Comment by ozim
2 days ago
Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
2 days ago
Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
”The lesser evil” is the essence of any two-party system. Which I would somewhat facetiously classify the UK system as. Abolish ”first past the post” and introduce proportional representation now!
Sweden has more parties than two and it's the lesser evil here as well - in what world would a party perfectly align to every single thing you like?
It is far, far more likely that you can get most of your opinions represented in a parliament with 8 parties than one with 2 or 3.
In Sweden, in the past 50 years, people with ”new” or fringe opinions have successfully started parties, and won seats in either the national or EU parliament, on these issues:
- Christianity - Environmentalism - Racism/populism - Internet freedom/privacy - Feminism - Racism/populism, again
Most of these have had their issues adopted by larger parties through triangulation, and thus shrunk away to nothing, while others persist to this day (christianity, environmentalism, racism).
I think if you tried to start a new labor party in the UK today, you should not expect to win any seats. Likewise if you attempted what the Swedish Feminist Initiative did. But I hope I’m about to be proven wrong on the first point.
6 replies →
Disagree. If the society is essentially "broken", with little sense of everyone working together to build and secure a positive future, then two-party systems can degenerate into "but they're even worse!" races to the bottom.
But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
(Yes, I think that political reform could be of some use in the UK. Some. The underlying problems would mostly remain.)
> But in better circumstances, there is enormous social pressure (at least on mainstream parties) to be much higher functioning, and willing and able to lead the nation toward a positive future.
No, there isn't, and comparative study of democracies has shown that there is a pretty direct relationship between effective degree of proportionality and a wide range of positive democratic outcome measures, as well as producing a richer national dialogue.
A two-party system doesn't just break down into an us-v-them negative dialogue in bad conditions (it pretty much gets permanently stuck there because it works in a two-party system, and it is consistently easier than deepe discussion of issues), it also narrows the space of of potential solution sets that are even available for discussion to an approximation of a one-dimensional space. Multiparty proportional systems leader to a search space with greater dimensionality, as well as making “well, they are worse” politicking generally ineffective.
I would say that what you wrote in the first two paragraphs is all equally true of a system with proportional representation. But you’d avoid a lot of problems:
- people in ”safe” constituencies being permanently represented by an MP from an opposing party, with no recourse except for moving
- policies that constantly pander to voters in ”swing” constituencies
- the two major parties constantly triangulating their policies around the center, rather than voters moving their votes to the party representing their opinions, which ensures that government is always centrist or near-centrist
Etc — these are just my pet peeves about the US and UK systems, I know there are more.
Plus, I think it’s good if a system is more robust against loss of trust that you mentioned. You could argue that in the UK, society hasn’t yet been broken, but looking at the US, don’t you think it’s better not to have that vulnerability?
It's the essence of any representative democracy - you'd need as many parties as there are citizens for everyone to be able to vote for one that truly represents their views on all relevant topics.
That might be true in some theory, in practice you can find reasonably good alignment for most people at five or six viable parties.
1 reply →
True, but please see my reply to the sibling comment.
I suppose when choosing between electoral systems, the choice is indeed a matter of the lesser of two evils!
Kier Starmer seems to be doing everything an establishment plant would - an establishment that really doesn't like the idea of a Labour government.
Are you somehow suggesting that Labour isn't (or shoudn't be) part of the establishment?
Labour has been part of the reigning duopoly in British politics for most of the last 100 years. How could they not be part of the establishment?
http://anthonyflood.com/rothbarddemocracy.htm still gets down-voted here, but perhaps we will finally see more people realizing that it is true, as it always has been.
You talk about the lesser evil here, well, it is exactly what is written there.
Some parts quoted:
> Democracy suffers from many more inherent contradictions as well. Thus, democratic voting may have either one of these two functions: to determine governmental policy or to select rulers. According to the former, what Schumpeter termed the “classical” theory of democracy, the majority will is supposed to rule on issues.[23] According to the latter theory, majority rule is supposed to be confined to choosing rulers, who in turn decide policy. While most political scientists support the latter version, democracy means the former version to most people, and we shall therefore discuss the classical theory first.
> According to the “will of the people” theory, direct democracy—voting on each issue by all the citizens, as in New England town meetings—is the ideal political arrangement. Modern civilization and the complexities of society, however, are supposed to have outmoded direct democracy, so that we must settle for the less perfect “representative democracy” (in olden days often called a “republic”), where the people select representatives to give effect to their will on political issues. Logical problems arise almost immediately. One is that different forms of electoral arrangements, different delimitations of geographical districts, all equally arbitrary, will often greatly alter the picture of the “majority will.” [...]
See the italic bit ("we must settle for the less perfect").
He talks about IMO the greatest contradictions after this part:
> But even proportional representation would not be as good—according to the classical view of democracy—as direct democracy, and here we come to another important and neglected consideration: modern technology does make it possible to have direct democracy. Certainly, each man could easily vote on issues several times per week by recording his choice on a device attached to his television set. This would not be difficult to achieve. And yet, why has no one seriously suggested a return to direct democracy, now that it may be feasible?
The whole thing is worth a read with an open mind.
One of the biggest problems with a lot of the modern theory of democracy is that it sees democratic mechanisms as being not just necessary but sufficient to justify any action undertaken by the state.
Another major problem is the lack of clear bounding principles to distinguish public questions from private ones (or universal public questions from public questions particular to a localized context).
Together these problems result in political processes that (a) treats every question as global problem affecting society an undifferentiated mass, and (b) uses majoritarianism applied to arbitrary, large-scale aggregations of people as means of answering those questions.
This leads to concepts like "one man, one vote" implying that everyone should have an equal say on every question regardless of the stake any given individual might have in the outcome of that question.
And that, in turn, leads to the dominant influence on every question -- in either mode of democracy Rothbard refers to -- being not the people who face the greatest impact from the answer, nor the people who understand its details the best, but rather vast numbers of people who really have no basis for any meaningful opinions in the first place.
Every question comes down to opposing parties trying to win over uninformed, disinterested voters through spurious arguments and vague appeals to emotion. Public choice theory hits the nail on the head here, and this is why the policy equilibrium in every modern political state is a dysfunctional mess of special-interest causes advanced at everyone else's expense.
Democracy is necessary, but not sufficient. And I think the particular genius of the American approach has been to embed democracy within a constitutional framework that attempts to define clear lines regarding what is a public question open to political answers and what is not. The more we erode that framework, the more the reliability of our institutions will fray.
Vote with your feet (and wallet).
> Feels utterly demoralizing when you have to vote for lesser evil and not for someone you feel will be better for the future.
Always go for your gut feeling, not for what people are blaring. Especially populists will, as the name suggest, crave for people's attention and a cheap "Yeah, they are totally right!". That's how they win elections. And three months into the new period, they will show their real intentions.
Surely gut feelings are how we get populists voted in? I’d prefer people sat and thought carefully for a while than trusted their gut!
I directly addressed the "feelings" OP was having.
Besides, the past has shown that facts are opinions for some folks, so even that would not work.
My advice assumes a mentally stable person with somewhat modest reasoning.