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The Two Party System Sucks

retrocryptid 3y ago
I was going to add a comment like "No Kidding!" or "Duh!" but if you click through to the article, it's a dude asking for a system which can represent more nuance in policy arguments. I completely agree and think it's worth the 90 seconds it takes to read. My opinion is a better title for this article would be "We Need Something Better Than The Two Party System."
- jauntywundrkind 3y ago
  It'd be lovely to see a government experiment with an issue based information system someday. Agree to move beyond open debate, & compel representatives to explicitly structure out issues, positions, & arguments for topics they discuss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system Just being able to capture what the different elements of policy debate really are would let so much more nuance be retained. And when going back to assess the impacts of a policy, there'd be such a clearer record of argumentation to assess: what did happen, what didn't happen, who was right here?
LatteLazy 3y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
- retrocryptid 3y ago
  If we're going to get technical, throw this on the reading list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
- hgsgm 3y ago
  > 1950s For those of us who missed the 1790s.
- tiahura 3y ago
  Thank you! I’ve always suspected that the natural equilibrium of a winner take all system was 2 parties.
soligern 3y ago
A multiparty system, while it may represent more diverse interests, invariably leads to weak majorities that ends up hamstringing any changes that government wants to make because all it takes is for someone with 2% of the vote to pull out of the coalition to bring the government down.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  How is they worse than the current weak majority that has largely hamstrung the government?
  - tptacek 3y ago
    Has it hamstrung the government? Or is there just a governing consensus on many aspects of the status quo?
    - hgsgm 3y ago
      There is a lack of consensus, so you get the two sides using procedural details to block each other's efforts.
      - tptacek 3y ago
        Which efforts are those? The last congress passed historic amounts of funding for infrastructure and technology investment. One of the primary powers of congress is that of the purse. What's the significant policy thing congress should clearly have done, because the polity so obviously supports it and is being thwarted by structural and elite factors? I bet it's not as clear as it seems.
    - alistairSH 3y ago
      Good question. There’s certainly some consensus on the status quo. But, then we have things like health care, abortion, and firearm regulation. Americans largely want better/cheaper access to the first two and more of the third. Yet, we can’t get any of them.
nh23423fefe 3y ago
> People are increasingly identifying as “independent” because the two parties don’t have enough nuance. Seems incoherent. The purpose of parties is to put someone in power. Arguing about positions or policies or whatever else some 101 class tells you about makes no sense. The thing that really exists is an elective office which confers power on the holder. Aggregations of different people over different time with unformed beliefs are meaningless. Confusing, "i hate repubs and dems" with "i hate the 2 party system" is a mistake.
- jszymborski 3y ago
  I think many people hold the opinion that Republicans and Democrats behave in a way they disapprove of _because_ of the two party system.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > The purpose of parties is to put someone in power. But in a 2 party system, the odds are very good that neither of the parties adequately represents you. That's the problem with it -- no nuance. As a result, every election is about choosing which candidate will do the least damage rather than which candidate will do the most good.
  - nh23423fefe 3y ago
    I dont think those statements are connected at all. I dont know what adequate representation is but I'll assume something like a similarity measure over preferences. The claim of no nuance is applied to parties. But parties aren't voted for candidates are. So sure, parties aggregate the preferences of their members and the distribution of members has some variance. So parties are bad because voters are different? And the solution is, what, smaller parties with less variance? The best political party has 1 member? I can't differentiate between the utility of gaining a want or avoiding a harm, so Im not sure what the point is when you introduce the damage vs good comparison. Seems like pretending "zero" has meaning. When really only differences in utility have meaning.
    - 3y ago
kneebonian 3y ago
The problem is political parties at all. People should vote for good people that they believe will do the best possible job. Parties instead confuse and obfuscate the issue as the parties abandon responsibility in favor of scoring points. I mean England, Germany and France all have more than 2 parties yet the people there have similar complaints and arguments as the people in the US. The problem is parties themselves. Good, wise and just men and women should be chosen to govern, not people who tell us what we want to hear.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  I agree. Interestingly, so did the founders -- even the ones that started the first political parties. So it seems that even though political parties are a disease, it's one that's very hard to avoid.
- hgsgm 3y ago
  That's obvious. That's like saying cancer or hurricanes are the problem. The question is what causes them (FPTP, transaction costs favors coordination and consolidation, power tends to increase itself) and how causes can be changed. > Good, wise and just men and women should be chosen to govern, not people who tell us what we want to hear. 2016 elected US President who cannot reasonably be considered part of a party. He was a "host unto himself". He flipped-flopped affiliation over decades, and steamrolled over the Republican party international power structures to win the voters in primary and general.
- ajmurmann 3y ago
  While I'm not a big fan of all of them, Germany saw the rise of three different new parties in the last 40 years (Green, Linke, AFD). They are all relevant political players and came out of the existing parties not representing sentiment felt by substantial portions of the electorate. I hate the AFD and Linke, but gotta say this is awesome and how the system should work. I'm not sure what would happen without parties entirely. I expect you'd see some natural alliances between politicians arise and you are back to parties. There is a somewhat related learning from German history. During the Weimar republic Germany had many very small parties represented in there parliament. This led to it becoming very hard to make progress which led to high churn of who was in power and allowed weird candidates to rise and take a shot at it. The criticism was that three parliament is just debating and debating and nothing ever happens. Weimar cycled through an unreasonable amount of politicians and eventually ended up with Hitler. This is why Germany now requires a minimum of 5% of votes for a party before they get any seats. If you'd somehow manage to keep parties from emerging, I'd expect a worse form of this problem to happen.
draw_down 3y ago
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softjobs 3y ago
The problems with First Past The Post voting explained. https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo
Veuxdo 3y ago
There is no "two party system". There is a "first post the post" system. There are only two viable parties because of it.
SeanLuke 3y ago
I agree that we now have a problem, particularly with the republican party going haywire, but let's not pretend that our two party system hasn't been extremely beneficial to us up until now. Historically for game theoretic reasons the parties have been pretty moderate: if one went off the deep end, centrists would flock to the other party. Having two large, stable, and moderate parties over the years has kept our government from rocking back and forth in extremism and paralysis. Witness Italy, with many dynamically changing parties and which can't keep a stable government longer than about 9 months on average. This stability is one of (several) factors which has made the US a safe haven for finance, etc. and which has benefitted us greatly on the world stage over the last century. So the issue is how to give other parties a seat at the table, and an opportunity to be heard and responded to, without destroying the very stability that has helped us for so long.
Apocryphon 3y ago
There's also the matter that there's an entire quadrant of the political map that appears to be unsupported by either party. https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_73d3873f90a694512aeeb56e0ab92cfa.png https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/reports/Graphs-Char... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/new-study-shows-what-really-happened-in-the-2016-election.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/new-study-shows-what... (Even though this oft-cited chart might be missing a lot of nuance:) https://medium.com/@xenocryptsite/revisiting-the-famous-2016-economic-views-vs-social-views-scatterplot-55016c1b8888 https://medium.com/@xenocryptsite/revisiting-the-famous-2016...
- m3047 3y ago
  The "magic quadrant" chart is what I was alluding to in my top post, although none of those references is the paper which first brought it to my attention.
- tivert 3y ago
  > There's also the matter that there's an entire quadrant of the political map that appears to be unsupported by either party. Are you referring to "the underrepresented cohort in American politics is the opposite of libertarians: people with right-wing social views who support big government on the economy," in your second link? I think you are, but I think there's also a chance you're referring to libertarians, which are also poorly served by the parties, because, as the article points out, voters with such views "are functionally nonexistent."
  - Apocryphon 3y ago
    I am talking about the anti-libertarians (populists, statists, communitarians, etc.), correct.
- GloomyBoots 3y ago
  Hey, that’s my quadrant. This article is good but I’d go further than just trying to add nuance to arbitrarily binary stances. The distinction between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” among normal people that I interact with is certainly going to be different in aggregate, but there’s a very blurry frontier and you can easily find “pro-lifers” who are more tolerant of abortion than their “pro-choice” neighbors.
z3c0 3y ago
If the Gallup poll indicating that 49% of people identify as independent is anything to go off of, this is more urgent of a matter than it seems. We're actually hitting an inflection point where voters can deny the presidency to either party, but if no third party is available, it would default to a vote by the house from the top 3 candidates by votes, aka a contingent election[0]. This is less than ideal. The majority party of the House would likely just insert their candidate, which would only further disenfranchise voters (who would have voiced their majority desire to not have that candidate.) Provided, people would have to stop falling for the "lesser of two evils" rhetoric, a deliberate ploy to stop the formation of a third party. However, should ideals fracture too much, too many new parties form, and you end up in a contingent election again, as was the case in 1824. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election
scythe 3y ago
A lot of politicians have challenged the two-party system over the years. Some examples: Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Ventura, Gary Johnson, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and now Cornel West. One thing you might notice about this list is that they all have crowds of highly vocal opponents. In fact, practically everyone strongly opposes at least one of these individuals. One sort of catch-22 about the opposition to the two-party system is that the people who are unwilling to hold their noses and support a major party despite its flaws are usually also not willing to hold their noses and support an imperfect movement against the duopoly. In fact, those who are still active among the aforementioned don't cooperate with each other, either.
iamjasonlevin 3y ago
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glimshe 3y ago
Having grown up in a country with a vibrant multi party system, I can tell you it's no panacea. Two things end up happening: parties that are so fragmented you don't know what each stands for anymore. Or single issue parties like the pirate party, green party, gay party etc that offer you no indication or consistency with issues outside their core. 2 parties might not be awesome but maybe 3 or 4 parties would be ideal.
- sampo 3y ago
  > Having grown up in a country with a vibrant multi party system, I can tell you it's no panacea. In Sweden, the multiple parties self-organized into 2 blocks, so for a while it was effectively like a 2-party system. But occasionally some small parties would switch blocks, disrupting the balance for a while.
082349872349872 3y ago
I managed to move on from the two party system ... and it only took ~2 years to get used to a new language and ~5 years to get used to a new culture.
m3047 3y ago
Having spent enough time around politics and politicians to realize you need as many different words for misrepresenting the truth as the eskimos need for snow there's a lot to unpack in that statement and the article kind of feels around the elephant (maybe you can discern a rough outline) but I don't think it gets to the heart of the two most common meanings of "two party". Yeah I agree that the political system in America favors two political parties, but why is that and what is a political party anyway? The first item I want to point out is that externally both extant parties (D and R) work hard to force the voter's exercise of choice into a first around the post model: if there are for instance two legislative reps they both run in separate elections. However internally both parties operate delegate systems much the same, and you vote for representatives as a bag (one election): if there are two slots then you cast two votes and the top two vote recipients become the delegates. This is emphatically not ranked-choice voting; I make no comment on the fitness of RCV except that some of the edge cases may be surprising. The second observation has to do with the nature of differences. Assuming that we can agree that the extreme right favors unfettered capitalism and the extreme left favors unfettered social mores (forgive me): in what calculus is unfettered capitalism the negation of social freedoms and vice versa? It gets a lot more interesting if you rotate the (horizontal) line representing that "continuum" 45 degrees and put it in a box and then label the other two corners "strict economic regulation" and "conservative social mores". Now ask yourself: where do people really lie in those quadrants? (I didn't come up with this, I read an article about it a few years ago and I've come to a greater appreciation for it over time.) The third observation has to do with an antipattern for consensus building. In this antipattern, a large and diverse body of constituents is divided into smaller groups and told to come up with let's say 5 issues and then they come together and somehow figure out the top "priorities" for the entire body to work on together. The antipattern manifests in that second step due to a flaw in the first one. In most if not all of the smaller groups there will be one tool, the architecture astronaut, who says "save the whales!": the fact that we don't live by the ocean is irrelevant, but in an act of appeasement this one always makes it onto the short list. So at phase 2 according to the antipattern the top fives from all of the small groups are added together aaand "save the whales" ends up at the top of the list. The real politicians who are leading this exercise know exactly what's going on, and this is why real legislative bodies have caucuses: that one group was concerned about sidewalks, another crosswalks, and another about signage is dropped on the floor rather than being resolved in conference to a single concern about pedestrian / vehicle interactions.
jacobn 3y ago
I agree that the lack of nuance and effective choice sucks in politics, but the root of the issue is that inevitably each individual vote is all-or-nothing for that politician's or party's agenda. In our everyday life we have plenty of options for most basic purchases, and can pick-and-choose whatever combination of goods/services we want (though there are of course market failures, but let's not get sidetracked). Imagine if you could only pick either prepackaged life choices A or prepackaged life choices B? It would be a dystopian hell (and only marginally improved by additional packages). Yet that's what we've got when it comes to politics.
- SomewhatLikely 3y ago
  There's a big difference that your life choices mostly only affect you. Governments specifically are focused on issues that affect lots of people. If everyone only votes for a candidate whose views perfectly match their own they'd only have one candidate they can vote on: themselves. At the end of the day the government has to make a decision that hopefully reflects as close to consensus as we can get. You could get there with direct democracy, or representative democracy where the representatives reflect proportions of their views in the public. I'm not sure we can get there when our representative has to simultaneously reflect the views of everyone in a localized region. Across the country there may be enough vegans for instance to have their own representative but in any particular district they will never have enough numbers to have their concerns addressed.
  - GloomyBoots 3y ago
    > I'm not sure we can get there when our representative has to simultaneously reflect the views of everyone in a localized region. They are meant to represent the general sentiment of their communities, not every person’s individual concerns. Most communities aren't starkly divided on major issues, and when they are it’s usually a sign that you’re not actually dealing with a single community in any meaningful sense of the word, but two or more that have been thrown together politically. You can even fairly reliably map out which neighborhoods go which way on a given issue and it’s usually not difficult to parse out deeper cultural differences at play. > Across the country there may be enough vegans for instance to have their own representative but in any particular district they will never have enough numbers to have their concerns addressed. I’m not sure if you’re saying this is good or bad. They may be related by virtue of being vegan, but their communities are not vegan. You aren’t owed a representative because you’re part of a fringe subculture that doesn’t even have the political will to actually coalesce into a real community.
Ferret7446 3y ago
This is important so it deserves many more comments: it's not a two party system, it's a first past the post system. So long as we continue to use an inferior, outdated voting system, having two dominant parties is inevitable. Talking about overthrowing the two party system is pointless and misguided; it's a red herring.
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  It's troublesome both at the grand strategic level with FPTP and Duvuger's Law and such systematic issues, but also at the local tactical level. Ballot access laws are written by the two major parties and often designed in a way to thwart third party ambitions, probably fear of competition that could drive the spoiler effect. This extends to everything from higher signature requirements to get on ballots all the way to requiring an impossibly high percentage of the vote to qualify for FEC primary matching funds, let alone being invited to the presidential debates.
toughncompetent 3y ago
Having two completely polar opposite group-thoughts is how we retain nuance (largely through compromise). If you want gray, you mix black and white; you don't go around throwing red, blue, green, etc. into the mix. Multi-party is not the solution.
differenttake 3y ago
Cogent analysis - part of the problem is that the two parties have each become more ideologically rigid, so that every issue seems to come down to a binary choice between the intransigent D and R positions. What's needed is a new politics that is open to compromise and to finding common ground between Ds and Rs so that we can actually get something done on issues like immigration and gun control.

I was going to add a comment like "No Kidding!" or "Duh!" but if you click through to the article, it's a dude asking for a system which can represent more nuance in policy arguments. I completely agree and think it's worth the 90 seconds it takes to read. My opinion is a better title for this article would be "We Need Something Better Than The Two Party System."

jauntywundrkind 3y ago
It'd be lovely to see a government experiment with an issue based information system someday. Agree to move beyond open debate, & compel representatives to explicitly structure out issues, positions, & arguments for topics they discuss. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Issue-based_information_system Just being able to capture what the different elements of policy debate really are would let so much more nuance be retained. And when going back to assess the impacts of a policy, there'd be such a clearer record of argumentation to assess: what did happen, what didn't happen, who was right here?

LatteLazy 3y ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law

retrocryptid 3y ago
If we're going to get technical, throw this on the reading list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow%27s_impossibility_theore...
hgsgm 3y ago
> 1950s For those of us who missed the 1790s.
tiahura 3y ago
Thank you! I’ve always suspected that the natural equilibrium of a winner take all system was 2 parties.

soligern 3y ago

A multiparty system, while it may represent more diverse interests, invariably leads to weak majorities that ends up hamstringing any changes that government wants to make because all it takes is for someone with 2% of the vote to pull out of the coalition to bring the government down.

alistairSH 3y ago
How is they worse than the current weak majority that has largely hamstrung the government?
- tptacek 3y ago
  Has it hamstrung the government? Or is there just a governing consensus on many aspects of the status quo?
  - hgsgm 3y ago
    There is a lack of consensus, so you get the two sides using procedural details to block each other's efforts.
    - tptacek 3y ago
      Which efforts are those? The last congress passed historic amounts of funding for infrastructure and technology investment. One of the primary powers of congress is that of the purse. What's the significant policy thing congress should clearly have done, because the polity so obviously supports it and is being thwarted by structural and elite factors? I bet it's not as clear as it seems.
  - alistairSH 3y ago
    Good question. There’s certainly some consensus on the status quo. But, then we have things like health care, abortion, and firearm regulation. Americans largely want better/cheaper access to the first two and more of the third. Yet, we can’t get any of them.

nh23423fefe 3y ago

> People are increasingly identifying as “independent” because the two parties don’t have enough nuance. Seems incoherent. The purpose of parties is to put someone in power. Arguing about positions or policies or whatever else some 101 class tells you about makes no sense. The thing that really exists is an elective office which confers power on the holder. Aggregations of different people over different time with unformed beliefs are meaningless. Confusing, "i hate repubs and dems" with "i hate the 2 party system" is a mistake.

jszymborski 3y ago
I think many people hold the opinion that Republicans and Democrats behave in a way they disapprove of _because_ of the two party system.
JohnFen 3y ago
> The purpose of parties is to put someone in power. But in a 2 party system, the odds are very good that neither of the parties adequately represents you. That's the problem with it -- no nuance. As a result, every election is about choosing which candidate will do the least damage rather than which candidate will do the most good.
- nh23423fefe 3y ago
  I dont think those statements are connected at all. I dont know what adequate representation is but I'll assume something like a similarity measure over preferences. The claim of no nuance is applied to parties. But parties aren't voted for candidates are. So sure, parties aggregate the preferences of their members and the distribution of members has some variance. So parties are bad because voters are different? And the solution is, what, smaller parties with less variance? The best political party has 1 member? I can't differentiate between the utility of gaining a want or avoiding a harm, so Im not sure what the point is when you introduce the damage vs good comparison. Seems like pretending "zero" has meaning. When really only differences in utility have meaning.
  - 3y ago

kneebonian 3y ago

The problem is political parties at all. People should vote for good people that they believe will do the best possible job. Parties instead confuse and obfuscate the issue as the parties abandon responsibility in favor of scoring points. I mean England, Germany and France all have more than 2 parties yet the people there have similar complaints and arguments as the people in the US. The problem is parties themselves. Good, wise and just men and women should be chosen to govern, not people who tell us what we want to hear.

JohnFen 3y ago
I agree. Interestingly, so did the founders -- even the ones that started the first political parties. So it seems that even though political parties are a disease, it's one that's very hard to avoid.
hgsgm 3y ago
That's obvious. That's like saying cancer or hurricanes are the problem. The question is what causes them (FPTP, transaction costs favors coordination and consolidation, power tends to increase itself) and how causes can be changed. > Good, wise and just men and women should be chosen to govern, not people who tell us what we want to hear. 2016 elected US President who cannot reasonably be considered part of a party. He was a "host unto himself". He flipped-flopped affiliation over decades, and steamrolled over the Republican party international power structures to win the voters in primary and general.
ajmurmann 3y ago
While I'm not a big fan of all of them, Germany saw the rise of three different new parties in the last 40 years (Green, Linke, AFD). They are all relevant political players and came out of the existing parties not representing sentiment felt by substantial portions of the electorate. I hate the AFD and Linke, but gotta say this is awesome and how the system should work. I'm not sure what would happen without parties entirely. I expect you'd see some natural alliances between politicians arise and you are back to parties. There is a somewhat related learning from German history. During the Weimar republic Germany had many very small parties represented in there parliament. This led to it becoming very hard to make progress which led to high churn of who was in power and allowed weird candidates to rise and take a shot at it. The criticism was that three parliament is just debating and debating and nothing ever happens. Weimar cycled through an unreasonable amount of politicians and eventually ended up with Hitler. This is why Germany now requires a minimum of 5% of votes for a party before they get any seats. If you'd somehow manage to keep parties from emerging, I'd expect a worse form of this problem to happen.

draw_down 3y ago

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softjobs 3y ago

The problems with First Past The Post voting explained. https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo https://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo

Veuxdo 3y ago

There is no "two party system". There is a "first post the post" system. There are only two viable parties because of it.

SeanLuke 3y ago

I agree that we now have a problem, particularly with the republican party going haywire, but let's not pretend that our two party system hasn't been extremely beneficial to us up until now. Historically for game theoretic reasons the parties have been pretty moderate: if one went off the deep end, centrists would flock to the other party. Having two large, stable, and moderate parties over the years has kept our government from rocking back and forth in extremism and paralysis. Witness Italy, with many dynamically changing parties and which can't keep a stable government longer than about 9 months on average. This stability is one of (several) factors which has made the US a safe haven for finance, etc. and which has benefitted us greatly on the world stage over the last century. So the issue is how to give other parties a seat at the table, and an opportunity to be heard and responded to, without destroying the very stability that has helped us for so long.

Apocryphon 3y ago

There's also the matter that there's an entire quadrant of the political map that appears to be unsupported by either party. https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/reports/Graphs-Charts/1101/figure2_drutman_73d3873f90a694512aeeb56e0ab92cfa.png https://www.voterstudygroup.org/assets/i/reports/Graphs-Char... https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/new-study-shows-what-really-happened-in-the-2016-election.html https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/06/new-study-shows-what... (Even though this oft-cited chart might be missing a lot of nuance:) https://medium.com/@xenocryptsite/revisiting-the-famous-2016-economic-views-vs-social-views-scatterplot-55016c1b8888 https://medium.com/@xenocryptsite/revisiting-the-famous-2016...

m3047 3y ago
The "magic quadrant" chart is what I was alluding to in my top post, although none of those references is the paper which first brought it to my attention.
tivert 3y ago
> There's also the matter that there's an entire quadrant of the political map that appears to be unsupported by either party. Are you referring to "the underrepresented cohort in American politics is the opposite of libertarians: people with right-wing social views who support big government on the economy," in your second link? I think you are, but I think there's also a chance you're referring to libertarians, which are also poorly served by the parties, because, as the article points out, voters with such views "are functionally nonexistent."
- Apocryphon 3y ago
  I am talking about the anti-libertarians (populists, statists, communitarians, etc.), correct.
GloomyBoots 3y ago
Hey, that’s my quadrant. This article is good but I’d go further than just trying to add nuance to arbitrarily binary stances. The distinction between “pro-choice” and “pro-life” among normal people that I interact with is certainly going to be different in aggregate, but there’s a very blurry frontier and you can easily find “pro-lifers” who are more tolerant of abortion than their “pro-choice” neighbors.

z3c0 3y ago

If the Gallup poll indicating that 49% of people identify as independent is anything to go off of, this is more urgent of a matter than it seems. We're actually hitting an inflection point where voters can deny the presidency to either party, but if no third party is available, it would default to a vote by the house from the top 3 candidates by votes, aka a contingent election[0]. This is less than ideal. The majority party of the House would likely just insert their candidate, which would only further disenfranchise voters (who would have voiced their majority desire to not have that candidate.) Provided, people would have to stop falling for the "lesser of two evils" rhetoric, a deliberate ploy to stop the formation of a third party. However, should ideals fracture too much, too many new parties form, and you end up in a contingent election again, as was the case in 1824. [0]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election

scythe 3y ago

A lot of politicians have challenged the two-party system over the years. Some examples: Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Jesse Ventura, Gary Johnson, Andrew Yang, Tulsi Gabbard, and now Cornel West. One thing you might notice about this list is that they all have crowds of highly vocal opponents. In fact, practically everyone strongly opposes at least one of these individuals. One sort of catch-22 about the opposition to the two-party system is that the people who are unwilling to hold their noses and support a major party despite its flaws are usually also not willing to hold their noses and support an imperfect movement against the duopoly. In fact, those who are still active among the aforementioned don't cooperate with each other, either.

iamjasonlevin 3y ago

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glimshe 3y ago

Having grown up in a country with a vibrant multi party system, I can tell you it's no panacea. Two things end up happening: parties that are so fragmented you don't know what each stands for anymore. Or single issue parties like the pirate party, green party, gay party etc that offer you no indication or consistency with issues outside their core. 2 parties might not be awesome but maybe 3 or 4 parties would be ideal.

sampo 3y ago
> Having grown up in a country with a vibrant multi party system, I can tell you it's no panacea. In Sweden, the multiple parties self-organized into 2 blocks, so for a while it was effectively like a 2-party system. But occasionally some small parties would switch blocks, disrupting the balance for a while.

082349872349872 3y ago

I managed to move on from the two party system ... and it only took ~2 years to get used to a new language and ~5 years to get used to a new culture.

m3047 3y ago

Having spent enough time around politics and politicians to realize you need as many different words for misrepresenting the truth as the eskimos need for snow there's a lot to unpack in that statement and the article kind of feels around the elephant (maybe you can discern a rough outline) but I don't think it gets to the heart of the two most common meanings of "two party". Yeah I agree that the political system in America favors two political parties, but why is that and what is a political party anyway? The first item I want to point out is that externally both extant parties (D and R) work hard to force the voter's exercise of choice into a first around the post model: if there are for instance two legislative reps they both run in separate elections. However internally both parties operate delegate systems much the same, and you vote for representatives as a bag (one election): if there are two slots then you cast two votes and the top two vote recipients become the delegates. This is emphatically not ranked-choice voting; I make no comment on the fitness of RCV except that some of the edge cases may be surprising. The second observation has to do with the nature of differences. Assuming that we can agree that the extreme right favors unfettered capitalism and the extreme left favors unfettered social mores (forgive me): in what calculus is unfettered capitalism the negation of social freedoms and vice versa? It gets a lot more interesting if you rotate the (horizontal) line representing that "continuum" 45 degrees and put it in a box and then label the other two corners "strict economic regulation" and "conservative social mores". Now ask yourself: where do people really lie in those quadrants? (I didn't come up with this, I read an article about it a few years ago and I've come to a greater appreciation for it over time.) The third observation has to do with an antipattern for consensus building. In this antipattern, a large and diverse body of constituents is divided into smaller groups and told to come up with let's say 5 issues and then they come together and somehow figure out the top "priorities" for the entire body to work on together. The antipattern manifests in that second step due to a flaw in the first one. In most if not all of the smaller groups there will be one tool, the architecture astronaut, who says "save the whales!": the fact that we don't live by the ocean is irrelevant, but in an act of appeasement this one always makes it onto the short list. So at phase 2 according to the antipattern the top fives from all of the small groups are added together aaand "save the whales" ends up at the top of the list. The real politicians who are leading this exercise know exactly what's going on, and this is why real legislative bodies have caucuses: that one group was concerned about sidewalks, another crosswalks, and another about signage is dropped on the floor rather than being resolved in conference to a single concern about pedestrian / vehicle interactions.

jacobn 3y ago

I agree that the lack of nuance and effective choice sucks in politics, but the root of the issue is that inevitably each individual vote is all-or-nothing for that politician's or party's agenda. In our everyday life we have plenty of options for most basic purchases, and can pick-and-choose whatever combination of goods/services we want (though there are of course market failures, but let's not get sidetracked). Imagine if you could only pick either prepackaged life choices A or prepackaged life choices B? It would be a dystopian hell (and only marginally improved by additional packages). Yet that's what we've got when it comes to politics.

SomewhatLikely 3y ago
There's a big difference that your life choices mostly only affect you. Governments specifically are focused on issues that affect lots of people. If everyone only votes for a candidate whose views perfectly match their own they'd only have one candidate they can vote on: themselves. At the end of the day the government has to make a decision that hopefully reflects as close to consensus as we can get. You could get there with direct democracy, or representative democracy where the representatives reflect proportions of their views in the public. I'm not sure we can get there when our representative has to simultaneously reflect the views of everyone in a localized region. Across the country there may be enough vegans for instance to have their own representative but in any particular district they will never have enough numbers to have their concerns addressed.
- GloomyBoots 3y ago
  > I'm not sure we can get there when our representative has to simultaneously reflect the views of everyone in a localized region. They are meant to represent the general sentiment of their communities, not every person’s individual concerns. Most communities aren't starkly divided on major issues, and when they are it’s usually a sign that you’re not actually dealing with a single community in any meaningful sense of the word, but two or more that have been thrown together politically. You can even fairly reliably map out which neighborhoods go which way on a given issue and it’s usually not difficult to parse out deeper cultural differences at play. > Across the country there may be enough vegans for instance to have their own representative but in any particular district they will never have enough numbers to have their concerns addressed. I’m not sure if you’re saying this is good or bad. They may be related by virtue of being vegan, but their communities are not vegan. You aren’t owed a representative because you’re part of a fringe subculture that doesn’t even have the political will to actually coalesce into a real community.

Ferret7446 3y ago

This is important so it deserves many more comments: it's not a two party system, it's a first past the post system. So long as we continue to use an inferior, outdated voting system, having two dominant parties is inevitable. Talking about overthrowing the two party system is pointless and misguided; it's a red herring.

Apocryphon 3y ago
It's troublesome both at the grand strategic level with FPTP and Duvuger's Law and such systematic issues, but also at the local tactical level. Ballot access laws are written by the two major parties and often designed in a way to thwart third party ambitions, probably fear of competition that could drive the spoiler effect. This extends to everything from higher signature requirements to get on ballots all the way to requiring an impossibly high percentage of the vote to qualify for FEC primary matching funds, let alone being invited to the presidential debates.

toughncompetent 3y ago

Having two completely polar opposite group-thoughts is how we retain nuance (largely through compromise). If you want gray, you mix black and white; you don't go around throwing red, blue, green, etc. into the mix. Multi-party is not the solution.

differenttake 3y ago

Cogent analysis - part of the problem is that the two parties have each become more ideologically rigid, so that every issue seems to come down to a binary choice between the intransigent D and R positions. What's needed is a new politics that is open to compromise and to finding common ground between Ds and Rs so that we can actually get something done on issues like immigration and gun control.