2024 Election: 2023 Edition

[Sarin]

I'm not sure what 3 or more parties in the US can do that 2 cannot. The dividing lines between Democrats and Republicans seem clear enough to anyone on any one issue we can mention. In fact it could be argued that their advantage is that their distinctions are so clear.
So I just don't know what you mean that multi-party systems have a better record. Record of what, exactly?

For one, not tearing the society apart by runaway polarization and actually arriving at compromises and representing, at least in some way, wishes of the people.

Look what's really happening in US. Two choices, one throws people scraps at best and second panders the religious part of population, and both collect big corporate money for running the country their way while pointing at the other party shouting how evil it is. It's a Hobson's choice, really, and people vote out of fear of the other party more than because they support one or the other. That's not democracy.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Divisiveness has been the GOP strategy for 30 years.

 

[Lexicus]

Divisiveness has been the GOP strategy for 30 years.

I love this whole thing about "divisiveness" and "partisanship" because it's a closed circle of thought. When anyone tries to blame the party actually responsible for most of the problems, it just reinforces the "divisiveness" mental feedback loop because look, you're just blaming the other side for the problem that is actually somehow everyone's fault equally.

For one, not tearing the society apart by runaway polarization and actually arriving at compromises and representing, at least in some way, wishes of the people.

By all means explain how adding more parties accomplishes this.

 

[Hygro]

I'm convinced most of the people moving to Florida will be dead (of old age) in like 15 years max

Replaced by people who are going to die in 15 years.

Divisiveness has been the GOP strategy for 30 years.

In 2008 Clinton ran in part on saying “this is what they do, I’ll fight them from day one”

Obama, with his popularity across the aisle was the conciliatory candidate, we wanted to give the GOP one more shot at decency. They lasted about 8 months.

 

[Broken_Erika]

By all means explain how adding more parties accomplishes this.

In theory* when a party becomes stagnant and stupid, that party flops and another takes its place.
*does not work so well in FPTP or when the voters are stupid

 

[Farm Boy]

second panders the religious part of population

My days may be "a calling" but I'd hardly put my economic circle as my religion. But it probably looks that way from the outside.

 

[Hygro]

In theory* when a party becomes stagnant and stupid, that party flops and another takes its place.
*does not work so well in FPTP or when the voters are stupid

Seems with so much existing infrastructure the new party takes the mantel of the old.

3rd way corporate dems and trumpistas

 

[sophie]

That kind of inter-compromise has existed for sustained periods in US history. It’s also important to remember that the two-party system in the US has historically operated as a top-level umbrella representing something closer to a coalition in a multi-party parliamentary system, rather than a specific, ideologically coherent, centrally disciplined party apparatus.

It’s been within my lifetime that certain structural changes to the way parties operated, campaign financing worked, and bills are written/amended that has lead the parties to function more like formal parties.

But even beyond that, the problems ultimately rest in how the constitution informs the national political character. The simple issue is that the founders believed that a small cadre of quasi-aristocrats would run the country dispassionately through interpersonal agreement between elites, and wrote a constitution on that basis. That assumption was almost immediately proved false, and we never really bothered to correct it in any meaningful way even though it led to multiple multiple periods of acute crisis that each time nearly caused the permanent disintegration of any stable social fabric.

 

[Sarin]

By all means explain how adding more parties accomplishes this.

In multi party system, the parties are less entrenched and there is more room for newcomers. You can't run a party purely on hate and fear, the political environment is more competitive and you need to be creative, otherwise you'll lose your voters to first party that says "okay, we don't like that either, but we also have ideas how to improve this or that". And because in such system, one party rarely reaches 50% alone, the governments are formed by coalitions, that means negotiating and compromising between parties. And you have to do something, in multi-party system there's actual inter-party competition and if you don't do enough when you're in power, then next election cycle someone WILL bring that up to knock you down.

It does not work that way in US because both parties realized they can maintain status quo via fear of the other side, so they don't actually have to be constructive, which is hard work.

 

[Lexicus]

and bills are written/amended that has lead the parties to function more like formal parties.

In some ways (increasing importance of ideology™ and national brand over sectional/patronage stuff), but the parties' ability to exercise discipline on individual legislators has declined substantially in the same period.

In multi party system, the parties are less entrenched and there is more room for newcomers. You can't run a party purely on hate and fear, the political environment is more competitive and you need to be creative, otherwise you'll lose your voters to first party that says "okay, we don't like that either, but we also have ideas how to improve this or that". And because in such system, one party rarely reaches 50% alone, the governments are formed by coalitions, that means negotiating and compromising between parties. And you have to do something, in multi-party system there's actual inter-party competition and if you don't do enough when you're in power, then next election cycle someone WILL bring that up to knock you down.

It does not work that way in US because both parties realized they can maintain status quo via fear of the other side, so they don't actually have to be constructive, which is hard work.

There is nothing stopping anyone from trying to run as a Democrat or Republican, so in that sense the system is not closed to newcomers. I think there are plenty of counterexamples from history that show you, in fact, can run a party purely on hate and fear. I don't think more political parties necessarily makes for more meaningful political competition.

I don't think the number of parties alone is a meaningful metric of...just about anything, because as @schlaufuchs points out each party represents something that would be a multi-party coalition in a non-FPTP system.

One thing I think Europeans often don't quite get about the US is just how much competition there is within the parties, exactly because our parties do not function like formal European parties that can institutionally discipline individual members. As an example, Joe Manchin, Democratic Senator from Virginia, can thumb his nose at the entire rest of the Democratic Party and there's fudge all they can do about it.

 

[Lexicus]

The worst case scenario is he's far gone he just kind of slumps away and leaves DeSantis be.

This only happens if he's diagnosed with Stage IV cancer or croaks or something.

More than a perp walk, per se, I'd like to see a cop bang his head into the frame of a car as that cop pushes him into the back seat.

My ambitions are so much bigger than this. Give him a ride like the ride they gave Freddy Gray.

 

[sophie]

Yeah, I mean you and I have talked about it in the past, but the real problem, as I noted above, is that ideologically coherent factions, to say nothing of formal parties never really factored into the original constitutional framework. The constitution aims to limit two specific kinds of interpersonal dominance by individual political actors: 1) between individual elites in any given branch, 2) between individual elites or groups of elites from particular geographic regions (and in this case to ensure a stable balance between the major 4 or Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England).

This is borne out by the fact that there are no formal disciplinary enforcement mechanisms. The presumption is, as I said, that everybody will operate as individuals, so the individual political actors in congress will have an interest in disciplining or enforcing checks on individual justices or executives and vice versa.

Another demonstration of this is that the President and Vice President were elected in the same vote: the greatest vote-getter would be president and the second-greatest would be vice president (who was the president of the senate). The whole point of the electoral college was to effect an outcome whereby Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and New England would each vote for their own representative, nobody would get a majority, and they’d all have to go into a room and hash it out together. The thing that has caused a massive constitutional crisis every time it has occurred was originally intended to happen basically every presidential election.

So this is the real radical problem with US governance: there was no accounting in the constitution for ideological coordination between the branches. If a president violates the constitution, ultimately at the end of the day you need a congress or court to intercede and impose a check, but the instant president and congress belong to the same faction united in common interest, then they together have carte blanche todo whatever they want. The check does not actually exist. This same problem will exist whether there are two parties or twenty.

 

[Lexicus]

On the larger topic,

Once an albatross around Trump’s neck, Jan. 6 is now taboo in the GOP primary

The insurrection was supposed to be the party’s breaking point with Trump. Now, no one running against him wants to talk about it.

www.politico.com

The insurrection was supposed to be the party’s breaking point with Trump. Now, no one running against him wants to talk about it.

Shocking!

Yeah, I mean you and I have talked about it in the past, but the real problem, as I noted above, is that ideologically coherent factions, to say nothing of formal parties never really factored into the original constitutional framework. The constitution aims to limit two specific kinds of interpersonal dominance by individual political actors: 1) between individual elites in any given branch, 2) between individual elites or groups of elites from particular geographic regions (and in this case to ensure a stable balance between the major 4 or Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, and New England).

This is borne out by the fact that there are no formal disciplinary enforcement mechanisms. The presumption is, as I said, that everybody will operate as individuals, so the individual political actors in congress will have an interest in disciplining or enforcing checks on individual justices or executives and vice versa.

Another demonstration of this is that the President and Vice President were elected in the same vote: the greatest vote-getter would be president and the second-greatest would be vice president (who was the president of the senate). The whole point of the electoral college was to effect an outcome whereby Pennsylvania, New York, Virginia, and New England would each vote for their own representative, nobody would get a majority, and they’d all have to go into a room and hash it out together. The thing that has caused a massive constitutional crisis every time it has occurred was originally intended to happen basically every presidential election.

So this is the real radical problem with US governance: there was no accounting in the constitution for ideological coordination between the branches. If a president violates the constitution, ultimately at the end of the day you need a congress or court to intercede and impose a check, but the instant president and congress belong to the same faction united in common interest, then they together have carte blanche todo whatever they want. The check does not actually exist. This same problem will exist whether there are two parties or twenty.

And looking at it the other way, the entrenched minority veto at multiple points in the system (producing inaction that may look like dysfunction from across the pond, but is actually the Constitution working as designed) just gets even worse if more parties make it harder to form a majority.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Florida, West Virginia and Missouri withdraw from bipartisan effort aimed at maintaining accurate voter rolls​

Florida, West Virginia and Missouri withdraw from bipartisan effort aimed at maintaining accurate voter rolls | CNN Politics

Florida, West Virginia and Missouri withdrew on Monday from the Electronic Registration Information Center, the bipartisan multi-state partnership aimed at helping states maintain accurate voter rolls.

www.cnn.com

 

[Sarin]

There is nothing stopping anyone from trying to run as a Democrat or Republican, so in that sense the system is not closed to newcomers. I think there are plenty of counterexamples from history that show you, in fact, can run a party purely on hate and fear. I don't think more political parties necessarily makes for more meaningful political competition.

I don't think the number of parties alone is a meaningful metric of...just about anything, because as @schlaufuchs points out each party represents something that would be a multi-party coalition in a non-FPTP system.

One thing I think Europeans often don't quite get about the US is just how much competition there is within the parties, exactly because our parties do not function like formal European parties that can institutionally discipline individual members. As an example, Joe Manchin, Democratic Senator from Virginia, can thumb his nose at the entire rest of the Democratic Party and there's fudge all they can do about it.

You still don't get it. It doesn't matter how the parties sort that out internally, the point is that in the end, voter is presented with a binary choice. This doesn't happen nearly as much in multi-party system where coalitions are formed after elections, based on the election result. Coalitions can be formed and announced, in some cases, beforehand, but those are relatively rare.

So this is the real radical problem with US governance: there was no accounting in the constitution for ideological coordination between the branches. If a president violates the constitution, ultimately at the end of the day you need a congress or court to intercede and impose a check, but the instant president and congress belong to the same faction united in common interest, then they together have carte blanche todo whatever they want. The check does not actually exist. This same problem will exist whether there are two parties or twenty.

While it exists, the issue of non-functioning checks arises much less often in multi-party system. Inherently, coalitions in multi-party system are more ephemeral, and it happens that a party will have different alliances in House and Senate. In your example, the party acts as one actor. A multi-party coalition will not do so, because next election cycle, the alliances will be different and a blatant violation of constitution will come to bite them in the donkey.

 

[Lexicus]

You still don't get it.

Nah, I get it lol.

It doesn't matter how the parties sort that out internally, the point is that in the end, voter is presented with a binary choice.

It does matter because the primary elections are not really internal party matters in this country.

 

[Sarin]

It does matter because the primary elections are not really internal party matters in this country.

Primaries are governed mostly by each party's internal rules and especially the last two Democrat primaries were rigged as hell.

 

[Birdjaguar]

In the US two party system, the parties form their coalitions during the primaries prior to the national elections. In Multi party nations, they form coalitions after the elections. Party platforms are supposed to represent the work of building those coalitions. Currently, the GOP has avoided having a platform beyond cutting taxes on the rich and staying in power.

 

[Sarin]

In the US two party system, the parties form their coalitions during the primaries prior to the national elections. In Multi party nations, they form coalitions after the elections. Party platforms are supposed to represent the work of building those coalitions. Currently, the GOP has avoided having a platform beyond cutting taxes on the rich and staying in power.

And that they're still a serious contender even with this platform says all you need to know about US political system.

 

[Birdjaguar]

Just think how lucky you are not to live here then. A billion dollars in election spending goes along way to keeping unfit people in office.