A Reddit user said this, and I thought it was interesting:
The entire problem is the US system that individuals opposed to ideologies run for office.
Where I live in the Netherlands individuals are expendible and one votes for parties that put individuals in officers and often replaces them mid-term either because the party lacks faith or because they resign and want to do something else and so forth.
The US system being all about individuals means that the individual lives of humans are at the forefront rather than the political issues.
Is this so? Regardless of its truth, would such an understanding of political parties be better in the U.S. than what we have now? What, if anything, can be done to bring us closer to such an ideal, assuming it’s desirable?
Netherlands has a parliamentary system. Parliamentary systems are built around parties and so are fundamentally different from our system. You can’t apply any commentary on the one to the other in most cases.
There must be a hundred threads here debating the pros and cons of parliamentary systems. Read them if you’re interested, but there’s as much chance of the U.S. having a parliament as there is of it having a monarch, so they’re irrelevant to any future we can see.
There is certainly some merit to this view, although I would argue that while ideology may describe political parties, it is policy that really distinguishes them in any material way. In American politics, while two major parties (Republican and Democrat) have a wide ideological gulf, with the exception of a few signature issues such as voting rights, immigration, abortion, and at least putative gun control restrictions, there is very little difference in terms of actual policies that they advocate to the extent that if you took the authors and sponsors off of most bills you would not be able to distinguish which party supports or opposes it. This is true even when it comes to hypothetically ideological issues like energy policy, corporate regulation, et cetera.
US elections, and particularly those for president and prominent state and federal legislature elections are far more about selling the candidate as a personality rather than advocating for policies. This is not a novel observation or new revelation; Robert Redford so accurately skewered this practice in The Candidate that he had to fend of multiple offers from both the Democratic party and several apparently sincere third parties who apparently missed the punchline of the film. I don’t know that it is really that different in Europe as far as the presentation of the candidate but there does seem to be more focus on policy because policies differing from the norm have a greater hearing in a coalition-based parliamentary system where the consensus of the party drives policy rather than a few personalities.
You’re pretty much right with the interplay between selling the candidate vs selling the party platform [note for Americans - successful political parties generally sell policy platforms, unsuccessful ones that sink without trace stay committed to ideology].
Candidates, esp in the modern age are usually self-selecting personality types, which comes to the fore in all political systems. What happens in parliamentary democracies is that there is some restraint from the party to prevent them going all out for self-aggrandisement. They usually owe their seat to the party’s support so are pretty much obliged to toe the line.
[In Australia] Every so often, someone does not conform to party positions and gets the boot, and stands at the next election as an independent. Usually they do very badly, which reinforces the point that winners join parties.
IMO First-Past-The-Post is really nefarious because it encourages political parties to be cynical and do all the awful things we associate them with, and then creates the illusion that the solution to create a system centered around political parties would be bad because it would be just about picking from a list of evil political parties.
Ultimately trusting people isn’t a good way to improve your life. Having a system that either has somewhat predictable policy outcomes or at least has feedback mechanisms to promote good ideas over bad ones, and political parties that have concrete ways of delivering on their promises.
The best system IMO that the human race has come up with is a parliamentary system with some form of proportional representation. There are of course quirks and negatives that can occur in this system, but the benefit is that proportionality creates distributions of legislative power that make sense and aren’t arbitrary (and can also reflect diversity of opinions beyond 2 major political parties) and concentration of power in one legislative chamber and requiring an agreement on policy to form a government means that the actual ideas get tested and political parties need to both compromise to get to a majority and have a plan in order to play the game at all.
The ability of the US to achieve this is going to be limited (to say the least) due to having two separate legislative chambers and the presidency is limited. We’re always going to be in a spot where legislative failures occur and it’s extremely hard even for people who are clued in to know why a failure occurred and who they should vote out to fix it. And the senate and presidency aren’t going to really work with proportional representation without massive constitutional changes. Best we can realistically hope for federally would be proportional representation for each state delegation in the House of Representatives (I think this is possible without a constitutional amendment (?)).
There’s a bill already written - but yet to receive even majority Democratic support - by Rep. Don Beyer (VA) called the Fair Representation Act. It requires states with at least three representatives to form multi-member districts and use single transferable voting in House elections.
It would end gerrymandering and get American voters comfortable with the idea of a different - and better - form of democracy.
I’m a parliament guy. Let me know if you’re opposed so I can work on convincing you to change your mind.
I don’t think the OP is really correct. Put an (R) next to the name of a dog and many people will vote for him. Even worse, put the (R) next to Donald Trump. Of course, it is a mix. If you put that (R) next to a pedophile, it probably won’t work. Would it in the Netherlands.
Quite different is proportional representation where the parties put up an ordered slate and the vote determines how many on the slate wins. Then you really are voting only for a party.