Just fine.
Exactly. That’s the only hope for third parties in this system, to replace one of the first two, and become a major party.
And then what? Most wouldn’t turn around and give power back.
That’s why PR is a great idea, and why it won’t ever happen.
What BS. Anyone can be on the ballot. If Wavy Gravy wants to run for President, of course he can be on the ballot. What isn’t needed is to make sure that hippies have their own special representative in Congress simply because hippies constitute a certain percentage of the American electorate.
But it’s nice to be reassured that your embrace of liberal democracy is not so broad as to countenance engaging with and listening to people who disagree with you.
But back to the larger topic: BG, have you ever considered that most people simply don’t share your interest in the taxonomy of American politics? I hope this doesn’t come across as a personal attack, because it certainly isn’t meant as one – but you do have a fascination with breaking down the polity into increasingly smaller (and often quantifiable) groups. You’ve had threads about 5.4% of Americans are neocons, and 3.9% are anarchro-green, 7.2% are pro-labor conservatives, and 1.5% are populist-vegan, and so on.
The idea that proportional representation is a good thing seems to stem from this idea of Americans are being members of discrete little groups that can be sliced, diced, and separated into independent organisms, and each organism is nearly sovereign from the other organisms who don’t see the world the same way.
There’s a word for that: divisive. A social scientist is free to make all the academic distinctions between self-associating groups that he wants, but when it comes to government, I truly believe that the most effective manner to run the government we have, as it is structured with separation of powers and checks and balances, is to encourage center-seeking behavior. Look at the dysfunction of the current government: I think the radical Tea Party wing of the Republican party is basically operating as its own party right now, with little means to induce or coerce them into moving forward and compromising on anything that doesn’t meet a zealot’s level of acceptance. They’ve found out that they are politically rewarded for not compromising at all.
So, you want to proliferate this behavior? We’re already seeing the government teeter on the brink of default for the second time in two years, and your solution is that there ought to be more radical parties in Congress? No, thank you. I prefer sane politicians who find value in compromise and negotiation, and are willing to reject party loyalty, party discipline, and ideological purity.
If we had a different form of government that did not have the checks and balances that the US does, the equation may be different. But you know the Constitution isn’t going to change. And seeking to eliminate center-seeking behavior in the electoral system will sow more dysfunction into the Congress, and be a total flaming wreck of a disaster. The house is on fire today because of the radicalization of American politics, and your proposal is to throw gasoline on it. I say that’s wrong.
I think that’s exactly why they SHOULD have a representative.
I never said you shouldn’t be listened to.
But we can turn this on its head. Why have 435 reps in the House? That’s divisive. Elect a single national person to run everything, elected by a majority of all U.S. voters, and voila! No divisiveness, no disagreement.
Would you support that?
You can’t get rid of politics. You can’t pretend a society with different strata of people won’t reflect that in their politics. You can only decide where and how the divisions are settled. In our system, it’s on election day - within each district or state. Then it moves on to the legislature. In a PR system, it’s all in the legislature. No reason to favor one over the other. The different parties in a PR or other multiparty legislature simply form coalitions, just like voters do on election day in our system. With all parties represented, the reps wont’ all line up on all issues the same way, unlike our system, so at least on some issues we could get compromise faster.
Let me ask you a question first: why should I waste time responding to stupid questions?
It was not a stupid question.
If you don’t want to have a discussion, just don’t reply.
I do not think we are likely to see a coalition of third parties over something relatively abstract like PR (yeah, I know we are talking about a fundamental change to how democracy works, but it’s still an abstraction to your average voter). Much more likely would be a coalition around a single fundamental issue that is causing voters great pain n their lives: say, if the banks fuck up again and cause another economic collapse with their derivatives gambling (a very possible scenario). Then you might see voters moving en masse to the third parties, as people will be more receptive to the fact that both the Dems and Pubs are in bed with the bankers.
Of course once that happens, PR might slip into being along with a lot of other reforms, most of them ill-conceived. And a very likely outcome is that the people vote for some strong reformer dictator wannabe who makes himself President For Life (in light of the “ever-present emergency” aka the War on Terror y’know). In which case PR will be moot.
But, except in a parliamentary system, they need be only temporary, issue-specific coalitions. E.g., the Libertarians probably would vote with the Republicans on economic-deregulation issues and with the Greens on drug-decriminalization issues.
A question incorporating a reductio ad absurdum of an opponent’s argument is not therefore a stupid one.
True. And of course, that happens in our legislatures too. The factions are just in a layer under the parties instead, for example, Blue Dog Democrats.
Thanks for remembering that funny French word I couldn’t think of :D.
Only if I never used it as a base to learn and study for four decades. But I did.
I see this as the exact equivalent of one of those GQ threads in which people proclaim that they’ve discovered that relativity is wrong. You don’t get to say that everybody must give your theory respect and debate it seriously as if it were true. Your (and lance’s) assumptions and suppositions don’t line up with anything I believe to be true about the real world in American politics. Or elsewhere, really. You do understand that many people around the world consider their governments to be as dysfunctional as ours even though they use some variety of PR, don’t you? You might also note that Libertarians get pounded every time they try to push their brand of utopian nonsense. It happens for the very same reasons. And they get just as angry as you. But that won’t change either case, because you’ve both arguing wrongness and you have to expect pushback on that.
Here’s a general rule that I find always to be true. If you are arguing for the One True Way your understanding of the world is flawed.
Hey, that’s great.
How about you explain why instead of just spewing “Utopia!” Have a discussion.
Do they? Are they actually as dysfunctional? Is dysfunction the only criterion for the value of an election system?
You finally added some substance. Keep it up.
Now you’re back to just bloviating.
We’re not.
Now, do you have something of substance to add? If not, you’ve made your point quite well and the rest of us can continue.
“Reductio ad absurdum is only valid when it builds on assertions which are actually present in the argument it is deconstructing, and not when it misrepresents them as a straw man.” From Rational Wiki. If you can point out where I asserted that legislatures need fewer members, as opposed to arguing about the composition of the membership, you would have a point.
My point was that as the number of legislators is reduced, the representation of each person is reduced.
You complained about divisiveness. Surely having 435 members of the House is more divisive than having, say, 50, or 25, or one?
The current system forces those divisive little groups to find a consensus (or only enough to get to a majority of voters, which is the problem, but whatever) on election day. If that’s a good thing, why not force them to do it even more? Why have representatives at all?
I haven’t put much effort into explaining my point though, because you don’t seem willing to have a discussion and I doubt you’ll start now. So do with it what you want, I don’t care any more.
They’d quite likely align with one of the major parties, like Bernie Sanders did.
That’s assuming that the Democratic party is in fact aligned to African American views. In fact, I feel that they’re viewed as the “less bad” alternative to the Republican party in their most salient factor, economic policy. African Americans support decriminalisation of marijuana, while there has been no push by the Obama administration in that direction. African Americans oppose gay marriage, but the Democratic party has been supportive of it. I can’t find any polls on worker ownership, universal healthcare or wealth redistribution for African Americans, but I’d bet blacks would favour such things more than whites - yet neither party explicitly advocates for either.
It seems you’ve taken two contradictory positions here: when parties didn’t matter, people were knowledgeable about the political positions of the candidates, now that legislators adhere to their party doctrine, people are incapable of learning about the political positions of a candidate?
Now you’re just making details up in the name of exaggeration.
I for one enjoy the Pew Political Typology stuff BG has posted.
How do you find the center?
I disagree with your diagnosis. Large parties don’t “find the center” if they can “control the center”–that is, control the debate. The TEA Party redefine their platform as catechism, they control access, they game elections–they don’t need to find the center if they can redefine it.
Right now we have one very ideological party with a gerrymandered majority in most state legislatures and Congress, and you’re scared of splitting that power up?
Make them seek the center, by making it much, much harder to dominate the landscape. As it stands now, they try to define the “center” inside their own coalition and platform; take that away.
I like this reductio ad absurdum.
I can’t speak for Ravenman, but sadly, I am so disgusted with the present régime that I would support that. Maybe a king would “find the center” better. Maybe better Ivan the Terrible than the Boyars. Maybe I’m wrong. Since rooting out democracy is extremely hard, I hope I’m wrong, because this is what we have to work with.
So that’s a point in its favor then. :p:(
Regarding all reform as utopian sounds awfully like defining a timid conservatism (in the literal sense not the “right-wing” sense) as the One True Way.
Of course there will still be problems. Politics exists to solve them as well as to create them. The present problem is fighting the dominance of the Conservative (in the “right-wing” sense not the literal sense) Movement in the world’s grandest polity.
Unless you can make all those theocons realize that climate change is killing them (and others) in time, we have to wrest power from their hands. BG favors peaceful reform. I think civil war may be necessary, though I haven’t made any definite plans for that.
PR is a neat idea, it may be less dysfunctional than the present FPTP system, and it offers a small ray of hope that we have a way to counter a corrupt GOP majority now self-sustaining by corruption.
But hey, we’re just internet punks, right?
If I’m understanding your comment, you’re confusing two different relationships; first that of a representative with other representatives and second that of a representative with constituents.
I’m defining this outside of reform. There are many ways to reform the current system within the system.
This is quite true and is the heart of the issue. PR does not help when a party - or a major faction of it - goes insane. It exacerbates the problem by giving additional insane groups more power. Therefore, it’s the exact opposite of a solution to the actual problem we have. But that’s politics, not principles, and the argument here has been entirely about principles, i.e. that PR is inherently a better system in the abstract sense.
Can this problem be solved within the current system? Yes, certainly. There has been an extraordinary amount of understanding of the changed reality from major Republican leaders. Whether this is mere talk remains to be seen. But politicians are remarkably good at reading constituencies. They keep to a path as long as it continues working. And the Republicans have had remarkable success with their branding for 40 years. But they can see that it is no longer a winning strategy.
Politically, this is a huge swing and won’t happen overnight and not even in the next presidential cycle. Regardless of the statements of far too many in the party, the leadership are not bad politicians. They will make a swing of some sort over some foreseeable future. And this will create a situation in which both major parties will be actively competing for the whole populace, not just for the halves they have been. That will drive the minor parties to even more minor status and give those invested in those parties less reason to want to dilute that investment by diminishing or destroying those parties.
But that’s all politics and politics apparently is discouraged in this thread.