Is this a whoosh? Do you seriously not know that there have been several black Republican candidate in the past?
-XT
As has been stated above, the biggest problem with a government by the people is that people are stupid.
So stupid that they forget that they have any say in government. Politicians who want to get elected only need to appease the stupids during election season by acting as if their interests are aligned, and then once elected they can do whatever they want until re-election time and the act returns.
I don’t see any way around that. Some people revel in their stupidity, or the religions that practically enforce stupidity. The only way to improve the IQ of our country is to massively improve our schooling, and every step made in that direction is cut short by people who think schools should be bible classes. Remember that people once refused to believe that the earth revolves around the sun, because that wasn’t in the bible. How far we’ve come!
Aside from passively trying to make a smarter nation by improving education, there’s not really anything else to do. If every reality tv show were canceled, and the only networks allowed on TV were PBS, the Science Channel, and the Discovery Channel, we might be better off. That wouldn’t be possible in a democracy.
I’d vote for mandatory viewing of Nova and The Universe. Possibly Sagan’s Cosmos, if the outdated facts are removed.
Seriously, I’d be completely in favor of government agents rounding us up every tuesday, putting us in large stadiums and forcing us to watch those shows, then giving us a comprehension quiz afterwords.
Also, removing tax exempt status for religions.
In the general election? That’d be news to me.
The Republicans, for 24 years, between 1861-1885. (I know that in his second term, Lincoln and Johnson ran under the “National Union” ticket, and Johnson had been a Democrat before, but I’m still counting him.)
The longest after that was the Democrats, for 20 years, between 1933-1953.
In terms of countries that get by with only two major parties, Britain almost counts. I mean, with the rise of the Liberal Democrats, that’s not really true anymore, but for most of its history, British politics was dominated by first the Conservative and Liberal parties, and then, post war, the Conservatives and Labour.
I’d disagree. It isn’t “not really true”. It isn’t true and hasn’t been true for my entire life (I am 35). The Lib Dems got 10% of the seats in 2005. That’s quite a non-trivial number. Enough to affect quite a lot. Their share of the vote is even higher, 22%. It is commonly acknowledged that PR screws the Lib Dems, which is why they are so pro it and the Tories and Labour are so against it. If you look at the individual nations, Scotland and Wales have large support for regional parties and Northern Ireland is a force on its own with none of the three main British parties having a single seat there or even managing to come second.
I wouldn’t say the experiment has failed yet, but I definitely feel like the country (& the world) is still on the wrong track. Greed is running the show, regardless of party in control. And ignorance is still winning, in spite of the increasing amount of knowledge available. I have no idea what could break the momentum. Probably the inevitable environmental breakdown, which still might be a hundred years or more. People are fired up, but the country is still cruising along fat dumb and happy, and the political pendulum will swing back. It can get *plenty *worse before the wheels really fall off. I don’t see catastrophe coming any time soon, but it is somewhere down the road we’re on.
I think Americans are stupid in a particular way that applies to English too (not so much Scots). It comes down to money. Both have been industrial powers and both have been in a position where at least in appearance it is possible to go from nothing to billionaire without education but with a certain kind of streetwise nous where education was for a long time the preserve of a rich who actually didn’t need it to get anywhere. The 19th century engineers who got rich were obviously intelligent but for the most part they were self-educated because nobody was teaching subjects that they were inventing.
So there’s a certain pride in getting rich without formal education. Up to a point that is a good thing but it becomes a bad thing when it dismisses education altogether and becomes a narrow money-obsessed thing. It goes wrong when it drifts from self-education outside of a narrow system to even narrower uneducation.
It hasn’t worked the same way in other countries where it might be expected to. France should be more democratic but its reality has always been burocratic and even the short time of The Terror was dominated by trained middle-class lawyers pretending to be ‘the people’. In France, formal education counts towards the valued Civil Service. The French attitude has been more that being low class does not make you any less intelligent or informed than upper class and you want to show it!
In Germany even before Nazism, and Italy under Fascism (and Japan of course) practical education in technology was fostered so that their traditionally rich families are mainly in engineering manufacture (that could easily be turned to military production). In the UK and US, especially recently, big money has come from playing with money. It needs a certain practical intelligence but not a formal ‘education’. An illiterate might be disadvantaged but there have been illiterate millionaires with their eyes and ears open knowing when and what to buy and sell where.
Even the professions that do require education are not truly ‘scientific’. We might say that medicine is but it really makes no difference whether a doctor accepts evolution or believes the flat earth was created yesterday, even less a lawyer. When the US did have a massive scientific lead, a lot of it was imported, refugees from Central Europe, and then need for their services in war. If there had been no Second World War and no Cold War, would Princetown and MIT have mattered as much as they did? Surely not.
The UK and US suffer technologically from getting there first. It’s difficult once you have developed something, to change it. It’s difficult to change the mentality behind it. The US motor industry is a very good example. It continued with 1930s engineering long after others with more pressure to provide small manoeuvrable economic vehicles had developed better engineering. GM owned marques have never sold well in Europe (and Chrysler not much better) because for so long they were dominated by management that believed the proper way to build a vehicle was the American way and Europeans would eventually come to understand that. They didn’t. Even more crowded Japan with no oil supplies of its own and resistance to imports proved even worse to get into. And they drive on the left.
Right. It isn’t as much true now, but prior to 1983, it was. Look at the results prior. In the 1979 election, between them, the Tories and Labour controlled 608 of of 635 seats. That’s 95%. That’s a pattern that’s true from 1945 on until 1983 (and even in 1983, the Alliance only got 3.5 percent of the seats, and all the parties other than Tories and Labour combined only got about 6.4%). It wasn’t until 1997 that the Lib Dems broke 5% of the seats. And while you’re right that in Northern Ireland, none of the major British parties have a single seat, Northern Ireland doesn’t have enough constituencies to matter Parliamentarily, and while Scotland and Wales have regional parties, they mostly vote Labour or Lib-Dem.
If you look at 19th century elections, it’s even more so. With the fairly important exception of the Irish party (and it’s predecessor, the Irish Repeal party), who were both pretty much single issue, Parliament was pretty consistently a 2 party show, with the occasional MP elected from a party either than the Tories or Liberals. In fact, in 1852, 1859, 1865, and 1868, there were no MPs from any other party seated.
Do not worry about the U.S. holding together until you have some clear conception of the lines along which it might break apart. At present, none suggest themselves. The divisions in our society are not regional like they were in 1861. The red-blue divide is not regional when you break it down by county. It’s actually rural v. urban areas, and there is no practical way the one can secede from the other.
Maybe the North American continent should be split up into nine nations?
“Reality has a known liberal bias.”
Yet in 1983 the Alliance managed 25% of all votes cast, thus showing that not only did they have a large support but also backing up my point about how the “first past the post” system screws the third party, leading the two main parties to want to keep it and the third main party wanting to move to proportional representation.
In other elections:
2001 Lib Dem 18%
1997 Lib Dem 17%
1992 Lib Dem 18%
1987 SDP/Liberal Alliance 23%
1979 Liberal 13%
1974 (October) Liberal 18%
1974 (February) Liberal 19%
1970 Liberal 7%
1966 Liberal 9%
1964 Liberal 11%
1959 Liberal 6%
1955 Liberal 2%
So apart from a single blip in 1979, where they only achieved 13% of the total vote, the third party in the UK has consistently achieved 18-25% of the national vote going back 35 years.
With proportional representation the political landscape in the UK would be wildly different. It is the method of counting, not the actual votes cast, that has stopped the third party. To say they are completely ineffectual and thus that the UK is a de-facto two party system is extremely naïve. At the very least, to win the Tories or Labour have to entice as many LibDem voters to them as possible, largely by pandering to their views.
For the record, I have only ever voted Labour. I also have not voted since I left the UK in 1999.
Yes, that’s one of the more endearing slogans used to reinforce group-mind cognitive bias.
The actual quote is pretty funny; “facts have a well-known liberal bias.” It’s satirical and holds enough truth to work. I’m pretty sure “reality” is apolitical.
That’s likely true in the United States too. But the system in both countries is first past the post, and not proportional representation, and hence, both have traditionally been two party states.
No; it’s a funny line used to point out that the right wing these days is quite detached from reality. The left tends to consider the right wing to be composed of ignorant fools, lunatics and liars for the simple reason that they ARE overwhelmingly composed of ignorant fools, lunatics and liars.
Soyou’re saying democracy has no place for reasonable debate, and is only about whoever’s fearmongering and demagoguery carries the day. Is that what you’re saying?
Cynicism is okay if you fess up to it. Weasely cynicism just sucks.
The point I am trying to make is that a large following for a party that gets screwed by the non-PR system can still affect the political makeup of the country.
But this is way too off topic now. The questions remains, is there another Western country that gets by with a two party system?
Japan gets by with essentially just one.
Not for long. They are holding elections very soon that the opposition seems poised to win.