[EM] Down with party poopers and primary poopers
Michael Ossipoff
email9648742 at gmail.com
Tue Dec 19 01:48:34 PST 2023
Rob—
Here's you today:
[quote]
I wish that our collective IQ could be applied to more than beverage
shopping (and more generally, that alternatives to "Republican" and
"Democrat" in the United States had greater brand recognition than "Coke"
or "Pepsi")H
[/quote]
Here’s you 3 months ago:
…
[quote]
It would seem that you are deep into the community/tribe of the Greens
based on this quote:
"Greens win all of our non-mass-media polls."
…
I don't think the Greens are a mainstream party. They seem to be quite
happy being a niche party complaining about how the Democrats are not as
pro-socialism and pro-environment as they are. I'm going to guess that the
Greens are fighting for fully compostable voting booths right now, and for
all of the weapons used by the police and the military to be fully
compostable. You know, the important stuff ;-)
[/quote]
…
I’ll paste it again below, & reply inline:
…
[quote]
It would seem that you are deep into the community/tribe of the Greens
based on this quote:
"Greens win all of our non-mass-media polls."
[/quote]
…
Let me guess: You’re deep into the tribe of the Democrats
…
Whenever there’s an Internet political poll among the various parties or
their candidates, the winner is usually the Green, or maybe Bernie Sanders,
but sometimes the Libertarian. Actually, Andrew Yang (Founder of the
Forward Party)wins pretty much every poll that includes him as a candidate
(I haven’t heard that he’s running for office, though it seems he should).
…
[quote]
I don't think the Greens are a mainstream party.
[/quote]
…
Translation: Your mass-media don’t cover them at all.
…
Yes, if “mainstream” means “in the corporate mass-media”, then they aren’t
mainstream.
…
[quote]
They seem to be quite
happy being a niche party complaining about how the Democrats are not as
pro-socialism and pro-environment as they are. I'm going to guess that the
Greens are fighting for fully compostable voting booths right now, and for
all of the weapons used by the police and the military to be fully
compostable. You know, the important stuff ;-)
[/quote]
…
Just maybe you might want to consider looking at their platform before
expounding on their policies.
…
The Greens have a detailed progressive platform. It probably fits the
“Social Democracy” classification.
…
The above-pasted quote of your September comments is pertinent to your
comment today the one that this post replies to.
…
Yes, it’s a pity that people in this country haven’t looked at any party
platforms, & don’t know that there are any offerings significantly
differing from the Democrats & Republicans.
…
People speak of having to vote for the lesser-evil (Democrat) to keep the
Republican from winning.
…
In non-mass-media Internet polls, the Republican always finishes last.
There’s no way the Republican could beat the Green in an honestly-voted &
honestly-counted election.
…
In one 23-candidate poll that I conducted at the Condorcet Internet Polling
Service, the lowest finishing Communist finished above the highest
finishing Republican.
…
In a recent poll on political categories, the winner was Social-Democracy. In
2nd place was Socialism. Liberalism was way down in the finishing-order, &
Conservatism was at the bottom.
…
But, with our Vote-For-1 (VF1) voting-system, one problem (among several)
is the split-vote problem when there are several Progressive candidates.
For some reason, Cornell West decided not to run as a Green, but, instead,
to run against the Green Party. That isn’t how we keep from splitting the
vote. If West has said what he thinks is wrong with the Green platform, &
why it’s necessary to run against it, proliferating progressive candidates
& split vote, I haven’t found that explanation.
…
Gore Vidal pointed out that we don’t have a 2-party system—We have 1 party
with 2 right-wings.
…
There of course are various non-Republocrat parties,& candidates… & yes,
they don’t get mass-media coverage, & therefore are not “mainstream”.
…
It’s bad enough with the progressive vote split as it is, but there are all
kinds of non-Republocrat parties.
…
I’ve felt that there should be a party whose only platform policy-changes
consist of electoral-reform. Then all the non-Republocrat parties could
combine their vote on that one party’s candidate. …& with that enhanced
winnability, the lesser-evil voters might even be willing to vote honestly,
for that combining-place party, which, if in office, would establish
genuine democracy, with a single-winner voting system that allows
multicandidate rating or preferences in multicandidate elections. (…a
pretty obvious requirement for freedom of choice in a democracy), &
proportional-representation.
…
Well guess what: Now there is such a party. Andrew Yang’s Forward Party.
The changes offered in its platform consist of a better single-winner
voting system...no more VF1. …& propotional-representation.
…
Libertarians, Greens, People’s, Working-Family, Socialist, Constitution,
American Independent, & all the other non-Republocrat parties needn’t split
the vote, when they could combine on one **electoral-reform** party.
…
I should add that Forward also offers better local autonomy. Why should
people who want different policies have to live under the same policies?
On Tue, Dec 19, 2023 at 12:59 AM Rob Lanphier <roblan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Kristofer,
>
> Good to hear some non-American perspective. The United States' two-party
> democracy leads us to think that fixing the "duopoly" will fix everything.
> There is a certain comfort in the stability with our Coke/Pepsi duopoly in
> the United States. You're clearly correct that voters can handle more than
> two parties (given the multitude of parties in Norway as an example), and I
> think that it sucks that the top two here in the United States are so
> safe. It bothers me that we actually DO have more choices than Coke and
> Pepsi, and that so many people almost immediately understand that metaphor
> for "duopoly". I wish that our collective IQ could be applied to more than
> beverage shopping (and more generally, that alternatives to "Republican"
> and "Democrat" in the United States had greater brand recognition than
> "Coke" or "Pepsi")
>
> More inline...
>
> On Mon, Dec 18, 2023 at 6:34 AM Kristofer Munsterhjelm <
> km_elmet at t-online.de> wrote:
>
>> One way I tend to think of it is that in a two-party system, the two
>> parties contain factions that, in a multiparty system, would be separate
>> parties. Thus, in a two-party system, first the factions negotiate and
>> then people vote; whereas in a multiparty system, the people vote and
>> then the factions negotiate.
>>
>
> That sounds nice. I'd be surprised if there weren't intraparty factions
> as well, though. I have to believe the eight (or so) major parties in your
> country have at least a little semi-structured infighting. Intraparty
> factions almost certainly still have to be a thing, even when there are
> more choices when one leaves a particular party.
>
> It seems to me that if there is a possibility for the relative strengths
>> of factions to be decided by the people rather than by party insiders,
>> we should take it. [...] Now, this has to be balanced against the burden
>>
> of being familiar with more parties. If there were a thousand parties,
>>
> there would be a big problem because nobody would care to read a
>>
> thousand party programs.
>>
>
> I also think that this is a problem for historians and for the electorate
> being able to learn from history. Having such a swirling soup of parties
> makes it difficult for newcomers and outsiders to understand how local
> politics work. I suppose it's not any worse than trying to understand what
> happened to the Rockerfeller Republicans in the United States, though:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockefeller_Republican
>
> But at least in this country, the voters don't seem to have a problem
>> dealing with eight parties.[1] While brand recognition is important,
>> there doesn't seem to be a significant penalty to having eight rather
>> than two.
>>
> [1] 8.36 parties by
>> https://electowiki.org/wiki/Effective_number_of_parties#Entropy_measure
>> and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_Norwegian_parliamentary_election.
>>
>
> It's interesting to me that you chose "eight" as the number of parties in
> Norway when you used the 2021 Norwegian parliamentary election as a
> reference. By my count, there were ten parties that received seats in the
> "Storting" (a.k.a. "the supreme legislature of Norway" according to
> Wikipedia) in 2021. It would seem based on a cursory glance at the 2021
> results that the parties can be classified large/medium/small:
>
> - The "Labour", "Conservative", "Centre", and "Progress" parties --
> these are the four big parties in Norway, and an overwhelming majority of
> Norwegians at least partially align with one of these parties. It would
> seem impossible to really understand the 2021 election without
> understanding these four.
> - The "Socialist Left", "Red", and "Liberal" parties are the
> medium-sized parties that earn a modest number of seats. I'm guessing that
> each of them must really rely on alliances with at least one of the larger
> parties to get anything done.
> - The "Green", "Christian Democratic", and "Patient Focus" parties are
> the boutique parties that appeal to a very narrow slice of the population.
>
> As I look back over the past 40 years of elections, my taxonomy above
> breaks down, since it's based on a single election. Labour, Progress,
> Conservative, Socialist Left, Centre, Christian Democratic, and Liberal
> seem to be the only seven that have a substantial history. Green, Red, and
> Patient Focus seem like weird little newcomers, but I guess the Red party
> is seemingly on the rise, no? Also, does the modern Liberal party have
> anything in common with Mowinckel's Liberal party of the 1930s (arguably
> the Liberal party's heyday)?
>
> Interestingly, the "Christian Democratic" seems to have fallen
> precipitously from its heyday in the 1980s and 1990s (under Bondevik's
> leadership). This Wikipedia article seems to confirm my speculation about
> intraparty infighting being a thing, even with a lot of parties:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_Democratic_Party_(Norway)
>
> That would also be true of the Liberal party:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_Party_(Norway)
>
> ...though I suppose the answer to intraparty strife is to FORM A NEW PARTY
> (or two)!!!!!
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_People%27s_Party_(Norway,_1972)
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_People%27s_Party_(Norway)
>
> I'm not entirely clear how you arrived at "8.36 parties", which seems
> awfully precise given the fluctuation of seat-earning parties in Norway.
>
>
>> There are definitely caveats worth mentioning: it's harder to have a
>> negotiation phase if the president is directly elected, since there's no
>> parliament where this discussion can happen. And we don't vote on minor
>> positions like city coroner, either. But it's still possible for
>> presidential systems to be multi-party, and to my knowledge, these do
>> not have primaries.
>>
>
> I suspect voters in the United States are way too fond of micromanaging
> their leadership to allow for taking away voting for city coroner or to
> vote for a party, and let the party leaders negotiate who gets to be
> president or prime minister or grand poobah or whatever. I didn't fully
> realize just how recent primary elections were anywhere in the world until
> the 20th century, and that the first time primary elections mattered for
> the U.S. presidency as in 1912:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1912_Republican_National_Convention
>
> While I'll concede that there are multi-party democracies that haven't
> found a need for primaries, and I'll concede that the brief history of
> primary elections here in the United States and elsewhere has been messy, I
> still think it's a good idea for high-stakes elections. For high-stakes
> positions, it seems wise (to me) to allow the general public two big stages
> of consideration: the primary process and the general election process.
> Though many aspects of the current mechanisms we use are awful, I think
> having two elections rather than one gives us enough time to collectively
> think through the decisions we make. For high-stakes elections, this seems
> worth it.
>
> Rob
> ----
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> info
>
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