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I heard PJ talk in a show about having a three party system in the US. And this is what he had to say. “Our big and sloppy political system keeps America away

I heard PJ talk in a show about having a three party system in the US. And this is what he had to say. “Our big and sloppy political system keeps America away from abstract political theorists. Away from abstract political theory is a good place to be. Our compromised and compromising system with its messey conflicts and fitful bipartisanship keeps governments close to real life. Because in reality we all contain within ourselves elements of the democrat and republican. We are conservatives when we catch the kids smoking pot and we are quite liberal when we catch ourselves doing it. No one ever says oh goodie when its time to pay the taxes and no one ever turns down a government benefit. Abondining the two party system would mean abondining a great truth. The truth that we are all of two minds about politics Greater certainity in our political system would mean more politics, more arguments, more strife we dont need that we got enough...”

MontagFTB 5y ago
This is a great quote - do you have a link to a source?
- robotresearcher 5y ago
  https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/two-party-system-making-america-ungovernable https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/two-party-syst... at 1h29m in transcript
  - MontagFTB 5y ago
    Thanks!
ncmncm 5y ago
Sounds articulate, plausible, and just so, so wrong. Other countries are not stuck with our system. We are stuck with it, but that is not a reason to come to like it. We have to find ways to work around being stuck with it. Pretending it is OK actively interferes with that.
- mabub24 5y ago
  Yeah, I think most people look at the endless 1v1 party sparring of America's political system and just see a recipe for unending revenge and bitterness. Most parliamentary systems, or multi-party systems, do not have the same amounts of longstanding political polarization that has come to grip America, where every issue must be divided along party lines or you're a "traitor to the cause".
  - jacobr1 5y ago
    The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is. Pre-polarized America (which is subjective and has been a long slide down a continuum) basically had something similar to parliamentary coalition-building politics where factions would shift within (and more rarely between) parties. There was a significant balancing act of the different "wings" of each party, and the regional differences were much more present.
    - dragonwriter 5y ago
      > The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is The weird thing is that people refer to the period of the overlapping post-WWII realignments, and the associated misalignment of the divide between the major parties with the major ideological divides, as being “pre-polarization”, since it was a time of intense political polarization, characterized by the period of the some of the most intense and violent sustained internal political conflict in the country after the Civil War (the overlapping Race/Civil Rights, Anti-War, and some overlapping less conflicts of the 50s-70s), where the polarizing issues just didn't cleanly align with the divide between the major parties. Intense political polarization isn't new. What is new (or, rather, has returned to it's historical norm after an unusually long break) is the partisan divide actually aligning with the main salient ideological divides around which the polarization occurs, as the period of realignment settled out around the early-to-mid-1990s.
      - ncmncm 5y ago
        What is new is that, instead of the partisan divide aligning with the ideological divide, the ideological divide turned over and around to match where the arbitrary partisan divide happened to be. So now we have "conservatives" identifying with Russians and against election regularity, and "liberals" identifying with the FBI and government mandates and against free speech and inquiry.

MontagFTB 5y ago

This is a great quote - do you have a link to a source?

robotresearcher 5y ago
https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/two-party-system-making-america-ungovernable https://www.intelligencesquaredus.org/debates/two-party-syst... at 1h29m in transcript
- MontagFTB 5y ago
  Thanks!

ncmncm 5y ago

Sounds articulate, plausible, and just so, so wrong. Other countries are not stuck with our system. We are stuck with it, but that is not a reason to come to like it. We have to find ways to work around being stuck with it. Pretending it is OK actively interferes with that.

mabub24 5y ago
Yeah, I think most people look at the endless 1v1 party sparring of America's political system and just see a recipe for unending revenge and bitterness. Most parliamentary systems, or multi-party systems, do not have the same amounts of longstanding political polarization that has come to grip America, where every issue must be divided along party lines or you're a "traitor to the cause".
- jacobr1 5y ago
  The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is. Pre-polarized America (which is subjective and has been a long slide down a continuum) basically had something similar to parliamentary coalition-building politics where factions would shift within (and more rarely between) parties. There was a significant balancing act of the different "wings" of each party, and the regional differences were much more present.
  - dragonwriter 5y ago
    > The weird thing though ... is how recent that polarization really is The weird thing is that people refer to the period of the overlapping post-WWII realignments, and the associated misalignment of the divide between the major parties with the major ideological divides, as being “pre-polarization”, since it was a time of intense political polarization, characterized by the period of the some of the most intense and violent sustained internal political conflict in the country after the Civil War (the overlapping Race/Civil Rights, Anti-War, and some overlapping less conflicts of the 50s-70s), where the polarizing issues just didn't cleanly align with the divide between the major parties. Intense political polarization isn't new. What is new (or, rather, has returned to it's historical norm after an unusually long break) is the partisan divide actually aligning with the main salient ideological divides around which the polarization occurs, as the period of realignment settled out around the early-to-mid-1990s.
    - ncmncm 5y ago
      What is new is that, instead of the partisan divide aligning with the ideological divide, the ideological divide turned over and around to match where the arbitrary partisan divide happened to be. So now we have "conservatives" identifying with Russians and against election regularity, and "liberals" identifying with the FBI and government mandates and against free speech and inquiry.