Mott the Hoople
Sweet Jane
Here's an excellent article a friend of mine, moniker "Hemingway", who is a political scientist wrote on basically how we arrived at the current predicament in U.S. politics. I.E. Hillary vs. Trump.
Why America has a Two Party System.
The answer is really simple. Our constitution says that he who gets the most votes wins. So if we have fifteen candidates and one guy who gets three, he gets the job. Everyone else gets nothing. Political scientists call this a "First-Past-the Post" system because our elections are like horse races, except there's no such thing as place or show.
Of course real elections have lots of voters, and most people want to get something. So in our "first-past-the-post" system that means Americans get to choose between two political parties. In theory, one will be slightly right of center, and the other slightly left of center, because that's the only way to actually compete in an election. And this pattern repeats itself in every other place on earth that actually has fair elections and the same voting system.
If you want more political parties to choose from, then you need to amend the Constitution for a more parliamentary style of government. One commonly used solution is called Proportional Representation, and it used by countries like Germany and Israel. Under Proportional Representation you don't vote for a candidate, you vote for a party. The seats in the legislature are then apportioned out according to the results of the election.
The advantage to this is that most people get to vote for someone who very closely aligns with their own beliefs. The disadvantage is, so does the Hitler Youth, and they get seats in Parliament too. But even more importantly it can lead to fairly unstable or weak governments.
No one ever gets an actual majority under Proportional Representation. So after the election the problem then becomes who will form the next government? Parties have to enter into coalitions with other parties, some of whom may have very bizarre or different ideas than those of the majority party. But if a governing majority is to be found, then deals must be struck, and struck after the election, meaning you end up with some pretty strange bedfellows. Laws that exempt orthodox Yeshiva students from service in the Israeli Army are the product of that sort of deal-making. You get some fairly bizarre and unwanted policy outcomes, but they're all a part of holding the whole thing together.
Another example can be inherently weak, or unstable governments. After all one or more of your coalition partners can pull out at any time. This makes it very hard to take difficult and necessary actions even in times of emergency. Germany's Weimar Republica operated under such rules, drawn up by the Allies who thought demcracy was the best way to prevent war. As you know, that didn't turn out so well for them. Germany still has a Proportional Representation today, but their current constitution learned the lessons of the Weimar Republic. In order to make government in Germany Today a party must get at least 5% of the popular vote. That gets rid of the tiny fringe parties, including much of the lunatic fringe. What you have in some ways resembles the US. One left-of-center mainstream party (the Social Democrats) one right-of-center party (the Christian Democrats/Christian socialists). There is a balancer party who makes up part of the governing coalitions. In the past that was the Free Democatic party, but the Green Party lately has fulfilled that role. Because they actually get into office and are then expected to govern the Greens of Germany look much different than the Greens in the U.S. It's easy to be ideologically pure so long as you never have to actually do anything.
This brings up two concepts that describe processes that take place in any election. The first is called Interest Articulation. Simply put, that's We The People telling our political leaders what they want. Bernie Sanders campaign proved to Democrats that they actually need to stand for something, and actively defend the interests of working Americans. Donald Trump showed Republicans that decades of winking at bigotry to win the votes of working class white Americans without every doing anything for them might have its disadvantages. Ted Cruz tried to represent the Christion Theonomy wing of Republican Party, while a number of candidates vied for their traditional anti-tax, business welfare wing of the GOP. We know who won.
The second is called interest aggregation. What this simply means is that parties then must bundle together the wishes expressed by their voters into a marketable package that might actually gain government. In mass political parties like in the United States, this is done before the election as the parties negotiate toward a platform. Platforms are generally statements of principles to worked towards. It doesn't mean they're going to be delivered. After all the other side has votes too, and for laws to be passed generally you need at least some support from the other side.
Under Proportional Representation this process takes place after the election as ideologically mixed parties are put together to form a governing coalition. An observant Israeli vote generally has a pretty good idea what she is going to get after the election, but surprises are always possible.
In the US we have a clearer Idea of what we're voting for, but we rarely get to vote for a person who represents everything we might want. That's just the way it is.
There are two factors that greatly complicate U.S. elections. In the US and a number of other countries (such as Great Britain) districts have a geographic base. In theory that means a Democrat in Massachusetts can be very different from the same animal in South Carolina. What that meant was that you got two ideologically diverse political parties with a lot of overlap and the ability to govern. And that's the way things were for the majority of American history.
So what went wrong? To answer that question I need to go back in time. American are creatures of their history, and probably the seminal event in American politics was the American Civil War. The emotions leading up to that conflict led to the death of Whig Party, which was the forerunner of the Republican party.
The early Republican party was generally a left-of-center party on social issues (slavery for one) but very cozy with Eastern Business interests, though there was constant strain with the Progressive movement within that party, whose most notable member was Theodore Roosevelt and clearly put the working man first. They gave us anti-trust legislation, the national parks and the first stirrings of America as a World Power. The Democratic party was much friendlier with the working class, but because of the Civil War the South very much identified with Democratic parties as opposed to those "Black Republicans". For decades after the Civil War the Republican Party waived the "bloody shirt" to remind Northern voters of the sacrifices made during the War. The South became the Solid South, where even a yellow dog could get elected so long as he was a Democrat.
The problem is people like change and Americans are never happy with any one group governing forever. Both Democrats and Republicans competed for votes and both wanted to win, so they began to try and pry away voting blocks from each others parties. Democrats began to adopt many the items that appealed to working people. And during the Great Depression the old debate between austerity and action came to the forefront. Republicans chose austerity, as they have today, and were run out of power on a rail for it. Franklin Roosevelt led the Democratic Party into a much more labor friendly era, with the New Deal, Social Security and more forming the core of liberal values to this day.
But it really was more than that. The War was a great equalizer and many Democrats began to feel that the Negro had gotten a pretty raw deal so far. But that struck at the heart of the Solid South. Many Southerners, and modern conservatives, don't like to admit it but the war was fought because of slavery and the role it played in Southern society. This is not to say that we northerners were free of prejudice, far from it. Northern racism has tended to be more hidden, but it is very real. There are a lot of Klukkers up North, maybe more than in the South. The Southerners were simply more up front about it.
But Southern racism was much more out in the open, with Jim Crow and lynchings all over the news, many were appalled. So the Democratic Party decided to do something about it, well the Northern Wing anyway. What began under Roosevelt and Truman became a full bore effort under Kennedy and Johnson, all made possible because of overt southern actions such as at (I forget) bridge, and because Martin Luther King was such an effective and moral leader for Black Americans. Only the most virulent racist could not help but be impressed by the man and his clear and definitive vision of an American for all people. He pushed Johnson to act. School desegregation and the Voting Rights Act were important moves toward equality. People bitch about Affirmative Action today, but we need to remember that when I was a boy NOBODY would hire a black man for a job above ditch digger. Black schools were a joke. My own Firestone High was built because my parents school, Buchtel, was looking like it might be integrated. We liked our schools segregated, and in the north we did that via redlining, discrimination in financing (something Hillary Clinton actually went undercover to prove in her youth.)
The Solid South quickly became unsolid. Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide in 1964 but a few people noted that every state Goldwater won in '64 was part of the old Confederacy. In 1968 Nixon's "Southern Strategy" set the tone for all GOP political campaigns since that time. Using code words to hint that racists might find a better home in the GOP has been standard Republican campaign tactics ever since. I don't the intent was to promote racism, rather they saw a chance to pry a bunch of voters away from the Democratic Party and went for it. Just as it was political apparatchiks who used the abortion issue to win previously non-political evangelicals into the GOP camp. it was about winning elections, and if they had to make friends with rather sordid people, well so what. These people would take crumbs and in return Republicans would take power.
Now this combined with yet another trend in the late sixties, which was to move the nomination process out of the hands of party operators and into the hand of the voters. Laws were passed which made the primaries the primary method of nomination. There were good reasons for this. Party bosses tended to put forward electable, moderate candidates but that also meant that a lot of important factions in the party were getting completely shut out of the process. As we were fighting in Vietnam at the time, this was seen as rather serious. After all the war was growing increasingly unpopular as American boys were dying by the thousands for no real discernable results. The peace movement needed to be heard.
The problem with this, was and is, that voting takes time and effort, so lots of people who don't do it. And with votes routinely being decided by thousands of votes, one could make a quite reasonable argument that voting itself was irrational. One of my first political science professors made that exact argument in class both to piss off we impressionable students but also to get us thinking. But the result became of that the most ideological voters were the people who turned, and still turn out, to vote in primaries. Caucuses are even worse because they take far more time and effort. Sanders voters don't like to complain about closed primaries but conveniently forget that most of his (and Ted Cruz's) wins took place in caucus states which truly favor the most ideological and committed candidates. The net effect of this was to push both parties toward their extremes.
Another problem is gerrymandering. Truth is that for the legislature, most Americans don't vote in truly competitive elections. In many ways this is favored by politicians of both parties because who doesn't like a safe seat? A yellow-dog would easily win former Speaker of the House John Boehner's district so long as he was a Republican. Now gerrymandering, has always been a part of American life. The problem is with modern computers, the game has been taken to a high art. The problem with that is our legislatures do not reflect the real will of the people. Democrats won clear majorities of the vote in 2012 in the House, yet the GOP retained control, because 2010 (a census year) had gone badly for the the Democrats as President Obama had failed to completely turn around the collapse of 2008 during his first 18 months in office.
but if Democrats had it bad, Republicans had it even worse. The nineties brought about the rise of right-wing radio and the birth of Fox News. These reflected a long term Iand in my view false) perception by conservatives that the news media was biased against them. The problem with that (as conservative speechwriter David Frum has pointed out) is that they became market share, and the way to keep the ratings high was not to inform, but rather be as inflammatory as possible. The result is by and large that conservatives are generally the most misinformed people on earth. This led directly to the growth of the Tea Party and the conception that Republicans interested in actual governing were RINOs or Republicans In Name Only. Very respected and long term Republicans such as Arlen Spector and Richard Lugar were turned out by voters for not being ideologically pure enough. Combined with gerrymandered, ultra conservative (and ultra-liberal) districts, the Congress has fractured. The finest example of that came in 2011 deficit cutting measure where President Obama offered $10 in spending cuts in return for $1 in tax increases. It was rejected in the Republican House because any tax increase was too much. It was there way or the highway, and in such an environment the concept of compromise made actually dealing with the country's problems impossible.
So that's where we are today. We have a Democratic party willing to compromise, but pissed off as Hell and with no faith at all that good faith offers will lead to actual negotiations. And a Republican party either stupidly ideological like Cruz of Steve King, or terrified that they'll be thrown out at the next primary if they do something reasonable. We also have two political candidates because that's what the system got us. Hillary Clinton who carries the negatives of two decades of constant partisan investigations and Trump has parlayed the GOPs real contempt for working class people and veiled racism into a shot at the White House.
This is how we got the two candidates we have. It wasn't a conspiracy. It was our laws about elections that created the whole thing. ---Hemingway---
Why America has a Two Party System.
The answer is really simple. Our constitution says that he who gets the most votes wins. So if we have fifteen candidates and one guy who gets three, he gets the job. Everyone else gets nothing. Political scientists call this a "First-Past-the Post" system because our elections are like horse races, except there's no such thing as place or show.
Of course real elections have lots of voters, and most people want to get something. So in our "first-past-the-post" system that means Americans get to choose between two political parties. In theory, one will be slightly right of center, and the other slightly left of center, because that's the only way to actually compete in an election. And this pattern repeats itself in every other place on earth that actually has fair elections and the same voting system.
If you want more political parties to choose from, then you need to amend the Constitution for a more parliamentary style of government. One commonly used solution is called Proportional Representation, and it used by countries like Germany and Israel. Under Proportional Representation you don't vote for a candidate, you vote for a party. The seats in the legislature are then apportioned out according to the results of the election.
The advantage to this is that most people get to vote for someone who very closely aligns with their own beliefs. The disadvantage is, so does the Hitler Youth, and they get seats in Parliament too. But even more importantly it can lead to fairly unstable or weak governments.
No one ever gets an actual majority under Proportional Representation. So after the election the problem then becomes who will form the next government? Parties have to enter into coalitions with other parties, some of whom may have very bizarre or different ideas than those of the majority party. But if a governing majority is to be found, then deals must be struck, and struck after the election, meaning you end up with some pretty strange bedfellows. Laws that exempt orthodox Yeshiva students from service in the Israeli Army are the product of that sort of deal-making. You get some fairly bizarre and unwanted policy outcomes, but they're all a part of holding the whole thing together.
Another example can be inherently weak, or unstable governments. After all one or more of your coalition partners can pull out at any time. This makes it very hard to take difficult and necessary actions even in times of emergency. Germany's Weimar Republica operated under such rules, drawn up by the Allies who thought demcracy was the best way to prevent war. As you know, that didn't turn out so well for them. Germany still has a Proportional Representation today, but their current constitution learned the lessons of the Weimar Republic. In order to make government in Germany Today a party must get at least 5% of the popular vote. That gets rid of the tiny fringe parties, including much of the lunatic fringe. What you have in some ways resembles the US. One left-of-center mainstream party (the Social Democrats) one right-of-center party (the Christian Democrats/Christian socialists). There is a balancer party who makes up part of the governing coalitions. In the past that was the Free Democatic party, but the Green Party lately has fulfilled that role. Because they actually get into office and are then expected to govern the Greens of Germany look much different than the Greens in the U.S. It's easy to be ideologically pure so long as you never have to actually do anything.
This brings up two concepts that describe processes that take place in any election. The first is called Interest Articulation. Simply put, that's We The People telling our political leaders what they want. Bernie Sanders campaign proved to Democrats that they actually need to stand for something, and actively defend the interests of working Americans. Donald Trump showed Republicans that decades of winking at bigotry to win the votes of working class white Americans without every doing anything for them might have its disadvantages. Ted Cruz tried to represent the Christion Theonomy wing of Republican Party, while a number of candidates vied for their traditional anti-tax, business welfare wing of the GOP. We know who won.
The second is called interest aggregation. What this simply means is that parties then must bundle together the wishes expressed by their voters into a marketable package that might actually gain government. In mass political parties like in the United States, this is done before the election as the parties negotiate toward a platform. Platforms are generally statements of principles to worked towards. It doesn't mean they're going to be delivered. After all the other side has votes too, and for laws to be passed generally you need at least some support from the other side.
Under Proportional Representation this process takes place after the election as ideologically mixed parties are put together to form a governing coalition. An observant Israeli vote generally has a pretty good idea what she is going to get after the election, but surprises are always possible.
In the US we have a clearer Idea of what we're voting for, but we rarely get to vote for a person who represents everything we might want. That's just the way it is.
There are two factors that greatly complicate U.S. elections. In the US and a number of other countries (such as Great Britain) districts have a geographic base. In theory that means a Democrat in Massachusetts can be very different from the same animal in South Carolina. What that meant was that you got two ideologically diverse political parties with a lot of overlap and the ability to govern. And that's the way things were for the majority of American history.
So what went wrong? To answer that question I need to go back in time. American are creatures of their history, and probably the seminal event in American politics was the American Civil War. The emotions leading up to that conflict led to the death of Whig Party, which was the forerunner of the Republican party.
The early Republican party was generally a left-of-center party on social issues (slavery for one) but very cozy with Eastern Business interests, though there was constant strain with the Progressive movement within that party, whose most notable member was Theodore Roosevelt and clearly put the working man first. They gave us anti-trust legislation, the national parks and the first stirrings of America as a World Power. The Democratic party was much friendlier with the working class, but because of the Civil War the South very much identified with Democratic parties as opposed to those "Black Republicans". For decades after the Civil War the Republican Party waived the "bloody shirt" to remind Northern voters of the sacrifices made during the War. The South became the Solid South, where even a yellow dog could get elected so long as he was a Democrat.
The problem is people like change and Americans are never happy with any one group governing forever. Both Democrats and Republicans competed for votes and both wanted to win, so they began to try and pry away voting blocks from each others parties. Democrats began to adopt many the items that appealed to working people. And during the Great Depression the old debate between austerity and action came to the forefront. Republicans chose austerity, as they have today, and were run out of power on a rail for it. Franklin Roosevelt led the Democratic Party into a much more labor friendly era, with the New Deal, Social Security and more forming the core of liberal values to this day.
But it really was more than that. The War was a great equalizer and many Democrats began to feel that the Negro had gotten a pretty raw deal so far. But that struck at the heart of the Solid South. Many Southerners, and modern conservatives, don't like to admit it but the war was fought because of slavery and the role it played in Southern society. This is not to say that we northerners were free of prejudice, far from it. Northern racism has tended to be more hidden, but it is very real. There are a lot of Klukkers up North, maybe more than in the South. The Southerners were simply more up front about it.
But Southern racism was much more out in the open, with Jim Crow and lynchings all over the news, many were appalled. So the Democratic Party decided to do something about it, well the Northern Wing anyway. What began under Roosevelt and Truman became a full bore effort under Kennedy and Johnson, all made possible because of overt southern actions such as at (I forget) bridge, and because Martin Luther King was such an effective and moral leader for Black Americans. Only the most virulent racist could not help but be impressed by the man and his clear and definitive vision of an American for all people. He pushed Johnson to act. School desegregation and the Voting Rights Act were important moves toward equality. People bitch about Affirmative Action today, but we need to remember that when I was a boy NOBODY would hire a black man for a job above ditch digger. Black schools were a joke. My own Firestone High was built because my parents school, Buchtel, was looking like it might be integrated. We liked our schools segregated, and in the north we did that via redlining, discrimination in financing (something Hillary Clinton actually went undercover to prove in her youth.)
The Solid South quickly became unsolid. Lyndon Johnson won by a landslide in 1964 but a few people noted that every state Goldwater won in '64 was part of the old Confederacy. In 1968 Nixon's "Southern Strategy" set the tone for all GOP political campaigns since that time. Using code words to hint that racists might find a better home in the GOP has been standard Republican campaign tactics ever since. I don't the intent was to promote racism, rather they saw a chance to pry a bunch of voters away from the Democratic Party and went for it. Just as it was political apparatchiks who used the abortion issue to win previously non-political evangelicals into the GOP camp. it was about winning elections, and if they had to make friends with rather sordid people, well so what. These people would take crumbs and in return Republicans would take power.
Now this combined with yet another trend in the late sixties, which was to move the nomination process out of the hands of party operators and into the hand of the voters. Laws were passed which made the primaries the primary method of nomination. There were good reasons for this. Party bosses tended to put forward electable, moderate candidates but that also meant that a lot of important factions in the party were getting completely shut out of the process. As we were fighting in Vietnam at the time, this was seen as rather serious. After all the war was growing increasingly unpopular as American boys were dying by the thousands for no real discernable results. The peace movement needed to be heard.
The problem with this, was and is, that voting takes time and effort, so lots of people who don't do it. And with votes routinely being decided by thousands of votes, one could make a quite reasonable argument that voting itself was irrational. One of my first political science professors made that exact argument in class both to piss off we impressionable students but also to get us thinking. But the result became of that the most ideological voters were the people who turned, and still turn out, to vote in primaries. Caucuses are even worse because they take far more time and effort. Sanders voters don't like to complain about closed primaries but conveniently forget that most of his (and Ted Cruz's) wins took place in caucus states which truly favor the most ideological and committed candidates. The net effect of this was to push both parties toward their extremes.
Another problem is gerrymandering. Truth is that for the legislature, most Americans don't vote in truly competitive elections. In many ways this is favored by politicians of both parties because who doesn't like a safe seat? A yellow-dog would easily win former Speaker of the House John Boehner's district so long as he was a Republican. Now gerrymandering, has always been a part of American life. The problem is with modern computers, the game has been taken to a high art. The problem with that is our legislatures do not reflect the real will of the people. Democrats won clear majorities of the vote in 2012 in the House, yet the GOP retained control, because 2010 (a census year) had gone badly for the the Democrats as President Obama had failed to completely turn around the collapse of 2008 during his first 18 months in office.
but if Democrats had it bad, Republicans had it even worse. The nineties brought about the rise of right-wing radio and the birth of Fox News. These reflected a long term Iand in my view false) perception by conservatives that the news media was biased against them. The problem with that (as conservative speechwriter David Frum has pointed out) is that they became market share, and the way to keep the ratings high was not to inform, but rather be as inflammatory as possible. The result is by and large that conservatives are generally the most misinformed people on earth. This led directly to the growth of the Tea Party and the conception that Republicans interested in actual governing were RINOs or Republicans In Name Only. Very respected and long term Republicans such as Arlen Spector and Richard Lugar were turned out by voters for not being ideologically pure enough. Combined with gerrymandered, ultra conservative (and ultra-liberal) districts, the Congress has fractured. The finest example of that came in 2011 deficit cutting measure where President Obama offered $10 in spending cuts in return for $1 in tax increases. It was rejected in the Republican House because any tax increase was too much. It was there way or the highway, and in such an environment the concept of compromise made actually dealing with the country's problems impossible.
So that's where we are today. We have a Democratic party willing to compromise, but pissed off as Hell and with no faith at all that good faith offers will lead to actual negotiations. And a Republican party either stupidly ideological like Cruz of Steve King, or terrified that they'll be thrown out at the next primary if they do something reasonable. We also have two political candidates because that's what the system got us. Hillary Clinton who carries the negatives of two decades of constant partisan investigations and Trump has parlayed the GOPs real contempt for working class people and veiled racism into a shot at the White House.
This is how we got the two candidates we have. It wasn't a conspiracy. It was our laws about elections that created the whole thing. ---Hemingway---
