Republican voters wish for a smaller government so they vote for republicans in order to shrink government. However Republican politicians benefit from people being upset about the size of government and it’s invasiveness in our lives so if they actually shrank government it would eliminate the very thing that allows them to get elected, people upset about the size of government. So they find ways to look like they’re trying to make a change but for whatever reason their hands are tied. So you’d better give them money and even more power and then you’ll get your way.
Democrats do the same thing, their voters want an end to discrimination yet cities which have been run by democrats for decades actually have more income inequality, more police shootings, and things are worse for minorities than they were in the past.
These are just two examples of issues that will never go away because leaders do not honestly try to make them go away for fear of losing voters when their issues are fixed. This has even led to politicians actually being more successful at solving the other sides issues than their own such as when Bill Clinton signet welfare reform in the 90s or Nixon negotiating with the Chinese communists.
Governance is too complex for people to just every candidate based solely on their personal characteristics. Parties are necessary for people to have a rough measure for how any particular candidate will govern.
We don’t give political power to individuals. We split it up amongst several offices. Parties are necessary for that power to be coordinated in any rational fashion.
A lot of our problems result from the way our voting system is structured. A good way to alleviate that would be to go to proportional representation.
Parties are the inevitable consequence of the fact that humans ally with each other to achieve shared goals. Even if you outlawed them you’d just end up with unofficial networks doing the same thing in a less accountable fashion.
Many of the problems with political parties in the US are because the founders *didn’t *want them, and so didn’t create legal provisions for them; as a result when they inevitably appeared it was in a messy ad-hoc sort of way. It would have been better if they’d been officially prepared for, with laws and regulations defining and limiting them.
That one I can’t really agree with. In a time when many candidates are described as “he/she really isn’t a Republican/Democrat” (Trump or Sanders for example) and when so many politicians at the local and state level run on both platforms/from both Parties at once, it just doesn’t ring true anymore. If you vote party over candidate you are going to be unpleasantly surprised more often than you would think.
And I will say exactly the opposite. If you vote for candidate over party, you will be far more likely to be disappointed. Because a single officer-holder cannot make decisions without some access to a coalition. And that coalition is a party. When it comes down to it, no matter what an individual candidate might believe, or think he or she believes, the coalition will draw him closer to its center of gravity.
And anyway no voter can learn enough about every single candidate in order to make the right choice for each race. It’s just not practical.
That in turn is a result of the American form of political party organization, in which there is no real “membership” structure to the point that in many states you don’t even have to be registered in the party to participate in its primaries/caucuses, where the national platform is largely a moot ritual formality, and you really do not quite have A Democratic or A Republican party but rather 57 affililated parties under an umbrella. So it’s not just that you have people who have given their all to the party for years simply shoved aside by an unexpected insurgency (e.g. Trump) or left orphaned in a major policy revolution (e.g. the segregationist Southern Democrats), which is normal and happens in other systems; but even further, that you can have a whole different strain of insurgent/outsider in every state stand up and claim to be the True Conservative/Progressive and that those in the majority are the ones who are RINO/DINO, and there’s really no authoritaty to control that. The Republican party cold not say to the state election authorities “no, DON’T list Donald Trump in our primary ballot, he’s not one of us”, nor could the Democrats say “Bernie, you were an Independent Socialist until the week before last, NO you may not run in our primary”. Back in the 80s professional weirdo Lyndon Larouche kept running as a Democrat and they just had to grin and bear it (what may have prevented it becoming a problem was that there was no Twitter for him to rally the weirdos so hardly anyone voted for him).
That’s OK; no one in my family never worried much about being practical.
Right choices, correct decisions, may be in the eye of the beholder but especially today the time it takes to make an informed decision really isn’t all that great. Toss in the full run of everything in a single election - from district/city officials, judges, controllers, prothonotaries, through state reps and the federal seats and you are looking at a time investment of say 10 hours to as much time as you wish to invest.
Is it easier to just look for that (D) (or (R) should you prefer) after the name of the candidate and assume that gives you all the information you need? Or to do the absolute easiest thing possible and just vote the single-lever straight ticket election after election? Sure! But what kind of shoddy representation will the easiest/fastest action buy us? And how many good things have you gotten in life from the laziest option possible?
Don’t get me wrong; I do understand in part where you are coming from and your mileage is free to vary as much as you wish. It just isn’t the way I was raised or what I believe myself.
This is the bottom line: Individuals don’t run our government. Decisions are made by groups of people working together. You can do your 10 hours of research and still never be able to predict how every individual’s personality and views are going to interact with every other individual’s personality and views. There are too many factors. Plus, the real data you need will never be available, because, in essence, it doesn’t exist. Government is a complex system, so there will never be enough data for you to make accurate decisions about individuals, and even if you had the data, it would be impossible for you to predict how they would interact with each other.
Voting for a party—or whatever you want to call the public coalition that forms in politics—isn’t “lazy.” It is, in essence, the sole rational course of action. Understand me here: I’m not saying that voting for individuals is too hard. I’m saying it’s foolish.
Before you can determine if an organization “works” or not, you have to understand what the purpose of that organization is. In the real world, the purpose of political parties is to allow individual politicians to work together to gain and maintain power. Now, ask yourself: Do they work?
Ah, youthful idealism. It’s so damn cute you just want to pinch its little cheeks!!
Given that monkeys and apes routinely form coalitions in order to gain and maintain power, it’s unlikely we hoo-mans aren’t going to understand why that works better than going it alone.
You can list all the outliers, and you’ll still on average get more predictable results voting for parties than for individuals.
I didn’t assert that a party stands for something. I’m not being idealistic at all. Yes, they are coalitions of people generally working together to help each other achieve political success. But out of necessity, that group of people has to in one way or another differentiate itself from other groups, and in differentiating—even if it starts out as something only for show—results in some level of shared values.
You can point out every single outlier in the Democratic Party, but when you look at Democratic politicians as a whole, you can’t be blind to the fact that as a group, they actually do coalesce when you look at the big picture—maybe not on any one issue looked at in isolation. In the long term, no successful party can be an entirely incoherent group of people with no values or goals in common other than winning elections.
Just to take one example, do you not believe, for example, that with a Democratic president and a Senate controlled by Democrats, you will get a predictably different type of Supreme Court seatings than you would with a Republican president and a Senate controlled by Republicans?
Voting for parties will give you as a voter some tangible degree of predictability as to what those people will do in power. Voting for individuals will give you almost zero ability to predict what will happen once those people are in government—bearing in mind that policy and politics move in certain directions through the actions of many officeholders.
Furthermore, eliminating parties would make it much, much easier for individual candidates and officeholders to divorce themselves from accountability for political outcomes.
The simple version is no – I don’t believe it. At least not to anything/any level I would consider betting money on. I could point out examples but you would simply label them as “outliers” and dismiss them. As for the rest of your contentions, I respectfully disagree. No harm and no foul; we were just raised in very different households.
This touches on something I mentioned only briefly, that the problems we have are largely because of the system we have created. Indeed, much of our problems now are not because parties exist, but because our parties are weak, and too easily hijacked by extremists.
I’m not sure why you even say they don’t “work”. Our government has seemed to run more or less fine with political parties since it’s inception.
There seems to be some misconception that our government isn’t working because it’s a bipartisan, bickering, bureaucratic mess. And by “working” I assume people mean “fixing every single problem ever”.
Well, the fact that there is so much argument and discussion should tell you that most problems don’t have a single obvious solution that everyone can agree on.
Secondly, government “not getting stuff done” is a feature, not a bug. You know who got a lot of stuff done? The Nazis.
While it is true that many Republicans pursue a “Starve the Beast” agenda in which government waste feeds their agenda — as do red-tape hurdles where regulators’ payrolls are cut, while being required to go through hoops" — there are two major flaws in OP.
(1) OP seems to assume that parties have always been like this — deliberately operating counter to their stated objectives. I’m very doubtful about that; I think GOP’s Starve the Beat and Drown it in Redtape agenda didn’t really take off until the 1980’s.
(2) OP falls victim to the “Both sides are the same” mentality. At the risk of mimicking OP in oversimplification and caricature, it was the GOP that poisoned Flint’s water. Cities are falling victim to systemic flaws that cannot be easily fixed, and certainly not with local funding when the tax bases have been severely eroded by flights to the suburbs.
It might be interesting to compare large GOP-run cities with large Democratic-run cities, but it will be tough coming up with GOP-run cities for the comparison. Even Indianapolis has a Democratic mayor.
