound ways. First, it disillusioned them toward the New Deal. It was, after all, many New Dealers, including union insiders, who nominated Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and who supported a war that killed millions, including 50,000 Americans their age. And second, higher education—the province of the affluent—exempted one from military service, which was an explicit distinction among classes.
[...] By quietly cutting back the influence of unions, [Democratic strategist Fred] Dutton sought to eject the white working class from the Democratic Party, which he saw as "a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote." The future, he argued, lay in a coalition of African Americans, feminists, and affluent, young, college-educated whites.
[...] By 2008, the ideas that took hold in the 1970s had been Democratic orthodoxy for two generations. "Left-wing" meant opposing war, supporting social tolerance, advocating environmentalism, and accepting corporatism and big finance while also seeking redistribution via taxes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 04 2016, @03:32AM
An electoral college is not what drives a 2 party system.
You're partly right, but the electoral college as currently implemented is heavily linked to the current voting system, and there's not an obvious way to make it work well under a reasonable voting system, such as approval or range/score voting.
Assuming the purpose the electoral college serves is still deemed desirable, the best way to implement it in a voting-system independent way is to simply weight ballots accordingly: I live in a state with a third the population of yours, so my vote counts for 120% of a vote, yours only counts for 105% of a vote. Of course, when you spell it out like that, a bunch of people will get all upset about "one person, one vote", but it is the most elegant and straightforward embodiment of the concept.
(The electoral college may or may not have been originally intended as a damper on popular stupidity, but they no longer serve any function except balancing power, per-capita vs. per-state.)
The thing which drives having at most 2 parties is the "winner take all" aspect of elections.
No. That is a thing that drives a 2-party system, but it is not the thing. Another important part of the problem (and IMO almost certainly a bigger part) is the voting method itself. Since this apparently isn't obvious to you, I hope an example will help.
Let's say, for convenience of math, that the current election is as close to 50% Trump, 50% Hillary as possible (i.e. equal chance the final count goes either way, but we know it's by a tiny margin). Let's further posit a mythic 3rd-party candidate A, who 40% of Trump voters prefer to Trump (and the remainder are T>A>H), and 40% of Hillary voters prefer to Hillary (and the remainder are H>A>T). I hope there's no argument that, if such a candidate could be found, the optimal outcome is for candidate A to win -- 40% of people would choose him as their first pick, vs. 30% for Trump or Hillary; and he's everyone else's second choice.
But in our current election, how will an A>H>T voter vote? (Keep in mind that the same arguments will hold for the corresponding A>T>H voter.) The only way you can express your preference for A is to not express your H>T preference -- and if you do that, suppose your corresponding A>T>H voter doesn't? Why, then Trump wins -- and that's your least favorable option. So you have to vote strategically, i.e for Hillary, in hopes of keeping the wrong lizard from winning.
Basically, it's the prisoners' dilemma: (x represents a "tie", really a toss-up)
| A | H
--+---+---
A | A | H
T | T | x
You start out neutral, absent cooperation; if you cooperate, but your "opponent" doesn't, you lose big. You only win if you both cooperate.
(You might start thinking of iterated prisoners' dilemma, and the tit-for-tat strategy. But AIUI that only works with two players -- here there's millions of players on each side. When half the other team cooperates, and half doesn't, what do you do?)
But if we use approval voting, the A>H>T voter can vote for both A and Hillary. If the A>T>H voters follow the same approach, A probably (see below) wins, and everyone's happy -- but if they vote for Trump only, then Hillary "ties" Trump (reality, 50% chance it goes either way) -- and you're no worse off for trying. Suddenly you both have an incentive to vote honestly, and the election actually chooses the favorite.
| A | H
--+---+---
A | A | x
T | x | x
(What about H>A>T (or T>A>H) voters? With these particular numbers, we need just 17% to vote for Hillary and A; the rest can vote for Hillary. If the Hillary (and Trump) camp keep iron control of all their voters, and persuade over 83% (of both camps combined) to vote strategically, they can keep the race a Trump/Hillary lock -- but in reality, most people would prefer to both a. vote honestly, and b. hedge against a Trump (or Hillary) win, so the 17% we need is incredibly likely.)
Note that this election is still winner-takes-all, yet the third party actually wins; this proves that winner-takes-all is not "the" reason third parties can't make it. All we had to do was eliminated the "spoiler effect" of voting for a third party, which is the principal means of 2-party lock-in, and is entirely a consequence of bad voting systems. (In fairness, the numbers I picked are not infeasible this year, because both parties did a horrible job selecting candidates this year -- it really would be easy for a baggage-free politician of almost any sort to swoop in and make off with the election, except for the voting system. In most years, without this artificially lowered bar of viability, third parties don't have a viable candidate to put forward, because a good candidate should have served some incubation period in congress or such -- this is where proportional representation would help immensely.)
For example, imagine all of Bernie Sanders voters thought Clinton was too conservative and wanted to vote for Jill Stein. All this would do would be to split the progressive vote, and cause Trump to win. (Likewise for Libertarians and Trump, causing Clinton to win.)
But that's not a consequence of winner-take-all. That's a consequence of a bad voting system. Again, go with approval voting for contrast: If you prefer J>C>T, vote for Jill and Hillary -- if you prefer G>T>H, vote for Gary and Trump. The spoiler effect only exists because our current voting system forces you to disavow all other candidates in order to express any preference for one candidate. Real people have opinions more complex than "that guy rocks, everyone else sucks", and real voting systems should allow them to express those opinions in a way that counts. (In truth, I prefer score/range voting -- I've been discussing approval voting because the same principles apply, and it's simpler to talk about.)
Now, to the extent that a 1-dimensional political spectrum is valid, and looks like J-H-T-G, neither J nor G can possibly win -- you don't win by going away from the middle. (Of course the 1d model is not right, but it's a common conception, and is not completely wrong, either.) The point is, a fair winner-takes-all system is likely to elect someone near the middle of the political space (however many dimensions it has), while a fair proportional representation system would be more likely to choose a few extremists from both (or more) directions. But even in winner-take-all elections, voting for an extreme candidate doesn't have to (and shouldn't!) throw the election to the farther of the mainstream candidates.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday November 04 2016, @05:57AM
So you have to vote strategically, i.e for Hillary, in hopes of keeping the wrong lizard from winning.
That's not strategic voting; that's mindless, short-sighted voting. Sure, you might help defeat your most hated major party bogeyman and delude yourself into believing you've prevented the end of the world, but you're only reducing (not eliminating) the amount of harm done in the short-term; in the long-term (assuming you keep voting this way), you've helped perpetuate a corrupt and authoritarian two-party system which does an astronomical amount of damage over long periods of time. Maybe some Really Bad Guys will have to win before we can beat the two parties into shape by using their fear of the spoiler effect as a weapon to guide them into adopting third party policies. We're not giving the two parties any incentives to change if people vote for them every single time, and this is indisputable. The real "disastrous possible" is our two-party system, not any individual bad candidate.