3 ms·
In contemporary American politics, "liberal" and "authoritarian" are often overlapping categories. The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances
by sandman8 3y ago
In contemporary American politics, "liberal" and "authoritarian" are often overlapping categories.
The two-party system makes for all sorts of weird alliances of distinct groups getting lumped together- there's really no reason that one's opinions on gun rights should be related to one's opinions on energy policy, or why one's opinion on abortion should be related to one's opinion on foreign affairs policy, but with two parties all these separate issues get grouped into two camps associated with either "Republican" or "Democrat" and then in turn everything "Republican" can also be called "Conservative" or "Right-Wing" and everything "Democrat" can also be called "Liberal" or "Left-Wing".
Using some academic definition of what "liberal" or "right-wing" or whatever meant in Europe in the 1890s or 1930s doesn't really work in popular English-language media today.
- dehrmann 3y agoI'm amazed at how people will happily (enough) coalesce into two parties and align their views accordingly. Maybe it's just an exercise in dimensionality reduction.
- loeg 3y agoIt's hard to get anything done without a majority coalition. The two party system endures due to quirks of our election design that the two parties themselves are both very happy to keep in place (any change to elections that would make 3rd parties viable would cause the two current parties to lose some power).
- dehrmann 3y ago> quirks Winner-takes-all popular elections have proven to be naive, but I wouldn't say it's a quirk. It's probably the first election format you'd try. My point wasn't that you need a coalition as much as that people will change their views to align with their coalition.