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Whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar

uniqueuid 5y ago
I agree, there is more policy based evidence making (or interpreting) than evidence based policy making. But I'd also argue that this problem (policies are similar no matter what party rues) is not one of the trivial ones. It's one of the hard ones, because it is sometimes true (especially in dual party systems like the US). And in other - very important - cases, it's suddenly not true. In other words, the limits of politics are mostly very narrow, but sometimes frighteningly wide. Covid is a prime example. We (society, citizens, politicians, scientists) need to do a better job understanding the state transitions from narrow to wide; but it's a hard question because there are so incredibly many factors and very small N (few observations, cannot easily transfer insights from one leader to another due to biography, for example).
- ContrarianBrit 5y ago
  On Covid, I suspect that partisan differences have been quite small, at least among mainstream parties! But of course, politics matters desperately in some circumstances. For example, the 2019 UK election and 2020 US election were extremely consequential, reflecting the issues at stake and profile of some of the candidates.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - thinkingemote 5y ago
    I'd agree with the idea of the article and I would extend this to say that both elections were inconsequential, as they usually are. It's just that we are too close to them in time to see this. Assuming that the areas that matter are not tribal politics, then give it decade or 3 and we will see that Biden and Trump were not so different in the areas that matter. Now, theres a good argument to make that tribal politics is ALL that matters..... which we see demonstrated all the time on social media and in these comments.... but political scientists should know better!
  - scarface74 5y ago
    I don’t know how Covid vaccines became political. The mainstream Republican leaders all the way up to Trump and most Senators and governors are trying to convince people to get vaccinated.
    - chmod600 5y ago
      Because vaccination is a proxy for your views on authority.
    - notahacker 5y ago
      A lot of right wing media commentators have decided the engagement and the cash come from leaning the other way, even when they've all been vaccinated according to their outlet's internal vaccine mandate policy. Many mainstream Republicans did jump on the "don't listen to the medical profession" bandwagon for various reasons, and it's not that easy to get everybody else off it, especially not if their shouting about the evils of vaccine mandates (out of genuine principle or not) is still louder than their insistence that vaccines are actually good. The irony is I think a lot of the shouting down the medical establishment came when they were trying to convince people that the worst effects of COVID could easily be prevented when it couldn't, and now the whole thing's flipped over...
      - scarface74 5y ago
        And it’s the red states that are suffering the most..
  - uniqueuid 5y ago
    Within some countries, partisan differences may have been small. But across countries, there is a wide range of measures implemented (or not). Some countries starting with fairly similar political systems and traditions ended up with very different covid regimes. So I'd count that as an indicator of the potential variation.
netfortius 5y ago
What a waste of [my] time! This type of articles shall be labeled very visibly [US applicable only], so the rest of the world could safely move onto reading some more relevant HN news.
- ContrarianBrit 5y ago
  This issue is relevant to all countries, not just the US...
  - WJW 5y ago
    It is much more applicable to countries with the first-past-the-post election system though, typically Great Britain and its former colonies. This is because that system tends to converge to very few, very large parties (really only two in the US), which then need to stay relatively close to each other so they can still compete for the "middle" voters. Stray too much and you will lose that middle group, so the big parties must stay relatively close together. In countries where this system is not in place, you tend to get many more parties with a much wider spectrum of political ideologies. For example, in the Netherlands there is currently a party (with only 1 seat atm) in our equivalent to Congress that exclusively focuses on the interests of farmers (a group consisting of <2% of the labor force). Also while all parties have some opinion about immigration, there are also more single-issue parties both for and against the topic. I'm not saying either system is better than the other (multiparty systems tend to have a much more difficult time forming governing coalitions than FPTP systems for example), but it is not an issue relevant to all countries.
    - ContrarianBrit 5y ago
      Whilst the electoral programmes of parties in proportional systems tend to be more different, differences are often bargained away during coalition negotiations. Also, proportional systems tend to have more institutional checks and balances than majoritarian systems. Indeed, Schmidt (1996) argues that partisan differences are less pronounced in proportional systems.
- eat_veggies 5y ago
beepbooptheory 5y ago
> Perhaps we should be glad that politicians and the media do not emphasize the limits of politics. This could be counterproductive, fuelling disengagement and populism. Why is engagement or "populism" still an end in itself, if it makes little effective difference? I can imagine its not "engagement" per se, that is desired, it is discipline. (Edit) Isn't this precisely what failed on January 6th? People (for mostly delusional reasons) were angry at a break down of politics itself, in their mind. The sports analogy makes sense, but there are economic interests there, on the part of the owners of the teams and the league, engagement by people to an arbritray cause translates to more tickets to the games, ad revenue for the broadcasts. There is maybe a distinction there, at least.
ARandomerDude 5y ago
> The secret is this; whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar. In other words, government ideology has little effect in areas such as taxation, welfare and foreign policy. There may be some areas of government that see relatively few differences, especially in the machinery of the bureaucracy. But in other areas the article's thesis couldn't be more wrong. Taxes, guns, COVID lockdowns, abortion, and many other issues have laws directly attributable to what party is in power.
- ContrarianBrit 5y ago
  Taxes are famously beyond partisan influences; lots of studies demonstrate this (see Imbeau et al for a review). It's a bit early to say on Covid lockdowns, but this also seems to be the case. On abortion/guns, Democrats may have very different positions than Republicans, but what degree of policy change have they secured?
  - mod 5y ago
    Pretty tough to enact much change with the constitution standing in your way.
    - sudosysgen 5y ago
      I don't think the Democrats are actually that miffed by the constitution limiting their ability to implement change. If they were really wishing they could do more, they wouldn't pretend they couldn't do anything when they actually do have the ability.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    Taxes aren't beyond partisan influences though. The UK's Conservative Party cut top rate income tax whilst the budget was in deficit. Clearly, the Labour Party would not have done this. Similarly, the Democrats would not have passed Trump's tax cuts, and the Republicans would not have hiked the top rate Sure, they are constrained by the art of the possible: massive top-rate rises and cuts are extremely appealing to left/right bases respectively but are constrained by the fact that (i) the median voter they need to woo doesn't like extreme change and (ii) extreme changes usually won't actually have the positive impact on the economy which left/right ideology claims they will. So tax changes usually aren't drastic, and don't show up well in panel data studies. But there's still plenty of changes at the margin and especially to tax incidence which are the result of one party being elected over another.
steelstraw 5y ago
Arguably an open secret at this point. The duopoly is increasingly organized around hyperventilating that the other will destroy civilization, then upon taking power the GOP passes its standard corporate tax cuts, Dems get a middling infrastructure bill, and both largely do the same thing on COVID and foreign policy.
- KerrAvon 5y ago
  It’s unfortunate that it’s total bullshit, and the end results are appreciably different on a variety of matters. People want so badly to believe that there’s a middle consensus where they can stand between the parties.
  - draw_down 5y ago
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Except this time around new Jim Crow laws were supported in almost all the Red states setting us back nearly 6 decades on fair voting for minorities. New laws have been passed in Red states to overthrow the will of the state if the state legislature doesn't like the results and will use an transparent "legal" means to tell their electors to vote for rather than who the populace voted for. 2024 could very well be the end of American democracy, yet people here on HN are talking about "both parties are the same"
  - steelstraw 5y ago
    A fine example of the kind of hyperventilating in question.
eat_veggies 5y ago
This is probably more of an indictment of electoral politics and the function of the state in general. Leftists (in their various strands of thought) have, for centuries, known and publicized the view that governments exist to dominate and to protect the interests of capital -- it's no secret. So yes, it's a football game, but one intended to distract us from attaining our material interests. This takes us in the opposite direction from his conclusion for activists (essentially, give up because it doesn't matter) toward a more productive one that asks, if left/right party politics does not produce meaningful change, then what kind of politics can? There's also a clever load-bearing phrase buried in here that sweeps the explanation for real variation in policy under the rug: "these governments followed the spirit of the age." Now, what is the spirit of the age but the movement of politics? Of course, the author's motivations are clearer if you look at the other trash that they've written: an article about not being ideological (recently litigated on hacker news [1]), dozens of posts ragging about "the left," and a few articles about how much they hate trans people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957328
- lazyeye 5y ago
  Your comment sounds tribal.
  - olivermarks 5y ago
    US politics is increasingly tribal because of the realities described. The irony is the political landscape is controlled by the DNC & the RNC, who are effectively the political equivalent of Mastercard and Visa. No other parties can get on a debate stage or any airtime. The two political machines are partnered with huge corporate media companies to manipulate popular opinion, instill fear and rage and to destroy any coherent opposition, including within those two manufactured and manipulated tribes
    - lazyeye 5y ago
      I agree with what you're saying. An important fact that has gone completely under the radar is the radically changing demographics of the media (both sides). The media used to be much more decentralized with a much greater diversity of views (rich and poor). Now with increasing technology and centralization of distribution, the demographics of people in the media is largely that of the elites. Journalists working for CNN, Fox or MSNBC are paid very high wages, come from the best schools and according to all conventional markers are in the top 10% of society. And this is reflected in the content they put out which is to generate controversy, keep the plebs squabbling amongst themselves and divert attention way from wealthy elites. This is their agenda and it's working fabulously.
mikewarot 5y ago
Here in the US, there exists a Duopoly that collectively support each other in excluding any other views by focusing on a series of "wedge issues" that generate a lot of emotional heat, where reality demands thought and nuance and compromise, but the extremists can dissipate emotions and distract. The RepubliCratic cancer needs to go, but I doubt it will. Why? It actively votes against the will of the population, in service of the wealthy donors who fund their reelection campaigns.
- BobbyJo 5y ago
  What if this is reflective of common ideology? What if most people agree on most things somewhere near a center (with some fluctuation) and the wedge issues are the rare points of hard, uncompromising disagreement. Wouldn't that eventually lead to the duopoly we see? Wouldn't that be the best case scenario?
  - mikewarot 5y ago
    No, it's the worst possible outcome, it is totally obstructive to the will of the people, and appears to be exclusively in service to the donor class who fund their reelection efforts.
    - hn_version_0023 5y ago
      So then the problem is the existence of the donor class. Perhaps we ought to curtail their power. Or their existence, I’m open to either.
      - acomar 5y ago
        from where does the donor class derive their wealth? they pay you a wage or collect rent, profiting either way. in all cases, they derive their wealth because they own the things that allow us to produce value. perhaps those things should be commonly owned instead. then these class distinctions would evaporate.
zhdc1 5y ago
Political scientists are generally focused on national governments and/or international organizations. To paraphrase a well known economist and political commentator, modern governments are essentially insurance companies with their own militaries. Add on a wealth redistribution function, and it's easy to see why competent national governments mostly behave alike, regardless of the policy positions of the ruling party. My feeling is that this changes dramatically when you look at local politics, which is where most of the interesting action is. There's not much that the French government can do that, when zoomed out, is fundamentally different from Germany or Spain. There's a lot more leeway when you compare Tokyo or Shanghai with Mexico City.
- ContrarianBrit 5y ago
  Good point. This article uses quasi-experimental methods and finds important partisan differences in Swedish local government: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40283092?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/40283092?seq=1#metadata_info_ta...
  - uniqueuid 5y ago
    Thanks! I haven't read the paper yet, but noticed it uses a regression discontinuity design without showing raw data (i.e. a scatterplot). There have been some cases where such discontinuity analyses were extremely misleading [1], so some caution is advised. [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/11/regression-discontinuity-analysis-is-often-a-disaster-so-what-should-you-do-instead-do-we-just-give-up-on-the-whole-natural-experiment-idea-heres-my-recommendation/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/11/regression...
    - ContrarianBrit 5y ago
      Thanks for the article! I love methods :-)
      - uniqueuid 5y ago
        Awesome! Maybe you'll like this better method then: Bayesian counterfactual time-series analysis [1]. In essence, it compares a "neutral" time series and another one affected by a natural experiment and produces bayesian point-estimates for the causal impact. Super powerful, there's a great R package, and really easy to use. [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub41854/ https://research.google/pubs/pub41854/
Txoko 5y ago
[flagged]
user249 5y ago
I've been puzzled by people blaming "open borders" (Mexico vs United States) on President Biden. What changed? Did he fire the 20,000 border guards? If there is one thing that's driving this charge it's Mexican neighboorhoods popping up in many small towns across the South and West. Many "native" whites feel like it's an invasion. Well, nothing changed. It's not the Democrats doing. It's industry bring in Mexicans for cheap labor. For example, in chicken processing factories. Americans don't want these jobs. But corporations don't want small town Americans to blame them for the foreign influx, so they blame Democrats in a constant drum beat on right wing media. "Democrats need new voters. They get them by bringing them here and putting them on welfare." When their people are in charge, they get them to claim they're building a wall and they're dealing with this influx that happened under Democrats. Corporations and industry shift the blame away from themselves for any social problem caused by the influx of cheap labor, even though they are responsible for it. Nothing changes under either party in power, only the blame rhetoric gets changed. That's political science in America.
- naasking 5y ago
  > Americans don't want these jobs. They don't want these jobs at the current pay rates. Let's not forget the most important qualifier here.
  - user249 5y ago
    No, this has been studied. Americans think bending over in artichoke fields in California or working in chicken and pig slaughtering plants are jobs suitbale for immigrants, not them. They seemingly can't put two and two together that's that is why Mexicans are here, unless everyone is participating in this charade that Mexicans come here for welfare and to vote for Democrats
    - naasking 5y ago
      Sure, Americans also don't want to work at McDonald's or as sanitation workers, or any number of other undesirable jobs, but they'll do it if they're unskilled and need the money, as long as it pays enough.
jl2718 5y ago
Objective: Maximize value extracted from the market.
kwhitefoot 5y ago
> The secret is this; whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar. In other words, government ideology has little effect in areas such as taxation, welfare and foreign policy. That's not a secret. As shown by the old saw: "Whoever you vote for the government always gets in." And it is easily explained by the huge inertia of vast numbers of people who rather like stability.
FpUser 5y ago
thinkingemote 5y ago
Title was changed, from "The biggest secret in political science" to "Whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar" after 1 hour and 35 Comments. So be aware that a few top level comments will be responding to the "secret revealed" click bait nature of the title.
motohagiography 5y ago
What bothers me about a lot of current political tactics is that the people engaged in them don't appear to understand or even apprehend what the failure mode of politics is. Not if you fail, or they fail, but when the process of discourse itself fails. If there were a dynamic I could articulate with some hope of helping to give people some extra cognitive tools keep things on the rails it would be this. Someone who self identifies as educated is untroubled by sustaining cognitive dissonance because from their perspective, the state and establishment is almost infinitely sophisticated and complex, so there is no reason to think you understand it, you just need to identify as it being yours, and by aligning to it by default and sustaining it, you are doing your part, and you get the rewards it offers. This is Pound's hedgehog knowing one thing. The one thing they need to know is if you sustain the establishment narrative, it will sustain you. Its leviathan vastness means you can't decide what about it is real or true, but you can find the hooks to align to it, and this is The Game people talk about. I have criticized the immoderate version of this in the past as "banal nihilism," but more generally, and charitably, there is an establishment We who ask things like what is to be done, and use terms like oxygen-starving, problematic, extremists, and other meta-social managerial terms to discuss how we will manage society. However, their ontology reduces to an infinte attrition game of musical chairs to determine who this We will include. At the other pole are those who are attached to the idea of Truth. We can criticize it as a need for concreteness and a lack of cognitive or educated ability to engage The Game as an abstraction separate from their identities (like the from-somewhere and from-nowhere dichotomy), and so when a politician says something, we might take it at face value, and not as a signal of alignment to an abstraction. This ontology includes principles, expectations, loyalties, immovable facts, laws of the universe, consequences, permanence, stability. These are Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind tribes, but with a twist where it's not right/left. Other criticisms I've heard is of relating "transactionally," to people, where there is objectivity, truth, roles, state, and definition. What I would say is there is an underlying axiom that there is a truth that is objective, persistent, and independent of whether it's observed, and when you align to it, it makes us good. Even if good for what is not always clear. The key piece is it both instinctively and competently rejects dissonance as a misalignment to truth. In this view, if something is untrue it cannot be relatively powerful or legitimate. This orientation to truth is what makes trust that would facilitate reconciliation or even an equillibrium increasingly impossible. There are a lot of frameworks for this including Jungian animus/anima, Marxist classes, Girardian memesis groups, etc. In the 90s when the so-called "neocons" arrived, they were a weird hybrid of these Game playing conservatives who appeared to support capitalistic ideas, but had an intellectual smarm and who looked down on others' inability to appreciate that this was just them playing this Game as an abstraction. The smarm was because they knew they were lying and didn't care. Tucker Carlson was very famously destroyed by John Stewart over this, and that takedown marked a cultural turning point, where I think the neocons popularly legitimized into the establishment the tactics of what people self-identify now as the "dirtbag left." (not an epithet, it's their word) But this idea of liar becomes the friction point, because from both the dynamic We and the stable truth perspective, yes, Truth is Power, but it depends on the directionality of that equivalence. Are they equal, is one a superset or subset of the other, is there causation between them and in what direction does it flow? This is what someone means when they say, "depends on what the meaning of is, is." What makes this conflict over what is is so irreversible is that a politics moored to geography, language, physical resources, growth, and a positive-sum planet and economics was durable against being pulled too far from one direction or another. Even warfare was a temporary disequillibrium. The change was in the 20th century when a viral idea that power was independent of these landmarks took hold, and that political power came not from these things, but from pure narrative and belief. For the first time, politics became understood as the totality of human experience. The immediate consequence of this newly moralized unmooring of power from truth was that from the perspective of power, all these things and even populations were liquid. Over a century downstream in time, the idea that politics is reserved to professional politicans is absurd. The political is the personal, everything is political, there is no separate private and public sphere. The individual is powerless, atomized, and the only real currency is the fluid affinity to group interests. Our societies are now post-totalitarian. What the authors seem to miss is that this is a total failure of politics, and it is not only Hobbes' "war of all against all," but the inherent violence in that failure mode is beyond what someone just going along to get along could possibly concieve of. The big secret of political science in a post-totalitarian world is that it is predicated on advocating unforgivable and irreconcilable deceptions without a great deal of thought about what the concrete consequences of that will be. Maybe my career in tech and risk has made me index on catastrophic outcomes, but this is not longer about my guy vs. your guy. The conversation we should be having is whether we prefer to reach an equillibrium using discourse moored to at least some of those landmarks, or, and I say this quite seriously, the failure mode of politics is cannibalism, and it would be constructive to consider this when we're at each other.
commiepatrol 5y ago
Just now figuring it out? It's all the same, money rules all.
wly_cdgr 5y ago
In America anyway that's because there are only two viable parties at national scale: center-right and right
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  by European standards I guess. But the values the two parties hole are diametrically opposed. Dems: diversity, equality amongst race, freedom of religion and though, open book policies, reproductive rights and guarantees for public education Republicans: white-males at the top, pseudo equal rights for the rest, Christo-fascism for a religion, other religions considered dangerous with the possible exception of Judaism which got grandfathered in, repeal of voting rights to what amounts to poll taxes, shut down the borders, poor people fend for themselves for scraps tossed by "private charities", religion over facts in schools, the end of public education in favor of private conservative schools for those who can afford it, etc. I think the choice is pretty clear if you're paying attention at all.
mythrwy 5y ago
Because governments of any size are largely run by bureaucracies. This is both positive and negative in that it's stabilizing, but also can become anti-democratic and parasitic. The politicians in the modern Western world mostly just give speeches and make deals and go to meetings. Sure they can guide policy to varying degrees, but implementation is through the bureaucracy. I have to imagine when a new leader or parliamentarian comes to town (if they haven't been in town for years already and know "how things work") they are immediately set upon by a plethora of advisors and "experts" who explain reality and what must be done. The politician then most likely see the light, but if not, they proceed to run into massive difficulties and very probably won't be there long. I'm only familiar with the system in the US, but I think this explains why people vote for something, then none of it happens, even the reverse.
throwawaygmbno 5y ago
As an educated black person in tech who grew up in America, I'll stick with voting democrat. I'd rather get lip service, be ignored, with some mostly superficial policy here and there than have policy that actively targets the community I grew up with and my family. I'm constantly told the conclusions of the article and how I'm much better off getting my taxes lowered, but there are just plainly obvious differences between living in a red or blue state. I grew up in a red state that is purple now and the back and forth major policy changes depending on the party in charge are palpable. Even with my increased salary and status at work that has me going to fewer of the places I grew up going to and being around a variety of people, I know voting Republican has a much greater chance of hurting cousins, aunts, childhood friends that maybe didn't get the chances I got in my immediate family. I also know no matter how well I do in life, I'm just one traffic stop away from death or disaster and I'd rather side with the party that at least occasionally tries to hold police accountable for their actions. I'll differentiate between democrats and third party candidates but I'll never cast a vote for anyone with R next to their name, unless there's some great switch like a massively racist candidate like Barry Goldwater.
- N1H1L 5y ago
  Same here. One party calls all post 1965 immigrants unwanted and the other doesn't. The choice is made for me
  - arminiusreturns 5y ago
    These are called wedge issues and are a favorite tool of the oligarchs to control both parties. I've long advocated for a third party aiming to take away the supermajority and force others to the table (peoples party!), but one of the biggest hurdles is how to address those wedge issues with getting sucked into the black hole of conversation they create. Lesser of two evils is still evil, and its probably questionable if its actually lesser.
    - dc-programmer 5y ago
      I don’t think there is some grand conspiracy here. Social conservatives are motivated by their desire for cultural homogeneity and protecting existing hierarchies. This isn’t a wedge issue, it’s a central part of what it means to be conservative in the first place. The left is defined by opposition to this idea to varying degrees (ranging from reform to revolution). The specifics of what it means to preserve tradition and how it might be challenged are specific to the historical and geo-political context.
cannabis_sam 5y ago
This is the worst and most painful example of motivated reasoning I have read in a long time.. Why can’t these people own up the ideology they ascribe to..? Or are they actually under the wrong impression that they are somehow conducting “neutral” economic analysis?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
draw_down 5y ago
chmod600 5y ago
Maybe at the national level... least in the sense "less different than you might think". But at the local level, things really are different.
chmod600 5y ago
Couldn't this be explained by the fact that power switches back and forth? Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. Wouldn't it be weird to, for example, pass single payer national healthcare under D and then repeal it 4-8 years later under R? The fact that our political systems avoid radical swings is a feature. Certainly change happens on a longer timescale, which sounds reasonable to me.
ngcc_hk 5y ago
Externally the clear is not who is in power but the change one can see at least during the transition. Only 100 days as said and then back to dynamics, one may say. But is it really so in real life.
User23 5y ago
That’s because the USA has a unitary ruling elite. The red team versus blue team theatrics exist solely to keep the rubes occupied.
rnd0 5y ago
This is certainly true, yep.
btdmaster 5y ago
I have advocated for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition for a while now because of this. The political class by definition cannot be reliably representative of the public given the way it is filtered from the public.
BirAdam 5y ago
This is because majoritarian governance does not work. Any system based upon voting will yield two outcomes: 1. The purchase of votes 2. The purchase of politicians This will always yield oligarchy. There is no magical law that will change this, as all law gets pretty much ignored by those in power when it suits their needs and used as a tool to hammer only their opponents. There is no magical system that will change this: red, blue, libertarian, green, communist, alt-right, whatever… people constantly think that if just “insert thing here” would happen then it would be solved. It won’t. History did have socialist, fascist, free market, democratic, communist, and very type of system in play at some point somewhere, and they all end poorly due to the basics of humanity. Politicians and votes can both be purchased and otherwise power is centered in too few hands and becomes tyrannical. So far, the systems that have worked best are all now hated for reason or another, and the world uses “democracy” as a synonym for “goodness” while every so-called democracy is at best corrupt and at worst the enemy of its population. The 20th century saw the largest amount of slaughter by secular humanist states of their own people. These were varying styles of government. They all fail to enact the will of the governed.
- stjohnswarts 5y ago
  Wrong: "The 20th century saw the largest amount of slaughter by secular humanist states of their own people. These were varying styles of government. They all fail to enact the will of the governed" I fixed it for you: The 20th century saw that much death because of -much- improved ways of killing one another and tremendous population increases because of scientific discoveries like vaccines and modern medicine.
- hnuser847 5y ago
  This is more or less the conclusion I've come to as well. All forms of government end up as aristocracy, including representative democracy. It takes a lot of money to fund "grass roots" campaigns, think tanks, lobbyists, and political campaigns. Normal people get to vote, but they don't participate in any meaningful way in the selection nominees or the policies they write. If you really want to have an impact on politics, you have to either get rich or secure the backing of someone else who's rich. For the vast majority of people this will not happen nor will it be worth it. It's better to just hunker down, focus on yourself and your family, and survive any way you can.

I agree, there is more policy based evidence making (or interpreting) than evidence based policy making. But I'd also argue that this problem (policies are similar no matter what party rues) is not one of the trivial ones. It's one of the hard ones, because it is sometimes true (especially in dual party systems like the US). And in other - very important - cases, it's suddenly not true. In other words, the limits of politics are mostly very narrow, but sometimes frighteningly wide. Covid is a prime example. We (society, citizens, politicians, scientists) need to do a better job understanding the state transitions from narrow to wide; but it's a hard question because there are so incredibly many factors and very small N (few observations, cannot easily transfer insights from one leader to another due to biography, for example).

ContrarianBrit 5y ago
On Covid, I suspect that partisan differences have been quite small, at least among mainstream parties! But of course, politics matters desperately in some circumstances. For example, the 2019 UK election and 2020 US election were extremely consequential, reflecting the issues at stake and profile of some of the candidates.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- thinkingemote 5y ago
  I'd agree with the idea of the article and I would extend this to say that both elections were inconsequential, as they usually are. It's just that we are too close to them in time to see this. Assuming that the areas that matter are not tribal politics, then give it decade or 3 and we will see that Biden and Trump were not so different in the areas that matter. Now, theres a good argument to make that tribal politics is ALL that matters..... which we see demonstrated all the time on social media and in these comments.... but political scientists should know better!
- scarface74 5y ago
  I don’t know how Covid vaccines became political. The mainstream Republican leaders all the way up to Trump and most Senators and governors are trying to convince people to get vaccinated.
  - chmod600 5y ago
    Because vaccination is a proxy for your views on authority.
  - notahacker 5y ago
    A lot of right wing media commentators have decided the engagement and the cash come from leaning the other way, even when they've all been vaccinated according to their outlet's internal vaccine mandate policy. Many mainstream Republicans did jump on the "don't listen to the medical profession" bandwagon for various reasons, and it's not that easy to get everybody else off it, especially not if their shouting about the evils of vaccine mandates (out of genuine principle or not) is still louder than their insistence that vaccines are actually good. The irony is I think a lot of the shouting down the medical establishment came when they were trying to convince people that the worst effects of COVID could easily be prevented when it couldn't, and now the whole thing's flipped over...
    - scarface74 5y ago
      And it’s the red states that are suffering the most..
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  Within some countries, partisan differences may have been small. But across countries, there is a wide range of measures implemented (or not). Some countries starting with fairly similar political systems and traditions ended up with very different covid regimes. So I'd count that as an indicator of the potential variation.

netfortius 5y ago

What a waste of [my] time! This type of articles shall be labeled very visibly [US applicable only], so the rest of the world could safely move onto reading some more relevant HN news.

ContrarianBrit 5y ago
This issue is relevant to all countries, not just the US...
- WJW 5y ago
  It is much more applicable to countries with the first-past-the-post election system though, typically Great Britain and its former colonies. This is because that system tends to converge to very few, very large parties (really only two in the US), which then need to stay relatively close to each other so they can still compete for the "middle" voters. Stray too much and you will lose that middle group, so the big parties must stay relatively close together. In countries where this system is not in place, you tend to get many more parties with a much wider spectrum of political ideologies. For example, in the Netherlands there is currently a party (with only 1 seat atm) in our equivalent to Congress that exclusively focuses on the interests of farmers (a group consisting of <2% of the labor force). Also while all parties have some opinion about immigration, there are also more single-issue parties both for and against the topic. I'm not saying either system is better than the other (multiparty systems tend to have a much more difficult time forming governing coalitions than FPTP systems for example), but it is not an issue relevant to all countries.
  - ContrarianBrit 5y ago
    Whilst the electoral programmes of parties in proportional systems tend to be more different, differences are often bargained away during coalition negotiations. Also, proportional systems tend to have more institutional checks and balances than majoritarian systems. Indeed, Schmidt (1996) argues that partisan differences are less pronounced in proportional systems.
eat_veggies 5y ago

beepbooptheory 5y ago

> Perhaps we should be glad that politicians and the media do not emphasize the limits of politics. This could be counterproductive, fuelling disengagement and populism. Why is engagement or "populism" still an end in itself, if it makes little effective difference? I can imagine its not "engagement" per se, that is desired, it is discipline. (Edit) Isn't this precisely what failed on January 6th? People (for mostly delusional reasons) were angry at a break down of politics itself, in their mind. The sports analogy makes sense, but there are economic interests there, on the part of the owners of the teams and the league, engagement by people to an arbritray cause translates to more tickets to the games, ad revenue for the broadcasts. There is maybe a distinction there, at least.

ARandomerDude 5y ago

> The secret is this; whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar. In other words, government ideology has little effect in areas such as taxation, welfare and foreign policy. There may be some areas of government that see relatively few differences, especially in the machinery of the bureaucracy. But in other areas the article's thesis couldn't be more wrong. Taxes, guns, COVID lockdowns, abortion, and many other issues have laws directly attributable to what party is in power.

ContrarianBrit 5y ago
Taxes are famously beyond partisan influences; lots of studies demonstrate this (see Imbeau et al for a review). It's a bit early to say on Covid lockdowns, but this also seems to be the case. On abortion/guns, Democrats may have very different positions than Republicans, but what degree of policy change have they secured?
- mod 5y ago
  Pretty tough to enact much change with the constitution standing in your way.
  - sudosysgen 5y ago
    I don't think the Democrats are actually that miffed by the constitution limiting their ability to implement change. If they were really wishing they could do more, they wouldn't pretend they couldn't do anything when they actually do have the ability.
- notahacker 5y ago
  Taxes aren't beyond partisan influences though. The UK's Conservative Party cut top rate income tax whilst the budget was in deficit. Clearly, the Labour Party would not have done this. Similarly, the Democrats would not have passed Trump's tax cuts, and the Republicans would not have hiked the top rate Sure, they are constrained by the art of the possible: massive top-rate rises and cuts are extremely appealing to left/right bases respectively but are constrained by the fact that (i) the median voter they need to woo doesn't like extreme change and (ii) extreme changes usually won't actually have the positive impact on the economy which left/right ideology claims they will. So tax changes usually aren't drastic, and don't show up well in panel data studies. But there's still plenty of changes at the margin and especially to tax incidence which are the result of one party being elected over another.

steelstraw 5y ago

Arguably an open secret at this point. The duopoly is increasingly organized around hyperventilating that the other will destroy civilization, then upon taking power the GOP passes its standard corporate tax cuts, Dems get a middling infrastructure bill, and both largely do the same thing on COVID and foreign policy.

KerrAvon 5y ago
It’s unfortunate that it’s total bullshit, and the end results are appreciably different on a variety of matters. People want so badly to believe that there’s a middle consensus where they can stand between the parties.
- draw_down 5y ago
stjohnswarts 5y ago
Except this time around new Jim Crow laws were supported in almost all the Red states setting us back nearly 6 decades on fair voting for minorities. New laws have been passed in Red states to overthrow the will of the state if the state legislature doesn't like the results and will use an transparent "legal" means to tell their electors to vote for rather than who the populace voted for. 2024 could very well be the end of American democracy, yet people here on HN are talking about "both parties are the same"
- steelstraw 5y ago
  A fine example of the kind of hyperventilating in question.

eat_veggies 5y ago

This is probably more of an indictment of electoral politics and the function of the state in general. Leftists (in their various strands of thought) have, for centuries, known and publicized the view that governments exist to dominate and to protect the interests of capital -- it's no secret. So yes, it's a football game, but one intended to distract us from attaining our material interests. This takes us in the opposite direction from his conclusion for activists (essentially, give up because it doesn't matter) toward a more productive one that asks, if left/right party politics does not produce meaningful change, then what kind of politics can? There's also a clever load-bearing phrase buried in here that sweeps the explanation for real variation in policy under the rug: "these governments followed the spirit of the age." Now, what is the spirit of the age but the movement of politics? Of course, the author's motivations are clearer if you look at the other trash that they've written: an article about not being ideological (recently litigated on hacker news [1]), dozens of posts ragging about "the left," and a few articles about how much they hate trans people. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957328 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29957328

lazyeye 5y ago
Your comment sounds tribal.
- olivermarks 5y ago
  US politics is increasingly tribal because of the realities described. The irony is the political landscape is controlled by the DNC & the RNC, who are effectively the political equivalent of Mastercard and Visa. No other parties can get on a debate stage or any airtime. The two political machines are partnered with huge corporate media companies to manipulate popular opinion, instill fear and rage and to destroy any coherent opposition, including within those two manufactured and manipulated tribes
  - lazyeye 5y ago
    I agree with what you're saying. An important fact that has gone completely under the radar is the radically changing demographics of the media (both sides). The media used to be much more decentralized with a much greater diversity of views (rich and poor). Now with increasing technology and centralization of distribution, the demographics of people in the media is largely that of the elites. Journalists working for CNN, Fox or MSNBC are paid very high wages, come from the best schools and according to all conventional markers are in the top 10% of society. And this is reflected in the content they put out which is to generate controversy, keep the plebs squabbling amongst themselves and divert attention way from wealthy elites. This is their agenda and it's working fabulously.

mikewarot 5y ago

Here in the US, there exists a Duopoly that collectively support each other in excluding any other views by focusing on a series of "wedge issues" that generate a lot of emotional heat, where reality demands thought and nuance and compromise, but the extremists can dissipate emotions and distract. The RepubliCratic cancer needs to go, but I doubt it will. Why? It actively votes against the will of the population, in service of the wealthy donors who fund their reelection campaigns.

BobbyJo 5y ago
What if this is reflective of common ideology? What if most people agree on most things somewhere near a center (with some fluctuation) and the wedge issues are the rare points of hard, uncompromising disagreement. Wouldn't that eventually lead to the duopoly we see? Wouldn't that be the best case scenario?
- mikewarot 5y ago
  No, it's the worst possible outcome, it is totally obstructive to the will of the people, and appears to be exclusively in service to the donor class who fund their reelection efforts.
  - hn_version_0023 5y ago
    So then the problem is the existence of the donor class. Perhaps we ought to curtail their power. Or their existence, I’m open to either.
    - acomar 5y ago
      from where does the donor class derive their wealth? they pay you a wage or collect rent, profiting either way. in all cases, they derive their wealth because they own the things that allow us to produce value. perhaps those things should be commonly owned instead. then these class distinctions would evaporate.

zhdc1 5y ago

Political scientists are generally focused on national governments and/or international organizations. To paraphrase a well known economist and political commentator, modern governments are essentially insurance companies with their own militaries. Add on a wealth redistribution function, and it's easy to see why competent national governments mostly behave alike, regardless of the policy positions of the ruling party. My feeling is that this changes dramatically when you look at local politics, which is where most of the interesting action is. There's not much that the French government can do that, when zoomed out, is fundamentally different from Germany or Spain. There's a lot more leeway when you compare Tokyo or Shanghai with Mexico City.

ContrarianBrit 5y ago
Good point. This article uses quasi-experimental methods and finds important partisan differences in Swedish local government: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40283092?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/40283092?seq=1#metadata_info_ta...
- uniqueuid 5y ago
  Thanks! I haven't read the paper yet, but noticed it uses a regression discontinuity design without showing raw data (i.e. a scatterplot). There have been some cases where such discontinuity analyses were extremely misleading [1], so some caution is advised. [1] https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/11/regression-discontinuity-analysis-is-often-a-disaster-so-what-should-you-do-instead-do-we-just-give-up-on-the-whole-natural-experiment-idea-heres-my-recommendation/ https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2021/03/11/regression...
  - ContrarianBrit 5y ago
    Thanks for the article! I love methods :-)
    - uniqueuid 5y ago
      Awesome! Maybe you'll like this better method then: Bayesian counterfactual time-series analysis [1]. In essence, it compares a "neutral" time series and another one affected by a natural experiment and produces bayesian point-estimates for the causal impact. Super powerful, there's a great R package, and really easy to use. [1] https://research.google/pubs/pub41854/ https://research.google/pubs/pub41854/

Txoko 5y ago

[flagged]

user249 5y ago

I've been puzzled by people blaming "open borders" (Mexico vs United States) on President Biden. What changed? Did he fire the 20,000 border guards? If there is one thing that's driving this charge it's Mexican neighboorhoods popping up in many small towns across the South and West. Many "native" whites feel like it's an invasion. Well, nothing changed. It's not the Democrats doing. It's industry bring in Mexicans for cheap labor. For example, in chicken processing factories. Americans don't want these jobs. But corporations don't want small town Americans to blame them for the foreign influx, so they blame Democrats in a constant drum beat on right wing media. "Democrats need new voters. They get them by bringing them here and putting them on welfare." When their people are in charge, they get them to claim they're building a wall and they're dealing with this influx that happened under Democrats. Corporations and industry shift the blame away from themselves for any social problem caused by the influx of cheap labor, even though they are responsible for it. Nothing changes under either party in power, only the blame rhetoric gets changed. That's political science in America.

naasking 5y ago
> Americans don't want these jobs. They don't want these jobs at the current pay rates. Let's not forget the most important qualifier here.
- user249 5y ago
  No, this has been studied. Americans think bending over in artichoke fields in California or working in chicken and pig slaughtering plants are jobs suitbale for immigrants, not them. They seemingly can't put two and two together that's that is why Mexicans are here, unless everyone is participating in this charade that Mexicans come here for welfare and to vote for Democrats
  - naasking 5y ago
    Sure, Americans also don't want to work at McDonald's or as sanitation workers, or any number of other undesirable jobs, but they'll do it if they're unskilled and need the money, as long as it pays enough.

jl2718 5y ago

Objective: Maximize value extracted from the market.

kwhitefoot 5y ago

> The secret is this; whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar. In other words, government ideology has little effect in areas such as taxation, welfare and foreign policy. That's not a secret. As shown by the old saw: "Whoever you vote for the government always gets in." And it is easily explained by the huge inertia of vast numbers of people who rather like stability.

FpUser 5y ago

thinkingemote 5y ago

Title was changed, from "The biggest secret in political science" to "Whichever party is in power, policies tend to be similar" after 1 hour and 35 Comments. So be aware that a few top level comments will be responding to the "secret revealed" click bait nature of the title.

motohagiography 5y ago

What bothers me about a lot of current political tactics is that the people engaged in them don't appear to understand or even apprehend what the failure mode of politics is. Not if you fail, or they fail, but when the process of discourse itself fails. If there were a dynamic I could articulate with some hope of helping to give people some extra cognitive tools keep things on the rails it would be this. Someone who self identifies as educated is untroubled by sustaining cognitive dissonance because from their perspective, the state and establishment is almost infinitely sophisticated and complex, so there is no reason to think you understand it, you just need to identify as it being yours, and by aligning to it by default and sustaining it, you are doing your part, and you get the rewards it offers. This is Pound's hedgehog knowing one thing. The one thing they need to know is if you sustain the establishment narrative, it will sustain you. Its leviathan vastness means you can't decide what about it is real or true, but you can find the hooks to align to it, and this is The Game people talk about. I have criticized the immoderate version of this in the past as "banal nihilism," but more generally, and charitably, there is an establishment We who ask things like what is to be done, and use terms like oxygen-starving, problematic, extremists, and other meta-social managerial terms to discuss how we will manage society. However, their ontology reduces to an infinte attrition game of musical chairs to determine who this We will include. At the other pole are those who are attached to the idea of Truth. We can criticize it as a need for concreteness and a lack of cognitive or educated ability to engage The Game as an abstraction separate from their identities (like the from-somewhere and from-nowhere dichotomy), and so when a politician says something, we might take it at face value, and not as a signal of alignment to an abstraction. This ontology includes principles, expectations, loyalties, immovable facts, laws of the universe, consequences, permanence, stability. These are Jonathan Haidt's Righteous Mind tribes, but with a twist where it's not right/left. Other criticisms I've heard is of relating "transactionally," to people, where there is objectivity, truth, roles, state, and definition. What I would say is there is an underlying axiom that there is a truth that is objective, persistent, and independent of whether it's observed, and when you align to it, it makes us good. Even if good for what is not always clear. The key piece is it both instinctively and competently rejects dissonance as a misalignment to truth. In this view, if something is untrue it cannot be relatively powerful or legitimate. This orientation to truth is what makes trust that would facilitate reconciliation or even an equillibrium increasingly impossible. There are a lot of frameworks for this including Jungian animus/anima, Marxist classes, Girardian memesis groups, etc. In the 90s when the so-called "neocons" arrived, they were a weird hybrid of these Game playing conservatives who appeared to support capitalistic ideas, but had an intellectual smarm and who looked down on others' inability to appreciate that this was just them playing this Game as an abstraction. The smarm was because they knew they were lying and didn't care. Tucker Carlson was very famously destroyed by John Stewart over this, and that takedown marked a cultural turning point, where I think the neocons popularly legitimized into the establishment the tactics of what people self-identify now as the "dirtbag left." (not an epithet, it's their word) But this idea of liar becomes the friction point, because from both the dynamic We and the stable truth perspective, yes, Truth is Power, but it depends on the directionality of that equivalence. Are they equal, is one a superset or subset of the other, is there causation between them and in what direction does it flow? This is what someone means when they say, "depends on what the meaning of is, is." What makes this conflict over what is is so irreversible is that a politics moored to geography, language, physical resources, growth, and a positive-sum planet and economics was durable against being pulled too far from one direction or another. Even warfare was a temporary disequillibrium. The change was in the 20th century when a viral idea that power was independent of these landmarks took hold, and that political power came not from these things, but from pure narrative and belief. For the first time, politics became understood as the totality of human experience. The immediate consequence of this newly moralized unmooring of power from truth was that from the perspective of power, all these things and even populations were liquid. Over a century downstream in time, the idea that politics is reserved to professional politicans is absurd. The political is the personal, everything is political, there is no separate private and public sphere. The individual is powerless, atomized, and the only real currency is the fluid affinity to group interests. Our societies are now post-totalitarian. What the authors seem to miss is that this is a total failure of politics, and it is not only Hobbes' "war of all against all," but the inherent violence in that failure mode is beyond what someone just going along to get along could possibly concieve of. The big secret of political science in a post-totalitarian world is that it is predicated on advocating unforgivable and irreconcilable deceptions without a great deal of thought about what the concrete consequences of that will be. Maybe my career in tech and risk has made me index on catastrophic outcomes, but this is not longer about my guy vs. your guy. The conversation we should be having is whether we prefer to reach an equillibrium using discourse moored to at least some of those landmarks, or, and I say this quite seriously, the failure mode of politics is cannibalism, and it would be constructive to consider this when we're at each other.

commiepatrol 5y ago

Just now figuring it out? It's all the same, money rules all.

wly_cdgr 5y ago

In America anyway that's because there are only two viable parties at national scale: center-right and right

stjohnswarts 5y ago
by European standards I guess. But the values the two parties hole are diametrically opposed. Dems: diversity, equality amongst race, freedom of religion and though, open book policies, reproductive rights and guarantees for public education Republicans: white-males at the top, pseudo equal rights for the rest, Christo-fascism for a religion, other religions considered dangerous with the possible exception of Judaism which got grandfathered in, repeal of voting rights to what amounts to poll taxes, shut down the borders, poor people fend for themselves for scraps tossed by "private charities", religion over facts in schools, the end of public education in favor of private conservative schools for those who can afford it, etc. I think the choice is pretty clear if you're paying attention at all.

mythrwy 5y ago

Because governments of any size are largely run by bureaucracies. This is both positive and negative in that it's stabilizing, but also can become anti-democratic and parasitic. The politicians in the modern Western world mostly just give speeches and make deals and go to meetings. Sure they can guide policy to varying degrees, but implementation is through the bureaucracy. I have to imagine when a new leader or parliamentarian comes to town (if they haven't been in town for years already and know "how things work") they are immediately set upon by a plethora of advisors and "experts" who explain reality and what must be done. The politician then most likely see the light, but if not, they proceed to run into massive difficulties and very probably won't be there long. I'm only familiar with the system in the US, but I think this explains why people vote for something, then none of it happens, even the reverse.

throwawaygmbno 5y ago

As an educated black person in tech who grew up in America, I'll stick with voting democrat. I'd rather get lip service, be ignored, with some mostly superficial policy here and there than have policy that actively targets the community I grew up with and my family. I'm constantly told the conclusions of the article and how I'm much better off getting my taxes lowered, but there are just plainly obvious differences between living in a red or blue state. I grew up in a red state that is purple now and the back and forth major policy changes depending on the party in charge are palpable. Even with my increased salary and status at work that has me going to fewer of the places I grew up going to and being around a variety of people, I know voting Republican has a much greater chance of hurting cousins, aunts, childhood friends that maybe didn't get the chances I got in my immediate family. I also know no matter how well I do in life, I'm just one traffic stop away from death or disaster and I'd rather side with the party that at least occasionally tries to hold police accountable for their actions. I'll differentiate between democrats and third party candidates but I'll never cast a vote for anyone with R next to their name, unless there's some great switch like a massively racist candidate like Barry Goldwater.

N1H1L 5y ago
Same here. One party calls all post 1965 immigrants unwanted and the other doesn't. The choice is made for me
- arminiusreturns 5y ago
  These are called wedge issues and are a favorite tool of the oligarchs to control both parties. I've long advocated for a third party aiming to take away the supermajority and force others to the table (peoples party!), but one of the biggest hurdles is how to address those wedge issues with getting sucked into the black hole of conversation they create. Lesser of two evils is still evil, and its probably questionable if its actually lesser.
  - dc-programmer 5y ago
    I don’t think there is some grand conspiracy here. Social conservatives are motivated by their desire for cultural homogeneity and protecting existing hierarchies. This isn’t a wedge issue, it’s a central part of what it means to be conservative in the first place. The left is defined by opposition to this idea to varying degrees (ranging from reform to revolution). The specifics of what it means to preserve tradition and how it might be challenged are specific to the historical and geo-political context.

cannabis_sam 5y ago

This is the worst and most painful example of motivated reasoning I have read in a long time.. Why can’t these people own up the ideology they ascribe to..? Or are they actually under the wrong impression that they are somehow conducting “neutral” economic analysis?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

draw_down 5y ago

chmod600 5y ago

Maybe at the national level... least in the sense "less different than you might think". But at the local level, things really are different.

chmod600 5y ago

Couldn't this be explained by the fact that power switches back and forth? Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Trump, Biden. Wouldn't it be weird to, for example, pass single payer national healthcare under D and then repeal it 4-8 years later under R? The fact that our political systems avoid radical swings is a feature. Certainly change happens on a longer timescale, which sounds reasonable to me.

ngcc_hk 5y ago

Externally the clear is not who is in power but the change one can see at least during the transition. Only 100 days as said and then back to dynamics, one may say. But is it really so in real life.

User23 5y ago

That’s because the USA has a unitary ruling elite. The red team versus blue team theatrics exist solely to keep the rubes occupied.

rnd0 5y ago

This is certainly true, yep.

btdmaster 5y ago

I have advocated for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition for a while now because of this. The political class by definition cannot be reliably representative of the public given the way it is filtered from the public.

BirAdam 5y ago

This is because majoritarian governance does not work. Any system based upon voting will yield two outcomes: 1. The purchase of votes 2. The purchase of politicians This will always yield oligarchy. There is no magical law that will change this, as all law gets pretty much ignored by those in power when it suits their needs and used as a tool to hammer only their opponents. There is no magical system that will change this: red, blue, libertarian, green, communist, alt-right, whatever… people constantly think that if just “insert thing here” would happen then it would be solved. It won’t. History did have socialist, fascist, free market, democratic, communist, and very type of system in play at some point somewhere, and they all end poorly due to the basics of humanity. Politicians and votes can both be purchased and otherwise power is centered in too few hands and becomes tyrannical. So far, the systems that have worked best are all now hated for reason or another, and the world uses “democracy” as a synonym for “goodness” while every so-called democracy is at best corrupt and at worst the enemy of its population. The 20th century saw the largest amount of slaughter by secular humanist states of their own people. These were varying styles of government. They all fail to enact the will of the governed.

stjohnswarts 5y ago
Wrong: "The 20th century saw the largest amount of slaughter by secular humanist states of their own people. These were varying styles of government. They all fail to enact the will of the governed" I fixed it for you: The 20th century saw that much death because of -much- improved ways of killing one another and tremendous population increases because of scientific discoveries like vaccines and modern medicine.
hnuser847 5y ago
This is more or less the conclusion I've come to as well. All forms of government end up as aristocracy, including representative democracy. It takes a lot of money to fund "grass roots" campaigns, think tanks, lobbyists, and political campaigns. Normal people get to vote, but they don't participate in any meaningful way in the selection nominees or the policies they write. If you really want to have an impact on politics, you have to either get rich or secure the backing of someone else who's rich. For the vast majority of people this will not happen nor will it be worth it. It's better to just hunker down, focus on yourself and your family, and survive any way you can.